XX

An African – Watching others work – Captured women – Surrounded – Rautenbach – A plague as staple.

ON THEIR PATROLS THEY came upon a Dutch farmer who sat on his veranda and smoked a green stone pipe. He rose from his chair as the irregulars approached and he stood and waited. The Captain dismounted and raised his hand.

Goede dag, Mynheer.

Goede dag, Baas, said the Dutchman.

He stood back and gestured and the Captain walked across the veranda and into a large dim room with a stone floor. Narrow shafts of light came in from the loopholes in the wall and the Captain saw a woman who sat unmoving in a chair. The Dutchman took out a bottle and poured measures into two battered cups and he gave one to the Captain and the men drank.

The Dutchman wiped his hand across his mouth and then he began a slow and earnest enumeration of his troubles with the heathen and of his accumulated losses and of his grievances against the various powers which had arbitrarily claimed sovereignty over land upon which he had been long since resident.

The Captain nodded and he looked up. The Dutchman had a chest like a barrel and he towered above by perhaps a foot and a half.

The Dutch, said the Captain, zijn onze grootste … allies. Our greatest friends.

And he lifted his hand high to pat the Dutchman just below the shoulder.

The Dutchman looked down with eyes narrowed and he started speaking again and he did not stop for a long time. The Captain was merely beginning to pick up a few words of the language but the Dutchman made it explicit to him that there was no such thing as the Dutch, although there were such things as Nederlanders. He said that he himself was neither but that he had met a Nederlander once and the language he spoke was virtually unintelligible to the Nederlander. It had in fact occasioned some mirth in that man. He said that his family had been on the continent for perhaps two hundred years and that was what he was, an Afrikander, an African.

Afrikander, said the Captain.

Ja, said The Dutchman. Afrikander.

The next day the irregulars returned to the place to assist with the harvest of the grape vines. The men worked up the rows and picked the big sweet bunches and Fingo women carried them in great baskets and tipped the purple and green grapes together into a vat where naked Fingo men trod and chanted in a circle. The Fingos laboured and chanted in the heat and the sweat ran down from their heads and mingled with the juices of the grapes and the Dutchman stood with his pipe in the shade of a tree and watched.

A patrol came in with two Hottentot women and a small boy with a dripping nose and thick crusts of mucus on his upper lip. Providence the Fingo stepped forward to help the Captain with the interrogation. The women said they new nothing of Jinqi or Branders or their intentions and then Providence began to cuff the older of the two. The woman cried out and knelt and grasped his knees.

Sla mij niet, she said.

Providence hit her again and she wailed.

Sla mij niet. Zij gaan aanvallen.

Aanvallen?

Ja. Zij gaan aanvallen.

The Hottentots were questioned further and the time of the proposed attack was ascertained and the Hottentots were held so that the quality of their intelligence could be assessed.

On the night of the expected assault the kid stood guard with Evans and one of the Dutch scouts at an outer picquet. They were a hundred yards from the walls and had little cover apart from the grasses. The plain was quiet and the men did not speak and they hunkered down and did not move unless they had to.

A little past midnight they heard strange yips and shrieks and hoots and wailing sounds that continued for a time and then ceased. The men stared at each other in alarm. The kid spoke in a whisper.

What was that?

There was silence for perhaps three minutes and then the dark plain became alive with animal sound as though whole menageries were in discussion preparatory to boarding an ark. And then there was silence once more. The scout rose carefully and looked about and squatted down again.

You see anything?

The scout shook his head.

What is it? Animals?

None of them knew. There was a strange rising hoot and it was answered by another from the opposite side of the fort.

Owl?

Wolf, said Evans.

The sound came again.

Niet uil, said the scout.

Not owl?

The scout shook his head.

En het is geen wolven.

What is it?

Heidenen.

Heidenen?

Heathen, said the scout.

The kid gripped his rifle and lifted his head carefully above the grasses. The plain was a dim sea of grass and nothing moved on it. The sounds came once more before they were relieved and upon relief they recounted their experiences and were much laughed at. But on the day following there were naked footprints in the soft ground on three sides of the fort and the marks also of the simple plains shoes which the Dutchmen made from antelope or bullock skin and which the Hottentots sometimes wear.

At midday on the 9th of January shots were heard from the farm of a Dutchman called Rautenbach who lived some four miles from the fort. The alarm was taken up by the Fingos on the lookout hills and the wall pieces at the fort were fired as a signal to the surrounding farmers.

Within twenty minutes the Captain rode out with a mounted party. They passed a fortified Dutch farmhouse where some forty men were ramming great four-ounce balls down the bores of their weapons while their women saddled the horses. They rode on and the Dutchmen caught up with them via a short cut and they came to Rautenbach’s farm. There they learnt that mounted defectors and heathen had concealed themselves overnight in a dry riverbed. They had emerged in the daylight to wound Rautenbach’s nephew and drive off Rautenbach’s herds.

The party rode on and came to a bend in the valley which revealed the landscape beyond. There was a mountain to their right and half a mile further up the valley mounted heathen were driving the missing cattle. The Dutchmen called out and lay close on their mounts and beat them about the rear with their hats and their manes and tails flew as they galloped. Balls sang past and the heathen before them urged the cattle on towards the entrance of a narrow gorge.

They passed the foot of the mountain and ten men veered off towards a herd of sheep deserted there and the rest rode on. The Captain rode and a horse fell before him and then another and the riders tumbled in the dust. The Captain steered past the treacherous holes and approached the gorge and came down into a depression. He plunged through a belt of bush and halted at the banks of a small stream. Men were dismounting and leading their horses across and they were under fire. The Captain followed and downstream of him a horse staggered and fell and its rider cursed in the water.

As each man forded the brook he mounted and rode on into the ravine and when the last had passed, a group of heathen came down to close off their exit. The Captain galloped on through the bush and passed the cattle. He emerged from behind a boulder and came upon a defector who rose up and ran and the Captain shot him in the back of the neck with the Adams. There was gunfire all about and men cried out and killed each other and one group of heathen abandoned their flight and fought back with knives and spears and the butts of their rifles until all were dead.

A bugle called and the party assembled. The men were bloodied and the horses were so worn out that the party moved out on foot. At the entrance to the gorge they met the ten men who had stayed behind with the sheep and fought off the party of heathen which had planned to ambush them.

They led their horses back to Rautenbach’s farm and herded the stock as they went and found the Dutchman grieving over his nephew. The fort’s surgeon was among the company and he examined the boy. He had been shot at short range with a weapon loaded with scraps of lead and metal which included three bits of typeface from a printing machine and his left shoulder was all but destroyed.

The sun was sinking towards the mountains as they approached the fort and the Captain heard a sound like wind but no wind blew. A shadow fell upon him and he looked up to see a strange vision that approached from the west. It seemed that snow was falling in the heat of the day. There was a cloud coming that shimmered with filaments that caught the light. And then the cloud turned dim and came down from the sky in great dark whorls.

The Captain sat his horse and stared. He spoke to the Dutch scout next to him.

What is that?

Sprinkhanen.

The Captain narrowed his eyes and they rode on and within minutes the locusts were all about them. The Captain kept his eyes half closed and let his mount walk after the horse before. The insects covered the ground and moved in waves and caught the sun with their strange radiance and they passed above like thick black smoke and they devoured all vegetable matter before them.

After three days the highlands were bare. The locusts had eaten everything and now everything began in turn to eat them. The Dutch and Hottentot workers fried them up in fat and devoured them by the bucketful. The fowls ran after them with open beaks and the yellow dog jumped and turned in the air as he tried to pluck them from the sky. The cattle grazed placidly upon locusts and the horses chewed them suspiciously with lifted lips. Among the irregulars the joiner and Higgs and Basson ate them also and Evans called them savages.

Lieutenant Bruce put his head into the Captain’s room one afternoon and found the Captain putting aside a plate of locusts which Johnny Fingo’s cook had prepared for him.

Try one, said the Captain.

Lieutenant Bruce stared at him for some time.

What are they like?

To be frank with you I find them indifferent eating.

Lieutenant Bruce moved a locust on the plate with his finger.

A Dutchman told me that there are tribes in the north that live on them during the season.

Live on them?

As a staple. They eat them fresh on arrival. But they also dry them in the sun and pound them between stones. They make a flour which they lay by for the winter months.

The Captain shook his head.

No easy task to civilise such a tribe.

These are people that store up bags of dried ants for family use, said Lieutenant Bruce. They kipper snakes.