ON THE 14TH OF SEPTEMBER 1852 the irregulars left the yellow dog in Clayton’s care at the Fort Cox camp and marched through the sleeping town. The dog followed for a mile and then the Captain dismounted and borrowed a short whip from a Dutch scout and walked back and cursed it. The dog lowered its curved yellow tail and turned and retreated for a few yards. When the kid looked back it was just a silhouette in the moonlight with its ears pricked forward as it watched them go.
Their uniforms were ragged patchworks and their shirts hung like rags from beneath their jackets. They trod quietly with their rifles held at the end of the barrel and carried over the shoulder in the manner of bandits. Seen from the shanties of the Hottentot village they were no more than shadows that clanked and tramped in the night. They passed like a hint of carrion on the breeze and they might have been the spectres of Rameses’ men deploying through the darkness about Kadesh or the risen ancestors of Scythian hordes asearch for plunder upon the steppe.
They moved westwards below the southern slopes of the Kromme and they joined with a force under Colonel Ire and they breakfasted at a little river. They were watched by small groups of warriors who stayed at the very extremity of the range of a Minié rifle in the hands of a good shot.
They marched on and they bivouacked in a ruin below the path where Hartung was taken. At four o’clock on the morning of the day following they started up the rocky track. They came to the place of ambush and disembowelment and the skeletons lay where the living had fallen. Fronds of creeper twined and flowered brightly among them and they appeared in that September dawn like an aberration, a ghastly caveat glimpsed in Eden.
They came out of the forest and onto the spur in a thick mist and felt their way up to the escarpment. They moved west along the southern heights of the Kromme and then they stopped and waited. When the sun was fully risen the mist dissipated to some extent and the scouts saw heathen warriors moving towards an outcrop of ridge which jutted into the Great Western Ravine.
The main body marched on in frontal assault and the irregulars approached the same objective by a forest path just below the spur’s eastern edge. They came out onto the prominence just as the main body arrived. Scattered balls passed over their heads and they moved forward towards the rocky natural fortress on the extremity. The irregulars returned the fire from good cover and crawled forward and fired again and the heathen descended into the Western Ravine by routes more commonly used by apes and down which the marauders were not confident to advance.
The heathen left three gaunt women and two small children behind and one of the women had a baby tied to her back. The irregulars paused there and the kid sat and watched the prisoners. The mother untied the knot in the front of her ragged blanket and swung the baby forward and inserted the nipple of her left breast into its mouth. The infant sucked at the shrivelled dug. There was a crust of mucus on its lip and flies buzzed about its dark staring eyes and it did not blink when they landed.
The irregulars descended into the ravine by a path so steep that they were in danger of following the rocks they dislodged and bouncing down with them to the valley floor. The ammunition and pack horses slid on their hindquarters and the rocket party fought with restraining ropes to stop their apparatus from falling forward onto their horses’ necks.
At the foot of the path they connected with the other forces to enclose a section of the ravine and the area was scoured. The marauder circle closed like a net and the heathen warriors dispersed singly or in pairs and as the long lines passed over them they rose from their hiding places and disappeared behind their pursuers by little-used paths.
The irregulars came upon further women and children, as many as seventy, hidden in the clefts in the base of the cliffs and took them, along with quantities of spears and guns and ornaments. They returned with their prisoners to rejoin Colonel Ire and found him halted at the edge of the forest. There were six fine trees there which stood at the entrance to a track into the bush and from the lower branches of five of them hung five Hottentot defectors. They turned slowly on their ropes as if to avert their gaze from another who was seated on a horse below the sixth tree with his noose about his neck. He lifted his hand and grasped the rope above and tugged at it.
De kabel is te lank, he said.
A Fingo remonstrated with him and others laughed but the Hottentot was grim and obdurate.
De kabel is te lank.
What’s that mean, said the kid.
Rope’s too long, said the joiner.
The Fingo remonstrated further, but another climbed the tree and shortened the rope and when he had descended the Hottentot dug his heels into the horse’s flanks and clicked it forward. The horse started away and the defector dropped and jerked and danced on the rope and a wetness spread in the groin of his threadbare trousers.
The irregulars rested for two hours with Colonel Ire’s forces and about them the valley filled with the smoke of burning huts. They left their warnings turning slowly in the haze as if under orders to take in all points of the compass impartially and they proceeded east towards the head of the valley. A party detached to the left to attack a small body of heathen on a height which commanded the intended ascent and another to the south scarps to intercept the flight of any dislodged groups in that direction.
They trudged up a pass to the northern plateau and found Highlanders posted on the summit to cover their ascent. They marched east and entered the forest below Mount Misery and the trees on the path to the Kromme were all decorated with corpses, the heads bent askew from the neck in strange attitudes and the bodies like gravid puppets hanging from their ropes. They marched through an avenue of death a mile long and then they came upon members of the 60th Rifles who cheered them and who offered the officers cigars and brandy as they passed. The sun went down and they marched for a short while in the darkness and they bivouacked on a bleak rocky ridge where the Captain broke all the pegs of his patrol tent before he gave up and slept on the bare ground.
At daylight they were amarch again and they separated into four bodies and descended via gorges into the Great Ravine. Above them a party occupied the spur they had cleared the day before and threw rockets down into inaccessible retreats.
They gained the floor of the ravine without opposition and proceeded to some entrenched fieldworks thrown up on a farm where they halted for breakfast. They marched east up the valley again through areas fragrant with flowering plants and bushes and boerboon covered with thick clusters of crimson blossom. They passed next to a rocky stream and the trees that lined it were alive with little apes that chattered and leapt from branch to branch.
They joined again with Colonel Ire’s forces and moved up the Great Ravine in a long line of redcoats and riflemen and Highlanders and artillery and Fingos and heathen prisoners. Colonel Ire’s column branched right and the Fingos were ordered to scour the bush. There were strange noises heard in the forest and the Fingos were hesitant to enter and Colonel Ire rode his horse at them and whipped them with a thick short leather lash and drove them before him into the trees.
Firing began at once and the irregulars traced the Fingos’ progress by the wreaths of smoke that curled above the trees. At the head of a subsidiary gorge the Fingos emerged driving two score of heathen women and children and a few sore-backed horses. The women wore black cloaks of finely dressed hide which had been stained with the juice of mimosa bark. Their dense coiled hair was entwined with the tooth and claw of wild beasts and their arms and legs were so thin that they looked more like bones dyed brown than human limbs.
The irregulars moved back down toward the valley floor with the prisoners going before. A woman struggled to keep pace and the Captain came round a corner of the path to hear a close report and his horse stumbled as the woman fell dead before it. A Fingo turned away with a smoking firelock. Another woman struggled under the burden of a child on her back and she discarded it and walked on. The Captain picked up the infant and gave it to a Fingo warrior who carried it held by the ankles over his shoulder like a dead rabbit and its head knocked against the stock of his firelock.
They came down into the main valley and turned again toward its head and in the evening they gained the Northern Highlands where they prepared for another high bivouac and it began to rain. The men had only a single blanket and that was quickly soaked through and they dozed all night like derelicts about their fires.
The reveille sounded at four o’clock and they stumbled up in great confusion in a searching wind. Two of the women prisoners had died during the night and the discarded infant was missing and the Fingo responsible told Johnny Fingo that it had escaped.
The irregulars moved out with Colonel Ire’s column through sleet that came angling out of a dim grey dawn. A world diffuse and bled of colour and the vivid hues of the landscape replaced with cold. They went west across the highlands and out onto the thin ridge that divided the twin valleys. They proceeded along this eminence in a wind that came direct from mountains iced with snow. To the south on the Kromme they could see artillery dropping shells in unbroken forest in the Southern Twin. The kid noted how the smoke billowed on the ridge and the devastation exploded in verdant green below and the great reports rolled out over the valley.
They descended in single file down a vertiginous track into the Northern Twin and they came to a ruined farm where the almond and peach trees stood like brides in puffed dresses of pink blossom. They halted in this bright place for an hour and then they climbed back to the ridge by a track towards its eastern extremity and they gained the summit and went down the other side. They crossed the Southern Twin at the open mouth of that valley and began to ascend to the ridge on the eastern end of the Kromme Heights. The slope steepened and they advanced by a wooded path so narrow that the whole column had to halt every twenty yards and wait for the front to move on as the bugles sounded the halt and advance from front to rear by companies. They came upon an area of burnt-out heathen fires with places for sentinels to cover the country below and they halted and the Captain stood with Colonel Ire while the men rested.
Fingo, said Colonel Ire, is the heathen word for wanderer. But in fact the heathen are wanderers and sojourners themselves. They are the Jews of this continent. And like the Jews of old they have a tendency to throw up millenarian prophets. Talk a certain language to a heathen and he’ll leap forward to gamble everything on a day of rapture. This prophet of theirs claimed that if roots of Pelargonium were eaten our bullets would turn to water. That was perhaps his biggest mistake.
In what sense?
His word is persistently demonstrated to be nonsense. One day a prophet will rise among them who has learnt the art of revelatory language combined with an appropriate vagueness. And who knows what they will do then.
Perhaps they will destroy us.
Their only hope is the missionaries. But given the poverty of their awareness it is more likely that they destroy themselves.
The party moved on and the kid heard firing from the vanguard and when he passed up the path there were three heathen bodies that lay beside it and a little beyond them a defector hung from a tree and blood trickled from a hole in his forehead and ran down his face and splashed onto his naked dusty feet. The kid brushed past and the dead man swung slowly in his wake.
They gained the heights and descended again by a path more difficult and precipitous than the last where horses slid thirty yards at a stretch and so they came down again into the Southern Twin. They passed through a smouldering village, a place so hot that they ran through it to avoid baking and they moved on into thick forest and scoured it.
Colonel Ire stood in a clearing with a bugler from each regiment at his side and the company and regimental calls of the different corps rang out and so the Colonel commanded the movements of a thousand hidden men who rooted through the undergrowth like hogs.
In the evening the forces reassembled in the valley and marched east and at sunset they bivouacked for the night on open ground. At six o’clock on the day following they marched in heavy rain for their respective camps and far above them on the forest paths the dead waited on their ropes.