ON THE SUNDAY that we were to join the Kurt Hansen I decided to walk down early to the harbour three miles away. Eric was to follow later with our gear in one of his father’s cars.
It was an evening just as beautiful as the Sunday that preceded it but for me even more exciting. It was the custom in the fashionable homes of Port Natal to release most of their Zulu servants from duty on Sunday afternoons, and they would all with rare exceptions make for the open spaces near the beaches where they congregated in hundreds to amuse themselves by talking, dancing, singing and playing their musical instruments.
On this particular evening there was an urgent feeling of release given out by the many black servants that I encountered on the steep slopes of the long hill above Port Natal, all going down towards the sea. I was young, and the history between us all was young, so there was still enough of the innocence of youth abroad to impart a brilliance to the moment.
The excitement for me was heightened by the music which accompanied me down the hill. Every black man walking the streets with me appeared to be a musician, some playing guitars slung minstrel-wise over their shoulders, others mouth-organs, or just modest Jew’s harps. All were strumming away in the quiet air like the copper of telegraph wires in the wind, carrying from one man to another the urgent call to hasten from the heights to the meeting down by the sea.
Even I, though a young pale face, felt myself utterly belonging to it all. Every now and then the music was overwhelmed by outbursts of bells tolling in the towers of the great cathedral in the European quarter of the city. I do not know why, but as a young lad church bells always alarmed me a little. They seemed to speak mainly the language of climax, crisis and challenge, and no matter how gay their peals, they always seemed to hold a profound warning in their summons. This evening was no exception. The cathedral bells seemed to flutter out wildly into the air as if the carved heraldic birds on their belfries had themselves been startled into taking wing to beat back this invasion of bright pagan music from the province of their holy church. Yet the moment the sound of bells returned to roost in the tall cathedral towers, then instantly, more vivid than ever, the gay, unrepentant native music swarmed in the vacated silences like fireflies in the hedges of the night.
The dress of these musicians too was as bright as their music. The Africans, when free to be themselves, dress for adornment with unashamed passion. There was one tall guitar player who impressed me in particular. He overtook me with a stride of incredible length and ease to pass me on the other side of the street. He had on a long white dress-shirt, the breast still stiff with starch, falling to his knees in front and to muscular calves behind. For a stud he had used a round brooch made of a bamboo frame and inlaid with vivid white, red, black and green beads. The ends of several bead necklaces formed a rainbow band round his throat. From each necklace hung a rectangular pendant also made of beads of fiery colours. Each pendant was of a different abstract design that had a definite meaning of its own in the tribal code. They were made for the wearers by the women whose fancy they had captured, and the number of pendants a man wore was testimony to the masculinity of his person. Below the lowest of the necklaces, flashing like crystal, hung a football referee’s whistle, and below the whistle, flowing smooth as liquid in the rhythm of the guitar player’s stride, emerged the unstarched ends of the shirt, the edges embroidered all along with beads of different colours. Copper anklets, burnished like new-strung telephone wire, shone on his feet; bracelets of elephant hair, locked with the metal of discarded paraffin tins silver with light, adorned his wrists; and from the lobes of his ears hung two large brass curtain rings. Everything about him flashed and jingled, and he passed me as a vision of such brilliance that both I and the few Europeans about seemed like ghosts trailing in his wake.
Just then a Zulu girl was entering the side gates of one of the larger houses. She was naked except for an apron of bright beads worked on ochre leather. Her dark skin had been polished with an ointment of hippopotamus lard so that it shone and added to the light of the anklets and bracelets of copper and metal as well as brooches and necklaces of beads smouldering on her person. She was tall, massive, strong, well-nourished, her body smooth and rounded as black polished marble and her breasts full and heavy. As she paused at the gate for a moment she threw a shy glance at the glittering minstrel striding down the hill. At the sight of her the Zulu minstrel abandoned even his music. He stopped playing, shouted aloud with joy and, as he did so, leapt with instant excitement into the air. “Oh you, you young woman there!” he called out. “I see you. I see the shadow you throw!”
She raised two long hands to hide the pleasure this recognition of her qualities brought burning to her face. Looking at him sideways over the tips of her fingers, her reply was made inaudible behind her broad hands.
At the shy response he laughed a laugh as bright and arrogant as a peacock’s tail spread out before a hen. Far from intimidating her, his arrogance made her bolder, as if she knew that her hidden fire was mother of it all. She lowered her hands to rest them lightly above her breasts and looked at him more frankly.
“Mother-to-be of a nation,” he called out again, “I see you have been waiting for me!”
“Oh you, you man!”
The response was in a low voice.
He answered with three chords plucked fiercely from his guitar, and picked up again his long resolute stride. At the sight of his tall shape swinging ahead, disappointment gripped her and she called out across the road; “But you! Where are you going in so great a hurry?”
“Not yet a wife but already an ipi-hambafn1 bush!” he answered, teasing her. Then added loftily: “I am just going.” Relenting, perhaps because the dazzle of the young woman there at the gate behind him was still bright within him, he condescended to explain, “My brothers are calling me and I must go.”
The girl stood staring after him striding purposively away, listening not only to his music but to the words of his improvised song which I can only render thus:
“Yes! My brothers call me
And I go. Look, how I go!
Not the way of old women,
The long path slow around the hill.
But straight up the mountain,
Steep down the side
Like a lamb-snatcher striking
Out of the sky.
Yes! My brothers called me,
And look! Oh look! How I go!”
Thinking back over the years, I can still remember that at that moment the light of the late afternoon, turning everything purple and gold in the fierce African sky, suddenly seemed old and everlasting. Perhaps that native girl was getting her first inkling of the part she would one day be compelled to play; the constant Dido in woman staring at the ruin of her brief encounter with the recurring Aeneas in man. Following the minstrel, I passed close by the girl at the gate. And brushing against her on the narrow pavement, I felt that I could hear the congregation of her blood singing in the temple of her heart.
Once down on the flats between the height and the sea I had to turn my back on such music and companionship. In an open space hard by a golf-course, a long line of young black men were doing a war dance. The light of the sun was on them like limelight in a theatre. They had all locked arms around one another’s shoulders, except one man who was leaping and whirling in front of them, chanting a theme of outraged honour and heroic revenge known since childhood to them all. I saw a silver whistle flashing between his teeth and heard a series of blasts. As the blasts ended, abruptly a hundred or more black legs of the men behind him were lifted as one into the air and then brought down with such power that the earth seemed to shake like a drum with the dynamic reverberation.
Regretfully I left all that behind me because my way to the port led me through the Asiatic quarter of Port Natal. It was astonishing how the smell of the magenta earth of Africa raised by the pounding feet vanished as if it had never been. Here the air immediately was astringent with a compound of the spices of Zanzibar and Madras, Malacca and Malabar; cloves, curry, pepper, nutmeg, saffron, cinnamon and a whiff of burned-out sandalwood as well.
The streets were dark with shadow and yet alight with the colour of the clothes of the races of India and Malaya. At many a doorway of dark interiors in narrow streets women stood tall like candles, flickering with the incandescence of their saris or embroidered coats worn over silk trousers ending well above feet set in jewelled slippers with long upturned points like gondolas. Invariably these women were surrounded with clusters of chattering children.
The men, or the prosperous ones among them, sat in front of their houses and shuttered shops fat and silent, staring at the scene in the street, hands holding their ample fronts. The not so prosperous were thinner, their faces ascetic and surprisingly aristocratic.
They struck me as an unusually handsome people, doomed by their numbers to wither long before their natural time. The truly poor were fearfully thin, the men worn out with constant labour, the women by both child-bearing and work. They crowded the streets first thing in the morning, proudly carrying their produce, painfully extracted from the untamed earth of Africa, piled high in wide round wicker trays where they gleamed like Arabian treasure under the opal light above. Fine apples, persimmons, guavas, loquats and bananas, brignolles and grinadellas of amethyst, carrots and mangoes topaz among the green of papayas and lettuces lush as velvet. Even the scrubbed faces of their new young potatoes had a moonstone glow upon them.
But what struck me most perhaps was how crowded was this part of Port Natal considering that all Africa lay vacant about it. It was as if for the oriental there was no escape from the tyranny of his numbers even in this empty land of ours. The feeling that these people had renounced hope of bettering their human condition, and the acceptance that was implied thereby, was for me darker than the shadows in the streets through which I walked. Everyone around me seemed bowed down by the weight of too much and too long a history. It was a world of lost reflexes, and I just could not imagine the young men of this spiced and over-crowded quarter able to stamp out the defiant war dances that I had just left behind me.
After the Indian quarter, the European part of the city was strangely dull, and empty and silent except when a tram rattled by me. Lack of interest quickened my step along the pavements. At the entrances of many hotels, boarding houses and apartment blocks old Zulu watchmen, hair grey at the temples, armed with sticks and knobkerries, were already in position to guard the possessions and persons of their employers during the night. Occasionally they would call out to each other and, without moving, carry on long conversations right across the streets. I remember in particular one old man dressed in rags who looked as if he were old enough to have fought in the Zulu rebellion, the son of a father, perhaps, who served in Cetewayo’s impis, and whose spirit doubtless had been nourished on legends of glory and of stories of powerful kings like Dingaan, Chaka and Dingiswayo. As he paced with a measured step up and down in front of the entrance to a jeweller’s shop, its front stuffed with the artifice of London’s gold- and silversmiths, Sheffield plate, Swiss watches and Japanese pearls, he carried the customary short knobkerrie with an abnormally big head that his people used for giving the coup de grâce to their enemies. Even then I wondered which was the stranger: the trust his employers confided in people like him, or the unerring loyalty with which they justified it?
I greeted him in his own tongue, calling him “my father”. With a flare of emotion he replied in kind, calling me “his little chief”. If so little produced so much, were there perhaps no limits to what it would be possible for both sides to give, and so induce a way of life for all that had never yet been seen?
The watchman’s beat ended right on the edge of the city’s great square. I crossed it to where, beyond, stood Port Natal’s vast City Hall. Everything possible had been done to make it look imposing. There was hardly a feature of European architecture that had not been mobilized to that end. On the remaining two sides of the square, merchants and planters had piled their own offices high to match the pretensions of public buildings, while in the centre of the square sat the great white Queen Victoria, sealed in phantom marble, surveying the scene like the midwife who had brought this hybrid brood of buildings into the world.
Had it not been for the fierce sunset fire in the sky, the tall royal palms at the side of the war memorials, and the dark pre-Christian green of the few Zulu trees (that had been allowed to remain on the scene, perhaps, because they screened the public lavatories from the eyes of the marble queen), it would have been easy to forget that I was still in Africa, so uncompromisingly European was the fixed mask on the face of the city. But now I was soon out of it, and at the bottom of a tawdry little side street the bay of Port Natal lay spread out tranquil and wide in the last of the day’s sunlight.
I do not know if there is anything more beautiful than the sight of a great natural harbour. I know for certain that then no view had ever moved me as much as the sight of the sea which travels so far and wide, coming home at last to the land. It is a view with the natural image of the pattern of departure and return which is the lot of all on earth. Something of this, not as articulate thought but as a surge of emotion, made me lean underneath a royal palm on green iron railings to look over the embankment where sea and city met.
The tide was in, the water smooth and shining as glass, and quickly around me the city of Port Natal lost its pomp and confidence. I saw how the untamed land that contained both it and the sea completely took over. This wide, wide land had a rim of hills, covered with thick dark green bush, against which the houses on their slopes seemed huddled together as if for protection. The crests of the hills themselves leapt livid with the colours of the sunset but their flanks already were blue with the ashes of the burned-out day. Only one great bluff of land to the south formed a tremendous natural breakwater against the quarter from which came the most stormy weather.
The curled bush which covered the bluff was yellow with sunlight, and the lighthouse perched on the end of the cliff was as white and tall as a candle. Behind the lighthouse far above the narrow Port Natal harbour mouth stood the high white Signals mast. As I watched, a whole line of brightly coloured flags were run up to the mast-head. Something clearly was on the move in the harbour, and it made me move on as well.
At the harbour gates the officer on duty, his spirit crushed with the weight of the Protestant inertia of what Samuel Butler called “the great and terrible day of our Lord”, hardly looked at me and just managed to raise a listless hand to wave me through. I found it incredible that anyone so dull could be employed in so exciting a place. I made straight for the quayside and the first of the long line of ships moored to it.
I can even now recall the name of each ship, the port of registration painted underneath it on the stern, the colours it wore on hull, deckwork and funnel, the flags it flew and the condition of its paint, so great a marvel were they all to me. There was not one among them, not even the rusty, overloaded and ill-equipped Greek tramp Leonidas, that seemed ordinary. I think that is perhaps the most remarkable thing about the sea: its power to invest all that lives and moves upon it with a wonder that nothing on land can equal. Its authority over our imagination seems to me final, as if it is at our beginning as it will be at our end.
On this particular evening at the beginning of my lessons in the alphabet of the sea, the wonder of it all burned in me with such a blaze that the ships were not just travel-stained pedlars of commerce but instruments of a living mythology; members all of an eternal argosy seeking gold not in mines but in odd, dream-like glimpses which, as yet, have flickered only on the far perimeter of the imagination; as the startling confrontation of Jason and the vision of the Fleece, or the flash of yellow on the bough which Aeneas plucked in the sacred wood for passport into the world below. I could not of course have put any of this into words at the time. But I know it was raw in the tooth-and-claw emotion of the moment, for I have only to think back, thus, for the same feelings to seize me again.
In this mood I strolled along the quayside, leaving the Leonidas of Piraeus for the Harrison freighter, Spectator from Liverpool, then on to another tramp, the Tosukuni Maru of Kobe, gleaming as if she like her crew had just emerged from the bath of purification preordained for all Japanese at the end of their day. The Swede Gripsholm of Gottenburg, decks stacked with neat standards of warm yellow wood; the Adolph Woermann, fat, prosperous and middleclass from Hamburg, a junior officer stiff with sense of duty at the head of the companion-way; the British India, Kandalla from Bombay, the Blue Funnel Nestor, classical in shape as in name, with some deep scars in her paintwork from her passage through the Roaring Forties on her Homeric voyage from London to Fremantle; the P. & O. Ballarat of Greenock, a Blue Peter at her tapering mast-head and a long line of homesick emigrants from Britain staring out with set, white faces at the silent cranes and shut warehouses on the quay; the Red Star Ceramic, one of the longest ships of her day and the last steam-driven four-master in the world, giving all the flags in her signals locker an airing by dressing herself in their gipsy colours overall from her greyhound nose to her wind-swept stern.
Each of these struck great chords on my senses, ending with the mail-ship which had docked only that morning and was still breathing steam and smoke from her marathon run between the Needles and the Cape.
All her brass and metal had been polished, her decks washed and holystoned, and the glass of all the many windows of saloons, drawing-rooms, long-galleries and bridge as well as row upon row of portholes from water-line to snow-white deck, had been soaped and rubbed down with leather so that she shone and gleamed with self-respect and circumspection unequalled even in the. Dutch interiors of Vermeer. Even the gulls which were sailing high overhead looked newly-washed and continued for some time after the shadows of the evening had darkened the ship, to flash like snow in the slanted sunlight. Their cry, the long notes drawn up and down constantly from the mooring ropes by the high-spirited ship straining at them with the slightest movement from the sea, and the imperative blasts from a tug’s whistle going at full speed to fetch in a new arrival at the roadstead before night should fall, combined to make a music full of nostalgia for me.
Finally, there hard by the mail-ship’s bow, I found at last the whaling fleet moored in line three abreast, noses in the air sniffing at the smell of the open sea, which I could now hear plainly pounding on the breakwater built on the narrow spit of sand which formed the lower lip of the mouth of the harbour. The ships were so small that they could easily have been an anti-climax in their position at the head of the great progression of shipping behind them. But they were, after all, the hunters of the sea, and as the hunter preceded the tiller of soil on earth, as Cain came before Abel, so the first-born among sailors too was a hunter, not a merchantman. Lying there with no fat or pretension upon them but athletic and sturdy, they satisfied my imagination as much as the liners glittering behind them.
I made my way then to the head of this small line where Larsen had told me I would find the Kurt Hansen. He had not told me, however, that she would be lying farthest out of the leading three. As a result I took it for granted that the ship immediately alongside was his, confidently crossed the gang-plank, and stepped on board. At first I thought there was no one in the ship and looked about me not knowing what to do. Then I saw the shoulder of a man protruding from behind the corner of the wheelhouse. I went up to him. To my amazement he was absorbed in knitting what looked like a broad scarf and did not hear me coming. Also his clothes were not at all what I had expected. No uniform. Only a thick brown woollen sweater with collar rolled back underneath his chin, a pair of heavy grey flannels and brown canvas shoes with rope soles.
“Excuse me. This is the Kurt Hansen, isn’t it?” I asked diffidently.
Without dropping a stitch, pausing in his knitting, or looking up, he said in a gruff, indifferent voice with a marked accent:
“No. This is not Kurt Hansen. This is Erik Hayerdahl. That alongside Harald Nielsen is Kurt Hansen.”
I stood for a moment irresolutely at his side, then I explained that I had been invited on board the Kurt Hansen by her Captain, Thor Larsen. Only then did he stop knitting to look me over from head to foot.
“So you want Larsen,” he remarked while he stared at me obviously trying to puzzle out what Larsen’s interest could be in someone like myself. The answer clearly evaded him and he soon dismissed the matter, muttering: “I think Larsen not back yet. But cook and stoker are there.”
Once more he became absorbed in his knitting, so I left him to board the Harald Nielsen, walked across her without seeing any sign of life, and made my way to the gang-plank between her and the Kurt Hansen.
fn1 Literally ‘where-are-you-going’, the name of a bush of dense, intricate, curved thorns which catch in the clothes of the careless walker and forces him to stop and disengage with difficulty. It is for this reason the Boer trekkers called it ‘the-wait-a-little-bit’ thorn.