The Lost World of the Kalahari (35 page)

We called it ‘The Song of the Rain' and it is for ever associated in my mind with that sudden re-flowering of the desert which arose from the coming of the rains. Even the thorn quickened and its iron branches budded. I do not know the names of all the flowers that appeared in the grass standing so erectly and proudly around us. We spoke of may to describe the branches of white blossom, dazzling against the purified blue above us; we called the wonderful white lilies near the sip-wells, amaryllis; the sharp spiked purple and red blooms in the bush, Kalahari iris; and the shy, shade-loving primulas, primroses. There were wild Bauhinia, curved and carved along the edges and folded in at the ends like Botticelli sea-shells; wild protolarias, mimosa, and dozens of other blooms sun-flower bold and love-mist fine. The song of birds building their nests became almost deafening, and in the distance the male ostriches, their black and white Macedon shirts repleated, began to trip fantastic, courting dances in circles round one another, booming ceaselessly to relieve the sudden fire of longing within. One day I came across two giant bustards harsh with passion, and so busy bowing, curtsying, and tripping to each other that they refused to acknowledge me though I came within five yards of them. I caught a rare glimpse in an earth hole of a baby hyaena in purple fur; at another place I saw a tiny jackal of burnished gold, and at yet another walked a bleating, trembling, newly-dropped springbuck kid whose mother had been taken by lion.

It was all beautiful, but like autumn and death, spring and new love, too, have their own unrest. Daily I was aware of a new and growing uneasiness which passed from ‘Spoor of Gazelle', from Nxou, from the oldest of the Bushmen, from Dabe and Ben, to me. I found Ben increasingly silent, nightly examining the sky and remarking how the lightning showed the tide of the rainy season daily surging nearer to where his lands lay, still unploughed, far away down south. I knew it was unfair to keep him a day longer than was necessary and one night I was constrained to explain: ‘I won't stay here a minute longer than necessary to finish the film I promised to make, Ben.'

‘Of course, I know.' His answer was genuine enough but I could feel the natural unrest within it.

Vyan, though not by hint or word would he have added to the pressure which he knew was already great in me, discussed increasingly with Ben the complexities of animal husbandry. He was homesick for his hump-backed cattle and the view of the Northern Frontier District hills on the far rim of his ranch. Jeremiah, too, took out the under-exposed and well-nigh illegible snapshot of his ‘very, very clever son' and stared at it over-long by the fire. I was forced to recognize that spring is not the natural time for completion but rather the moment of life's re-beginnings.

Duncan, alone, was blissfully happy working from dawn to sunset, photographing, filming, and tending his cameras. He was an endless source of amusement to the Bushmen because, time and again, he would forget everything except his camera and walk straight into a tree, or fall backwards into a bush of thorn, to emerge without his hat. But behind their merriment I knew they, too, were daily more anxious to be off on one of their mysterious ‘walk-abouts' to the rare places of desert life of which they alone knew. This was evident in the eyes of the mothers as well as the children that they now brought to me to doctor for minor ailments. But our coming, too, had laid many of their fears to rest, and some of them looked at us as if to say: ‘Stay with us forever. With your magic and your guns we'll make heaven of this desert earth.'

I, myself, would have stayed on gladly much longer. There was so much more to learn and so much else I wanted to do. There was, for instance, the great gathering of Bushman clans at which Nxou hinted one day. We were speaking of dancing and he said the best dances always were in full summer, after the rains, at some great pan in the deepest part of the desert, where all people came to play and dance and eat and ‘make glad together'. I took a compass bearing of the direction in which he pointed and longed with all my heart to be able to stay for the great occasion. But I knew it was impossible to do so without loss of honour. All situations in life have an inner as well as an outer shape which is uniquely their own, and one does violence to either at one's peril. I feared that perhaps I had already been greedy, trying to force more out of the situation than it naturally contained. That fear in the end preserved me.

As the end of the filming of the love-bow ritual came in sight, and comforting myself with the hope that if I were obedient to the true proportions of the occasion one day life might reward me with the chance for a longer and more fruitful journey, I asked Ben and Vyan to go out to our nearest supply point for the last time. I asked them to bring back not only enough water and petrol to carry us across the heart of the great desert to the railway on the far-eastern boundary, but also to bring back some farewell presents for our Bushmen.

This matter of presents gave us many an anxious moment. We were humiliated by the realization of how little there was we could give to the Bushmen. Almost everything seemed likely to make life more difficult for them by adding to the litter and weight of their daily round. They themselves had practically no possessions: a loin strap, a skin blanket, and a leather satchel. There was nothing that they could not assemble in one minute, wrap in their blankets and carry on their shoulders for a journey of a thousand miles. They had no sense of possession. When first I offered to cut up and divide fairly between them a buck that we had killed, they merely looked puzzled and said: ‘Yes, by all means if you wish it. But why go to that unnecessary trouble? If one eats, all eat; if one is hungry, all are hungry.' When I gave one of them a cigarette, after three puffs it was passed to the next, and so travelled backwards and forwards, three puffs at a time, among all of them. With such a people I had long since realized there was only one way of truly giving and that was to give them a place in our hearts and imaginations; to see beyond the dialectical obsession with externals that bedevil our minds, to where stood these authentically caring and cruelly uncared-for children of life. Only in that way could they have a part in our lives and not vanish, as so many others had done before them. I feared even to give a small present of glass beads to the women in case it made them dissatisfied with their own ostrich shell, stained roots, and coloured woods. Yet my instinct was strong that some free gift from us was needed in order to seal, both in their minds and ours, the fact that this encounter was different from any other between our races: a meeting of hunters at a well in a desert, all following the same perilous spoor of greater meaning and becoming. We decided, therefore, to give presents of a handful of beads and a vivid kerchief to each of the women which, in deference to the absence of a sense of individual property, was to be equal from the youngest to the oldest. We got each of the men a hunter's knife and a plug of tobacco.

On the last evening we set up our one table on the edge of the clearing, piled our presents on it, brewed buckets of coffee made mellow with the last of our preserved milk and saturated with sugar, and invited all the Bushmen to join us. While another hunter's sunset glorified the sky we gave them each their presents. They accepted them as in a dream with a look of wonder and also, I thought, a touch of sadness that this was the end. They dispersed quietly, only Nxou making some attempt to sing the wayfarer's song we knew so well.

Watching them go, Ben said: ‘They, too, will be off soon.' He waved his hand to the far south where a god-like head of thunder-cloud was beginning to send out lightning in the darkening sky.

‘But these old people, how will they get on?' I asked, pointing to the ancient couple I had met the first morning, now slowly following in the wake of the others.

‘They'll go as far as they can,' Ben answered. ‘But a day will come when they can't go on. Then, weeping bitterly, all will gather round them. They'll give them all the food and water they can spare. They'll build a thick shelter of thorn to protect them against wild animals. Still weeping, the rest of the band, like the life that asks it of them, will move on. Sooner or later, probably before their water or food is finished, a leopard, but more commonly hyaena, will break through and eat them. It's always been like that, they tell me, for those who survive the hazards of the desert to grow truly old. But they'll do it without a whimper.'

Remembering the untroubled expressions on the two wrinkled old faces it was almost more than I could bear to hear.

‘Do they know all this, Ben?' I asked.

‘Yes, they know it all right. They've had to do it to others before them,' he answered, swinging around sharply on his heel to go back to the fire as if, in the darkness beyond, he had seen a gathering shadow he did not wish to face.

I sat for some time by myself thinking over what he had told me. Life was only possible for all of us because, in our past, there had been those who had put the claims of life itself before all else. Did it really matter whether the end came from the crab within or the hyaena without? We will have the courage to meet it and give meaning to the manner of our dying provided we, like these humble, wrinkled old Bushmen, have not set a part of ourselves above the wholeness of life.

We broke camp early the next morning, all the Bushmen, the women wearing their vivid new kerchiefs, crowding round our last fire to watch us. Their eyes, as they followed us, seemed uncomprehending and, to me, almost accusing. I know we all felt sad. I heard Vyan mutter to Ben: ‘You know, an old hunter up north once said to me, “Wherever you camp in the bush you leave a part of yourself behind.” I feel it more about this place than any other.'

For once I moved off first because I wanted to get the break over quickly. Just before I got into my Land-Rover, ‘Spoor of Gazelle' broke out of the bush, the kerchief round her neck streaming out like a flag of fire behind her, and ran up to put an ostrich egg full of water in my hand as I had so often seen her do to other hunters setting off on a long chase. ‘Bowl of Food' (Nxou), ‘Stone-axe' (Bauxhau), ‘Powerful Wildebeest' (Tsexchi), and ‘Lips of Fat' (Xhooxham) were sitting silenty beside the fire Watching us intenly. As I slammed the door of the car they all stood up and raised their hands as Nxou had done the evening I first met him. I drove past the silent huddle of little men and women all standing upright with hands raised above their heads. Waving to them I felt as if all my re-discovered childhood were dying within me. I drove up past the sip-wells to the high dunes behind them. On the crest I stopped, got out, and looked back. The remaining three Land-Rovers were just crossing the dry watercourse. Beyond them there was no smoke over our old camp, no visible sign of man or human habitation. The desert looked as empty as it had ever been. Yet in that vast world, behind the glitter of pointed leaves and in the miracle of sand made alive and thorn of steel set alight with flower by the rain, the child in me had become reconciled to the man. The desert could never be empty again. For there my aboriginal heart now had living kinsmen and a home on which to turn. I got back into my Land-Rover. I drove over the crest and began the long, harsh journey back to our twentieth-century world beyond the timeless Kalahari blue.