HOMEWARD BOUND--FACES AROUND THE FIRE--THE BUSHMEN--PIET NOONA AND THE
SNAKE--THE LOVE OF THE DESERT--MY PREHISTORIC UNCLE AND AUNT--SCRUPLES--
THE HUNTER'S INSTINCT.
The ocean-plain to the south of Typhon and the camp we had broken up, is
probably the loneliest among the less frequented parts of Bushmanland.
No Trek Boer ever ventures there with his stock; the hunter pauses on
its undefined margin--well knowing that should he pursue the
disappearing herd of oryx much farther, he and his horse would
inevitably perish of thirst. For even on the rare occasions when rain
falls on this tract no water is conserved on its surface. Those
sand-choked, saucer-shaped depressions of the exposed bedrock found in
other parts of the desert, in which rain-water sometimes lodges, do not
there exist.
The only people who ever visited the area in which we sojourned were
half-breed hunters. These had developed abnormal thirst-resisting
powers. They usually occupied a tract some hundred miles farther south,
and were incorrigible poachers of ostriches. By means of a flying
squadron of boys mounted on tough ponies, these half-breeds used to
round up herds, comprising birds of all ages, and mercilessly slaughter
them all on the edge of the Kanya-tract.
We outspanned after a trek of about three hours. That night we intended
to take things easy,--at least I meant to try and persuade Andries to
consent to our so doing. The wagon was lightly laden, owing to our
having consumed most of the water,--the heat had not been excessive
since the oxen started from Gamoep; therefore they were not
over-thirsty. In fairly cool weather cattle bred on the borders of the
desert often voluntarily refrain from drinking water for several days at
a time. We were homeward bound after a prosperous voyage. Supper was
being got ready; Andries was busy preparing gemsbok soup, in which to
soak our rusks. The candle-bush fire flared aloft. Our pipes were
alight and the peace of the desert filled us with content.
Hendrick and Danster had skinned the second jackal which, in
anticipation of the arrival of Piet Noona and his nephew with the
cattle, I had insisted should be reserved for that night's supper,--for
on the night previous we had trekked without a halt. The flesh of
Autolycus was soon roasting on the embers; all our Hottentots were
smacking their lips in anticipation of a feast.
I formally presented both jackal skins to Piet Noona's nephew,--but
under an undertaking that they were not to be sold or otherwise
alienated. The skin of the first jackal was too thoroughly riddled with
buck-shot to be of much use to me; that of the second was badly torn by
the bullet. They were to be brayed, mended, and donned by the recipient
with as little delay as possible.
This gift might have been described as an offering on the altar of
decency. I was not inclined to prudery, but Piet Noona's nephew was
beginning to grow up, and his sumptuary condition was shocking. In fact
his only available garment was a tattered fragment of sheepskin,--a
fragment so scanty that it would have barely sufficed to cover the
opening of a porcupine's burrow. Even then it could not have been
guaranteed to keep out the draught. The jackal skins were not large,
but compared with the sheepskin fragment they would have been as an
overcoat to a child's pinafore. I explained how they were to be worn:
one in front and one in the rear. The coverings of the hind paws were
to be joined, skin to skin, in such a way that the combined result would
hang from the wearer's shoulders, and the brushes were to be wound about
his neck when the weather was chilly. Piet Noona's nephew would thus be
reasonably protected, fore and aft, both from Mrs Grundy and the
weather. Crowned with a chaplet of Ghanna leaves and with his
knob-kerrie for thyrsus, he might have easily passed for a youthful but
disreputable Dionysus.
As we drew out towards the borders of the desert the fingers of silence
seemed to press less heavily on our lips. Supper over, we laid
ourselves on the soft sand and conversed. But at first our conversation
was low-toned and very serious. The imminence of infinity abashed us;
it was as though earth and air were full of ears bent to catch every
word we uttered. I do not think anyone,--even the most feather-brained,
could be garrulous in the desert.
The flames lit up the surrounding faces,--the ruddy, rugged countenance
of Andries, with its blue, laughing eyes and cropped beard streaked with
grey. The visage of Piet Noona was like that of an old baboon; his
nephew's resembled that of a young monkey. Danster's physiognomy
indicated a mixture of various strains; the result was quite
insignificant.
The Mongolian features of Hendrick were distinctive and very
interesting. What was it that his appearance suggested; not exactly the
Chinaman, for his expression was not at all impassive; one could always
read his mood by it. His eyes were slightly oblique, his cheekbones
high, his head was as round as a Kanya stone. With remarkable muscular
development of the chest and shoulders, heavily hipped and very slightly
bandy-legged,--for long I was puzzled to discover what is was that
Hendrick reminded me of. He loved a horse and rode like a Centaur--or
the man-part thereof. Then I knew: it was a Hun that I was seeking
for,--one of the locusts of that Asiatic horde which swept over Europe
from the north-eastern steppes. I think that Attila, the Eraser of
Nations, who swayed the world from his saddle-throne, must have looked
somewhat like my scout. The most plausible theory as to the origin of
the Hottentot race is that its progenitors migrated hither from Asia.
Even van Riebeek noticed the resemblance between the aborigines of the
Cape and the Chinese. Yes, I was almost certain that Hendrick was a
Hun,--or rather that the tribe he was mainly descended from and the Huns
were twigs from the same bough of the great human tree.
Hendrick, to be appreciated, should have been seen on the back of an
unrestrained or a vicious horse; it was then that he became a
personality. He rode as gracefully bare-back as with a saddle. I could
picture him galloping away from some sacked and smoking town--not on
raw-boned Bucephalus, but on some thickset, shaggy, steppe-bred mount.
Hanging limply across his tense, gripping thighs was a milk-white,
gently-nurtured Ildico maiden. Her wide blue eyes were stony with
horror,--her golden hair dabbled in the sweat of the horse's heaving
flank. She was bound and pinioned with shreds torn from her robe of
lawn. The other Huns were loaded with sacks of church plate, with
weapons and with merchandise. But Hendrick looked on the face of this
maiden, the daughter of what, but a few short hours before, had been a
proud and noble house,--and desired her alone. But I think and hope she
died of terror before the bivouac was reached. Hendrick was a tame,
kindly, obedient hunting-scout, but I am sure that the fierce,
conquering Hun lay sleeping within him.
There is not a watering place in the Bushmanland desert which has not
some tragic story connected with it,--some reminiscence of a lonely
thirst-death, some tale having for its motif the shedding of blood--
usually by treachery. But death, accidental or designed, was always the
theme. Not many miles from where we were camped that night one of the
earlier Wesleyan missionaries travelling from Warmbad to the half-breed
settlement on the Kamiesbergen had been shot to death with poisoned
arrows. This happened early in the nineteenth century. The murderer
was executed some time afterwards at Silverfontein.
The first white man who crossed this tract did a venturesome thing. For
although at that time the Bushmen had already been considerably thinned
out by the Hottentots and half-breeds, many of them still lurked in the
less accessible parts. From time to time they emerged, singly or in
small parties, and wreaked a wild and often quite inconsequent revenge.
Their mode of attacking travellers was to steal up at night among the
tussocks and discharge a flight of poisoned arrows at point-blank range,
among those surrounding the camp fire. They would then immediately
decamp and scatter in the darkness. Hours afterwards they might repeat
the attack. If the travellers were deep in the desert the repetition
would perhaps be delayed until the following night, for the Bushmen took
no avoidable risks. Usually the oxen or horses forming the span would
also be slain. One can imagine the plight of a party of travellers
under such circumstances: half of them dead or dying in agony, the
survivors cowering in a wagon as hopelessly tethered to a lonely spot in
a trackless waste as a wrecked ship is chained to the reef that gores
her side. They would have been ringed round with drought and famine;
close prisoners in a solitude only mitigated by the unseen presence of
implacable foes, the stroke of whose dart was as silent and deadly as
that of the snake.
Yet these Bushmen had sufficient justification for all the terrible
reprisals they perpetrated. They were the original dwellers of the
soil; the Hottentots came, dispossessed them of their best water-places
and slaughtered them without mercy. When they migrated eastward they
met the Kaffirs, who proved a more formidable and quite as pitiless a
foe. In the storming of the Bushmen's strongholds their women and
children were speared or flung into the flames. They retired to the
most remote wastes,--to the sheer, black-chasmed fastnesses of the
Malutis, where snow lies thick for months at a time,--to torrid,
waterless deserts. But in every retreat, no matter how remote, their
foes sought them out. They invariably made a desperate resistance, and
sold their lives dearly.
But the duel was between ferocity organised and ferocity deranged, so
the former was bound to prevail. It was a struggle of the clan against
a number of units which had no permanent cohesion; whose combinations
were fitful and occasional. There is no god but strength visible on the
checker-board of history. When the mighty is put down from his seat it
is not the humble and meek who is exalted, but one whose strength, being
of a more subtle order, is perhaps not at first recognised as such--one
whose cloak of humility may cover armour of proved temper. The strength
of the Bushmen, perfected through long ages of experience, was
all-potent against his one-time only adversary, the animal. But when
used against man, the intruder who had fought for his existence with
other men and learnt in the process the utility of combination, it
failed. The Bushman contended under one tremendous disability: he had
no tribal organisation,--the family was the independent unit.
Piet Noona's nephew, having had the duty of collecting fuel assigned to
him, carried a considerable store of bushes to the vicinity of the fire
and there heaped them together. With the exception of the "toa," most
of the vegetation of the desert is globular in form, and, being usually
rooted in more or less soft sand, is easily pulled out. Andries reached
over and seized a bush-globe; one that was rather denser and larger than
usual. This he flung on the fire. Out of it glided, hissing, a snake--
a horned adder. The reptile was quickly despatched. But upon seeing it
Piet Noona sprang into the air to a height of about four feet; then he
fled away into the darkness, bounding sideways as he ran and shrieking.
He had gone quite mad for the time being. This always happened when he
found himself in close proximity to a snake, and the madness invariably
manifested itself in the same way. Years ago Piet had been bitten by a
puff adder and narrowly escaped with his life. Ever since the sight of
a snake at close quarters has incontinently thrown his brain out of
gear. How far occasional bouts of brandy-drinking at the Copper Mines
has been responsible for this peculiarity, I cannot say.
Some months previously I had played--to a great extent unwittingly--a
cruel trick on him. I had heard of Piet's being afraid of snakes, but
had no idea that his dread of them was so intense. One day when he was
saddling Prince I laid a recently-killed snake across the saddle. The
creature was practically dead, but was still squirming slightly--as
snakes are apt to do for a considerable time after they have been
rendered harmless, no matter how badly they may have been mangled.
Piet's head, as he tightened the girth, was under the uplifted
saddle-flap. When he dropped the latter and found the snake close to
his face he sprang into the air and fled, bounding sideways and every
now and then striking his thigh diagonally with the palm of his right
hand. It was a most peculiar and uncanny manifestation. I did not see
Piet for three days afterwards. Then he emerged from the veld, red-eyed
and starving, but once more in his (comparatively) right mind. That
night, as his cries grew fainter in the distance, we concluded that we
should see no more of him during the trip.
Once more our caravan was silently moving over the trackless waste. The
desert was now in one of her moods of tenderness,--the air full of soft
and subtle scent that was sweeter than myrrh--more grateful than wafts
from a garden of spices. A feeling of sadness gripped my heartstrings;
I was leaving the mistress I loved--the mistress beneath whose stern,
arid, monotonous day-mask I could discern the fair symmetry, the soft
and delicately-tinted curves of perfect and eternal youth. How often
had I breathlessly watched those features quicken and grow mobile as the
defacing sun departed. It was then that the breath of her mouth sought
mine; then that her eyes shone softly as the evening star. But it was
at full night, when the great dome above us was unvexed by the least
trace of day, that the desert's inhabiting soul came forth and
transfigured the littleness of my cribbed and cabined spirit.
Sometimes for a season she smiled as though she relented, but the smile
was not for me. At dawn, when Zephyr and Aurora couched at the hem of
her robe, she let me lean against the softness of her bosom. At night
she lulled me to sleep and crooned into my ear dream-songs that were
great and strong with wisdom gleaned from the most ancient seasons. But
when day returned she flung me to the lions of the sun. Should they
have mangled me to death the mistress of my worship would not have
cared. She was too strong to feel compassion, too lofty to be moved by
grief or touched by any regret. My beloved was not mine, tho' I was
wholly hers, and the lilies at her breast were petalled with consuming
flame. "Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon,
clear as the sun, terrible as an army with banners?" It was the desert.
Spinoza's aphorism:--"Those who love God truly must not expect that God
will love them in return," roots deep in human experience. The loftiest
love is that which gets not nor expects requital. I used to believe
that this desert I love hated me. But I thought so no longer. It was
not hate nor any other emotion that she felt; she was filled with the
divine attribute of infinite indifference.
I am subjectively certain that some ancestor of mine with prognathous
jaw, flat forehead and enormous thews, paddled over the sea that once
filled these plains and roamed over the far-separated hill-tracks. I
often saw him,--usually where the stark mountain range,--which in those
old days was covered with verdure,--arises like a rampart from the
northern limit of the plains. I have watched him crouching behind a
rock with a sling in his hairy hand and a stone-axe slung to his girdle
of twisted thongs,--his fierce eyes bent on a herd of Aurochs (or
whatever the local contemporary equivalent of those beasts may have
been) straying down to the entrance of a certain valley. There he had
constructed, and skilfully concealed, a staked pit. The mountains at
Agenhuis and the high kopjes at Gaams and Namies were then islands, and
he used to paddle from one to the other in a canoe made of Aurochs' hide
stretched over boughs. In the gorge that splits Agenhuis Mountain he
waged mighty and victorious war with such dragons of the prime as
attempted to lair therein,--for Agenhuis was one of his favourite
sojourning places, and in the days when he flourished, dragons had not
yet disappeared from earth.
In view of the undoubted scientific foundation upon which the germ-plasm
theory rests, there is no limit to be set to atavistic memory. I am
quite persuaded that this ancestor of mine actually existed; as a matter
of fact I have over and over again seen him on the hunting trail,
attending to the all-important business of filling his larder. I have
watched him as he set forth in the early morning, empty and wrathful,
and as he returned towards evening--still empty but laden with
extraordinary spoil of antediluvian meat, and whooping an extempore
triumphal chant.
He would fling the meat down at the mouth of his cave, and bellow for
the attendance of his by-no-means gentle mate. She, with the fear of
the stone-axe before her prehistoric eyes, would at once conceal the
prehistoric baby in a corner, and with almost feverish energy busy
herself with rudimentary cooking. A big fire would be already alight,--
the embers containing stones in red-hot readiness for dropping into a
pot-shaped depression in the cave's floor, half-full of water. Into
this the meat and the stones would be flung together, but in the
meantime a tit-bit had been lightly and hurriedly broiled, cleaned of
ashes, and held out to the hunter on the end of a long stick, in a
propitiatory way. After this had been snatched and swallowed to the
accompaniment of savage growls, the cook seemed to be more at her ease.
All this time the baby kept as still as a mouse. Prehistoric babies did
not cry when papa was about, and hungry. In the exceptional cases where
they did, it only happened once.
I trust my claim to such ancient lineage may not be put down to
snobbery. One always suspects those who dwell unduly on the deeds of
their ancestors. But my justification is this:--a germ charged with an
epitome of that creature's stormy life has come down to me through the
generations. It remained dormant until it met in my brain some solvent
which disintegrated its shell and thus set the sleeper free. Garrulous
after its long imprisonment the germ has told the story over and over
again to all the grey molecules of my cortex. For some time most of
these have known it off by heart.
Accordingly this ancestor--or perhaps for the sake of convenience I
might term him my (many times removed) uncle--and I have been for some
time shouting to each other across the ages, until we have attained to
almost an intimacy. I have, in fact, by this means, acquired many
prehistoric forms of thought. As may be imagined this has somewhat
confused my ethical canons. Much of what I have learnt is difficult to
translate into terms of modern speech.
I often long with all my soul to be prehistoric in certain matters, but
the prim hand of convention--otherwise the unimaginative policeman--
holds me back. However, some of my uncle's views are still more or less
widely held. He was, for instance, what in modern speech would be
called a strong Conservative; that is abundantly clear from many of his
peculiarities. But in his day Imperialism had not yet been born; there
was so far no urgent necessity to provide for the younger sons of the
aristocracy. In fact there was still room in the world for everybody,
and as cultivation had not yet been invented, there was no such thing as
private ownership of land. Moreover, the pressure of over-population
was never really felt until cannibalism went out of fashion, and that
happened only quite recently.
My uncle was, of course, an aristocrat,--his three-fold patent of
nobility being founded on his muscular strength, his skill in wielding
weapons and his unique talent for concentrating all the faculties of his
prehistoric mind on what I, his degenerate nephew, would call the main
chance.
My aunt--there were several of them, of course, but you may take your
choice, they were all of the same type--was an extremely practical
woman. But she was not a Suffragette--or if she was she carefully
concealed the circumstance. She was quite devoid of any kind of
sentiment. In the matter of personal adornment, she affected the
jewellery of the period; this consisted of the scalps and ears of my
husband's deceased enemies--more or less dessicated--and the teeth of
the same persons, bored through and strung on thin thongs. Her wardrobe
was not extensive; in fact she never owned more than one garment at a
time, and that she only used in cold weather. My uncle's hunting
provided the material, so he had neither dressmakers' nor milliners'
bills to meet.
My aunt was fiercely fond of her children so long as they depended upon
her for food and protection. Afterwards she rather disliked them than
otherwise. If one of them after reaching adolescence met her
accidentally when she took her walks abroad, that one would utter a howl
of dismay as loud as though he had met an angry odontosaurus, and flee,
leaping from side to side to avoid the slung stones. For my aunt also
carried a sling; she found it far more useful than a reticule.
How Nietsche would have delighted in this family; what a joy it would be
to Mr Bernard Shaw. I can imagine my uncle dining with President
Roosevelt,--but it would hardly have done to invite Booker Washington to
meet him.
About two hours after midnight I coerced Andries into being merciful and
calling a halt, for I felt that I must sleep or die. It was only when I
had thrown myself prone on the sand and told Hendrick to picket the
horses close by, that Andries relented. There was really no object in
pushing on at such rapid rate; by making an early start we could easily
reach Gamoep shortly after noon on the morrow.
Both Danster and Piet Noona reported the presence of springbuck in this
vicinity. Mrs Esterhuizen would be disappointed and contemptuous if we
returned without meat other than the half-dried oryx-flesh. When, I
again asked myself, would repentance for the crimes I committed in
slaying those beautiful desert creatures become final and practical,
instead of intermittent? Saint Augustine once put up a prayer for the
grace of continence, but added a rider to the effect that he did not
desire it to be granted immediately. This somewhat suggested my state
of mind. But I meant some day to lay down my rifle finally--perhaps
after a particularly good bag or an unusually skilful shot. Afterwards
I should never kill another animal--unless in self-defence or because I
badly lacked meat. However, in the meantime, like Saint Augustine, I
knew I should continue certain practices which my conscience
reprehended. The hunter's instinct is the one most deeply rooted in the
mind of man; it is among those tendencies which persist after the
conditions which called them forth have disappeared--even from memory.
It is the true basis of that original sin over which the theologians
fumble, for in the absence of other available game men hunt each other.
But I had, incontinently, to sleep. And hey--for a gallop over the
plains in the morning.