‘I’m concerned with only one thing,’ Kitto went on. ‘And that’s my country. I was one of the men who helped pull down the Transvaal flag and I had to watch the bloody politicians in Whitehall give it all back to them. You don’t think I’m going to let a few hotheads like De Wet drag apart all we’ve built up, do you? Now let’s get going.’
Winter shrugged, humbled by Kitto’s obsessed pride. ‘Have it your own way,’ he said, ‘but we can’t follow their tracks till daylight, surely?’
‘I think we can.’ Kitto sounded cheerful again. ‘I’ve got an ex-scout with my mob. Chap called Le Roux. He could follow the spoor with his nose. He can smell it in the dark. He’s out there now. And these damn’ people can’t ride a horse at sixty miles an hour.’
‘Good God,’ Romanis added, ‘this Schuter’s only a Sheeny backvelder! He can’t read or write. He’s never been to school. Surely some bloody ignoramus of an old clo’ merchant’s son isn’t going to put it across
us.’
Between them they swept the unwilling Winter into the box-like rear of the car and slammed the doors. The engine howled metallically.
‘Hold tight,’ Romanis shouted. ‘This driver’s hell-bent for glory.’
The clutch was let in with a jerk that flung their heads back and as they roared out of the square, Winter realised he still held his empty glass in his hand. He shrugged and tossed it over his shoulder into the cloud of dust they trailed behind them, and concentrated on keeping his eyes closed against the flying particles of grit that washed against his face like spray.
‘Where do you hope to pick ‘em up?’ he shouted.
Kitto raised his voice above the roar of the engine. ‘Sheba,’ he yelled gaily. ‘Somewhere south of Sheba. They can’t have got far beyond there.’
Sheba. Rising out of the limitless veld as though it had no connection with the flat unturned earth around it, it stood in an eerie stillness, precipitous to the south, east and west, and sloping sharply towards the north. Its summit and sides were covered with unscaleable rocks that looked like the broken parapets of giant castles, time-smoothed ramparts like minarets flecked with colouring that gave it the appearance of some towering eastern city.
Every variety of colour blended on its sides, grey, black, yellow, red, brown and purple, all harmonising, all weatherworn and softened, its only inhabitants the few remaining klipspringers and dassies, the little rock rabbits who lived in the crevasses between the vast stone spires.
In front, beyond the sloping side to the north, lay a smaller pile of stones thrown up in the same vast prehistoric upheaval, a bare heap of sandy-coloured rocks which had become known, by the same token as its bigger neighbour, as Babylon; standing alone like Sheba, a miniature kopje, its southern end finishing in a pile of loose boulders tumbled haphazardly across the dusty plain.
Here, in front of Babylon, Sammy Schuter and Polly Bolt had camped for the night.
The day started in a spot of pink beyond the bleak enigmatic plain and spread slowly, washing the eastern skyline. The brick red earth turned lighter as the purple grey of the night faded and the outlines of the distant folds of land became visible in the first pale glow of day.
The fire had burned down to a hot incandescent heap of charcoal and the smoke that spiralled upwards had thinned to a single twisting pencil line. The light night winds had died and the whole enormous landscape of short dry grass and far distant purple slopes was utterly motionless in the first hint of the sun’s glow.
Polly was standing by the fire scrubbing out the cooking pot with gritty dust, her eyes smarting from the milk-blue wood smoke that had rolled across the little camp. Her cheeks, dusty from travel, were stained where she had rubbed the tears away. They had breakfasted on buck liver and fat cookies prepared by Sammy, and strips of meat crozzled on sharpened sticks, eating them Boer fashion, crossed-legged round the fire, their backs against the cart. The heat of the food was penetrating now through her body and the chills and discomfort and all the myriad fears of the unfamiliar and unfriendly night she had spent out there on the veld were slowly disappearing from her mind.
She watched Sammy for a while as he worked, steadily and efficiently by the back of the cart, flaying the body of a dead duiker he had shot the previous night as it went plunging in its curious diving motion for the scrub. He had brought it up all-standing with a sharp shrill whistle, its head up, its ears pricked, its tail flapping, and dropped it quickly with a bullet through the brain that had flung it end over end and left it sprawled on the grass, its head thrown back. They had covered it with a frame of grass and sticks to keep away the night-prowling animals and before she was awake he had cleared the obstruction and, cutting a stick, had braced the hind legs apart, piercing the shanks with its pointed tips. Then he had hung the carcass from the tailgate of the cart with a length of hide he had stripped from the body, and he was now engaged in cutting slices of flesh down the centre of the back, in deft swinging strokes, and rolling them in salt spread on a board in the cart. The prepared strips of meat lay in a row on a rock beside him, ready for drying in the fierce heat of the sun when it rose in the heavens.
She watched him as she moved about the fire, rinsing out the gritty greasy cooking pot with a cupful of boiled water. She stared dolefully at the scum the operation left on her fingers, then she tossed the pot into the back of the cart and, wiping her hands on the limp print frock she’d changed into, lashed out at the flies with a cheerful violence.
‘This is a fine old way to wash things,’ she said. ‘Sammy, can’t we get any water? That stream’s more mud than anything else.’
‘You ought to know by now,’ Sammy replied calmly, ‘that when you fall into a South African stream you get suffocated by the dust. We can pick up water tonight,’ he added. ‘I know a sure place. Plenty of time. Got to learn to make do.’
‘Sammy Schuter, we’ve been making do ever since we left Plummerton! I’ve got dust in my eyes, in my nose, in my mouth. My hair’s full of it. I haven’t looked in a mirror since we left. How’s a girl to take a proper pride in herself?’ It was less of a complaint than the mourning cry of a town dweller whose personal appearance was part of her life.
‘It won’t take long,’ he consoled her. ‘Then you’ll be able to comb it all out.’
She looked at him candidly, demanding the truth. ‘Sammy, when are we going to find a decent-sized town again? These flies fair take the flesh off you.’
‘I told you,’ he said patiently. ‘Four-five days. A bit longer perhaps.’
‘A bit longer’s right,’ she said ruefully. ‘I didn’t think it’d be like this.’
‘I warned you.’
‘No, you didn’t. You just said there’d be no hotels. You didn’t say there’d be no water either, and all this dust.’
She picked up the concertina and stretched out on the ground, idly squeezing a tune out of the instrument. Her face felt like leather and she was uncomfortably aware of the grease that still lay between her fingers from the rudimentary cooking and cleaning.
For a while she studied the veld, gently undulating, wide and empty and featureless to the distant horizon, and the immeasurable saffron dome of the sky. The land lay very still in the first streaks of light, and the faded green patched with reddish-brown stony earth looked like a desert. The Wilderness. It was well named. With its scant vegetation and wide patches of coarse grass alternating with slopes of thorny scrub, it looked like the bleak landscape of another planet, for trees were rare enough to be a landmark beyond the patch of mimosa along the deep dry bed of the stream.
Polly stared at it, comparing it with the single bedroom which had been her home in Plummerton. Used as she was to the sound of a piano somewhere in the background, the chatter of voices, the rumble of traffic outside, she was still unable to accept the tremendous silences that made her feel as though she were suspended in space.
‘Sammy,’ she said uncertainly.
‘Yep?’
‘How much longer will it
really
take?’
He glanced down at her, busy with his task. ‘We’ve hardly started yet!’ he said, avoiding an answer.
She looked up at him, slashing at the flies again. ‘I didn’t get any sleep last night,’ she pointed out. ‘I was cold. I had a stone in my back. And, Sammy, I could imagine creepy-crawly things all the time. I heard ‘em once. I heard something howling.’
‘Wild dog mebbe,’ he said, unmoved. ‘Nothing to worry about.’
She regarded him with a wry expression on her face. ‘I bet you knew it’d be like this,’ she accused.
‘Course I knew.’
‘Sammy, why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I tried to, but you wouldn’t listen.’
‘Did you have a bad night?’
‘No. Slept like a log.’
‘Anybody’d think you were enjoying it.’
He grinned at her. ‘I am. I like it best out here. Better than towns.’ He looked up at the horizon and wiped his hands on the grass. ‘Better be making a move,’ he said. ‘We’re not here for pleasure.’
Polly jumped to her feet and began to load pans into the back of the cart.
‘What are we going to do?’ she asked, eager for anything that would take her mind off their discomfort.
‘A bit o’ shootin’,’ he said.
She stood with an armful of their belongings, watching him over the top of them as he lowered the carcass of the buck to the ground.
‘Sammy’ - her eyes shone suddenly as excitement caught hold of her - ‘shoot me a springbok! I’ve never seen a springbok shot, only that measly little thing you got last night!’
He glanced at her, enjoying the gaiety in her face. She hadn’t bothered to put make-up on and instead of doing her hair in elaborate rolls, as she usually did, she had tied it simply behind her head with a ribbon she had unthreaded from her petticoat, so that she looked softer, fresher and curiously younger in the old print frock and with the coils of her hair free about her neck and throat.
Sammy was staring at her, his eyes steady on her face, approving and warm. ‘Don’t know why you ever put all that muck on your face,’ he said, apropos of nothing.
Polly frowned, but it was a half-hearted gesture, spoiled by the look of pleasure in her eyes. ‘A girl don’t look her best less she titivates herself up a bit.’ She stared at him primly, nearer to blushing than she’d been for years. ‘We going to stand here all day?’ she demanded loudly.
He grinned. ‘I’ll get the hosses.’
He loped off to where the horses were grazing - the old mare that they used in the shafts and the one-eyed Argentino police horse that they’d bought for ten pounds in Plummerton Sidings, a bad-tempered animal which shied every time they approached it from its right hand side. They were both of them knee-haltered a short distance away, cropping at the grass.
‘We’ll pick up meat for a few days,’ he said as he returned. ‘Then we’ll get moving. When we get nearer Kimberley, we’ll fill the cart. It’ll fetch a pound or two in the market. Get that fire out, Poll.’
Polly was already kicking dust over the remains of the fire as Sammy harnessed the bony grey mare into the shafts, but the smell of coffee and fried meat still hung faintly round the small encampment.
Sammy swung himself into the saddle of the little Argentino with its age-whitened muzzle, fighting it as it moodily protested against his mounting on the wrong side. For a while, it jerked its hindquarters, lifting its legs with hints of kicking, a tough little animal which for all its age and lightweight had already proved its stamina, then he mastered it and waited until Polly had swung herself up on to the seat of the cart and adjusted the folds of her skirt. He passed her the old shotgun they’d bought with the horse and she sat holding it gingerly.
‘Don’t blow your head off,’ he warned.
He pulled the Martini Henry from the scabbard and laid it across his saddle, holding the reins with one hand and the rifle with the other.
‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘Now’s the time to pick up the buck. They’re kind of slow before the sun warms ‘em up. We’ll find ‘em in the hollows licking the salt off the dried water holes.’
The day was still only a faint promise of gold in the east and it was a pure morning, with all the world still and the air invigorating. Even Polly was aware of its clarity.
‘Kind of cleans out your lungs and brain,’ she admitted, gesturing vaguely at the space around them.
Sammy nodded silently. There was a quiet, unhesitating sureness about him, a definiteness of purpose in his movements that inspired confidence. Taking out a yellow bandanna handkerchief, he removed his hat and passed the handkerchief round the brim, not looking at it, his eyes moving down the valley.
The land seemed empty, bare and rolling, covered with thin brown grass dried through the summer by the shimmering heat of the sun. The ridge beyond them rose slantwise, rough-edged like a saw where small outcrops of rocks broke through the surface and edged the skyline.
The Argentino stood in silence, snorting softly through its nostrils, nuzzling at the dried blood on its foreleg where it had cut it climbing out of a donga the night before, and Sammy’s hand moved gently along its neck, soothingly, feeling the greasy sweat where the reins lay. Then he licked a finger and held it up thoughtfully.
‘What wind there is, is coming from the west,’ he said quietly. ‘That’s good. We can keep the sun behind us and stay downwind at the same time. Won’t affect the shooting neither.’
Polly stared around her at the endless horizons. The exhilarating climate lifted her heart and for the first time in her life she knew the pull of a different existence from the one she had lived in the saloons and bars of Plummerton with their smell of stale smoke and spilt liquor, and the dusty plush and gilt furnishings.
‘You know,’ she said grudgingly, ‘this place’s maybe got something after all. I’m beginning to see why we could never get you home, Sammy.’
He nodded. ‘Some men’s for towns,’ he said shortly, ‘and some’s for the veld.’
She sniffed the air, noticing in it a freshness she had not caught during the heat of the previous day. ‘It’s sort of clean-smelling in the morning before the dust gets up, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘You’ve got to get up early to get a proper whiff of it.’