The Lost World of the Kalahari (18 page)

He was of course Karuso, and he forthwith began to bargain for the assembly with eloquence and great pertinacity. It was an affair that could not be hurried. The wage itself was a pretext, but the bargaining was important. Had I agreed immediately to the little money he demanded, all would have felt cheated and the poorer for it. The whole process was essentially a provision of wisdom and an affair of primitive honour that should not be minimized. It was a drama designed also to bring out the human factors to which Karuso was committing them all. I knew they would stop bargaining, not only when the wage seemed fair, but also when they felt they knew what kind of people we were. Well aware that their future conduct would depend a great deal on how I managed this exchange with Karuso I put all I could of time and imagination into it. Soon the others started joining in. Before long I was getting to know them as they slowly unravelled me. Again I did not like my knowledge much. Yet I felt they must do, because I had no other immediate choice.

After two hours I decided the time had come to end it. I made a final and generous offer, climbed into the launch, and started writing a letter while I waited for their answer. For a while longer they talked among themselves and then accepted my offer: twenty-eight men to man thirteen makorros and to join me early the next day.

While the negotiations were going on a slight man with a thin ascetic face and grey hair sat silent and apart from the rest. He did not speak once though I was aware that his eyes hardly ever left my face. When all was decided he suddenly got up.

‘Please,' he said, turning to me: ‘I would like to come with you.' He told me his name was Samutchoso. It meant: ‘He who was left after the reaping.' I had no idea what forces were set in motion when I agreed without hesitation that he could come.

There remained only one more thing to explain.

‘You know, of course,' I told Karuso, ‘that I'm not looking for the unknown tree!'

For the first time he looked upset. ‘But what else could you be looking for in the swamp, Moren?' he asked in a voice now pitched high like a woman's with surprise.

I told him: and asked him what chances we had of finding River Bushmen. He was squatting on the ground and I remember still how he scooped up some earth in his long paddler's hand, began crumbling it, and then with a far-away look said we might succeed but there were not many left.

‘What's become of them?' I asked.

‘I don't know,
Moren
,' he said, shaking his grey head. ‘They're just gone.' And he let the crumbled earth in his hands trickle through his fingers into the water at his feet.

We spent the night about forty miles on by water, at the last African outpost on the northern edge of the swamps between us and Mann. Below it lay the great unknown swamp district. When we arived there were only a few hours of daylight left. Quickly I extracted all the information I could from an African headman who was clearly fearful of what I proposed to do. He did his best to dissuade me by reciting the disasters inflicted by hippo and crocodile on those who still travelled by makorro the three hundred miles to Maun. When that failed, however, he produced for me as guide a great, simple man who knew the deep interior of the swamps because he made his living trapping and hunting there.

By this time the news of our arrival had spread and a tragic procession of sick and ailing started coming into our camp. A doctor visited this place on the far side of the swamp only once every two or three years. An African dispenser on a vast round called in twice a year. That was all. The need for even the simplest medicines was overwhelming. I treated twenty-seven children for infections of the eye which would probably leave their vision permanently impaired. Many of the little faces already had deep scars at the temples and cheeks where the witch-doctors had cut into the flesh to let out the evil spirit that caused the infection. When I asked the mothers how they could allow that to happen to their children they each exclaimed, indignant in defence of their maternal honour: ‘But what was I to do? Night and day my child cried with pain. Was I to do nothing?'

After the children came persons of all ages with festering sores and unhealed wounds, the inevitable cases of chronic malaria, and a few far gone with sleeping sickness. There were also the cheerful lovers of castor oil trying to maintain a tortured look on their healthy faces so that I should be moved to satisfy their strange addiction for so odd a lubrication! Finally I was taken to a hut where a little wasted boy was stretched out shivering on a mat of reeds in the last rays of the sun. When he saw my white face close to his he let out a sob of fear and turned his head to his mother beside him. I thought he had had pneumonia for over-long and could not live, but none the less I dosed him with a sulpha-drug. In the morning when I saw him again he was shivering no longer, nor was he afraid of me but held firmly to one of my fingers, reluctant to let me go.

I was more than ever glad that I carried more medicines with me than I could possibly need. This kind of occasion and the quickening look in the eyes of those treated seemed great reward. All the time I longed for Spode to film the scene. I felt the camera could catch its import more immediately and vividly than words, and would help to convey its implications to the many who think of Africa's greatest needs in terms of politics of an alien pattern. However, Spode appeared not only disinterested but deeply involved in the emotions of a private world of his own.

When at last I had finished my amateur nursing the sun was touching the tall papyrus tops. On the far side of the stream, clearly outlined against the bleeding west, a lone paddler was about to turn a makorro into a channel leading into the heart of the impersonal universe of water, darkness, and reeds. Already in the channel a swell had risen full of evening fire to rock his craft over a pool where a hippo had just dived out of sight. Unconcerned, he paddled on with long, easy strokes as if before him was not the evening twilight but the dawn of a new day. His silhouette was slighter than that of any African man and had something oddly Chinese about it.

‘There he is,
Moren
!' the headman beside me said, a strangely urgent note in his voice. ‘There he goes.'

‘Who?' I asked.

‘The River Bushman,' he answered.

I wanted to send someone hastening to bring him back, but I was told it would be useless because he was deaf and dumb. For a generation or more he had been living alone on a small island about fifteen miles on into the swamp. There he lived by trapping fish and birds, and from time to time coming out to exchange them for tobacco. His lean-to shelter of grass and reeds on his island, they said, was surrounded with mounds of the bones of fish he had consumed over the years. No one knew where he came from or who his people had been. Whether he knew himself no one could tell. I stood there stirred to the heart, watching his progress across the burning water deeper into the papyrus standing so erect before the night. In that mythological light of the dying day he seemed to me the complete symbol of the silent fate of his race.

At about ten the next morning Karuso and his men burst out of an obscure channel through the reeds, shouting and singing with triumph and relief. Two to each makorro, they stood upright in the long narrow hulls swinging rhythmically from the shoulder and hips as they drove the black dugouts forward across the bright water, racing one another for the harbour below our camp.

‘It looks easy,' Ben told Vyan and Charles as we watched them coming. ‘But make no mistake about it, it's very difficult. Years ago I had to train in one of those for a race at Maun and it was harder than learning to ride a bicycle! You can't just sit or stand still in them. If you do, you upset at once, and then you're lost. They're made of wood heavier than water and go like lead to the bottom. You have continually to keep them balanced from the hips, even as a passenger. It's really a skilled job, and the first time I did it, I was stiff for days! But look at them! Don't they make a lovely picture?'

He turned to look over his shoulder at Spode sitting silent and unhappy on a pile of baggage, and then turned questioningly to me. I pretended not to see. Spode had already dismissed an earlier suggestion for filming with a cross ‘You don't understand, Laurens. One can't film in this way . . .' In what way one could film he had not stayed to say. Besides his cameras were locked away in their cases. In London I'd imagined that we would make a film to catch reality on the wing: now, it seemed, we'd be lucky to shoot it sitting.

Karuso, already leaping out of his makorro like a young boy, shouted: ‘
Moren
, if it were not for God I would not be here now! Four times I was attacked by hippo bulls!'

‘And I three times,' someone else interrupted, jumping ashore.

‘I, five times,' another yelled.

So each pair of paddlers had their own story of early morning attack, particularly two boasters whose faces I had disliked the day before, and who now claimed to have survived the maximum of eight furious onslaughts. Only ‘He that was left after reaping' and his companion, a tall young man with narrow lips, broad shoulders, an open unclouded face, and a name signifying ‘Long-axe', volunteered no information about their journey. When I asked Samutchoso if they too had been attacked, he looked surprised and shook his head in emphatic denial.

None the less, exaggerated as were some of the paddlers' tales, there was enough truth in them to confirm the wise advice given us: namely, not to use makorros until absolutely necessary. Meanwhile, we ourselves had gone one better than our advisers. The launch seemed to us big enough both to hold our paddlers and to take their makorros in tow. That way the journey, we felt, would be safer and faster for all.

When we told Karuso of the plan his relief and delight were intense. It took him and his men only a short while to tranship their baggage and food which, since they looked to us to feed them on the meat we would shoot, was little. In the heat of the day we were once more afloat and driving east as fast as the launch would go. The huts and the shouts of the uncomprehending people who crowded the banks below our camp soon fell away behind the dense papyrus screens. For long, however, we heard the great drum outside the headman's hut, the most melancholy drum I have ever heard tapping out a call of farewell in a curious sobbing and inverted sound which translated itself unbidden in my imagination as:

We held on through the brilliant afternoon, twisting and turning with the stream, as it pushed its way backwards and forwards through dense swamp growths. Sometimes the sun shone full in our faces; at others it burnt the back of our necks. From time to time I climbed up in the prow to look over the cliffs of reeds, rushes, and papyrus growing along the water's edge. The bush-veld vanished. There was nothing solid left in sight, only this world of grass, uneasily stirring in the draught drawn by the furnace of the surrounding desert, and all along the smarting horizon was the glow of transubstantiated sulphur where the great fire was ceaselessly tended. After the first rush of excited chatter even the paddlers were driven to silence, or if they spoke they spoke in whispers.

In the evening we moored ourselves to an island. It was barely an inch or two above the prevailing water, about fifty yards by fifty, made of sodden black clay and frail trees so entangled that one could barely see the sky through their branches and leaves. So isolated was it that several of the water-birds had made their nests only a foot or two above the surface. Two of the nests were filled with fluffy yellow chicks all screaming for food, and we looked straight down into their pink throats as we clambered out of the launch to go ashore. All the while their frightened mothers flew in circles round us moaning with despair.

Once ashore we lit enormous fires to cook our food and smoke out the mosquitoes. We crept early under our nets, all night long hearing the mosquitoes singing their wild pagan hymn. Often the sound of their tense song was drowned by crashes of impatient hippos cutting through difficult papyrus knots, or the noise of great bulls diving for refreshment in the starlit water and huffing and puffing with delight whenever they broke to the surface. Some of their more violent splashes drove the water lapping over the edges of the thin sheet of clay on which we slept and sent a tremor through the foundations of our precarious earth. I lay as was my habit apart from the others, in order to be free to make the rounds of the camp when necessary without disturbing my companions. From where I was I could not hear the sleepers. There was no human sound to come between me and the audible life of the great swamp.

At the core of that ancient pre-natal music my heart made its bed and rested beyond all disquiet of man and uncertainty of future days.

Just before the sun rose we sailed on again. The stream, which falls barely a foot in over a hundred miles, seemed still more unsure of its direction east. We twisted and turned with it to all points of the compass, but no matter to which extreme it took us no firm land or bush-veld tree-top could be seen from my post in the prow. The hippo, warned by the noise of our engines and in any case accustomed to forsake the streams in the heat of the day, left us only a silky swell to remind us of them, or a dripping, muddied tunnel deep in the reeds where they had gone, heaving, to their rest. Judging by these and other signs I was sure there must be thousands of hippo in the vicinity. Could we but silence the siren-song of birds and shut off our engines, we would hear a tidal surge of snoring blurring the clarity of the day around us.

As we went deeper into the interior the crocodile seemed to grow bigger, sleeker, and less alert. They were sleeping in the sun on every spit of earth that protruded beyond the cool papyrus shadows. We would be upon them before they were aware of us and then, instantly, they took straight to the water like bronze swords to their sheaths. One, surprised on a sandy shallow, gave the ground a resounding smack with his tail, hurled himself high in the air, and looped a gleaming prehistoric loop straight into the deepest water. Round another bend we sailed into the midst of a feud between two desperate males. They rose half out of the water, their small forefeet sparring like dachshund puppies, but their long jaws snapping and grappling with incredible rapidity. They went under still wrestling, the tips of their tails agitating the water just beneath the surface like a shoal of eels. Where they vanished a scarlet bee-eater swooped low from the bank and I saw its reflection scatter confetti on the broken water.