The Lost World of the Kalahari (29 page)

His name he told us was ‘Nxou'. It signified, according to Dabe, a ‘wooden bowl for food'. He and his people lived nearby, and he said that if we would give him time to finish what he had been doing he would show us a camping place near his home, and in the morning take us to his people. We watched him, probing holes in the sand with a pliable rod about twenty feet long and a sharp pointed hook at the end of it. The holes were made by spring-hares and soon he had hunted out his quarry and killed it deftly with a wooden club lying ready beside him. That done he collected his spear, a bow and quiver full of arrows, a leather shoulder-satchel containing some ostrich eggs filled with water, picked up his club and the dead hare, and declared himself ready.

Any fears I had that he might decide to run from us in the dark were shamed by the air of trust with which he committed himself to us. We had no room in any of our Land-Rovers but he, who had never seen a motor before, unhesitatingly seated himself with his belongings on the spare-wheel on the bonnet of my vehicle and in this way, just as the luminous, pure twilight descended, he calmly brought us to a place where the bush was reforming its ranks beyond the frontier of grass favoured by the dunes and the wide depression. There, he said, we would have wood for fire by night and some shade in the day. Promising to return early in the morning he bade us a grave good night or, to translate literally from Bushman
‘Txhaiisai-xhum'
, beseeched us to ‘rest well'. Then he walked away from us into the brown of evening, so supple in limb that I had only seen his equal in the wild dog whose inexhaustible capacity for movement carries him over land like a ripple across a pool.

‘Is it wise to let him go like that?' Duncan asked, anxious for his film. ‘D'you really expect ever to see him again?'

I had no hesitation in replying: ‘We'll see him first thing in the morning.'

No camping site in the central desert can ever be spectacular. This one was no exception and was, without doubt, the most uncomfortable we ever had. The trees in the dense thorn bush around were little more than ten feet high and gave little shade. We had to make our home under a nylon tarpaulin stretched between our Land-Rovers, and there in the long days to come we hoped to hold out against the Kalahari extremes of sun and weather. The site did not even offer the normal compensation of a generous view over the desert because there was a restricted ring of tough thorn trees and brief glades of red sand and grass about us. Yet we were more content than we had ever been. There one felt curiously close to the secret world into which we had broken, as if clasped in its arms and held close to its warm and deeply breathing bosom. We had made contact! It is impossible to exaggerate what that meant to us all who had been disappointed so often, and travelled so many thousands of vain, hot, uncomfortable miles. Ben, after his incredible feat of tracking by childhood memory, talked eloquently about his experiences of the desert and its animals and people. Vyan joined in as freely and disclosed how in vain he had tried to persuade his Government to use Bushmen as trackers against Mau-mau because he was convinced they were the best in the world. I was sad that Charles was not yet there to share the moment with us, but judged it appropriate to produce some of the ‘surprises' I carry for unique occasions.

With Jeremiah's assistance I gave them a special dinner, printing this menu in block letters by the firelight:

Although tired, we talked until late in the night, Dabe and all our staunch African companions crowding around to listen. The only warning note came from me. Remembering the grimace made at Nxou's smell I felt compelled to utter a warning. I begged them to remember in the days to come that we were there not to teach the Bushman but solely to learn all we could from him, his ways, his spirit, and the terms he had made with his own life in a world so harsh that even the greediest among us had shunned it. We could do that only if we set aside our own bias and preferences, and prepared ourselves to listen and observe. Also we would have to tread delicately so as not to inflict vital injury on the Bushman's natural values.

I was shaving by torch-light in the morning listening to the distant roar of a lion fading solemn as a shooting star, when a new sound fell on my ears. Jeremiah, too, heard it and stopped tending the fire to listen. Somewhere in the dark bush between us and the first sear of red in the sky, we heard music. It rose and fell, growing steadily louder, a tune in the wayfarer's nostalgic pattern, as sad with arrival as departure, but gay with the lift of spirit provided by the journey in between. Soon Nxou emerged into the fire-light, a cloak of skin like a Roman toga about him, playing as he walked, head bowed over one of the oldest instruments in the world. It was shaped like a long bow with only one string, bound in the middle, to the back. One end rested on his parted lips, the other in his left hand while he beat the taut string on either side with a small stick and, catching the reverbations in his open mouth, shaped them between his lips to produce the notes. Behind him walked another who could have been a sturdier brother, hunting bow in hand, and shaft of the spear stuck into a quiverful of poisoned arrows. He was Bauxhau: ‘Stone-axe', and although not of as fine texture as Nxou he was as authentically Bushman and more vividly handsome. They were close friends and with the good Bushman manners that they expected of others, they squatted down at the edge of the fire-light waiting to be greeted before they came into the centre of our camp. Once by our fire they did not speak unless spoken to, but Nxou went on playing his instrument and Bauxhau listened.

‘I see the hotel has an orchestra,' Duncan remarked when I woke him with coffee, obviously relieved at the sight of his Bushman by the fire. ‘All modern conveniences in fact.'

‘This is the last convenience of the day,' I told him laughing, as I handed him his cup. ‘From now on you'll have to work as you've never worked before.'

As soon as we had eaten we went to visit Nxou's people. Those of us who had expected a large settlement were immediately disappointed. We were among the first four shelters before we had even seen them, so discreetly were they made and so naturally did they blend with the growth and colour around them. Basically they were of the same bee-hive design as the other shelters we had encountered in the Slippery Hills but more solidly built and more carefully roofed with branches of thorn and tufts of grass. Each had a tree at the back to support it and from some of the branches hung strips of venison drying in the wind and shade. The floors of the shelters were scooped out in places to make them more comfortable for the hips of the people sleeping in them, the interiors were almost bare of decoration or utensils. But where the women slept hung strings of the white beads and ivory headbands made out of the shells of ostrich eggs, and along the sides of the shelters were rows of ostrich egg-shells securely placed upright in the sand, plugged with grass and presumably filled with water.

Outside the first shelter a middle-aged woman sat diligently pounding the seeds of the tsamma, the Kalahari melon which sustains man and beast with food and moisture in the long, hot months between the rains. The stamping block is the Bushman woman's most precious possession: a large pestle and mortar carved out of iron-wood. Wherever she goes she carries it with her to make meal out of nuts and seeds of melons and grass, and to pulverize dried meat for toothless children and old people. As the woman pounded it the block made a curious drum-like sound which travelled a surprising distance, and in the days to come greeted us from afar like a quickened beat of our hearts at the realization that after a harsh day, home was near.

In front of the second shelter sat Nxou's father stringing a bow. His wife at his side was cooking something in a small clay pot on a tiny fire which hardly made any smoke. At the third shelter another middle-aged man was repairing one of the long rods used to fish in holes in the ground for spring-hares, porcupines, badgers, ground squirrels, and other animals that live underneath the Kalahari sand. Outside the last of the shelters sat two of the oldest people I have ever seen. They were Nxou's grandparents and the skins of both were so creased and stained with life, weather, and time that they might have been dark brown parchment covered with some close Oriental script. Both had serene expressions on their faces and they looked continually from one to the other as if in constant need of reassurance that the miracle of being together after so many years was indeed still real. They seemed to have grown old in the right way, they and their spirit being contained within their age as naturally as a nut is enclosed within a shell, and only when fully ripened falling obediently to the need for a renewal of life.

The old lady I could see was already beginning to feel the heat. From time to time she put her hand deep into a hole beside her to pull out a handful of cool sand which she scattered over her naked body for relief. I have often seen elephants do the same thing with their trunks. She did this as daintily as some Mongol lady fanning herself, and was as shy as a young girl, immediately looking away from us when she caught our eye, and then glancing coyly back out of the corner of her slanted eyes when her curiosity became too great. Her husband, however, looked at us as if trying to get into focus something seen from an immense distance.

When I asked if that was the whole community Nxou shook his head. The young women and children he said were already out in the desert seeking for food. The other half of his people were grouped around five similar shelters about a mile away. All told they were about thirty persons though it was difficult to determine the exact number because from time to time relations would suddenly appear like reflections in a distorting mirror out of the vast quicksilver day around them, stay for a week or ten days, and then as suddenly vanish again into the desert. But during our stay the number was seldom less than thirty, though often more. I did not press Nxou to elaborate on the answers to my questions because I noticed they tended to make him uneasy. Instead I followed him on foot and in silence to the other shelters.

They were almost exact copies of the first with people doing the same sorts of things, except that one man was busy redipping his arrows in newly prepared poison, and another softening a duiker skin with incredible swiftness by squeezing the juice of a large bulb on to it and wringing the moist skin between his hands. While we were there the younger women began coming home. They were all naked except for a leather wrap each hung by a strap from one shoulder and tied round their waists. The hem of the wrap was decorated with ostrich-shell beads and around the smooth yellow necks of the younger women hung rows of necklaces made of the same beads. In that sun, against those apricot skins, the necklaces shone like jewels. Each woman carried a shawl of skin tied into a bundle which she placed on the sand and undid, taking out the amazing variety of roots and tubers they had collected in the desert, as well as dozens of ostrich egg-shells filled with water. Like everyone else they appeared to be of pure Bushman stock and in their truly feminine way possessed the same wild beauty that made Nxou and Bauxhau so attractive. Indeed, one of the younger women might have been the model of the girl figuring in one of the most impressive rock paintings. Her dress of draped skin, and the circle of beads below her left knee, was exactly like that of her ancient painted prototype, only she did not walk with a flower in her hand, though her step was as high and her carriage as full of grace. Her name was Xhooxham, signifying, as we gathered with difficulty from Dabe, the equivalent of ‘Lips of Finest Fat' because fat in that harsh land is one of the rarest and greatest of all delicacies.

Only one of the women had a child, a baby she carried in a skin on her hip. It was her first, Nixou said, and when she sat down in a patch of shade to feed it and the plump little body was tugging sleepily at her full round breast the look of unimpeded tenderness on her face was so intense that she might well have had a halo around her Mongolian head. But apart from that one little suckling, there appeared to be no other babies. I had always been told that the Bushmen had small families, that the Bushman was, in fact, to use the language of animal husbandry applied to him in my country, a ‘shy breeder', but even so this lack of children was excessive. I questioned Nxou and he said there were four more children but that was all. Just then a woman came from the back of a shelter with a little boy. He could hardly walk and was naked except for one string of beads shining like pearls around his fat tummy. Any slight doubts we might have had about the authenticity of the people around us were removed by the vision of the infant man openly displaying his ‘
Qhwai-xkhwe
', the ancient badge of his race.

‘Look at that little chap, Duncan,' I told him, ‘and you'll see why the Bushman calls himself “
Qhwai-xkhwe
”.'

Duncan was amazed: ‘Surely he can't keep it up for long?' he asked.

‘From birth to death,' I told him, and though Duncan tried to prove the impossibility of the statement the little boy remained a picture-book illustration of the national male condition, and figured so in all our films, even in the climax of midnight-dancing.

We were still discussing the little boy when a woman called out something to her companions. They all stopped what they were doing and began jumping up and down, clasping and unclasping their hands in gestures of instinctive gratitude, and chanting what I learnt later to be a Hunter's Praise in such clear and melodious voices that my nerves resounded like violin strings with the sound. Another young man, a little taller than Nxou and almost as attractive, came running into our midst, a small buck like a boa around his neck. His name was Tsexchi, signifying a ‘Powerful Wildebeest', and he, Nxou, and Bauxhau were so much together that inevitably we christened them The Three Musketeers.