The Smoke Jumper (42 page)

The title of the poem was ‘Walk Within You,’ and whether Ed had written it himself or had found it somewhere and copied it down, there was no indication. The tone and sensibility seemed like his but there were certain things in it that suggested whoever wrote it had not been blind. She had worried whether it was appropriate to read it out to everyone. But Amy wanted her to, so she was going to try. Julia raised her head and looked out at all the faces watching and waiting, half lit by the angling sun. There was perfect silence. She cleared her throat and began.

24

T
hey gathered driftwood from along the shore and carried or dragged it back to the hollow that they had made for the fire. The wood was mostly stripped of bark and bleached by sun and salt to the color of bone and once when Connor bent to lift what he thought was a branch he found instead that he had chanced upon the skeleton of some great creature half buried in the sand. He asked Kocha what it was and the old man said it was a whale. Sometimes they lost their bearings and beached themselves, he said, and sometimes they died at sea and were washed ashore, though it wasn’t for these bones, but for those of shipwrecked sailors that the place was named the Skeleton Coast.

They built the fire but didn’t light it, and the two of them sat on the sand with the great dunes aglow behind them and watched the sun sink vast and trembling through the salt haze and into the slate-gray ocean. Connor watched the glow of the horizon fade and one by one the stars puncture the indigo sky.

With the darkness came a cold breeze from the ocean and Kocha lit the fire. The wood was dry and burned with a hunger and they stood clear, watching the fanned flames dance and flatten and dance again, sending sparks whirling away into the heavens. When the fire had settled, they spitted the fish that Kocha had caught and ate it with the last of the rice.

They had known each other for barely a week but it seemed much longer. Heading slowly north in the car he had rented in Cape Town, Connor had stopped at a roadside store for water. He had never been to Namibia before but had long ago heard of the Skeleton Coast and wanted to see it. For reasons that he hadn’t stopped to analyze, he wanted to reach it on foot. He asked the storekeeper if he knew of anyone who might act as his guide and the man said he did and told him to come back the next day.

Kocha was waiting on the porch at dawn the next morning with a small backpack and an ancient Lee-Enfield rifle. He was under five feet tall and dressed in a tattered khaki shirt and pants that hung in folds from his birdlike frame. He had a haze of gray hair and a face like a weathered walnut into which his eyes all but disappeared when he smiled. He shook Connor’s hand and looked into his eyes for a long time, nodding as if he understood something. Inside, while Connor bought provisions, the storekeeper told him that Kocha was a Bushman who many years ago had worked as a tracker for wealthy white hunters. His English was good, the man said, and nobody knew the land better.

The storekeeper drove them out into the desert in his own truck and left them on the brink of a lush green valley many feet below. He wished them luck and went and they stood awhile and watched the red cloud of his wake catch the climbing sun and slowly drift and dissolve until he was gone and a silence deeper than any Connor had ever known settled upon them.

The chill of the dawn was gone now and as the sun rose higher the immense plain of red gravel that stretched to every horizon began to liquefy with mirage. Below them in the valley, however, the mist still curled among the trees and they shouldered their packs and Kocha his rifle with its sling of frayed webbing and began their descent.

The valley snaked east to west in a broad green band as far as the eye could see. Kocha told him that it marked the course of an underground river which rose in the highlands many miles to the east but soon grew shy and hid beneath the gypsum crust and lichen-covered gravel. Now and then, as if to check that it was headed in the right direction, it would boldly bubble up among the trees and shrubs and for a few hundred yards run clear and cool and confident over shelves of russet rock and then vanish once more into the sand.

Many animals lived in the valley of the invisible river. Over the days and nights that followed they saw kudu and gemsbok and giraffe and zebra. On their third evening while they were making camp, Kocha heard something and told Connor quietly to come and they stole among the trees and, sheltering downwind behind some rocks, watched a small herd of elephant drinking and drenching each other at a water hole.

Sometimes, sitting by their campfire after dark, they would see hyena slinking in the shadows, their eyes glinting pale and ghostly in the firelight. And once they heard the rasping cough of a leopard and in the morning found its tracks circling not twenty yards from where they had slept. Kocha, who slept - if indeed he slept at all - with his rifle beside him, said he had seen the animal and met its eyes and knew that it meant them no harm.

The old man knew the name of every beast and bird and insect and plant, though some he knew only by the names the Bushmen gave them. The language of his people was unlike any Connor had heard, with strange clicking sounds that he tried to imitate but always failed, reducing Kocha to fits of helpless laughter. Kocha taught him many things about how the creatures that lived here survived the unforgiving heat and drought. How sandgrouse would douse their feathers with water and then fly many miles to give it to their young and how the dune beetle would stand for hours to let the mist condense upon its back, then dance to make the droplets slide into its mouth. He showed Connor how a man could survive by finding water in the tubers of plants and in secret wells that you sipped through long and hollow grasses from beneath the parched earth.

At night, sitting by the fire, Connor would ask him to tell some of his people’s stories. How Kaang the Creator, who often took the form of a praying mantis, made the moon by tossing an old shoe into the sky and how the Milky Way was made by the ash of a fire tossed there to light the way home for hunters and how once all animals were friends with man and spoke his language until he frightened them with fire and they were stricken dumb and fled.

And Connor sensed that, more than the sum of all the things he learned, a lesson far greater was being disclosed, though what it was he was unable yet to say.

He had been traveling now for many months. When he fled New York, he had been closer to madness than he had ever been or hoped to be again. He left with no plan, simply with an overwhelming urge to escape, though from what he still wasn’t sure, except that it was connected in some way with what the woman Beatrice had said to him that night at the gallery and the vision of himself that she had made him see in his photographs. For no other reason than that it was pretty much the farthest he could go, he had flown first to Australia. From there he had traveled in a slow curve north and west, through Southeast Asia and India and finally back to the continent that now seemed forever lodged within him, by ship across the Indian Ocean, to Africa.

He lived simply, sleeping under the stars whenever he could and traveling as the whim took him, though always to places that he had never before visited. He neither sought company nor shunned it, except that of those with loud opinions. And uncannily, again and again, he had found himself with people such as Kocha, who were linked in some ancient way to the land that they inhabited and who seemed to know time and space and man’s place within both as if by some extra sense.

In what precise way these encounters and indeed his whole journey had changed him, Connor could not say. But he knew they had. It showed in his face. On those rare occasions that he bothered to shave, he was startled by the sight of himself in the mirror. He had grown thin and bony and his hair was long and tousled and bleached white by the sun. His sunburnt skin stretched tightly over his cheekbones and his pale eyes above them peered back at him like a stranger’s. Perhaps it should have disturbed him, but it didn’t. For it matched the inner change, the feeling that he was being slowly purged of some dark organic need that had lain curled and feeding within him for years. Where once it had been, now there was clear space. And although the scar tissue was raw and tender, he knew it was healing. Still, of course, there were times when the horrors he had seen returned to haunt him and other times when he felt the ache of losing those he loved. But he knew that these feelings were but clouds that passed and that the vessel of what, for want of a better word, he could only call his soul, though scoured and almost empty, was sound.

On leaving New York he had packed only one small bag of camera gear but despite all the extraordinary sights he had seen, he had rarely opened it. He had taken a few pictures of landscapes and temples, the kind of pictures tourists took. But never once had he photographed the face of another human being.

How much of this inner journey Kocha sensed in him, Connor didn’t know. Their days had been spent very much in the moment and they had hardly talked of the past or of the facts of their personal lives. Kocha had told him about a wife, long dead, and their many children who lived somewhere far away to the east. Connor had shown him his little laminated photos of Julia and Amy but hadn’t gone into any detail, nor had Kocha asked for any. Yet he suspected that the old man knew many truths without needing to be told.

Two days ago, Kocha had woken him before dawn and led him up and out of the valley. He gave no reason and Connor didn’t ask for one. They walked in the cold unfolding light across the gravel plain toward a great tower of jagged rock that rose from the desert like some ancient rusting citadel. It took them an hour to reach it and by then the rising sun had set its flanks aflame. And standing at its foot and gazing up at it and at the pair of black eagles that soared silently across its battlements, Connor somehow knew that there was a secret here to be divulged.

They climbed for almost an hour, more through narrow twists and gullies with lizards skittering before them and watching with unblinking eyes from the shadows as they passed. The last gully was steep and treacherous and then suddenly the mountain opened like a flower and they were standing in a circular chamber of rock, one half shadowed and the other aglow like molten iron in the sun’s slant glare.

The walls were ten or twelve feet tall and the floor was littered with rock. Connor figured that the place had once been a cave whose roof had since collapsed. The air was still and hot and the only sound was his own labored breathing. Kocha lifted an arm and gestured toward the walls and for a moment, Connor didn’t understand why. He shielded his eyes from the sun and stepped closer.

Then he saw. The walls were covered in paintings in black and red and white. There were animals of many kinds, elephant and giraffe and zebra, and lion and cheetah and leopard chasing them and men with spears and bows and arrows. And interlaced among them were patterns and symbols, some clearly inspired by the tracks of the various creatures but others more difficult to decipher. He asked Kocha what these others meant and the old man smiled and said that they were ancient maps of the desert, many centuries old, and that they depicted places where certain animals and plants were to be found and the rivers and water holes and landmarks, some long swallowed by the sand.

Connor walked the circle of the walls with a mounting sense of wonder. The sun was at his back and his shadow moved slowly before him across the painted rock like a curtain of constant revelation. Then, at the exact point where the sunlit rock gave way to shadow, he saw an image that made him suddenly stop and his heart lurch and a shiver prickle the back of his neck.

It was a painting of fire. There was a grove of burning trees and bushes, and standing before them, as if he had just emerged, was a horned animal. It was no doubt meant to be some kind of large antelope, a gemsbok perhaps, or a kudu. But it might as well have been an elk, for its horns and its coat were alive with flames.

Connor stared at it in disbelief. He wanted to ask Kocha about it but it took some time before he could trust himself to speak.

‘Do you know what this is?’ he said at last.

Kocha replied in his own tongue, a single word with the clicking sound. But this time Connor didn’t attempt to repeat it. Kocha went on.

‘Maybe you would call it the Flame Spirit.’

‘Is it a good spirit or an evil one?’