The ox-rider laid a hand on my shoulder. “You must stay and eat with us, all of you. You have travelled far, your oxen are tired. Stay a few days. Then I will send a guide with you. There are bad people in this country. You will not be safe by yourselves. Stay with us. We will entertain you”. Who was he? More men were crowding round me. I recognized faces from the band that had met my wagon. One whispered in the ox-rider’s ear. He nudged the man back with his elbow. I composed myself and spoke.
“I thank you for your hospitality. I will be most happy to stay. But my men are waiting for me. I must give them their instructions. We will be back”.
They did not look pleased but no one hindered me from mounting. I cantered over to the wagon. A file of children trotted behind.
All was not well. A ring of strangers had collected at the tailgate where Klawer seemed to be scuffling with someone. My other four men were standing helplessly to one side. “What is going on here?” I asked. I looked at Plaatje. He drew his shoulders up miserably. “I leave you for half an hour and I come back to chaos!” “They are stealing, master” “Do something about it!” I screamed. I have a bad temper. Everyone, Namaquas included, turned to stare at me. I raised the whip above my head and lunged into the mob. It scattered, leaving Klawer and a strange boy high and dry wrestling over what looked like a small sack. I leaned over and flogged at them until the boy scrambled away. Klawer lay on his back clutching the sack. Good watchdog! He must have been nearly fifty. “Stand up!” I screamed at him. “You are in charge here! What is going on?” He climbed to his feet. He was panting too much to speak. I swung round on the other men and caught a smirk on Adonis’s face. He ducked and the lash struck his shoulders. “Span in the oxen! All of them! At once! Double team!” My face was engorged with purple blood. They lacked all will, they were born slaves.
The Hottentots had fallen back in little clumps and were staring at us. I rode out toward them. “The first person who lays a hand on my wagon or my oxen I will shoot dead with this gun! This gun will kill you! Go back to your houses!” They looked back at me stonily. The crowd was growing larger. Even women with babies were drifting over now from the village. “Ssss-sa!” hissed someone, and others took it up. “Ssss-sa!” It was the sound they make to taunt a cornered animal into jumping. The hisses settled into a steady rhythm. I stood my ground. My horse grew nervous.
A woman stepped out of the crowd toward me. Her legs were straddled, her knees bent, her arms held out horizontally on either side. Over the drum-roll of the “Ssss-” she twitched her whole body so that her fat naked breasts and buttocks shuddered. On each explosive “-sa!” her fingers clicked, her head jerked, her pelvis snapped at me. Thus twitching and jerking, feet wide apart, three steps forward two steps back, she advanced on me, the Hottentots’ music becoming quieter and more excited until I could hear each snap of her fingers. Through slit eyes she was smiling at me.
Lifting my gun in one easy motion I fired into the ground at her feet. There was no echo and barely any dust, but the woman screamed with fright and fell flat. The crowd turned tail. I left her untouched where she lay and turned to supervise the inspanning. At once she scrambled off.
The sun was declining when we left the deserted village behind. We travelled north. My heart was buoyant. Soon we would be alone again and could recover ourselves. We travelled late into the night. When we stopped to rest I set a double guard. I had bad dreams. I awoke at dawn shivering and light-headed. Klawer pointed out smoke to the south where we had come from. The oxen were weary but we set off again. I wrapped myself in a blanket and sat next to the driver. My bones ached. With the sun high overhead we found water and stopped. Behind us on the plain we could now see dark little figures following. I drank and drank, and then evacuated my bowels in a furious gush. I was too weak to ride, perhaps too weak to shoot straight. My men bedded me down in the wagon with my gun at my side. I told them to have no fear, to keep to the open country and continue northwards. They kicked the oxen to their feet and harnessed them. We could make out our pursuers: thirty men, one mounted. The cattle shambled on through the heat. If we stopped now they would not budge but would stand in their traces till they died. Held in position by Klawer I evacuated myself heroically over the tailgate, wondering whether the Hottentot wizards could divine my future from the splashes. A great peace descended upon me: the even rocking of the wagon, the calm sun on the tent. I carried my secret buried within me. I could not be touched.
Much time passed. I deepened myself in a boyhood memory of a hawk ascending the sky in a funnel of hot air.
The stillness of the wagon awoke me. I gathered myself to shout but succeeded only in fouling my bed. I was too weak to sit up. My eyes ached. There was talk going on outside, in Hottentot. I tried to make out what was being said, but everything had three meanings. I must eat or I would lose all my strength.
My men were betraying me. They were colluding with the strange Hottentots. With infinite subtlety I sent out my hand in search of my gun. I closed my fingers on the stock and appreciated anew its comforting solidity and the complex musculature of my arm. Thus I lay, wafted in my own smells, smiling and listening. There were two voices, one near, one far. “Wash my feet, bind my breast”, said the near voice, “will you promise not to sing?” Far away, from the remote South, the second voice sang. The first voice responded interminably. I gave up listening and snuggled back into sleep.
I was being handled roughly. Rough men were lifting me, wrapped in blankets like a corpse. My hands were locked at my sides. I wept: my face was wet with weeping. My head was lower than my feet. I was being lifted from the wagon. The sun was gone, there were stars in the sky. The sweet smell of cattle. It was my own men who were carrying me, I knew them from their hats. “Plaatje”, I said softly, “what are you doing to me?” “We will take care of you master, you are sick”. He was smiling over me like a guardian angel. He laid me on the ground. My other men also bent their kind faces over me: the Tamboer brothers, so young and unformed, Adonis, good, faithful old Jan Klawer. I wept with gratitude. And now mingling with their faces were the faces of the foreign Hottentots, smiling at me, assuring me that they meant well. Gentle hands raised me till I was sitting. With gestures of the eyebrows I apologized for the smell. I was lifted on to the back of an ox: not my ox, the strange Hottentot’s! I sat for a moment; but my thighs refused to clench, I slipped sideways and was lowered to the ground. The voices around me were murmuring again, discussing my welfare. I smiled and slid back into sleep.
I awoke to lucidity tied into a litter between two yoked oxen, jarred and tilted, the rest of my span breathing heavily behind me, my wagon gone, I knew, rifled and abandoned. I could not relax, I was clenched in rigors of cold. I whistled, I croaked, I panted to draw the attention of the strange dark figure who upside-down led me upside-down through the night. In a moment of sober arithmetic I realized that, sick with who knows what fever, I had fallen into the hands of callous thieves ignorant of the very rudiments of medicine, barbarians, children of nature whose hospitality I had only yesterday insulted. I descended into hallucinated vision of my deceased mother sitting in a straight-backed chair reading a letter announcing my death, and re-emerged into spasms of shivering from which I prayed to my long-absent God to bring back the sun. The stars continued to shine down from a sky which at any other time I might have admired for its crystal beauty. I prayed too for oblivion in any of its forms, from death to delirium. I was awarded delirium upon delirium, and finally chill of such depth that sensation in my hands and legs perished. “I am dying”, I said, [three] good, clear Dutch words, “how humiliating”, and noticed at the same moment that the sky had begun to redden. Forever blessed be the swift subtropical sunrise. Time passed, I thawed, soon I could forget my concern with death by exposure and begin to think of death by thirst. How had these people found the strength in my desperate foolish oxen to stumble on through the night? With pathetic bravado I fouled my bla
nkets again. Let the dead clean the dead, I would be saved.
Halloos from the Hottentots and the reappearance of troops of odious chattering hand-clapping boys announced the end of the journey. There was talk, interminable talk, while upside-down I fretted. Then through banks of peering women I was led to the cluster of huts beyond the stream that marked the boundary of the village proper. My own men inexplicably gone, I was unlashed from my bier and laid out in the shade by strange hands. The onlookers drifted away, all but two invincible old men and the children. “Water!” I screamed, and remarkably a crone appeared with a calabash. It was water, but bitterly tinctured and smelling of onion. I drank avidly, despising myself. I flashed a smile at the crone. She went away.
Klawer came, not so solicitous as I might have wished, and removed me from the spectators to the menstruation hut which, it appeared, had been assigned to me, and in whose sombre privacy I thrice, clinging for support to my foreman’s thighs, vented myself into a hemispherical gourd which it was his privilege to empty in the bushes. This charge he fulfilled day after day thereafter. Morning and evening he conveyed to me too the bowl of broth which constituted the foundation of the cure by purge that was being practised upon me by the same crone who had brought me drink, a gloomy Bushman slave with a knowledge of the Bushman pharmacopoeia whom I sometimes glimpsed peering in at me from the door of the hut and who replied to my questions about the name and prognosis of my illness, the reason for her benefactions, and (weakness this) my fate with churlish silence.
My fevers came and went, distinguishable only by the flexings of the soul’s wings that came with fever and the lumpish tedium of the return to earth. I inhabited the past again, meditating upon my life as tamer of the wild. I meditated upon the acres of new ground I had eaten up with my eyes. I meditated upon the deaths I had presided over, the slack tongue of the antelope and the neat crack of the beetle’s carapace. With a slight thrust of my wings I inhabited the horses that had lived under me (what had they thought of it all?), the patient leather of my boots, the air that had pressed on me wherever I moved. Thus I progressed, sending myself out from the shrunken space of my bed to repossess my old world, and repossessed it until, coming face to face with the alien certainties of sun and stone, I had to stand off, leaving them for the day when I would not flinch. The stone desert shimmered in the haze. Behind this familiar red or grey exterior, spoke the stone from its stone heart to mine, this exterior, jutting into every dimension inhabited by man, lies in ambush a black interior quite, quite strange to the world. Yet under the explorer’s hammerblow this innocent interior transforms itself in a flash into a replete, confident, worldly image of that red or grey exterior. How then, asked the stone, can the hammerwielder who seeks to penetrate the heart of the universe be sure that there exist any interiors? Are they not perhaps fictions, these lures of interiors for rape which the universe uses to draw out its explorers? (Entombed in its coffer my heart too had lived in darkness all its life. My gut would dazzle if I pierced myself. These thoughts disquieted me.)
I meditated and perhaps even dreamed on the subject of dreams. Might I hope that all the misfortune that had befallen me since I set eye on the Namaqua was a bad dream? Were the Namaqua merely demons? Was I become a prisoner of my own underworld? If so, where was the passage that led back to daylight? Was there a charm I had to know? Was the charm simply “I am dreaming” ejaculated with conviction? If so, why did I lack conviction? Did I fear that not only my sojourn among the Namaqua but all my life might be a dream? But if so, where would the exit from my dream take me? To a universe of which I the Dreamer was sole inhabitant? But had I not hereby arrived by a devious passage at the little fable I had always kept in reserve to solace myself with on lonely evenings, much as the lost traveller in the desert keeps back his last few drops of water, choosing to choose to die rather than die without choice? But did this little fable on the other hand not take much of the spice out of life?
I divulged the stages of this elegant meditation to Klawer at dusk on the third day of my confinement as the last swallows swept over the water and the first bats emerged. Dusk has always found me reckless in my confidences. Klawer understood not a word and pushed a “Yes master” into every rhetorical pause; but I was too drunk on my own speculations to be prudent.
From the fertile but on the whole effete topos of dreaming oneself and the world I progressed to an exposition of my career as tamer of the wild.
In the wild I lose my sense of boundaries. This is a consequence of space and solitude. The operation of space is thus: the five senses stretch out from the body they inhabit, but four stretch into a vacuum. The ear cannot hear, the nose cannot smell, the tongue cannot taste, the skin cannot feel. The skin cannot feel: the sun bears down on the body, flesh and skin move in a pocket of heat, the skin stretches vainly around, everything is sun. Only the eyes have power. The eyes are free, they reach out to the horizon all around. Nothing is hidden from the eyes. As the other senses grow numb or dumb my eyes flex and extend themselves. I become a spherical reflecting eye moving through the wilderness and ingesting it. Destroyer of the wilderness, I move through the land cutting a devouring path from horizon to horizon. There is nothing from which my eye turns, I am all that I see. Such loneliness! Not a stone, not a bush, not a wretched provident ant that is not comprehended in this travelling sphere. What is there that is not me? I am a transparent sac with a black core full of images and a gun.
The gun stands for the hope that there exists that which is other than oneself. The gun is our last defence against isolation within the travelling sphere. The gun is our mediator with the world and therefore our saviour. The tidings of the gun: such-and-such is outside, have no fear. The gun saves us from the fear that all life is within us. It does so by laying at our feet all the evidence we need of a dying and therefore a living world. I move through the wilderness with my gun at the shoulder of my eye and slay elephants, hippopotami, rhinoceres, buffalo, lions, leopards, dogs, giraffes, antelope and buck of all descriptions, fowl of all descriptions, hares, and snakes; I leave behind me a mountain of skin, bones, inedible gristle, and excrement. All this is my dispersed pyramid to life. It is my life’s work, my incessant proclamation of the otherness of the dead and therefore the otherness of life. A bush too, no doubt, is alive. From a practical point of view, however, a gun is useless against it. There are other extensions of the self that might be efficacious against bushes and trees and turn their death into a hymn of life, a flame-throwing device for example. But as for a gun, a charge of shot into a tree means nothing, the tree does not bleed, it is undisturbed, it lives on trapped in its treeness, out there and therefore in here. Otherwise with the hare that pants out its life at one’s feet. The death of the hare is the logic of salvation. For either he was living out there and is dying into a world of objects, and I am content; or he was living within me and would not die within me, for we know that no man ever yet hated his own flesh, that flesh will not kill itself, that every suicide is a declaration of the otherness of killer from victim. The death of the hare is my metaphysical meat, just as the flesh of the hare is the meat of my dogs. The hare dies to keep my soul from merging with the world. All honour to the hare. Nor is he an easy shot.
We cannot count the wild. The wild is one because it is boundless. We can count fig-trees, we can count sheep because the orchard and the farm are bounded. The essence of orchard tree and farm sheep is number. Our commerce with the wild is a tireless enterprise of turning it into orchard and farm. When we cannot fence it and count it we reduce it to number by other means. Every wild creature I kill crosses the boundary between wilderness and number. I have presided over the becoming number of ten thousand creatures, omitting the innumerable insects that have expired beneath my feet. I am a hunter, a domesticator of the wilderness, a hero of enumeration. He who does not understand number does not understand death. Death is as obscure to him as to an animal. This holds true of the Bushman, and can be
seen in his language, which does not include a procedure for counting.
The instrument of survival in the wild is the gun, but the need for it is metaphysical rather than physical. The native tribes have survived without the gun. I too could survive in the wilderness armed with only bow and arrow, did I not fear that so deprived I would perish not of hunger but of the disease of the spirit that drives the caged baboon to evacuate its entrails. Now that the gun has arrived among them the native tribes are doomed, not only because the gun will kill them in large numbers but because the yearning for it will alienate them from the wilderness. Every territory through which I march with my gun becomes a territory cast loose from the past and bound to the future.
To this sermon Klawer returned not a word but suggested humbly that it was late, I should sleep. Klawer had lived at my elbow since I was a boy; we had lived much the same outward life; but he understood nothing. I dismissed him.
Savages do not have guns. This is the effective meaning of savagery, which we may define as enslavement to space, as one speaks obversely of the explorer’s mastery of space. The relation of master and savage is a spatial relation. The African highland is flat, the approach of the savage across space continuous. From the fringes of the horizon he approaches, growing to manhood beneath my eyes until he reaches the verge of that precarious zone in which, invulnerable to his weapons, I command his life. Across this annulus I behold him approach bearing the wilderness in his heart. On the far side he is nothing to me and I probably nothing to him. On the near side mutual fear will drive us to our little comedies of man and man, prospector and guide, benefactor and beneficiary, victim and assassin, teacher and pupil, father and child. He crosses it, however, in none of these characters but as representative of that out there which my eye once enfolded and ingested and which now promises to enfold, ingest, and project me through itself as a speck on a field which we may call annihilation or alternatively history. He threatens to have a history in which I shall be a term. Such is the material basis of the malady of the master’s soul. So often, waking or dreaming, has his soul lived through the approach of the savage that this has become an ideal form of the life of penetration. A wagon moves through the heat and desolation. Miles away dark figures emerge, they are seen to be men, they are seen to be savages, the wagon moves on, the figures grow nearer, they cross the last hundred yards, the wagon stops, the oxen droop, nothing is heard but breathing and the scraping of cicadas. There he stands, inhabiting the prescribed place four paces away and three feet down, resignation is in the air, we are now going to live through gifts of tobacco and words of peace, directions to water and warnings against brigands, demonstrations of firearms, murmurs of awe, and eventually a lifetime of the pad-pad-pad of naked feet behind us. The devious pursuit ending in the frank straight line, the transformation of savage into enigmatic follower, and the obscure movement of the soul (weariness, relief, incuriosity, terror) that comes with this familiar transformation, we feel as a fated pattern and a condition of life.