“Oh no, you know how they are down there. The whole network has to be alerted everytime somebody moves.”
He left a good — bye message with her, for Aleke. “He must be triumphant. He’s been threatening to storm the Ministry and carry off a secretary.”
“I came quietly,” the girl said, with her good chap smile.
It had rained in the night and the elephant grass was matted with brilliant dew. He could hear his tyres cutting the first tread of the day into the wet packed sand on the road; his blunted sense of smell revived to something of the animal’s keen nose. Bamboo, rocks, lichens — they stood out fresh as a rock — painting doused with water. Ten miles or so from Gala he picked up a young man who was trudging along with a cardboard suitcase. There were other people here and there on the road, women with bundles and pots, barefoot country people criss — crossing the forest and the grass in the ordinary course of their daily lives as clerks and shoppers move about the streets of a town, but this man in shirt — sleeves with new shoes spattered with mud was, at a glance, outside this activity: Bray stopped just ahead of him, and he got into the car without a word. “I’m going to the mine — that direction. How far’re you going?” “That will be all right.”
The presence in the car changed the mood of the morning; the sensuous pleasure of it sank back. The sunlight was empty upon a heavily charged object: the man breathed quietly, his lips closed with a small sound now and then on something he had not said aloud, and Bray saw, out of the corner of his eye, curly lashes slow — blinking and a line of sickness or strain marking the coarse cheek. His trousers were very clean and had the concave and convex lines of having been folded small in a suitcase. Once he took the ball — point pen out of his shirt — pocket and clicked the point in and out in a beautiful, matt — black hand.
Bray did not know whether the youngster was merely paralysed by the social proximity of a white man — so often the old dependencies, the unformulated resentments, the spell in which even the simplest of confrontations had been held so long, struck dumb — or whether he did not want to speak or be spoken to. Yet his presence was extraordinarily oppressive. Bray tried Gala; the young man said, without response, “I am returning home.” How long had he been in town? “Two months and seventeen days.” Bray did not want an interrogation; the man accepted a cigarette and Bray let the motion of the car and the focus of the passing road contain them dreamily.
The iron-ore mine was a purplish — red gash in the foothills before the pass. A sandcastle mountain of the same colour had been thrown up beside it, bare of the green skin of bush and grass that hid this gory earth on the hills. A new road led to it; on a nearby slope, a settlement was drawn and small figures were set down here and there, moving thinly. As the car came nearer they became the demonic figures of miners everywhere, faces streaked with lurid dirt under helmets, gumboots clogged with clay — the dank look of men who daily come back from the grave.
“I’m going to call in on someone who has a place about three miles on …?”
“Yes sir.”
Bray had thought he would get off at the mine; that was what was understood — but it didn’t matter. “Just tell me when we get near your village.” The young man heavily waved a hand to suggest an infinite distance, or indifference. They drove to the cattle ranch that had been remote fifteen years ago, when George Boxer settled there. Now there were a mine and telephone wires, over the hill. Boxer was still there, still wearing immaculately polished leather leggings, and attended by three Afghan hounds lean and wild in locks of matted hair. Boxer was one of those men whose sole connection with the world is achieved through a struggle with nature. The affairs of men did not engage his mind. Men themselves, white or black, had a reality for him only insofar as they were engaged with him in that struggle. Whether the man who searched with him for a lost heifer or worked with him to repair a fence was black or white was not a factor: the definitive situation was that of two men, himself and another, in conflict with dry rot in a fence — post, or with the marauding leopard who, too, was after the heifer. He had not joined in the settlers’ hue and cry against Bray ten years ago for the same reason that he hadn’t joined the exodus of settlers with the coming of independence: it was not that he had no feelings about colour, but that he had no communion with human beings of any colour. Circumstances — Bray’s circumstances, then — had made Boxer look like a friend simply because he was indifferent to being an enemy, but Bray had always known that this appearance had no more meaning in its way than that other, physical, appearance of Boxer’s — he wore the clothes, maintained the manners and household conventions of his public — school background not as if these were the manifestations of a place in a highly evolved society, but as if they were the markings, habits, and lair with which, unconscious of them (like any hare or jackal), he had been born.
Bray was directed down from the house to one of the cattle camps to find Boxer. While they were talking, looking at Boxer’s two fine bulls that he had bred himself, Bray forgot his passenger. Boxer began to walk Bray up to the house past the car: “There’s someone I’m giving a lift.” Boxer glanced at the passenger, swept aside the pause— “I’ll get something sent down to him. You’ll have lunch, of course.” But Bray insisted that tea or a drink was all he could stay for. They went into the living-room-cum-library that Boxer had panelled in the local mahogany; it was dimly like a headmaster’s study, although the reference books were agricultural. The tea — tray had a silver inscription, the inherited English furniture was set about as Bray now remembered the room. They talked about the mine. “Any chance of a find on your property? I suppose you’ve had it prospected?” Boxer took a can of beer out of a cabinet filled with tarnished decanters. “I don’t have to worry. There’s nothing. The Company’s gone over every inch. At one time I had it all planned — there’d be a vein here; how much I’d be paid out; the twenty thousand acres I’d had my eye on to buy down on the Bashi Flats. Kept me amused many nights. Awake, anyway.”
The books on cattle breeding had pushed the Mort d’Arthur, the Iliad and Churchill’s memoirs to the top shelves but there were book — club novels and The Alexandria Quartet in paperback accessible among the farming journals, and some seedpods and a giant snail — shell lying among rifle cartridges on a tray. — Bray remembered George Boxer’s wife, a black — haired woman with green eyes, pretty until she smiled on little, stained, cracked teeth. They had had a son; just entered Sandhurst, Boxer said, as if reminded of something he hadn’t thought of lately.
“Why the Bashi?” Bray asked. “I shouldn’t have thought it was the place for cattle.”
“No, no, that’s the point — it’s a lot of nonsense about the low altitude and so on. I’ve gone into the whole business thoroughly for ten years, I’ve collected sample pasture, recorded water supplies, collected every kind of tick there is all over this country. And you can take my word, there are no fewer tick — borne diseases up here than on the Flats, it’s exactly the same problem, and the natural pasture is infinitely better. If the water — conservation scheme goes ahead — the flood — water diversion one, I mean — I think one wouldn’t have to supplement feed at all, not even in August — November, before the rains. You could keep your pasture going right round the year. And you’d have no problem about watering your cattle. You see, at the moment, when the floods recede, everything drains away quickly to the south.”