From the saddle I survey the bushes and the grasses and the thorn trees and the anthills like towers of Babel. Sometimes I pull up next to a rock formation or a plant that claims my attention, but while there is still sun, the wagon stops for nothing and nobody. I follow the wagon on horseback, my thoughts already straying to other rocks or leaves or wandering off into the distance. I’m not here on a voyage of discovery. I’m on my way to the border. The few people who call this region home have no use for me here: the Christians hunt the likes of them, and they in turn rob and murder the Christians in that old cycle of devastation without beginning or end. Here you keep a low profile and you don’t stay in one place for too long. The Bushmen must never think you want to settle in.
Sometimes we cross the paths of other wagons, sometimes people on foot or on horseback, but nobody makes a lasting impression on anybody else. We don’t outspan at other farmhouses like most people. The customs and the conversations in there are what I’m getting away from. When supplies run low, we sometimes stop over at a kraal. The Hottentots readily barter sheep and edible bulbs and honey, and treat Maria well, this diminutive queen with her gigantic white husband and her Hottentot underlings.
In one kraal of an evening the Hottentots are dancing. When Elizabeth comes to sit by me near the fire, in no time at all there are several figures squatting around her in wonderment. They can see she shies away from human contact. They approach slowly, careful not to startle her. One presses a finger gently against her shoulder. She looks at the finger. He presses an ochre-tipped finger to her nose. She giggles, presses her own finger to the Hottentot’s nose. After a while she allows the enchanted Hottentot to stroke her hair. She climbs onto my lap, but allows them to mark her little body all over with ochre hands like the hands they press against the walls of caves. Eventually the little crowd win her over; she scrambles down from my lap. They lift her onto their shoulders and dance around the fire. She looks like the afterthought of a flame, red and lambent but less so, as if fire had a shadow that could dance with humans without consuming them.
Sometimes I do call at homesteads to angle for news. As the trek wends its way eastward, you need to look ever more closely to identify a hut as Christian turf. Heathens live in round huts; Christian wattle-and-daub huts are rectangular. The news is never good. The Christians I talk to are mainly refugees who abandoned their farms on the eastern frontier and crawled back deep into the embrace of the Colony, only to be robbed and slaughtered here as well. The accounts of these fearful god-fearing folk are as void of meaning as the cairns on graves.
One afternoon one of these gormless Christians crawls out of his mud hut to greet me. A broad-brimmed hat on his head and the tatters of what were once military shoes are the sum total of his apparel. His whole body is peeling with sunburn. He babbles on about Caffres and locusts and his failed crops and this is what he knows and this is his life. How could he know what Omni-Buys knows and what would it be to him that Louis the Sixteenth in this year of our Lord 1785 signs a proclamation declaring that henceforth handkerchiefs must be square?
When the wind blows through the grass or the shadows of clouds tumble over the slopes and kopjes, the whole moribund landscape seems to come to life and race past underfoot. The eye plays games in this endless place where days of trekking feel like standing still, and an hour or so of seeking shelter from a thunderstorm feels like growing old. By day the veldt is dead as dust. We trek past lions lounging under thorn trees, not bothering to bestir themselves for a whole herd of cattle. At the times of transition from night to day and from day to night the veldt is a deafening discord of life calling and cawing and rustling and racing as if aspiring to destinations beyond the multitudinous cycles intersecting here in the softly luminescent spaciousness.
By day I’m never alone with Maria. Our conversations are instructions to each other, schemes to keep the wagon in motion and the children in good health. At night when the offspring are asleep, we can love each other cautiously. If one of the children wakes up from the rocking of the wagon, we lie down giggling between the wheels or steal off into the veldt.
By day it’s just me and the flatness. Usually I ride off away from the team and the wagon, where I can feel the openness and be afraid. On the plain there is nowhere to hide. My chest tightens and the soil binds my feet and pours lead into my veins. I race out over the plain with the thunder rolling and crashing and furious in the black clouds. The lightning bolts set fire to the horizon. There is no hiding place when the heavy drops and the hail start pelting down. It is there that I want to be. That is what scares me. Then I have passed under it and my breast fills with air and my feet become light; then everything is open, in front of and around and in me.
After such a storm the open spaces stir up something in me. I grab Maria from the wagon chest and throw Windvogel the whip, shout a few commands and race into the veldt with my darling wife who is trying to find her seat on the saddle until the wagon shrinks to a spot in the distance. As if the whole world is watching me, I make a great show of every movement. She just happens to be the woman with me; I am strutting my stuff to the veldt. Afterwards I lie against her and drink from her while she strokes my head.
Close your eyes, I tell her. Close them, nobody may see.
I shut my eyes tight and we lie in the darkness and her milk spills into my beard. The team is trundling along slowly, we need not hurry to catch up with it. Back at the wagon the children are crying and Windvogel mocks us until I clout him.
The sun is a lidless eye on the day that the big book with the drawings is found lying on the wagon trail. I read in it: ink sketches of giraffes, the long necks implausibly long, asses, leopards, then horses with rhinoceros horns, water maidens. The further I page, the more freakish the drawings. The lines blur into blotches. On every few pages there are maps in the finest detail and shading repeated over and over again in the book and sometimes scratched out. Every map stranger than the one before. I stuff the book into my saddlebag. I fill my pipe and smoke in the saddle. Before the fill is done, a white wig is lying in the road. Minutes later a black tricorn hat on a walking stick with an ivory knob, planted in the ground. Further along two worn black shoes with shiny buckles, neatly arranged next to each other. Around the next bend a jacket draped over a thorn tree and then some distance along the white shirtsleeves fluttering from a branch. The black velvet culottes we find spread out over a desiccated bush and then a naked man sitting under a waboom next to the road, legs spread, with his head on his chest. The sun-scorched fellow doesn’t look up when he’s hailed and doesn’t stir when I place a skin pouch of water next to him. He pretends to be asleep. I shake him. He snores louder, rolls over and curls up with his hands under his head. I shake again; he draws his head in between his shoulders. I nudge him with a boot. He wriggles his body as if I’m a fly bothering him and snores furiously. The devil take him. I pick up the water pouch and we travel on.
And always, at a distance, the dogs. At night their lamentations and by day they are nowhere to be seen, except the one-eared male who takes up position next to Horse when I lose track of the wagon trail and cut into the veldt. Life and her perils, the miracles and death itself are not to be found on the wagon trail. I don’t go far, I keep my people in sight. Old One-ear pants next to me, his legs less limber than a few years ago. I stand in the stirrups, survey the surrounds. You set yourself up as a target if you don’t check behind the nearest bushes next to the road. Away from the wagon tracks you find signs of life. Other tracks and traces, warm ash in holes where last night small fires were made. A broken rifle, the butt end full of black blood. A man wandering feverishly with vacant eyes, bent under the guilt from which he fled, dying for the water he drank too quickly.