Note welclass="underline" If you stand back far enough, or look closely enough, you’ll see how the magma erupts bubbling through the crust and suppurates into the open. Fragments of the crust subside to fill in the absence of the molten centre. Thus the inside is transformed into the outside and the outside into the inside and the planet renews itself and destroys it all and everything has to start all over again in all eternity. There is life on the surface during the interstices between ice and fire.
According to report Ngqika’s men visit Bresler in October 1798. I am told the landdrost asked after me. Apparently said he wouldn’t rest until the Colony was rid of that scum Buys. They say the Caffres were suddenly silent and stony-faced. They talked among one another. All that Bresler could make out from the conversation was the name Khula.
Another fine story that makes me laugh up my leather sleeve: In April of that year there is apparently an Irishman who hangs around Graaffe Rijnet like a blue-arse fly. A drunken Irishman who tells all who are prepared to lend an ear that he’s a prince and definitely not, as they are later to discover, a deserter. An Irishman who is too loud and can’t hold his liquor. Who late at night tells his drinking pals he is on his way across the Fish, to Coenraad de Buys, king of the Caffres.
There are many places to cross the border with a wagon or two and your wives and children, your cattle and your comrades who have also been declared outlaws. See, at one of these crossings there are tracks in the mud: deep tracks of wagons and oxen and horses following one another in parallel lines, and then, barely visible, over these deeply rutted tracks, a swarm of light, shallow dog tracks that proliferate and coagulate and intricate and disperse.
1799 – 1801
1
How much grey matter have I not seen? How many sheep’s brains have I not devoured? How many human brains have not lain at my feet in my time? A squelchy heap of fleshy mush with deep ravines that slurps and spatters under my sole and is instantly forgotten. It taught me nothing.
Come and look by all means, peering into my eyes gets you nowhere. They are not the windows to anything. Behind them only the moist darkness undulates. My skull is fully occupied with two grey fists. Come in, sneak past the eyes, enter by the ears, or panga your way through the boscage of the nostrils. Dart through any of the tiny cranial apertures into the interior. Chart and annotate to your heart’s content, but don’t feel too secure. Here be dragons. Shoot like a seizure through the multitudinous cells. Each more unfathomable than a beehive. On each of them an inscrutable map of my inbred destiny. Name each flickering and fold. Trace each capillary on your map. You have the words, you have your atlas, but you will recover nothing of me here. There are as many pulsating sparks in my brain as stars in the Milky Way. Words can forget about it and mathematics eternally lags behind. As it is in heaven, so it is in here. This anthill swells and swarms so prodigiously that the whole conglomeration starts reflecting upon itself. The Milky Way starts dreaming herself.
My thoughts wander along elephant trails, trodden generation after generation by forebears with longer arms and teeth and pizzles. Your compass chases its own tail. The paths do not lead anywhere, they merely start up and sprout offshoots and turn-offs. You and I get lost in here. We hear the pumping of the artery that will one day rupture.
Carry on tunnelling, through the lobes, burrow through the landscapes where my tongue finds its words and where my fingers discover their purposes; deeper. It’s dark in here. Cast away your map; grope your way along the slippery chilly walls and beware of precipices. Keep going through the raw offal, until you strike the first vertebra. Like the business end of a knobkerrie, the vertebral stem terminates in a sturdy burl. In this knob, things have been stirring since the beginning of time. Regard it well and you’ll swear you can see a lithe reptile slithering over the cold grey hills of the forebrain. While you’re still staring, the silver sliver slips into the slimy slit. This sly so-and-so hears nothing of what the rest of the brain mutters and grumbles. The lizard knows no metaphysics. A crag lizard has such a knobkerrie in its head, and so do I. So do the dogs who are never far away.
This reptile brain is what drives me. I am at the mercy of the juices in my body and the short circuits in my head. For years a constant sputtering combustion and then smothered in mud. The saps and shocks urge me to mark my territory and defend it. I am what I am. I piss on boundary beacons. I ruffle my fur and curl my lips, baring my teeth. I go courting, clothed in all the colours of the veldt. The prancing parade transports me to violence. Here dwells the germ of cunt-quest and buck-death. Evenings of endlessly squatting by the fire. You’ll say that life on the frontier wounds us, that every mortal creature here staggers through life, struck deaf and dumb and always plundering, with the waters of destruction in his wake. I wouldn’t know. I am what I am. I don’t look back. The slitherer in me learns nothing; it does not utter fine language; it does not adapt. It feeds on the iron in my blood. The devil take table manners – its only need is to yowl and roar. My brain and vertebrae are silted up with the residual ooze of primordial wildernesses.
If you want to see me, you must get out of here. Mount the nearest impulse and ride it out of the brain across the spider’s web of nerves. Let go of the fine threads bearing pain and pleasure. Slam yourself into the flesh clinging to the scaffolding of bone clawing at bone. Tear through the network of sinewy muscle. Drift a while with the blood and listen to the soughing organs and the phlegmy smoke-ruckle. Forge to the outside, to the pelt with its cicatrised lacerations. In the books of the Cape they call me white and of French stock, but here on the surface, between the hair and the pores, only the scars stay white. Get off my skin and begone.
You have to stand well clear to see me speeding. Just see how loosely my moleskin trousers fit over the flanks of the bay. I got thin among the Tambookies, miles and miles east of Ngqika and the border and Graaffe Rijnet. It is September 1799. My family I left with the Tambookies; now I’m galloping back to Ngqika. In these last few months Glider has had to carry me great distances.
I don’t want to bore you. I’d hardly settled in with Ngqika and his mother, or I got mail. Just before Christmas 1798 a run-to-rags Hottentot hands me a letter where I’m outspanning over the border, in the lee of the frowning Amathole Mountains, at the end of the charted world, on the edge of the Milky Way. The letter says they’re going to lock up Adriaan van Jaarsveld and in Graaffe Rijnet the revolution is still smouldering under the red soil. It’s Martiens Prinsloo who’s writing. He asks me if I’m in the mood to fock up the English good and proper. While Maria is still gabbling with the Hottentot, I’m already in the saddle.
Just see me racing, back to the kraal of my sort-of-son Ngqika, my shoulders churning, old Glider’s hooves floating as if the earth had relinquished them. My dogs, my extended shadow, as always behind and next to and in front of me. The new leader’s ridge rises high and his ears lie back and he is pure speed and his bark is as nothing to his bite.
At the end of last year I raced just like this, that time away from the kraal, back to the Colony. Believe me, Caffraria was oozing milk and honey and I had just contracted marriage with Ngqika’s mother. Yese, my gigantic bestial wife, Yese with an appetite that obliged me on those mornings after I’d been with her to mount my horse wearily and all too warily. Maria and Nombini were not charmed with my marriage. When I’m at home, the two are at each other’s throats, except if they’re both clambering on my neck. With Yese my yard is manhandled as no Christian’s has ever been. Not that I’m complaining, but the Lord knows there’s not much to do among the Caffres. Beer and meat are brought out all day long and a man needn’t hunt any more than he’s inclined to. Except if you feel the urge to hunt, because hunting is hunting. I must sit in front of my house smoking my pipe and looking impressive because the king’s mother is now my wife and she milks me morning and night. They say she’s a witch and her darling son dare not piss before she’s nodded her double chin in consent. Then Martiens’ letter arrived. So how does a creature like me refuse the opportunity to go and light a firebrand once again under the communal fundament of Graaffe Rijnet?