The mighty Keiskamma is little more than a trickle nowadays. The only moving things are the whirlwinds that toss about our tents every late afternoon. Deep into September even Yese is heard of. I don’t think of her very much any more; all that I retain are faint twinges of jealousy and shame. Yese sends word that she doesn’t get any rain made. There are malign sorcerers in the vicinity who stop up the hole from which the rain falls, she says. She says Jank’hanna must make rain, please. Later that week it’s Ngqika’s brother-in-law who comes to plead with Jank’hanna to dance for rain.
Bezuidenhout, Oosthuizen and Steenberg come upon four Caffres and a woman sitting next to the road roasting the hindquarter of a cow. They say they found the carcase in the veldt. Look, they say, here the Bushman arrows are still sticking out. We’re just roasting it because we’re hungry. We haven’t stolen it. Steenberg shoots the spokesman in the head. The other two Christians are also obliged to shoot, so that the truth may be left lying here next to the road. They shoot the woman and two of the Caffres, but one escapes and comes tattling to Kemp; the woman, it seems, was his sister. Once again I have to sweet-talk and lie and connive or my friend the philanthropist will also get a ball of lead between the eyes.
I hear an unearthly screaming from Kemp’s tent and go to investigate. He’s bleeding an elderly Caffre. The man has rheumatism, he says. This bloodletting is reputed to help. I rub my fingers against one another, feel if they can still feel, praise his healing powers, and make my getaway.
A man can’t walk two steps without bumping into a Hottentot tittle-tattling. The latest news is that three castaways emerged from the sea on a piece of plank and when they set foot on shore were immediately captured by a lot of Ngqika’s Caffres. The men tried to escape but were caught again and beaten to a pulp with knobkerries. One of them lay still pretending to be dead, but when he saw the Caffres slitting his comrades’ throats to make sure they would lie still for good, he jumped to his feet and dived into the river and escaped. When we sound Ngqika out on this, he shrugs his ever-fatter shoulders and says they’re like the hyenas of the veldt, they’ve got no business here. Bezuidenhout gets hold of the two bags of raw coffee beans on which the castaways survived and now we have coffee three times a day.
When Kemp finds out that Bezuidenhout is planning to move to the sea, he gets anxious about Sara’s soul. On 15 October he baptises the woman and her two daughters in the Keiskamma. Maria is so overjoyed at her friend’s access to Eternal Life that, without asking me, she slaughters a sheep for the woman. On the 19th Kemp also baptises Sara’s oldest daughter as Christina. As if there weren’t enough damned Christinas in this world.
Ngqika gets to hear of Bezuidenhout’s plans and with great ostentation makes sure that my pal and his household understand that this is Caffraria and that Ngqika will decide who lives where. Kemp is overjoyed that Sara will not be taken away from him. He knows all too well that his diary will be read by the whole of the London Missionary Society, and yet he betrays himself in his scribblings. Jank’hanna and Kemp increasingly diverge into two distinct people. Just listen to the musings of a ruttish preacher on the 23rd of October of the year of our Lord 1800:
I now rejoiced in the prospect that I should again have an opportunity to feed her soul with the milk of the word of God.
At the end of October we trek away from the Keiskamma and her hippopotami with the protruding ribs. The king of this parched land once again comes pleading for Jank’hanna to pray for rain; the witchdoctors are being threatened and executed. Ngqika promises him two milk cows and their calves. Jank’hanna says he’ll pray and the king can keep his presents, but he should bear in mind that God’s ways are mysterious and unfathomable and whatever else.
That evening we arrive at our old living space. All this trekking in pursuit of nothing, with Ngqika breathing up our bungholes all the time, and now once again back where we goddamwell started out from. Kemp says there’s a Greek who maintained that Achilles would never catch up with a tortoise and that an arrow never really moved. I ask him whether he’s ever shot with a bow. The Caffres who used to live here, the eleven kraals full of people and cattle, have all moved on in search of food and pasturage. They burned down the grass before clearing out and Kemp’s branch-and-reed house, which I helped build with these two cramped hands and in the sweat of my brow, has perished in the process. My friend is in tears and on his knees.
Next to the chimney, which is all that is left towering over the veldt, stand the cows and calves that Ngqika promised. The rainmaker sends the herdsmen away with the gifted cattle and pitches his tent again, bolts together the printing press once again, makes his bed and sows the last of the vegetable seeds in the blackened grass.
I leave him there and run after the herdsmen. I tell him that Jank’hanna will definitely accept the king’s gift, on condition that it’s larger. The next morning the herdsmen come walking up the hill with another twenty cows. I take the cattle from them and say Of course I’ll see to it that Jank’hanna receives the gift and send my love to my son and Jank’hanna’s thanks to the king.
Jank’hanna prays fervently, his head banging the ground. He prays until the Lord’s temper has been tried beyond endurance and in a fit of wrath he opens up his heavens and the whole of Caffraria is flooded. Ngqika and all his people flee before the deluge. The lightning flashes so fiercely that Ngqika sends to ask the white rainmaker: Tell your god that if he wants me to listen to him, he must stop deafening me with thunder. Day after day it pours down. People flee the low-lying areas.
The red barbarian Bezuidenhout seizes his opportunity in the midst of the mayhem, and at the beginning of November he and his people trek to the banks of the Kabusie. He takes Sara along, and Kemp starts cultivating some other woman’s soul. Maria is with Kemp all day and every day, babbling on about her heart and soul. One night a tempest rips the missionary’s tent to shreds. Maria wants him to move in with us. I say he can muck off, if the two of them want to blacken the good name of my house they can go and wash her as white as driven snow outside in the rain. Since the houseless Kemp contracts an acute case of belly-run, Maria’s soul does after all remain in my house and out of heaven. Hardly has my own soul attained serenity, towards mid-November, or the Caffres start stealing my cattle. When Faber and his Leentjie also make for the Kabusie, even I, the father of Ngqika, start thinking it’s time to clear out.
These days I’m avoiding both my friends. I don’t have the stomach for squitter-shitting and puking. Kemp is permanently on his bucket and Ngqika is also out of sorts. He does not respond to my complaints about the cattle rustling. All that I hear are strange rumours making him out to be demented. Apparently Ngqika wanted to buy horses from two deserters. When the horses were in his kraal, he attacked the two men. It seems he pulled and pushed them around and cut the buttons off their jackets. When the poor fools asked him to return two buttons to button up their jackets against the cold, he pointed out the tree from which he was going to hang them. The two of them cleared out quickly. One of them arrives at my place badly dishevelled that evening, looking for Kemp. He says he lost his friend somewhere in the bush. The next morning the other one turns up on my doorstep and he looks even worse. Apparently six or so Caffres attacked him during the night. That same night a young shepherd is devoured by a pack of hyenas.