In the course of the night before my departure a few hyenas tear our last horse to pieces and thirty jackals come to devour what the hyenas and a lone lion left behind. By morning even the bones have vanished. All that we find is a piece of skull with one eye regarding us milkily.
I rejoin the nomadic tribe in time to watch in wonderment a host of locusts swarming past northwards. A thundering immeasurable cloud, a mile wide and how many long. The leading hoppers descend and settle and devour everything that grows, to fall in again at the back when the cloud has streamed past darkly and deafeningly. The larvae have hatched in the frontier districts and mounted the wind and will rage forth until they’ve exhausted themselves or been blown into the sea. As they move they leave eggs behind and new storms arise. Never resting, they carry on hopping until the very dust is alive. I hear stories of how such swarms cross rivers, the floating drowned form a bridge for the rearguard. They smother the fires the farmers make to staunch them by hopping into the fires in their thousands. Those that don’t get burnt move on.
The little lost band draws up and even the oxen turn their yoke-burdened shoulders to gaze at the locusts, how the things that were still larvae only the other day now denude the course of their migration of all that human or animal could eat. This track will remain visible for weeks, as if a monstrous harrow has moved across the land.
We trek on through plains full of wildebeest, bontebok, springbok, jackal, leopard, wild dogs and my red dogs with their new wild blood, even more savage. At the foot of the Bamboesberg we swerve south and then west to cross the Colony border once again through a defile in the mountains. On 27 April we stop at a place called Schapenkraal.
My days with Kemp draw to a close. Van der Walt had given me a letter for Kemp in which he says that the missionaries Read and Van der Lingen are already waiting for him in Graaffe Rijnet with a wagon at the ready. Van der Walt also offers his own wagon to fetch Kemp from us. Kemp writes back and thanks the zealous Van der Walt for his wagon. He also asks that, if possible, Van der Walt should bring along mission money to pay Kemp’s travel companions for their trouble in bringing him this far. I still don’t divulge to Kemp that the so-called Christians that he now wants to pay were the selfsame thieves who at Ngqika’s place systematically robbed him blind.
Esteemed voyeur, do not begrudge me a break in my narrative. I have no desire to tell you what Kemp and I spoke about that night when we could have a last dispute in peace. See, my old friend is also somewhat cryptic on the subject in his diary of 30 Apriclass="underline"
By the mercy of the Lord I got an opportunity to converse freely with Buys on the concerns of his soul.
There by the fire we were honest for once, with each other and especially with ourselves. We prattled for a long time about God and soul and that which no man ever dares utter to another or to himself. Our conversation took us to places far beyond the limits of the permissible, places that will never be revisited in daylight. If you want to know more, you can damnwell think it up. Go on, go as far as your imagination can take you. Believe me, that night we went further.
On the 6th of May 1801 Van der Walt turns up with his wagon and the money Kemp asked for. On the 7th they’re gone. I shall never see Jank’hanna van der Kemp again.
While I’m helping him load the wagon, I filch a little bag of letters. I’ll melt them down and cast bullets. The words of the press will spread through this land as my friend hoped. They will be lodged in many hearts and brains and I’ll assist a horde of Heathenish souls to escape from their mortal dungeons, so please it the Lord of missionaries. Amen.
7 – 8 November 1814
1
Where once my houses stood, game parks and hunting lodges now lie. Where once I lived, you don’t live. My ferality has seeped into the soil. Where I staked my claim, where I pissed on the corner posts of my yard, there your bricks and your tar don’t grow.
It is early morning, my house is dark. If you want to see where you are, open the narrow casement window. Bang open the stuck shutter; the wood warped last winter. The light flows down the wall, over the floor. The window frames the mountains, all of the outside hovers before the window opening; then the landscape washes in, imprisoned in the room. The darkness inside frames the light on the dung-covered floor. The floor anchors your feet. This is the first mark we make on earth, the place where you scrabble open a seat for yourself by the fire. Once the soil around the floor has been trodden flat, the dance can begin. And see, the wall is a floor rising up. The wall frames the window. Walls divide up the floor, walls create rooms; as soon as there are rooms, time slows down. The wall separates us from the world and it creates a new world, a framed world. Indeed, the wall separates, thank God. We can coexist as long as the walls remain standing. The floor and walls and windows choose one another and separate one another and share one outside and together they bring about a last partition: a roof. In this country roofs are seldom flat; where else would the coffins go? The roof is dried rushes; it is cool; it burns easily.
Do you hear the termites in the wood of the frames? The yellow-wood door frames are their mansions with a thousand rooms. They were here first. You are standing in a long house with one room opening into another. You are standing in the kitchen. Are you surprised that this is your entrance – the hearth? Open the back door. With the opening and closing of windows and doors you rule the routes of the wind. Against the outer wall is piled a heap of rhinoceros bush and hopbush for firewood. Can you still smell the bread in the built-out baking oven?
The kitchen is my wife’s nest. See, the lanterns are calabashes into which she cut holes for candles. See, the last two porcelain plates are hanging against the wall, the relics of what my neighbours call civilisation. And you don’t besmirch civilisation with animal fat and sweet potatoes. The tin plates in the little wooden cupboard that I hammered together. The bowls of wood, the basins of earthenware. The cups and saucers mostly broken by children, by jolting wagons and by temper tantrums. Run a finger over any object here and you won’t find any dust. The copper gleams and even the wood strives to shine. She polishes every ladle and spoon until the things start sharing their own intimate light with her, as if they lose all happenstance and become more real. Every fork is inexorably here and hers. The house is brought forth from her callused hands. She takes care. She rebuilds the house from the inside. And I can hardly hammer together a rickety table. Her long fingers burnish the house to life every day anew. It is her house, it is egg and nest, it is country and universe. Every few years I tell a Hottentot to limewash the outer walls.
Peek into the pantry, but keep your paws off my biltong. Look up, the purlins are festooned with bowls and tobacco. Do you see the massive ridge pole of mountain cypress? It’s the only wood in the house that has not yet invited in the termites.
Step out of the kitchen into the back room. In the evenings we eat here. Step warily in the dusk, one or two of my offspring are always playing or sleeping here. My wife sets only forks on the table. In my world everyone carries his own knife. My blade has worn thin with whetting. Open the shutter, otherwise you’ll bump into the little table and six chairs that were in the house before us. Two of the chairs are held together by God’s grace and tolerated only for the sake of their beauty. They have been eaten hollow. A solid fart would reduce them to the dust whence they came. The furniture mirrors the house back to itself. The table is a floor on the floor. It is furniture that your body brushes against most often and not the floor and walls. Furniture has a more intimate knowledge of your body. Furniture brings the outside inside, because until recently it was still trees and driftwood. Furniture is the outside that has been sawn and planed and varnished. You will fit, but I have to stoop under the reed ceiling. Just as well my table does not stand here.