See, all the veldt is aflutter with brown butterflies. They cluster on us like flies. I take off my hat, flap them away, the grey horse under me shivers its mane. The one nameless mount follows the other until it, too, is speared or arrowed or simply dies like all tamed animals in the interior. I press my hat back onto my head. Then the tapping on the inside of the sweat-moistened leather, the scrabbling in my hair. I lift the hat and a butterfly erupts.
The sand is dark red, the dust kicked up by the hooves, rusty. The people we travel past seem calm and long-suffering, as if the soil has been saturated with blood and has nothing more to demand from those who set foot on her. The grass is yellow, the trees lush and green and the sky so bright it scorches my eyes.
We approach the settlement from the east. Peaked huts like the armour of a lizard extend over the surface of the two highest hills in the area. A colony of kraals on the kopjes, and in the low-lying areas wild olives and marula and tambotie as far as the eye can see. See, the gigantic wild plum tree on the slopes of the steepest peak, the teeming southern peak of Karechuenya.
This is the Caffre city of cities. Such a multitude of people I could not have imagined. Some people say there are sixteen thousand souls living here, others say twenty thousand; I don’t try to count them. The Bastaards say Karechuenya means See, here be baboons; apparently used to be a colony of apes before people started piling up the rocks.
I trek through their pasturage, the herdsmen wave at me. Their flocks like an undulating brown sea over the hills as far as an old man can see, and then the unknown expanse. Every few yards the veldt looks different, but mainly overgrown and impenetrable. You have to watch your step or you fall into one of the fountains that spring up here as only stones can in the rest of this vast expanse. A one-eared dog keeps running in under my horse’s hooves, the dumb creature excited to the point of peril. I take a gulp of water from the knapsack, spit.
The Hurutshes walk to meet us. They say chief Senosi lives on the southern peak in the kgosing, the royal district. Chief Diutlwileng lives on the plateau, the northern district where the biggest cattle kraals are situated. Both are children of the daughters of the deceased king. Both rule over their own people, each on his own hill. Senosi lives on the royal hill and we must meet him first. I have the wagons outspanned at the foot of the southern hill. The town’s children descend upon us. I unsaddle my horse and walk up the hill with the welcoming committee. See, the women here walk with their shoulders thrown back, their breasts like soft battering rams.
The northern district is not visible from Senosi’s hill. What one can see from the hill is a plain bordered by hills extending in front of me for a hundred miles. Between the high stone walls people are teeming. The stonework is the best I’ve ever seen, square and strong but fine and artistic; no hole for a louse in between any of the cut and stacked stones. The neighbourhoods are divided up into wards, each ward with the divisions of ten or so families, each division a ring wall as high as I myself on my toes. In every camp is a large hut for sleeping, as well as one or two smaller huts. Above a foot-high stone base, which keeps out the wind and the crawling creatures, the residences are of wood, the roofs of reed. Large man-height monoliths in front of some of the kraals and in front of the huts of the most prominent residents. Each camp has its own grain store, ten feet high, raised from the ground on stones and with a thatched roof. Stone mills and fireplaces in front of the huts, generally also with a small kraal where the slaughter animals are kept. Most of these yards are enclosed with a low stone wall. Here and there even a narrow and upright stone doorway in front of a hut. The door rests in a groove cut into the flat stone on the threshold. In the evening the door slides shut and in the morning the door slides open. Large spiders spin and descend and ascend in every tree. Never have I seen so many leopard skins. The people wear and drape the skins as I use cattle hides. Large skins. In this area the hunters are more plentiful than the prey.
I meet Senosi at the kgotla, the meeting place compacted by many feet. He is large and serious. He jokes when it’s expected of him, but without conviction. We shake the necessary hands and he invites me and his closest advisers to his hut for beer and kudu. He listens with one ear and rubs his arms and chest with both his hands, so that after a while I look away.
Was he merely caressing his oiled arms, or was it fate that he felt prickling on his skin? Could he have guessed then that this gigantic town and all its people would be razed to the red ground barely three or four years later? That his arms and his walls would not be able to withstand the hordes of the difaqane?
A high wall with large upright white rocks at its entrance encloses Senosi’s yard. Inside are four huts, a large one for him and his arms, two smallish ones for his wives and a fourth small one for storage. His wives are pretty, but Senosi is more concerned with the bulging of the veins on his forearms when he balls his fists. His beer is good and strong, and as the afternoon lingers on, his wives get prettier and prettier. The kudu meat is young and succulent. To stop staring at the chief’s muscles and especially his wives – who giggle archly when the calabashes they’re bearing spill beer on them – I enquire with feigned interest after the white and polished stones. The oldest adviser says the white quartz is scarce. It is the colour of the place where the spirits dwell. Only he with the requisite importance and daring to chat with the dead and the spirits, plants a stone like that at his door. While I live will I praise the Lord, just to be allowed to slurp up the foaming beer from between those breasts.
The wagons blunder around the slope of the hill and down into the kloof. Around us the vegetable gardens and lands, and forges burning all day. We outspan and start clearing a plot of land next to a spring. The Hurutshes take one look at my kraals of branches and a few days later there’s a whole gang in the camp building stone kraals for my cattle, and five huts for me and the men with me.
Two or three weeks after I’ve moved in between the wild figs and the umbrella thorn, the sorcerer comes to call. Wrapped in a kaross cloak stretching to his ankles and with his woolly headdress the man looks as if he’s expecting snow at any moment. His eyes are milky and peer into another world. He’s come to bless me and to safeguard my camp against the worst of the evil spirits. He lives on the hill with Senosi so that he can be with his ancestors. The ancestors, he says, live in a cave on the south side of the hill. He says the chiefs also go to the cave to discuss the urgent affairs of the day with the ancients of spirit. He says the ancestors like giving advice, but you have to beware of the snake with many heads that also lives in the cave. The lights that one can see at night close to the cave are the eyes of the snake gleaming in the moonlight. He says there on that hill you feel the nature spirits and the ancestors in your blood. This place is holy. The sorcerer strikes the nearest log with his stick. The nature spirits roam all over, he says. He says you can’t see them with your ordinary eyes, but they are in every stone on the hill and also here in the forests of the kloof. He says one of the thickets on the hill is his alone to enter. That is where he dances for rain, where he pleads for rain with the god he calls Modimo. He says he dances up there where it’s high so that the ancestors can hear him. But it’s by the waters here in the kloof that the real holiness dwells. Every blessed drop of every fountain and waterfall and pool and puddle here is holy and can heal. He says I’ll see yet, every day there are sick and careworn people who come to seek out the waters here near my camp. I walk with him to the nearest pool so that he can collect his rain medicine. He says that what the water spits out is the medicine against the drought. He fills his bag with the scum that the water vomits out on her banks – twigs, leaves, moss, mud and a whole school of tadpoles. I take off my boots and soak my sore feet in the water. Today only one kind of holy water is going to be of any use – the kind you find in a flagon or a vat, not in any holy puddle.