Thursday, the following day, we set off at daybreak and breakfasted at the next camp, Skukuza, where we were to stay that night.
Skukuza was larger and boasted executive-status rondavels, which Evan’s production company had naturally latched on to. They had also engaged the full-time attendance of a park ranger for the day, which would have been splendid had he not been an Afrikaaner with incomplete English. He was big, slow moving, quiet, and unemotional, the complete antithesis of Evan’s fiery zeal for allegory.
Evan shot questions and had to wait through silences for his answers: no doubt Haagner was merely translating the one into Afrikaans in his head, formulating the other and translating that into English, but the delay irritated Evan from the start. Haagner treated Evan with detachment and refused to be hurried, which gave Conrad the (decently concealed) satisfaction of an underdog seeing his master slip on a banana skin.
We set off in Haagner’s Range Rover, accompanied by the Arriflex, a tape recorder, half a dozen smaller cameras, and the red thermal box loaded with a mixed cargo of film, beer, fruit, and sandwiches in plastic bags. Evan had brought sketch pads, maps and notebooks, and six times remarked that the company should have equipped him with a secretary. Conrad murmured that we should be glad that we weren’t equipped with Drix Goddart, but from the sour look Evan slid me he didn’t necessarily agree.
‘Olifant,’ Haagner said, pointing, having been three times told of the aim of the expedition.
He stopped the van. ‘There, in the valley.’
We looked. A lot of trees, a patch of green, a winding river.
‘There, man,’ he said.
Eventually our untrained eyes saw them; three dark hunched shapes made small by distance, flapping a lazy ear behind a bush.
‘Not near enough,’ Evan said disgustedly. ‘We must get nearer.’
‘Not here,’ said Haagner. ‘They are across the river. The Sabie river. Sabie is Bantu word: it means Fear.’
I looked at him suspiciously but he was not provoking Evan in any way; simply imparting information. The slow peaceful-looking water wound through the valley and looked as unfearful as the Thames.
Evan had no eyes for the various antelope-like species Haagner pointed out, nor for the blue jays or turkey buzzards or vervet moneys or wildebeest, and particularly not for the herds of gentle impala. Only the implicitly violent took his attention: the vultures, the hyena, the wart-hog, the possibility of lion and the scarcity of cheetah.
And, of course, olifants. Evan adopted the Afrikaans word as his own and rolled it round his tongue as if he alone had invented it. Olifant droppings on the road (fresh, said Haagner) excited him almost to orgasm. He insisted on us stopping there and reversing for a better view, and on Conrad sticking the Arriflex lens out of the window and exposing about fifty feet of film from different angles and with several focal lengths.
Haagner, patiently positioning the van for every shot, watched these antics and clearly thought Evan unhinged, and I laughed internally until my throat ached. Had the obliging elephant returned Evan would no doubt have directed him to defecate again for Scene I, Take II. He would have seen nothing odd in it.
Evan left the heap reluctantly and was working out how to symbolise it in an utterly meaningful way. Conrad said he could do with a beer but Haagner pointed ahead and said ‘Onder-Sabie’, which turned out to be another rest camp like the others.
‘Olifant in Saliji river,’ said Haagner coming back from a chat with some colleagues. ‘If we go now, you see them perhaps.’
Evan swept us away from the shady table and our half empty glasses and scurried forth again into the increasing noonday heat. All around us, more sensible mortals were fanning themselves and contemplating siesta, but olifants, with Evan, came before sense.
The Range Rover was as hot as an oven.
‘It is hot, today,’ Haagner said. ‘Hotter tomorrow. Summer is coming. Soon we will have the rain, and all the park will be green.’
Evan, alarmed, said, ‘No, no. The park must be burned up, just like this. Inhospitable land, bare, hungry, predatory, aggressive and cruel. Certainly not soft and lush.’
Haagner understood less than a tenth. After a long pause he merely repeated the bad news: ‘In one month, after the rains start, the park will be all green. Then, much water. Now, not much. All small rivers are dry. We find olifant near bigger rivers. In Saliji.’
He drove several miles and stopped beside a large wooden sun shelter built high at the end of a valley. Below, the Saliji river stretched away straight ahead, and the olifants had done Evan proud. A large family of them were playing in the water, squirting each other through their trunks and taking care of their kids.
As it was an official picnic place especially built in an area of cleared ground, we were all allowed out of the car. I stretched myself thankfully and dug into the red box for a spot of irrigation. Conrad had a camera in one hand and a beer in the other and Evan brandished his enthusiasm over us all like a whip.
Haagner and I sat in ninety degrees in the shade at one of the small scattered tables and ate some of the packed sandwiches. He had warned Evan not to go too far from the shelter while filming as it presented an open invitation to a hungry lion, but Evan naturally believed that he would not meet one: and he didn’t. He took Conrad plus Arriflex fifty yards downhill into the bush for some closer shots and Haagner called him urgently to come back, telling me his job would be lost if Evan were.
Conrad soon climbed up again, mopping drops from his brow which were not all heat, and reported that ‘something’ was grunting down there behind some rocks.
‘There are twelve hundred lion in the park,’ Haagner said. ‘When hungry, they kill. Lions alone kill thirty thousand animals in the park every year.’
‘God,’ said Conrad, visibly losing interest in Evan’s whole project.
Eventually Evan returned unscathed, but Haagner regarded him with disfavour.
‘More olifant in the north,’ he said. ‘For olifant, you go north.’ Out of his district, his tone said.
Evan nodded briskly and set his mind at rest.
‘Tomorrow. We set off northwards tomorrow, and tomorrow night we stay in a camp called Satara.’
Reassured, Haagner drove us slowly back towards Skukuza, conscientiously pointing out animals all the way.
‘Could you cross the park on a horse?’ I asked.
He shook his head decisively. ‘Very dangerous. More dangerous than walking, and walking is not safe.’ He looked directly at Evan. ‘If your car break down, wait for next car, and ask people to tell rangers at the next camp. Do not leave your car. Do not walk in the park. Especially do not walk in the park at night. Stay in car all night.’
Evan listened to the lecture with every symptom of ignoring it. He pointed instead to one of the several un-metalled side roads we had passed with ‘no entry’ signs on them, and asked where they led.
‘Some go to the many Bantu ranger stations,’ said Haagner after the pause for translation. ‘Some to water holes. Some are fire breaks. They are roads for rangers. Not roads for visitors. Do not go down those roads.’ He looked at Evan, clearly seeing that Evan would not necessarily obey. ‘It is not allowed.’