The Outspan: Tales of South Africa

Percy Fitzpatrick

The Outspan: Tales of South Africa

Chapter One

“There is no art in the Telling that can equal the consummate art of the Happening!”

It was a remark dropped by a forgotten someone in a prospector’s hut one night, years and years ago, when we had exhausted snakes and hunting, lucky strikes and escapes, and had got away into coincidences. One of the party had been telling us an experience of his. He was introduced on the day he arrived to a man well known on the fields. It seemed quite impossible that they could have met before, for they compared dates and places for ten years back, and yet both were puzzled by the hazy suggestion of having seen the other before, and, in our friend’s case, of something more definite. His remark to the other was:

“I can’t help feeling that I saw you once in a devil of a fright somewhere – or dreamt it, I suppose!”

But this first feeling faded quickly away, and was utterly forgotten by both. Later on they shared a hut near Rimer’s Creek, and afterwards, when houses came into vogue, they lived for several years together, while the first impression was lying buried, but not dead.

One day, in the process of swapping yarns, the other man was telling of the “narrowest escape he ever had” – and all due to such a simple little mistake. A ticket-collector took the tickets at the wrong end of a footbridge. Instead of collecting them as the passengers from the train went on to the bridge, he took them as they were going off. The result was that the crowd of excursionists was too great for the little bridge, and it slipped between the abutments, carrying some two hundred people into the river below, the narrator being one of them. It was then that the dormant idea stirred and awoke – jumped into life – and our friend put up his hands as he had done fifteen years before, when the little bridge in Bath dropped, and gasped out:

“My God! you were the other chap that hung on to the broken rail! That’s where we met!”

That was what prompted the forgotten one to say after we had lapsed into silence:

“There’s no art in the Telling that can equal the consummate art of the Happening!”

And I only recall the remark because it must be my apology for telling plain truth just as it happened.

When a man has spent some years of his life – the years of young manhood they generally are – in the veld, in the waggon, or tent, or Bush, it is an almost invariable rule that something which you can’t define germinates in him and never entirely dies until he does. When this thing – this instinct, feeling, craving, call it what you will – awakens, as it periodically does, it becomes a madness, and they call it trek-fever, and then, as an old friend used to say, “You must trek or burst!” There are many stories based on trek-fever, but this is not one of them; and if you were to ask those who know them, or, better still, get hold of any of the old hands, hard-headed, commonplace, unromantic specimens though they might be, who have lived in the veld – if you gave them time to let it slip out unawares – you would find that every man jack of them would have something to say about the camp-fire. I do believe that the fascination within the fascination is the camp-fire in veld life, with its pleasant yarn-swapping, and its long, pregnant, thoughtful silences, no less enjoyable. The least loquacious individual in the world will be tempted to unfold a tale within the circle of a camp-fire’s light.

Everything is so quietly, unobtrusively sociable, and subjects are not too numerous in the veld, so that when a man has something apropos or interesting to tell, he commands an appreciative audience. Nobody bores, and nobody interrupts. Perhaps it is the half-lazy preference for playing the listener which everyone feels that is the best security against bores and interruptions.

The charm of the life is indescribable, and none who have tasted it ever weary of it, ever forget it, or cease to feel the longing to return when once they have quitted it.

It was in ’91, the year after the pioneers cut their way through the Bush, with Selous to guide them, and occupied Mashonaland. We followed their trail and lived again their anxious nights and days, when they, a small handful in a dense Bush, at the mercy of the Matabele thousands, did not know at what hour they would be pounced on and massacred.

We crossed the Lundi, and somewhere beyond where one of their worst nights was passed we outspanned in peace and security, and gossiped over the ruins of ancient temples and the graves of modern pioneers. There were half a dozen of us, and we lay round the fire in lazy silence, too content to speak, simply living and drinking in the indescribable glories of an ideal African night.

It was someone knocking his pipe out and asking for the tobacco that broke the long silence, and the old Barbertonian, who had had to move to release the tobacco, looked round with the air of wanting someone to talk to. As no one gave any sign, he asked presently:

“Are you chaps asleep?”

“No!” came in clear, wakeful voices, with various degrees of promptness.

“I was just thinking,” he said, refilling his pipe slowly, “that this sort of thing – a night like this, you know, and all that – although it seems perfection to us, isn’t really so perfect after all. It all depends on the point of view, you know. A night like this must be a perfect curse to a lion or a tiger, you know.”

“Your sympathies are too wide, old man,” said the surveyor. “Chuck me a light, and console yourself that your predatory friends do well enough when others are miserable. Take a more human view.”

“If you want an outlet for your native sympathy, you might heave me out a cushion,” suggested another. “I’ve made a pillow of a bucket, and got a dent in my head. The thick cushion, old boy, and I’m with you so far as to say that the lions have a jolly hard time of it with so much fine weather.”

The Barbertonian lighted up his pipe and threw the cushion at the last speaker.

“H’m!” he grunted between puffs. “I was really thinking of it from quite a human standpoint – the view of that poor devil who got lost here two months ago. Now, he couldn’t have thought much of nights like these. Do you think he mused on their beauty!”

“Oh, I heard something of him,” said one. “Lost for forty days in the wilderness, wasn’t he? I remember. The coincidence struck me as peculiar.”

“Yes, it was odd in a way. He was just ‘forty days and forty nights.’ He went out with a rifle and five cartridges to kick up a duiker along the river bank here, and somehow or other got astray towards sundown, and lost his head completely. Five cartridges, seven matches, no grub, no coat, no compass, and no savvey! That’s a fair start for a forty days’ picnic, isn’t it?” he resumed. “Well, he fired off all his cartridges by dark, trying to signal to his camp, and then threw away his rifle. Fact! He broke the heads off two matches – he was shaking so from fright – before he realised that there were only seven altogether. But as he had nothing to cook, it didn’t really make much difference whether he had matches or not.”

“What, in winter time, and with lions about?”

“Yah! Well, you get used to that. It was a bit frosty, and sometimes wet, and at first the lions worried him a lot and treed him several nights; but he says that that was nothing, while the sense of being lost – dead, yet alive – remained. What’s that? Live? Oh, he doesn’t know himself how he lived, but we could pretty well tell by his condition when we found him. We were out shooting about five miles down-stream, and on one of the sandy spits of the river we saw fresh footprints. Nigger, we thought, as it was barefoot. We wondered, because there were no kraals near here, and we had seen no cattle spoor or footpaths. I was on top of the bank every minute expecting a duiker or Bush buck to make a break out, and – I tell you – I don’t know when I got such a start – such a turn, I should say – as when I caught sight of a white face looking at me out of an ant-bear hole. Great Caesar! there was something so infernally uncanny, wild, and hunted in the look that I instinctively got the gun round to cover him if he came at me. When the others came up, he crawled out, stark naked, sunburnt, scratched, shock-headed – still staring with that strange hunted look – came up to us and – laughed! We led him back to our camp. He could tell nothing, could hardly understand any of our questions. He was quite dazed. His hands were cut and disfigured, the nails were worn off with burrowing for roots. We went to his den. It was a big ant-bear hole under an old tree and among rocks – a well-chosen spot. He had burrowed it out a bit, I think, and in a sort of pigeon-hole or socket in the side of it there were a few nuts, and round about there were the remains of nuts and chewed roots, stones of fruit, and such things. I never could understand how it was that, being mad as he certainly was then, he had still the sense – well, really it was an instinct more than any knowledge – to get roots and wild-fruits to keep body and soul together!”

“A suggestive subject, truly,” said a man who had more millions to his credit than you would expect of a traveller in Mashonaland. “A man starving within rifle-shot of his friends and supplies. Helpless in spite of the resources that civilisation gives him, and saved from absolute death by a blessed instinct that we didn’t know was ours since the days of the anthropomorphic ape! H’m! You’re right, Barberton! He couldn’t have thought much of the beauties of the night, and, if he thought at all, he must have placed a grim and literal interpretation on the Descent of Man when he was grubbing for roots with bleeding, nail-stripped fingers or climbing for nuts without a tail to steady him!”

Among us there was a retired naval man, a clean-featured, bronzed, shrewd-looking fellow, who was a determined listener during these camp-fire chats; in fact, he seldom made a remark at all. He sat cross-legged, with one eye closed – a telescope habit, I suppose – watching Barberton for quite a spell, and at last said, very slowly, and seemingly speaking under compulsion:

“Well, you never know how they take these shocks. We picked a man up once whose two companions had lain dead beside him for days and days. Before he became delirious, the last thing he remembers was getting some carbolic acid from a small medicine-chest. His mates had been dead two days then, and he had not the strength to heave them overboard. I believe he wanted to drink the carbolic. Any way, he spilt it, and went off his head with the smell of carbolic around him. He recovered while with us – we were on a weary deep-sea-sounding cruise – but twice during the voyage he had short but violent returns of the delirium and the other conditions that he was suffering under when we found him. By the merest accident our doctor discovered that it was the smell of carbolic that sent him off. Once – years after this – he nearly died of it. He had had fever, and they kept disinfecting his room; but, luckily for him, he became dangerous and violent, and they had to remove him to another place. He was all right in a few days.”

“Do you believe that a man could live out a reasonably long lifetime in the way that ‘forty days’ chap lived? I suppose he could, eh! Shoo! Fancy forgetting the civilised uses of tongue and limbs and brain! It seems awful, doesn’t it? and yet men have been known to deliberately choose a life of savagery and barbarism – men whose lines had been cast in easy places, too!”

“That’s all very well,” said Barberton. “Now you are speaking of fellows settling down among savages and in the wilds voluntarily, and with certain provisions made for emergencies, etc, not of men lost.”

“Even so, a man must deteriorate most horribly under such circumstances.”

“Well,” said Barberton contemplatively, “I don’t know so much about that. It all depends upon the man. Mind you, I do think that the end is always fiasco – tragedy, trouble, ruin, call it what you like. We can’t throw back to barbarism at will. For good or ill we have taken civilisation, and the man who quits it pays heavy toll on the road he travels, and, likely enough, fetches up where he never expected to.”

The man who wrote for the papers smiled.

“I know,” he said with kindling eye – “I know. It was just such a case you told us of at Churchill’s Camp the other night. A man of the best calibre and training goes wild and marries two – mark you, two! – Kaffir women, and becomes a Swazie chief, and then the drama of the – ”

“Drama be damned!” growled Barberton. “It was one case out of twenty of the same sort.”

Barberton was nervously apprehensive of ridicule, and hated to be traded and walked out for effects.

“I was up on the Transvaal-Swazie border in ’86,” said the millionaire. “I remember you told me something of them then. It was a warm corner, Swazieland, then – about the warmest in South Africa, I should think. Eh?”

“You’re right. It was. But,” said Barberton, turning to the correspondent, “you were talking of men going amok through playing white nigger. Well, I can tell you this, that two of my best friends have done that same trick, and I’d stake my head that better men or more thorough gentlemen never trod in shoe-leather, for all their Kaffir ways.”

“Do you mean to say,” asked the millionaire, “that you have known men settle down among natives, living among them as one of themselves, and still retain the manners, customs, instincts, habits of mind and body, even to the ambitions, of a white man?”

“No – well, I can’t quite say that. Their ambitions, as far as you could gauge them, were a Kaffir’s; that is, they aspired to own cattle, and to hunt successfully, but – And yet I don’t know that it is right to say that even, because in almost every case these men get the ‘hanker’ for white life again sooner or later. The Kaffir ambition may be a temporary one, or it may be that the return to white ways is the passing mania. Who knows, any way? From my own experience of them, I can say that the return to their own colour almost invariably means their doom and ruin. I don’t know why, but I’ve noticed it, and it seems like – like a sort of judgment, if you believe in those things.”

“And you know,” he said, after taking a few pulls at the pipe again, “there’s a sense of justice in that, too. Civilisation, scorned and flouted, being the instrument of its own revenge! If one could vest the abstract with personal feelings, what an ample revenge would be hers at the sight of the renegade – sick-hearted, weary, and shamefaced – coming back to the ways of his youth and race, and succumbing to some one part of that which he had despised and rejected in toto!”

Barberton generally became philosophic and reminiscent on these fine nights. Someone would make a remark of pretty general application, and he would sit up and wag his old head a few times in silence; then, from force of habit, examine his pipe and knock it out on the heel of his boot, and then out would lounge some reminiscence in illustration of his philosophy.

It was generally introduced by a long-drawn, thoughtful, “We-ll, you know, I’ve always thought there was something curious about these things.” He would have another squint down the empty bowl of the pipe and ask for the tobacco. There would be a couple of grunts, and then, as he lighted up, he would say, between puffs, “I remember, in ’78, up at Pilgrim’s,” or, “There was a fellow up Barberton way in ’86.”

This night he sat in tailor fashion, with an elbow socketed in each knee-bend, and his hands clasped over the bowl of his pipe.

“One of the rummiest meetings I ever had,” said he, smiling thoughtfully at the recollection, “was in the Swazie country in ’85. Did I ever tell you about Mahaash and the Silver Spur!”

He gave a gurgling sort of chuckle, and puffed contentedly at the big-bowled briar.

“There were two of us riding through the Swazie country, and making for the landing-place on the Maputa side. We had had a row with the Portuguese about some cattle that the niggers stole from us. A couple of the niggers got shot, of course, during the discussion, and we had to quit for a while and take a rest on the Lebombo. But that’s nix! When we got to the Komati, we were told that there was a white man on the Lebombo whose Kaffir name was Sebougwaan. That’s the name the niggers give to a man who wears an eyeglass or spectacles. We were jogging along doing our thirty miles a day, living on old mealies roasted on a bit of tin, and an occasional fowl – Swazie fowl, two to the meal – helped down by bowls of amazi – thick milk, you know. We used to sleep out in the Bush every night, with a blanket apiece and saddles for pillows, and the horses picketed at our heads. Man, it was grand on nights like this! We were always tired and often hungry; but to lie there in the peace and stillness of the Bush, to look up at the stars like diamond dust against the sky, and not care a damn for anything in God’s world, why – why – I call that living! All those months we had no knowledge of the outer world. As far as we were concerned, there might as well have been none. We had one book, ‘The Ingoldsby Legends.’ If anyone could have seen me reading Ingoldsby by the light of the fire, and have heard every now and then the bursts of laughter over ‘The Jackdaw of Rheims’ or ‘The Witches’ Frolic,’ and others, his face would have been a study, I expect.

“However, I was telling you about Mahaash. Mahaash was a big induna, and had about five to seven thousand fighting men. He used to konza to Umbandine, but paid merely nominal tribute, and was jolly independent. He was the cleverest-looking nigger I have ever seen. Small, thin, and ascetic-looking, with wonderfully delicate hands, clear features, and lustrous black eyes. Really, he gave one the idea that he saw through everything, or next to it, and though he said very little, he looked one of the very determined quiet ones. We had to pass his place to get to Sebougwaan’s, and, of course, had to stay the day and pay our respects. His kraal was on top of the highest plateau, near the Mananga Bluff. It lay on the edge of a forest, and the road – an aggregation of cattle tracks – was very steep and very stony. You can imagine we were not overflush just then, and what puzzled us was what to give the chief as a present when he would accord us an interview. Rifles and ammunition we daren’t part with, and we were mortally afraid they were just the things he would want to annex. Finally, it occurred to us to present him with one of my chum’s silver spurs. Heron didn’t favour this much. He said it would likely cause trouble; but I put that down to his disinclination to spoil his pair of swagger spurs. Only the day before our arrival the chief had purchased a horse; he had sent to Lydenburg for it, and it was the first they had ever seen in that part of the country – which seems odd when you think that the chief’s own name, Mahaash, means ‘the Horse.’ However, to proceed. We got word next day that the chief would see us, and after the usual hour’s wait we had our indaba, and presented the silver spur. I must say he viewed it very suspiciously – very! – and when we showed him how to put it on, he gave a slow, cynical smile, and made some remark in an undertone to one of his councillors. I began to agree with Heron about the unwisdom of giving a present so little understood, and would gladly have changed it, but that Mahaash – who was of a practical turn of mind – sent a man for our horses, and bade us ride with the ‘biting iron’ on. We gave an exhibition of its uses which pleased him, and we, too, felt quite satisfied – for a moment! But things didn’t look quite so well when he announced that he was going to ride his horse, and he desired Heron to strap the spur on to his bare foot. It was no use hesitating – we had to trust to luck and the chances that a skinny moke such as his was would take no notice of a spur; besides which Heron, with good presence of mind, jammed the rowels on a stone and turned most of the points. It was no good, however. The chief had never been astride a horse before; he was hoisted up by a couple of stalwart warriors. Once on, he laid hold of the mane with both hands, and gripped his heels firmly under the horse’s belly. I saw the brute’s ears go flat on his neck. The two supporters stepped back. Mahaash swayed to one side, and, I suppose, gave a convulsive grip with the armoured heel. There was a squeal and scuffle, and a black streak shooting through the air with a red blanket floating behind it. The chief bounced once on the stony incline, shot on for another ten feet, and fetched up with his head against a rock. I can tell you that for two minutes it was just hell let loose. We dropped our rifles – we always carried them – and ran to the chief I believe if we had kept them they’d have stuck us, for there were scores of black devils round each of us, flashing assegais in our faces, and yelling: ‘Bolalile Inkos! Umtagati! umtagati!’ – ‘They have killed the chief! Witchcraft! witchcraft!’ But in another minute we saw Mahaash standing propped up by several kehles, and holding one hand to his head. He steadied himself for a moment, gave us one steady, inscrutable look, and walked into his private enclosure.

“For four days we remained there – prisoners in fact, though not in name. Nothing was said about leaving, but our guns and horses were gone, and we were given a hut to ourselves in the centre of the kraal. We didn’t know whether Mahaash was dead, dying, or quite unhurt. We didn’t know whether we were to be despatched or set free, or to be kept for ever. On the morning of the fifth day we found our horses tied to the cattle kraal in front of our hut, and a grey-headed induna brought word to us that Sebougwaan, for whom we were looking, lived not far from there along the plateau. We took the hint, and saddled up. As we were starting an umfaan brought a kid, killed and cleaned, and handed it to me – a gift from the chief; and the old induna stepped up to Heron with a queer look in his wrinkled, cunning old phiz, and said:

“‘The chief says, “Hamba gahlé”,’ (‘Pleasant journey’), ‘and sends you this.’

“It was the silver spur.”

Barberton had another squint at his pipe, and chuckled at the recollection of the old nigger’s grim pleasantry.

“But I was telling you about that white man on the Bomba,” he resumed. “Well, we weren’t long in making tracks out of Mahaash’s kraal, and as we dodged along through the forest, following a footpath which just permitted a man on foot to pass, we realised how poor a chance we’d have had had we tried to escape. Every hundred yards or so we had to dismount to get under overhanging boughs or trunks of fallen trees or networks of monkey-ropes. The horses had got so used to roughing it that they went like cats, and in several places they had to duck under the heavy timber that hung, portcullis fashion, across the dark little pathway. This was the only way out at the back of Mahaash’s. In front of him, of course, were the precipitous sides of the Lebombo Range.

“We went on for hours through this sort of thing, hardly seeing sunlight through the dense foliage; and when we got out at last into a green grassy flat, the bright light and open country fairly dazzled us. Here we met a few women and boys, who, in reply to our stock question, gave the same old reply that we had heard for days: ‘Sebougwaan? Oh, further on ahead!’

“We just swore together and like one man, for we really had reckoned to get to this flying Dutchman this time without further disappointments. We looked around for a place to off-saddle, and made for a koppie surrounded by trees.

“Heron was ahead. As we reached the trees, he pulled up, and with a growing grin called to me, ‘I say, just look here! Here’s a rum start!’

“It was clearly our friend Sebougwaan. He was standing with arms akimbo, and feet well set apart, surveying critically the framework of a house he was putting up.

“He had a towel round his loins, and an eye glass screwed tightly into the near eye. Nothing else.

“We viewed him en profile for quite awhile, until he turned sharply our way and saw us. It was one of the pleasantest faces in the world that smiled on us then. Sebougwaan walked briskly towards us, saying: