1972 - A Story Like the Wind (69 page)

François stood there, stroking her head as gently as he had stroked Messenger’s hand. There was nothing more to be said and no answers in his heart or mind to any questions, even the simplest ones. Then a whimper made him look down and he saw Hintza staring up at them, his own great eyes glowing with concern, in that light the full purple they had been when he had opened them first on François as a cold little puppy.

‘Look, Nonnie,’ he begged her. ‘Please look at poor old Hin. Say something to him. Without him we wouldn’t be here and he’s as unhappy as you and me.’

It was the best thing he could have done because it summoned the mother latent in Nonnie. She went down on her knees and held Hintza in her arms, no longer in tears as she murmured words of gratitude, love and comfort over him.

Xhabbo, however, did even better. He knew, out of his endless history of persecution which had created its own immediate instincts, what must be in her heart.-He said quietly, ‘Foot of the Day, tell this utterly your woman, not to let her heart be troubled. Xhabbo will find a way.’

François told her, and the strangest of all things to give him hope was that she seemed to accept this promise from someone she had never known and could not even have imagined existed. She looked up, her eyes bright, her hand resting on Hintza’s neck and asked François to thank Xhabbo and to tell him she believed that he would indeed find a way.

For a moment the four of them, no five, for the dog that had been the first animal to become the friend of man; a man and a woman of the people who had been the first representative of man in Africa, and a boy and a girl who were of the people most recently come to the Dark Continent, stood there. Two of the remotest beginning and two of the most immediate now stood as one and watched the fire die down in the west. As it died they saw star after star come into the sky until the last red glimmer of light vanished. Then, as Xhabbo said, it was ‘utterly dark, the night feeling itself to be utterly dark’. From east to west, north to south, from the rim of an horizon round and perfect as a ripple on a tranquil, limpid pond travelling into the smooth night, to the greatest deep of the sky above them, Heaven was packed with stars bright as only the stars of Africa can be.

All these stars had thrown away the arrows and spears with which the Bushman imagination arms them, and gone over to watering the night with their tears. They were indeed, as the Matabele would have said, ‘stringing the beads’ for all the many good and dear people who had died that day, stringing them indeed for a whole heroic age of man and his empire of natural spirit that had crumbled to nothing in one brief red dawn and was now beyond recall. Somehow, this feeling that the stars in their lawful courses were weeping for them, informed the four on that rock high above the precious, onflowing river which they heard beneath them like a great wind in the dark as if it were the river of time itself, that they were not alone but facing the future in infinite company.

It was a moment of such brave and perfect illumination of night that Nonnie, one hand on Hintza, took Francis’s in the other, her heart crying out to her mind, ‘Oh, how beautiful, how absolutely beautiful. With such beauty, how
can
men be so ugly as they have been today?’

At that moment first one and then a succession of great stars came shooting red out of the sky over the river and fell in a slow, heavy arc towards the horizon, almost touching it before vanishing. For the first time that day a voice spoke up in the bush, the voice of the great, lonely old lion.

The one voice and the echo of its calling vanished, and in the stillness they heard Xhabbo sigh a profound sigh of fulfilment as he declared quietly: ‘Xhabbo knew that the stars who hide in light as other things hide in darkness were there to see all today. For the stars do fall in this manner when our hearts fall down. The time when the stars also fall down is while the stars feel that our hearts fall over, because those who had been walking upright, leaving their footprints in the sand, have fallen over on to their sides. Therefore the stars fall down on account of them, knowing the time when men die and that they must, falling, go to tell other people that a bad thing has happened at another place. Tell this utterly your woman, Foot of the Day, that the stars are acting thus on account of us and that we are not alone.’

Xhabbo paused until François had told Nonnie and in the telling noticed how the tension went out of the hand in his. Hintza, too, was still, his head on one side listening. Then, so accustomed were their eyes to the darkness and the starlight so bright and quick that they could see Xhabbo’s arm pointing high while he went on: ‘Look, Foot of the Day, how those stars which have not fallen over are full of a tapping as I, Xhabbo, am full of a tapping. And their tapping is joined to Xhabbo’s tapping, seeking to tell me of the way we must go. I must go into the cave and sit apart, listening utterly to this tapping, in order to learn of this way we must go.’

After that he put his arm on Nuin-Tara’s shoulder in a way that was a sign to her. She instantly went down on her knees and crawled into the cave. Xhabbo followed at once and François, putting his hand on Nonnie’s shoulder as Xhabbo had done on Nuin-Tara’s, sent her down on her knees carefully after them. Hintza followed her, and finally François, as someone from far back in time turning for help to the last temple left on earth.