The Triangle and The Mountain: A Bermuda Triangle Adventure (13 page)

“Is the farmer here?” he asked.

“Down by the stream,” came the answer.

“It’s a big house.”

“It is. We are now building another house for ourselves and
a big one for the sheep as well.”

“Does the farmer have lots of sheep?”

“He had more, but the wolves came and killed many of them.”

“Are you sure it was wolves? There are leopards on this
mountain as well.”

“It was the wolves. The boss shot one the other night. The
skin is over there.”

The master and Hadah walked over to several pegs in the ground.
Stretched between the pegs, with the fleshy side up, was the skin of a brown
hyena. Somebody had scraped it clean. There was a hole in the chest area where
the bullet had gone through. They both realised that they probably knew this animal
but they could not recognise it in its upside down state.

“Was this the wolf that killed the sheep?”

“Definitely. The boss tied a sheep to a peg close to the
path that the wolves take to come down from the mountain at night and when they
wanted to grab the sheep he shot this one.”

“Four nights ago when the moon was full?” guessed the
master.

“That’s right.”

The slaves suddenly started up their labour again. The
master, with years of experience, knew that the farmer had made an appearance
and turned toward the stream. This farmer was obviously somebody who did not
stand behind his people with hands folded behind his back all day. He carried a
spade that still had clods of red clay on it. He must have heard the banter and
came up through the dense riverine bush to see what the matter was. He was
about midway between the master and Hadah in age and observed them through dark
eyes in a face ringed with a beard and hair as dark as the eyes. French,
guessed the master. He got confirmation when the man spoke. His Kitchen Dutch
was broken and overlaid by a heavy accent.  The master almost shook his head in
wonder that a white man could speak the language so badly.

“Yes,
Hottentotten
. What do you want?”

“I am Johannes,” the master introduced himself. “This is my
cousin Herman. We wondered if you might need herders to look after your sheep.
We are not scared of the wolves.”

“I am Jacques de Villiers,” the farmer said. “How can you
not be scared? Have you seen how big this animal is?” They went on a tour
around the skin for a second time, this time conducted by the farmer. He
pointed out the skinned head of the animal, which lay next to the skin.

“Look at these teeth. I can see you how scared you are when
you look at it.”

“We are not scared, Mr De Villiers. We have spears and
fighting sticks. These animals do not like pain. Our people have devised ways
to drive them off and protect the sheep. Even the small ones know that because
they learn it from their parents. They only need to smell us to leave your
animals alone.”

“Hmf, I think the only way to protect the sheep is to build
an enclosure so high that they cannot jump over. No wolf will ever again take a
sheep of mine at night once we have finished.” He gestured at a levelled space
where some building was already taking place. “We need bricks, men!” he said, exhorting
his slaves.

“We know this mountain very well,” said the master. “We know
where the best grazing is and your animals will become fat.”

“They are already fat. That is why the wolves come for them.
If you know this mountain, how come I have not seen you before?”

“I grew up here,” said the master. “Do you see those trees
over there? Often, when I was a child, my family came here to graze their
flocks and we had our houses by those trees.”

“I do not see anything,” said De Villiers, “Show me.”

They walked about two hundred paces and then the master picked
up a plate-sized rock that was flat on the one side and hollowed out on the
other side. “See this,” he said. “The women used it to grind seeds.  And here
is the other part,” he said and picked up a smaller stone with a flat bottom.
They looked around and found a few more of the same.

“OK, I believe you,” said De Villiers. “When can you start?
You understand that you have to build your own house?”

“We are visiting our family today,” said the master. “That
is why we passed here. Can we start when we come back?  We will build our own
house and stay here after that, taking your animals into the mountain during
the day and bringing them back safe every night.”

The farmer fingered his beard with clay encrusted fingers
while he pondered the request. “All right,” he said. “But it is a new farm. I
don’t pay much.”

“It will be fine by us,” said the master, “as long as we can
eat and have some money to buy tobacco.”

On leaving the sorcerers did not take the road to
Stellenbosch. Instead, they took a less travelled track that pointed straight
at Table Mountain in the distance.

Hadah was excited by the shooting prowess of the Frenchman.
“He must be a very good shot,” he said, “to kill a hyena by moonlight.”

“He is just lucky that there are no more lions here, like
there was when I was a youngster. If you shoot a lion and wound it, it can turn
on you and kill you on the spot. Hyenas!” the Master said contemptuously. “When
I was a boy looking after the cattle, goats and sheep we had to worry about
lions only. Who was scared of a hyena?”

They felt good about their negotiations with the farmer and
as they dipped into a marsh they spoke about the fact that the reeds in that
place were good for making the mats that they needed to construct their new
home with on the De Villiers farm.

“Yes,” said the master. “This is where our people always
came to harvest reeds.”

“Maybe the farmer will let us have some bricks, so we can
build ourselves a brick house,” said Hadah hopefully.

“You’ll have to dig up the clay yourself,” said the master,
“and put it in that machine. I’d rather make a house like our people. There is
nothing wrong with our houses.”

“Are we going to build our house on the spot where you lived
as a child?”

“Yes.”

Forever on the prowl, they were immediately on the alert
when an antelope bounded away in the reeds. Cautiously they circled downwind
and managed to spear a fat duiker. That night they feasted on fresh meat once
more, supplemented by the usual selection of bulbs that grew in profusion in
the marshy ground. The journey to Cape Town was going to take three days,
instead of the usual two, because of the detour they had made to the De
Villiers farm. Early in the morning they circled the hill that kept the marsh
from emptying into the sea and joined the main track that connected Eland’s
Pass and the settlements at its feet with Cape Town. The sun was pleasantly
warm and soon they were into the white sand that made draught horses and oxen
work hard but which was soft and nice to walk in. On impulse, they jogged a
little.

“I can feel the spirit looking at my back,” said Hadah. “It
is a good feeling.”

“The spirit is looking after us,” said the master. “He
called us and we are its servants.”

“I would have died if you did not come and told me that I
had the sickness of the spirit.”

“Yes, you would have died. But the spirit directed me to you
in the same way that it directed Aitsi-!uma to me when I was your age. She told
me that I had the sickness of the spirit and that it was calling me to be its
servant.”

“How did the spirit do that?”

“I saw you in my dreams and when I found you I asked you to
look at the mountain, remember?”
“I remember.”

“When you told me that you saw a face on the mountain that
looked like a skull and the head of a serpent at the same time, I knew that you
were the right one.”

“Why do we see its face and nobody else sees it?”

“Nobody is looking. And if they see the face they are
afraid. They don’t want to know about it.”

“Why is the serpent in the mountain?”

“You ask me all the questions that I asked of Aitsi-!uma and
it is good. She asked the same questions of the old man who was her master. The
serpent has been in the mountain a long time.”

“How long?”

“Very, very long. Even before our people were here, there
were others and always, there was somebody who responded to the call of the
serpent.”

“What were those people like?”

“Mostly, they looked like us, but there were also people who
came from the sea and who were different.”

“Were they speaking Dutch?”

“No, they were not Dutch.”

“What were they like, then?”

“They were very clever and rode out of the sea on ships that
looked like the new moon. Maybe it was the moon itself. Aitsi-!uma was not
sure.”

“What happened to them?”

“They lived here for some time and those of them who were
called are buried on Snake Mountain. Then one day they mounted their new-moon
ships again and went away over the sea.”

“They must have been very clever indeed. Our people pray to
the moon but these people could ride on it. How did they manage that? Can we do
it?”

“Aitsi-!uma could not tell me how it was possible. I’ve
pondered this often when I see the new moon rise from the sea, wondering if it
will bring those people back again and if they will teach us how to get rid of
the Dutch. Perhaps they could even teach us how to ride on the moon.”

“I don’t want to leave my country,” said Hadah.

“Then we will not learn how to ride on the moon.”

“Has the serpent always been living in the mountain?”

“No. There was a time when there was no serpent in our
mountain. People knew about sea serpents, however. They climbed on top of Sea
Mountain and burned potions and danced to keep the Sea Serpents away. Then
calamity struck.”

“What happened?”

“Here where we are running now, it is dry, right?”

“It is dry, yes.”

“Well, at that time, long ago, the sea rose up and covered
this land completely. You could not get from Snake Mountain to Sea Mountain
anymore. This was all sea. That is why the sand is so white. It is sea sand.”

“How long ago was that? Was Aitsi-!uma born then?”

“It was long before her time. But do you see the problem?
The people could no longer go to Sea Mountain to ward off the sea serpents and
that is why one of them could come around and make its home in our mountain.”

“So there are more serpents?”

“There are many more.”

“Why does our sea serpent have such an angry face?”

“Because it is hurt and angry. Long ago there was a big war.
This war was so violent that the waves of the sea reached up to the stars and
washed some of the stars from the heavens. Those stars became sea serpents
themselves and they fought in the battles. Our sea serpent was once a star and
got wounded in the battle. It managed to crawl into our mountain and now it
lives there. It is just like a mortally wounded lion. The lion knows that it
has to die sometime but before it dies it will take as many people or animals
or even trees and grass with it.”

“Will it destroy our people?

“It will, if we do not appease it.”

“But it likes us.”

“It likes us because we are the chosen ones.”

Hadah was not finished with his line of questioning. “Why
does it want the babies?”

The master pulled his face into a mass of folds and jogged
on for quite a while before he answered.

“Perhaps it is because the serpent wants to do the most
damage it can. The worst thing you can do to a human is to prevent its spirit
from expanding. The human spirit comes into the world in order to grow and
expand into a mature man or woman. The serpent is denying these little babies.
All of that power is not spent on anything in life. It goes unchanged into the
serpent, who uses it for its own purposes.”

Hadah mulled over the old man’s wisdom as he jogged on.
Jogging became much easier now, since the distances that they had covered over
the past weeks made him very fit. Eventually he was ready with his next
question.

“Why,” he asked, “when we slaughter the babies, do our manhoods
go all hard?”

“It is the spirit moving in us,” said the master. “In the
days when we had many babies Aitsi-!uma would have relations with little boys
of just a few days old and she would encourage me to do the same with the
little girls. Sometimes they died like that and that is the reason why I have
not taught it to you.”

They were slowly being overtaken by a four-span of horses
pulling a closed carriage. As it came closer the master got off the track and
jogged several paces to the side, where he stopped. He had tasted the wrong end
of the long driver’s whip before. The driver and all the inhabitants were
Dutch. There were only women in the carriage. Pale faces under severe bonnets
stared expressionlessly at them, unseeing.

“Something is wrong,” said the master, expressing his usual
keen perception.

They waded through the
Eerste
River, which flowed all
the way from Stellenbosch and refilled their bottle gourds. Not long afterward
the master led Hadah a hundred paces off the track, seaward. He stopped in an
expanse of sour figs which covered an entire dune with its finger-like leaves. Hadah
was pleased. This was food that he grew up with. They managed to find several
handfuls of ripe ones ready for eating and even more for storing in their
leather bags. They were careful not to overdo it. Too many sour figs could
cause a stomach to run severely.

The rough features of Sea Mountain were becoming clearer by
the time the sun stood directly above their heads.  Their track joined with the
busy one leading to Stellenbosch and the traffic picked up as well. A total of
three carriages passed them, one heading for Cape Town and two heading toward
Stellenbosch. On each occasion they got off the track, stopped and stared.

The sun was slanting steeply toward Sea Mountain when the
tired travellers approached a hill nowadays called
Tygerberg
. There were
some herders here who looked after flocks that they grazed on the sweet grass
that covered the hill. They were met with the usual mixture of respect and
distaste but the herders shared what they had. They also shared some news that
the master found disconcerting. Yes, the Dutch were dying, but so were the
KhoiKhoi
.