The Triangle and The Mountain: A Bermuda Triangle Adventure (5 page)

They talked about the runaways.

“How far do you think they will go?” asked Hadah.

“I think they will reach the Great Mountains tonight,” said
the master. “Most probably they will rest there and that will be a mistake. The
Dutch know that you can get through at that break.”

“That means sometime tomorrow they will be there with
horses.”

“If they are clever they will go there even now and wait for
them. It’s the only place where these slaves can get through.”

“If they escape do you think they will reach their people?”

“Many of them run away but I wonder if any ever get back to
their own people. It is very far. You may start off as a young man but be home
when you are old. Also, I have seen that these slaves have no knowledge of
living off the land. They get a fright when they hear a bird make a noise in
the bushes. Most of them never try to go far. They just live around here,
mostly in caves near the coast where they eat shellfish like our people.”

“So they have no chance?
“They have a chance but they must learn from our people and also from the
Sonqua
.”

“The
Sonqua
will kill them with their poisoned
arrows.”

“Only if they interfere with their women. The
Sonqua
may
make slaves out of them, though. So will our people. You must be able to rely
on yourself and for that you need knowledge.”

The apprentice nodded. He was also trying to acquire
knowledge. He wondered if the slaves were going to overcome the temptation of
the dark cave that they will pass at the foot of the vertical face of the next
peak, the biggest in the range. Maybe they will feel the shudder that he
experienced when he was there for the first time and maybe then they will
realise that it would be prudent to act on the advice of the master to pass it
by. Even the baboons stayed away from that place.

He wondered if they would recognise anything, being so
stupid. When they saw the slab of rock to the right of the entrance, would they
guess what it was used for? What would they make of the leather thongs with
loops at their ends that hung from the boughs of the ancient fire scarred tree
behind the rock? Would they somehow know that those thongs were meant to hold
the feet of infants while blood dripped from their sliced throats into
receptacles on the rock and their lives seeped away, only to be absorbed by the
spirit living in the mountain?

It was his master’s and his place of work. It was important
that nothing should be disturbed.

If they moved on he wondered if they would speculate about
the peculiar shapes in the scree below the cliff face, about the fact that the
rocks were organised in mounds. He once asked the master how many there were.

“If a man lived to a very old age there would be a mound
here for every day of his life,” was his answer. “The first custodian of the
mountain was buried here,” and he indicated a spot very close to the cave.
“From here on the others were buried further and further away. It is important
not to disturb the graves of those who went before us.”

On the day that he explained this they walked along the
footpath that tracked the cliff-face.  One of the big black eagles that circled
the mountain in search of careless rock hyraxes passed them at eye level and it
had returned by the time they reached a mound at which the master stopped.

“This is the grave of my predecessor, Aitsi-!uma. “See here.
This is where you bring my body and if not my body, then my bones.” It was
prescient of him to talk about the bones because years later Hadah was to open
a grave in the night and walk many days with a set of bones on his back, so
they could get to the place that the master had indicated.

“On this mountain,” continued the master, “we do not hunt.
We do not kill any animal here, especially not near any of these graves.”

All the
KhoiKhoi
of the land knew that this was a
special place. They did not talk about it much. It was associated with tears
and grief at times and the kind of dark fear you had of unknown things that
moved about in the night. They all knew that yes, you could graze your sheep
and your cattle on the sweet red grass that sprouted thick in the years after a
fire on the slopes of the mountain. But for hunting you stuck to the bottom of
the valleys.  You kept your distance.

The master told the story of the Dutch boy whose father had established
a farm on the outskirts of the new settlement called Stellenbosch. The boy
liked to ride and hunt. One day he travelled further than usual. What attracted
him, nobody knew. Maybe he saw a few of the last eland that was left in the
area. Maybe it was something else. At any rate, he rode his horse as close to
the mountain as he could get. When he reached the beginning of the wide field
of scree he tethered the horse and continued on foot over the rocks. He got off
one shot only. That is what they said when they examined his musket where he
died. They found the body after only two days of searching. First they spotted
the horse at the top end of the grassy valley and after an hour of search they
found the body. Miraculously the wild animals had not eaten the body yet. What
puzzled them even more, was that there was no obvious reason why the boy should
have died. The master visited the farm shortly afterwards and heard it all from
the
KhoiKhoi
who helped to track down the horse and the boy.

The farmer had a physician come from town to examine the boy
but even he could not figure it out. The master chuckled with merriment when he
came to this point. The first thing that the doctor commented on was that there
was no gunshot wound that indicated a hunting accident. Then he examined him
for a broken neck that would indicate a fall with instantaneous death as a
result. His neck was fine. Perhaps he had fallen and broken something else, but
no, everything was still whole. He had not broken a leg and lay there waiting
for help, only to die from exposure and thirst. He examined the body carefully
for snakebite. The mountain was full of puff adders. Since this became the only
plausible explanation the doctor spent a whole hour trying to find the location
of the snake bite, or for that matter a sting from a scorpion or a spider bite
but eventually declared himself as dumbfounded as everybody else.

“Perhaps it was a very small snake,” he offered lamely.

They buried him on a small hill, in full sight of hot side
of the mountain and the place where he died. Around his grave they built man high
walls which they whitewashed. His burial spot was the first in the family
graveyard.

“You can see it from here,” said the master, pointing
through a gap in the foliage. “It is the white spot not too far from that
farmer’s house. Do you see it? When I passed there I saw that they had planted
some small trees inside. Already the silly slaves say they had seen the ghost
of the young man.”

Hidden by the sugar bushes, master and apprentice carefully
cleared an area for themselves. They gathered up dried sticks for a fire later
on. Then they built a makeshift fireplace with rocks. It would keep the coals
from blowing about. Under the bushes there was almost no wind but you never
knew. The weather could change quickly and the mountain was dry.

“Do you know why there are so many of these bushes nowadays
on the mountain?” asked the master once they were done.

“No.”

“It’s because nobody is burning any more. In the old days
when our people lived in this land we used to burn the veld. Then you go away
and come back in the fourth winter for the new grass. The Dutch don’t
understand about burning. That’s why you have bushes everywhere and the grazing
gets less and less. And because they don’t move the animals around,” said the
old man, “the mountainsides around their homes are criss-crossed with
footpaths, killing the grass even more.”

They both took swigs of water from their gourds while they
contemplated how the world had changed.

Their idle ruminations were interrupted by a boom, followed
by another. They jumped up and hurried to the nearest clearing. There they
settled down to watch the spectacle. There was a new arrival in Table Bay.  A
ship moved as gracefully as a large water bird past Robben Island. It lightened
sail, slowed down and eventually stopped.

“There is another one,” said Hadah.

Indeed there was. The
KhoiKhoi
were now tired of
sitting up, so they lay back and watched the second ship through the open Vs of
their legs. The ship followed the course of the first one and they watched it
until it lost its sails as well. They knew what was coming next. They had to
wait two hours for it. A cannon on the fort issued a series of booms. A few minutes
later that same series was taken up by other cannons closer to them. They
listened as the message was taken up by cannons far away on the West Coast,
repeated a third time, then a fourth time, so faint that it was nothing more
than a whisper.

“What did the message say?” asked Hadah.

“I don’t know exactly,” said the master, “but I’ve heard the
code for cattle and the one for vegetables.”

“Now the farmers will harvest overnight and set off early in
the morning for the market.”

 “Exactly,” said the master.

“Perhaps the people chasing the runaway slaves will turn
around because they have something better to do.”

“Perhaps, but let’s not take a chance. We’ll stay here for
the night.”

“What do you think they are doing there?” asked Hadah,
pointing to a spot at the foot of the mountain, closer than any other
farmstead.

“I’ve been watching this all the time that we were sitting
here and the more I look at it the more I think they are building a house.”

“A new farm!”

“It certainly looks like it.”

“What are we going to do? It’s so close!”

“You sound like Aitsi-!uma. Do know what she did when people
started traveling from Stellenbosch to the cool side of this mountain?”

“No, you have not told me that story yet.”

“All right. This is what she did. She was so indignant that
the Dutch came close to this mountain that she mixed some of our potions and
pronounced a curse on all travellers on that road. The next time a party of
Dutch travelled along the road they all sunk into the mud. The horses could not
move because they were down to their bellies and the wagons were down to their
axles. It took them days to get it all out. Even now there are some wheels in
the ground that they could not recover.”

“Haha,” laughed Hadah. “I would have liked to see it.”

“She laughed as well, so much that she fell over. We were
standing on the edge of the mountain, watching it all. But I’m thinking about something,”
said the master, now serious. “We can just as well take advantage of the
changes. If a new farm comes there, it might be a good idea for us to offer our
services to the farmer as herders. That way we can eat, herd the livestock up
here and do our work at the same time. Perhaps we should find out what kind of
a person he is.”

Hadah understood the master’s thinking. The days when the custodians
of the mountain lived in abundance seemed to be over. Their people lived further
and further away and even worse, those who stayed behind were allowing
themselves more and more to be influenced by the ways of the Dutch. Being a
custodian had become hard living. It was time to adapt. Herding was not new to
him or to the master. They both had been doing herding jobs on and off. The
Dutch deemed the
KhoiKhoi
to be too small in stature to do the hard work
on the fields but they liked them as herders. The more he thought about it the
more the idea appealed to him.

When night fell they lit the fire using the flint from the
master’s bag.

“If there is one good thing that came with the Dutch,” said
the master, not for the first time, “it was flint.”

The sparks fell into the ball of dried grass and Hadah blew
it into a flame. He stuffed it into the pyramid of sticks and the dried wood
lit up instantly. It took only a few seconds to skin the rabbit. It was already
smelling but they did not care. The meat was softer that way anyway. Since they
left their cooking pot behind, they forced a sharpened stick through it length
wise and set the rabbit up over the coals with rocks as support on either side.
 Carefully they turned and turned on the ends of the stick to get the meat just
right. A rabbit did not have much meat and they did not want to burn it. To
neutralise the gaminess they used the ashes from the fire for seasoning and had
the rabbit with the tubers that they baked in the soil under the fire. The
whole tasted excellently and the bones which they threw into the darkness of
the bushes around them were licked clean.

Later that night Hadah woke up as a rabbit bone snapped in
powerful jaws. He immediately knew that it was a long-haired brown hyena. They
shared their mountain redoubt with a few solitary leopards and several families
of brown hyenas, the last of the predators. He listened to the crunching noises
as the bone got reduced to grist and heard the animal sniff as it looked for
more. When it moved up-wind he could smell it too. He looked over at the dark
form of the master. The old man snored so loud that they might just as well
have kept the fire going. One could probably hear him halfway down the
mountain. He woke up for the occasional pee, otherwise nothing could disturb
his sleep.

It is not that he was scared of the hyena. Neither of them
were scared of the leopards or the hyenas. The animals were clever enough not
to attack humans but hyenas were known to run off with the
karos
of soft
buck hide. He held it tighter around his body and felt for his fighting stick,
just in case there was going to be a tug-of-war.

In truth he felt a kinship with the hyenas. They knew each
other from sight but also, they were in the same business. Every night the
hyenas slipped into the surrounding valleys searching for a stray, sick or
infirm animal, be it wild antelope or domestic. And they, his master and he,
were doing exactly the same. They performed a service to humanity by weeding
out the weak, be it a malformed baby or the smaller sibling where a mother gave
birth to twins or triplets. They had a calling – it was to be the hyenas of
humankind.