Free The Lost World of the Kalahari by Laurens Van Der Post Page B

tragedies? And which particular one? Now I shall never know because the people who could speak of it with authority are dead. But I can only say that the whole of the Bushman past came to a point for me in those two little men. They confirmed all that I vaguely feared and wondered at, and the world of the past which I came to recreate for myself in my imagination spun on into the future and gathered substance with those two little men always at the imponderable centre.
    From these two old men and others left in my native village I learnt something of the imagination of the Bushman and his knowledge of the inmost life of Africa. That was another aspect of the past that confounded me. How little we ourselves knew of the Bushman’s mind and spirit. We had killed him off after nearly two hundred and fifty years of contact without really knowing whom we had exterminated. True, an old German professor had tried to reconstruct Bushman lore and grammar from a few convicts working on the breakwater in Table Bay, and a British geologist had tried to gather together the threads of remembrance still adrift on the sterile winds of our history and to weave them into some coherent design of the past. But what was known was a fragmentary and, to me, reproachful residue which made my slight contact with the few survivors all the more meaningful since it gave me the actual feel of the living texture and quality of the vanished people.
    In this way, for instance, as children we learnt where to find and how to distinguish the edible from inedible tubers and roots of the veld and made good use of our knowledge. In winter our colds were doctored effectively by our parents with medicine brewed from a wild herb to which the Bushman had introduced us. I learnt how to extract a thick milky liquid from a plant with the shape of an elephant’s ear and the hide of a hippopotamus, which was what the Bushman used as glue for the poison on his arrows, and later learnt how to make a sticky paste of it, spread it on traps baited with corn, and so catch the birds who, attempting to feed, found their claws held fast by the glue. In summer we children descended into the deep bed of the Great River, threw off our clothes, and lived there as the Bushman had done before us, naked. At evening we would stand, as the Bushman had taught us, to watch the bees flying home on burning wings. At dusk we were up in the wreath of purple rocks high above the gleaming river where the bees had vanished and listening, in the prescribed Bushman manner, for the bees’ hymn of thanksgiving to die down in the amber catacombs of some tired nest, while baboon sentinels on the peaks around boomed out a challenge to warn their sleepy kinsfolk that we, the humans, were still near. Finally, making smoke ‘the Bushman way’ we would extract our prize and come down in the dark to our camp-fires wtih buckets full of fragrant black honey.
    Often at dawn we stood still in the shallows among the rocks above the rapids armed with long, supple, blue-bush wands. When the golden bream on their way up-stream rose to the surface, a surface so filled with the light of the opening sky that they might have been birds with folded wings swooping out of the blue, we would smack the water smartly over their heads just as the River Bushman had done, and the shock would turn the fish over on their backs to drift helplessly into our clutches. At home our coloured and Bushman nurses would send us to sleep with stories of animals, birds, streams, and trees, which were part of the response of the Bushman’s creative imagination to the reality of his great mother earth. Somehow, in imagination, the Bushman was always with us even when the two little old men were no longer there to represent him. And in an even more subtle way the earth too participated profoundly in the process. Ever since I can remember I have been struck by the profound quality of melancholy which lies at the heart of the