Free The Expedition to the Baobab Tree by Wilma Stockenstrom Page A

thinking that he had come to do his everyday business, come to buy up iron and copper in exchange for rolls of silk and cotton, come on the trade wind at the head of the little fleet of dhows under his command as of old, come from afar across the rippling blue-green where other trading cities on other coasts shrouded themselves in a haze of strangeness – that is how I thought. That he and his crew had come to unload one cargo and take on another.
    I could not know that this time he would temporarily relinquish his command over the sailors and hand it over to a subordinate in order to undertake a journey in the opposite direction from the white flutter dance of the brown-veined butterflies over mountains and plains, nobody knew whither, nobody knew why. And no one knew why he had allowed himself to be talked into it. He provided no reasons. He went. I accompanied him, his recently acquired latest possession. I became part of the extensive organization that kept him and the eldest son busy and had them doing calculations till late at night by oillamps and had them unraveling the possible, the probable, the actual and the enigmatic and weighing them up against each other till one grew bored. The possible and the impossible fell, rose and hovered in balance. The particulars heaped up and up, and an idea suffocated, and new ideas were sought, and eventually the question why was of absolutely no importance. Fancy and the profit motive. Childish dreams. Longing for the faraway. Elaborate estimates. A rebellious streak. Perhaps the last.
    So. For that reason we departed for the frontiers of the spirit. Invertebrates about to change homes, that is what we were. Shellfish sliding over the sand. A colony of sea anemones slithering over dry rocks on their single feet. Fish walking on their fins. Wobbling salt-scaled coelacanths. Wailing dugongs.
    Our procession of bearers and cattle and sedan chairs with passengers on the shoulders of bearers wound into the interior on the way to the great ocean that booms at the uttermost limits of the world. It could not be too far, as determined by the eldest son and the stranger, rationally, with the help of their maps. It could not take a lifetime, they calculated. Taking everything into account, it ought in fact to be a shortcut to the land of the able mariners who had recently called at the city and boasted of their hardships on the billows of an immense unknown sea, and who could prove on the evidence of the numerous cases of scurvy among the crew that they came from the utmost limits of the utmost limits.
    To us it seemed as if they suddenly appeared out of nothing, as if they slowly came shifting across the foil of the sea, oh so slowly,in bulky caravels driven by a mass of patched sails in the tackling of which we saw the crew scrambling with apelike agility. We were not impressed. Or did not make it apparent. But in spite of this gathered on the beach or climbed to the terrace roofs. If you were rich you ordered a sedan chair, if you were a perky child you climbed the bow of a coconut tree, if you were a carpenter you dropped your tools and forgot your commissions and stood up, if you had a suspicion of new trade connections you locked up your trading house and with a small retinue of scribes sauntered, calm, chatting, exchanging greetings, pretending boredom, to the spot, more or less, where they would drop anchor in our treacherous bay. What can they offer that we do not have? was the general feeling, and the city did not seethe with excitement, not so that it could be seen, and the new arrivals were nonchalantly made welcome, not suspiciously, but still … Not so that it could be seen.
    The eldest son was the first to be invited aboard the flagship. He asked the stranger to accompany him because of his greater knowledge of marine matters. I remember how noble the stranger looked in his green-striped robe with green headdress, how he towered above the bearded newcomers as he stood on