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

the commander’s deck and he and the eldest son tried to make themselves understood in sailors’ language, with plenty of gestures and headshaking, up and down, back and forth. We all waited on the report. We learned about a land at the other end of the earth’s disc and about voyagers who had sailed as far as here all along the edge of the world and about the mighty storms with which the gods tried to drive them over the edge andplunge them into nothingness, and about voices they heard in the howling wind warning them to turn around, and about monsters on land where they wanted to fetch fresh water, about short rests to repair broken yards, about beacons they had erected and about hostile backward peoples, and they pointed, so we learned, at a red sign on their yellow sails and explained that they sailed for their king, these stocky hairy men in thick peculiar garments.
    Unnoticed as the birth of a wave an idea came into being and swelled unnoticed. The city’s richest merchant’s as yet unmarried eldest son, he with the interest in far places because of which he felt attracted to the stranger and kept pestering him with his questions, he who now after his father’s death had inherited the most important trading interests, this very person hurriedly got married on the eve of his departure for a destination which according to everyone existed only in his imagination and about which he was secretly laughed at.
    Only one did not laugh, namely the stranger, whom he persuaded to seal his fate thus: to cease, temporarily, one presumed, voyaging over the high seas from one land mass to another and back, voyaging across a too well-known water mass afflicted with cyclones, blessed with monsoons, and to essay the unknown of a land journey with a vague goal. A gaze accustomed to the nervous riffling of water would have to accustom itself to the green of forest and marsh, to ravines veiled in old man’s beard and steep cliffs, to plains and sluggish rivers and a horizon of dome-shaped hills. The stars no longer teemed over an unstable water surface but over the stability of resistant earth, and looked relatively calmer and of surer course in the wide night. Thestars of the earth would look stiller. The night look thicker. Everything would look more dependable.
    I suppose it was the spirit of adventure. I can’t be bothered with what made him embark upon something so silly that would provide him with a trivial death in the heart of the wilderness, lamented by his last possession, myself. I was the only one left to pace up and down the river bank calling anxiously, plaintively, urgently, hopelessly, and to feel mocked by the fish eagles that wove the strip of air above the river from tree to tree with their screeches and proclaimed it forbidden territory by order of the giant crocodile.
    Come to his end in the belly of a reptile. There are times when I really can’t help laughing at it. It is after all a particularly laughable death. One is so used to regarding other inhabitants of the earth as food, to accepting them, as it were, as self-evident sources of food, and to putting whatever is edible in service of one’s digestion, to raising the ingestion of food to an art by adding condiments and tastefully serving up dishes that go together, to making a huge fuss of a meal and to developing customs around it that ossify into rituals, to making a whole rigmarole of the utterly natural bodily function of eating – one is so used to it that it seems terribly funny when other-consuming man is himself eaten. The untouchably mighty, revealed to be nothing but food, was knocked into the water with a well-aimed flick of the tail – actually not well aimed, actually executed with unconscious perfection – and drowned and devoured.
    Did his spirit perhaps escape in bubbles? Did my companion the water spirit grow jealous and demand him as hers?
    Then I grew afraid of pursuing my thoughts. I who am of water never wished it on him, and