Owen Sheers - The Dust Diaries

Arthur raises his own hand in reply. ‘ Mangwanani. Makadii? ’

‘ Ndiripotnakadiwo .’

Arthur nods and smiles. ‘ Ndiripo .’

The young men look back at him. Both have a little blood spattered on their arms and legs. They smile, and, in that way that Arthur has come to love, laugh and nod their heads, for no other reason than it is a good morning. Waving again, he turns away from them and continues up the narrow track that leads on in front of him, its pale dust cutting a ragged path through the patchy grass, boulders and low thorn trees of the veld and onto Enkeldoorn, ten miles away. Behind him he hears the chatter of the two men and the deep lowing of the bull. He likes the translation of that greeting he was given once. There is something in it that calls to the core of a very human need, the affirmation of one’s existence in another’s:

‘Morning chief.’

‘Morning. How are you?’

‘I am here if you are here.’

‘I am here.’

♦

It is three years since Arthur disembarked at Beira Bay to find Bishop Gaul waiting for him, and since then being ‘here’ has often meant walking the track he is on this morning, between his mission station at Wreningham and the small Dutch town of Enkeldoorn. The track is rough and narrow, no wider than the span of a hand. It has been made over the years by the feet of the people who walk this way, wearing away at the soil with their hard soles. It is an unremarkable track, a common footpath, and, to the infrequent eye, anonymous, like any of the thousands and maybe millions of similar paths that cross and intersect over the velds of Africa. But to Arthur it is his track, his path which he has claimed over the three years he has walked it, with his feet, his sweat and his aching muscles, twice every week. It is a journey that he has made so many times, in so many weathers, that now he can travel the path in the pitch dark of an African night, walking by instinct and familiarity alone. His feet know every bend and swell, his eye recognises every misshapen rock that looms out of the darkness towards him. Only his ears are still surprised by what he can meet on it: an unfamiliar breaking of twigs or undergrowth often bringing him to a dead stop, motionless, listening to his own breath loud and clumsy in his ear. Several times now he has thought he has heard a lion rolling a growl in its throat, and it has left him standing still for minutes, waiting for the sound again, hopefully receded, or, as he so often feared, louder and closer to him again. But now, after three years walking the track, he is even getting used to these noises. The howling of the striped hyenas, the static of the cicadas tit dusk and the whooping of the baboons in the trees are all as much a part of the veld for him now as the endless horizon and the towering clouds piled up in the sky. With every day spent out in its barren beauty he was growing into it, and so far it had not harmed him. Blisters and sweat rashes, not lions or rhinos, were his only regular discomforts.

He stops by a boulder and leans against it, feeling its pitted hardness against his hip bone. Bending his right leg, he holds it by the ankle with his right hand and, pulling down his woollen sock with his left, he examines his ankle, like a farrier passing his eye over a tricky hoof. The skin on his heel is hardened and calloused, but this morning it has bloomed again into a patch of rosy pink, laced with the darker red of broken skin. He spits on his left hand and wipes away the dust that has been sanding away at it as he walks. As he pulls his sock back up he notices that the piece of bully-beef tin he had nailed to the sole of his boot is coming loose again. There is little he can do about it here, so he just stamps his foot hard on the ground a couple of times, raising little puffs of dust from the path. Adjusting his satchel about his shoulders, he looks up into the sky. It is clear blue and cold. He watches a tawny eagle launch itself from a white thorn tree on a kopje off the path and slow-glide a spiral in the air. It beats its wings just once, the movement reaching Arthur with the sound of a breath. He follows its slow tour of the sky. Then he carries on.

Behind him, the track leads back through the scrubland to Wren-ingham mission station, where he started out at first light this morning and where he has been stationed since he arrived in the area from Umtali three years ago. In 1891 Bishop Knight Bruce, the first Bishop of Mashonaland, passed through this country, maybe on the same track that Arthur is walking this morning. The Bishop walked 1,300 miles through the veld that year, looking for ground on which to stake his spiritual claim for the Anglican church. At Wreningham he introduced himself to the chief of a nearby village, and requested an area of land. The chief gave him some, and the Bishop’s native boy marked the place with a tall white cross, planted on top of a kopje. Then the Bishop and his boy left, to find another chief and another area of land. On that trek Bishop Knight Bruce met more than forty-five Shona chiefs. All of them gave him some land and in all these places the Bishop planted a white cross until there was a chain of white crosses stretching out across Mashonaland. Over the next ten years these crosses attracted more white men and with their arrival, they grew, like magical seeds, into mission stations. Wreningham was one of these stations, named after a school in England of which the first priest to serve there, Archdeacon Upcher, had particularly fond memories.

The station itself occupies a low kopje that overlooks an expanse of tall yellow grass through which the wind, when it comes, blows shifting waves of shadow and light. Outcrops of granite and the odd thorn tree are the only features to break the immediate view on all sides, although just over the horizon there are scatterings of Mashona kraals, their conical rondavels dotting the ground down towards a dip in the land where a sluggish river ebbs and flows with the seasons. At the top of the kopje two huge gum trees stand on either side of a small compound. In front of these is the square thatched hut that serves as both church and schoolroom, and behind this another hut of a similar shape, but smaller, which is the priest’s quarters. The store room and kitchen stand a few yards further off again. Across from the church a ragged line of rondavels back onto a patch of scrubland vegetation that falls away down the east flank of the kopje. Their walls are made of a crude wattle and daub and their mud-clotted thatches reach almost as far as the floor. Goats, dogs and chickens wander freely about the area between these huts and the church, and the air is often languid with the heavy smoke of open or smouldering fires, lingering like incense.

Arthur stops again, this time by an acacia tree that he knows marks the half-way point on the track. Digging in his satchel between the books and the letters, his fingers find the cold steel of his water bottle. Pulling it free with a metallic swill of the water inside, he untwists the cap, and brings the bottle to his lips and drinks. The water is still cool despite the growing heat of the day and he feels it run down his throat into his stomach, tracing the route of his gullet with a chill sensation, coming to rest in a dark cold patch in the pit of his belly. He resists the temptation to drain the bottle, although he knows he needs the water. He has not long recovered from a bout of malarial fever, and he still carries the residue of that sickness in the shape of a vicious thirst. But he is only half-way, so he places the bottle back in his satchel, buckles its one strap and carries on again.

Ahead of him is Enkeldoorn, the only other significant destination on this path apart from Wreningham. It is a small place, no more than fifty or sixty people making it their permanent home, and its history is one of chance and accident rather than design. Arthur is not alone in considering it something of a lost town.