Wilma Stockenstrom - The Expedition to the Baobab Tree

My dreams fill me and help me eat time. It no longer matters to me that I cannot neatly dispose of time and store it away and preferably forget it; for now I perceive that dreaming and waking do not damn each other, but are extensions of each other and flow into each other, enrich each other, supplement each other, make each other bearable, and that my baobab is a dream come true, and when I see the little people I know they are dream figures that really hunt and really provide me with food and that they really see me but also do not see me because I exist in their dream, and they feed their dream by caring for me. We meet each other and know nothing of each other. We go our ways separately and depend on each other, they on me in that I am as I am, and I on them in that they act as they act.

Nowadays I laugh ruefully at my spasmodic attempts to use the black and green beads I picked up to measure what is so ridiculous to measure and record. I attribute it to my education, random but education nevertheless, in which division and counting and classification played such an important role as to inspire people to undertake a journey that ought to progress so and so, and bring in such and such, and therefore for this and that reason ought to be set about in this way and not another, in this season and not another, in this direction and not another, with this equipment and not that — in which every last factor was taken into account, and when the day of our departure arrived with late-summer laziness, when day slipped into the realm of night and we forgot our sleepiness and our yawns, when for a last time, purely out of habit, we looked at the sea and saw the dhows and the skiffs heaving and the sky begin to burn with colors of fire in the kudu-berry trees, none of us noticed that we were entering a dream. So treacherous are the adventures of sleep.

It is clear that when I have finished drinking this last gift of the little people I will gain entrance to a new kind of dream. The brew is unknown to me but I do not have to know it to know that crocodile brains are the main constituent. Perhaps that is what I have been expecting. Will a dark mumbling wind come and fetch me?

What will I do with the golden nails and the beads, with the near-black water pot and the ostrich eggshell, my possessions? I would like time to reclaim them. The nails were the most useless present. I could do nothing with them, and how to show gratitude for them remained a riddle to me. Here they lie in my palm like seed that might germinate advantageously.

Everything I do is discreetly watched, and even my last gesture, the lifting of the ostrich eggshell to my lips, will be observed and (hopefully, presumably, probably) approved of. I will do it respectfully, slowly and stately in a last vain effort to satisfy demands I do not understand.

But for them I would long ago have starved. I was in a precarious state when the meeting occurred.

Scorching sunshine early-winter, but I remained asleep in the belly of the great tree. I remained asleep from hunger exhaustion, delirious and slowly withering away, with too little strength to change my habitation, to move to better grazing, simply grateful for the roomy hiding place, bare and robbed of its foliage, uncomfortable colossus with its probing fingers. I remained lying half-asleep, half-awake, and did not know if what I heard was really taking place outside or was in my mind, for I became aware of people talking, but as in one’s sleep they talked so that one understood nothing. These phantoms busied themselves around the tree and I wondered whether they would enter my own dream reality and bend over me. I smelled something. I smelled smoke. It frightened me. I was not prepared to believe I would be consumed in the flames of my delirium. Through the crevice I saw floating forms pass, and sat upright on one elbow. Smoke. Human voices. The phantoms carried long branches stripped bare and joined to one another in a rough way to resemble a ladder. I understood nothing of what was going on. Nothing of the events being played out around my dwelling. I saw faces. Through a haze of smoke and incomprehension I saw the ladder being leaned against the smooth trunk, men climbing up it with bouquets of burning twigs, I heard shouts of joy, I saw ghostly people dance, men and women and children, I saw them gorge themselves and lick their lips and heard them laugh, and I stepped out of the baobab, the meager remnants of me, stepped out of the shadow mouth of the opening into the blinding winter light, clad in the tatters of a silk robe, my eyes huge, my lips open, my hands stretched forward in helplessness. I spoke.

Only the next day must one or two of them have returned, for when I came back from my drinking-water stream there was a dry hollowed-out monkey-orange shell filled with honey waiting for me at the crevice opening. Dark brown, almost black honey with the coarseness of bee grub.

How to show thanks? I held the monkey orange in my outstretched hand and stood a short distance from the tree trunk so that I was easily visible. For a while I stood so. The bees in the disturbed nest above buzzed busily, hummed as they tried to repair the damage against the assault of the cold. In the movement of light and shadow it looked as if they were swimming around, falling and rising. Thus I paid tribute to the bees and to their accomplices.

Every day there was something waiting for me. When I went to drink water they came with their gifts and set them down before the opening. Out of curiosity I spied on them one day. I pretended to go into the river undergrowth but did not at once go to the water; I hid in the thicket and watched the vicinity of the baobab. I saw two men approach through the long grass. They were short, and the grass made them seem even smaller. They had a light skin color and short hair like lichen spread over the head. They had crude clothing and weapons. First they gazed at the tree, then quickly went nearer, put something down, and scampered off. The long grass swallowed them.

A ground hornbill came up, walking. I saw that he was heading for the baobab opening. I could clearly recognize the calculating look in his light-blue eyes, coquettishly veiled by stiff eyelashes, and I got cross, and before he could get to my present I burst out of my hiding place to chase him away. The next day nothing was brought to me. Only the day after that. Thus I learned to behave according to unknown laws, though I burned with curiosity and would have given anything to learn more.

Particularly welcome were the serviceable hide clothes that they gave me, with an eye to the premonitions of winter which was so much harsher here than the winters I was used to, harsher and drier and more yellow. The earth crumbled and turned to powder. The branches of deciduous trees showed confused silhouettes against a sky become much lighter. And the bauhinia flowers decayed into a frenzy of shooting seeds. Everything seemed to me as if abandoned. The ibis community looked dusty and untidy. Even the elephants looked dismal.

It affected me. Again a somberness came over me. The mischievousness of a mongoose, the water games of an otter failed to cheer me up. The head-wagging rock lizards did not divert me. I slouched aimlessly around.

Chased somewhere by the intimidation maneuver of a baboon sentry, I had picked up the first beads somewhere where a crack in the rocks turned into a crevice, somewhere in the dust among intertwined dry dead tubes of stalks, grass tassels, calices, petals, roots, somewhere not so long ago.

Humanware. Humans been here. An incalculable distance between me and those who had left behind beads and potsherds, irrecoverable time, unbridgeable estrangement, insuperable my loneness intensified by this small discovery, interminable the continuation of solitude, surrounded as I am by those who keep themselves apart and for whom I exist, but only as an apparition.