Norman Rush - Mating

He got up and was angelic.

As we went I decided to wipe the peanut butter off my lips. The smell was making me nauseous. I had been using the peanut butter as a surrogate for my zinc oxide. I decided my lips were burned and swollen beyond repair anyhow, and for a split second I was able to feel glad that there was no mirror to see them in.

Night came and the idea of camping was unthinkable because, as I saw it, only impetus could save us. We had to reach Tsau. We would go with the water we had and forget about the last water point.

So long as Baph would walk, I would walk. That was another reason to keep going: he was proceeding at a dragging pace. And the final reason for continuing was that a vulture couple had picked us up during the day and was following us. This was not what we needed. And vultures leave you alone during the night. They go someplace and roost. There was a chance, I thought, that something more attractively protomoribund than we two might detain them on the morrow.

That night at last I became my body, my body and my breath, in about the way I assume the counsels of perfection I’d gotten from the lion man had meant I should. Walking was painless. I had no punitive ideation all night, none. It was very cold, and even that was pleasant. Undoubtedly this state was something devised out of the chemistry of threat, like Livingstone going into a religious rapture when a lion got him by the shoulder.

Tsau Appears

I assume I was in a fugue state until the moment the next afternoon when the reddish hills that were proof you were within eight miles of Tsau appeared. Appeared is the only word for the experience. They were not there and then they were.

Internally I experienced something like a profound but subaudible chord being played. And then I was alert. It was like falling back into my body from a height. Everything hurt at once: my insides hurt, my hands were pulsing with infection from unextracted splinters, my tongue for some reason felt like balsa, as did my lips. Baph stank, which I had not been noticing, and he was breathing in an alarming way.

Even now all I remember from the night before is walking through the dark through an intermittent, patternless wind. A couple of times, depending on the angle of the wind, it seemed to me that I heard, coming from a great distance, a sound like glass being struck. I assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that this was an anomaly like the phantom gunshot I’d heard earlier.

The hills appeared, and the sand river that was guaranteed to meander straight to the outskirts of Tsau. Shortly I was at the hills themselves.

I wanted to see Tsau. I felt it as a physical emergency that I see my destination.

Up to my left on the flank of a hill was an odd, sharply higher hummock. There were trees on it that looked like parsley: albizzia, I guessed. A path marked with stones led to the hummock and up it, and there was what was clearly a hitching post at the mouth of the path. I tied Baph to it and went up.

The whole hummock was a devised thing. Chiming sounds came from the trees. The base of the hummock was encircled by a collar of dead broom plants. I could see some sort of furniture under the trees.

I was in a state of triumph.

It was clear that this eminence was something amplified by the hand of man and designed to be the place the traveler from the west got his or her first full prospect of Tsau. I gazed at Tsau.

Most koppies look like rubble pyramids with the apices sheared off and usually just a few bands or pockets of vegetation established on the slopes. The koppie Tsau was built against was different and classic. It was vast. It was a true island mountain rising splendidly alone in the plain. It was evenly and densely wooded almost to the crest, where enormous rouge-red bulbous boulders sat like ruins.

On the flats a tract of small houses lay like a fan open toward me. There was more housing, more structures in any case, on the lower slopes of the koppie. Not everything I could see was interpretable. I was puzzled by three flickering white bars or slots set in a row high up on the koppie, which would turn out to be the flanged cylinders that are the wind-trapping elements in the avant-garde windmills Denoon had installed in Tsau. I was also puzzled that Tsau looked almost sequined, owing to the profusion of glints and flashes of reflected light coming from all over the settlement. There was an explanation for this too.

One end of a sweep of fenced fields, all very geometrical, was visible far to the east. Where were the freeform Tswana mealie fields I was used to? I wanted to know. Overall I loved what I was seeing.

I was not emotionally normal.

Hanging from a chain in the crown of a large albizzia was the answer to the mystery of the crystalline notes I had picked up during the night. It was a glass bell the size of a half-gallon jug. It was beautifully shaped. I had never seen anything like it. The glass was thick and the same blue-green you see in utility line insulators, and the clapper was like an elongated iron teardrop. It seemed like the most beautiful object I had ever seen. I wanted it. I had to forcibly remind myself that the bell was there for a reason, although what that might be I was unable to imagine. Tsau was eight miles away and the idea that this bell might function in some way to give warning was ludicrous. Besides, it was hung so as to ring whenever a decent wind struck the tree. I shook the branches to make it drop its notes on me. They were like cool water. I must have needed some kind of release, because I went on autistically shaking the branches until I realized the blood was leaving my arms.

I seemed to see a pair of horns sticking out of the earth fifteen feet from the base of the bell tree, lower down on the Tsau-facing side of the hummock. Skulls of ungulates are common in the Kalahari, so I had barely paid attention. But these horns were too thick and in fact were carved out of wood and enameled white. I thought briefly then that this might be a cult item that would make some greater sense of the amount of work that had gone into creating this shrine area or whatever it might be.

I cleared the sand away from the base of the U formed by the horns. They were set into a hinged plug that opened on a narrow ceramic tank, glazed, with water in its depths. Resting in the tank was an iron dipper with a shank a yard long. The water seemed fine and sweet. I was out of halazone tablets, so I wouldn’t drink it, but I could wash in it — or rinse off in it, rather, since I had no soap.

I was curious about this cistern, how it was fed, and went back to look more closely at the tree itself. It was a work of art. The tree had been converted into a device to harvest downpours. The cistern was fed by a system of Polyvinylchloride tubes leading from ceramic basins sunk into sanded-out hollows in the main forks of the tree. All the small tubes were gathered together and stapled nicely out of sight on the Tsau side of the tree before joining at the base with the main collector, which ran underground to the capped cistern. I had no way of knowing it then, but this was my first brush with the jungle of contrivances Tsau so often felt like. This cistern was an elaboration of the Bushman praxis of using hollow trees as rain collectors. In part I was not impressed. The amount of labor involved in creating this thing was what bothered me. Other trees were also ducted into the system. How many people would ever use this? How could the labor of setting it up and maintaining it — presumably the collector basins would have to be cleaned and the tubing purged from time to time — ever be justified? I then proceeded to justify it in my case at least by lavishly using the water, of which there seemed to be plenty, for my purposes.

First I made several trips down to Baph to pour water over him and try to get him to come up into the shade with me. He balked. I cleaned his eyes and gave up.