Patrick White - Voss

It began to overpower.

One burning afternoon the blacks dragged away the profane body of the white boy, which was rising where it lay. They let out yells, and kicked the offending corpse rather a lot. It was swelling. It had become a green woman, that they took and threw into the gully with the body of the other white man, who had let his own spirit out.

The plump body and the dried one lay together in the gully.

There let them breed maggots together, white maggots, cried one blackfellow, who was a poet.

Everybody laughed.

Then they were singing, though in soft, reverential voices, for it was still the season of the snake that could devour them; they were singing:

‘White maggots are drying up,

White maggots are drying up.…’

Voss, who heard them, saw that the palm of his otherwise yellow hand was still astonishingly white.

‘Harry,’ he called out in his loneliness, ‘come and read to me.’

And then:

‘Ein guter Junge.’

And again, still fascinated by his own surprising hand:

‘ Ach , Harry is, naturally, dead.’

Only he was left, only he could endure it, and that because at last he was truly humbled.

So saints acquire sanctity who are only bones.

He laughed.

It was both easy and difficult. For he was still a man, bound by the threads of his fate. A whole knot of it.

At night he lay and looked through the thin twigs, at the stars, but more especially at the Comet, which appeared to have glided almost the length of its appointed course. It was fading, or else his eyes were.

‘That, Harry,’ he said, ‘is the southern Cross, I believe, to the south of the mainmast. That is where, doubtless, their snake will burrow in and we shall not see him again.

‘Are you frightened?’ he asked.

He himself, he realized, had always been most abominably frightened, even at the height of his divine power, a frail god upon a rickety throne, afraid of opening letters, of making decisions, afraid of the instinctive knowledge in the eyes of mules, of the innocent eyes of good men, of the elastic nature of the passions, even of the devotion he had received from some men, and one woman, and dogs.

Now, at least, reduced to the bones of manhood, he could admit to all this and listen to his teeth rattling in the darkness.

‘ O Jesus ,’ he cried, ‘ rette mich nur! Du lieber! ’

Of this too, mortally frightened, of the arms, or sticks, reaching down from the eternal tree, and tears of blood, and candle-wax. Of the great legend becoming truth.

Towards evening the old man who sat with the explorer cut into the latter’s forearm, experimentally, cautiously, to see whether the blood would flow. It did, if feebly. The old man rubbed a finger in the dark, poor blood. He smelled it, too. Then he spat upon his finger, to wash off the stain.

The following day, which could also prove to be the last, was a burning one. The blacks, who had watched the sky most of the night in anticipation of the Great Snake’s disappearance, were particularly sullen. They had suffered a fraud, it seemed. Only the women were indifferent. Having risen from the dust and the demands of their husbands, they were engaged in their usual pursuit of digging for yams. All except one young woman, who was exhausted by celestial visions. Almost inverted, she had dreamt dizzily of yellow stars falling, and of the suave, golden flesh, full of kindness for her, that she had touched with her own hands.

Consequently, this young person, to whom a mystery had been revealed, as if she were an old man, increased in importance in the eyes of the others. Her companions were diffident of sharing their chatter. They talked round, rather than to the young initiate, who had been, until recently, the little girl they had given to Jackie, the boy from a tribe to the eastward.

That day the men returned earlier than usual from the hunt, and were questioning the unfortunate Jackie, who suffered the miseries of language. They could not hew the answers out of his silence. He remained an unhappy, lumpish youth.

Then the old fellow who had let the blood of the white man came into their midst showing his finger. This member was examined by everyone of responsible age, although there was no longer any trace of blood. By sundown, all were angry and sullen.

So the explorer waited. He did not fear tortures of the body, for little enough of that remained. It was some final torment of the spirit that he might not have the strength to endure. For a long time that night he did not dare raise his eyes towards the sky. When he did, at last, there were the nails of the Cross still eating into it, but the Comet, he saw, was gone.

There was almost continuous tramping and stamping on earth. It had become obvious to the blacks that they were saved, which should have been the signal to express simple joy, if, during all those days, they had not been deceived, both by the Snake and by the white man. So the blacks were very angry indeed, if also glad that one of the agents responsible for their deception still remained to them.

Voss listened.

Their feet were thumping the ground. The men had painted their bodies with the warm colours of the earth they knew totem by totem, and which had prevailed at last over the cold, nebulous country of the stars. The homely spirits were dancing, who had vanquished the dreadful ones of darkness. The animals had come out again, in soft, musky fur and feather. They were dancing their contribution to life. And the dust was hot beneath their feet.

Voss could hear them. As it was no longer possible for him to turn his neck more than an inch or two, he did not see, but could smell the stench of their armpits. The black bodies were sweating at every pore.

Then he heard the first scream; he heard the rattle of chains, and knew.

In the night the blackfellows were killing the horses and mules of the white men, as it was now their right. The emaciated animals could not rear up, but made an attempt with their hobbled forelegs. Some, ridiculously, fell over sideways. Their eyes were glittering with fear in the firelight. Their nostrils were stiff. Blood ran. Those animals that smelled the blood, and were not yet touched, screamed more frightfully than those which were already dying. Tongues were lolling out. If the mules were silenter, they were also perhaps more desperate, like big, caught fish leaping and squirming upon the bank of a river. But their eyes glazed finally.

None of this was seen by Voss, but at one stage the spear seemed to enter his own hide, and he screamed through his thin throat with his little, leathery strip of remaining tongue. For all suffering he screamed.

Ah, Lord, let him bear it.

Soon the bowels of the dying animals were filling the night. The glistening, greenish caverns of their bellies were open. Drunk with the foetid smells, the blacks were running amongst the carcasses, tearing out the varnished livers, and hacking off the rough tongues.

Almost before the blood was dry on their hands, they had fallen to gorging themselves, and in a very short time, or so it seemed, were sucking the charred bones, and some were coughing for a final square of singed hide that had stuck in going down. It was, on the whole, a poor feast, but the bellies of all had swelled out. If they were beyond pardon, it was their lean lives that had damned them.

Voss heard the sucking of fingers beside the fires, as the blacks drowsed off into silence, deeper, closer, their own skins almost singed upon the coals.

As for himself, a cool wind of dreaming began about this time to blow upon his face, and it seemed as if he might even escape from that pocket of purgatory in which he had been caught His cheeks, above his exhausted beard, were supple and unfamiliar. The sleek, kind gelding stood, and was rubbing its muzzle against its foreleg, to gentle music of metal, which persisted after he had mounted. Once he had ridden away, he did not look back at the past, so great was his confidence in the future.