Брайс Кортни - The Power of One

He hadn’t expected an answer and I waited for him to continue.

‘The music of Africa is too wild, too free, too accustomed to death for romance. Africa is too crude a stage for the small scratching of the violin, too majestic for the piano. Africa is only right for drums. The drum carries its rhythm but does not steal its music. Timpani is the background, the music of Africa is in the voices of the people. They are its instruments, more subtle, more beautiful, infinitely more noble than the scratching, thumping, banging and blowing of brass and wind and vellum, strings and keyboard.’

‘What about Requiem for Geel Piet?’ I asked.

Doc chuckled. ‘For twenty years I have tried to compose ten or even five minutes of music, good music for the great Southland. And then, after twenty years of failure, I find it in the chain gangs, in the rhythm of a pick and the sweat of black backs and the vicious crack of the sjambok and the almost noiseless thud of the donkey prick. The voice music is not the keening of despair but the expression of a certainty that Africa will live and the spirit will survive brutality. The music of Africa is in the soul and its instruments are in the voices of its people. Such a domkop, Peekay. All the time it is waiting absoloodle under my long German nose. Requiem for Geel Piet is not my music, it is the music of the people. The necklace is only mine because I strung the beads.’

I handed Doc a steaming plate of bully beef. Then, using a short stick, I rolled the two sweet potatoes from the embers to cool a little for later. We ate in silence. Doc never took food for granted and would chew for ages before swallowing. I added a couple of logs to build the fire up again and then walked down to the stream to wash the plates and fill the billy.

After I’d made coffee and poured a tablespoon of condensed milk into the tin mug just the way Doc liked it, I placed the steaming cup next to him and sliced open his sweet potato. Steam rose from its fat, succulent belly and to this too I added condensed milk as a special treat. The mosquitoes, kept at bay by the early smoke from the fire, were out in force again. I rubbed Citronella oil over my arms and legs and handed the bottle to Doc. The oil smelt pretty bad, but it was a damn sight better than being bitten half to death. We’d been going since four-fifteen in the morning and were exhausted. Too tired to wash the mugs, I wrapped myself in my blanket. Checking first to see that Doc lay well clear of the fire, I curled up under the overhang of the rock so that my blanket wouldn’t be wet with dew in the morning and went to sleep.

I awoke at dawn, and keeping my blanket wrapped around me I built the fire up again. The valley was shrouded in mist and the rainforest which began not twenty yards from our camp site was invisible. Minutes after the sun hit the valley the mist would vanish, but until it did the cold would remain. My hands were freezing as I filled the billy from the stream for coffee. Doc was snoring again, tightly wrapped in his blanket, and I let him sleep on until I’d made his coffee and blown a generous tablespoon’s worth of condensed milk into it. I did the same for myself and the steaming mug soon warmed my hands. I didn’t wake Doc; I knew the smell of the fresh-brewed coffee would do that for me. Doc loved coffee more than I think he loved his cactus garden and almost as much as Beethoven and J. S. Bach. Pretty soon his nostrils began to twitch, and grunting to himself he sat up in the blanket and knuckled his eyes open. High up through the mist we could hear the barking of the baboons; the sun must have reached them and they were moving on.

Doc gripped the mug I gave him in both hands, then looking up in the direction of the cliffs invisible above him in the mist he said, ‘Today will be different, Peekay.’ The barking of the baboons echoed down the misty valley. ‘Ja, for sure and absoloodle, today we find something.’ Taking a careful sip of coffee, ‘I hope you sleep good, Peekay?’ he asked.

I cooked two sausages and a couple of rashers of bacon and then split the sausages down the centre and laid them on two slices of bread, topped them with bacon and sandwiched them with two more thick slices of bread. I handed one of the crude sandwiches to Doc and ate the other myself, holding it to my mouth with both hands.

While we were having a second cup of coffee the sun was beginning to dazzle its way through the mist and seemingly in minutes the valley was filled with sunshine. A few patches of mist hung near the floor of the rainforest, but they too were soon gone. Above us the strange-looking cliffs looked less foreboding in the bright morning light and I scanned them to see how we might set about the climb.

In a mist-shrouded landscape, sounds are always exaggerated. Now, with the mist gone, the morning settled down into all its reassuring components, the chatter of birds, running water, the urgent whirr of a grasshopper and in fact the generally busy noises of the mountain day coming fully to life. I walked over to a small clump of bushes and was in the half squat position with my pants around my ankles when two plump bush partridges whirred from the underbrush directly beside me. I rose, my pants still around my ankles, and squinting down the barrel of an imaginary shotgun, I let them have it, first with the left and then pulling carefully around to get the second bird with the right barrel. I then watched, laughing, as they disappeared like a couple of hurricane fighters over a small ridge beyond me.

After washing I cleaned up camp and stowed our stuff under the overhanging rock, sprinkling our blanket rolls with Citronella oil. If anything approached, particularly a scorpion looking for a nice warm place to nestle, the unfamiliar smell of the oil would drive it away.

Doc slung the rope around his neck and hung his eight-battery Eveready torch from his belt. I took a small climber’s rucksack with water bottle, trowel for digging footholds, hammer, metal spikes, paraffin lamp and Doc’s field glasses. The climb didn’t look too bad, buttresses of rock led to long ridges eroded into the face of the rock, as though the cliff face itself were made from a composition of hard and soft rock. It was these seemingly soft, white striations of rock which had first caught Doc’s interest and which he was pretty sure would be dolomite or some sort of limestone. The torch and the paraffin lamp were a giveaway. Doc, always a romantic, was hoping we’d find a cave in the cliff face, a prospect which naturally appealed to me enormously.

We climbed for an hour, the going not too hard. Doc, despite his age, was a skilled mountaineer who took no chances and whereas I might have made it to the first ridge of eroded rock perhaps a hundred foot from the ground in half the time it took us, our progress was sure and the way back carefully mapped out in our minds. Getting down a steep face can often be more difficult than getting up it. The first ridge of eroded rock proved Doc’s theory to be right, the material was dolomite which had been worn away by tens of thousands of years of wind and rain to make deep ledges with overhangs cut into the cliff face. We followed the ledge until we found a way back onto the cliff face, and continued to climb. It took us another hour to get another hundred feet up the cliff to yet another ledge. This one, more exposed to the wind, had been cut deeper into the rock and we could smell where the baboons had settled for the night. Another fifty feet up the face and we came to a third ridge, deeper yet again. Walking along this ridge we found it gouged deeper and deeper into the cliff face until it came to a sudden end. We’d reached a blind alley; there seemed to be no way of getting back onto the face so that we could climb higher.

By now we’d been going almost three hours and the sun, beating onto the face of the cliff, was hot. Doc’s khaki shirt was wet with perspiration and I suggested we sit down for a drink and a rest. The ridge we were sitting on was, I judged, about a hundred feet from the top of the cliff but it appeared impossible to go any further. Down below us we could see the canopy of the rainforest, with one old yellow wood tree, its branches stretching clear to the sky fifty feet above the canopy of the forest and no more than a hundred feet below where we were sitting. Doc said it could well be a thousand years old. The cliff face was shaped in a wide arc and on our right, about a hundred feet below us, the waterfall gushed from the rock face, more a fine, misty spray than a gush really, but sufficient to feed the stream we’d camped beside.