Dusklands by J M Coetzee

Author:J M Coetzee [J. M. Coetzee]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1998-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

The Hottentot camp was laid out on the bank of one of the streams that feed the Leeuwen River. It consisted of perhaps forty huts arranged in a rough circle with outliers, plus five set quite apart across the stream. These would be the huts for menstruating women, who during their flux are permitted congress with neither husbands nor cattle. The huts were of uniform construction: bark mats and animal skins spread over hemispheres of supple branches that had been thrust into the ground and lashed together at the apex. The apex is open, allowing the Hottentot abed a barred view of the night sky. It has led to neither a special relationship with the sky-gods nor a Hottentot astrology. It is nothing but a smoke-hole.

One of the band had raced ahead of the wagon to bring news of us to the camp. When we hove into sight a stream of boys and dogs deranged with excitement poured forth to meet us. In the camp women with babies at their hips and comely ten-year-olds skulking behind their legs stood squinting at us, neglecting the discipline of the cooking-pot. Smoke of course ascended in thin trails into the sky.

Fearing that my wagon would be stripped bare by predatory juveniles unless I took unusual precautions, I halted well short of the camp, removed certain necessaries, and had my men lash our supplies down under canvas. Leaving them at this task, with orders to guard wagon and cattle with their lives but to provoke no incident, I rode into the village, some scraps of my savage retinue still at my heels.

I had forgotten the terrors that the communal life of the Hottentots can hold for the established soul. A skeletal hound thumped the earth with its tail, its neck tied to a rock with a thong too thrifty for its teeth to reach. Odours of the slaughtering pole drifted on the air. Desolate stupidity in the women’s eyes. Flies sucking mucus from the lips of children. Scorched twigs in the dust. A tortoise shell baked white. Everywhere the surface of life was cracked by hunger. How could they tolerate the insects they lived amongst?

I rode into the clearing at the centre of the camp and stopped. The circle of Hottentots closed around me. My escort moved gaily about the crowd talking and laughing. Some of the sullen women bandied words with them. I judged that there were two hundred people. Boys wriggled to the front of the circle and squatted staring appreciatively. I was being called Long-Nose. Patiently, like an equestrian statue, I waited for their chieftain to receive me.

The Hottentots have no feeling for ceremony and show only the most perfunctory reverence for authority. Their chieftain could not receive me. He was an old man, sick, perhaps dying. I asked to see him nevertheless. I insisted. I dismounted and took my offerings out of my saddle bag. They shrugged shoulders and smiled at each other and conducted me, the whole whispering horde, to the open door of a hut.

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