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21. Westering
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2 21 W WE ES ST TE ER RI IN NG G When George opened his eyes Polly was already awake, examining the paintings on the wall of the cave. She seemed to be particularly interested in a stylised running man wearing an animal mask. George noticed the burned mud structures at the back of the cave, remnants of bins where the Matabele would have stored their grain during the 1896 uprising or First Chimurenga. Waves of nausea, increasing in intensity, forced George to leave the shelter. He stumbled down the slope a few metres and then vomited blood and bile over a rock already spattered with orange lichen. His action disturbed a group of dassies basking in the early morning sunlight, and they scattered in all directions. Once he felt a little better he built a fire in a sheltered spot near the entrance to the cave. He made some tea. Polly ate the left-over sadza or amalaja, which George had put in the ice-cream carton. When she was full she shared the tea with George. Afterwards he rinsed the carton and the pot, and stuffed them in the backpack. They still had a long way to go – about sixty kilometres, as the crow flies, according to Ndiweni – and George felt sufficiently far enough from Bulawayo to travel by day. The feeling that his body was finally packing in gave him a new sense of urgency . He put on the backpack and called Polly: “Let’s go, kid!” Ndiweni had advised him to head in the direction of Bambata Cave. Once they had exited the National Park they would find themselves in Kumalo Communal Land where people would guide them. The intoxicating beauty of this ancient granite landscape acted as an analgesic on George, and they reached Bambata, about ten kilometres away, without his having to rest. He was so thin now that he had to hold his shorts up as he walked. He eventually devised a makeshift belt with a length of bark stripped from a mopani sapling. They rested at the picnic site near Bambata where they could hear running water. They traced the sound to a nearby spruit and enjoyed themselves paddling, and splashing each 136 other. George showed Polly how to get clean water by digging in the sand (nature’s filter) to below the surface water line. She watched fascinated as the hole gradually filled with clean sweet water. George used the relish pot to scoop it into the Mazoe Orange bottle. They went on their way. “Look,” said George, “an Indaba tree; and it’s positively teeming.” He guided Polly to a place where she could reach the lower branches, and showed her how to extract the cherry-like fruit from its green capsule. “At Government House in Bulawayo there’s a very old specimen – I think it’s dead now – of Pappea capensis, and it was under the canopy that King Lobengula held meetings with his chiefs. That’s why it’s called the Indaba tree!” For twenty minutes Polly gorged herself on the refreshing berries. George put one in his mouth, pressed it with his tongue against his palate, and as it burst, the nausea returned. Polly watched with deep concern as he sank to the ground and retched, and retched. He knew they were out of the National Park when huts, singly or in clusters, began to appear. They saw very few people and even fewer chickens and goats. The immaculately swept surroundings of these villages could not conceal abject poverty, depopulation, inertia. George approached an ancient woman sitting on a grass mat outside her hut, greeted her politely and asked her in halting Ndebele if she knew the way to Empandeni Mission. She pointed in the opposite direction to which they were heading, and George had a mild panic attack. Then he noticed that she was blind, her eyes blue with cataracts. He bade her farewell, took the child’s hand and continued, using the sun as his guide, in what he thought was a westerly direction. The sun was not much help at this time of day, squatting more or less directly above the heads of the now weary travellers . Then he heard a welcome sound. Away to the left of their path, the incessant chatter of white-browed sparrow-weavers. When he found their colony, some fifteen nests occupying two adjacent acacia trees, he was amazed to discover that the blind old woman had been...