Going home at the end of each term was like sloughing a skin. The joy of a small town lies in its unchanging nature. Except for Doc, Mrs Boxall, Miss Bornstein, old Mr Bornstein, the guys at the prison and of course, my mother, Granpa, Marie and especially Dum and Dee, people would look up when you entered a shop and enquire casually, ‘Goodness, hols again, Peekay? How’s life in the big city? Are you playing in the Easter concert? What can I do for you?’ They’d say this almost in one breath, not because they were bored and felt compelled to be polite, but mostly because time has a sameness in a small town, which the coming and going of people doesn’t disturb. I liked the idea of nothing ever changing in Barberton, it gave me a sense of belonging. Now that the war was over and the military camp no longer a part of the town’s economy, Barberton settled back into its favourite old scuffed leather armchair and went to sleep again. Even the prison warders seemed to fit into the community more easily and for the last two concerts they had remained while ‘God save the King’ was played, though Mrs Boxall reported that they still protested in their own way by not standing to attention. This made Mr Hankin of the Goldfields News mad as usual, but it rated a paragraph, not a leader or the entire editorial like the good old days.
Mrs Boxall had become a firm favourite at the prison. The Kommandant, who had become a colonel because of Doc’s concert, decided he liked prison reform and had allowed her to start a Sunday morning school for the prisoners. She had negotiated with the Kommandant to reward progress with King Georgies. The Pentecostal missionaries, who had agreed to do the teaching in return for a fifteen-minute sermon every Sunday, disagreed violently with the distribution of tobacco to students who excelled. Their God was neither a consumer of strong drink nor a user of tobacco. They were forced to conclude that God worked in mysterious ways when attendance and scholastic effort increased markedly with the introduction of King Georgies as an incentive. A prisoner would study for every limited moment he had during the week for the reward of one cigarette. With the result, many blacks left prison able to read, write and do simple arithmetic. Mr Bornstein, Miss Bornstein’s father, had converted the Earl of Sandwich Fund into the Sandwich Foundation and already one little old lady had left it a bequest of two thousand pounds. The letter writing sessions still continued, and during the holidays I’d take over from the missionaries and Marie’s father’s tobacco leaf would once again be fitted into the folds of the tracts and given out with every letter. In fact during every school holiday letters to King George, which of course we never posted, became very popular again. The Tadpole Angel was back in town and Gert used to swear that trouble in the prison was almost non-existent during these periods.
Gert, with encouragement from Mrs Boxall, had tackled English and now spoke it fairly well. He’d become very attached to Doc and Mrs Boxall and made sure that the repairs around Doc’s cottage or Mrs Boxall’s house were done and that Charlie’s motor was kept going. Every time I’d get home it would be the same thing, ‘I’m telling you, man, only chewing gum and axle grease is holding that old tjorrie together, one day I’m just going to have to take it to a cliff top, say a prayer and push it over. Only it won’t be able to make it up the hill in the first place!’ But under Gert’s concerned and tender care Charlie kept going.
Klipkop had been transferred to Pretoria and Gert, to his enormous surprise, had been given the job of assistant to Captain Smit. As a consequence he had earned his corporal’s stripes. He was now the prison heavyweight and would be fighting for the vacant title at the next championships. The giant Potgieter, who had continued to beat Gert in the final of the two subsequent championships after Gert’s original defeat in Nelspruit, had turned professional.
The Lowveld Championships had been expanded and were now known as the Eastern Transvaal Championships, bringing in some of the bigger towns and making it tougher for the Barberton Blues. As they always occurred during the December school holidays, it was important to Captain Smit that I take part as a member of the Blues.
Regular boxing against the Afrikaans schools during term had made me a much better boxer, although I personally longed for the magic of Geel Piet, who knew how to make me think better in the ring. Whereas Darby White and Sarge, like Captain Smit, were honest carpenters, Geel Piet had been an artist and I missed his uncanny understanding of how to exploit my personality in the ring.
I felt I wasn’t growing as a boxer. Yehudi Menuhin once said that playing the violin is like singing through your limbs; Geel Piet had had the ability to make boxing seem the same, each punch the result of perfect timing, continuity, controlled emotion and intelligence. If I was to become the welterweight champion of the world, I knew I’d soon have to find a coach who thought beyond schoolboy boxing.
The holidays were packed. I’d be at the prison at five-thirty a.m. for boxing, and Captain Smit would make me go three rounds with two of the other kids. Mostly with Snotnose and Jaapie, both heavier than me but really the only two boxers who could box well enough to push me. Both would itch to have a go, both were fighters in the Smit tradition, and both were very tough. It called for all my ringcraft to stay out of trouble. Halfway through the second round, Captain Smit would blow his whistle and one of them would step down and the other come in. This meant each of them only boxed one and a half rounds and so they’d go flat out, prepared to take a few punches to get a good one in. Captain Smit was convinced that it was the only way to increase my speed and keep me sharp.
After an hour and a half in the prison gym I’d head for Doc’s cottage, where either Dee or Dum, who took it turn about, would have delivered breakfast. By the time I arrived at eight, the coffee would be made and a loaf of fresh bread would be on the table, together with eggs and bacon, plopping away on the back of the stove waiting for me to arrive. Doc was, after all, still a German and he expected me to be exactly on egg and bacon time. The girls loved the holidays and they’d spoil me rotten, with baking and fussing and generally cooking up a storm. Doc always claimed he put on several pounds when I was around.
Doc and I would sit outside on his stoep for breakfast and we’d plan the weekend hike. This usually meant repeating an old trail. Doc would bring out his notepad and we’d discuss the last time we’d done the planned walk, which might have been five years before. We’d discuss every specimen we’d found then and sometimes even leave the table to check the progress of some long forgotten succulent we had collected. Doc was still tied to the Steinway and his little girl students during the week, so our long walks had to take place over the weekend. Though I’m sure, after a while, he’d have had it no other way, the planning and the discussion over his notes became just as important to him as the excursions themselves. At nine he’d give me a piano lesson, shaking his head at the bad habits I’d acquired under the direction of Mr Mollip, the Prince of Wales School music master. ‘This Mr Muddleup, you are sure he teaches pianoforte?’ he would say, shaking his head. ‘I think maybe the banjo yes? He would spend the rest of the holidays getting me back into some sort of musical shape.
The first time I played St Louis blues for Doc I had expected to shock him out of his pants. In fact it was meant as a joke. Instead he nodded quietly. ‘Ja, that is goot.’ I turned to look at him in surprise. ‘But to play black, the music must come from your soul not out from your head, Peekay.’ He indicated that I should rise from the piano stool, and seated in my place he played the piece in the same haunting way as Hymie’s seventy-eight of Errol Garner.
‘Bloody hell, Doc, where’d you learn to do that!’ It was the first time I’d sworn in Doc’s presence but he seemed not to notice. ‘Okey-dokey, Mr Schmarty-Pantz, who is a person called W. C. Handy?’
‘He sounds like a lavatory brush,’ I said flippantly.
‘Mr W. C. Handy wrote this music, and now you want to play it without heart and even without knowing who is the composer! Would you do this to Beethoven or Bach? No, I think not. But now Mr Schmarty-Pantz thinks to play the black man’s music is easy.’
‘Sorry, Doc, it was only a joke. I only wanted to shock you.’
‘Then to shock me you must play me bad music, not play me good music badly,’ he said softly.
I was the one who had been shocked and Doc had in the process taught me once again to do my research and my thinking before I did my judging. ‘Where’d you learn to play like that, Doc?’
Doc laughed. ‘So long ago, ja, when I write my first book on cactus in North America, I was in New Orleans. I had no money so I played fifteen minutes classical every night in a fancy cathouse, the Golden Slipper. Ja, this is the name of that place. After I play comes every night a jazz band and soon we talk and so on and so forth and they think the German professor is very funny, but not my music, the rich people who come to this cathouse, they don’t understand Mr Beethoven and Chopin and Brahms. But the black men, they understood. I teach them a little of this and a little of that and they teach me a little of that and a little of this,’ he touched the keys and played a couple of bars of blues music. ‘It was here I meet Mr W. C. Handy and later also Mr Willie Smith.’
‘You met Willie Smith!’ I yelled at him. ‘The Willie Smith?’
‘Ja, I think there is only one.’
‘Doc, please, please teach me how to play jazz piano.’
Doc laughed, and affecting his version of an American accent replied, ‘Not on your sweet-tootin’ nelly, Peekay.’
‘Please, Doc!’
He shook his head. ‘I cannot teach you what I cannot feel. Peekay, you must understand this. It is not possible for a man to touch the heart of the negro man’s music when he cannot feel it through his fingers.’
Doc had just explained to me why I would never amount to much musically. What Geel Piet knew I had as a boxer, Doc knew I lacked as a musician.
I would leave Doc at eleven o’clock and by a quarter past I had arrived at Miss Bornstein’s house. Mr Bornstein who, as I mentioned before, was a lawyer in partnership with Mr Andrews, had a big white double-storey house designed in the Cape Dutch style. A huge bougainvillea creeper cascaded purple bloom over one side of the house, its mass of purple blossom stark and beautiful against the wall so gleaming white that it hurt to look at it in the near noon sun. The next impression the eye met was of the sweeping lawns which smelt of cut grass and never seemed to lose their wet green look even in the late summer when every other lawn seemed strawed and faded from the heat. There were other things in the garden, trees and tropical shrubs and a bed of deep red canna. And of course all the usual junk like roses and things. But all I seem to remember is the dramatic splash of the deep purple bougainvillea against the blinding white of the house, the green, perfectly manicured lawns and the chit-chit-chit of the hose spitting stingy jets of water somewhere in the garden.
I’d spend the first half-hour or less, depending only on whether I could hold out that long, playing a game of chess with old Mr Bornstein. He would always checkmate me with the same words: ‘Not so shameful. Tomorrow maybe, if God spares us, you will win.’ God spared us but I never won.
A houseboy in a white starched coat would then bring me a glass of milk and two chocolate biscuits, my favourite. Then the lesson would begin. We’d work until two o’clock when the same boy brought in a jug of orange juice and a plate of polony and tomato sandwiches, also my favourite.
Miss Bornstein was determined that I should win a Rhodes scholarship and go to Oxford, and the work we did was far in excess of anything I needed to know to pass my matriculation. With her pushing me, particularly in Latin and Greek, by weekly letter and during the school holidays and with the tuition reserved for Sinjun’s People I was probably getting as fine an education as it was possible for anyone of my age to absorb.
After orange juice and sandwiches I was free. Some days I’d spend the afternoon with Mrs Boxall or help Granpa in the garden or play a little snooker down at the Impala Hotel with John Hopkins and Geoffrey Scruby and some of the other guys all of whom, like me, were going to boarding school. They’d drink a couple of beers and smoke a little and we’d all generally act a bit tough with each other, though I was always in training and neither smoked nor drank.
I was beginning to understand how intellect separates men. For common ground we would talk rugby and cricket and girls. Daily we destroyed the reputations of the girls who’d been in class with us in primary school and who were now supposedly screwing like rattlesnakes. We never quite worked out with whom, it was always supposed to be someone older than ourselves, like Paul Everingham and Bob Goodhead who were in form six at Jeepe High and both had their school colours for rugby and cricket.
Puberty had taken a fierce and urgent grip on all of us so that the fantasy of fucking was never more than an unuttered sentence away. But my mind, when it wasn’t on sex, was different. I guess it had always been, but now the dichotomy was beginning to show. I didn’t feel superior, there was nothing to be superior about, my mind simply seemed to gaze over different intellectual landscapes. I dare say had I not been a boxer and rugby player and greatly respected for the former, the rest of the chaps in Barberton would have dismissed me as a brain and a bit of a loner.
I found Doc, Mrs Boxall, Miss Bornstein and old Mr Bornstein a source of stimulation, but the adult mind has lost much of its craziness, its zany quality and I missed the verbal jousting that Hymie supplied in our day-to-day relationship at school. In fact, when I got back to school after the holidays, it would take me a couple of days to get my verbal riposte sharp and my timing right again.
‘Christ, Peekay, your brain’s addled by too much deep and meaningful discussion about the weather and the crops and whether the locusts will come again this year!’ Hymie would tease. Atherton, Pissy and Cunning-Spider also shared an intelligence which would readily mix into a really good verbal over an abstract point simply for the love of argument itself.
Hymie would contend that anything, no matter how banal, could be raised to the level of intelligent debate if the minds which attended to it were good enough. He told the story of the little cobbler in a shtetl in Russia who was spreading honey on a piece of bread when the bread fell to the floor. To his amazement the bread fell right side up. ‘How can this be?’ he said, and with the slice of bread in his hand he ran to consult the rabbi and the village elders. ‘We are Jews in Russia, how can it be that I spread honey on my bread and when it fell to the floor it landed right side up? Since when did luck such as this come to a Jew?’ The rabbi and the elders pondered the point for several days, consulting the Torah frequently. Finally they called the little cobbler to the synagogue. The rabbi pronounced the verdict, ‘The answer my boy is quite clear, you honeyed your bread on the wrong side.’
We had all cawed and moaned at the story but Hymie, as usual, had made his point, good conversational debate was an end in itself and talking for the love of conversation is what makes us human.
That Easter holiday Doc and I had planned an overnight hike to a waterfall we knew about some twelve miles past Saddleback Pass. As waterfalls go it wasn’t a major one but it tumbled down through an area of rainforest which, in our only previous visit, we’d come across too late to explore properly. The cliffs rising above the forest looked interesting and Doc was sure we’d find succulents and several species of dwarf aloe in the rocky crags and ledges. I had been concerned when Doc had suggested the hike, it was a good twenty miles across the mountains and Doc was over eighty. Just how far over no one knew and while he was as lean as a twist of liquorice and tough as a mountain goat it was a hard day’s march by any standards, and in the notes he had made on our previous trip nearly eight years earlier, he’d noted that the hike had been an exhausting one.
He had answered my protests with typical Doc logic. ‘Peekay, if not now it will be never again. Our work here is unfinished, the topography, see I have made a drawing here in my notes, suggests limestone in the cliffs. If this is true it is rare, almost impossible, some geological freak happenings maybe?
Doc knew he’d stirred my need for adventure, and the prospect of finding something that shouldn’t be there allowed me to brush my concern aside and agree that we should undertake the trip.
Doc had managed to postpone his little girls for Friday and we set out at dawn with our blanket rolls, billy cans and enough food for two days, as well as a hurricane lamp, Doc’s eight-battery Eveready torch, rope, a small hammer and a dozen homemade metal spikes hooked at the ends to secure the rope if necessary. Gert had made these for Doc in the prison metal shop soon after he’d left prison and they’d been invaluable for scrambling up rock faces now that Doc wasn’t as young a mountain goat as he pretended to be.
By the time the sun rose over the escarpment and filled the de Kaap valley, we had climbed the foothills and were into the mountains proper. The aloe and thorn scrub were replaced by scree and tussock grass, turning to rocky crags where the wind can be cold even on a hot day. We often saw an eagle high above us seemingly drifting without purpose, carried by the currents of air. With a stop for lunch of cheese and cream crackers, washed down by a billy of sweet black tea, we crossed Saddleback Pass in the early afternoon and started the climb down the other side. By late afternoon we’d reached the peculiar formation of mountain cliffs rising above the deep kloof of rainforest Doc had noted in his diary.
We made camp beside a mountain brook flowing from the waterfall which dropped like a bridal veil down the far edge of the cliffs above us. I had chosen our campsite on the edge of the rainforest where an overhanging rock protected us from the wind. It can get bitterly cold during the night in the mountains and we set about collecting firewood before we lost the light. High above us we first heard and then saw a troop of baboons climbing the strange cliff face and running along the white ledges eroded into the face of the rock. Their urgent barking echoed down into the kloof where we’d made our camp.
Doc put his field glasses onto the cliff. ‘It’s too much shadow now, but I think tomorrow we find up there for sure something.’
Darkness comes quickly in the mountains and less than an hour after we’d arrived the sun had set, throwing the deep kloof into shadow. Even though there was still some light I got the fire for supper going, the dry branches crackling and popping with plenty of smoke to ward off the mosquitoes which always seem to come from nowhere moments after sunset. I set about making our supper while Doc washed at the stream. Chopping an onion and two tomatoes into a billy can, I then upended a can of bully beef into the billy, mashing it all together with my hunting knife, ready for when the fire would glow down so that it would cook slowly. I’d already trapped two large sweet potatoes under the unmade fire so that we’d be able to pluck them out of the cooking embers later for dessert. The rainforest grew dark first, the clear outlines of the giant tree ferns smudged and then blackened into darkness while high up in a yellow wood tree a couple of green loeries called out one last time before they called it a day. Next the valley on the edge of the forest where we’d camped dimmed down for the night, closing out the light, blurring rock and bush and tree. Finally the sky on the high ridge above us pulled a dark sheet over us and pinned it with stars. The distant sound of falling water from the falls seemed to emphasise the silence. Doc spoke quietly in the night. ‘No one has written a great symphony or even a concerto about Africa. Why is this so?’
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.
Doc took his notebook from the rucksack and turned to a crude sketch he’d made of the cliff from the ground level the previous afternoon. ‘Ja, we are sitting now in the deepest ledge, above is harder rock and not so deep striations.’ He sighed, clearly puzzled. Doc didn’t like to be wrong about his observations which he would only have permitted himself to voice after a great deal of careful consideration. ‘Well, Peekay, we found dolomite and also there is water, but no cave. This is very strange. You can see the waterfall comes straight from the cliff, the stream must run deep inside the face of the cliff. There should be caves. Ja, this is so, absoloodle.’
I walked back to the wall at the end of the ledge and peeked over the edge, hoping to find a small ledge which would take us further across the face. About three feet below me a small ridge of rock, no more than six inches wide, ran for two or three yards and then took a slight turn so I was unable to see whether it continued. I swung my body over the edge of the ledge, dangling my feet until they reached the narrow ridge of rock. With my stomach against the cliff I edged my way along it. I’d hardly moved more than three feet when I found myself looking directly into a hole in the cliff, about two feet wide and three feet high. I was able to look some ten feet down the tunnel before it turned to darkness. It was quite clearly an entrance to a cave, and not simply a tunnel worn into the rock. A fire bush grew from a crack in the rock to the right of the opening to conceal it from being seen from below. Suddenly a bat flew out of the tunnel, blurred past me, and I heard the unmistakable squeak of bats deep in the rock face. I was certain I had found a cave.
‘I’ve found it! We’ve found our cave!’ I yelled. My voice, hugely magnified, echoed down the valley. It would take very little effort to lift myself up into the hole, but holes have a habit of containing surprises infinitely worse than a few hundred harmless bats. So I edged back to where Doc was waiting. Helping me back up onto the ledge, Doc too was excited. ‘So, I am right, Peekay,’ he said triumphantly. I explained that if we could secure a rope handrail it would be possible for him to follow me into the cave.
We discussed a way of doing this for some time. Then, hammering a couple of spikes into the floor of the ledge, we secured one end of the rope through the eyes of the spikes, both of us pulling on the rope to make sure the spikes were firmly bedded into the rock. Next we tied the rope to my waist and I tucked three spikes, the hammer and Doc’s torch into the back of my belt where I could reach back and get them comfortably. Doc paid out the rope as I slid backwards, down onto the thin lip of rock below the ledge. Had I fallen it was unlikely Doc would have been able to haul me back again but I was very sure on my feet and unconcerned by heights. In less than thirty seconds I was in front of the cave entrance. I lifted myself through the hole with comparative ease and commenced to crawl along the narrow tunnel which continued in a slightly upward direction for about twenty feet then widened out. I untied the rope from around my waist and removed the long silver torch from my belt. The daylight had disappeared by the time I’d crawled to the end of the tunnel so I switched on the powerful Eveready to find that the tunnel led into a cave which appeared to be about fifteen feet long and equally wide, while being high enough for me to stand upright.
The cave smelt powerfully of baboon and bats. As I played the torch around the walls I could see hundreds of bats hanging from the roof and the walls. I returned down the narrow passage to the cliff face, and sticking my head out yelled at Doc that I’d found a big cave. My voice echoed down the valley as the barking of the baboons had done the previous evening and again that morning.
‘It’s not too hard, Doc. I’ll hammer a couple of spikes into the tunnel wall and tie the rope and you can use it as a handrail to come across.’ I set about this task, drawing the rope tight so that it made a firm handrail from the ledge into the mouth of the tunnel. Doc was a fearless old coot and dropping himself backwards onto the rock ridge and holding the rope he quickly edged across the cliff face to the mouth of the tunnel. I pulled him in and now he was lying on his belly looking into the dark tunnel.
‘Wunderbar, Peekay, a cave. How big? A big one, yes?’ he panted.
‘You’ll have to crawl, it’s slightly upwards. Follow the torch, it’s only about twenty feet in.’
The cave was not high enough for Doc to stand upright so he squatted holding the torch while I lit the hurricane lamp which he’d brought with him in the rucksack strapped to his back.
I placed the lamp in the middle of the cave where it threw a dim but adequate light and Doc started to examine the walls with the torch beam.
The floor was covered with bat shit. ‘It should smell worse than this.’ Doc took out a box of matches and struck one on the side of his pants. The match flared, momentarily lighting his face. ‘A wind! In here is a wind, from some place else there is coming a wind.’ Doc was right, the flame from the match was flickering and then went out. He shone his torch into the left corner of the cave where a sharp buttress of rock protruded. The torch light played on the rock and as Doc swept the beam to the top of the buttress the light disappeared into a void. We realised that there was an opening beyond it from which came the unmistakable sound of water dripping. We both moved round the back of the rock to discover the opening about four feet above the ground which reached to the ceiling. Doc lit the opening for me to scramble through and he passed the lantern to me and then the torch before following. As he dropped to the ground I swung the powerful torch into the black void.
‘Holy Molenski!’ The torch showed a huge chamber, from the floor and the ceiling of which grew stalactite and stalagmite. The roof of the cave must have been at least forty feet high and the snowy white calcareous structures falling from it, some of which had reached the ground, looked like an illustration from a child’s fairy tale. Pools of infinitely still water on parts of the cave floor mirrored the grotesque shapes, creating an enchanted world which appeared to be carved in crystal.
I handed the torch back to Doc and took up the lantern as we moved forward to explore. Doc kept stopping to train his torch on one or another of the beautiful crystal columns. ‘Absoloodle, absoloodle wunderbar!’ he kept repeating. It was certainly the most amazing natural phenomenon I had ever witnessed and I followed Doc as we explored the huge chamber. We found several fissures in the walls, none of which were wide enough to climb through; we traced the source of the water to a point high in the ceiling from which a constant drip was too rapid for the formation of stalactites. The gradual movement of water seeping through rock collects a load of calcium carbonate, when it finally squeezes through to the ceiling of the cave and reaches the air it sheds its load of calcium carbonate and an infinitely small part of a stalactite is formed. Each drop adds its minute contribution. He pointed to a massive stalactite to our right. ‘Perhaps three hundred thousand years, maybe more.’ Doc’s voice was filled with awe. On the far wall, some sixty feet into the cave, a ledge of rock protruded about fifteen feet from the floor. Above it hung huge spikes of stalactite and clumps of glittering crystals, while directly under the ledge, like grotesque legs to a giant table, stalagmites had grown. A buttress of crystal stalagmite had grown to the one side of the platform to resemble steps leading up to it, so the entire effect was like a magnificent slab held high by crystal shafts with huge spikes of crystallised light suspended above it.
‘Look, Doc, it’s like Merlin’s altar in the crystal cave!’
Doc sucked in his breath, ‘Ja, in such a place went Merlin for sure.’ He pointed to the throne, ‘To lie on this altar and in a hundred and fifty thousand years maybe the body would be a part of this cave. A part of the crystal cave of Africa. Imagine only this, Peekay.’
I grinned. ‘Can you hold off for a while, please Doc, I still need you here.’ The thought of Doc dying had never entered my head. I often thought of him growing old, unable to do things we’d done in the past; but I never thought of him as disappearing, not being there, not being a part of my life. I understood death, it happened at any time. It was a brutal accident like the death of Granpa Chook or Geel Piet, or Big Hettie’s flyweight. Even Big Hettie’s death could be explained in that she was freakishly big and thus fell into the category of unexpected death. Doc did not fall into any of the criteria I had set aside in my mind for death. Doc was calm and reason and order and the kind of death I knew had no part in the expectations for our relationship.
He had walked ahead up to the crystal-like speleothems which formed the steps to the platform. Climbing these, his boots made a scrunching noise on the hard calcium deposits, and soon he stood on the platform. Suddenly, without warning, he squatted and then stretched out full length, so his body was lost from my sight.
‘Ah, come on, Doc! That’s not funny,’ I said, suddenly a little scared. Doc’s torch shone upwards, lighting the stalactites falling from the ceiling above him so that they looked like crystal bolts of lightning frozen in place above him. It was the most frightening and magnificent effect I have ever seen.
Doc’s voice came back to me, sounding serene. ‘It is beautiful, Peekay, we must never tell any person about the crystal cave of Africa.’
‘C’mon, Doc, you’re giving me the creeps,’ I answered, not fully taking in what he had said.
Doc stood up, shining the torch straight into my eyes so that I was blinded by the light. ‘You must promise me, Peekay. It is very important. You must promise, please?’ He withdrew the torch from my face and in the fuzziness the temporary blinding had created he looked just like Merlin, standing between huge spikes of crystal on the platform ten feet above me.
‘Doc, please come down. I promise, now please come down.’
‘Ja, I come. Remember you have promised, Peekay.’ He made his way down from the platform carefully and I ran to give him a hand. He was breathing heavily, and as I helped him down I could feel the excitement in the old man.
We made our way back to the bat cave and Doc shone the Eveready back into the chamber. ‘Peekay, we have found a place in Africa no man has ever seen, the purest magic cave, the crystal cave of Africa.’
‘Come on, Doc, let’s skedaddle, what’s the time?’ He fished into his trouser pocket for his hunter and shone the torch on its face. ‘Half clock ten,’ he said. Doc always told the time in this funny manner.
‘We’ve got to go. If we get back to camp by noon it’ll be dark by the time we get home.’ Fortunately most of the way home was downhill and we knew we would gain a couple of hours on the way back. I calculated it would be around eight that evening before we would be home. Walking the foothills in the dark wouldn’t be much fun and Doc would be exhausted. My anxiety to get going had taken the edge off my excitement. Doc grabbed me by the arm, he was still shaking. ‘Remember, Peekay, this is our cave, the crystal cave belongs only to you and to me.’
‘Okay, Doc, I promise. I already promised. Now let’s get the hell out of here.’ It wasn’t at all like Doc to be so insistent, anyway he knew he could trust me implicitly. The cave had had a tremendous effect on him and I knew he’d want us to come back, though I doubted that he’d be able to make such a tough climb for much longer. I’d cut the rope we’d taken into the cave but had left the rope handrail intact for Doc to use getting out. Once we were back on the ledge I began to retrieve the two metal spikes, as we’d already lost two by having to leave them embedded in the tunnel wall.
‘No, leave them, Peekay,’ Doc said suddenly, ‘there is no time.’ It was unlike Doc, who was always very careful about equipment. We’d account for everything before moving on from a camp site or where we had been collecting specimens. It was the first time he had ever been devious and I realised how emotionally charged he had become over the crystal cave; the old bugger was determined to come back.
We arrived back in the foothills above the town just as a giant moon was coming up over the escarpment, flooding the de Kaap valley in silver light. It was a full moon again and that was always a difficult time for me. It had been a full moon when Granpa Chook died and while the memory of that funny old rooster had dimmed, when the moon was full memories came galloping through the silver night to sadden me. It had also been a full moon when Geel Piet had died.
I was right, this would be the last big trek with Doc, who was at the point of collapse by the time we finally reached his cottage. I laid him on top of his bed and removed his boots. He had two large blisters, one under each big toe, so I threaded a needle and cotton and ran a loop of cotton through each blister which I then tied, leaving them overnight to drain the fluid. It was a technique Doc had shown me years before and I knew that by morning the blisters would have flattened and there would be no pain. I washed his face and put Vaseline over a cut under his eye and threw an army blanket over him. He was a tough old blighter and in the morning I was pretty sure he’d be okay.
‘Ours. The crystal cave, Africa. You, me, Peekay,’ he mumbled and then seemed to drift off into sleep. I waited until his breathing was deep and even before leaving for home. On the way the moon was so bright that one could see the purple blossom of the jacaranda trees. I was saddened at the thought of never again being with him in the high mountains. Each time I came back from school Doc seemed a little more frail. We had found the crystal cave of Africa but would I see it only once? Perhaps I would return, perhaps not. When you share things, as Doc and I had done, somehow it seemed wrong to halve the secret by returning alone. I thought of the rope rotting and perhaps in a hundred years they’d find the holes where the spikes had long since rusted out and observe the rust stains in the dolomite. They’d search and find minute metal fragments which they’d analyse, and then propound all sorts of theories that would have nothing to do with a six foot seven inch German professor of music and the future welterweight boxing champion of the world.