The Sun Between Their Feet Read online

  ‘I see you!’ shouted the old man spitefully. They did not move. He stumped into the little whitewashed house, hearing the wooden veranda creak angrily under his feet. His daughter was sewing in the front room, threading a needle held to the light.

  He stopped again, looking back into the garden. The couple were now sauntering among the bushes, laughing. As he watched he saw the girl escape from the youth with a sudden mischievous movement, and run off through the flowers with him in pursuit. He heard shouts, laughter, a scream, silence.

  ‘But it’s not like that at all,’ he muttered miserably. ‘It’s not like that. Why can’t you see? Running and giggling, and kissing and kissing. You’ll come to something quite different.’

  He looked at his daughter with sardonic hatred, hating himself. They were caught and finished, both of them, but the girl was still running free.

  ‘Can’t you see?’ he demanded of his invisible granddaughter, who was at that moment lying in the thick green grass with the postmaster’s son.

  His daughter looked at him and her eyebrows went up in tired forbearance.

  ‘Put your birds to bed?’ she asked, humouring him.

  ‘Lucy,’ he said urgently. ‘Lucy …’

  ‘Well, what is it now?’

  ‘She’s in the garden with Steven.’

  ‘Now you just sit down and have your tea.’

  He stumped his feet alternately, thump, thump, on the hollow wooden floor and shouted: ‘She’ll marry him. I’m telling you, she’ll be marrying him next!’

  His daughter rose swiftly, brought him a cup, set him a plate.

  ‘I don’t want any tea. I don’t want it, I tell you.’ ‘Now, now,’ she crooned. ‘What’s wrong with it? Why not?’

  ‘She’s eighteen. Eighteen!’

  ‘I was married at seventeen and I never regretted it.’

  ‘Liar,’ he said. ‘Liar. Then you should regret it. Why do you make your girls marry? It’s you who do it. What do you do it for? Why?’

  ‘The other three have done fine. They’ve three fine husbands. Why not Alice?’

  ‘She’s the last,’ he mourned. ‘Can’t we keep her a bit longer?’

  ‘Come, now, dad. She’ll be down the road, that’s all. She’ll be here every day to see you.’

  ‘But it’s not the same.’ He thought of the other three girls, transformed inside a few months from charming petulant spoiled children into serious young matrons.

  ‘You never did like it when we married,’ she said. ‘Why not? Every time, it’s the same. When I got married you made me feel like it was something wrong. And my girls the same. You get them all crying and miserable the way you go on. Leave Alice alone. She’s happy.’ She sighed, letting her eyes linger on the sunlit garden. ‘She’ll marry next month. There’s no reason to wait.’

  ‘You’ve said they can marry?’ he said incredulously.

  ‘Yes, dad, why not?’ she said coldly, and took up her sewing.

  His eyes stung, and he went out on to the veranda. Wet spread down over his chin and he took out a handkerchief and mopped his whole face. The garden was empty.

  From around the comer came the young couple; but their faces were no longer set against him. On the wrist of the postmaster’s son balanced a young pigeon, the light gleaming on its breast.

  ‘For me?’ said the old man, letting the drops shake off his chin. ‘For me?’

  ‘Do you like it?’ The girl grabbed his hand and swung on it. ‘It’s for you, Grandad. Steven brought it for you.’ They hung about him, affectionate, concerned, trying to charm away his wet eyes and his misery. They took his arms and directed him to the shelf of birds, one on each side, enclosing him, petting him, saying wordlessly that nothing would be changed, nothing could change, and that they would be with him always. The bird was proof of it, they said, from their lying happy eyes, as they thrust it on him. ‘There, Grandad, it’s yours. It’s for you.’

  They watched him as he held it on his wrist, stroking its soft, sun-warmed back, watching the wings lift and balance.

  ‘You must shut it up for a bit,’ said the girl intimately. ‘Until it knows this is its home.’

  ‘Teach your grandmother to suck eggs,’ growled the old man.

  Released by his half-deliberate anger, they fell back, laughing at him. ‘We’re glad you like it.’ They moved off, now serious and full of purpose, to the gate, where they hung, backs to him, talking quietly. More than anything could, their grown-up seriousness shut him out, making him alone; also, it quietened him, took the sting out of their tumbling like puppies on the grass. They had forgotten him again. Well, so they should, the old man reassured himself, feeling his throat clotted with tears, his lips trembling. He held the new bird to his face, for the caress of its silken feathers. Then he shut it in a box and took out his favourite.

  ‘Now you can go,’ he said aloud. He held it poised, ready for flight, while he looked down the garden towards the boy and the girl. Then, clenched in the pain of loss, he lifted the bird on his wrist, and watched it soar. A whirr and a spatter of wings, and a cloud of birds rose into the evening from the dovecote.

  At the gate Alice and Steven forgot their talk and watched the birds.

  On the veranda, that woman, his daughter, stood gazing, her eyes shaded with a hand that still held her sewing.

  It seemed to the old man that the whole afternoon had stilled to watch his gesture of self-command, that even the leaves of the trees had stopped shaking.

  Dry-eyed and calm, he let his hands fall to his sides and stood erect, staring up into the sky.

  The cloud of shining silver birds flew up and up, with a shrill cleaving of wings, over the dark ploughed land and the darker belts of trees and the bright folds of grass, until they floated high in the sunlight, like a cloud of motes of dust.

  They wheeled in a wide circle, tilting their wings so there was flash after flash of light, and one after another they dropped from the sunshine of the upper sky to shadow, one after another, returning to the shadowed earth over trees and grass and field, returning to the valley and the shelter of night.

  The garden was all a fluster and a flurry of returning birds. Then silence, and the sky was empty.

  The old man turned, slowly, taking his time; he lifted his eyes to smile proudly down the garden at his grand-daughter. She was staring at him. She did not smile. She was wide-eyed, and pale in the cold shadow, and he saw the tears run shivering off her face.

  The Sun Between Their Feet

  The road from the back of the station went to the Roman Catholic Mission, which was a dead-end, being in the middle of a Native Reserve. It was a poor mission, with only one lorry, so the road was always deserted, a track of sand between long or short grasses. The station itself was busy with trains and people, and the good country in front was settled thick with white farmers, but all the country behind the station was unused because it was granite boulders, outcrops, and sand. The scrub cattle from the Reserve strayed there. There were no human beings. From the track it seemed the hills of boulders were so steep and laced with vines and weed there would be no place to go between them. But you could force your way in, and there it became clear that in the past people had made use of this wilderness. For one thing there were the remains of earth and rock defences built by the Mashona against the Matabele when they came raiding after cattle and women before Rhodes put an end to all that.* For another, the under-surfaces of the great boulders were covered with Bushmen paintings. After a hundred yards or so of clambering and squeezing there came a flattish sandy stretch before the boulders erupted again. In this space, at the time of the raiding, the women and the cattle would have been kept while the men held the surrounding defences. From this space, at the time of the Bushmen, small hunting-men took coloured clays, and earths, and plant juices for their pictures.

  * Since writing this I have understood that this version of history is not necessarily the true one. Some Mashona authorities dispute it.

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sp; It had rained last night and the low grass was still wet around my ankles and the early sun had not dried the sand. There was a sharp upjut of rock in the middle of the space. The rock was damp, and I could feel the wet heat being dragged up past my bare legs.

  Sitting low here, the encircling piles of boulders seemed like mountains, heightening the sky on tall horizons. The rocks were dark grey, but stained with lichens. The trees between the boulders were meagre, and several were lightning-struck, no more than black skeletons. This was hungry country, growing sand and thin grass and rocks and heat. The sun came down hard between heat-conserving rocks. After an hour of sun the sand between the grasses showed a clean, dry, glistening surface, and a dark wet underneath.

  The Reserve cattle must have moved here since the rains last night, for there were a score of fresh cow pats laid on the grass. Big blue flies swore and tumbled over them, breaking the crust the sun had baked. The air was heavy and sweet. The buzzing of the flies, the tiny sucking sound of the heat, the cooing of the pigeons, made a morning silence.

  Hot, and silent; and save for the flies, no movement anywhere, for what winds there were blew outside this sheltered space.

  But soon there was new movement. Where the flies had broken the crust of the nearest dung-clot, two beetles were at work. They were small, dusty, black, round-bodied beetles. One had set his black legs over a bit of dung and was heaving and levering at it. The other, with a fast rolling movement, the same that a hen makes settling roused feathers over eggs, was using his body to form the ball even before it was heaved clear of the main lump of matter. As soon as the piece was freed, both beetles assaulted it with legs and bodies, modelling fast, frantic with creation, seizing it between their back legs, spinning it, rolling it under them, both tugging and pushing it through the thick encumbering grass stems that rose over them like forest trees until at last the ball rolled away from them into a plain, or glade, or inch-wide space of sand. The two beetles scuttled about among the stems, looking for their property. They were on the point of starting again on the mother-pile of muck, when one of them saw the ball lying free in the open, and both ran after it.

  All over the grassy space around the cow pats, dung-beetles were at work, the blowflies hustled and buzzed, and by night all the new cow-stomach-worked grass would be lifted away, rolled away, to feed flies, beetles and new earth. That is, unless it rained hard again, when everything would be scattered by rods of rain.

  But there was no sign of rain yet. The sky was the clear slow blue of African mornings after night-storms. My two beetles had the sky on their side. They had all day.

  The book says that dung-beetles form a ball of dung, lay their eggs on it, search for a gentle slope, roll the ball up it, and then allow it to roll down again so that in the process of rolling ‘the pellet becomes compacted’.

  Why must the pellet be compacted? Presumably so that the blows of sun and rain do not beat it to fragments. Why this complicated business of rolling up and rolling down?

  Well, it is not for us to criticize the processes of nature; so I sat on top of the jutting rock, and watched the beetles rolling the ball towards it. In a few minutes of work they had reached it, and had hurled themselves and the dung-ball at its foot. Their momentum took them a few inches up the slope, then they slipped, and ball and beetles rolled back to the flat again.

  I got down off the rock, and sat in the grass behind them to view the ascent through their eyes.

  The rock was about four feet long and three feet high. It was a jutting slab of granite, wooded and lichened, its edges blunted by rain and by wind. The beetles, hugging their ball between legs and bellies, looked up to a savage mountain, whose first slopes were an easy foot-assisting invitation. They rolled their ball, which was now crusted with dirt, to a small ridge under the foothills, and began, this time with slow care, to hitch it up from ridge to ridge, from one crust of lichen to the next. One beetle above, one below, they cherished their ball upwards. Soon they met the obstruction that had defeated them before: a sudden upswelling in the mountain wall. This time, one remained below the ball, holding its weight on its back legs, while the other scouted off sideways to find an easier path. It returned, gripped the ball with its legs, and the two beetles resumed their difficult, sideways scrambling progress, up around the swell in the rock into a small valley which led, or so it seemed, into the second great stage of the ascent. But this valley was a snare, for there was a crevasse across it. The mountain was riven. Heat and cold had split it to its base, and the narrow crack sloped down to a mountain lake full of warm fresh water over a bed of wind-gathered leaves and grass. The dung-ball slipped over the edge of the crevasse into the gulf, and rolled gently into the lake where it was supported at its edge by a small fringe of lichen. The beetles flung themselves after it. One straddling desperate legs from a raft of reed to the shore, held the ball from plunging into the depths of the lake. The other, gripping fast with its front legs to a thick bed of weed on shore, grappled the ball with its back legs, and together they heaved and shoved that precious dung out of the water and back into the ravine. But now the mountain walls rose high on either side, and the ball lay between them. The beetles remained still a moment. The dirt had been washed from the dung, and it was smooth and slippery.

  They consulted. Again one remained on guard, while the other scouted, returning to report that if they rolled the ball clear along the bottom of the ravine, this would in due course narrow, and they could, by use of legs and shoulders and backs, lift the ball up the crack to a new height on the mountain and, by crossing another dangerous shoulder, attain a gentle weed-roughed slope that led to the summit. This they tried. But on the dangerous shoulder there was a disaster. The lake-slippery ball left their grasp and plunged down the mountain-side to the ground, to the point they had started from half an hour before. The two beetles flung themselves after it, and again they began their slow difficult climb. Again their dung-ball fell into the crevasse, rolled down into the lake, and again they rescued it, at the cost of infinite resource and patience, again they pushed and pulled it up the ravine, again they manoeuvred it up the crack, again they tried to roll it around the mountain’s sharp shoulder, and again it fell back to the foot of the mountain, and they plunged after it.

  ‘The dung-beetle, Scarabaeus or Aleuchus sacer, lays its eggs in a ball of dung, then chooses a gentle slope, and compacts the pellet by pushing it uphill backwards with its hind legs and allowing it to roll down, eventually reaching its place of deposit.’

  I continued to sit in the low, hot grass, feeling the sun first on my back, then hard down on my shoulders, and then direct from above on my head. The air was dry now, all the moisture from the night had gone up into the air. Clouds were packing the lower skies. Even the small pool in the rock was evaporating. Above it the air quivered with steam. When, for the third time, the beetles lost their ball in the mountain lake, it was no lake, but a spongy marsh, and getting it out involved no danger or difficulty. Now the ball was sticky, had lost its shape, and was crusted with bits of leaf and grass.

  At the fourth attempt, when the ball rolled down to the starting point and the beetles bundled after it, it was past midday, my head ached with heat, and I took a large leaf, slipped it under the ball of dung and the beetles, and lifted this unit away to one side, away from the impossible and destructive mountain.

  But when I slid the leaf from under them, they rested a moment in the new patch of territory, scouted this way and that among the grass-stems, found their position, and at once rolled their ball back to the foot of the mountain where they prepared another ascent.

  Meanwhile, the cow pats on the grass had been dismantled by flies and other dung-beetles. Nothing remained but small grassy fragments, or dusty brown stains on the lifting stems. The buzzing of the flies was silenced. The pigeons were stilled by the heat. Far away thunder rolled, and sometimes there was the shriek of a train at the station or the puffing and clanging of shunting engines.

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sp; The beetles again got the ball up into the ravine, and this time it rolled down, not into a marsh, but into a damp bed of leaves. There they rested awhile in a steam of heat.

  Sacred beetles, these, the sacred beetles of the Egyptians, holding the symbol of the sun between their busy stupid feet. Busy, silly beetles, mothering their ball of dung again and again up a mountain when a few minutes’ march to one side would take them clear of it.

  Again I lifted them, dung and beetles, away from the precipice, to a clear place where they had the choice of a dozen suitable gentle slopes, but they rolled their ball patiently back to the mountain’s foot.

  ‘The slope is chosen,’ says the book, ‘by a beautiful instinct, so that the ball of dung comes to rest in a spot suitable for the hatching of the new generation of sacred insect.’

  The sun had now rolled past midday position and was shining on to my face. Sweat scattered off me. The air snapped with heat. The sky where the sun would go down was banked high with darkening cloud. Those beetles would have to hurry not to get drowned.

  They continued to roll the dung up the mountain, rescue it from the dried bed of the mountain lake, and force it up to the exposed dry shoulder. It rolled down and they plunged after it. Again and again and again, while the ball became a ragged drying structure of fragmented grass clotted with dung. The afternoon passed. The sun was low in my eyes. I could hardly see the beetles or the dung because of the glare from a black pack of clouds which were red-rimmed from the lowering sun behind. The red streaming rays came down and the black beetles and their dung-ball on the mountain-side seemed dissolved in sizzling light.

  It was raining away on the far hills. The drumming of the rain and the drumming of the thunder came closer. I could see the skirmishing side-lances of an army of rain pass half a mile away beyond the rocks. A few great shining drops fell here, and hissed on burning sand and on the burning mountain-side. The beetles laboured on.