The JRB presents new short fiction by Simon van Schalkwyk.
Antlers
Anyone who has visited Giant’s Castle will know the story of Rock 75. Carved into a stone midway between the Main Caves and Meander Hut, the number commemorates the 75th Carbineers Regiment under a certain Major Dunford, dispatched by the British colonial administration to quash a rebellion by Chief Langalibalele, who refused to pay taxes. It’s said that the chief made his way up a Bushman path but fell, alongside five of the Regiment’s men, in a bloody skirmish in 1873. The names of these men have been given over to the mountain.
Less well known—the details have not made their way into the tourist brochures and travel maps that can be bought at the reception desk of the Giant’s Castle resort—is the story of the last ‘wild’ Bushman of South Africa, a man shot and killed in 1873 for having been a member of a species designated ‘vermin’ by colonial law. Relegated to a note by Bristow, this man supposedly carried with him a belt of horns in which powders and unguents were kept for marking the rocks of the Drakensberg. It is generally agreed that the paintings adorning the boulders in the Main Caves, one of which depicts a bushman with the head of an eland, were produced by this nameless, faceless man.
But there is another, much earlier story that has left less of a trace. It tells of Lt Gen M——’s band of marauders who, long before the construction of the Meander Hut, had broken away from Napier’s 72nd Highlanders before making their way deep into Natália only to be overcome by strange afflictions during one eerily endless winter. According to a diary kept by one of these men, a certain Brig S——, the trouble began soon after the sudden cessation of a severe and unseasonal blizzard, which had forced the band to hunker down in the foothills of the Kamberg for several weeks. Emerging from their tents, these men were confronted by a landscape that seemed startlingly transformed and wholly unfamiliar to them. Their maps were useless—mountains had appeared where there should not have been mountains, and rivers had been replaced by ravines. They checked their compasses to no avail: the needles spun as if they were at the centre of the magnetic poles and the moon and stars shared the sky with a blood-blue sun. In the distance, they heard the barking echo of a solitary baviaan.
Lt Gen M—— sent out a scout. He did not return. He sent out two more. They, too, vanished without a trace. Unnerved, the Lt Gen ordered his remaining troops to march north, which they did, setting and striking camp and murmuring among themselves around nightly fires. Their provisions ran low. They shot at small animals in the bush, against the officer’s orders. Preserve your ammunition, he said, or aim true. They ate the charred flesh, saying nothing. They shot at animals. Missed. Their ammunition ran low. They ran low on water. Some of them fell ill, fell to the back of the troop, fell. There were skirmishes. Some defected, slipping quietly away under cover of darkness, never to be seen again. Eventually, Lt Gen M—— ordered them to set up camp at the edge of what must have been a small lake once, now frozen over, the fish staring up at them silently from beneath the transparent ice.
And then, one day, one of the defectors returned. A sorry state. Fever. Delirium. Whispering something about distant, barking figures—men resembling baboons, or baboons resembling men—plinthed on the hilltop, shimmering in the green mist. The Lt Gen had it out of him. No response when hailed. No movement when the trooper cracked a shot across the ravines. The thing moving only when the trooper moved. Mirror-man, mirage. The trooper waited until nightfall. Held off sleep and crept across the cracked ground and up the hard cutting terrain towards his mark, found the dying embers of a fire. Then heard a barking from the direction from which he had come and saw, or thought he saw, the shadow of his enemy standing by his abandoned bivouac. Returning there to ransacked belongings, the trooper felt his tongue dry to a choke.
The figure continued to linger on the horizon in the days that followed, as the trooper, suffering hunger and thirst and then fever, struggled onward. And then, one day, he stumbled down a steep incline, into the thick-clumped grasses of baboon-paths. Turned a wrist badly, turned a knee, almost turned his neck. There was no telling, he said, how long he lay there, in the thorns, amid the glossy red berries, gnawed at by the ants and the gnats. Swore he saw above him, the thing perched on the krans. He could not explain how he came out of that place nor recall the journey back here. He died quietly with open eyes, the blue sun imprinted upon his blank pupils.
The Lt Gen arranged a burial but the ground was unyielding, so he had some of his men cover the body with stones and he said a quiet prayer over the cairn. They moved out again, north, across icefields that glared at them undutifully. After three days they found the body of another defector, ugly rend across the bloodless torso, inspected by buzzards.
The Lt Gen’s diary re-emerged when it was exchanged for salt at an Indian trading post not far from Kolobeng. From there, it somehow found its way first into Shepstone’s colonial administration, and, later, the library of the Natal Mounted Police. It was here that it seems to have come to the attention of a colonial magistrate known only by the initials JHM. Claiming that he had been assigned to investigate the so-called Meander Murders, JHM confiscated the diary on behalf of the Cape High Commissioner, Loch. The diary itself was badly damaged during an unseasonal storm when the magistrate returned to the Cape by sea on the Sad Eyed Lady, a clipper that still used the old Cape Route in the years following the opening of the Suez Canal. This is why the magistrate’s report, complete with partial, handwritten copies of the original text, is a godsend. It is this report, which had been kept in the Parliamentary Library, that I have been fortunate enough to consult and which forms the basis of this study.
*
The diary begins with the Lt Gen’s admission at having suffered long spells of delirium and, upon recovery, isolation. Striking out into the Barrier of Spears in search of his vanished party, he espies strange figures on the horizon who seem to shimmer in and out of view. The Lt Gen first speculates, reasonably, that these figures are either defectors or some hitherto unknown enemy. In later entries, however, what were once men become Fata Morgana, symptoms of object agnosia, entoptic phenomena—tricks of the brain and eye.
At some point, the writing drifts away from legibility, words replaced by a series of artful hieroglyphs. And then, as if the Lt Gen had snapped to his senses, it returns to order, but with a decidedly altered focus. With renewed composure, the Lt Gen begins to describe the flora, fauna and meteorology of his immediate environment. The sun is a blue orb that does not offer any heat. The glacial landscape refuses to thaw. He heads into the hills, returns to camp, notes down what he has found: tufts of papio, a tree infested with iridescent emerald beetles. He is aware, he writes calmly, that he is being watched and that the watchers stand plinthed and ready on the horizon, but he refuses to look. He suspects that the watcher is either Hamadryad, Callitrix or Cercopes.
The days between diary entries grow further and further apart. In his notes, the magistrate speculates that the reason for this had much to do with the increased duration of the Lt Gen’s forays into the mountains.
After some deliberation, the magistrate closes the case and shelves the diary. In the ensuing weeks, however, he becomes increasingly distracted from his work by intrusive thoughts about the diary’s final entry, dated 7th October, which contains a single word: ‘Antlers’. He wakes from sleep in the early hours of the morning, shivering in a film of sweat, with one of Lt Gen M—’s hieroglyphs—a curious image of anthropomorphic silhouettes floating across hardeveld—haunting the swiftly dissipating memory of a dream. He suffers a trembling of the wrist and finds himself doodling certain hieroglyphic characters in the margins of new case files brought before him in the circuit courts. Unnerved, he begins to tickle the ears of his entourage with the mystery, hoping by the force of habitual repetition to dampen, if not to entirely exorcise, its hold upon him. It is of little use. Neglecting his duties, he is eventually dismissed. Turning to the church, he subjects himself to confession, pleading with the dominee for absolution. Finally, he boards a merchant vessel, the Duppy, to minister to unrepentant sealers bound for the Southern Seas and Antarctica.
*
I reproduce here a photograph that, to my mind, bears an uncanny resemblance to the hieroglyph that haunted the magistrate’s dreams. In my investigations into this subject, I happened quite by chance upon a very similar set of images that had been sketched by twin sisters who, at that time, were being interviewed by a certain Duggmoore de La Boétie, an acquaintance of Lucy Lloyd. De La Boétie had been moved to interview these twins, orphaned after the Schwarzkommando’s incursion into South West Africa and adopted by a settler woman known only by the number 3-6-5 seared into the now ample flesh of her upper arm, as they passed through the Cape in search of a new life in the earliest stages of the last century.
The sisters were … uncanny. Inseparable, always whispering to each other in their own language, click click click. To ward off the oppressive memory that had attached itself to their given names, it was decided that they should be rechristened—Nienke, Grazjyna—before they made the journey south, to the Cape, to begin their lives anew. Nienke had one blind eye with which she claimed to be able to see tomorrow. Grazjyna spat flies out of the summer air and told people what they were thinking.
During his sessions with them, De La Boétie had been struck by the sisters’ frequent repetition of the word, ǀHúnntuǃattǃatte̥n. After consulting Lloyd, who admitted that she had never heard the word mentioned by any of her informants, De La Boétie urged the sisters to communicate its meaning by visual means. The prints they produced during these sessions, a series of peculiar hieroglyphic images, were very much like the image above. Yet far from representing two floating figures, my research into comparative grammar and the new science of natural history leads me to suspect that what is being depicted here is in fact the eye of ǀHúnntuǃattǃatte̥n, Mother of Porcupine, who, according to local folklore, peers out at us from her dwelling-place on the hillsides and mountains of this land.
From, Colbe, Hensley Christopher. ‘“Antlers’: A Study of Potential Cryptid Activity in the Colonial Records of Natalia, and Various Oral Sources’, a mini-dissertation submitted to the Department of Theosophy in the Faculty of Postnormal Science and Uncertainty, University of Cabe Town, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for a Master’s Degree, September 26, 1977.
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- Simon van Schalkwyk is the Academic Editor. His latest work is a collection of poems, Transcontinental Delay.
