The mask: A savage story from the African past, by Stuart Cloete

The mask: A savage story from the African past, by Stuart Cloete.

The mask: A savage story from the African past, by Stuart Cloete.

Stuart Cloete dedicated his novel The mask: A savage story from the African past to the memory of twenty-eight Boers murdered by the Ndebele in September 1854.

Stuart Cloete  

The water flowed slowly past the reeds that edged the drift. It was some hours since the last wagon had crossed the Nyl as the Boers called this little river. The wheel spoor at the water's edge had been smoothed off, planed away by the slow-moving current. The birds were black. A black heron shaded its eyes with raised wings as it peered into the dark brown water looking for the small frogs and fish on which it lived. A flock of white cattle egrets were perched on the three big thorns that shaded the outspan. This evening no one was camped here. There were no tented wagons drawn up by the roadside. No smoke rose from cooking fires. No oxen grazed. No children played. Except for the road leading to Zoutpansberg there was no sign that man, either black or white, had ever been here. There was no sound except for the bark of a baboon in the hills and the cries of the tick birds quarrelling as they roosted. But this drift was the hub of events that were to come. From the south, the east, the west and the north people were moving through time toward it, driven to this pinpoint in Africa by thè pressures of their various circumstances. Driven by hopes of profit, by the love of adventure, by a desire for war, revenge and blood. Then, in 1852, this place was known as the Nyl drift. A good place to outspan and camp. There was grass and water and shade trees. There was game for the pot and what more, in so wild a country, could a man ask of God than this? To-day it is called Moorddrift, the murder ford. And a monument to the dead still to be massacred here, stands in Potgietersras, the nearest town. In the north men talked with nostalgia of the south whence they had come trekking so arduously over the plains and mountains to reach this, the end of the white man's world. In the south the young men talked of the north, the place where life was free, the farms wide and unsurveyed, the hunting good and the rewards, for those who survived, beyond the imagination of man. Of course both the rewards and the nostalgias were exaggerated. Those in the south were loath to give up their comfortable thatched homesteads ; those in the north, whatever the hardships they endured, were unready to return to the circumscribed lives they and their fathers had led at the Cape. But each had their dreams. For this is the nature of man, to dream about what he has not got. About what he has lost or dare not seek. To-day as in those days the same sun still shines over the drift in the daytime, the same stars still pierce the cloak of the night. They were the same, too, before men came here and only the wild beasts drank from the banks of the river. The wild beasts and the little yellow bushmen hunters who later were crushed, ground to nothingness between the black millstone of Kaffirs coming from the north and the white adventuring farmers advancing from the south. Of them only their paintings in the hills remain as a testament. And perhaps a little of their blood, for conquerors seldom exterminate a race totally. The women, or at least the youngest of them, are often spared. But this was the day of the beast; of the elephant, the rhinoceros, the seacow, the camel, or kameel as the Boers called the giraffe. Vast herds of springbuck, hartebeest, eland, zebra and wildebeest roamed the bush. Buffalo stood with curved massive scimitar horns chewing their cuds in the shade of the trees. [...]

This is an excerpt from the novel: The mask: A savage story from the African past, by Stuart Cloete:

Title: The Mask
Subtitle: A savage story from the African past
Author: Stuart Cloete
Publisher: Fontana Books
4th impression. London and Glasgow, 1973
ISBN 0006128572 / ISBN 0-00-612857-2
Original softcover, 11x18 cm, 191 pages

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