The hairs on their leaves rasp at his clothes. The cobs are clubs pressed against the central canes, with a tassel of silky green fringe tagged at the top. To demonstrate, to test a cob he has to slice with his thumbnail through the tight bandage of ribbed leaves that encases it like a mummy. Through the slit the nail suddenly reaches and penetrates the white nubs so young they are not yet quite solid, and their white milky substance flows under the nail and round the cuticle. Even here, there is a great deal of water: coming out of the mealie-field, he has jumped a ditch and landed on a bank that gives way. His left leg plunges before him down into a hole, he is one-legged, lop-sided, windmilling his arms for balance, and he regains it only by landing with one palm hard on the wet, tussocky ground. He doesn’t quite know what to do next, for a moment; he stays there, in this grotesque variation of the position of a runner poised for the starting shot. He could have broken a leg. But he is unhurt. He must get his leg out of the mud, that’s all. It has already seeped in over the top of the boot and through the sole and holds him in a cold thick hand round the ankle. A soft cold black hand. Ugh. It’s simply a matter of getting enough leverage, with the other leg and the rest of his body, to pull himself free. As he heaves, the mud holds him, holds on, hangs on, has him by the leg and won’t let him go, down there. Now it’s just as if someone has both arms tightly round the leg. It’s suction, of course, that’s all; the more he pulls the greater the vacuum. He would get out of his boot if he could, but the leg’s caught nearly to the knee. He pulls and pulls; down there, he’s pulled and pulled. It’s absurd; he’s begun to giggle with queer panicky exasperation.
And then, he’s been let go. That’s exactly how it feels: something lets go — the suction breaks. He has to stump up to the house with an elephantiasis of mud on one foot. It’s heavy as lead. It feels as if part of him is still buried.
Jacobus is full of concern, of course. The good old devil half-carries him to the tap, tries to scrape the mud away with a spade and, making a hell of a mess, twice the mess necessary if he’d been left to deal with it himself, washes the clotted earth clear of the shoe. Alina, on Jacobus’s excitable and confused instructions, finds a pair of veldskoen in the house and brings them. They are a little too short, the old shoes of a half-grown boy. But they will do. That’s what comes of having two places; you never have what you need, in either.
The sun has turned to a thickening blur of radiance and the heat is intense. It’ll come down again, this afternoon.
— Too much rain, Jacobus. —
— Too much rain, master. —
… the heaven was hard and it did not rain. The people persecuted him exceedingly. When he was persecuted I saw him and pitied him, for I saw men come even by night and smite his doorway with clubs, and take him out of his house… And on another year, when they saw that the heaven wished to destroy the corn, they hated him exceedingly… I heard it said that it rained excessively that it might cover the dead body of Umkqaekana with earth. I heard it said they poisoned him and did not stab him. I heard it said that those people were troubled, for their gardens were carried away by a flood.
The weather came from the Moçambique Channel.
Space is conceived as trackless but there are beats about the world frequented by cyclones given female names. One of these beats crosses the Indian Ocean by way of the islands of the Seychelles, Madagascar, and the Mascarenes. The great island of Madagascar forms one side of the Channel and shields a long stretch of the east coast of Africa, which forms the other, from the open Indian Ocean. A cyclone paused somewhere miles out to sea, miles up in the atmosphere, its vast hesitation raising a draught of tidal waves, wavering first towards one side of the island then over the mountains to the other, darkening the thousand up-turned mirrors of the rice paddies and finally taking off again with a sweep that shed, monstrous cosmic peacock, gross paillettes of hail, a dross of battering rain, and all the smashed flying detritus of uprooted trees, tin roofs and dead beasts caught up in it.
From the Moçambique Channel a mass of damp air was pushed out over Southern Africa, and as the other factors — atmospheric pressure, prevailing winds — did not head it off, turned to rain. It began one afternoon but unlike other cloudbursts common on the highveld after a hot morning, did not stop at sunset. The rain went on all night — a really good rain, people remarked, steady and soaking — and continued most of the next day. A set-in rain; one of the three-day rains that, in a good year, mark the beginning of the end of summer and ensure that the grazing will last out well into winter. After three days it did slacken, but the tarpaulin of cloud bulged low with more, and by afternoon it had begun again, a rain steady as ticker-tape. A dark rain, a tropical rain, not the summer storms of a high altitude often lit by the sun still shining in another part of the vast sky.
The English-language evening paper published a picture of a pet dog being rescued from a flooded storm-drain by the fire brigade. In the city, black men put specially-shaped waterproof covers on their hats. On the farm the children huddled along to school in plastic bags that had held superphosphates. The streets of the location returned to the vlei of which it had once been part, and the white policemen at the local station had time to send off entries for several commercial radio competitions: there was a drop in crime.
In the bus queues at the location gates people stood under more sheets of plastic, scavenged from the packing in which the factories near by received materials. The distended buses lurched cautiously round from the gates to the road, their windows steamed-up inside and streaming outside. Location taxis, old and huge, were the first to be stranded by water on the plugs or in the distributor. But soon there were cars from the city, as well, with grimacing white men in raincoats dirtying their handkerchiefs in an attempt to dry off some vital part of the engine, or waiting anxiously for a passing black, bent drenched over a bicycle, to stop and help push the car out of the way of traffic. The traffic moved slower and slower; came to a stop. Sometimes there had been an accident, someone had skidded and caused a collision, and helplessly, clumsy in a chain-mail of rain, a string of cars collided nose-to-tail behind the first, as the coaches of a shunting train buffet each other. Once it was a transport vehicle blocking the way, a huge tented thing from the abattoir. Water streamed over marbled pink statuary of pig-carcases; the attendant workers in their yellow sou‘westers clambered about, black seamen trying to batten down canvas against high seas. The sense of perspective was changed as out on an ocean where, by the very qualification of their designation, no landmarks are recognizable. The familiar shapes of factories lined the road somewhere, if they could have been seen and if what the tyres went over as if greased, engaging with a tangible surface only on intermittent revolutions, was a road somewhere. At the three-way intersection a sheet of water formed through which most vehicles could venture successfully the first few days so long as more rain was not falling too heavily at the time, making visibility nil. When there were children in these cars they shrieked with pleasure and fear at the lack of sensation — the impression of being carried along without any kind of familiar motion; it seemed arms that bore them let go, yet they did not fall. Red of their lips and tongues and bone and blubber-white of their noses pressed gleefully against the windows made melting, distorted images loom up to the cars behind: flesh disintegrated by water. On the Friday the sky held for a few hours and there was a tender area of glare where the sun must have been buried, a grey pearl in jewellers’ cottonwool or an opaque insect-egg swathed in web, and in the lunch-break white youths from the Fiat assembly plant rolled the legs of their jeans and waded, goading one another in Afrikaans. By four o’clock, when the factories were closing for the week, rain so close and heavy it actually pummelled the flesh of the black backs on bicycles, came from over the Katbosrand hills. The artificial lake might be only a few inches deep in places; it might be over the axles of cars in others. Everywhere the dim-lit submarine habitations waited. A young man stripped to his underpants emerged from one as if daring a line of tracer bullets, arms over his head, knees comically bent, kicking up water in water, against water, and bolted back again. Some vehicles were slowly reversed, eddying round their own axes, and crawled off up the roads again. One — in a great hurry perhaps, or merely bored and impatient — began to edge round the lake. The car wavered, tipped, obviously floated, then found solidity again, and from the lalique glimmer of its lights, could be judged to have regained safely the slight rise on the far side of the hazard. Another crept out and the people closed in the car nearest it heard the determined change to second gear. But this time, just as it had come through what must have been the deepest water, because there, too, like the first car, it was seen to float a moment and then engage with some solid surface again — just as it was about to gain the rise, something burst, out there: one of the many tributary streams that fed the vlei from miles away, unseen, swollen unbearably for six days, ruptured like a blood-vessel and shot mud-red into the lake, the final violent, infinitely distant whip of the cyclone’s passing, the final fulfilment of the weather outlook for the Moçambique Channel. The car swung sideways, tilted, and was sped over the drop to a gulley below the right of the road, now a waterfall and in moments a tangled heaving river, bearing away, bearing away. It made its escape tearing through the eucalyptus between the cyanide mountains, frothing a yellow saliva of streaming sand. A man got out of one of the stationary cars and staggered a few yards, arms out, in the direction that the car had disappeared. He clearly had difficulty in keeping on his feet. He staggered back again, arms stretched in the direction of shelter.