The Journey. (Chapter 3)

I awoke the next morning with my head a lump of thump. Too much deeply introspective fire-gazing will do that.

I wasted no time getting out of the space that was still gnawing at the dreams fogging my pillow.

I needed to move on.

I found myself dumping my goods into the van; rolling and folding my camp-ware carelessly.

I rolled out of that campsite and used the gear-lever to edit the pain that still thrust and stabbed inside my head. I used it roughly.

I had planned to make a slight knuckle-and-back journey on my way to Fletcher to the caves I had driven past on my way in. I had recognised the features and landscape from before; not just recently, but eternally; as far back as I can remember. A dark and drawing place I knew was waiting.

As the sun glowed from its tinder pit, I hit the dirt road and soon the waves were sunk behind the hills.

I let my mind drift to earlier memories of this stretch of country, back to the late Seventies when apartheid still darkened the nation and this Eastern Cape region was a designated homeland for the Xhosa people. As youngsters, we defied the curfews and visited friends of colour in their forbidden townships, and always found the rural Xhosa people to be welcoming and friendly to white surfers and “hippies”, which we most definitely were.

The area was well-known for its powerful strains of outdoor weed and our road-trips were punctuated by stopovers in the hills of Lusikisiki to purchase bags of their higher-grade produce.

In those days, this was more a ritual than a negotiation. We would sit around the fire with the men of the villages, share Umkumbuti with them and sample their wares. They had a cunning technique of bringing out the lower-grade stuff first and passing it around. My brother Kenny was usually chief negotiator for our tribe. Cloaked in clouds of smoke, we would all stare in silence into the fire. “Upi number One?” my brother would ask. There would be a lot of head-shaking and banter as they tried to convince us the batch we’d just sampled was the best they had.

By this time, I would be so stoned not to bother bartering, but my brother’s tolerance for the stuff was much higher than mine.

“Uh-uh. Yizise Number One,” my brother insisted.

And so it would go on through the night. Stories would flow with the beer until one by one, we’d all fall asleep around the fire.

One summer, on just such an evening, at the place I was heading to now, I remember the locals telling us about the magic stone that stood under a rock overhang at a nearby cliff. This, said the elders, was where the iSangoma developed a “soft head” and became a “house of dreams”.

At the time, I wanted to uncurl the mysteries these elders held so tightly to themselves, and so loosely against our own tight-assed ideologies. But life tightened its noose and kept me far from these dreaming shores for too long.

As I drove through the greening hills, dodging potholes and little black pigs, I drew down from the knowledge I’d accumulated over the years researching the Ancients and their sudden awakening to a deeper human condition represented by mystical cave art portrayals of supernatural realms and beings.

I had a sense that the time was imminent that I would be immersed in a deeper connection to the mysteries that had consumed me for so long.

It was late afternoon when I saw the cave mouth high up in a Krans off to the left of the dirt road I was on. At the foot of the rock-face stood the village I had visited two decades ago; vaguely familiar through the fog of time and higher-grade haze.

I turned my Cruiser onto the footpath to the village, and parked a respectful distance from the mud-and-thatch roundhouses and living spaces of the small community settled out here in total rural isolation.

I carried with me a stick that one of the young men of the village had carved and traded for a Billabong hoodie on my last visit. It was a garment that had travelled with me on many roadtrips, but the trade was fair, and I had become as attached to my beautifully crafted stick as I used to be to the faded hoodie.

First to see and greet me were, as always, the young boys who tended the goats in the lands around the small settlement. They leaped and twirled around me, as I made my way toward the centre of the compound.

I recognised him in an instant; not by his tall, sinewy frame, but by the hoodie he wore. I raised my stick in greeting and he left the work he was doing making bricks and rushed over. He grabbed my outstretched hand with one arm and my backpack with the other. His smile shone a welcome that stretched wide across the years since our last meeting.

I grabbed a fistful of the hoodie and said “It looks the same!” Laughing, he said “You don’t look so young anymore.”

By now, the women tending the maize patch behind the roundhouses were looking over to see what the excitement was all about; the old men smoking under the Acacia trees remained unmoved; the bony dogs scurried between the legs of the swarming children; the dusty chickens pecked at unseen morsels between tufts of Ngongoni and the arrowed limbs of Bitter Aloe.

The late afternoon air was scratched with the bright rasping of cicadas; breeze-lifted laps of fire-smoke washed the smell of road dust off my jostled senses; doves croowoo’d their gentle adieu to the sinking sun.

A Transkei evening released her warm, seductive breath over the receptive fibres of my vibrant skin.

I sensed a new journey into the mists of nights Ancient, long anaesthetised by my narrow worldview, was about to begin.