there was not even a Mtosa cattle-herd so ignorant as willingly to venture near the drift after nightfall.
When it came to having to do with ghosts, a Mtosa could be almost as educated as a white man.
Again, with regard to ghosts, we still remember the time when the new schoolteacher, Charlie Rossouw, who was fresh from college, taught the Standard Five class, in the history lesson, about the Great Trek. He was talking about the Voortrekker leader, Lodewyk Loggenberg, and about the route his party took, and about the Dagboek that Lodewyk Loggenberg kept. The young schoolteacher said that he did not want his class to think of history as just names of persons that they had to remember, but that the Voortrekkers belonged to their own nation, and were people like their own fathers, say, or – if that was too unpleasant a thought – perhaps like their uncles. Or maybe even like the second cousins of their aunts’ half-sisters by marriage. That young schoolteacher was very thorough in his way.
Then, drawing on the blackboard with a piece of chalk, Charlie Rossouw explained to the class that Lodewyk Loggenberg had passed through the Groot Marico with his wagons. “Perhaps the trek passed right in front of where this schoolhouse is today,” the teacher said. “Maybe Lodewyk Loggenberg’s long line of wagons, with voorryers and agterryers and with the Staats Bybel in the bok and with copper moulds from which to make candles six at a time after you fixed the wick in the middle, properly (I mean, you know the difference now between a form candle and a water candle: we did that last week) – maybe these Voortrekkers passed along right here, and the tracks that their wagon-wheels made over the veld were the beginning of what we today call the Government Road. Think of that. I wonder what Lodewyk Loggenberg wrote in his Dagboek when he went along this way towards Spelonksdrift? What he thought of this part of the country, I mean. That grand old Patriarch. Does anybody know what a Patriarch is?”
Practically every child in his Standard Five class put up his or her hand, then. No, they did not know what a Patriarch was. But they did know what Lodewyk Loggenberg wrote in his Dagboek about Spelonksdrift. And they told the schoolmaster. And the schoolmaster, because he was young and fresh from college, laughed in a lighthearted manner at the answers the pupils gave him. It was all the same answer, really. And it was only after Faans Grobler, who was chairman of our school committee, had spoken earnestly to Charlie Rossouw about how serious a thing it was to laugh at a Standard Five pupil when he gave the right answer, that Charlie Rossouw went to Zeerust on a push bicycle over a weekend. Charlie Rossouw spent several hours in the public library at Zeerust. When he came back he was a changed man.
After that, he put in even more time than he had done in the Zeerust library in explaining to Standard Five – which was the top class – that he had not known, until then, that that particular passage about the haunted character of the Spelonksdrift appeared in Lodewyk Loggenberg’s Dagboek. He had never been taught that at university, Charlie Rossouw said. But it was clear enough, now, of course. He had read it in print. It gave him an insight into Lodewyk Loggenberg’s mind that he did not have before, he acknowledged. But then, while he was at the teachers’ college, he was not able to go into all those details about South African history. He had to study subjects like blackboard work and cardboard modelling and the theory of education and the depth of the Indian Ocean and the Scholastic Philosophers, including Archbishop Anselm and Thomas Aquinas and Peter Lombard and Duns Scotus. And there was also Albertus Magnus, Charlie Rossouw said. So he should not be blamed for not knowing everything Lodewyk Loggenberg wrote in his Dagboek. He had been so busy, night after night, trying to make out what Duns Scotus was trying to get at. But now that he had himself gone into the world a bit, the schoolmaster said, it seemed to him that there was quite a lot in common between Duns Scotus and Lodewyk Loggenberg. In his opinion, they would both of them have got pretty high marks for cardboard modelling.
Francina Smit, who was in Standard Five, and who was good at arithmetic, said afterwards that Charlie Rossouw made that remark with what she could only describe as a sneer.
All the same, Charlie Rossouw said to his class, even though it was true that Lodewyk Loggenberg had written those things about Spelonksdrift in his Dagboek, it would be best if the class kept quiet about it when the inspector came. He was sure that the school inspector would misunderstand an answer like that. He did not believe that the school inspector knew Lodewyk Loggenberg’s Dagboek very well. He even went so far as to doubt whether the school inspector knew much about Thomas Aquinas.
A little later, when Charlie Rossouw was sacked from the Education Department, we in the Groot Marico were pleased about it. There was just something about Charlie Rossouw that made us feel that he was getting too big for his boots. The next thing he would be telling his class was that the earth turns around the sun. Whereas you’ve only got to lie in the tamboekie grass on Abjaterskop towards evening and watch, and you’ll see for yourself it isn’t so. All those astronomers and people like that – where would they be if they once lay on Abjaterskop in the setting sun, and shredded a plug of roll-tobacco with a pocket knife, in the setting sun, and looked about them, and thought a little? Put an astronomer on top of Abjaterskop, in the setting sun, and with a plug of roll-tobacco, and lying in the tamboekie grass, and where would he be?
Anyway, even though we who were sitting in Jurie Steyn’s voor-kamer that also served as the Drogevlei post office were not astronomers, or anywhere near, we were nevertheless much impressed by Chris Welman’s statement that they were having ghost trouble at Spelonksdrift. When it came to seeing a ghost you didn’t need to be an astronomer and to have a telescope: a ghost was something that you could actually see best just with the naked eye.
Now, if the spirits of the dead were content to haunt only the drift after nightfall, then no harm would come to any human being. No human being was ever there after nightfall. It was when a pale apparition took to the road, and wandered through the poort to have a look round, that unfortunate incidents occurred.
If you were travelling along the Government Road at night and you saw a person walking – or riding on horseback, even – and you saw the moon shining through that person, then you would know, of course, that you had met a ghost. If there was no moon, then you would see the stars shining through the ghost. Or you might even see a withaak tree or a piece of road showing through the ghost.
Gysbert van Tonder once encountered an elderly ghost, riding a mule, right in the middle of the poort. And Gysbert van Tonder held long converse with the ghost, whom he took to be an elderly farmer that had come back from a dance at Nietverdiend – coming back so late because he was elderly. It was when Gysbert van Tonder recognised the mule that the elderly farmer was sitting on as old Koffiebek, that had belonged to his grandfather and that had died many years before of grass-belly, that Gysbert van Tonder grew to have doubts. What made him suspicious, Gysbert van Tonder said, was that he had never in his life seen Koffiebek standing so still, with a man on his back, talking. During the whole conversation Koffiebek did not once try to bite a chunk out of his rider’s leg. In the same moment Gysbert van Tonder realised that it was because there wasn’t much of his rider for Koffiebek to bite.
“What made it all so queer,” Gysbert van Tonder said, “was that I had been talking to the elderly farmer on the mule about a new comet that there was in the sky, then. And I had asked him if he thought it meant the end of the world, and he said he hoped not, because there were several things that he wanted to do still. And it didn’t strike me that, all the time we were talking about the comet, the old farmer was sitting between me and the comet, and I was seeing the comet through the middle of his left lung. I could see his right lung, too, the way it swelled out when he breathed.”
It was getting late, not only in Jurie Steyn’s post office, but everywhere in the Marico, and the lorry from Bekkersdal had not yet arrived with our letters and milk-cans. They must be having trouble along the road, we said to each other.
And because of the line of conversation that Chris Welman had started we were glad when Jurie Steyn, on his return from the milking shed, lit the paraffin lamp in the voorkamer
