The Songlines

  Our porters were a cringing lot, forever complaining that their poor feet could carry them no farther and casting envious eyes on our boots.

  At four o’clock they wanted us to camp beside some sunless and broken houses, but we insisted on moving up the valley. An hour later, we came to a village surrounded by walnut trees. The roof-tops were orange, from apricots drying in the sun, and girls in rose-madder dresses were playing in a field of flowers.

  The village headman welcomed us with a frank and open smile. We were then joined by a bearded young satyr, his hair wreathed in vine leaves and meadow-sweet, who offered us from his leather flask a thread of sharp white wine.

  ‘Here,’ I said to the leading porter, ‘we will stop.’

  ‘We will not stop,’ he said.

  He had learnt his English in the Peshawar bazaar.

  ‘We will stop,’ I said.

  ‘These people are wolves,’ he said.

  ‘Wolves?’

  ‘They are wolves.’

  ‘And the people of that village?’ I asked, pointing to a second, dejected-looking village about a mile upstream.

  ‘They are people,’ he said.

  ‘And the village beyond that? Wolves, I suppose?’

  ‘Wolves,’ he nodded.

  ‘What nonsense you do talk!’

  ‘Not nonsense, sahib,’ he said. ‘Some people are people and some other people are wolves.’

  It does not take too much imagination to suppose that man, as a species, has suffered some tremendous ordeal in his evolutionary past: the fact that he scraped through so brilliantly is a measure of the magnitude of the threat.

  To prove this is another matter. Yet, already twenty years ago, I felt that far too much attention was being paid to our supposedly ‘fratricidal’ tendencies and too little to the role of the Carnivore in shaping our character and destiny.

  If one had to give a general answer to the question, ‘What do carnivores eat?’ it would be a very simple one, ‘What they can get.’

  Griff Ewer, The Carnivores

  It has been said of the Kadars, a hunting tribe of southern India, that they were strangers to violence or displays of virility because they channelled all their antipathies outwards on to the tiger.

  Suppose, for the sake of argument, you cut all the loose talk of ‘aggression’ and focused on the problem of ‘defence’. What if the Adversary, on the plains of Africa, had not been the other man? Not the men of the other tribe? What if the adrenal discharges that precipitate ‘fighting fury’ had evolved to protect us from the big cats? What if our weapons were not, primarily, for hunting game, but for saving our skins? What if we were not so much a predatory species as a species in search of a predator? Or if, at some critical watershed, the Beast had been about to win?

  Here – let there be no mistake – lies the great divide.

  If the first men had been brutish, murderous, cannibalistic, if their rapacity had driven them to acts of extermination and conquest, then any State, by providing an umbrella of force, will have saved men from themselves and must, inevitably, be considered beneficial. Such a State must, however frightful for the individual, be counted a blessing. And any action by individuals to disrupt, weaken or threaten the State will be a step in the direction of primaeval chaos.

  If, on the other hand, the first men themselves were humbled, harried, besieged, their communities few and fragmented, forever gazing at the horizon whence help might come, clinging to life and one another through the horrors of the night – might not all the specific attributes we call ‘human’ – language, song-making, food-sharing, gift-giving, intermarriage – this is to say, all the voluntary graces which bring equipoise to society, which suppress the use of force among its members; and which can only function smoothly if equivalence is the rule – might not all these have evolved as stratagems for survival, hammered out against tremendous odds, to avert the threat of extinction? Would they, therefore, be any less instinctual or directionless? Would not a general theory of defence explain more readily why offensive wars are, in the long run, unfightable? Why the bullies never win?

  Altenberg, Austria, 1974

  It was too hot in Lorenz’s study and we moved into a summerhouse in the garden. Above the town towered the mediaeval castle of Greiffenstein: a bastion of Christian Europe against the shifting world of Asiatic horsemen. Seeing him on his own ground made me realise that his views on fighting must, in some way, be coloured by having been brought up at the centre of a tremendous geopolitical drama.

  Why was it, I asked him, that so many people still found the theory of instinct, as applied to man, unstomachable?

  ‘There are certain things’, he said, ‘with which one simply cannot cope, and one of them is plain stupidity.’

  ‘Please stop me if I’m wrong,’ I said, ‘but when, in any animal, you isolate a “bloc” of behaviour, the first question to ask is “What for?” How would this or that have helped to preserve the species in its original habitat?’

  ‘True,’ he nodded.

  ‘A robin’, I said, alluding to one of his experiments, ‘on seeing another robin, or even a piece of red fluff, will move into the attack, because red says “territorial rival”.’

  ‘He will.’

  ‘So the trigger which releases fighting in a robin is the sight of its own kind?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well, why, when it comes to fighting among men, must one or other of the fighters be not quite human? Don’t you think that “militant enthusiasm”, as you describe it, might have evolved as a defensive reaction against the wild beasts?’

  ‘It could be,’ he answered thoughtfully. ‘It could very well be. Before hunting a lion, the Masai in Kenya drum up fighting enthusiasm quite artificially, like a Nazi music march . . . Yes. Fighting may have developed primarily against the wild beasts. Chimps, at the sight of a leopard, do the whole collective aggression stunt beautifully.’

  ‘But surely,’ I persisted, ‘haven’t we got the concepts of “aggression” and “defence” mixed up? Aren’t we dealing with two entirely separate mechanisms? On the one hand you have the “aggressive” rituals which, in the case of human beings, are gift-giving, treaty-making and kinship arrangements. Then you have “defence”, surely against the Beast?’

  All war propaganda, I went on, proceeded on the assumption that you must degrade the enemy into something bestial, infidel, cancerous, and so on. Or, alternatively, your fighters must transform themselves into surrogate beasts – in which case men became their legitimate prey.

  Lorenz tugged at his beard, gave me a searching look and said, ironically or not I’ll never know:

  ‘What you have just said is totally new.’

  32

  ONE MORNING, AS I was having breakfast with Rolf and Wendy, a tall shirtless figure came ambling towards us.

  ‘We’re honoured,’ Rolf said. ‘Big Foot Clarence. Chairman of the Cullen Council.’

  The man was dark-skinned and rather pear-shaped, and his feet were enormous. I gave him my chair. He sat down, scowling.

  ‘So how’s you?’ Rolf asked.

  ‘Right,’ said Clarence.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘They passed the budget in Canberra,’ Clarence said, in a flat disinterested voice.

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Yep,’ he said. ‘We’ve got the plane.’

  For over two years now, the Cullen Council had been angling for a plane.

  ‘Yep,’ Clarence repeated. ‘We’ve got the plane now. Thought I’d tell you.’

  ‘Thanks, Clarence.’

  ‘Thought I’d go to Canberra Thursday,’ he said. ‘Thought I’d come back in the plane.’

  ‘You do that,’ said Rolf.

  Clarence got to his feet and was walking away when Rolf called him back.

  ‘Clarence,’ he said.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Clarence, what have you done with the grader?’

  ‘What grader?’

&
nbsp; ‘The Popanji grader.’

  ‘Don’t know no Popanji grader.’

  ‘Yes, you do,’ Rolf said. ‘The grader Red Lawson lent you.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last year,’ he said. ‘You and your mates went hunting on that grader. Remember?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, Red’s coming over to fetch the grader. I suggest you find it, Clarence. Or they might deduct the cost from the plane.’

  ‘Dunno nothing about a grader,’ Clarence sneered, angrily, and stamped off.

  I caught Wendy’s eye. She was trying not to giggle.

  ‘That plane’, Rolf turned to me, ‘is going to be trouble.’

  It was all very well to give them a plane, another thing to pay for its upkeep. None of the Cullen Mob saw the least point in having a plane unless they had the plane right there. That meant paying a pilot to live at Cullen. It also meant a child-proof hangar.

  At the Amadeus Settlement, Rolf continued, the pilot had been a nice guy who liked to take the kids for a spin. Kids of eight and ten, and they soon got wise to the plane’s control systems. They watched where he kept his keys, in a locked drawer in his caravan, and managed to nick them while he was taking a nap.

  ‘He woke’, Rolf said, ‘to watch the aircraft moving down the runway.’

  ‘They took off?’

  ‘Not quite,’ he said. ‘Overshot the strip and landed in some bushes. The plane was a near wreck.’

  It was still cool and bright in the early morning.

  ‘I thought I’d go for a walk today,’ I said.

  We were expecting Arkady any day and, each morning, at work in the caravan, I promised myself a walk up Mount Liebler.

  ‘Take water,’ said Rolf. ‘Take three times the water you think you need.’

  I pointed out the way I planned to climb.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We’ve got trackers who’d find you in a couple of hours. But you must take the water.’

  I filled my water flask, put two extra bottles in my rucksack, and set out. On the edge of the settlement, I passed a lady’s handbag hanging from a tree.

  I walked over a plateau of sandhills and crumbly red rock, broken by gulches which were difficult to cross. The bushes had been burnt for game-drives, and bright green shoots were sprouting from the stumps.

  I was climbing steadily, and, looking down at the plain, I understood why Aboriginals choose to paint their land in ‘pointillist’ dots. The land was dotted. The white dots were spinifex; the blueish dots were eucalyptus, and the lemon-green dots were some other kind of tufty grass. I understood, too, better than ever, what Lawrence meant by the ‘peculiar, lost weary aloofness of Australia’.

  A wallaby got up and went bounding downhill. I then saw, on the far side of the chasm, something big in the shade of a tree. At first I thought it might be a Giant Red, until I realised it was a man.

  I shinned up the far side to find Old Alex, naked, his spears along the ground and his velvet coat wrapped in a bundle. I nodded and he nodded.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘What brings you here?’

  He smiled, bashful at his nakedness, and barely opening his lips, said: ‘Footwalking all the time all over the world.’

  I left him to his reverie and walked on. The spinifex was thicker than ever. At times I despaired of finding a way through, but always, like Ariadne’s thread, there was a way through.

  I next fell for the temptation – the temptation of touching a hedgehog–to put my hand on a clump: only to find my palm was stuck with spines an inch or so before I’d expected. As I picked them out, I remembered something Arkady had said, ‘Everything’s spiny in Australia. Even a goanna’s got a mouthful of spines.’

  I clambered up the screes of the escarpment and came out on a knife edge of rock. It really did look like the perenty lizard’s tail. Beyond, there was a tableland with some trees along a dried-up watercourse. The trees were leafless. They had rumpled grey bark and tiny scarlet flowers that fell to the ground like drops of blood.

  I sat, exhausted, in the half-shade of one of these trees. It was infernally hot.

  A short way off, two male butcher birds, black and white like magpies, were calling antiphonally across a ravine. One bird would lift his beak vertically and let out three long whooping notes, followed by three ascending shorts. The rival would then pick up the refrain, and repeat it.

  ‘Simple as that,’ I said to myself. ‘Exchanging notes across a frontier.’

  I was lying spreadeagled against the tree-trunk with one leg dangling over the bank, swigging greedily from the water flask. I now knew what Rolf meant by dehydration. It was madness to go on up the mountain. I would have to go back the way I’d come.

  The butcher birds were silent. Sweat poured over my eyelids so that everything seemed blurred and out of scale. I heard the clatter of loose stones along the bank, and looked up to see a monster approaching.

  It was a giant lace-monitor, the lord of the mountain, Perenty himself. He must have been seven feet long. His skin was pale ochre, with darker brown markings. He licked the air with his lilac tongue. I froze. He clawed his way forward: there was no way of telling if he’d seen me. The claws passed within two inches of my boot. Then he turned full-circle and, with a sudden burst of speed, shot off the way he’d come.

  The perenty has a nasty set of teeth, but is harmless to man unless cornered: in fact, apart from scorpions, snakes and spiders, Australia is exceptionally benign.

  All the same the Aboriginals have inherited a bestiary of monsters and bugaboos: with which to menace their children, or torment young men at initiation time. I remembered Sir George Grey’s description of the Boly-yas: a flap-eared apparition, more stealthily vengeful than any other creature, which would consume the flesh, but leave the bones. I remembered the Rainbow Snake. And I remembered Arkady talking about the Manu-manu: a fanged, yeti-like creature which moved underground, prowled the camps at night, and made off with unwary strangers.

  The first Australians, I reflected, will have known real monsters such as the Thylacaleo, or ‘marsupial lion’. There was also a perenty lizard thirty feet long. Yet there was nothing in the Australian megafauna to contend with the horrors of the African bush.

  I fell to wondering whether the violent edge of Aboriginal life – the blood-vengeance and bloody initiations – might stem from the fact of their having no proper beasts to contend with.

  I dragged myself to my feet, climbed across the ridge, and looked down over Cullen settlement.

  I thought I could see an easier way down, which would avoid having to cross the gulches. This ‘easy way’ turned out to be a rock-slide, but I arrived at the bottom in one piece and walked home along a streambed.

  There was a trickle of water in the stream, and bushes grew along it. I splashed some water over my face, and walked on. I had raised my right leg to take a step forward and heard myself saying, ‘I am about to tread on something that looks like a green pine-cone.’ What I had not yet seen was the head of the king-brown, about to strike, rearing up behind a bush. I put my legs into reverse and drew back, very slowly . . . one . . . two . . . one . . . two. The snake also withdrew, and slithered off into a hole. I said to myself, ‘You’re being very calm’ – until I felt the waves of nausea.

  I got back to Cullen at half past one.

  Rolf looked me up and down and said, ‘You look quite shattered, mate.’

  ROCK-A-BYE, baby, on the tree top,

  When the wind blows, the cradle will rock.

  When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,

  And down will come baby, cradle and all.

  That man is a migratory species is, in my opinion, born out by an experiment made at the Tavistock Clinic in London and described by Dr John Bowlby in his Attachment and Loss.

  Every normal baby will scream if left alone; and the best way of silencing these screams is for the mother to take it in her arms and rock or ‘walk’ it back to contentment. Bowlby rigged up
a machine which imitated, exactly, the pace and action of a mother’s walk; and found that, providing the baby was healthy, warm and well-fed, it stopped crying at once. ‘The ideal movement’, he wrote, ‘is a vertical one with a traverse of three inches.’ Rocking at slow speeds, such as thirty cycles a minute, had no effect: but once you raised the pace to fifty and above, every baby ceased to cry and almost always stayed quiet.

  Day in, day out, a baby cannot have enough walking. And if babies instinctively demand to be walked, the mother, on the African savannah, must have been walking too: from camp to camp on her daily foraging round, to the waterhole and on visits to the neighbours.

  Apes have flat feet, we have sprung arches. According to Professor Napier, the human gait is a long, lilting stride – 1 . . . 2, . . . 1 . . . 2 – with a fourfold rhythm built into the action of the feet as they come into contact with the ground – 1, 2, 3, 4 . . . 1, 2, 3, 4 . . .: heel strike; weight along the outside of the foot; weight transferred to the ball of the foot; push-off with big toe.

  The question occurs to me – and quite seriously – how many shoe soles, how many ox-hide soles, how many sandals Alighieri wore out in the course of his poetic work, wandering about on the goat paths of Italy.

  The Inferno and especially the Purgatorio glorify the human gait, the measure and rhythm of walking, the foot and its shape. The step, linked to the breathing and saturated with thought: this Dante understands as the beginning of prosody.

  Osip Mandelstam, Conversations about Dante, trans. Clarence Brown

  Melos: Greek for ‘limb’, hence ‘melody.’

  And think this slow-pac’d soule . . .

  John Donne, ‘The Second Anniversarie’

  A white explorer in Africa, anxious to press ahead with his journey, paid his porters for a series of forced marches. But they, almost within reach of their destination, set down their bundles and refused to budge. No amount of extra payment would convince them otherwise. They said they had to wait for their souls to catch up.