• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1003 0

the storms and the beating rains of the wet seasons, the grass of the roof flattened like old flesh into the hollows and bumps of the poles under it; and sometimes the mud-skin fell off in patches and had to be replaced; and sometimes parts of the roof received a new layer of grass. A house like this is a living thing, responsive to every mood of the weather; and during the time I was growing up it had already begun to sink back into the forms of the bush. I remember it as a rather old, shaggy animal standing still among the trees, lifting its head to look out over the vleis and valleys to the mountains.

I wrote a poem once about a group of suburban town houses; which I could not have written had I not been brought up in such a house as I have described:

THE HOUSE AT NIGHT

That house grew there, self-compact;

And with what long hopeless love

I walked about, about-

To make the creature out.

First with fingers: grainy brick

That took its texture from the earth;

The roof, membranous sheath

On rafters stretched beneath.

Yet, though I held the thing as close

As child’s toy gathered in my hand—

Could shatter it or not;

No nearer truth I got.

Eluded by so frail a thing?

But if touch fails then sight succeeds.

But windows shadowed in

My face that peered within.

And through my shadowing face I saw

A room where someone lived, and there

The glow of hidden fire;

A secret, guarded fire.

Should I fail by closeness? Then

Move back and see the house from far,

Gathered among its kind,

No unit hard-defined.

And there a herd of houses! Each

Brooding darkly on its own,

Settled in the shade

That each small shape had made.

Till suddenly a mocking light

Flashed on from that one house I’d searched,

As if a beast had raised

His head from where he grazed.

And brilliant to my blinded face

As if with laughter openly,

These dazzling panes comprise

All dazzling gold eyes.

The house was built high, on a kopje that rose from a lower system of vleis and ridges. Looking from the windows you seemed on a level with the circling mountains, on a level with the hawks which wheeled over the fields.

My room was the third down from the top or end of the house; and it was very big and very light, for it had a large, low window, and a door which I kept propped open with a stone. The stones on the kopje were not of the quartz which cropped up all over the farm, but tended to be flattened and layered, and were brown, a light, bright brown, and when they were wet with rain, yellowish. To the touch they were smooth and velvety, because of the dust surface. Such a stone I used to prop my door open, so that I could look down on the hawks that hung over the fields, and watch them turn and slide down the currents of air with their stretched wings motionless. The great mountain ten miles off was the chrome mountain, scarred all over with workings; and it was part of the chain of hills and peaks over which the sun rose. The big field below the house was a mealie field. Newly ploughed it was rich reddish-brown, a sea of great, tumbling clods. From the path which ran along its edge, the field showed a pattern of clods that had fallen over from the plough-shares one after another, so that walking slowly beside it avenues opened and shut, lanes of sunlight and shadow. And each clod was like a rock, for the interest of its shape and colour: the plough-share cutting smooth through the hard soil left a clean, shining surface, iridescent, as if it had been oiled with dark oil.

And sometimes, from the height of the house, looking down, these clean, shared surfaces caught the sun all over the field at the same moment so that a hundred acres of clods glittered darkly together, flashing off a sullen light; and at such times the hawks swerved off, high and away, frightened.

Then the harrows drove over the field, side by side, the heavy, shining oxen plunging and scrambling over the great earth-boulders;