This Was the Old Chief's Country by Doris Lessing

was out of the question.
    â€˜Why don’t you keep the cover on the well?’ my father said to the women, who were still loitering resentfully at the back door. He was really angry. ‘Last time the well was cleaned there were fourteen dead rats and a dead snake. We never get things in our well because we remember to keep the lid on.’
    But the women appeared to consider the lid being on, or off, was an act of God, and nothing to do with them.
    We always went down to watch the well-emptying, which had the fascination of a ritual. Like the mealie-shelling, or the first rains, it marked a turning-point in the year. It seemed as if a besieged city were laying plans for the conservation of supplies. The sap was falling in tree and grass-root; the sun was withdrawing high, high, behind a veil of smoke and dust; the fierce dryness of the air was a new element, parching foliage as the heat cauterized it. The well-emptying was an act of faith, and of defiance. For a whole afternoon there would be no water on the farm at all. One well was completely dry. And this one would be drained, dependent on the mysterious ebbing and flowing of underground rivers. What if they should fail us? There was an anxious evening, every year; and in the morning, when the Long One stood at the back door and said, beaming, that the bucket was bringing up fine new water, it was like a festival.
    But this afternoon we could not stick it out. The smell was intolerable. We saw the usual complement of bloated rats, laid out on the stones around the well, and there was even the skeleton of a small buck that must have fallen in in the dark. Then we left, along the road that was temporarily a river whose source was that apparently endless succession of buckets filled by greyish, evil water.
    It was the Long One himself who came to tell us the news. Afterwards we tried to remember what look that always expressive face wore as he told it.
    It seemed that in the last bucket but one had floated a human arm, or rather the fragments of one. Piece by piece they had fetched her up, the Cross-eyed Woman, his own first wife. They recognized her by her bangles. Last of all the Long One went down to fetch up her head, which was missing.
    â€˜I thought you said your wife had gone home?’ said my father.
    â€˜I thought she had. Where else could she have gone?’
    â€˜Well,’ said my father at last, disgusted by the whole thing, ‘if she had to kill herself, why couldn’t she hang herself on a tree, instead of spoiling the well?’
    â€˜She might have slipped and fallen,’ said the Long One.
    My father looked up at him suddenly. He stared for a few moments. Then: ‘Ye-yes,’ he said, ‘I suppose she might.’
    Later, we talked about the thing, saying how odd it was that natives should commit suicide; it seemed almost like an impertinence, as if they were claiming to have the same delicate feelings as ours.
    But later still, apropos of nothing in particular, my father was heard to remark: ‘Well, I don’t know, I’m damned if I know, but in any case he’s a damned good driver.’

The De Wets come to Kloof Grange
    The veranda, which was lifted on stone pillars, jutted forward over the garden like a box in the theatre. Below were luxuriant masses of flowering shrubs, and creepers whose shiny leaves, like sequins, reflected light from a sky stained scarlet and purple and apple-green. This splendiferous sunset filled one half of the sky, fading gently through shades of mauve to a calm expanse of ruffling grey, blown over by tinted cloudlets; and in this still evening sky, just above a clump of darkening conifers, hung a small crystal moon.
    There sat Major Gale and his wife, as they did every evening at this hour, side by side trimly in deck chairs, their sundowners on small tables at their elbows, critically watching, like connoisseurs, the pageant presented for them.
    Major Gale said, with