This is one of the lesser known novels by Laurens van der Post, and I can see why. The story is nothing special, yet there are some beautiful paragraphs:
I was linked, through such a night, with all the life there had ever been and ever would be. I knew that each of those stars, before their meaning was confined to what could be determined by telescopes and spectrums, had had a personal significance for countless vanished peoples.
I know that this will be dismissed as ridiculous superstition by most people on shore, where life in its metropolitan context wears such a plausible air of logic and security that they overlook what a fundamentally brief, brittle and insecure business it is, rather as persons who, shutting out the night by drawing the curtains and lighting a lamp in their locked rooms, no longer remember how great is the darkness and how remote the pinprick of stars outside. But those of us who encounter life beyond the fortifications of towns and civilization, who still climb mountains and experience their fall of cliffs and avalanche, who till the land and endure the inconstancies of rain and harvest or sail the seas to hunt for whales, enter an uncircumscribed area of existence where all our brightest knowledge and deepest experience often fail and what is despised as foolish superstition becomes the best available answer to the onslaught of the great unknown in the mind and life of man.
There are many Europeans who are curious about primitive peoples not in order to understand them better, but just to laugh them out of the way.
I wish I understood him as much as I liked him
Nehaveigur 