The Covenant (117 page)

On the last day Frank asked Jakob for a free space at the table, and there, with the twins looking over his shoulder, he wrote a long report to his employer, the crucial paragraph being this:

By the accidents of history, Frank Saltwood was about to traverse in 1895 the route that young Nxumalo had taken in 1457. He left Vrymeer and headed for the Limpopo, near whose banks the copper mine still flourished. Once more high water impeded the crossing, and when the north bank was reached, the baobab trees exerted their magic. “I was quite unprepared for them,” he wrote his mother. “Trees which seemed to be planted upside down by some mysterious force, their uplifted roots filled with birds. On two occasions we have slept inside the trees.”

Like Nxumalo, he came upon the great slabs of granite, their layers exfoliated into perfect building blocks, but unlike him, he did not have to carry samples to the king. In proper time he reached the hills from which the ancient city became visible, and there he paused to see for himself, without distraction of any kind, physical or historical, just what it was this strange, lost city represented. Lacking all prejudice, he studied the ruins from afar and saw that they were long overgrown with trees and climbing vines, that they must once have been imposing but were now in poor condition, and that nothing in their sad, majestic profile betrayed their origin.

He descended into a valley leading to the ruins, and came after a while to an impoverished group of blacks led by a Chief Mugabe, who could speak neither the Zulu nor the Sotho language of the bearers, but after a while one was found who had once drifted down to the diamond mines, and he could speak a kind of lingua franca.

“Zimbabwe?” He knew nothing of it.

“Who rules now?” No one, but Chief Mugabe had his kraal on the side of the hill on which the citadel rested.

“Who built the towers?” That had often been discussed.

“Can we inspect it?” Why not?

For two weeks Frank climbed over the ruins, uncovering not a single clue which would indicate origins. The pictures in the Bible his parents had given him on his twenty-first birthday came to mind, but they looked nothing like this. However, suppose that all those pictures had been of Jewish structures? Could not these ruins have been those of the Queen of Sheba, who would have built in a different manner? Or of the Phoenicians, who would have had their own style? And what authority did the pictures in the Bible have? Were they not merely some artist’s imagination?

Whenever he pursued such thoughts, he stopped before reaching a logical conclusion, because he had to keep in mind the fact that his
employer, Mr. Rhodes, desperately wanted these buildings to be the ancient Ophir, not because that would prove the Bible to have been accurate, but for a much subtler reason: to justify his own wrongdoing.

When he got nowhere with President Kruger in his plan to have a joint English-Boer occupation of the lands north of the Limpopo, he had leap-frogged the Boer republics and thrown his own pioneer column deep into Matabeleland, where Mzilikazi’s son was overrun. When resistance developed, he dispatched a private army to crush it, then annexed the entire area. Even at this moment, grateful imperialists in London were proposing that this new British colony be called Rhodesia.

So now, if Rhodes could prove that no black society had ever been advanced enough to have build Zimbabwe, his theft of Matabeleland would seem more palatable. It would, after all, be rather ugly to have stolen a kingdom in order to bring it civilization if that kingdom had once been civilized.

Frank Saltwood was thus obligated to prove that Zimbabwe had been built far back, in the time of the Old Testament, and during his last three days on the site he remained in his tent, drafting another report to Mr. Rhodes:

But when the wagons were packed, and the last photograph taken, and the antelope shot for the food supply, Frank returned to the ruins alone, sickened by the shameful thing he had done, this profanation of everything he had learned at Oriel: “A man must be true to the facts, and if the facts disprove his preconceptions, he must change his preconceptions, not the facts.”

What have I done? he asked himself as he studied the silent stones whose messages were crying out to be understood. Have I debased myself to curry favor with an irascible man who perverts everything to his own purpose?

Cautiously he climbed a platform next to the tower to inspect once more the stonework, which now seemed so primitive, so unlike anything the Phoenicians or the Jews of Solomon’s time might have done. After all, the basic stonework of Rome was being laid down in that age, and Greek masons already knew the major principles. Men trained in those schools could never have built these edifices.

But he found no proof of anything until the final moments, when he had left the tower and was standing at a point where two walls abutted, and he saw with amazement that the stones were not interlocked, as they would have been in any Mediterranean building: that is, the stones of the wall running east and west did not bind themselves into the stones of the wall running north and south, making each wall stronger. In crude fashion, one wall merely leaned against the other, acquiring only such added strength as proximity provided, and it occurred to him that masons had not used that childish device in Rome or Greece or Phoenicia or the Holy Land or Persia or Arabia for the past four thousand years.

“My God!” he whispered. “They’re right. These buildings were erected by black men who never heard of Ophir or the Queen of Sheba,” and he ran to all the corners where walls abutted, and in every instance one wall merely leaned against the other. With this knowledge, he hastened to the foot of the steep hill on which the citadel rested, and, though exhausted, ran up, breathing furiously until he reached the lonely top where the goldsmiths had worked and the great Mhondoro conversed with spirits. And there, too, the walls leaned one upon the other, and the stonework was primitive, with no sign of Mediterranean sophistication. These buildings, too, had been built by the ancestors of the Xhosa and the Zulu. The nonsense about the Queen of Sheba was a fatuous dream generated by men who had never seen the stones, and kept alive by fancifiers
who loved the idea of ancient royalty and despised the actuality of black builders.

As he was about to leave the citadel he saw, partly hidden by the rubble, something he had missed on his earlier explorations: a beautifully carved narrow stone about six feet high, its bottom squared off for fitting into a socket, its top an intriguing bird, something like a falcon, something like an eagle. In not a single line did it betray Mediterranean influence; this was an artwork of black men, and when he called for servants to carry it down the hill for delivery to Mr. Rhodes, he thought: I have been forced to write that Zimbabwe is Phoenician, but this bird will proclaim the truth.

Back in his tent as it was about to be folded, he looked at his report and was tempted to destroy it, but he was restrained by the fact that Mr. Rhodes would like it in its present form and would be most distressed if he, Frank, modified it in accordance with his final discovery: I know what the truth is. Does what Mr. Rhodes thinks do any harm? And he carefully filed the papers that would set the intellectual patterns for the next eighty years. Zimbabwe had been stolen from the blacks.

When he neared civilization he began to hear rumors of turmoil, but exactly what caused them he could not ascertain. Black members of his safari spoke of a battle, but the white members could make nothing of this until a terrified English miner, obviously running for his life, intercepted them with the shocking news that Mr. Rhodes had shortly before declared war on the Boer republics. His ragtag army, led by the mercurial Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, had tried to take over the government but had been roundly defeated.

Anxiously, Frank interrogated the fugitive, who gave confirming details: Mr. Rhodes had done all the things which Frank had warned him against, and the consequences had been the disaster he had predicted.

When the safari reached Pretoria it was approached by an armed Boer commando whose leader shouted in English, “You have a man named Saltwood?” and when Frank stepped forward, three Boers pinioned him, took his papers, and carted him off to jail.

“What’s the charge?” Frank protested.

“You’ll hear. Just before they hang you.”

He was thrown into a cell that contained an Australian member
of Mr. Rhodes’ revolutionary force, two Englishmen and a breezy, even-tempered American mining engineer named John Hays Hammond, who had helped organize the ridiculous affair. “What happened?” Frank asked.

“Very simple,” Hammond explained. “We had five hundred handpicked men under Dr. Jameson, many more waiting in Johannesburg, but with no communication between them. We marched forth to capture the country, but suddenly Boer horsemen appeared from everywhere, led by this great whiskered brute of a man, General de Groot, riding a little Basuto pony. He said, ‘All right, boys, put down your guns.’ So our men put them down, and here we are—in jail.”

“You mean De Groot defeated your whole army?”

“Have you ever seen De Groot?”

“I have. They call him the Hero of Majuba.”

“He’s a formidable man,” Hammond said.

“But what am I doing here?” Frank asked. “I was north of the Limpopo when this happened.”

None of the prisoners, cell after cell of Uitlanders, who had called themselves Reformers, could explain why Saltwood had been arrested, but after days in the crowded jail he heard enough from the conspirators to assure himself that they were indeed guilty of insurrection and that the venture had been sorely botched.

“How could Mr. Rhodes have stumbled into this?” he asked repeatedly, and finally the Australian said, “Because he had contempt for the Boers, like all of us did.”

“After what I wrote him?” Frank blurted out, and when these words echoed in the cell, all the prisoners looked at him.

“Oh,” one of the Englishmen said, “you’re the spy they kept asking about.”

“Spy?” Frank repeated. He suddenly realized that his prying visit to General de Groot, his chain of persistent questions and his note-taking could be interpreted as spying.

And at the trial, General de Groot and Jakob van Doorn both testified, with regret, that he had come to them some months before the raid as a friend, asking a series of probing questions relating to the rebellion. Van Doorn in particular could verify that he had written a long report which he admitted he was sending to Cecil Rhodes, and from hints that Van Doorn picked up, it concerned the military capabilities of the Boers.

“Did Mr. Saltwood appear at your farm in military uniform?”

“No, sir, he came as a spy.”

“Did he inform you that he was serving as the agent of a rebellion?”

“No, sir, he functioned as a spy.”

When the trial ended, the grim-faced judge placed on his head a small black cloth. One by one the prisoners were brought before him: “John Hays Hammond, the court finds you guilty, and for your treasons you will be taken from jail and hanged.”

Frank felt his knees buckling as an ashen-faced Hammond was returned to the jail, and if the Australian had not held him, he might have collapsed. The Australian was sentenced, then the two Englishmen, and now it was Saltwood’s turn, but as he was led into the dock a rude commotion erupted at the rear of the courtroom. Two policemen were trying to restrain an elderly Boer who was struggling with some heavy object.

When they led him before the bench, the judge looked down severely: “Lang-Piet Bezuidenhout, what is this nonsense?”

“Forgive me, your Honor. But I bring something that might help your Honor punish these men.”

“Lang-Piet, this is a court for justice, not a place for cheap revenge. Go before I get angry.”

“But, your Honor, the men of my commando have been in the saddle many days to bring you this thing.”