The Covenant (171 page)

He wandered in a few minutes after the service had started, and by good fortune the congregation was singing a hymn he had grown to love, popular in both Australia and America. It was Martin Luther’s
“Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott,”
and although it was being sung in Afrikaans, its noble message was the same in any language, and he bellowed his version in English. As he did so, he became aware
that a most lovely Afrikaner girl, her hair in Saxon braids, was laughing at him. Turning his head quickly, he caught her eye, and she blushed and buried her face in her hymnal. But since she knew this greatest of the Afrikaans hymns by heart, she soon looked up and he saw the golden face that would haunt him during the remaining months of his dig. It was squarish, characteristically Dutch, with broad forehead, blue eyes, generous lips and pronounced chin. She was not a tall girl, but she gave the impression of being extremely solid, like some tidy Cape Dutch farmhouse nestled against the berg. She was dressed in white, so that her flaxen hair and golden complexion shone to good advantage, and in no way could she discipline her mischievous smile.

He ended Luther’s rousing hymn, this battle cry of a new religion, with his voice in full power, then sat so that he could watch the girl with the Saxon braids, but before long his attention was drawn to the pulpit, raised high above the congregation, from which a young predikant with brilliant forcefulness had begun to deliver his sermon, leaning down on his black robes to castigate, implore, inspirit, deride, cajole, threaten and bless.

I haven’t heard preaching like that since the Holy Rollers in the Oklahoma oil fields, Saltwood said to himself, and for the moment he forgot the girl as he tried to follow what the predikant was saying. He knew only such Afrikaans as an engineer would acquire in a mining camp, but this was sufficient for him to pick out the main ideas: Joshua was on a hilltop looking down at Jericho, facing a great obligation placed upon him by the Lord, and the people of this congregation, every man, woman and child, stood this morning upon a similar hilltop staring down at his or her obligation.

The theme of the sermon was powerful, but it was the delivery that overwhelmed Saltwood: This isn’t your basic Episcopalian homily. This is by-God religion. That man’s the best I ever heard.

And then he saw something which had escaped him at first. In a special section of pews at the right hand of the predikant sat a group of older men, solemn-faced and rigid, each dressed in somber black with white shirt and gleaming white tie, and each word that the young predikant uttered seemed to be recorded mentally by these thirty men, who nodded when they approved what he said, or sat grimly silent when they did not. Because they were seated well below the pulpit, which was hung suspended from the ceiling of the church,
they had to raise their faces to see the predikant, so that they looked like a group from some Ghirlandaio fresco in Florence or the figures from a dark terracotta casting by one of the Della Robbias.

To the left of the preacher, in a similar collection of pews, sat a much younger group of men, also dressed in funereal black with the same type of white shirt and white tie. They, too, followed the predikant with intense interest, but their special function did not become clear until toward the end of the service, when they rose en masse, moved to the foot of the pulpit, and took heavy wooden plates in which to gather the collection. As the choir sang, the young men moved briskly along the aisles, and when Saltwood saw how big they were he thought: I’d hate to tackle that gang on a rugger field. He smiled, then looked at the older men: Or try to pass a law that they didn’t approve of.

The service ended with a brief, sweet prayer of consolation and reconciliation, and when Saltwood started for the exit he concluded: This could be the finest church service I’ve ever attended. He sensed that it had been a community affair, a gathering of like-minded persons who sincerely sought the message their predikant had to offer, and whose voices were raised in unison to give thanks to God for once more having demonstrated His benevolence and concern.

He was thinking in this manner when he felt his arm taken by a firm grasp, after which a strong voice asked, “Aren’t you Philip Saltwood, from the diggings?”

“I am,” he said, and turned to see a stalwart man in his forties, obviously Afrikaner, although why Philip thought so he could not have explained. The man smiled the warm greeting which Afrikaners always extended to strangers visiting their churches.

“I’m Marius van Doorn. We live just west of here, and we’d be honored if you’d take dinner with us.” With this the speaker reached back, clasped the arm of his wife and brought her forward, and she, in turn, reached for the hand of her daughter, and Saltwood saw to his delight that this was the girl with the Saxon braids who had been laughing at him.

“This is my daughter Sannie,” the man said.

“Susanna van Doorn,” her mother explained, and they headed for Vrymeer.

•  •  •

The original invitation had been for one dinner, after church, on one Sunday afternoon. It was extended to drop-in meals whenever Saltwood could detach himself from the diamond explorations, and whenever he drove the few miles from Venloo to Vrymeer and came over that last hill, his heart beat faster to see the white-faced blesbok grazing quietly. They seemed like unicorns of legend attending the lovely young woman waiting in the farmhouse.

Because of the shape of the Van Doorn house and the way the road twisted, visitors were attracted automatically to the kitchen stoep, as if aware that here life centered. The front door was rarely used, and this was understandable, for at the Van Dooms’, the family usually gathered in the big, inviting rear room. It contained a long plank table, two comfortable carver chairs, one for the master, the other for any honored guest, and nine sturdy chairs of lesser dignity. Against one wall stood shelves of Ball jars containing canned fruits and vegetables; opposite was a collection of old copperware. There was a big glass container, too, but only rarely did a guest learn of its contents: all that remained of the old brown-and-gold Dutch crock that had been in the Van Doorn family for generations. At the far end of the kitchen an electric range had long since replaced the old coaleating monster, but the servants who had tended that area were still present: an older Nxumalo woman and two young girls. Most of all, the kitchen exuded a sense of warmth and home, as if here innumerable meals had been eaten, vivid topics discussed.

Sannie did not try to mask her pleasure in having the American geologist as an unannounced suitor; when he came to the farm she ran to the stoep to greet him, extending her two hands and bringing him into the kitchen, where hot coffee and cold beer were waiting. By the end of his second month at the dig he had begun to think of Vrymeer as his headquarters; he even took his telephone calls there. It was a constantly rewarding experience, for not only was Sannie a charming young woman, but her parents were helpful and instructive. Mrs. van Doorn was English and represented the thinking of that large segment of the population, but her husband was a true Afrikaner, and from him Philip derived his insights into the thinking of the men who directed the country. Debate in the Van Doorn kitchen was apt to be heated and prolonged, and as Saltwood listened to the conflicting points of view he realized that he was sharing a privileged introduction to South African life: the Afrikaner view;
the English view; and in Sannie’s bold opinions, the view of the new breed who represented the best of the two older stocks.

Like all visitors, Philip was astounded by the freedom with which the citizens of South Africa discussed their problems. The expression of ideas and the exploration of alternatives were totally free, and what was not said in the kitchen debates was spelled out in the very good English-language newspapers. This was no dictatorship, like Idi Amin’s Uganda or Franco’s Spain; within fifteen minutes of meeting the average Afrikaner family, a stranger was sure to be asked: “Mr. Saltwood, do you think we can escape armed revolution?” or “Have you ever heard anything more stupid than what our prime minister proposed yesterday?” What with his intense work at the diggings, where he was in contact with all types of South Africans, and his discussions at Vrymeer, Philip was learning much about this country.

But of course his real purpose in visiting the farm was not to gain an education; he was falling in love with Sannie van Doorn, and he had reason to believe that she was most seriously interested in him. In the third month, with her parents’ obvious consent, she accepted his invitation to visit the diamond claims, and then to drive over to Kruger National Park, where they would spend two days watching the great animals.

At the diamond camp she asked, “Philip, what is it you’re doing?”

He showed her where they had found traces of diamond, and when she saw how minute the specks were she gasped: “Why, they’re not worth anything!” And he said, “They’re pointers, and diamond experts all over the world are thrilled that we’ve found them.”

“Pointing to what?” she asked, whereupon he honored her with a graduate seminar on diamonds. She understood only the highlights, but when he reinforced his lecture with a rough diagram, she grasped what he was up to.

“This is the Swartstroom, the little river we’re exploring. It’s yielded diamonds, so we know they exist. Our problem is ‘Where did they come from?’ They didn’t originate in this stream, that we know. It merely carried them here. But from where? This branch of the river is Krokodilspruit. After we finish here, we’ll look there. Maybe they were carried down that stream. We’ll look everywhere.”

“What for?”

“The pipe. My life is spent looking for the pipe.”

“And what’s that?”

“About a billion years ago, give or take a million or two, one hundred
and twenty miles straight down, somewhere near here, a kind of subterranean cave or area developed. We know its characteristics completely: twelve hundred degrees Celsius, pressure sixty-two thousand times greater than here at the surface. In that environment, and there alone, carbon transmutes into diamonds. In some circumstances down there this carbon becomes coal; in others, graphite. In ours it becomes diamonds.”

“But what’s the pipe?”

“The diamonds form in a kind of blue clay, and when everything is just right, that clay, carrying its diamonds with it, roars upward through one hundred and twenty miles of intervening material and bursts loose, something like a volcano.”

“I still don’t know what the pipe is.”

“The channel it leaves on its upward journey. Lined with that blue clay and sometimes diamonds. We call the blue clay kimberlite, after Kimberley. And my job is to find that pipe, lined with kimberlite, carrying diamonds.”

“Where do you think it might be?” Sannie asked, and he said, “For this year I torment myself with only two questions: ‘Will Sannie van Doorn marry me?’ and ‘Where in hell is the pipe that produced these diamond fragments?’ ”

“Where could it be?”

Returning to the diagram, he said, “You can see that it can’t be down at Chrissie Meer. Those mountains would prevent this river from coming this way. That region up there is too far north. It can’t be over at Vrymeer, because those two little hills …” He paused in some embarrassment.

“You mean Sannie’s Tits?” she asked demurely.

“You damned Afrikaners are very careless with words. We better get over to Kruger Park.”

At the close of their first long day with the animals they stopped at a camping site, whose manager asked routinely, “One rondavel?” and Sannie said promptly, “Two, if you please.”

So that night they slept apart, but on the second day of viewing animals they came upon a glade where giraffes were resting in shadows, some seventy of them, and two were in the courting mood. It was an extraordinary sight, these tall, ungainly animals, preserved by some freak of nature from ages past, standing under trees facing each
other and twining their necks in the most lovely, slow, poetic way, as if they were weaving dreams. It was their love dance, unmatched in nature.

As they watched, Sannie moved closer, until at the conclusion of the giraffes’ exquisite performance the human beings were duplicating the animals, touching and kissing and moving apart, then rushing together again. That night when they approached the same camping ground, it was Sannie who suggested: “Let’s drive to the other one. It’ll be less embarrassing.” And when they reached the alternate and the caretaker asked, “One rondavel?” she said, “Yes.”

In succeeding weeks Sannie and Philip took excursions to various sites in eastern Transvaal—north to Waterval-Boven to see the cog railway, south to Chrissiesmeer to see the site of the concentration camp—and on one weekend they drove to Pretoria to see the capital, and the rugged beauty of this veld city was a surprise. Philip was excited by the imposing statue of Oom Paul Kruger in the center of town, with four handsome statues of burghers ready to ride forth on commando.

“It’s heroic—the way a patriotic statue should be,” he exclaimed.

“Wait till you see the Voortrekker Monument!” she cried, pleased that he was respectful of her treasures. And again she was right. This great, brooding pile atop its mountain, this amazing echo of Great Zimbabwe, was such a perfect evocation of the Afrikaner spirit that he was almost afraid to enter. “Do they allow Englishmen in here?”

“They’re not welcome,” she joked, “but I’ll tell them you’re my Afrikaner cousin from Ceylon.” When they went inside and Philip saw the fiercely patriotic bas-reliefs depicting Blood River and the other victories of the Afrikaner tribe, he was struck by the strangeness of a nation’s having as its principal monument a memorial in which only a small segment of its population would feel welcomed. There were no blacks here, no Englishmen at ease, only Afrikaners reveling in their hard-won victories.

“How many people are there in South Africa?” he asked as they sat on stone benches in the lower crypt.

“About thirty-one million, all told.”

“And how many Afrikaners?”

“Let’s say three million maximum.”