So eager were these Boers for the sight of long-lost kinsmen, not to mention land and profits, that the Predikant was left on his knees, still bellowing prayers, and had to scramble into his cart and whip up his sorry mule for a mile before he could bring up the tail of our strange caravan.
(I tried, from time to time, to discourse with this Predikant, hoping for intellectual stimulus, but I found that his learning was as narrow as his beliefs. He had a perfect knowledge of the more merciless parts of the Old Testament but was vague and evasive on the subject of Jesus Christ. I lost his friendship, I believe, when I postulated, simply as a point of argument, that the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah must have been drunk when they wrote. He never spoke to me again but I did not regret this. One of the few things I have learned in life is that only a fool argues with bigots when he could be in bed with a lovely and lustful woman. And Blanche, at just this time, was coming into full blossom as a lover: all the years of misdirected passion burst forth like petals of an autumn rose and her inventiveness astonished and challenged my simple Dutch lechery.)
A trek is like a long sea-voyage but dusty. The dangers are as many but of a different nature: there is little danger of drowning, for instance. The boredom is exactly similar, day follows day in an unchanging pattern, one loses count of time, and after many days one can only recall trivial incidents, small oases in a desert of dullness. One such was the night when Orace was eaten by a lion. Poor child, he had failed to keep the fire bright and had fallen asleep. I was awakened by a gentle thudding, as though someone were pounding the earth with fists. Peering out between the laces of the wagon-flap, I caught a glimpse of a great yellow beast trotting away with a large object between its jaws, then, despite its burden, clearing the thorn stockade or bomah, which closed the entry-gap between the semi-circle of wagons, with one bound. I called crossly for Orace to make up the fire but he did not reply. A search shewed that he was missing and must have been what the lion was carrying. I had half a mind to go out with my heavy rifle and pursue the cowardly beast, but I was readily persuaded that this would be both hopeless and dangerous.
I was quite cast down by the loss of this devoted child; indeed, I believe I shed a tear. Blanche comforted me, saying that she would learn to wash my linen, but she did not understand: I had become fond of Orace, foundling or no. Fond.
Another day which sticks in my memory is the day after we crossed the Olifants River, skirting the high ground to the west of the great Desert of Kali-Hari. It was my turn to be riding far ahead of the trek as voorloper and I was nodding in the saddle when I noticed that my horse had come to a halt. Looking up, I saw through sleep-filmed eyes what appeared to be a monstrous cloud of dust hazing the air a few miles ahead. I rubbed my eyes clear and looked again. As far as I could see, from east to west, this cloud of dust was still rising. I galloped back to the trek-leader — although I had been warned against galloping a horse in that climate — and reported that at least a regiment, probably a brigade, perhaps a division of cavalry was crossing our front.
He glared inscrutably at me from the forest of his brows and beard and said, although with little conviction, that everything was possible under God. Then he called up young Cloete, a man of fine breeding who had scouted as far as the Congo River itself, although not for gain, because he was one of the heirs of the great Constantia estate, where the finest wine in the world is made. (If you do not believe this last remark, I remind you that Napoleon Bonaparte himself, on his death-bed, called for a glass of Constantia.)
Young Cloete, reins slack, moved out on his beautiful half-bred Arab at a ground-eating single-step pace, the great broad brim of his hat over his eyes and only one foot in a strirrup, so sure he was of his mount. (This is also a useful way to ride over broken ground or if you fear an ambuscade.)
In twenty minutes he was back with us, smiling, but holding up his arm, palm out-stretched. The trek halted untidily, the men growling, the women squabbling, the children squealing and the oxen, horses, milch-cows, goats, mules, pigs, poultry and dogs each making noises proper to their kind.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Bok,” said Cloete as he dismounted and lay down to rest.
“Is that offensive?” I asked the trek-leader.
“No. It is bok.”
I walked my tired horse back to the wagon and gave him a hatful of water.
“Why have we stopped?” asked Blanche.
“Bok,” I said.
“The same to you!” she replied with spirit.
Hours later our motley cavalcade ground into motion again and, before dusk, crossed the track of the great movement I had first seen. A thin film of the finest particles of dust still hung over it and for the breadth of quite half a mile, our wagon wheels pressed over a carpet of flattened corpses of little buck. Cloete told me later that this particular kind of antelope, once in a while, takes it into its head to migrate in unimaginable numbers, for no discernible reason. “They are almost human,” he explained. If I used the words “one million” in respect of this exodus of buck you would only laugh, for you have seen little of the world and know less. Cloete used these words, prefixed by the words “at least”.
The irrational nature of this business of the bok vexed me strangely, for I had already made a fool of myself the previous day, when I had suggested that I might leave the trek at the River Olifants and proceed down it to the sea, finding a ship at the Western Coast. The trek-leader, whose religion, I think, prohibited laughter, sank his great bomah-covered chin further into his breast and controlled his breathing carefully before pointing out to me that the Olifants, except in spate, was a series of disconnected lagoons and that its course was, in any case, opposite to the direction I named. These Boers have a name for us British: rooinek — it means red-neck. My neck became red.
In this business of the Afrikaaners’ religion I found much to reflect on. Their “Reformed Church” was strict in its doctrine but easy to follow: the whole truth was to be found in the Bible, therefore nothing else could be true. So, the earth had four corners and was therefore flat. Nothing could be more logical. (They marvelled that I should want to take ship to London: it was only a couple of hundred marches to the north-west, just as Jerusalem was a similar number of marches to the north-east. Perhaps this was the cause of the continual treks northward from the Cape: they did not like to live so close to the southern edge of the world.)
There was no possibility of salvation for any but members of this Reformed Church — and, to judge by the rantings of the Predikant, precious little chance for them. One formed a mental picture of the Elysian fields, empty as the High Veldt except for an occasional Predikant wearing a justified look of righteousness and a few withered virgins wearing calico from hairy chin to scrawny ankle.
They had the inhabitants of this continent of Africa neatly docketed. The Kaffirs were partly educable and might be beaten and baptised. The Hottentots were sub-human: the very word comes from the Dutch word for a stutterer; the Hottentot does not speak but he tries to. So, he may be trained and charitably fed and beaten but not baptised. The little yellow Bushmen, with hair like a sprinkle of peppercorns and buttocks which, in a good season, protruded astonishingly but, in times of hardship, withered into a sort of flaccid apron, were clearly non-human. They had to be exterminated, for all sorts of excellent reasons which I cannot recall at this remove of time.