In the centre of the room the fountain played. Matron explained: ‘The fountain is known as the Afrika Stimme, or the African Voice. When Uncle Paul arrived here with his valet Happé he found the place in ruins. It had been a spa once, it was to have been a palace of health visited by the crowned heads of Europe and was founded by one Pringsheim with casinos above, baths below. Built in 1875 at a time when the great spas of Europe were beginning to draw the rich and famous to them, Pringsheim knew of the link between wealth and power as well as the incessant interest aroused in rich and successful people by their bowels, their colons and their irrigation systems. He understood their obsession with health. He understood that the rich and beautiful and powerful needed to purge themselves of the grime which inevitably accumulated in mastering the world. This spa was founded upon an incredible hot-water spring. Such was its heat that it was known to the locals as the Afrika Stimme. You’ve seen the bathing halls below, those enormous, moist, echoing places. The curative properties of the steaming, radioactive waters were believed to be miraculous and have been known since Roman times when legionaries were said to have bathed here in the reign of the Emperor Diocletian. Pringsheim planned for these healing waters to wash away the sins of the worldly. Pringsheim was ambitious. He built wonderful new bathrooms, steam rooms, mud rooms, inhalatoriums. There were nozzles and sprays and dunk baths, plunge pools, massage rooms, radon chambers. There were waters for drinking, for irrigation, for warming, curing, strengthening, purging, saving. Alas, tragedy struck. The great casino was no sooner built, where we now sit, than the spring died. Stopped dead one day and would not flow again. Pringsheim shot himself. For a time the place was empty and I believe after that an asylum was established for a short while. However it was quite unsuitable for lunatics who drowned in the mineral water swimming pool, choked in the mud baths, strangled one another with inhalant tubes. The building fell into disuse, into ruin — and that is how Uncle Paul and his valet Happé found it.
‘Uncle Paul did not hesitate. He knew the curative properties of the water, these had been analysed and found to contain various chemicals: lithium, manganese, phosphoric acid, fluorine, caesium, and even a tiny touch of arsenic, besides, of course, being radioactive. Fifteen mach units of radon was the measurement, good for the blood, for breathing problems, for arthritis, rheumatism, for just about anything you care to mention. He knew this, but that wasn’t the main attraction. The main attraction was the hot spring, the African Voice. It seemed fated. Intended by God. It was a sign. Of course they told him that the spring had failed. That it would never flow again. The old man is reported to have said nothing, merely to have asked Happé to help him over to the base of the fountain you see there, and proceeded to strike it with his walking stick. And the spring flowed again. Those around him understood the significance of that gesture, they read their Bibles regularly, they knew the story of Moses striking the rock in the desert and finding water. They knew of the wanderings in the desert of the Israelites in search of the Promised Land. They knew the old man had made his choice. In a sense he had come home, he had realised his dream. The spring flowed again. He had made a home for others to come home to.
‘Two events were crucial in driving the old man to this place. The story of the Thirstland Trekkers of the 1870 haunted Kruger, Happé writes. Perhaps you know it? The Thirstland Trekkers were not content even with a pure Boer Republic. Even there they felt the lack of freedom, even there they felt constrained, even there when they had what they wanted of Africa they dreamed of yet another Promised Land, a heavenly Republic beyond the horizon. They dreamed, in a word, of Beulah, the Promised Land, Eden, Shangri-La. It was a vision which drew this particular party of Boers to trek forever onwards to the sacred laager. It carried this small desperate party of six hundred or so men, women and children through the Kalahari Desert “dying as they went”, according to one historian. The end is sad. The dream drew them not to Beulah but to a steamy, fever-ridden province owned, not by Jehovah, but by Catholic Portugal. They set off, as Uncle Paul told Happé, those poor haunted brave Boers in search of heaven only to end in the hands of Portuguese market-gardeners! The special significance of this trek, said Uncle Paul, exposed the vital character of the Boers. They were destined to trek, but the mistake of the Thirstland Trekkers was that they trekked away outward, whereas the true trek was not one which covered territory but one that moved forever inward. An interior trek, an internal journey to the centre of themselves. This was the paradox at the heart of the true Boer, that he must continue to trek and yet he could never expect to arrive in the Promised Land. Kruger saw the fate which awaited his people if the trek failed. He saw it in the two colleagues closest to him, he saw it in Smuts who turned from general to bank robber overnight, and, worse, went on to show considerable flair for world diplomacy. Kruger did not know which was the greater scandal. And then there was General Piet Cronje, whose defeat in the Battle of Paardeberg and his subsequent surrender to the British enemy had been one of the most cruel calamities of the war and hastened the end of the struggle against the British Empire. He saw his enemies, the foreign outlanders, the gold bugs, throwing parties and buying beers all round, inviting Boer generals to sit on the boards of their companies. And then in the final months of his life he heard of General Cronje’s horrible plans in St Louis, Mississippi. For what was the old general preparing to do? He was preparing to stage, for gawping tourists, his Last Stand at Paardeberg. According to Happé this distressed the old man terribly. “Can you imagine it, can you imagine it?” he is supposed to have said. “Can you see, these Americans, queuing up to see this great disaster inflicted on our suffering people?” The knowledge tortured him. Visitors to the Kruger House in Clarens gave him graphic descriptions of the preparation for Cronje’s little piece of theatre in faraway St Louis.’
The matron drew deeply on her cheroot and puffed creamy smoke. Her voice sharpened and quickened in an American drawl. ‘Roll up! Roll up! See the Boojers meet the British in mortal combat! See General Kitchener’s final triumph! See the Boojers digging nests of trenches! See the Lydite shells blasting their positions! Read Cronje’s courteous request for a truce to bury his dead and for British doctors to treat his wounded. Listen as Field-Marshal Roberts pronounces his niggardly refusal. Then hear General Cronje’s noble response, which was in essence, Then bombard away…! Now watch the great Boer military genius De Wet harassing the British from Kitchener’s koppie which with supreme daring he has snatched from under their noses. See him command the strong point of Paardeberg for three days. But it is too little, too late. Now see everything lost. See General Piet Cronje and his four thousand men surrendering to Roberts. See him stepping down from his white horse, the Boer in his big hat and his floppy trousers and see the triumphant Roberts, neat and dapper, stepping towards him while in the shade Cronje’s broken troops watch impassively from their wagons, and all around them sit the British in their khaki, wearing their funny hats with those strange protective peaks back and front to keep the sun off those long, thin noses, those red necks…’ The matron’s impersonation using hands and napkins impressed a number of the diners who applauded politely. She acknowledged the compliment with a nod of the head. ‘You can imagine the old man’s agony when he heard of Cronje’s preparations at the World Fair, of his old friend’s plan to make money while the bones of the Boer dead whitened on the slopes of the mountains their General had lost. But it spurred Kruger on. He told his doctor, according to a story that has come down to us, “You take care of the bodies, but someone must take care of the souls. We must make a little hospital, a little spirit hospital, ready for them.” Well this is that little hospital. By July of that year, 1904, Uncle Paul was dead, but Bad Kruger was alive and well.’