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By Root 3760 0

imagine his family might have reached, he came upon the shabbiest hut he had yet seen, and in it lived a man and wife who had taken up their six thousand acres with only the meagerest chance of succeeding. They were the first white people Adriaan had seen since setting out, and he talked with them avidly: 'You hear of any Van Doorns passing this way?'

'They went.'

'Which direction?'

'East.'

'How long ago?'

'Before I got here.'

'But you're sure they went?'

'We stayed in their old huts. Four months. Trekboer came through, told us they had gone.'

Since Adriaan needed rest, he stayed with the couple for a short time, and one morning the woman asked, 'Who's this Swarts you keep talking to?' and he replied, 'Friend of mine.'

After two weeks, during which the trekboer gave him a supply of ammunition, which he used to bring meat to the hut, Adriaan announced casually that he was about to try to locate his family. 'How long you been gone?' the woman asked.

'Three years.'

'Where'd you say you were?'

'M'popo,' he said, using a name the blacks had taught him.

'Never heard of it.' For a moment Adriaan felt that he owed it to his hosts to explain, but upon reflection, realized that to do so adequately would require another two weeks, so he departed with no further comment.

On and on he went, well past the place where he had met Sotopo, the Xhosa, and one morning as he reached the crest of a substantial line of hills he looked down to see something which disturbed him greatly; it was a valley comprising some nine thousand acres and completely boxed in by hills. 'It's a prison!' he cried, alarmed that people would willingly submit themselves to such confinement.

What dismayed him especially was that at the center, beside a lively stream that ran from the southwest to the northeast, escaping through a cleft in the hills, stood not the usual Van Doorn huts but solid buildings constructed of clay and stone. Whoever had planned this tight enclave intended to occupy it not for the ordinary ten years, but for a lifetime. It represented a change of pattern so drastic that in one swift glance Adriaan realized that his old trekboer days were ended, and he groaned at the error these people were making: Stone houses! Prisons within a prison! To reach this at the end of three years on the most glorious land in Africa was regrettable.

But he still was not certain that this was his new farm until an older woman with fading red hair came out of the stone house and walked toward the barn. It was Seena. This stronghold was her home, and now it would be his.

He did not call out to his wife, but he did say to Swarts, 'We've come to the end, old fellow. Things we don't understand .. .' Slowly and without the jubilation he should have felt at reaching the end of so long a journey, he came down the hill, went to the door of the barn, and called, 'Seena!' She knew immediately who it was and left the gathering of eggs, running to him and hugging him as if he were a child. 'Verdomde ou man,' she cried. 'You're home!'

After the children had screamed their greetings and Lodevicus, now a solid thirty, had come forth with Rebecca, Adriaan asked the adults, 'How did our farm get to this place?'

'We wanted security,' Lodevicus explained. 'The hills, you know.'

'But why the stone houses?'

'Because this is the last jump that can be made. Because on the other side of the Great Fish River the Xhosa wait.'

'This is our permanent home,' Rebecca said. 'Like Swellendam, a foothold on the frontier.'

'I saw a place up north. It had hills like this, but they were open. There was a lake, and it was open too. Animals from everywhere came to drink.'

The younger Van Doorns were not interested in what their father had seen at the north, but that night when Adriaan and Seena went to their bed after the long absence she whispered, 'What was it like?' and all he could say was 'It's a beautiful country.'

That had to stand for the thundering sunsets, the upside-down trees, the veld bursting in flowers, the great mountains to the east, the mysterious rivers to the