The covenant - James A. Michener [231]
'In what way?'
'Made them dissatisfied with their lot.' 'What is their lot?'
'At school in England, did they teach you the Book of Joshua?' 'I've read it.'
'But have you taken it to heart? God's story of how the Israelites came into a strange land? And how they were to conduct themselves there?' It was obvious to the Boer listeners that the new missionary knew little of Joshua, so the oldest farmer took down his huge Bible and slowly leafed the pages until he came to the familiar instructions, which he translated roughly for the newcomer:
'You shall not marry with the daughters of Canaan . . . You shall keep yourself apart. . . You shall destroy their cities . . . You shall hang their kings from trees . . . You shall block up their graves with stones, even to this day . . . You shall take the land, and occupy it and make it fruitful . . . One man of you shall chase one thousand of them . . . You shall keep yourselves apart. . . And they shall be your hewers of wood and your drawers of water... And all this you shall do in the name of the Lord, for He has commanded it.'
Closing the big book reverently and placing his hands upon it, he stared directly into Hilary's eyes and said, 'That is the word of the Lord. It is His Bible which instructs us.'
'There is another part of the Bible,' Hilary said quietly, leaning his thin shoulders forward to engage the debate.
'Yes, your Reverend Keer preached quite a different message, but he was an idiot. Young friend, believe me, it is the ancient word of God Himself that we follow, and you will break your teeth in this country if you contradict it.'
Across the southern plains of Africa, wherever he stopped, Hilary found himself engaged in argument over the merits of Simon Keer, and the Boers were so forceful in their rejection of the little redhead that in his quiet moments Hilary began to read Numbers and Joshua, finding in them not only the passages which his first Boer mentors had cited, but scores of others which applied directly to the position of the Dutch who had come into this land like the Israelites of old, who had entered their land of Canaan. The parallels were so overwhelming that he began to see local history through Dutch eyes, and this was a salvation when he opened his own mission.
The spot selected for him lay on the left bank of the Sundays River, four hundred miles from Cape Town. When he reached it, not a building stood, not a roadway existed. The river, suffering from drought, carried little water, and there were no trees. But the spot itself was congenial, perched on a broad bend of the river and graced with level fields acceptable to plowing. In the distance was a forest with an abundance of usable wood; and at hand, enough stones to build a city. Hilary, visualizing what this bleak spot might become, named it from a passage in the twentieth chapter of Joshua, where God instructs His people to erect cities of refuge to which any accused could flee and be assured of temporary safety:
And on the other side Jordan . . . eastward they assigned . . . Golan ... that whosoever killeth any person at unawares might flee thither, and not die . . . until he stood before the congregation.
This will be Golan, my city of refuge, Hilary thought, and when the last members of his caravan disappeared, leaving him majestically alone in the heart of a strange land, he prayed that he might be allowed to build well.
The first night, as he lay on the ground close to his belongings, he listened to strange sounds, and the darkness of Africa assailed him with a wild discordance, a sense of awe and anticipation rather than fear. When he awakened at dawn, he found a group of brown people watching him, squatting on their haunches a hundred feet away. For months there had been rumors that a missionary was coming.
Hilary beamed at the sight. Surely the Lord Himself had brought this little gathering into the arms of His servant Saltwood. Dusting himself