The covenant - James A. Michener [266]
'O let the nations rejoice and be glad: for thou shalt judge the folk righteously, and govern the nations upon earth.'
The congregants heard the song but not the words.
On the return trip Hilary said, 'It was a dreadful mistake to have come. They saw nothing. They understood nothing.' 'What did you think when you met Vera?'
'It was strange. I'd never seen her, you know. Not really. I moved forward. She moved back. And I thought, "How lucky I was not to have married her."'
'You never had the chance,' Emma said.
'I'm convinced God took care of that. He had you in mind.'
'I liked Thomas very much,' she said. 'He'll do well in this country. We need wagons.'
'You and I need one, particularly.'
'Why?'
'Because we've got to move north. We're not wanted here any longer.'
So when they reached Golan and satisfied themselves that Saul could maintain the mission with Hottentot and Xhosa deacons until some young clergyman arrived from England, they started packing in earnest. They acquired a small wagon and sixteen oxen, a tent of sorts and some wooden boxes for their goods. With this meager equipment they set forth.
They headed northwest for a destination unknown, one man, one woman traversing barren lands that held no water, moving into canyons where desperadoes might be lurking, and crossing lands often ravaged by wandering bands of Hottentot and Bushmen outlaws. They had no fear, because they carried almost nothing of value that could be taken from them, and if they were to be slain, it would be in God's service. They were traveling to take His word into a new land, and they would maintain their steady progress for fifty days. Alone, walking slowly beside their oxen, they went into lands that no white man had ever penetrated before.
In later decades much would be made of treks conducted by large groups of Boers armed with guns, and these would indeed be remarkable adventures, but equally so were the unspectacular movements of solitary English missionaries as they probed the wilderness, these lonely harbingers of civilization.
By accident, and surely not by design, the Saltwoods came at last into that bleak northern country which had provided refuge to the slaves Jango and Deborah, who had fled here with their children. The land was now occupied by a few Bushmen, a few Hottentots who led a vagrant life after their last herds had been bartered away, quite a few runaway slaves from various parts of the world, and a scattering of ill-defined ne'er-do-wells and outcasts. In the veins of these fugitives there was Dutch blood aplenty, German, too, from settlers and sailors off ships, and not a little contributed by English officers on their way home from India and freed during their Cape Town leaves from the confines of British respectability. There was every color, from the purest black to the fairest white, the last being provided by the new missionary, Hilary Saltwood of Oxford.
He had settled on land in the northern part of the Great Karroo, that rolling semi-desert which occupied so much of the country. It was a thirst-land whose treeless expanse frightened most people but enchanted those who found refuge here. The Saltwoods built their meager hartebeest hut close to a meandering stream, which went dry much of the year. When it was finished, they surrounded it with a thicket of protective thorn, exactly as Australopithecus had done five million years earlier.
The site would have seemed quite miserable, except for the cluster of five hills, each separated from all the others, perfectly round at the base, handsomely leveled off at the top. Their beauty lay in their symmetry, their classic purity of form; from a distance they resembled five judges huddling for an opinion, but from within their circlessay at the entrance to the missionaries' hutthey became protective sentinels guarding