The covenant - James A. Michener [338]
Selecting a sturdy one off by itself, she would take a heavy stick and break open a small hole at the spot where the side of the dome touched the earth; she was careful not to disturb the upper part of the ant hill, for it was this dome which ensured fruitful use. When the hole was broken, a flood of small black ants scurried about the landscape and soon disappeared. Then the opening was crammed with sticks, leaves and other flammable debris and set afire; for an hour or so it blazed and smoldered, becoming in due course an effective, excellent oven in which all kinds of food could be prepared.
Jakoba liked to bake her bread in such ovens, but she also knew how to prepare a delicious toasted curry dish made of antelope strips bathed in a sauce flavored with dried onions. The men were so fond of this that as they traveled they kept an eye alert for ant hills, and the women learned that when such were plentiful, there would probably be a restful halt. And if there were no hills, they prepared a bobotie.
The determined movement of these Voortrekkers must not be thought of as a gallop across the landscape toward a known, specific destination; it was more like the slow displacement of a small villagewith all the utensils, the babies' cribs, and the cattle moving patiently along.
But in one startling aspect the trek did not resemble the slow displacement of a town: among the fourteen thousand Boers who would ultimately travel north, there was not one clergyman. The Dutch Reformed Church, which had played, and would play, so significant a role in the history of the Boers, refused to sanction the mass exodus, and for substantial reasons: it suspected that the exiles represented a revolutionary spirit, and Calvinism could not tolerate that; it feared that the farmers were moving away from church influence, and this had to be opposed; and it felt uneasy about unauthorized movement into unexplored territory, since in such unfamiliar land the dominance of the church might be diminished. Resolutely the church turned its back on the emigrants, castigated them as revolutionaries and ignored their pleas for assistance.
More remarkable was the fact that in the most significant event in South African history, individual predikants also cut themselves off from the people, with many dominees flatly refusing to accompany the wanderers. The Voortrekkers, one of the most religious people on earth, with a profound reliance upon the Bible, were thus rejected by their own church. There could be no baptisms, marriages, solemnized burials, or even weekly services, yet at the end of the travail the Voortrekkers would be even more solidly supportive of their church than they had been at the beginning, and after having refused the travelers the services of religion, the Dutch Reformed Church would gather the emigrants back into its hands, converting the whole nation into a theocracy.
The man who suffered most in this strange development was Theunis Nel. Acutely aware of the Voortrekkers' spiritual needs, and grieved by the refusal of his church to help, he volunteered at various intervals to serve as substitute predikant, but invariably the majority rejected him on the grounds of his blemished eye and crookbackt.
He did not complain. Patiently he bore his wife's scorn, the ridicule of his fellow travelers, the lack of support from leaders like Van Doorn and De Groot. He tended the sick, tried to teach the children, and recited prayers at the graves of those who died. At one funeral, when an old man was being buried short of the new home he had hoped to reach, Theunis was overcome by emotion and launched into a graveside homily, a sort of informal sermon about the transitory nature of human life, and after