The covenant - James A. Michener [392]
As he became more excited, his voice rose until it was a complaining wail. Flicking the maps, he invited his companions to see for themselves how their continent had been defrauded. 'It's only when you compare us with Asia, Europe and North America that our impoverishment becomes clear. If those continents had been cut off the way we've been, look at the civilization they'd have lost!'
With the men following his finger closely, he demonstrated how Asia would have had to surrender Kyoto, Tokyo, Peking, Tehran and most of Turkey. 'Every good thing done in those civilizations lost forever. But look at Europe!' Here he showed how the entire continent would have been lost had it been as truncated as South Africa. 'And when we reach America, the same story.' Carefully he drew the line which would have run south of Chattanooga, Memphis, Oklahoma City, Amarillo and Albuquerque. 'Those cities and all the places to the north that you've heard of St. Louis, Seattle, Detroit, New York, Boston. None of them would have existed.'
He passed his atlas to his listeners, and as they studied the facts he said solemnly, 'If the rest of the world were as deprived as we are, civilization would consist of Los Angeles, Mexico City, Jerusalem and Delhi. Our cathedrals would not have been built, our plays would not have been written, and neither Beethoven nor Shakespeare would have existed.'
He spoke with great passion, then recovered his atlas and opened it to South Africa itself to make his final points. 'We've been sorely cheated by nature . . .'
'Why are you afraid to say that it was God who cheated us?' a man asked.
'God?' Rhodes said, twisting the palm of his right hand up and down like a bargainer. 'I give Him fifty-fifty. He may exist. He may not. I never fight with Him, and if you want to say God where I say nature, so be it.' He returned to the map and said, 'We can't move northwest because the Kalahari Desert impedes us. And we can't move south because our land ends. What we can do, is make the most of what nature has given us.'
He became quite poetical as he outlined the South African promise: 'We have people with wonderful vitality. Forests with some of the most fertile lands on earth. Flowers that have no equal. And herds of great animals that are inexhaustible. In a week's journey you can see hippos and rhinos, lions and elephants. I've seen the land rolling with zebra and eland and gemsbok. It's a treasury with boundaries unlimited.'
Then he plumped his fingers upon the area about Kimberley, where his mining interests lay. 'Nature is rarely unfair. If she cheats us in extension, she compensates by allowing us to dig deep. She's given us the finest concentration of diamonds in the world. And they've already found gold, too. But the real gold lies up here.'
As he said this, he pointed to the empty lands north of the Limpopo; at least the map showed them as empty, a vague Matabeleland governed by a son of the famous Mzilikazi. 'And here, too,' he said gravely, indicating land north of the Zambezi. With a sudden movement of his right hand he covered the entire segment of Africa with his palm. 'This map should all be red.' He meant that it should become part of the British Empire.
'How could that happen?' one of the listeners asked. 'It's your job to make it happen,' he said.
The next weeks determined the pattern of Frank Saltwood's life. He had intended going to South Africa for only a brief visit with his parents, then returning to London