The covenant - James A. Michener [47]
So in the final days of his life, while Nxumalo and his king wrestled with sophisticated problems of management, Prince Henry challenged his captains to round Africa. Two generations of these men would die before anyone breasted the cape, but Henry approached death convinced that the discovery of Ophir was close at hand. 'My books assure me,' he told his sailors, 'that Ophir was built by those Phoenicians who later built Carthage. It is very ancient, long before the days of Solomon.' He took real consolation in this belief, and when a captain said, 'I have been told it was built by Egyptians,' he snorted, 'Never! Perhaps Old Testament Jews drifting down from Elath, or maybe powerful builders from Sidon or Arabia.' Not in his worst fever could he imagine that blacks had built an Ophir, and worked its mines and shipped its gold to all parts of Asia.
And even had he survived long enough to see one of his captains reach Sofala, and if that man had sent an expedition inland to Zimbabwe, and if he had reported upon the city, its towers gleaming in the sun, its carved birds silent upon their parapetsand all managed by blackshe might have refused to accept the facts, for in his thinking, blacks capable of running a nation did not exist.
There were dark-skinned Muslims who threatened the Christian world, and yellow Chinese of whom Marco Polo had written so engagingly, and soft-brown Javanese who traded with all, but there were no blacks other than the unspeakable savages his captains had met on the western coast of Africa.
'The only people with whom we contend,' he told his captains, 'are the Muslims who endanger our world. So you must speed south, and turn the headland which I know is there, and then sail north toward the lands our Saviour knew. We shall confront the infidel and win a world for Christ, and your soldiers shall enjoy the gold of Ophir.'
Prince Henry was sixty-six years old that November, a worn-out man and one of the supreme contradictions in history. He had sailed practically nowhere, but had provided a fortune to his captains, threatening to bankrupt his brother's kingdom, in his rugged belief that the entire world could be navigated, that Ophir lay where the Bible intimated, and that if only he could get his ships to India and China, his priests could Christianize the world.
Henry of Portugal was an explorer sans egal, for he was goaded onward solely by what he read in books, and from them he deduced all his great perceptions. How sad that his captains, in his lifetime, did not indeed reach Sofala, so that he could have read their reports of a thriving Zimbabwe. Had he seen proof of this black civilization, it might have shaken his preconceptions, for he was, above all, a man of probity. And if the few remaining stragglers in the area had accepted Christianity, he would have found a respectable place for them in his cosmogony. But his people had neither reached Zimbabwe nor envisioned its existence.
Even sadder was the fact that after Vasco da Gama did finally reach Sofala in 1498, the Portuguese considered such ports merely as targets for looting, gateways to vaster riches inland. By 1512, fifty-two years after Prince Henry's death, Portuguese traders were beginning a brisk business with the chiefdoms that had grown up in the shadow of Great Zimbabwe, and one priest composed a long report of his dealings with a representative from one settlement who had come down to Sofala leading sixty blacks bearing cargoes of gold and ivory and copper, just as the Bible had predicted:
His name, Nxumalo, third chief of a city I was not privileged to see but on which I interrogated him closely. He was very old, very black, with hair of purest white. He talked like a young man and wore no adornment or badge of office except an iron staff topped by feathers. He seemed able to speak many languages and talked eagerly with all, but when I asked him if his city was the ancient Ophir, he smiled evasively. I knew he was trying to mislead