The covenant - James A. Michener [600]
Sannie did not try to mask her pleasure in having the American geologist as an unannounced suitor; when he came to the farm she ran to the stoep to greet him, extending her two hands and bringing him into the kitchen, where hot coffee and cold beer were waiting. By the end of his second month at the dig he had begun to think of Vrymeer as his headquarters; he even took his telephone calls there. It was a constantly rewarding experience, for not only was Sannie a charming young woman, but her parents were helpful and instructive. Mrs. van Doorn was English and represented the thinking of that large segment of the population, but her husband was a true Afrikaner, and from him Philip derived his insights into the thinking of the men who directed the country. Debate in the Van Doorn kitchen was apt to be heated and prolonged, and as Saltwood listened to the conflicting points of view he realized that he was sharing a privileged introduction to South African life: the Afrikaner view; the English view; and in Sannie's bold opinions, the view of the new breed who represented the best of the two older stocks.
Like all visitors, Philip was astounded by the freedom with which the citizens of South Africa discussed their problems. The expression of ideas and the exploration of alternatives were totally free, and what was not said in the kitchen debates was spelled out in the very good English-language newspapers. This was no dictatorship, like Idi Amin's Uganda or Franco's Spain; within fifteen minutes of meeting the average Afrikaner family, a stranger was sure to be asked: 'Mr. Saltwood, do you think we can escape armed revolution?' or 'Have you ever heard anything more stupid than what our prime minister proposed yesterday?' What with his intense work at the diggings, where he was in contact with all types of South Africans, and his discussions at Vrymeer, Philip was learning much about this country.
But of course his real purpose in visiting the farm was not to gain an education; he was falling in love with Sannie van Doorn, and he had reason to believe that she was most seriously interested in him. In the third month, with her parents' obvious consent, she accepted his invitation to visit the diamond claims, and then to drive over to Kruger National Park, where they would spend two days watching the great animals.
At the diamond camp she asked, 'Philip, what is it you're doing?'
He showed her where they had found traces of diamond, and when she saw how minute the specks were she gasped: 'Why, they're not worth anything!' And he said, 'They're pointers, and diamond experts all over the world are thrilled that we've found them.'
'Pointing to what?' she asked, whereupon he honored her with a graduate seminar on diamonds. She understood only the highlights, but when he reinforced his lecture with a rough diagram, she grasped what he was up to.
'This is the Swartstroom, the little river we're exploring. It's yielded diamonds, so we know they exist. Our problem is "Where did they come from?" They didn't originate in this stream, that we know. It merely carried them here. But from where? This branch of the river is Krokodilspruit. After we finish here, we'll look there. Maybe they were carried down that stream. We'll look everywhere.'
'What for?'
'The pipe. My life is spent looking for the pipe.'
'And what's that?'
'About a billion years ago, give or take a million or two, one hundred and twenty miles straight down, somewhere near here, a kind of subterranean cave or area developed. We know its characteristics completely: twelve hundred degrees Celsius, pressure sixty-two thousand times greater than here at the surface. In that environment, and there alone, carbon transmutes into diamonds. In some circumstances down there this carbon becomes coal; in others, graphite. In ours it becomes diamonds.'
'But what's the pipe?'
'The diamonds form in a kind of blue clay, and when everything is just right, that clay, carrying its diamonds with it, roars upward through one hundred and twenty