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'I still don't know what the pipe is.'

'The channel it leaves on its upward journey. Lined with that blue clay and sometimes diamonds. We call the blue clay kimberlite, after Kimberley. And my job is to find that pipe, lined with kimberlite, carrying diamonds.'

'Where do you think it might be?' Sannie asked, and he said, 'For this year I torment myself with only two questions: "Will Sannie van Doorn marry me?" and "Where in hell is the pipe that produced these diamond fragments?" '

'Where could it be?'

Returning to the diagram, he said, 'You can see that it can't be down at Chrissie Meer. Those mountains would prevent this river from coming this way. That region up there is too far north. It can't be over at Vrymeer, because those two little hills . . .' He paused in some embarrassment.

'You mean Sannie's Tits?' she asked demurely.

'You damned Afrikaners are very careless with words. We better get over to Kruger Park.'

At the close of their first long day with the animals they stopped at a camping site, whose manager asked routinely, 'One rondavel?' and Sannie said promptly, 'Two, if you please.'

So that night they slept apart, but on the second day of viewing animals they came upon a glade where giraffes were resting in shadows, some seventy of them, and two were in the courting mood. It was an extraordinary sight, these tall, ungainly animals, preserved by some freak of nature from ages past, standing under trees facing each other and twining their necks in the most lovely, slow, poetic way, as if they were weaving dreams. It was their love dance, unmatched in nature.

As they watched, Sannie moved closer, until at the conclusion of the giraffes' exquisite performance the human beings were duplicating the animals, touching and kissing and moving apart, then rushing together again. That night when they approached the same camping ground, it was Sannie who suggested: 'Let's drive to the other one. It'll be less embarrassing.' And when they reached the alternate and the caretaker asked, 'One rondavel?' she said, 'Yes.'

In succeeding weeks Sannie and Philip took excursions to various sites in eastern Transvaalnorth to Waterval-Boven to see the cog railway, south to Chrissiesmeer to see the site of the concentration campand on one weekend they drove to Pretoria to see the capital, and the rugged beauty of this veld city was a surprise. Philip was excited by the imposing statue of Oom Paul Kruger in the center of town, with four handsome statues of burghers ready to ride forth on commando.

'It's heroicthe way a patriotic statue should be,' he exclaimed.

'Wait till you see the Voortrekker Monument!' she cried, pleased that he was respectful of her treasures. And again she was right. This great, brooding pile atop its mountain, this amazing echo of Great Zimbabwe, was such a perfect evocation of the Afrikaner spirit that he was almost afraid to enter. 'Do they allow Englishmen in here?'

'They're not welcome,' she joked, 'but I'll tell them you're my Afrikaner cousin from Ceylon.' When they went inside and Philip saw the fiercely patriotic bas-reliefs depicting Blood River and the other victories of the Afrikaner tribe, he was struck by the strangeness of a nation's having as its principal monument a memorial in which only a small segment of its population would feel welcomed. There were no blacks here, no Englishmen at ease, only Afrikaners reveling in their hard-won victories.

'How many people are there in South Africa?' he asked as they sat on stone benches in the lower crypt.

'About thirty-one million, all told.'

'And how many Afrikaners?'

'Let's say three million maximum.'

'Less than one-tenth of the total. Doesn't it seem odd to you, Sannie, to have your major national monument restricted to one-tenth of the population?'

'It's not restricted. On certain days, at certain times, blacks are allowed in.'

'Would they want to come? A monument dedicated to their defeat?'

She drew away from him for a moment, then said stiffly, 'We're a