The covenant - James A. Michener [602]
From this vast, awesome structure they went back to the residential areas of the city, and it was here that Philip received his major shock, because whole avenues and scores of broad streets, reaching as far as he could see, were lined with jacaranda trees bursting with purple, not hundreds of them but thousands upon thousands, until the entire city seemed a bed of flowers. He had never seen anything to compare with this explosion of purple elegance, and when they slipped into bed that night he whispered,
'You're a blend of monument and jacarandafierce durability and soft elegance.' When she said nothing, snuggling closer to be kissed, he asked, 'Shall we be married?' but then she drew away, for she was not yet prepared to make such a commitment.
Wherever they went on their brief excursions she provided him with new revelations of her country. After they had visited some dozen little towns, each with its statue of some minor Boer War general, they returned to Pretoria, where she took him to the fine figure of General Louis Botha in front of the government buildings. Behind it stood a somber, handsome memorial to the 2,683 South African soldiers who had lost their lives in a single battle.
'Wasn't Delville Wood, back in 1916, the most important battle your troops ever engaged in?' Philip asked. 'Perhaps,' she said grudgingly. 'All those men lost . . .'
'It was the wrong war, fought on the wrong continent, by the wrong troops.' After reflecting upon this curt dismissal, she added, 'It was an English affair that played no part in our history, an incident well forgotten.'
He was struck by the exposed beauty of South Africa, the endless veld, the treeless reaches of landscape, the wonderful little flat-topped hills, the enclaves with elephants, and white rhinoceros, and eland, and the great blazing sky. 'Your roads, you know, are much better than those in the United States,' he told her once as they were driving across a far stretch of veld on a roadway that contained not a ripple.
Most of all he liked the little towns with their public squares, their low white-walled buildings and their jacaranda trees. He became familiar with a dozen other blossoming trees whose names he did not know: 'This is a land of flowers!' And of all those he saw, better even than the jacarandas, he liked the protea: 'You must have a hundred varieties!'
'More, I think.'
They were able to take these excursions because of his schedule at the dig: three weeks of dawn to dusk, then a week off, and once when he was entitled to a break she said, 'We have a remarkable village which you really must see,' and when he took out his map she said, 'You will find it as Tulbagh, but we like to call it by its old name, Church-Street-in-the-Land-of-Waveren.'
'What a delightful name!' and they drove two days to an enclave among tall hills where in a closed valley stood this remarkable thoroughfare, as beautiful as any in the world. It had been founded as early as 1700, one long street with a church at one end, a parsonage about half a mile away, and some fifteen houses connecting the two. As the centuries passed, the low houses seemed to settle close to the ground, and the place might have been remembered only as a fading echo of past times, except that on 29 September 1969 an earthquake shattered the area, knocking down some of the dwellings and damaging all of them.
'What happened,' Sannie explained, 'was that some energetic men and women, Father among them, got together and said, "This is a chance to rebuild the street as it was in 1750," and believe it or not, Philip, that's just what they did.'
When they approached the village, Philip saw a church of stubborn beauty and in the distance a stately parsonage, but what captivated him was the row of stark-white houses, all cheap adornment erased, standing pristine as they had two centuries earlier. It was as if a magician had waved a wand and restored patterns of living long since vanished. They