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'You think they'll triumph?' Sannie asked contemptuously.

'Or their sons, who will be much like them,' her father said.

'My sons will shoot them down,' she said.

'Then their grandsons. History has time ... It can wait.'

'For what?' Saltwood asked eagerly.

'As I was saying, I think the black victors will be generous. They'll want us to stay. God knows, their brothers haven't made much of the countries they now control. They'll realize they need us.'

'You really believe that?' Sannie asked.

'Without question. The black leadership in this country has been the most patient on earth, the most understanding. It's been a miracle of compassion and tolerance, and I think it will continue in that vein.'

'Then where's the trouble?' Philip asked.

'With us. With Sannie and Frikkie and Jopie. We won't be able to accept the change. We'll ride the Gotterdammerung Commando, as you predict, but we'll grow sickened of it, even if the rest of the world doesn't intervene. And then . . .'

Here he showed himself truly reluctant to spell out his vision, and neither his daughter nor his American guest could possibly have foreseen what he was about to say: 'At that moment of crisis the Afrikaner and his English supporters, of whom my wife will be one, will go into perpetual laager. With the full connivance and even assistance of the new black rulers, we'll retreat to the western half of the Orange Free State and Cape Province west of Grahamstown. We'll keep the diamond mines at Kimberley, but surrender the gold fields at Johannesburg. That city and Pretoria will be turned over to the new black government, and in our compressed little area we will build our Afrikanerstan. The tables will be reversed. When we were in power we tried to concentrate all the blacks into little areas, while we held the vast open spaces and the good cities. In the future they'll hold the open spaces and the good cities, and we'll be compressed.'

'What will happen to the Coloureds?' Philip asked. 'They'll all be with youin Afrikanerstan?' And Marius van Doorn gave the same answer his people had been giving for the past three hundred years: 'We'll deal with that knotty problem later.'

When Philip and Sannie, much sobered by her father's predictions, repeated them to the Troxels, the cousins guffawed, and Jopie said, 'When they try to capture Pretoria, they'll find us in the trenches at the monument, and they better be prepared to die.'

'Father said the real tests will come with your grandsons. They'll be smart enough to'

'If one of my grandsons talks like your father, I'll beat him to a jelly.'

Frikkie sought to face the problem more philosophically: 'There was no one on this land when we arrived. God gave it to us. We found a primitive paradise and converted it into a great nation.'

'Just a minute!' Philip protested. 'I'm sure I read that natives greeted your ships when they arrived at the Cape.'

'There was no one here,' Jopie insisted. 'I heard Sannie's grandfather state this in a public meeting.'

This evidence so startled Philip that he asked Marius to join them to clarify the facts. 'Jopie says he heard your father . . .'

'On several occasions,' Frikkie added.

'... state that when the Dutch arrived at the Cape, they found the place completely empty.'

Marius laughed. 'My father was fond of claiming this in his orations. It was a basic tenet of his religionstill is for the average Afrikaner.'

'See, there were no people here!' Jopie cried triumphantly.

'Detleef was right, according to his definitions. There were no Englishmen, no Spaniards, no Portuguese. And certainly no blacks.'

'We took over a virgin land,' Frikkie said quietly.

'Not exactly. There were many little brown people. Bushmen, Hottentots.'

'They don't count,' Jopie protested. 'They weren't human.'

'They did die out,' Frikkie said. 'Diseases took them. And a few returned to the desert, and pretty soon they'll die, too.'

'Like we said,' Jopie concluded, looking fiercely at Philip, 'the place was empty. God called us here to perform a task on His behalf.'

The Troxel arrogance