The covenant - James A. Michener [651]
Grabbing Marius by the arm, Philip ran toward the lake, and when they stood at its edge, he said, 'Suppose this lake has existed for eons. Why did it settlehere in this declivity?'
'Why not?'
'The only explanation would be that it filled some natural dip in the earth. And what caused that dip? The mouth of an old pipe.' He knelt down, pecked at the striations with no purpose, for they could reveal nothing, then rose and cried, 'Marius! What I've been searching for could be right here.'
And he turned eastward toward the spot where old Pik Prinsloo had found his diamonds, far beyond the intervening hills, and with a sweep of hand obliterated the hills, for he supposed correctly that they had erupted millions of years later than the formation of this lake.
With the hills gone, he could visualize the river that had carried the diamonds downstream; it had come from the west, probably, along this chain of little lakes, and it had flowed eastward right over the roots of those hills, and it had not turned northward, along the path of the river that now existed, but always eastward in a logical direction, bearing the diamonds with it.
'Marius!' he cried. 'I think I've found it.'
'What?'
'The pipe that produced those diamonds. I've spent a year searching in the wrong direction.'
'You think it might be here?'
'I'm convinced of it. Not because of anything I've seen here today, but because I've exhausted all other possibilities.'
The words had a heavy impact on Van Doorn, for he saw his country in the process of exhausting to various possibilities before it came to grips with the towering one that threatened its existence. But as with Saltwood and the diamonds, preliminary exploration required time and the cauterizing of old animosities. If Philip had spent a futile year searching for his diamonds, South Africa could afford ten or twenty searching for its solution:
Let's say ten years' toying with the idea of a total, military-style repression, then maybe five with some kind of neo-fascism, then another five in a retreat to sanity, and then perhaps another ten in fumbling attempts at a shared democracy. Hell, time moves in vast cycles, but this whole thing could be solved in my lifetime. In my white-hair period I could see a splendid society here. We wouldn't have to scuttle down to the Cape enclave. Black and white, Coloured and Indian could participate equally.
'Marius, are you listening?'
'What?'
'I said I'd like to drill one more experimental hole. Over there at the margin of your lake.'
'For what?'
'I'm convinced I'll find kimberlite. Maybe five hundred feet down, through the detritus.'
Detritus, that's the word. The awful accumulation of wrong decisions, improper turns. You scrape away the excrescences of historythe hangings at Slagter's Nek, the awfulness of the prison camps, the sins we've committed with apartheidand maybe you get down to the bedrock of human society, where diamonds hide. God of my fathers, how I wish we could bring in the psychological drills and probe down to bedrock.
'So, I have your permission?'
'To do what?'
'To drill the test hole . . . down to kimberlite?'
Kimberlite! This nation of mine will gamble a billion rand to find the next kimberlite in hopes that diamonds will be uncovered. But it won't spend ten rand to find the kimberlite of the human soul. We'll turn the clock back a billion years to find gems worth absolutely nothing in a reasonable world, but we ignore the flint-hard gems in the human conscience that are worth all the raw money in the world. It's an insane society, and if Saltwood does find the new cache of diamonds, everyone in Pretoria and London and Amsterdam and New York will say, 'South Africa has saved itself once more in its time of crisis.' We buy financial credits, but not intelligence.
'I'll keep the mess off to one side,' Philip said in great excitement. 'Not bring in too many vehicles. And the lake poses no