The covenant - James A. Michener [70]
Only twelve days later, at the end of April when the finest days of autumn came, Willem surprised the fort commanders by announcing, 'I'd like to be the first to climb Table Mountain,' and when permission was granted he enlisted two friends. They marched briskly toward the glowing mountain, some dozen miles to the south, and when they stood at its foot Willem cried, 'We don't stop till we reach up there.'
It was a punishing climb, and often the young men came to precipices which they had to circumvent, but at last they reached that broad, gracious plateau which forms the crest of this mountain, and from it they could survey their empire.
To the south lay nothing but the icebound pole. To the west were the empty Atlantic and the New World territories owned by Spain. To the north they saw nothing but wind-swept dunes stretching beyond the power of the eye. But to the east they saw inviting meadows, and the rise of hills, and then the reach of mountains, and then more and more and more, on to a horizon they could only imagine. In silence the three sailors studied the land as it basked in the autumn sun, and often they wheeled about to see the lonely seas across which winds could howl for a thousand miles. But always their eyes returned to those tempting green valleys in the east, those beckoning mountains.
But looking eastward, they ignored the clouds which had formed almost instantaneously over the ocean to the west, and when they turned to descend the mountain, the devil threw his tablecloth and any movement became perilous.
'What can we do?' his companions asked Willem, and he replied with common sense, 'Shiver till dawn.' They knew that this would result in anxiety at the fort, but they had no alternative, and when the sun finally rose, dispelling the fog, they marveled anew at the paradise which awaited in the east.
From the first days of isolation the sailors had been aware of little brown men who occupied the Cape. They were a pitiful lot, 'barely human,' one scribe wrote, 'dirty, thieving and existing miserably on such shell fish as they could trap.' They were given the name Strandloopers (beach rangers), and to the sailors' dismay, they had nothing of value to trade but wanted everything they saw. It was a poor relationship, marked by many scuffles and some deaths.
But on June 1, when the marooned men concluded that they had seen everything worth seeing in their temporary homerhinos feeding in the swales, hippos in the streams, lions prowling at night, and antelope untold an incident occurred, so bizarre that everyone who later wrote his report of the wreck commented upon it:
On this day at about two in the afternoon we were approached from the east by a group of some twenty little brown men much different from the pathetic ones we called Strandloopers. They were taller. Their loincloths were cleaner. They moved without fear, and what joyed us most, they led before them a herd of sheep with the most enormous tails we have ever seen. We called them Huttentuts from their manner of stuttering with strange click sounds and got quickly to work trying to trade with them. They were quite willing to give us their sheep for bits of brass, which they cherish.
And then the most amazing thing happened. From their ranks stepped a man about thirty years old, quick and intelligent of manner, and God's word, he was dressed in the full uniform of an English sailor, shoes included. What was most remarkable, he spoke good English without any click sounds. Since none of us knew this language, I went running for Willem van Doorn, who had learned it at Java, and when he left the fort, knowing that a Huttentut had come who spoke English, he asked me, 'Could it be?' and when he saw the little man in the sailor's uniform he broke into a run, shouting, 'Jack! Jack!' and they embraced many times and fingered the ivory bracelet that we had seen on Van Doorn's chain. Then they danced a jig of happiness and stood