The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 83

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About this time he showed a gift of extra-sensory powers. Before a hunt, standing at his horse's head, he would go into a self-induced trance and begin describing the surrounding countryside and the wild animals in it. "One hour's ride to the north there is a small muddy pan. A herd of quagga are drinking there, and five fat eland are coming down the path to the water. On the hill above it, under a camel-Thorn tree, a pride of lion are resting, "n ou swart maanhaar, an old black mane and two lionesses. In the valleys beyond, three giraffe." The hunters would find the animals, or the signs they had left, exactly as young Paul described them.

At sixteen, he was entitled, as a man, to ride off two farms, as much land as a horseman could encircle in a day. Each of them was approximately sixteen thousand acres. They were the first of the vast land-holdings he acquired and held during his lifetime, sometimes bartering sixteen thousand acres of prime pasture for a plough or a bag of sugar.

At twenty he was a field cornet, an elected office which was something between magistrate and sheriff.-, at such tender years to be chosen by men who venerated and marked him as somebody unusual. About this time, he ran a foot race against a horseman on a picked steed over a course of a mile, and won by a length. Then during a battle against the black chief Sekukuni, the Boer General was shot through the head and tumbled over the edge of the kopje. The General was a big bulky man, two hundred and forty pounds weight, but Paul Kruger leaped down the krans, picked up the body and ran-back up the hillside under the musket-fire of Sekukuni's men.

When he set off to claim his bride, he found his way blocked by the wide Vaal river in raging spate, the carcasses of cattle and wild game rolling by in the flood. Despite cries of warning from the ferryman, and without even removing his boots, he urged his horse into the brown waters and swam across. Flooded rivers would not stop a man like Paul Kruger.

After having fought Moshesh and Mzilikazi, and every other warlike tribe south of the Limpopo river, after having burned Dr. David Livingstone's mission on the suspicion that he was supplying arms to the tribes, after having fought even his own people, the rebellious Boers of the Orange Free State, he was made Commandant-in-Chief of the army, and still later the President of the South African Republic.

It was this indomitable, courageous, immensely physically powerful, ugly, obstinate, devout and cantankerous old man, rich in land and herds, who now lifted his head from the Bible and finished his reading with a simple injunction to the men who waited upon him attentively.

"Fear God, and distrust the English," he said, and closed the Bible.

Then still without taking his bloodshot eyes from Ralph's face, he bellowed with shocking force, "Bring coffee!" and a coloured maid bustled in with a tin tray loaded with steaming mugs. The men around the table exchanged pouches of black Magaliesberg shag, and charged their pipes, watching Ralph with closed and guarded expressions. Once the oily blue smoke had veiled the air, Kruger spoke again. "You asked to see me, mynheer?" "Alone,"said Ralph. "These men I trust." "Very well." They used the taal. Ralph knew that Kruger could speak English with some fluency, and that he would not do so as a matter of principle. Ralph had learned to speak the taal on the diamond-diggings. It was the simplest of all European languages, suited to the everyday life of an uncomplicated society of hunters and farmers, though even they, for the purposes of political discussion or worship, fell back upon the sophistication of High Dutch.

"My name is Ballantyne." "I know who you are. Your father was the elephant-hunter. A strong man, they say, and straight but you," and now a world of loathing entered the old man's tone, "you belong to that heathen, Rhodes." And though Ralph shook his head, he went on, "Do not think I have not heard his blasphemies. I know that when he was asked if he believed there was a God, he replied," and here he broke into heavily accented English for the first time, "I give God a fifty-fifty chance of existing."" Kruger shook his head slowly. "He will pay for that one day, for the Lord has commanded, "Thou shalt not take My name in vain."" "Perhaps that day of payment is already at hand, "said Ralph softly. "And perhaps you are God's chosen instrument.

"Do you dare to blaspheme, also?" the old man demanded sharply.

"No," Ralph shook his head. "I come to deliver the blasphemer into your hands." And he laid an envelope on the dark wood, then with a flick slid it down the length of the table until it lay in front of the president. "A list of the arms he has sent "secretly into Johannesburg, and where they are held. The names of the rebels who intend to use them. The size and force of the commando gathered on your borders at Pitsani, the route they Will take to join the rebels in Johannesburg, and the date on which they intend to ride." Every man at the table had stiffened with shock, only the old man still puffed calmly at his pipe. He made no effort" to touch the envelope.

"Why do you come to me with this?" "When I see a thief about to break into a neighbour's home, I take it as my duty to warn him. Kruger removed the pipe from his mouth and flicked a spurt of yellow tobacco juice from the stem onto the dung floor beside his chair. We are neighbours," Ralph explained. "We are white men living in Africa. We have a common destiny. We have many enemies, and one day we may be required to fight them together." Kruger's pipe gurgled softly, but nobody spoke again for fully two minutes, until Ralph broke the silence.

"Very well then," he said. "If Rhodes fails, I will make a great deal of money." Kruger sighed, and nodded. "All right, now I believe you at last, for that is an Englishman's reason for treachery." And he picked up the envelope in his brown gnarled old hand. "Goodbye, mynheer, "he said softly.

Cathy had taken to her paintbox again. She had put it away when Jon-Jon was born, but now there was time for it once more, However, this time she was determined to make a more serious work of it, instead of sugary family portraits and pretty landscapes.

She had begun a study of the trees of Rhodesia, and already had a considerable portfolio of them. First she painted the entire tree, making as many as twenty studies of typical specimens before settling on a representative example, and then to the master painting she added detailed drawings of the leaves, the flowers and the fruits, which she rendered faithfully in watercolours, finally she pressed actual leaves and blooms and gathered the seeds, then wrote a detailed description of the plant.

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