The Covenant (67 page)

Toward the close of day Josiah said, “I rather think that at the rise of the next hill we shall see it,” and he told the boys to rein in their horses and allow the Proprietor to be in the lead when Stonehenge was first sighted.

“There they are!” the old man cried, and to the east on a small mound which caught the first rays of the rising sun and the last light of day stood the hallowed stones, some fallen, some leaning, some erect in the location they had occupied for more than four thousand years. It was an awesome place, and no Englishman conversant with his nation’s history could fail to be humbled upon approaching it.

“D’you think it was the Druids?” the Proprietor asked as the group surveyed the somber monument.

“It was here centuries before anyone heard of Druids,” Josiah suggested.

“My own thoughts,” the Proprietor said. “Sturdy bastards, whoever they were.”

Hilary had always been enchanted by Stonehenge. He had seen it first as a boy of ten on a family excursion much like this. He had seen it again when he accompanied Peter to Oriel, and of course on his own travels to Oxford. It was timeless, old beyond counting when Jesus was born, and it reminded men of the long sweep of history
and the periods of darkness. The stones turned red as the sun dipped to its horizon, shimmering in the fading light.

“We’ll pitch the tents over there,” the Proprietor suggested, and that night they slept within the shadowed circle.

Long before dawn the Proprietor was up, cursing the night and abusing his servants for not having lighted candles. “I want to see the sun striking it,” he grumbled, and as the Saltwoods joined him he said, “I’m sure they used to conduct human sacrifice here. At the solstices, anyway. Probably killed off two old men like me and three young virgins. Let’s go to the sacrifice.”

And they stood among the ancient stones, hauled here from sources far removed, as the sun broke upon them.

“D’you think you could offer us a prayer, Hilary?” the old man asked.

“Let us bow our heads,” the new minister said, and as day came in earnest he prayed: “God, Who marks our passage back to Salisbury and to India and to South Africa, and also to America where our brother hides, watch over us. Watch over us.”

The Proprietor said that while these were fine words, he would have appreciated some mention of the fact that this might be his last journey to the stones, whereupon Hilary uttered another short prayer, instructing God on this additional matter, and the old man was appeased.

They spent that day inspecting the fallen rocks and making cautious guesses as to how old they might be, but as dusk approached, Hilary experienced a surge of religious emotion and moved apart from the others. Standing among the untoppled pillars, a gaunt, angular, stoop-shouldered figure who might well have been an ancient priest of this temple, he whispered, “O God, I swear to Thee that I shall be as faithful to Thy religion as the men who erected these stones were to theirs.”

He landed at Table Bay one morning in the spring of 1810, expecting to be greeted by representatives of the LMS who would probably spend some weeks indoctrinating him in his duties and perhaps even accompanying him to his place of assignment. Instead, as soon as he stepped ashore he was grabbed by a sturdy Dutch farmer with very broad shoulders and full beard who asked in heavily accented English, “Is it true, you’re a disciple of Simon Keer?”

Modestly Saltwood conceded that he was, whereupon the farmer pushed him away, muttering, “You ought to be ashamed, spreading lies.”

He was not allowed even one night’s rest in Cape Town, for at noon he found himself in a caravan of sorts heading eastward to a river on the far side of the mountains, where he had been directed to launch a mission. During the arduous journey he learned much about South Africa but even more about Reverend Keer, for wherever he stopped, people asked about the red-headed Lancashire man. The few Englishmen spoke of him with obvious regard, the many Dutchmen with unmasked contempt, and one night he asked an English missionary’s wife to explain this contradiction.

“Simple,” she said. “Simon Keer always stood up for the Hottentots and the Xhosa.”

“Isn’t that our duty? To bring them to Jesus Christ?”

“Reverend Keer treated the Hottentots more like workmen in England. Always fighting for their rights. Decent pay. Decent homes for them to live in. Things like that.”

“Did the Dutch object?”

She put down her cooking pans and turned to face Hilary. “You must keep one thing in mind, if you’re to be an effective missionary. We English have been here four years. The Dutch have been here a hundred and fifty-eight. They know what they’re doing and they do it well.”

“Keer says that what they do so well is slavery.”

She placed her two hands on Hilary’s and pleaded, “Don’t use that word. Reverend Keer was given to exaggeration. He lacked education, you know.”

“He’s translating the Gospels.”

“Oh, he was excellent at identifying himself with the Xhosa. He could stay up all night transcribing their words.”

“I thought it was my duty to do the same.”

“To bring them Christ, yes. To become their advocate against the Dutch, no.”

“You speak harshly.”

“The Xhosa killed my son. They’d have killed me, too, except that a Dutch commando arrived in time.”

“And you stay?”

“It was an incident. We were at war and our troops had killed their people. Simple retaliation.”

“Aren’t you afraid?”

“I am, and you will be, too. And pray God that you don’t get caught up in it.”

As he penetrated farther into the country he became increasingly aware of how different the long-established Dutch were from the lately arrived English, and in his first letter home he shared his observations with his mother:

At his next halt, where only Boers lived, Hilary received his harshest view of Reverend Keer: “Arrogant, stupid man. Kept saying he loved the Xhosa and the Hottentots, but every action he took damaged them.”

“In what way?”

“Made them dissatisfied with their lot.”

“What is their lot?”

“At school in England, did they teach you the Book of Joshua?”

“I’ve read it.”

“But have you taken it to heart? God’s story of how the Israelites came into a strange land? And how they were to conduct themselves there?” It was obvious to the Boer listeners that the new missionary knew little of Joshua, so the oldest farmer took down his huge Bible and slowly leafed the pages until he came to the familiar instructions, which he translated roughly for the newcomer:

Closing the big book reverently and placing his hands upon it, he stared directly into Hilary’s eyes and said, “That is the word of the Lord. It is His Bible which instructs us.”

“There is another part of the Bible,” Hilary said quietly, leaning his thin shoulders forward to engage the debate.

“Yes, your Reverend Keer preached quite a different message, but he was an idiot. Young friend, believe me, it is the ancient word of God Himself that we follow, and you will break your teeth in this country if you contradict it.”

Across the southern plains of Africa, wherever he stopped, Hilary found himself engaged in argument over the merits of Simon Keer, and the Boers were so forceful in their rejection of the little redhead that in his quiet moments Hilary began to read Numbers and Joshua, finding in them not only the passages which his first Boer mentors had cited, but scores of others which applied directly to the position of the Dutch who had come into this land like the Israelites of old, who had entered their land of Canaan. The parallels were so overwhelming that he began to see local history through Dutch eyes, and this was a salvation when he opened his own mission.

The spot selected for him lay on the left bank of the Sundays River, four hundred miles from Cape Town. When he reached it, not a building stood, not a roadway existed. The river, suffering from drought, carried little water, and there were no trees. But the spot itself was congenial, perched on a broad bend of the river and graced with level fields acceptable to plowing. In the distance was a forest with an abundance of usable wood; and at hand, enough stones to build a city. Hilary, visualizing what this bleak spot might become, named it from a passage in the twentieth chapter of Joshua, where God instructs His people to erect cities of refuge to which any accused could flee and be assured of temporary safety:

This will be Golan, my city of refuge, Hilary thought, and when the last members of his caravan disappeared, leaving him majestically alone in the heart of a strange land, he prayed that he might be allowed to build well.

The first night, as he lay on the ground close to his belongings, he listened to strange sounds, and the darkness of Africa assailed him with a wild discordance, a sense of awe and anticipation rather than fear. When he awakened at dawn, he found a group of brown people watching him, squatting on their haunches a hundred feet away. For months there had been rumors that a missionary was coming.

Hilary beamed at the sight. Surely the Lord Himself had brought this little gathering into the arms of His servant Saltwood. Dusting himself off, he rose to greet them, overjoyed when one man spoke to him in broken English.

“We stay with you. We your people now.” His name was Pieter, son of that Dikkop who had traveled with Mal Adriaan. It was ten years since he had lived with the Van Doorns; he had run away after a beating for eating a melon from the family garden. He had drifted from farm to farm, working just enough to avoid being classified as “Vagrant Hottentot,” which would allow his being assigned arbitrarily to any farmer who wanted him.

In truth, Pieter was a man who saw virtue in idleness; he could happily pass an entire day with his back against a tree, eyes firmly shut.

But before sunset that first day the Hottentots had shown Hilary how to dig a foundation to keep out rain, and by the second nightfall they had cut enough saplings to frame out a dwelling. Hilary saw in his imagination how Golan should look: rows of huts facing each other, a meeting hall and a church to close off one end of the rectangle.

He was pleased with the rapid growth of his little community—six Hottentots to forty within three weeks—and within a short time Hilary and his followers had the mud-and-clay walls of a mission
church in place. Before the thatching of the roof was complete he preached a message of dedication inside the little structure. Having mastered several words of the Dutch-like language these people spoke, and some Hottentot with its click sounds, he delighted his congregation by offering the benediction in their language. In the days that followed he heard members of the mission saying gravely to one another as they worked, “Peace be unto you.”

Peace was a commodity almost unknown. Young Xhosa warriors persisted in raiding cattle from white men’s farms, and not long after Hilary’s first sermon English troops, fortified by a Boer commando, had launched a massive attack against the black men, driving twenty thousand of them back across the Great Fish River and liberating, as they phrased it, vast herds of cattle. The gallant leader of this rout would be honored by having a newborn town named after him: Grahamstown.

Hilary was untouched by these events; but it grieved him that after six months he had not met one Xhosa, and he began to fear that he had made a mistake in locating Golan here. During his studies at Gosport he had imagined himself bringing Christianity to black savages, wrestling with their pagan beliefs and finally welcoming them to Jesus. Instead he was surrounded by brown Hottentots, more than ninety in the huts that faced the rectangle, while all the Xhosa lurked far across the river, a gang of cattle thieves.

In his reports to the LMS he called his flock “my Hottentots,” knowing that few were of the pure strain; they ranged from light, yellow-skinned half-Malays to very dark half-Angolans. They were not inclined to hard work, and a distressing number loitered about the mission doing nothing. But Hilary always remembered the name he had given this place, Golan the refuge, and he believed that these “mild and peaceable folk,” as he wrote of them, merited all the sanctuary they could find. Many had come to him with terrible tales of beatings, chains, and years of labor without pay from Boers who made their lives a misery. Simon Keer’s impassioned indictment of the colonists echoed in his ears, and he saw it his duty to succor the weak.

Even his hopes for the Xhosa soared when a black man finally came to Golan, an elderly fellow from a kraal to the east. He proclaimed himself to be a Christian, stating in halting English that he had been baptized by a missionary with red hair called “Master Keer,”
and he indicated that his village contained several other blacks who had been converted by “our dear little man who could speak Xhosa.”