The Covenant (8 page)

When the others realized that Gumsto’s days were almost finished, for he was now forty-five, a very old age for these people, they knew that the day was approaching when they could wait for him no longer, and one afternoon they watched indulgently as he crawled from his area into the one occupied by Gao and Naoka, where the young bride lolled in the sand. “I wanted you for my wife,” he told her. She smiled. “We could have …”

“It’s better this way,” she said without moving. “Gao is young and you’re an old man now.”

“No more hunting,” he said.

“How good that your son learned.”

“Indeed,” the old man agreed. He had an infinity of things he
wished to say to this splendid girl with the unwrinkled face, but she seemed uninterested, yet when he started to crawl back to his own area she smiled at him in her ravishing way and said, “I would have liked you for my husband, Gumsto. You were a man.” She sighed. “But my father was a man, too, and one day Gao will be as great a hunter as either of you.” She sighed again. “It’s always for the best.”

Everyone in the tribe knew that the decision had to be made. Gumsto lagged so constantly that he was becoming an impediment, and this could not be tolerated. For two more days old Kharu served as his crutch, allowing him to lean upon her while she leaned on her digging stick, two old people striving to keep up, and on the third day, when it seemed that he must be left behind, Kharu was surprised to find Naoka coming back to urge Gumsto along.

“Let him lean on me,” the girl said as she assumed the greater burden, and in the heat of the day, when Kharu herself began to falter, Naoka alone carried him along. At dusk, when the others were well ahead, Gumsto told his two women, “This is the last night.” Naoka nodded and left the old couple by a thorn tree.

In the morning Kharu overtook the others, asking for a filled ostrich egg and a bone with some meat on it. These were provided by Gao, but it was Naoka who carried them back to where Gumsto sat propped against the thorn. “We bring you farewell,” the girl said, and it was from her smooth hands that he took his final supplies.

“We must leave now,” Kharu said, and if she was crying, Gumsto could not detect it, for her tears fell into such deep wrinkles that they quickly became invisible. Gumsto leaned back exhausted, able to show no interest in the meat or the water, and after a while Naoka knelt down, touched him on the forehead, and departed.

“You must catch up,” Gumsto warned the woman he had tended since the age of seven.

Kharu rested upon her digging stick, reflected for a moment on the days they had spent together, then pushed the bone nearer to him and strode off.

For just a moment Gumsto looked up at the gathering vultures, but then his eyes lowered to follow the disappearing file, and as he watched it move toward better land he felt content. Gao was a hunter. Naoka was learning where the beetles hid, and the luscious tubers. With Kharu to guide them for a while, they would do well. The clan was twenty-five again, the right number: he was gone, but Kusha’s baby restored the balance. The clan had survived the bad days, and
now as it disappeared he wished it well. His last thoughts, before the predators moved in, were of that zebra: He had insisted on moving away from his clan, and the lions had got him.

Kharu, walking with determination, soon passed Naoka, then overtook the main portion of the file, and assumed at last her place in the lead. There, with her stick to aid her, she led her band not due west, as it had been heading recently, but more to the southwest, as if she knew by some immortal instinct that there lay the Cape—with its endless supply of good water and wandering animals and wild vines that produced succulent things that could be gathered.

I
N THE YEAR
1453
AFTER
C
HRIST
,
THE EFFECTIVE HISTORY OF
South Africa began by actions occurring at a most unlikely spot. At Cape St. Vincent, on the extreme southwestern tip of Europe, a monkish prince of Portugal in his fifty-ninth year sat in his monastery on the bleak promontory of Sagres and contemplated the tragedy that had overtaken his world. He would be known to history as Prince Henry the Navigator, which was preposterous in that he had never mastered navigation nor sailed in one of his ships with an explorer who had.

His genius was vision. At a time when his narrow world was circumscribed by fear and ignorance, those handmaidens of despair, he looked far beyond the confines of Europe, imagining worlds that awaited his discovery, and although he had studied carefully the reports of Marco Polo and knew that civilizations existed in the far Orient, he was convinced that until white men from Europe, baptized into Christianity, had stepped upon a piece of land, it remained for all reasonable purposes undiscovered, heathen and condemned.

His target was Africa. Twice he had visited this dark and brooding continent which lay so close to Portugal, once in grand victory at Ceuta when he was twenty-one; once in shameful defeat at Tangier when he was forty-three, and it fascinated him. From much study he
had deduced that his ships, each flying a flag blazoned with the red cross of Jesus Christ, could sail southward along the western coast of Africa, turn a corner at the southern tip and sail up the eastern coast to the riches of India, China and mysterious Japan. Obstinately he had pursued this goal for forty years and would continue until his death seven years hence, but he would fail.

His defeat was Africa. No matter how forcefully he goaded his captains, they never accomplished much. They did rediscover the Madeira Islands in 1418, but it took sixteen more years before they passed a cape jutting out from the Sahara. They did round Cape Blanco in 1443, and one of Henry’s ships had ventured a little farther south, but there the matter rested. The great hump of Africa was not yet rounded, and by the time Henry would die in 1460 very little would be completed; the notable voyages of Bartholomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama would not be made till long after the Navigator was gone.

His triumph was Africa. For although he was permitted by God to witness none of the success of which he dreamed, it was his dreams that sent the caravels south, and if he never saw a shred of merchandise from India or China coming home in his ships, he did fix Africa in the Renaissance mind, and he did spur its exploration and its conversion to Christianity. It was this latter goal that was of major importance, for he lived a monastic life, eschewing the grandeurs of the court and the intrigues which might have made him king, satisfied in his servitude to God. Of course, as a youth he had fathered an illegitimate daughter and later he did rampage as a soldier, but the main burden of his life was the Christianizing of Africa, and that was why the year 1453 brought him such grief.

The Muslims, those dreadful and perpetual enemies of Christ, had swarmed into Constantinople, lugging their ships across land to break the defenses, and this outpost, which had long protected Christianity from the infidel, had fallen. Since all Europe could now be invaded by the followers of Muhammad, it was more urgent than ever that a way be found around Africa to circumvent the menace, and it was this problem which preoccupied Henry as he studied his maps and laid his plans for new explorations.

What did he know of Africa? He had assembled most of the material available at that time, plus the rumors and the excited speculations of sea captains and travelers. He knew that millennia ago the Egyptians had ventured down the east coast for great distances, and he had talked with sailors who had touched Arab ports in that region.
He had often read that amazing statement in Herodotus about a supposed ship which had set south from the Red Sea with the sun rising on its left and had sailed so far that one day the sun rose on its right; this ship had presumably circumnavigated the entire continent, but Herodotus added that he did not believe the story. Most enchanting were the repeated passages in the Old Testament referring to the immense stores of gold that Ophir, somewhere in Africa, provided:

The happy phrase, “the golden wedge of Ophir,” sang in Henry’s mind, urging him to visualize the vast mines from which the Queen of Sheba had brought her gifts to Solomon. But there were other verses that haunted him: King Solomon built a navy at Ezion-geber; his ships conducted voyages lasting three years, returning home with cargoes of gold and silver, ivory and apes and peacocks; and once King Jehoshaphat assembled a vast fleet to bring back the gold of Ophir “but they went not; for the ships were broken at Ezion-geber.”

It was all so factual—the fleets, the voyages, the gold. “And where was this Ezion-geber?” Prince Henry asked his sages. “It was the city we know as Elath,” they replied, “lying at a northern tip of the Red Sea.” When Henry consulted his maps it was clear that the Biblical ships must have gone south to Africa; there was no way by which they could have entered the Mediterranean. So somewhere along the east coast of Africa lay this golden wedge of Ophir, immeasurably rich and doubtless steeped in heathenism. To salvage it became a Christian duty.

And now, in 1453, the obligation was trebled, for with Constantinople in Muslim hands and the profitable trade routes to the East permanently cut, it was imperative that Africa be saved for Christianity so that ships could sail around it directly to India and China. Then the soldiers of Jesus Christ could capture Ophir from the Muslims and turn its gold to civilized purposes. But where was Ophir?

•  •  •

While Prince Henry brooded and plotted at Sagres, constantly goading his reluctant captains to seek the cape which he knew must mark the southern tip of Africa, events at a small lake in that region were taking an interesting turn. To the undistinguished village of mud-and-thatch rondavels that huddled along the southern edge of this lake, a gang of noisy children came shouting, “He comes! Old Seeker comes again!” And all the black inhabitants came out to greet the old man who dreamed.

When the file of newcomers reached the edge of the village it stopped to allow the Old Seeker time to arrange his clothing and take from a bag carried by one of his servants an iron staff topped by a handsome spread of ostrich feathers. Bearing this nobly in his left hand, he moved two steps forward, then prostrated himself, and from this position called, “Great Chief, I bid you good morning!”

From the mass of villagers a man in his fifties stepped forward and nodded: “Old Seeker, I bid you good morning.”

“Great Chief, did you sleep well?”

“If you slept well, I slept well.”

“I slept well, Great Chief.” Both the chief and his villagers must have sensed the irony in those words, for he was by no accounting a great chief, but protocol demanded that he be called such, especially when the man coming into the village sought advantages.

“You may rise,” the chief said, whereupon the Old Seeker stood erect, grasped his iron staff with one hand, placed his other upon the wrist, and rested his powder-gray head on both.

“What do you come seeking this time?” the chief asked, and evasively the old fellow replied, “The goodness of the soil, the secrets of the earth.”

The chief nodded ceremoniously, and the formal greetings ended. “How was the journey south?” he asked.

The old man handed his staff to a servant and said in a whisper, “Each year, more difficult. I am tired. This is my last trip to your territories.”

Chief Ngalo burst into laughter, for the old man had made this threat three years ago and four years before that. He was a genial, conniving old rascal who had once served as overseer of mines in a great kingdom to the north and who now traveled far beyond his ruler’s lands searching for additional mines, observing remote settlements, and probing always for new trade links. He was an ambassador-at-large, an explorer, a seeker.

“Why do you come to my poor village?” Chief Ngalo asked. “You know we have no mines.”

“I come on a much different mission, dear friend. Salt.”

“If we had salt,” Ngalo said, “we could trade with the world.”

The old man sighed. He had expected to be disappointed, but his people did need salt. However, they had other needs, some of them mysterious. “What I could use,” he said confidentially, “is rhinoceros horns. Not less than sixteen.” They were required, he explained, by older men who wished to marry young wives: “They need assurance that they will not disappoint in bed.”

“But your king is a young man,” the chief said. “Why does he need the horn?”

“Not he! For the rich old men with slanted eyes who live in a far country.”

From the tree under which they took their rest, the two men looked down at the lake, and Ngalo said, “Tonight you will see many animals come to that water. Buffalo, lions, hippos, giraffes and antelope like the stars.” The Old Seeker nodded, and Ngalo added, “But you will never see a rhino. Where can we possibly find sixteen horns?”