about a loan he laughed.
'Christ! Sean, I only work there-I don't own the bloody mine.'
Sean had dinner with him and his bride of two years' standing.
At their urging Sean examined their newborn infant and secretly decided
that it looked like an unweaned bulldog.
Extending his stay in Johannesburg, Sean visited the banks.
He had dealt with most of them long ago, but the personnel had changed,
so he was puzzled that the manager of each institution seemed to have
heard of him.
'Colonel Courtney. Now would you be Colonel Sean Courtney of Lion Kop
Wattle Estates down in Natal?' And when he nodded he saw the shutters
come down in their eyes, like windows barred by a prudent householder
against burglars.
On the eighth night he ordered liquor to be sent to his suite, two full
bottles of brandy. He drank steadily and desperately.
The brandy would not quieten the violent struggles of his brain, but
seemed to goad it, distorting his problems and deepening his
melancholia.
He lay alone until the dawn paled out the yellow gaslight of the lamps.
The brandy hummed giddily in his head and he longed for peace-the peace
he had found only in the immense silence and space of the veld.
Suddenly a picture fbrined in his mind of a lonely grave below a little
hill. He heard the wind moan over it and saw the brown grass sway.
That was peace.
'Saul,' he said, and the sadness was heavy on him for the pilgrimage he
had promised himself and had not made.
'It is finished here. I'll go now,' and he stood up. The giddiness
caught him and he clutched at the head-rail of the bed to steady
himself.
He recognized the kopJe from four miles off. Into his memory its shape
was indelibly etched; the symmetrical slope of the sides cobbled with
boulders that glinted dully in the sunshine like the scales of a
reptile, the flattened summit ringed by a holder stratum of rock, the
high altar on which the sacrifice to greed and Stupidity had been
made.
Closer he could discern the aloe plants upon the slopes, fleshy leaves
spiked like crowns and jewelled with scarlet blooms. On the plain
below the kopje, in the short brown grass, stood a long line of white
specks. Sean rode towards them and as he approached each speck evolved
into a cairn of whitewashed stones and on each stood a metal cross.
Stiff from the long day in the saddle Sean dismounted slowly.
He hobbled the horses, dropped saddle and pack from their backs and
turned them loose to feed. He stood alone and lit a cheroot, suddenly
reluctant to approach the line of graves.
The silence of the empty land settled gently upon him, a silence not
broken but somehow heightened by the sound of the wind across the
plain. The harsh tearing as his mount cropped at the dry brown grass
seemed sacrilegious in this place, but it roused Sean from his
thoughts. He walked towards the double line of graves and stood before
one of them. Stamped crudely into the metal of the cross the words
