The man held the door open for Ralph and he stooped through it into the windowless living- room. It smelled of stale smoke and dead ash from the open fireplace. The floor was covered with rush mats and animal-skins. There was a single table down the centre of the room, of heavy crudely fashioned dark wood. There was a single hanging on the wall opposite the fireplace, an embroidered copy of the ten commandments in High Dutch script. The only book in the room lay open on the bare table-top. It was an enormous Dutch Bible with leather cover and bindings of brass.
On leather-thonged chairs, eight men sat down the length of both sides of the table. They all looked up at Ralph as he entered. There was not a man amongst them younger than fifty years old, for the Boers valued experience and acquired wisdom in their leaders. Most of them were bearded and all of them wore rough hard-worn clothing, and were solemn and unsmiling. The man who had greeted Ralph followed him in and silently indicated an empty chair. Ralph sat down and every shaggy bearded head turned away from him towards the figure at the end of the table.
He was the biggest man in the room, monumentally ugly, as a bulldog or one of the great anthropoids is ugly. His beard was a grey scraggly fringe, but his upper lip was shaven. His face hung in folds and bags, the skin was darkly burned by ten thousand fierce African suns, and it was lumped and stained with warts and with the speckles of benign skin cancer, like the foxing on the pages of a very old book.
One eyelid drooped to give him a crafty suspicious expression. His toffee-brown eyes had also been affected by the white sun glare of Africa, and by the scouring dust of the hunting veld and the battlefield, so they were now perpetually bloodshot, sore and inflamed-looking. His people called him Oom Paul, Uncle Paul, and held him in only slightly less veneration than they did their Old Testament God.
Paul Kruger began to read aloud again from the open Bible before him. He read slowly, followed the text with his finger. The thumb was missing from his hand. It had been blown off by a bursting gunbarrel thirty years before. His voice was a rumbling basso profunda.
'Nevertheless the people be strong that dwell in the land, and the cities are walled and very great. and moreover we saw the children of the Anak there... And Caleb stilled the people, and said. Let us go up at once and possess it, for we are well able to overcome it.' Ralph watched him intently, studying the huge slumped body, the shoulders so wide that the ugly head seemed to perch upon them like a bedraggled bird on a mountaintop, and he thought of the legend that surrounded this strange man.
Paul Kruger had been nine years old when his father and uncles had packed their wagons and gathered their herds and trekked northwards, away from British rule, driven on by the memory of their folk heroes hanged at Slachters Nek by the Redcoats. The Krugers trekked from the injustice of having their slaves turned free, from the English black circuit courts, from judges who did not speak their language, from taxes levied on land that was theirs and from the foreign troops who seized their beloved herds to pay those taxes.
The year had been 1835 and on that hard trek Paul Kruger became a man at an age when most boys are still playing with kites and marbles.
Each day he was given a single bullet and a charge of powder and sent out to provide meat for the family. If he failed to bring back a buck, his father beat him. He became, by necessity, an expert marksman. it was one of his duties to scout ahead for water and good grazing, and to lead the caravan to it. He became a skilled horseman and developed an almost mystical affinity for the veld, and the herds of fat-tailed sheep and multi-hued cattle that were. his family's wealth. Like a Matabele mujiba, he knew every beast by name, and could pick out an ailing animal from the herd at a mile distant.
When Mzilikazi, the Matabele emperor, sent his imp is with their long shields swarming down upon the little caravan of wagons, little Paul took his place with the other men at the barricades. There were thirty-three Boer fighting men inside the circle of wagons. The wagon trucks were lashed together with trek chains, and the openings between the wheels latticed with woven thorn- branches.
The Matabele amadoda were uncountable. Regiment after regiment they charged, hissing their deep ringing 'Jee!' They attacked for six hours without respite, and when the bullets ran low, the Boer women smelted and cast lead in the midst of the battle. When the Matabele fell back at last, their dead lay chest-deep around the wagons and little Paul had become a man, for he had killed a man many men.
Strangely, it was another four years before he killed his first lion, sending a hardened ball through its heart as it sprang upon his horse's back. By now he was able to test a new horse by galloping it over broken ground. If it fell, young Paul would land catlike, on his feet, shake his head with disapproval, and walk away. When hunting buffalo, he would mount facing his horse's tail so as to have a steadier shot when the beasts 'chased his horse, as they invariably did. This unusual seat in no way hampered his control of the horse, and he could change to face ahead so swiftly and smoothly as not to upset his mount's stride in full gallop.
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
