“Ach! what does it matter? Let the children alone.”
The conversation soon glided back to the channel in which it had been flowing when the interruption came. A certain stranger—a man who was travelling through Bushmanland for the purpose of buying cattle for the Cape Town market—was discussing astronomy with Old Schalk, who was a strong supporter of the geocentric theory. The cattle-dealer was not by any means well up in his subject; as a matter of fact, he was simply retailing certain notions which he had picked up in a crude state from a young relative of his who had been to a college, and which he had not been able properly to digest. Nevertheless he stoutly maintained his thesis.
“Ach! what?” said Old Schalk. “These star-peerers, what do they know? Are their eyes better than mine? Can they shoot springbucks better than I can? Don’t I see that the sun gets up every morning there” (he pointed to the east), “and don’t I see every evening that it goes down there?”
He shook the long stick towards the west, as though threatening an astronomer with the consequences of his folly.
“Ja, Oom; but you see it’s this way—”
“Ach! don’t tell me about your this way and that way. You find me a star-peerer who knows his Bible or has better eyes than I have, and I’ll listen to him. Doesn’t the Bible say that Joshua told the sun to stand still? Doesn’t the Prophet Isaiah say that the Lord stretched the sky over the earth like a tent? These star-peerers are all rogues and Romanist heathens.”
“But, Oom,” said the cattle-dealer, who was, as it were, blowing the fuse of a torpedo which he had in reserve, “how is it that these star-peerers are able to tell long before the times when the sun and the moon will be darkened?”
“How are they able to tell? Why, they find it out from the almanack, of course.” The only almanack with which the Trek-Boer is acquainted is one issued by the Dutch Reformed Church. This document is adorned with the Signs of the Zodiac, and is heavily garnished with Scripture texts. It is believed by certain classes of the Boers that the almanack is annually deduced from the Bible by a committee of Church ministers.
The cattle-dealer, blown up—to change the old metaphor—by his own torpedo, had to own himself vanquished. Old Schalk’s reputation for wisdom rose higher than ever, and a deadly blow was dealt to the heliocentric theory in Bushmanland.
The lovers strolled away over the sandy plain, which was now covered with a rich carpet of variously hued flowers. Gorgeous gazanias of the tint of the richest mahogany, and with the base of each petal eyed like a peacock’s tail; blue, sweet-scented heliophilas, purple and crimson mesembryanthemums, and lovely variegated pelargoniums brushed their feet at every step. They said little to one another, and that little could interest none but themselves. Both were ignorant and illiterate to a degree; their range of ideas was more limited than it is easy to describe, or even to realise; but their hearts were young and full of vague, sweet, unutterable thoughts. The springbucks—the advance detachment of a large “trek”—were scattered, singly or in small groups, over the illimitable plain. They sheered off, feeding tamely, to either side. The meerkats scuttled back to their low, burrow-pierced mounds, where they sat erect on a tripod, formed by hind legs and tail, ready to dart underground. The striped-faced gemsbuck-mice dashed wildly into their burrows in terror, and then out again in uncontrollable curiosity.