Empire of Ivory Page 0,75

It is a bad business," he added, "these settlers want more grazing land, badly, and they cannot get it; so they have nothing to do but quarrel with the tribesmen over what land the ferals do not mind leaving to them."

"Can the ferals not be deterred?" Laurence asked. He did not know how ferals were managed, precisely; in Britain he knew they were largely induced to confine themselves to the breeding grounds, by the regular provision of easy meals.

"No; there must be too much wild game," Grey said. "They are not tempted enough, at any rate, to leave the settlements alone, and there have been trials made enough to prove it. Every year a few young hotheads make a push inland; for what good it does them, which is none." He shrugged. "Most of our adventurers are not heard from again, and of course the inaction of the government is blamed. But they will not understand the expense and difficulty involved. I tell you I should not undertake to carve out any more sizable territory here without at the least a six-dragon formation, and two companies of field artillery."

Laurence nodded; there was certainly no likelihood of the Admiralty sending such assistance at present, or for that matter in the foreseeable future; even apart from the disease, which had so wracked their aerial strength, any significant force would naturally be committed to the war against France.

"We will just have to make shift as best we can," Catherine said, when he had grimly reported his lack of success that night. "Surely Reverend Erasmus can help us; he can speak with the natives, and perhaps that merchant will know where we can find them."

Laurence and Berkley went to apply to him the next morning at the mission, already much altered since the last visit which Laurence had made: the plot of land was now a handsome vegetable-garden, full of tomato and pepper plants; a few Khoi girls in modest black shifts were tending the rows, tying up the tomato plants to stakes, and another group beneath a broad mimosa tree were sewing diligently, while Mrs. Erasmus and another missionary lady, a white woman, took it in turn to read to them out of a Bible translated into their tongue.

Inside, the house was almost wholly given over to students scratching laboriously away at writing on scraps of slate, paper too valuable to be used for such an exercise. Erasmus came walking outside with them, for lack of room to talk, and said, "I have not forgotten to be grateful to you for our passage here, Captain, and I would gladly be of service to you. But there is likely as much kinship between the Khoi tongue and that of the Xhosa as there is between French and German, and I am by no means yet fluent even in the first. Hannah does better, and we do remember a little of our own native tongues; but those will be of even less use: we were both taken from tribes much farther north."

"You still have a damned better chance to jaw with them than any of us do," Berkley said bluntly. "It cannot be that bloody difficult to make them understand: we have a scrap of the thing left, and we can wave it in their faces to show them what we want."

"Surely having lived neighbor to the Khoi themselves," Laurence said, "there may be those among them who speak a little of that tongue, which would allow you to open some communication? We can ask only," he added, "that you try: a failure would leave us no worse than we stand."

Erasmus stopped before the garden gate, watching where his wife was reading to the girls, then said low and thoughtfully, "I have not heard of it, if anyone has brought the Gospel to the Xhosa yet."

Though barred from much expansion inland, the settlers had been creeping steadily out along the coast eastward from Capetown. The Tsitsikamma River, some two long days' flight away, was now a theoretical sort of border between the Dutch and the Xhosa territories: there were no settlements nearer than Plettenberg Bay, and if the Xhosa were lurking in the brush five steps beyond the boundaries of the outermost villages, as many of the settlers imagined they were, no-one would have been any the wiser. But they had been pushed across the river in the last fighting, it was a convenient line upon a map, and so it had been named in