Chapter 2

A WOMAN’S CLOTHES

Ryk Schoonraad views the complete destruction on his farm Horison with amazement, with sorrow, but also with great anger. His house’s roof burned down and has collapsed. The doors and windows are burned out. One gable has half collapsed. His furniture is destroyed. He didn’t have much, but what he had was very precious to him. Among them were a few beautiful old heirlooms, a stinkwood riempie mat couch, which still belonged to his late father. A small set of stinkwood chairs with riempie mats. An old stinkwood table that still belonged to his grandfather. A linen cupboard that was once his mother’s proud possession. All of this is burned to charcoal.

Shaking his head, he turns away from the house. The windlass on the house well has been thrown down into the well. The neat wooden kraal that he made of sweet thorn and camel thorn has been broken to pieces. His buck wagon, the neat red-wheeled wagon that he ordered from Paarl two years ago, is a black skeleton. Apparently a fire was made under the wagon. Buck beams, belly boards, frame, drawbar, rims, hubs, everything is charred.

Ryk Schoonraad is short of breath after he has made a record of everything he has lost.

Then he looks bewildered at the straw house of old Andries. He starts walking there quickly, but then he realizes that the straw house has also disappeared. He stops there in the sun and shouts loudly for Andries. As loud as he can. But his voice vanishes into the silence and the emptiness that surrounds him. There is no answer from old Andries.

Then he walks to the small masonry dam that he built of neat dressed limestone, the dam that he and old Andries always so diligently filled from the cattle watering hole.

When he gets there, his shock is further deepened. Next to the dam in the shade of an old camel thorn tree he finds old Andries. But old Andries no longer looks like he knew him. His clothes are in rags. His corpse is horribly torn and mutilated by wild animals, and when Ryk stands there in a daze by the remains of his faithful old creature, he hears a loud hyena laugh a little way from him.

“Lord,” he says, “what has happened here? What on earth has happened here? Can one man hate another man so much that he wipes him out like this?”

With a lump in his throat and an anger that makes him short of breath, he turns away from the mutilated remains of old Andries.

In the yard he tries to track. He is looking for an indication that might give him a clue regarding this insane destruction. But what has taken place here has clearly taken place a few days ago, because wind and rain have erased all the signs. There is no trace to be seen. Nothing. Only the destruction grins at him in the bright sunlight.

Like an old, broken man, Ryk Schoonraad walks to where he hooked Held under the camel thorn tree. Like a sleepwalker, he climbs into the saddle. Then he rides away into the veld, going to look for his cattle. Every time he feels how his eyes burn because he and old Andries worked hard here at Horison. What is here they built up out of the ground. When they moved in here, there was not one stone on top of another. They made everything out of the ground with their sweat and with their labor. And now there is nothing. Everything is destroyed and given back to nature. He will have to start again. He will have to pull the first furrow again.

Ryk is so bewildered that he doesn’t really know what to do. A dismay has seized him. He rides a distance and then stops again. He looks around the environment and a heavy suspicion takes hold of him. He looks around him, looks into the distance to see if he sees dust rising or if he sees a group of riders somewhere. It gets cold inside him because he knows Mertel Duvenage. He knows that the villain will not be satisfied with just wiping out Horison. He will also seek the life of the one who is Ryk Schoonraad. F