His defeat was Africa. No matter how forcefully he goaded his captains, they never accomplished much. They did rediscover the Madeira Islands in 1418, but it took sixteen more years before they passed a cape jutting out from the Sahara. They did round Cape Blanco in 1443, and one of Henry’s ships had ventured a little farther south, but there the matter rested. The great hump of Africa was not yet rounded, and by the time Henry would die in 1460 very little would be completed; the notable voyages of Bartholomeu Dias and Vasco da Gama would not be made till long after the Navigator was gone.
His triumph was Africa. For although he was permitted by God to witness none of the success of which he dreamed, it was his dreams that sent the caravels south, and if he never saw a shred of merchandise from India or China coming home in his ships, he did fix Africa in the Renaissance mind, and he did spur its exploration and its conversion to Christianity. It was this latter goal that was of major importance, for he lived a monastic life, eschewing the grandeurs of the court and the intrigues which might have made him king, satisfied in his servitude to God. Of course, as a youth he had fathered an illegitimate daughter and later he did rampage as a soldier, but the main burden of his life was the Christianizing of Africa, and that was why the year 1453 brought him such grief.
The Muslims, those dreadful and perpetual enemies of Christ, had swarmed into Constantinople, lugging their ships across land to break the defenses, and this outpost, which had long protected Christianity from the infidel, had fallen. Since all Europe could now be invaded by the followers of Muhammad, it was more urgent than ever that a way be found around Africa to circumvent the menace, and it was this problem which preoccupied Henry as he studied his maps and laid his plans for new explorations.
What did he know of Africa? He had assembled most of the material available at that time, plus the rumors and the excited speculations of sea captains and travelers. He knew that millennia ago the Egyptians had ventured down the east coast for great distances, and he had talked with sailors who had touched Arab ports in that region. He had often read that amazing statement in Herodotus about a supposed ship which had set south from the Red Sea with the sun rising on its left and had sailed so far that one day the sun rose on its right; this ship had presumably circumnavigated the entire continent, but Herodotus added that he did not believe the story. Most enchanting were the repeated passages in the Old Testament referring to the immense stores of gold that Ophir, somewhere in Africa, provided:
… and they went with the servants of Solomon to Ophir, and took thence four hundred and fifty talents of gold, and brought them to King Solomon.
Kings’ daughters were among thy honourable women: upon thy right hand did stand the queen in gold of Ophir.
I will make a man more precious than fine gold; even a man than the golden wedge of Ophir.
The happy phrase, ‘the golden wedge of Ophir,’ sang in Henry’s mind, urging him to visualize the vast mines from which the Queen of Sheba had brought her gifts to Solomon. But there were other verses that haunted him: King Solomon built a navy at Ezion-geber; his ships conducted voyages lasting three years, returning home with cargoes of gold and silver, ivory and apes and peacocks; and once King Jehoshaphat assembled a vast fleet to bring back the gold of Ophir ‘but they went not; for the ships were broken at Ezion-geber.’
It was all so factual—the fleets, the voyages, the gold. ‘And where was this Ezion-geber?’ Prince Henry asked his sages. ‘It was the city we know as Elath,’ they replied, ‘lying at a northern tip of the Red Sea.’ When Henry consulted his maps it was clear that the Biblical ships must have gone south to Africa; there was no way by which they could have entered the Mediterranean. So somewhere along the east coast of Africa lay this golden wedge of Ophir, immeasurably rich and doubtless steeped in heathenism. To salvage it became a Christian duty.
And now, in 1453, the obligation was trebled, for with Constantinople in Muslim hands and the profitable trade routes to the East permanently cut, it was imperative that Africa be saved for Christianity so that ships could sail around it directly to India and China. Then the soldiers of Jesus Christ could capture Ophir from the Muslims and turn its gold to civilized purposes. But where was Ophir?
While Prince Henry brooded and plotted at Sagres, constantly goading his reluctant captains to seek the cape which he knew must mark the southern tip of Africa, events at a small lake in that region were taking an interesting turn. To the undistinguished village of mud-and-thatch rondavels that huddled along the southern edge of this lake, a gang of noisy children came shouting, ‘He comes! Old Seeker comes again!’ And all the black inhabitants came out to greet the old man who dreamed.
When the file of newcomers reached the edge of the village it stopped to allow the Old Seeker time to arrange his clothing and take from a bag carried by one of his servants an iron staff topped by a handsome spread of ostrich feathers. Bearing this nobly in his left hand, he moved two steps forward, then prostrated himself, and from this position called, ‘Great Chief, I bid you good morning!’
From the mass of villagers a man in his fifties stepped forward and nodded: ‘Old Seeker, I bid you good morning.’
‘Great Chief, did you sleep well?’
‘If you slept well, I slept well.’
‘I slept well, Great Chief.’ Both the chief and his villagers must have sensed the irony in those words, for he was by no accounting a great chief, but protocol demanded that he be called such, especially when the man coming into the village sought advantages.
‘You may rise,’ the chief said, whereupon the Old Seeker stood erect, grasped his iron staff with one hand, placed his other upon the wrist, and rested his powder-gray head on both.
‘What do you come seeking this time?’ the chief asked, and evasively the old fellow replied, ‘The goodness of the soil, the secrets of the earth.’
The chief nodded ceremoniously, and the formal greetings ended. ‘How was the journey south?’ he asked.
The old man handed his staff to a servant and said in a whisper, ‘Each year, more difficult. I am tired. This is my last trip to your territories.’
Chief Ngalo burst into laughter, for the old man had made this threat three years ago and four years before that. He was a genial, conniving old rascal who had once served as overseer of mines in a great kingdom to the north and who now traveled far beyond his ruler’s lands searching for additional mines, observing remote settlements, and probing always for new trade links. He was an ambassador-at-large, an explorer, a seeker.
‘Why do you come to my poor village?’ Chief Ngalo asked. ‘You know we have no mines.’
‘I come on a much different mission, dear friend. Salt.’
‘If we had salt,’ Ngalo said, ‘we could trade with the world.’
The old man sighed. He had expected to be disappointed, but his people did need salt. However, they had other needs, some of them mysterious. ‘What I could use,’ he said confidentially, ‘is rhinoceros horns. Not less than sixteen.’ They were required, he explained, by older men who wished to marry young wives: ‘They need assurance that they will not disappoint in bed.’
‘But your king is a young man,’ the cheif said. ‘Why does he need the horn?’
‘Not he! For the rich old men with slanted eyes who live in a far country.’
From the tree under which they took their rest, the two men looked down at the lake, and Ngalo said, ‘Tonight you will see many animals come to that water. Buffalo, lions, hippos, giraffes and antelope like the stars.’ The Old Seeker nodded, and Ngalo added, ‘But you will never see a rhino. Where can we possibly find sixteen horns?’
The old fellow reflected on this question and replied, ‘In this life man is assigned difficult tasks. How to find a good wife. How to find sixteen horns. It is his task to find them.’
Chief Ngalo smiled. It was pleasurable to be with this old man. Always when he wanted something badly, he devised sententious and moral justifications. ‘Mankind does not want si
xteen rhinoceros horns,’ he chided. ‘You want them.’
‘I am mankind.’
The chief could not resist such blandishments, but neither could he comply. ‘Look, dear friend. We have no rhinos, but we have something much better.’ Clapping for an aide, he cried, ‘Tell Nxumalo to fetch the heavy earth!’ And in a moment a boy of sixteen appeared, smiling, bearing three roughly rectangular ingots made from some kind of metal. Placing them on the ground before his father, he started to depart, but the Old Seeker asked, ‘Do you understand what you have brought me, son?’
‘Iron from Phalaborwa,’ the boy said promptly. ‘When my father’s people went there to barter for these, I went with them. I saw the place where men worked the earth like ants. They had done so, they told me, for as long as anyone alive could remember, and many generations before that.’
‘What did you trade?’ the old man asked.
‘Cloth. The cloth we weave.’
The Old Seeker smiled to indicate his pleasure that this lad should know the provenance of things, but once he had done so, he frowned. ‘If I had wanted iron from the mines of Phalaborwa, I would have gone directly there. Thaba!’ he shouted. ‘Bring me the staff!’ And when his servant ran up, bearing the carefully wrapped iron staff, the old man uncovered it and thrust it at the boy.
‘That’s real iron. From our mines south of Zimbabwe. We have all we need,’ and contemptuously he pushed aside Nxumalo’s rude ingots. Then he drew out from inside his robe a small oval object such as Nxumalo had never seen before. It was a shimmering yellow that glistened when light fell upon it, and it was suspended from a chain, each careful link of which was made of the same substance. When the old man thrust it suddenly upon him, Nxumalo found that it was surprisingly heavy.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Amulet.’ There came a long pause. ‘From Persia.’ Another pregnant halting, then: ‘Gold.’
‘What is gold?’ the boy asked.
‘Now, there’s a question!’ the old man said, sitting back on his haunches and staring at the lake. ‘For forty travels of the moon through the stars it was my job to find gold, and like you, I never knew what it was. It’s death at the bottom of a deep pit. It’s fire engulfing the iron containers when the smithy melts the ore. It’s men sitting day after day, hammering out these links. But do you know what it is most of all?’
Nxumalo shook his head, liking the feel of the heavy metal. ‘In the end it’s a mystery, son. It’s magic, because it lures men from lands you never heard of to come to our shores, to ford our rivers, to climb our mountains, to come a journey of many moons to Zimbabwe to get our gold.’ Gently, almost lovingly, he retrieved the amulet and placed the chain about his neck, hiding the golden pendant beneath his cotton robe.
That was the beginning of his attempt to persuade Nxumalo: ‘What you must do, son, is find eight rhinos and take their horns, then follow my trail to Zimbabwe …’
‘What is Zimbabwe?’ the boy asked one evening.
‘How sad,’ the old man said with unfeigned regret. ‘Not one person in this village has ever seen Zimbabwe!’
‘What is it?’
‘Towers and soaring walls.’ He paused and pointed to the low stone wall that surrounded the cattle kraal and said in an awed voice, ‘Walls ten, twenty times higher than that. Buildings that reach to the sky.’ A group of elders shook their heads in disbelief and clucked among themselves, but the Old Seeker ignored them. ‘Our king, lord of a thousand villages bigger than yours, the great one the spirits talk to, he lives in a kraal surrounded by walls higher than trees.’ He placed his hand on Nxumalo’s arm and said, ‘Until you’ve seen Zimbabwe, you live in darkness.’
Whenever he spoke like this, telling the boy of the grandness of the city from which he came, he reverted to the problem of the rhinoceros horns and the necessity of bringing them to the city, but one morning as he spoke with Nxumalo and his father he said abruptly, ‘Ngalo, dear friend of many searchings, today I leave you to look for the Ridge-of-White-Waters, and I want Nxumalo to lead me.’
‘He knows the way,’ Ngalo said, pointing directly west to where the prominent ridge lay. It was a four-day journey which entailed some dangers, but the path was a pleasant one. ‘Why do you wish to go?’
‘In my day, Ngalo, I have sought many things. Women, high office, the path to Sofala, the king’s good wishes. But the best thing I ever sought was gold. And I am convinced that in your terrain, there must be gold somewhere.’ Contemptuously he dismissed the iron ingots that remained under the tree. Addressing only Nxumalo, he said, ‘Iron gives temporary power. It can be made into spearheads and clubs. But gold gives permanent power. It can be fashioned into dreams, and men will come a long way to satisfy their dreams.’
On the third day of their journey west, after they had passed many small villages which the old man seemed to know, it became apparent to Nxumalo that the Seeker knew very well where the Ridge-of-White-Waters lay and that he had insisted on having companionship only because he wanted to convince Nxumalo of something. That night, as they were resting at the edge of a miserable kraal, the old man spied the boy standing alone, in his eyes a mixture of sadness and anticipation as he stared toward the empty lands to the south.
‘What is it, young friend?’
‘It is my brother, mfundisi,’ he said, using a term of respect. ‘Last year he left for the south, and I must go too, when it is time.’ It was a custom that he must honor: the oldest brother always succeeded to the chieftainship, while the younger brothers moved to the frontier and started their own villages. And this had been done since these blacks came down from the north, centuries ago.
‘No, no!’ the Old Seeker protested. ‘Find me the rhinoceros horn. Bring it to me in Zimbabwe.’
‘Why should I do so?’
The old man took the boy’s hands and said, ‘If one like you, a boy of deep promise, does not test himself in the city, he spends his life where? In some wretched village like this.’
On the fourth day such discussions halted temporarily, for the Old Seeker’s troop was attacked by a band of little brown men who swarmed like pestilential flies determined to repel an invader. When their slim arrows began buzzing, Nxumalo shouted, ‘Beware! Poison!’ and he led the Old Seeker to safety inside a ring of porters whose shields repelled the arrows.
The fight continued for about an hour, with the little men shouting battle orders in a preposterous series of clicking sounds, but gradually the taller, more powerful blacks herded them away, and they retreated into the savanna, still uttering their clicks.
‘Aiee!’ Nxumalo shouted with exasperation as the little fellows disappeared. ‘Why do they attack us like jackals?’
Old Seeker, who had worked with the small people in the north, said calmly, ‘Because we’re crossing hunting grounds they claim as their own.’
‘Jackals!’ the boy snorted, but he knew the old man was right.
On the morning of the fifth day, as planned, the file of men reached the Ridge-of-White-Waters, which later settlers would call Witwatersrand, where the Old Seeker hoped to find evidence that gold existed, but the more carefully he explored the region—a handsome one, with prominent hillocks from which Nxumalo could see for miles—the more disappointed he became. Here the telltale signs, which in the lands about Zimbabwe indicated gold, were missing; there was no gold, and it became obvious that the exploration had been fruitless, but on the evening of their last day of tramping the hills the Old Seeker discovered what he was looking for. It was an ant hill, eleven feet high, and he rushed to it, breaking it apart with a long stick and fumbling through the fine-grained soil.
‘What are you looking for?’ Nxumalo asked, and the old man said, ‘Gold. These ants dig down two hundred feet to build their tunnels. If there’s gold here, they bring flecks to the surface.’
At this site there were none, and reluctantly the Old Seeker had to admit that he had taken this long journey to no avail: ‘I didn’t come to see your
father. I didn’t come for rhino horn. Son, when you have a multitude of targets, always aim for the one of merit. I came seeking gold, and I’m convinced there’s gold here.’
‘But you didn’t find it.’
‘I had the joy of hunting. Son, have you listened to what I’ve been telling you these days?’ He led Nxumalo some distance from the spot where his bearers waited, and as he looked out over the vast bleakness visible from the fruitless ridge he said, ‘It isn’t even gold I seek. It’s what gold can achieve. To Zimbabwe come men from all across the world. They bring us gifts you cannot imagine. Four times I went down the trails to Sofala. Twice I sailed upon the dhows to mighty Kilwa. I saw things no man could ever forget. When you seek, you find things you did not anticipate.’
‘What are you seeking?’ Nxumalo asked.
The old man had no answer.
The task of collecting sixteen rhinoceros horns was proving much more complex than Nxumalo anticipated when he accepted the challenge, and after the Old Seeker had departed to visit other tribes who might or might not know of gold mines, the boy approached his father: ‘I want to track down the rhinos.’
‘So the old talker poisoned you?’
Nxumalo looked down at his feet, unwilling to admit that he had been entrapped by blandishments and singing words. ‘Like the iron,’ his father said. ‘You went, and you dug for iron, and you found it. And when you came home with ingots … they didn’t mean very much, not really.’
‘I want to see the city,’ Nxumalo said.
‘And you shall. And when you come home you’ll tell me, “It didn’t matter very much.” ’