Ancestral Voices, by Etienne van Heerden

Ancestral Voices, by Etienne van Heerden. The Penguin Group (SA). Cape Town, South Africa 2011. ISBN  9780143026549 / ISBN 978-0-14-302654-9

Ancestral Voices, by Etienne van Heerden. The Penguin Group (SA). Cape Town, South Africa 2011. ISBN 9780143026549 / ISBN 978-0-14-302654-9

From Etienne van Heerden's novel and South African familiy saga 'Ancestral Voices' the following text is an excerpt from the first chapter.

Etienne van Heerden  

[...] The magistrate did not have much luggage with him on the journey: two bags, the smaller one with the more immediate necessities and the larger one with a few books and court reports on cases which he had thought might prove relevant; also a photograph in a silver frame, a notebook, a flask of whisky, a box of cigars, a small jar of ointment to rub on his stump and a camera for in loco inspections. A quiet, thorough man, the magistrate; one who had spent long years working in the courts of the outlying districts. He sat in the jolting train compartment sipping whisky as he watched the veld moving past the window. He had been born in a roadcamp, in a tent beside a camp-fire. So his mother had told him. On a night when his father and the labour gang were packing charges of dynamite into the rock crevices of a hill through which the new railway line was to pass. As the dolomite grated and broke and the earth was wrenched asunder, he arrived. They had never found his fathers body. Only the ring which the magistrate wore on the hand now holding the whisky glass had been picked up, days later, without a scratch or even the slightest trace of blood on it, still loosely circling a thin dry finger bone. The ring had landed near a nest of army ants which had stripped the bone quite clean. They could not very well bury the bone on its own, so till the day of her death his mother had carried his father's finger bone in her apron pocket, and whenever she was worried about anything she would lay her hand on it. When she died, the magistrate had had it buried with her, so his father's name could also appear on the tombstone. Before boarding the train, he had done his preparation thoroughly, acquainting himself with all the facts about the jealous soil of Toorberg. It was a farm with topsoil a hundred feet deep, right down to bedrock - so the drillmen were reputed to have said. Taking samples with the hollow-tipped drill, they found nothing but the purest black earth for ninety feet. Only after that did they strike loose gravel, and eventually, at one hundred feet, the hard crust which lay impenetrably covering the mysteries below. Jealous soil, thought the magistrate. While ploughing in sowing time one year Abel had evidently unearthed the skull of a prehistoric monster. When excavated it was the size of a small Ford and the bone was as white as snow. Abel had the tractor drag the huge skull up to the homestead. There he carefully measured it with a ruler, photographed it from all angles and noted down everything which he thought might prove important or of interest. He realised the value of his find, because he'd read up about it in the Encyclopaedia Britannica in his study. Then he ordered the skull to be soaked in old engine oil to stop it rotting and to prevent vermin from gnawing at it, and had it buried under the floorboards of the stable where the rams were housed, believing that the rams' urine would preserve it. [...]

This is an exerpt from the narrative 'Ancestral Voices', by Etienne van Heerden.

Title: Ancestral Voices
Author: Etienne van Heerden
Genre: Novel
Publisher: The Penguin Group (SA)
Cape Town, South Africa 2011
ISBN  9780143026549 / ISBN 978-0-14-302654-9
Softcover, 13 x 20 cm, 253 pages

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