Devil's Valley Read Free

the founder of the family’s local branch. But between this Monsieur l’Hermite and my Lukas Lermiet there was many a gap still to be plugged, and all the wrinkles in the line would first have to be ironed out before one could be quite sure. A damn tantalising idea, anyway. In the meantime my early research had suggested that the original Monsieur l’Hermite was not exactly a fucking ancestor to be proud of, as he appeared to have fled La Rochelle to escape a charge of murder, and travelled to the Cape masquerading as a religious refugee. Once arrived, he did a pretty good job covering his tracks while sowing all manner of wild oats, thistles and tumbleweeds well out of sight of the European authorities. And it might well be that a century and a half later the family finally took root among the koppies of the deep interior. All of which was still virgin territory for the researcher.
    Anyway, our Lukas Lermiet left Graaff-Reinet in the company of Gerrit Maritz, but soon ran into trouble with the old sourpuss preacher of the group, Maritz’s brother-in-law Erasmus Smit, and it seems that, possessed by a vision, and accompanied by a few like-minded spirits, the Seer turned off course to trek south-east, into the forbidding Swartberg range. Just as ancient maritime charts of Africa marked certain parts with the legend Hie sunt hones , there were old maps of the interior on which the Swartberg was superscribed with the words Hier zijn duvelen , or Here be devils . Hence, I guess, the name ‘Duiwelskloof—Devil’s Valley.
    Odd Reference
    There was not much more on Lukas Lermiet and his descendants to be found in the Archives, apart from the odd (sometimes very odd) reference in minor official documents. In the 1890 s an agent of the Cape government was dispatched to collect taxes or quitrent or whatever from the people who’d apparently disappeared into the Devil’s Valley without a trace; but he was screwed out of his clothes and sent back across the mountains like my finger. Whereupon a whole armed detachment came all the way from Cape Town to avenge the honour of Her Fucking Majesty. Once again without result, for no trace of the blasted commando could ever be found; and soon afterwards the Anglo-Boer War gave the distant government other priorities to care about.
    From the time of the 1914 Rebellion came a reference to a couple of burghers who’d escaped into the valley to hide from government troops, never to be heard of again. Much later, during the Second World War, a small band of right-wing extremists from the Ossewa-Brandwag fled into the valley to get away from Smuts’s officers, and the bodies of two policemen sent after them were later found in a deep kloof where they’d presumably fallen to their death. Once again the matter was not followed up.
    After the war individuals from the Devil’s Valley sporadically turned up in the outside world, and a legend took root about a community of physically or mentally handicapped people in the mountains, the sad outcome of generations of inbreeding. Somewhere in the fifties a team of census agents were sent out to record particulars of the inhabitants, but they never came back; on another occasion an exciseman dispatched to investigate rumours of illicit distilling met with a fatal accident in the mountains. Still later the University of Stellenbosch mounted an expedition of anthropologists and sociologists and God knows what other -ists on a research project, but they returned not only empty-handed but stubbornly mum about the expedition. Then money ran out as the government started cutting down on university budgets, and that was that.
    All of which I found promising enough. But my designated supervisor found it too insubstantial. How about the Development of a Christian National Character Among the Voortrekkers, 1836-1843 instead? I might still have pressed my luck, but that was when Sylvia appeared on the scene and began to play me off against Twinkletoes van