For the Sake of Silence by Michael Cawood-Green

Author:Michael Cawood-Green
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: For the Sake of Silence
ISBN: 9781415203736
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Published: 2010-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

Worse was to come. The rank of the quiet, smiling man jotting down the figures of weights and distances and times was finally remembered. Just over a year after Franz began his pattern of outstations, a new station was founded that in size alone was clearly destined to be more than simply another station. It was named after Lourdes, no less, and word was already circulating of how important it was going to be. Fr Arsenius was dispatched from Reichenau to see what he could make of the vast expanse Brother Nivard and Prior Gerard had won out of Franz’s long negotiations with a major landholder in East Griqualand, and I was designated to take the pioneer’s place as Superior at our now somewhat eclipsed first outstation.

The road approaching Reichenau curves around a hill and looks down on the busy jumble of buildings, and from here I could see immediately why the word “station” was beginning to be replaced by the word “mission”. For there, held in an arm of the Polela River, was an established community that really did echo in miniature, even without the church that was yet to come, its namesake on the island in Lake Constance.

Although our Reichenau was not situated on an island, one still had to endure the trial of crossing the Polela to reach it. The river was, at the time of my arrival, in full flood and the path of stones that formed the usual ford was entirely submerged. There was no other course than to plunge one’s horse into the powerful flow of water, trying all the time not to look to the right, where the current swept up to and then over the waterfall Franz had written of in so idyllic a way. His perspective was, as I later discovered, afforded only from the other side of the falls, when one could safely meditate on them from below. Whilst trying to cross the river, all they inspired in me was several minutes of desperate novenas shot through with terror as the water gushed up around the neck of my horse and over my knees.

Not long after my crossing, a Brother was caught up in that steady rush and thrust over the falls to his death at the very spot where Brother Nivard would site a mill some years later that challenged even Mariannhill’s in its technological ingenuity. I did not need to know this story at the time to be able to imagine just such a tragic end as I clung to my rearing horse, uncertain as to which to fear more, animal or water.

When I emerged dripping from my baptism of terror it was into a world that it was hard to believe was Trappist. A store and a school were being built of stone quarried about half an hour’s distance from the station, and I was told that Brother Nivard visited regularly to oversee this and several other projects – which included, I was relieved to hear, a bridge of stone and iron across the Polela.

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