The technique of these chapters is to present the general picture of the court in detail, describing all the various aspects of the room. Later, the author will go into the dramatic trial scene in which Absalom is tried for the murder of Arthur Jarvis. Paton, who often brings the reader to a close emotional understanding of the African situation, reverses his technique in this chapter and instead creates an objective distance from his reader in order to present the courtroom scene. Instead of making it emotional, he presents it quietly. In other words, it is not his purpose to arouse any undue emotion over the trial itself: Absalom is guilty and must be found so. The intent is to get past this and investigate Kumalo's and Jarvis' reactions to the situation that brought about this unnecessary crime.
At the end of Chapter 22, there is the first recognition by Kumalo of Jarvis. In the courtroom, Kumalo recognizes Jarvis as the man from his own district, and he trembles in the presence of the man whose son was killed by Absalom.
Chapter 23 is about gold fever; it shows people driven nearly mad by gold, luxuriating in gold, in a frenzy over the state of their stocks, and weeping because they made only a small fortune and then sold their shares, instead of holding them and making a larger fortune. They weep for this but not for the families destroyed, lives destroyed, and land destroyed. The voices of those who want something not for themselves, but for others, are voices crying in the wilderness of this greed.
Among the strongest voices crying for sanity and compassion are the voices of the churches. Father Beresford here is rather like the real Father Trevor Huddleston and the former Anglican bishop of Johannesburg, both of whom worked desperately to enlighten the whites, educate the natives, and inform the world about the South African tragedy, and who were exiled from South Africa by its government.
