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Utama The Angels Weep
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Wilbur Smith - B3 The Angels Weep PART ONE. Three horsemen rode out from the edge of the forest with a restrained eagerness that not even weary weeks of constant searching could dull. They reined in, stirrup to stirrup, and looked down into another shallow valley. Each stalk of the dry winter grass bore a fluffy seed-head of a lovely pale rose colour, and the light breeze stirred them and made them dance, so that the herd of sable antelope in the gut of the valley seemed to float belly-deep in a bank of swirling pink mist. There was a single herd bull. He stood almost fourteen hands tall at the withers. His satiny back and shoulders were black as a panther's, but his belly and the intricate designs of his face-mask were the startling iridescent white of mother-of-pearl. His great ridged horns, curved like Saladin's scimitar, swept baIck to touch his croup, and his neck was proudly arched as that of a blood Arabian stallion. Long ago hunted to extinction in his former southern ranges, this noblest of all the antelopes of Africa had come to symbolize for Ralph Ballantyne this wild and beautiful new land between the Limpopo and the wide green Zambezi rivers. The great black bull stared arrogantly at the horsemen on the ridge above him, then snorted and tossed his warlike head. Thick dark mane flying, sharp hooves clattering over the stony ground, he led his chocolate-coloured brood mares at a gallop up and over the far ridge, leaving the watching men mute at their grandeur and their beauty. Ralph Ballantyne was first to rouse himself and he turned in the saddle towards his father. "Well, Papa," he asked, "do you recognize any landmarks?" "It was more than thirty years ago," Zouga. Ballantyne murmured, a little frown of concentration puckering an arrowhead in the centre of his forehead, "thirty years, and I was riddled with malaria. "Then he turned to the third rider, the little wizened Hottentot, his companion and servant since those far-off days. &q; uot;What do you think, Jan Cheroot?" The Hottentot lifted the battered regimental cap from his head, and smoothed the little peppercorns of pure white wool that covered his scalp. "Perhaps.-" Ralph cut in brusquely, "Perhaps it was all merely a fever dream." The frown on his father's handsome bearded features sharpened, and the scar upon his cheek flushed from boneporcelain to rose, while Jan Cheroot grinned with anticipation, when these two were together it was better entertainment than a cock-fight any day. "Damn it, boy," Zouga snapped. "Why don't you go back to the wagons and keep the women company." Zouga drew the thin chain. from his fob pocket and dangled it before his son's face. "There it is,"he snapped, "that's the proof." On the ring of the chain hung a small bunch of keys, and other oddments, a gold seal, a St. Christopher, a cigar-cutter and an irregular lump of quartz the size of a ripe grape. This last was mottled like fine blue marble and starred through its centre with a thick wedge of gleaming native metal. "Raw red gold, "said Zouga. "Ripe for the picking!" Ralph grinned at his father, but it was an insolent and provocative grin, for he was bored. Weeks of wandering and fruitless searching were not Ralph's style at all. "I always suspected that you picked that up from a pedlar's stall on the Grand Parade at Cape Town, and that it's only fool's gold anyway." The scar on his father's cheek turned a darker furious red, and Ralph laughed delightedly and clasped Zouga's shoulder. "Oh, Papa, if I truly believed that, do you think I would waste weeks of my time? What with the railroad building and the dozen other balls I am juggling, would I be here, instead of in Johannesburg or Kimberley?" He shook Zouga's shoulder gently, the smile no longer mocking. "It's here we both know it. We could be standing on the reef at this very moment, or it could be just over the next ridge." Slowly the heat went out of Zouga's scar, and Ralph went on evenly. "The trick, of course, is to find it again. We could stumble over it in the next hour, or search another ten years." Watching father and son, Jan Cheroot felt a small prick of disappointment. He had seen them fight once before, but that was long ago. Ralph was now in the full prime of his manhood, almost thirty years of age, accustomed to handling the hundreds of rough men that he employed in his transport company and his construction teams, handling them with tongue and boot and fist. He was big and hard and st rutty as a game cock, but Jan Cheroot suspected that the old dog would still be able to roll the puppy in the dust. The praise name that the Matabele had given Zouga Ballantyne was "Bakela', the Fist, and "he was still fast and lean. Yes, Jan Cheroot decided regretfully, it would still be worth watching, but perhaps another day, for already the flare of tempers had faded and the two men were again talking quietly and eagerly, leaning from their saddles towards each other. Now they seemed more like brothers, for although the family resemblance was unmistakable, yet Zouga did not seem old enough to be Ralph's father. His skin was too clear and unlined, his eye too quick and vital and the faint lacing of silver in his golden beard might have been merely the bleaching of the fierce African sun. "If only you had been able to get a sun-sight, the other observations you made were all so accurate," Ralph lamented. "I was able to go directly to every cache of ivory that you left that year." "By that time the rains had started." Zouga shook his head. "And, by God, how it rained! We hadn't seen the sun for a week, every river was in full spate, so we were marching in circles, trying to find a ford-" He broke off, and lifted the reins in his left hand. "But I've told the tale a hundred times. Let's get on with the search," he suggested quietly, and they trotted down off the ridge into the valley, Zouga stooping from the saddle to examine the ground for chips of broken reef, or swivelling slowly to survey the skyline to try and recognize the shape of the crests or the blue loom of a distant, kopje against the towering African sky, where the silver fair-weather cumulus sailed high and serene. "The only definite landmark we have to work on is the site of the ruins of Great Zimbabwe," Zouga muttered. "We marched eight days due westwards from the ruins." "Nine days," Jan Cheroot corrected him. "You lost one day when Matthew died. You were in fever. I had to nurse you like a baby, and we were carrying that damned stone bird." "We couldn't have made good more than ten miles a day," Zouga ignored him. "Eight days" march, not more than eighty miles." "And Great Zimbabwe is there. Due east of us now.) Ralph reined in his horse as they came out on the next ridge. "That is the Sentinel." He pointed at a rocky kopie, the distant blue summit shaped like a crouching lion. "The ruins are just beyond, I would never mistake that view." For both father and son the ruined city had a special significance. There within the massive stone-built walls Zouga and Jan Cheroot had found the ancient graven bird images that had been abandoned by the long-vanished inhabitants. Despite the desperate straits to which they had been reduced by fever and the other hardships of the long expedition from the Zambezi river in the north, Zouga had insisted on carrying away with him one of the statues. Then many years later it had been Ralph's turn. Guided by his father's diary and the meticulous sextant observations that it contained, Ralph had once again won through to the deserted citadel. Though he had been pursued by the border imp is of Lobengula, the Matabele king, he had defied the king's taboo on the holy place and had spirited away the remaining statues. Thus all three men had intimate knowledge of those haunting and haunted ruins, and as they stared at the far hills that marked the site, they were silent with their memories. "I still wonder, who were the men who built Zimbabwe?" Ralph asked at last. "And what happened to them?" There was an uncharacteristic dreamy tone to his voice, and he expected no answer. "Were they the Queen of Sheba's miners? Was this the Ophir of the Bible? Did they carry the gold they mined to Solomon?" "Perhaps we will never know." Zouga roused himself. But we do know they valued gold as we do. I found gold foil and beads and bars of bullion in the courtyard of Great Zimbabwe, and it must be within a few miles of where we stand that Jan Cheroot and I explored the shafts that they drove into the earth, and found the broken reef piled in dumps ready for crushing." Zouga glanced across at the little Hottentot. "Do you recognize any of this?" The dark pixie face wrinkled up like a sun-dried prune as Jan Cheroot considered. "Perhaps from the next ridge," he muttered lugubriously, and the trio rode down into the valley that looked like a hundred others they had crossed in the preceding weeks. Ralph was a dozen strides ahead of the others, cantering easily, swinging his mount to skirt a thicket of the dense wild ebony, when abruptly he stood in the stirrups, snatched his hat from his head and waved it high. "Tally ho!"he yelled. "Gone away!" And Zouga saw the burnt gold flash of fluid movement across the far slope of open ground. "Three of the devils!" Ralph's excitement and his loathing were clear in the pitch and timbre of his voice. "Jan Cheroot, you turn "em on the left! Papa, stop them crossing the ravine!" The easy manner of command came naturally to Ralph Ballantyne, and the two older men accepted it as naturally, while none of them questioned for an instant why they should destroy the magnificent animals that Ralph had flushed from the ebony thicket. Ralph owned two hundred wagons, each drawn by sixteen draught oxen. King's Lynn, Zouga's estates, taken up with the land grants that the British South Africa Company had tis sued to the volunteers who had destroyed the Matabele king's imp is covered many tens of thousands of acres that were stocked with the pick of the captured Matabele breeding herds running with blood bulls imported from Good Hope and old England. Father and son were both cattlemen, and they had suffered the terrible depredations of the lion prides which infested this lovely land north of the Limpopo and Shashi rivers. Too often they had heard their valuable and beloved beasts bellowing in agony in the night, and in the dawn found their ravaged carcasses. To both of them, lions were the worst kind of vermin, and they were elated with this rare chance of taking a pride in broad daylight. Ralph yanked the repeating Winchester rifle from the leather scabbard under his left knee, as he urged the chestnut gelding into full gallop after the big yellow cats. The lion had been the first away, and Ralph had only a glimpse of him, sway-backed and swing-bellied, the dense dark ruff of his mane fluffed out with alarm, padding majestically on heavy paws into the scrub. The older lioness followed him swiftly. She was lean and scarred from a thousand hunts, blue with age across the shoulders and back. She went away at a bounding gallop. However, the younger lioness, unaccustomed to men, was bold and curious as a cat. She was still faintly cub-spotted across her creamy gold belly, and she turned on the edge of the thicket to snarl at the pursuing horseman. Her ears lay flat against her skull, her furry pink tongue curled out over her fangs, and her whiskers were white and stiff as porcupine quills. Ralph dropped his reins onto the gelding's neck, and the horse responded instantly by plunging to a dead stop and freezing for the shot, only the scissoring of his ears betraying his agitation. Ralph tossed up the Winchester and fired as the butt plate slapped into his shoulder. The lioness grunted explosively as the bullet thumped into her shoulder, angled for the heart. She went up in a high sun fishing somersault, roaring in her death frenzy. She fell and rolled on her back, tearing at the scrub with fully extended yellow claws, and then stretching out in a last shuddering convulsion before slumping into the softness of death. Ralph pumped a fresh round into the chamber of the Winchester, and gathered up the reins. The gelding leaped forward. Out on the right Zouga was pounding up the lip of the ravine, leaning forward in the saddle, and at that moment the second lioness broke into the open ahead of him, going for the deep brush-choked ravine at a driving run, and Zouga fired still at full gallop. Ralph saw dust spurt under the animal's belly. "Low and left. Papa is getting old," Ralph thought derisively, and brought the gelding crashing down to a stiff4 egged halt. Before he could fire, Zouga had shot again, and the lioness collapsed and rolled like a yellow ball on the stony earth, shot through the neck a hand's span behind the ear. "Bully for you!" Ralph laughed With excitement, and kicked his heels into the gelding's flank as they charged up the slope, shoulder to shoulder. "Where is Jan Cheroot?" Zouga shouted, and as if in reply they heard the clap of rifle fire in the forest on the left, and they swung the horses in that direction. "Can you see him? "Ralph called. The bush was thicker ahead of them, and the thorn branches whipped at their thighs as they passed. There was a second shot, and immediately afterwards the furious ear-numbing roars of the lion mingled with Jan Cheroot's shrill squeals of terror. "He is in trouble!" Zouga called anxiously, as they burst out of the thick scrub. Before them there lay parkland, fine open grass beneath the tall flat-topped acacia trees along the crest of the ridge. A hundred yards ahead Jan Cheroot was tearing along the crest, twisted in the saddle to look over his shoulder, his face a mask of terror, his eyes huge and glistening white. He had lost his hat and rifle, but he was lashing his mount across the neck and shoulders, although the animal was already at a wild uncontrolled gallop. The lion was a dozen strides behind them, but gaining with each elastic bound as though they were standing still. Its heaving flank was painted slick and shiny with bright new blood, shot through the guts, but the wound had not crippled nor even slowed the beast. Rather it had maddened him, so that the solid blasts of sound from his throat sounded like the thunder of the skies. Ralph swerved his gelding to try and intercept the little Hottentot, and alter the angle to give himself an open shot at the lion, but at that moment the cat came up out of its flat snaking charge, reared up over the bunched and straining quarters of the horse and raked them with long curved talons so that the sweat-darkened hide opened in deep parallel wounds, and the blood smoked from them in a fine crimson cloud. The horse shrieked and lashed out with its hind hooves, catching the lion in his chest, so that he reeled and lost a stride. Immediately he gathered himself and came again, quartering in beside the running horse, his eyes inscrutably yellow as he prepared to leap astride the panic driven animal. "Jump, Jan Cheroot!" Ralph yelled. The lion was too close to risk a shot. "Jump, damn you!" But Jan Cheroot did not appear to have heard him, he was clinging helplessly to the tangled flying mane, paralysed with fear. The lion rose lightly into the air, and settled like a huge yellow bird on the horse's back, crushing Jan Cheroot beneath his massive, blood-streaked body. At that instant, horse and rider and lion seemed to disappear into the very earth, and there was only a swirling column of dust to mark where they had been. Yet the shattering roars of the enraged animal and Jan Cheroot's howls of terror grew even louder as Ralph galloped up to the point on the ridge where they had disappeared. With the Winchester in one hand he kicked his feet from the stirrup irons and jumped from the saddle, letting his own momentum throw him forward until he stood on the edge of a sheer-sided pitfall at the bottom of which lay a tangle of heaving bodies. "The devil is killing me!" screamed Jan Cheroot, and Ralph could see him pinned beneath the body of the horse. The horse must have broken its neck in the fall, it was a lifeless heap with head twisted up under its shoulder and the lion was ripping the carcass and saddle, trying to reach Jan Cheroot. "Lie still," Ralph shouted down at him. "Give me a clear shot!" But it was the lion that heard him. He left the horse and came up the vertical side of the pit with the ease of a cat climbing a tree, his glossy muscular hindquarters driving him lightly upwards and his pale yellow eyes fastened upon Ralph as he stood on the lip of the deep hole. Ralph dropped on one knee to steady himself for the shot, and aimed down into the broad golden chest. The jaws were wide open, the fangs long as a man's forefinger and white as polished ivory, the deafening clamour from the open throat dinned into Ralph's face. He could smell the rotten-flesh taint of the lion's breath and flecks of hot saliva splattered against his cheeks and forehead. He fired, and pumped the loading-handle and fired again, so swiftly that the shots were a continuous blast of sound. The lion arched backwards, hung for a long moment from the -wall of the pit, and then toppled and fell back upon the dead horse. Now there was no movement from the bottom of the pit, and the silence was more intense than the shattering uproar that had preceded it. "Jan Cheroot, are you all right?" Ralph called anxiously. There was no sign of the little Hottentot, he was completely smothered by the carcasses of horse and lion. "Jan Cheroot, can you hear me?" The reply was in a hollow, sepulchral whisper. "Dead men cannot hear it's all over, they have got old Jan Cheroot at last." "Come out from under there,"Zouga Ballantyne ordered, as he stepped up to Ralph's shoulder. "This is no time to play the clown, Jan Cheroot." Ralph dropped a coil of manilla rope down to Jan Cheroot, and between them they hauled him and the saddle from the dead horse to the surface. The excavation into which Jan Cheroot had fallen was a deep narrow trench along the crest of the ridge. In places it was twenty feet deep, but never more than six feet wide. Mostly it was choked with creepers and rank vegetation, but this could not disguise the certainty that it had been dug by men. "The reef was exposed along this line," Zouga guessed, as they followed the edge of the old trench, "the ancient miners simply dug it out and did not bother to refill." "How did they blast the reef" Ralph demanded. "That's solid rock down there." "They probably built fires upon it, and then quenched it with water. The contraction cracked the rock." "Well, they seem to have taken out every grain of the ore body and left nary a speck for us." Zouga nodded. "They would have worked out this section first, and then when the reef pinched out they would have started sinking potholes along the strike to try and intercept it again." Zouga turned to Jan Cheroot and demanded, "Now do you recognize this place, Jan Cheroot?" And when the Hottentot hesitated, he pointed down the slope. "I'he swamp in the valley down there, and the teak trees--" "Yes, yes." Jan Cheroot clapped his hands, and his eyes twinkled with delight. "This is the same Place where you killed the bull elephant the tusks are on the stoep at King's Lynn." "The ancient dump will be just ahead." Zouga hurried forward. He found the low mound covered by grass, and went down on his knees to scrabble amongst the grass roots, picking out the chips of white sugar quartz, examining each one swiftly and discarding it. Occasionally he wet one with his tongue, held it to the sunlight to try and highlight the sparkle of metal, then frowned and shook his head with disappointment. At last he stood and wiped his hands on his breeches. "It's quartz all right, but the ancient miners must have hand-sorted this dump. We will have to find the old shafts if we want to see visible gold in the ore." From the top of the ancient dump Zouga orientated himself rapidly. "The carcass of the bull elephant fell about there," he pointed, and to confirm it Jan Cheroot searched in the grass and lifted a huge thighbone, dry and white as chalk, and at last after thirty years beginning to crumble. "He was the father of all elephant," Jan Cheroot said reverently. "There will never be another like him, and it was he that led us to this place. When you shot him he fell here to mark it for us." Zouga turned a quarter-circle and pointed again. "The ancient shaft where we buried old Matthew will be there." Ralph recalled the elephant hunt as his father had described it in his celebrated book A Hunter's Odyssey. The black gunbearer had not flinched from the great bull elephant's charge, but had stood it down and handed Zouga the second gun, sacrificing his own life for that of his master. So Ralph understood and remained silent, as Zouga went down on one knee beside the rock pile that marked the gunbearer's grave. After a minute, Zouga rose and dusted off his knee, and said simply, "He was a good man." "Good, but stupid," Jan Cheroot agreed. "A wise man would have run." "And a wise man would have chosen a better grave," Ralph murmured. "He is plumb in the centre of a gold reef. We will have to dig him out." But Zouga frowned. "Let him lie. There are other shafts along the strike." He turned away, and the others followed him. A hundred yards farther on, Zouga stopped again. "Here!" he called with satisfaction. "The second shaft there were four of them altogether." This opening had also been refilled with chunks of native rock. Ralph shrugged off his jacket, propped his rifle against the hole of the nearest tree and climbed down into the shallow depression until he stooped over the narrow blocked entrance. "I'm going to open it up." They worked for half an hour, pr ising loose the boulders with a branch of a lead wood and manhandling them aside until they had exposed the square opening to the shaft. It was narrow, so narrow that only a child could have passed through it. They knelt and peered down into it. There was no telling how deep it was, for it was impenetrably black in the depths and it stank of damp, of fungus and bats, and of rotting things. Ralph and Zouga stared into the opening with a horrid fascination. "They say the ancients used child slaves or captured Bushmen in the workings,"Zouga murmured. "We have to know if the reef is down there," Ralph whispered. "But no grown man-" he broke off and there was another moment of thoughtful silence, before Zouga and Ralph glanced at each other and smiled, and then both their heads turned in unison towards Jan Cheroot. "Never!" said the little Hottentot fiercely. "I am a sick old man. Never! You will have to kill me first!" Ralph found a stump of candle in his saddlebag, while Zouga swiftly spliced together the three coils of Rrope used for tethering the horses, and Jan Cheroot watched their preparation like a condemned man watching the construction of the gallows. "For twenty-nine years, since the day I was born, you have been telling me of your courage and daring," Ralph reminded him, as he placed an arm around Jan Cheroot's shoulder and led him gently back to the mouth of the shaft. "Perhaps I exaggerated a little," Jan Cheroot admitted, as Zouga knotted the rope under his armpits and strapped a saddlebag around his tiny waist. "You, who have fought wild men and hunted elephant and lion what can you fear in this little hole? A few snakes, a little darkness, the ghosts of dead men, that's all." "Perhaps I exaggerated more than a little," Jan Cheroot whispered huskily. "You are not a coward are you, Jan Cheroot?" "Yes," Jan Cheroot nodded fervently. "That is exactly what I am, and this is no place for a coward." Ralph drew him back, struggling like a hooked catfish on the end of the rope, lifted him easily and lowered him into the shaft. His protests faded gradually as Ralph paid out the rope. Ralph was measuring the rope across the reach of his outstretched arms. Reckoning each span at six feet, he had lowered the little Hottentot a little under sixty feet before the rope went slack. "Jan Cheroot!"Zouga bellowed down the shaft. "A little cave." Jan Cheroot's voice was muffled and distorted by echoes. "I can just stand. The reef is black with soot." "Cooking fires. The slaves would have been kept down there," Zouga guessed, "never seeing the light of day again until they died. "Then he raised his voice. "what else?" "Ropes, plaited grass ropes, and buckets, leather buckets like we used on the diamond diggings at New Rush-" Jan Cheroot broke off with an exclamation. "They fall to pieces when I touch them, just dust now." Faintly they could hear Jan Cheroot sneezing and coughing in the dust he had raised and his voice was thickened and nasal as he went on, "Iron tools, something like an adze," and when he called again they could hear the tremor in his voice. "Name of the great snake, there are dead men here, dead men's bones. I am coming up pull me up!" Staring down the narrow shaft, Ralph could see the light of the candle flame wavering and trembling at the bottom. "Jan Cheroot, is there a tunnel leading off from the cave?" "Pull me up." "Can you see a tunnel?" "Yes, now will you pull me up?" "Not until you follow the tunnel to the end." "Are you mad? I would have to crawl on hands and knees." "Take one of the iron tools with you, to break a piece off the reef." "No. That is enough. I go no farther, not with dead men guarding this place." "Very well," Ralph bellowed into the hole, "then I will throw the end of the rope down on top of you." "You would not do that!" "After that I will put the rocks back over the entrance." "I am going." Jan Cheroot's voice had a desperate edge, and once again the rope began slithering down into the shaft like a serpent into its nest. Ralph and Zouga squatted beside the shaft, passing their last cheroot back and forth and waiting with ill grace and impatience. "When they deserted these workings, they must have sealed the slaves in the shaft. A slave was a valuable chattel, so that proves they were still working the reef and that they left in great haste." Zouga paused, cocked his head to listen and then said, "Ah!" with satisfaction. From the depths of the earth at their feet came the distant clank of metal tool on living rock. "Jan Cheroot has reached the working-face." However, it was many minutes more before they saw the wavering candle light in the bottom of the pit again and jan Cheroot's pleas, quavering and pitiful, came up to them. "Please, Master Ralph, I have done it. Now will you pull me up, please?" Ralph stood with one booted foot on each side of the shaft, and hauled in the rope hand over hand. "The muscles of his arms bulged and subsided under the sleeves of his thin cotton shirt, as he lifted the Hottentot and his burden to the surface without a pause, and when he had finished, Ralph's breathing was still even and quiet and there was not a single bead of perspiration on his face. "So, Jan Cheroot, what did you find?" Jan Cheroot was coated all over with fine pale dust through which his sweat had cut muddy tunnels and he stank of bat guano and the mushroom odour of long-deserted caves. With hands that still shook with fear and exhaustion, he opened the flap of the saddlebag at his waist. "This is what I found, he croaked, and Zouga took a lump of the raw rough rock from him. It had a crystalline texture, that glittered like ice and was marbled with blue and riven by minute flaws and fissures, some of which had cracked through under the pounding of the iron adze with which Jan Cheroot had hacked it from the rock face. However, the shattered fragments of shining quartz were held together by the substance that had filled every crack and fault line in the ore. This cement was a thin malleable layer of bright metal, that twinkled in the sunlight when Zouga wet it with the tip of his tongue. "By God, Ralph, will you look at that!" And Ralph took it from his father's hand with the reverence of a worshipper receiving the sacrament. "Gold!" he whispered, and it sparkled at him, that lovely yellow smile that had captivated men almost from the time they had first stood upon their hind legs. "Gold!" Ralph repeated. To find this glimmer of precious metal they had laboured. most of their lives, father and son, they had ridden far and, in the company of other freebooters, had fought bloody battles, had helped destroy a proud nation and hunt a king to a lonely death. Led by a sick man with swollen crippled heart and grandiose dreams, they had seized a vast land that now bore that giant's name, Rhodesia, and they had forced the land to yield up, one by one, its riches. They had taken its wide sweet pastures and lovely mountain ranges, its forests of fine native timber, its herds of sleek cattle, its legions of sturdy black men who for a pittance would provide the thews to gather in the vast harvest. And now at last they held the ultimate treasure in their hands. "Gold!" Ralph said for the third time. They struck their pegs along the ridge, cutting them from the living acacia trees that oozed clear sap from the axe cuts, and they hammered them into the hard earth with the flat of the blade. Then they built cairns of stone to mark the corner of each claim. Under the Fort Victoria Agreement, which both of them had signed when they volunteered to ride against Lobengula's imp is they were each entitled to ten gold claims. This naturally did not apply to Jan Cheroot. Despite the fact that he had ridden into Matabeleland with Jameson's flying column and shot down the Matabele amadoda at the Shangani river and the Bembesi crossing with as much gusto as had his masters, yet he was a man of colour, and as such he could not share the spoils. In addition to the booty to which Zouga and Ralph were entitled under the Victoria Agreement, both of them had bought up many blocks of claims from the dissolute and spendthrift troopers of Jameson's conquering force, some of whom had sold for the price of a bottle of whisky. So between them they could peg off the entire ridge and most of the valley bottoms on each side of it. It was hard work, but urgent, for there were other prospectors abroad, one of whom could have followed their tracks. They worked through the heat of noon and by the light of the moon until sheer exhaustion forced them to drop their axes and sleep where they fell. On the fourth evening, they could stop at last, content that they had secured the entire reef for themselves. There was no gap between their pegs into which another prospector could jump. "Jan Cheroot, there is only one bottle of whisky left," Zouga groaned, and stretched his aching shoulders, "but tonight I am going to let you pour your own dop." They watched with amusement the elaborate precautions which Jan Cheroot took to get the last drop into his brimming mug. In the process, the line around the bottom that marked his daily grog ration was entirely ignored, and when the mug was full, he did not trust the steadiness of his own hand but slurped up the first mouthful on all fours like a dog. Ralph retrieved the bottle, and ruefully considered the remnants of the liquor before pouring a dram for his father and himself. "The Harkness Mine," Zouga gave them the toast. "Why do you call it that?" Ralph demanded, when he lowered his mug and wiped his moustache with the back of his hand. "Old Tom Harkness gave me the map that led me to it," Zouga replied. "We could find a better name." "Perhaps, but that's the one I want." "The gold will be just as bright, I expect," Ralph capitulated, and carefully moved the whisky bottle out of the little Hottentot's reach, for Jan Cheroot had drained his mug already. "I am glad we are doing something together again, Papa." Ralph settled down luxuriously against his saddle. "Yes," Zouga agreed softly. "It's been too long since we worked side by side in the diamond pit at New Rush." "I know just the right fellow to open up the workings for us. He is a top man, the best on the Witwatersrand gold fields and I'll have my wagons bringing up the machinery before the rains break." It was part of their agreement that Ralph would provide the men and machinery and money to run the Harkness Mine when Zouga led him to it. For Ralph was a rich man. Some said he was already a millionaire, though Zouga knew that was unlikely. Nevertheless, Zouga remembered that Ralph had provided the transport and commissariat for both the Mashonaland column and the Matabeleland expedition against Lobengula, and for each he had been paid huge sums by Mr. Rhodes" British South Africa Company,_not in cash but in company shares. Like Zouga himself, he had speculated by buying up original land grants from the thriftless drifters that made up the bulk of the original column and had paid them in whisky, carried up from the railhead in his own wagons. Ralph's Rhodesia Lands Company owned more land than did even Zouga himself. Ralph had also speculated in the shares of the British South Africa Company. In those heady days when the column first reached Fort Salisbury, he had sold shares that Mr. Rhodes had issued to him at 1 pound for the sum of 15 pounds on the London stock market. Then, when the pioneers" vaunting hopes and optimism had withered on the sour veld and barren ore bodies of Mashonaland, and Rhodes and Jameson were secretly planning their war against the Matabele king, Ralph had re-purchased British South Africans at eight shillings. He had then seen them quoted at 8 pounds when the column rode into the burning ruins of Lobengula's kraal at GuBulawayo. and the Company had added the entire realm of the Matabele monarch to its possessions. Now, listening to his son talk with that infectious energy and charisma which even those hard days and nights of physical labour on the claims could not dull, Zouga reflected that Ralph had laid the telegraph lines from Kimberley to Fort Salisbury, that his construction gangs were at this moment laying the railway lines across the same wilderness towards Bulawayo, that his two hundred wagons carried trade goods to more than a hundred of Ralph's own trading posts scattered across Bechuanaland and Matabeleland and Mashonaland, that as of today Ralph was a half-owner of a gold mine that promised to be as rich as any on the fabulous Witwatersrand. Zouga smiled to himself as he listened to Ralph talk in the flickering firelight, and he thought suddenly, "Damn it, but they might be right after all the puppy might just possibly be a millionaire already." And his pride was tinged with envy. Zouga himself had worked and dreamed from long before Ralph was born, had made sacrifices and had suffered hardships that still made him shudder when he thought about them, all for much lesser reward. Apart from this new reef, all he had to show for a lifetime of striving was King's Lynn and Louise and then he smiled. With those two possessions, he was richer than Mr. Rhodes would ever be. Zouga sighed and tilted his hat forward over his eyes, and with Louise's beloved face held firmly in the eye of his mind he drifted into sleep, while across the fire Ralph still talked quietly, for himself more than for his father, and conjured up new visions of wealth and power. It was two full days" ride back to the wagons, but they were still half a mile from the camp when they were spotted, and a joyous tide of servants and children and dogs and wives came clamouring out to greet them. Ralph spurred forward and leaned low from the saddle to sweep Cathy up onto the pommel so violently that her hair tumbled into her face and she shrieked breathlessly until he silenced her with a kiss full on the mouth, and he held the kiss unashamedly while little Jonathan danced impatiently around the horse shouting, "Me too! Lift me up, too, Papa!" When at last he broke the kiss, Ralph held her close still, and his stiff dark moustache tickled her ear as he whispered, "The minute I get you into the tent, Katie MY love, we will give that new mattress of yours a stiff test." She flushed a richer tone of pink and tried to slap his cheek, but the blow was light and loving. Ralph chuckled, then reached down and picked Jonathan up by one arm and dropped him into the gelding's croup behind the saddle. The boy wrapped his arms around Ralph's waist and demanded in a high piping voice. "Did you find gold, Papa?" "A ton." "Did you shoot any lions?" "A hundred." "Did you kill any Matabele?" "The season's closed," Ralph laughed, and ruffled his son's dark thick curls, but Cathy scolded quickly. "That's a wicked thing to ask your father, you bloodthirsty little pagan." Louise followed the younger woman and the child at a more sedate pace, stepping lightly and lithely in the thick dust of the wagon road. Her hair was drawn back from her broad forehead and hung down her back to the level of her waist in a thick braid. It emphasized the high arches of her cheekbones. Her eyes had changed colour again. It always fascinated Zouga to see the shifts of her mood reflected in those huge slanted eyes. Now they were a lighter softer blue, the colour of happiness. She stopped at the horse's head and Zouga stepped down from the stirrup and lifted the hat from his head, studying her gravely for a moment before he spoke. "Even in such a short time I had forgotten -how truly beautiful you are, he said. "It was not a short time," she contradicted him. "Every hour I am away from you is an eternity." It was an elaborate camp, for this was Cathy and Ralph's home. They owned no other, but like gypsies moved to where the pickings were richest. There were four wagons out spanned under the tall arched wild fig trees on the bank of the river above the ford. The tents were of new snowy canvas, one of which, set a little apart, served for ablution. This contained a galvanized iron bath in which one could stretch out full length. There was a servant whose sole duty was to tend the forty-gallon drum on the fire behind the tent and to deliver unlimited quantities of hot water, day and night. Another smaller tent beyond held a commode whose seat Cathy had hand-painted with cupids and bouquets of roses, and beside the commode she had placed the ultimate luxury, scented sheets of soft coloured paper in a sandalwood box. There were horse-hair mattresses on each cot, comfortable canvas chairs to sit on, and a long trestle-table to eat off under the fly of the open-sided dining tent. There were canvas coolers for the champagne and lemonade bottles, food safes screened with insect-proof gauze, and thirty servants. Servants to cut wood and tend fires, servants to wash and iron so that the women could change their clothing daily, others to make the bed and sweep up every fallen leaf from the bare ground between the tents and then sprinkle it with water to lay the dust, one to wait exclusively upon Master Jonathan, to feed him and bathe him and ride him on a shoulder or sing to him when he grew petulant. Servants to cook the food and to wait upon the table, servants to light the lanterns and lace up the flies of the tents at nightfall and even one to empty the bucket of the hand-painted commode whenever the little bell tinkled. Ralph rode in through the gate of the high thorn bush stockade that surrounded the entire camp to protect it from the nocturnal visits of the lion prides. Cathy was still on the saddle in front of him and his son up behind. He looked about the camp with satisfaction, and squeezed Cathy's waist. "By God, it's good to be home, a hot bath, and you can scrub my back, Katie." He broke off, and exclaimed with surprise. "Damn it, woman! You might have warned me!" "You never gave me a chance," she protested. Parked at the end of the row of wagons was a closed coach, a vehicle with sprung wheels, the windows fitted with teak shutters that could be raised against the heat. The body of the coach was painted a cool and delightful green under the dust and dried mud of hard travel, the doors were picked out in gold leaf and the high wheels piped with the same gold. The interior was finished in glossy green leather with gold tassels on the curtains. There were fitted leather and brass steamer trunks strapped to the roof rack, and beyond the coach in Ralph's kraal of thorn bush the big white mules, all carefully matched for colour and size, were feeding on bundles of fresh grass that Ralph's servants had cut along the river bank. "How did Himself find us?" Ralph demanded, as he let Cathy down to the ground. He did not have to ask who the visitor was, this magnificent equipage was famous across the continent. "We are camped only a mile from the main road up from the south," Cathy pointed out tartly. "He could hardly miss US." "And he has his whole gang with him, by the looks of it," Ralph muttered. There were two dozen blood horses in the kraal with the white mules. "All the king's horses and all the king's men," Cathy agreed, "and at that moment Zouga hurried in through the gate with Louise on his arm. He was as excited by their visitor as Ralph was irritated. "Louise tells me that he has broken his journey especially to talk to me." "You had better not keep him waiting then, Papa," Ralph grinned sardonically. It was strange how all men, even the aloof and cool-headed Major Zouga Ballantyne, came under the spell that their visitor wove. Ralph prided himself -that he alone was able to resist it, although at times it required a conscious effort. Zouga was striding eagerly down the row of wagons towards the inner stockade with Louise skipping to keep up with him. Ralph dawdled deliberately, admiring the remarkable animals that Jonathan had moulded from river clay and now paraded for his approbation. "Beautiful hippos, Jon-Jon! Not hippo? Oh, I see, the horns fell off, did they? Well then, they are the most beautiful, fattest hornless kudu that I have ever seen." Cathy tugged at his arm at last. "You know he wants to speak to you also, Ralph," she urged, and Ralph swung Jonathan up onto his shoulder, took Cathy on his other arm, for he knew that such a display of domesticity would irritate the man they were going to meet, and sauntered into the inner stockade of the camp. The canvas sides of the dining marquee had been rolled up to allow the cool afternoon breeze to blow through it, and there were half a dozen men seated at the long trestle table In the centre of the group was a hulking figure, dressed in an ill-fitting jacket of expensive English cloth that was closed to the top button. The knot of his necktie had slipped and the colours of Oriel College were dulled with the dust of the long road up from the diamond city of Kimberley. Even Ralph, whose feelings for this ungainly giant of a man were ambivalent, hostility mixed with a grudging admiration, was shocked by the changes that a few short years had wrought on him. The meaty features seemed to have sagged from the raw bones of his face, his colour was high and unhealthy. He was barely forty years of age, yet his moustache and sideburns had faded from ruddy blond to dull silver, and he looked fifteen years older. Only the pale blue eyes retained their force and mystic visionary glitter. "Well, how are you, Ralph?" His voice was high and clear, incongruous in such a big body. "Good afternoon, Mr. Rhodes," Ralph replied, and despite himself let his son slip from his shoulder and lowered him gently to the ground. Instantly the child darted away. "How is my railway progressing, while you are out here enjoying yourself?" "Ahead of schedule and below budget," Ralph countered the barely veiled rebuke, and with a small effort broke the hypnotic gaze of those blue eyes and glanced at the men who flanked Mr. Rhodes. On his right was the great man's shadow, small, narrow shouldered and as neatly dressed as his master was untidy. He had the prim but nondescript features of a schoolmaster, and receding wispy hair, but keen and acquisitive eyes that gave the lie to the rest of it. "Jameson," Ralph nodded coolly at him, using neither Doctor Leander Starr Jameson's title nor the more familiar and affectionate "Doctor Jim'. "Young Ballantyne." Jameson slightly emphasized the diminutive and gave it a faintly derogatory twist. From the very first, their hostility had been mutual and instinctive. From Rhodes" left rose a younger man with straight back and broad shoulders, an open handsome face and a friendly smile which showed big even white teeth. "Hello, Ralph." His handshake was firm and dry, his Kentucky accent easy and pleasant. "Harry, I was speaking of you this very morning." Ralph's pleasure was obvious, and he glanced at Zouga "Papa, this is Harry Mellow, the best mining engineer in Africa." Zouga nodded. "We have been introduced." And father and son exchanged a glance of understanding. This young American was the one that Ralph had chosen to develop and operate the Harkness Mine. It meant little to Ralph that Harry Mellow, like most of the bright young bachelors of special promise in southern Africa, already worked for Cecil John Rhodes. Ralph intended to find the bait that would tempt him away. "We must talk later, Harry,"he murmured, and turned to another young man seated at the end of the table. "Jordan," he exclaimed. "By God, it's good to see you." The two brothers met and embraced, and Ralph made no effort to hide his affection, but then everybody loved Jordan. They loved him not only for his golden beauty and gentle manner, but also for his many talents and for the warmth and real concern that he extended to all about him. "Oh Ralph, I have so much to ask, and so much to tell you. "Jordan's delight was as intense as Ralph's. "Later, Jordan," Mr. Rhodes broke in querulously. He did not like to be interrupted, and he waved Jordan back to his seat. Jordan went instantly. He had been Mr. Rhodes" private secretary since he was nineteen years of age, and obedience to his master's least whim was part of his nature by now. Rhodes glanced at Cathy and Louise. "Ladies, I am sure you will find our discourse tedious, and you have urgent chores to attend to, I am certain." Cathy glanced up at her husband, and saw Ralph's quick annoyance at the artless presumption with which Mr. Rhodes had taken over his camp and all within it. Surreptitiously Cathy squeezed his hand to calm him, and felt Ralph relax slightly. There was a limit to even Ralph's defiance. He might not be in Rhodes" employ, but the railway contract and a hundred cartage routes depended upon this man. Then Cathy looked across at Louise, and saw that she was as piqued by the dismissal. There was a blue spark in her eyes and a faint heat under the fine freckles on her cheeks, but her voice was level and cool as she replied for both Cathy and herself, "Of course you are chrrect, Mr. Rhodes. Will you please excuse us." It was well known that Mr. Rhodes was uncomfortable in the presence of females. He employed no female servants, would not allow a painting nor statue of a woman to decorate his ornate mansion at Groote Schuur in the Cape of Good Hope, he would not even employ a married man in a position close to his person, and immediately discharged even the most trusted employee who took the unforgivable plunge into matrimony. "You cannot dance to a woman's whims and serve me at the same time," he would explain as he fired an offender. Now Rhodes beckoned Ralph. "Sit here, where I can see you," he commanded, and immediately turned back to Zouga, and began rapping out questions. His questions cut like the lash of a stock whip, but the attention with which he listened to the replies was evidence of the high regard he had for Zouga Ballantyne. Their relationship went back many years, to the early days of the diamond diggings at Colesberg kopje which had since been renamed Kimberley after the colonial secretary who accepted it into Her Majesty's dominions. On those diggings Zouga had once worked claims which had yielded up the fabulous "Ballantyne Diamond', but now Rhodes owned those claims, as he owned every single claim on the fields. Since then, Rhodes had employed Zouga as his personal agent at the kraal of Lobengula, King of the Matabele, for he spoke the language with colloquial fluency. When Doctor Jameson had led his flying column in that swift and victorious strike against the king, Zouga had ridden with him as one of his field officers and had been the first man into the burning kraal of GuBulawayo after the king had fled. After Lobengula's death, Rhodes had appointed Zouga "Custodian of Enemy Property, and Zouga had been responsible for rounding up the captured herds of Matabele cattle and redistributing them as booty to the company and to Jameson's volunteers. Once Zouga had completed that task, Rhodes would have appointed him Chief Native Commissioner, to deal with the indunas of the Matabele, but Zouga had preferred to retire to his estates at King's Lynn with his new bride, and had let the job go to General Mungo St. John. However, Zouga was still on the Board of the British South Africa Company, and Rhodes trusted him as he did few other men. "Matabeleland is booming, Mr. Rhodes," Zouga reported. "You will find Bulawayo is almost a city already, with its own school and hospital. There are already more than six hundred white women and children in Matabeleland, a sure sign that your settlers are here to stay at last. All the land grants have been taken up, and many of the farms are already being worked. The blood stock from the Cape is taking to the local conditions and breeding well with the captured Matabele cattle." "What about the minerals, Ballantyne?" "Over ten thousand claims have been registered, and I have seen some very rich crushings." Zouga hesitated, glanced at Ralph, and when he nodded, turned back to Rhodes. "Within the last few days, my son and I have rediscovered and pegged the ancient workings I first stumbled on in the sixties." "The Harkness Mine," Rhodes nodded heavily, and even Ralph was impressed by the range and grasp of his mind. "I remember your original description in The Hunter's Odyssey. Did you sample the reef?" In reply, Zouga placed a dozen lumps of quartz upon the table in front of him, and the raw gold glistened so that the men around the table craned forward in rapt fascination. Mr. Rhodes turned one of the samples in his big mottled hands before passing it to the American engineer. "What do you make of these, Harry?" "It will go fifty ounces a ton," Harry whistled softly. "Perhaps too rich, like Nome and Klondike." The American looked up at Ralph. "How thick is the reef? How broad is the strike?" Ralph shook his head. "I don't know, the workings are too narrow to get into the face." "This is quartz, of course, not the ban ket reef like we have on the Witwatersrand," Harry Mellow murmured. The ban ket reef was named after the sweetmeat of toffee and nuts and almonds and cloves which the conglomerated reef so much resembled. It was made up of the thick sedimentary beds of ancient buried lakes, not as rich in gold as this chip of quartz, but many feet thick and extending as wide as the broad lakes had once stretched, a mother lode which could be mined for a hundred years without exhausting its reserves. "It's too rich," Harry Mellow repeated, fondling the sample of quartz. "I can't believe that it will be more than a stringer a few inches thick." "But if it isn't?" Rhodes demanded harshly. The American smiled quietly. Then you will not only control nearly all the diamonds in the world, Mr. Rhodes, but most of the gold as well." His words were a sharp reminder to Ralph that the British South Africa Company owned fifty per cent royalty in every ounce of gold mined in Matabeleland, and Ralph felt his resentment return in full force. Rhodes and his ubiquitous BSA Company were like a vast octopus that smothered the efforts and the fortunes of all lesser men. "Will you allow Harry to ride with me for a few days, Mr. Rhodes, so that he can examine the strike?" Ralph's irritation sharpened the tone of his request, so that Rhodes" big shaggy head lifted quickly and his pale blue eyes seemed to search out his soul for a moment before he nodded, and then with a mercurial change of direction abandoned the subject of gold and shot his next question at Zouga. "The Matabele indunas how are they behaving themselves?" This time Zouga hesitated. "They have grievances, Mr. Rhodes." Yes? "The swollen features coagulated into a scowl. "The cattle, naturally enough, are the main source of trouble," Zouga said quietly, and Rhodes cut him off brusquely. "We captured less than 125,000 head of cattle, and we returned 40,000 of those to the tribe." Zouga did not remind him that the return was made only after the strongest representation by Robyn St. John, Zouga's own sister. Robyn was the missionary doctor at Khami Mission Station and she had once been Lobengula's closest friend and adviser. "Forty thousand head of cattle, Ballantyne! A most generous gesture by the Company! "Rhodes repeated portentously, and again he did not add that he had made this return in order to avert the famine which Robyn St. John had warned him would decimate the defeated Matabele nation, and which would have surely brought the intervention of the Imperial government in Whitehall, and possibly the revocation of the Royal Charter under which Rhodes" Company ruled both Mashonaland and Matabeleland. Not such an outstanding act of charity, after all, Ralph thought wryly. "After giving back those cattle to the indunas, we were left with less than eighty-five thousand head, the Company barely recouped the cost of the war." "Still the indunas claim they were given back only inferior beasts, the old and barren cows and scrub bulls." "Damn it, Ballantyne, the volunteers earned the right to first pick from the herds. Quite naturally, they chose the prime stock." He shot out his right fist with the forefinger aimed like a pistol at Zouga's heart. "They do say that our own herds, chosen from the captured cattle, are the finest in Matabeleland." "The indunas don't understand that" Zouga answered. "Well then, the least they should understand is that they are a conquered nation. Their welfare depends on the goodwill of the victors. They extended no such consideration to the tribes that they conquered when they lorded it across the continent. Mzilikazi slew a million defenceless souls when he devastated the land south of the Limpopo, and Lobengula, his son, called the lesser tribes his dogs, to kill or cast into slavery as the whim took him. They must not whine now at the bitter taste of defeat." Even gentle Jordan, at the end of the table, nodded at this. "To protect the Mashona tribes from Lobengula's depredations was one of the reasons why we marched on Bulawayo,"he murmured. "I said that they had grievances," Zouga pointed out. "I did not say that they were justified." "Then what else do they have to complain about?" Rhodes demanded. "The Company police. The young Matabele bucks whom General St. John has recruited and armed are strutting through the kraals, usurping the power of the indunas, taking their pick of the young girL---" Again Rhodes interrupted. "Better that than a resurrection of the fighting imp is under the indunas. Can you imagine twenty thousand warriors in impi under Babiaan and Gandang and Bozo? No, St. John was right to break the power of the indunas. As Native Commissioner, it is his duty to guard against resurgence of the Matabele fighting tradition." "Especially in view of the events that are in train south of where we now sit." Dr. Leander Starr Jameson spoke for the first time since he had greeted Ralph, and Rhodes turned to him swiftly. "I wonder if this is the time to speak of that, Doctor Jim." "Why not? Every man here is trustworthy and discreet. We are all committed to the same bright vision of Empire, and the Lord knows, we are in no danger of being overheard. Not in this wilderness. What better time than now to explain why the Company police must be made even stronger, must be better armed and trained to the highest degree of readiness?"Jameson demanded. Instinctively Rhodes glanced at Ralph Ballantyne, and Ralph raised one eyebrow, a cynical and mildly challenging gesture that seemed to decide Rhodes. "No, Doctor Jim," he spoke decisively. "There will be another time for that." And when Jameson shrugged and capitulated, Rhodes turned to Jordan. "The sun is setting," he said, and Jordan rose obediently to charge the glasses. The sundowner whisky was already a traditional ending to the day in this land north of the Limpopo. The brilliant white gems of the Southern Cross hung over Ralph's camp, dimming the lesser stars, and sprinkling the bald domes of the granite kopjes with a pearly light as Ralph picked his way towards his tent. He had inherited his father's head for liquor, so that his step was even and steady. It was ideas, not whisky, which had inebriated him. He stooped through the fly of the darkened tent and sat down on the edge of the cot. He touched Cathy's cheek. "I am awake," she said softly. What time is it?" "After midnight." "What kept you so long?" she whispered, for Jonathan slept just beyond the canvas screen. "The dreams and boasts of men drunk with power and success." He grinned in the dark and dragged off his boots. "And by God, I did my fair share of dreaming and boasting." He stood to strip off his breeches. "What do you think of Harry Mellow?"he asked, with an abrupt change of pace. "The American? He is very- Cathy hesitated. "I mean, he seems to be manly and rather nice." "Attractive?" Ralph demanded. "Irresistible to a young woman?" "You know I don't think like that," Cathy protested primly. "The hell you don't," Ralph chuckled, and as he kissed her, he covered one of her round breasts with his cupped hand. Through the thin cotton nightdress it felt taut as a ripening melon. She struggled genteelly to free her lips from his and to prise his fingers loose, but he held her fast and after a few seconds she struggled no more, and instead she slipped her arms around the back of his neck. "You smell of sweat and cigars and whisky." "I'm sorry." "Don't be, it's lovely," she putted. "Let me take off my shirt." "No, I'll do it for you." Much later Ralph lay upon his back with Cathy snuggled down against his bare chest. "How would you like to have your sisters come down from Khami?" he asked suddenly. "They enjoy camp life, but even more, they like to escape from your mother." "It was I who wanted to invite the twins," she reminded him sleepily. "You were the one who said they were too unsettling." "Actually, I said they were too rowdy and boisterous," he corrected her, and she raised her head and looked at him in the faint moonlight that filtered through the canvas. "A change of heart-" She thought about it for a moment, aware that her husband always had good reason for even his most unreasonable suggestions. "The American," she exclaimed, with such force that behind the canvas screen Jonathan stirred and whimpered. Instantly, Cathy dropped her voice to a fierce whisper. "Not even you would use my own sisters you wouldn't, would you?" He pulled her head down onto his chest again. "They are big girls now. How old are they?" "Eighteen." She wrinkled her nose as his damp, curly chest hairs tickled it. "But, " "Old maids, already." "My own sisters you wouldn't use them?" "They never get to meet decent young men at Khami. Your mother frightens them all off." "You are awful, Ralph Ballantyne." "Would you like a demonstration of just how awful I can be?" She considered that for a moment, and then, "Yes, please, "she giggled softly. "one day I will be riding with you," Jonathan said. "Won't I, Papa?" "One day, soon," Ralph agreed, and ruffled the child's dark curling head. "Now I want you to take care of your mother while I am away, Jon-Jon." Jonathan nodded, his face pale and set, the tears grimly restrained. "Promise?" Ralph squeezed the small warm body that he held on his lap, and then he stooped from the saddle and stood the child beside Cathy, and Jonathan took her hand protectively, though he did not reach to her hip. "I promise, Papa," he said, and gulped, staring up at his father on the tall horse. Ralph touched Cathy's cheek lightly with his fingertips. 41 love you," she said softly. "My beautiful Katie." And it was true. The first yellow rays of sunlight in her hair turned it into a bright halo and she was serene as a madonna, in the deep fastness of their love. Ralph spurred away, and Harry Mellow swung his horse in beside him. It was a fine red thoroughbred from Mr. Rhodes'private stable, and he rode like a plainsman. At the edge of the forest both men turned to look back. The woman and child still stood at the gate of the stockade. "You are a lucky man," Harry said softly. "Without a good woman, there is no today, and without a son there is no tomorrow," Ralph agreed. he vultures were still hunched in the tree-tops, although the bones of the lions had been picked clean and scattered across the stony ground of the ridge. They had to digest the contents of their bloated bellies before they could soar away, and their dark misshapen bodies against the clear winter sky guided Ralph and Harry the last few miles to the ridge of the Harkness claims. "It looks promising," Harry gave his guarded judgement that first night as they squatted beside the camp fire. "The country rock is in contact with the reef You could have a reef that continues to real depth, and we have traced the strike for over two miles. Tomorrow I will mark out the spots where you must sink your prospect holes." "There are mineralized ore bodies right across this country," Ralph told him. "The continuation of the great gold crescent of the Witwatersrand and Pilgrims Rest and Toti gold fields curves right across here-" Ralph broke off. "But you have the special gift, I have heard them say you can smell gold at fifty miles." Harry dismissed the suggestion with a deprecating wave of his coffee mug, but Ralph went on, "And I have the wagons and capital to grubstake a prospecting venture, and to develop the finds that are made. I like you, Harry, I think we would work well together, the Harkness Mine first, and after that, who knows, the whole bloody country, perhaps." Harry started to speak, but Ralph put a hand on his forearm to stop him. "This continent is a treasure chest. The Kimberley diamond fields and the Witwatersrand ban ket side by side, all the diamond and gold in the one bucket who would ever have believed it?" "Ralph." Harry shook his head. "I have already thrown in my lot with Mr. Rhodes." Ralph sighed, and stared into the flames of the fire for a full minute. Then he relit the stump of his dead cheroot, and began to argue and cajole in his plausible and convincing way. An hour later as he rolled into his blanket, he repeated his offer. "Under Rhodes you will never be your own man. You will always be a servant." "You work for Mr. Rhodes, Ralph." "I contract to him, Harry, but the profit or loss is mine. I still own my soul." "And I don't," Harry chuckled. "Come in with me, Harry. Find out what it feels like to bet your own cards, to calculate your own risks, to give the orders, instead of taking them. Life is all a game, Harry, and there' is only one way to play it, flat out." "I'm Rhodes" man." "When the time comes, then we will talk again," Ralph said and pulled the blanket over his head. Within minutes his breathing was slow and regular. In the morning Harry marked the sites for the prospect bores with cairns of stone, and Ralph realized how cunningly he was quartering the extended line of the reef to pick it up again at depth. By noon Harry had finished, and as they up-saddled, Ralph made a swift calculation and realized it would be another two days before Cathy's twin sisters could arrive at the base camp from Khami Mission. "Seeing that we have come so far, we should make a sweep out towards the east before turning back. God knows what we could find more gold, diamonds." And when Harry hesitated, "Mr. Rhodes will have gone on to Bulawayo already. He'll be holding court there for the next month at least, he won't even miss you." Harry thought for a moment, then grinned like a schoolboy about to bunk his classes to raid the orchard. "Let's go" he said. They rode slowly, and at each river course they dismounted to pan the gravel from the bottom of the stagnant green pools. Wherever the bedrock outcropped above the overburden of earth, they broke off samples. They searched out the burrows of ant-bear and porcupine, and the nests of the swarming white termites to find what grains and chippings they had brought up from depth. On the third day, Harry said, "We've picked up a dozen likely shows of colour. I particularly liked those crystals of beryllium, they are a good pointer to emerald deposits." Harry's enthusiasm had increased with each mile ridden, but now they had reached the end of the outward leg of their eastward sweep, and even Ralph realized that it was time to turn back. They had been out five days from the base camp, they had exhausted their coffee and sugar and meal, and Cathy would be anxious by now. They took one last look at the country that they must leave unexplored for the time being. "It's beautiful," Harry murmured. "I have never seen a more magnificent land. What is the name of that range of hills?" "That's the southern end of the Matopos." "I have heard Mr. "Rhodes speak of them. Aren't they the sacred hills of the Matabele?" Ralph nodded. "If I believed in witchcraft-'he broke off and chuckled with embarrassment. "There is something about those hills." There was the first rosy flush of the sunset in the western sky, and it turned the smooth polished rock of those distant brooding hills to pink marble, while their crests were garlanded with fragile twists of cloud coloured by the softly slanting rays to ivory and ashes. "There is a secret cave hidden in there where a witch who presided over the tribes used to live. My father took in a commando and destroyed her at the beginning of the war against Lobengula." "I have heard the story, it is one of the legends, already." "Well, it's true. They say-" Ralph broke off and studied the tall and turreted range of rock with a thoughtful expression. "Those are not clouds, Harry," he said at last. "That's smoke. Yet there are no kraals in the Matopos. It could be a bush-fire, but I don't think so, it's not on a broad front." "Then where is the smoke coming from?" "That is what we are going to find out," Ralph replied, and before Harry could protest, he had started his horse, and was cantering across the plains of pale winter grass towards the high rampart of bare granite that blocked off the horizon. Matabele warrior sat aloof from the men who swarmed about the earthen kilns. He sat in the A meagre shade of a twisted cripple-wood tree. He was lean, so that the rack of his ribs showed through the covering of elastic muscle under his cloak. His skin was burned by the sun to the deep midnight black of carved ebony, and it was glossed with health, like the coat of a race-trained thoroughbred, blemished only by the old healed gunshot wounds on his chest and back. He wore a simple kilt and cloak of tanned leather, no feathers nor war rattles, no regimentals of fur nor plumes of marabou stork upon his bared head. He was unarmed, for the white men had made roaring bonfires of the long rawhide shields and carried away the broad silver assegais by the wagon-load, they had confiscated also the Martini-Henry rifles with which the Company had paid King Lobengula. for the concession to all the mineral wealth beneath this land. On his head the warrior wore the head ring of the and una it was of gum and clay, woven permanently into his own hair and black and hard as iron. This badge of rank announced to the world that he had once been a councillor of Lobengula, the last king of the Matabele. The simple ring declared his royal bloodline, the Zanzi blood of the Kumalo tribe, running back pure and unbroken to old Zululand, a thousand miles and more away in the south. Mzilikazi had been this man's grandfather, Mzilikazi who had defied the tyrant Chaka and led his people away towards the north. Mzilikazi, the little chief who had slaughtered a million souls on that terrible northward march, and in the process had become a mighty emperor, as powerful and cruel as Chaka had ever been. Mzilikazi, his grandfather, who had finally brought his nation- to this rich and beautiful land, who had been the first to enter these magical hills and to listen to the myriad weird voices of the Umlimo, the Chosen One, the witch and oracle of the Matopos. Lobengula, son of Mzilikazi, who ruled the Matabele after the old king's death, had been the young man's blood uncle. It was Lobengula who had granted him the honours of the and una head ring and appointed him commander of one of the elite fighting imp is But now Lobengula was dead, and the young and una impi had been blown to nothing by the Maxim guns on the bank of the Shangani river, and the same Maxim guns had branded him with those deeply dimpled cicatrices upon his trunk. His name was Bazo, which means "the axe," but more often now men spoke of him as "the Wanderer." He had sat beneath the cripple-wood tree all that day, watching the iron smiths perform their rites, for the birth of iron was a mystery to all but these adepts. The smiths were not Matabele, but were members of an older tribe, an ancient people whose origins were somehow interwoven with those haunted and ruined stone walls of Great Zimbabwe. Although the new white masters and their queen beyond the seas had decreed that the Matabele no longer own aniahoh, slaves, yet these Rozwi iron smiths were still the dogs of the Matabele, still performed their art at the behest of their warlike masters. The ten oldest and wisest of the Rozwi smiths, had selected the ore from the quarry, deliberating over each fragment like vain women choosing ceramic beads from the trader's stock. They had judged the iron ore for colour and weight, for the perfection of the metal it contained and for its purity from foreign matter, and then they had broken up the ore upon the rock anvils until each lump was the perfect size. While they worked with care and total preoccupation, some of their apprentices were cutting and burning the tree trunks in the charcoal pits, controlling the combustion with layers of earth and finally quenching it with clay pots of water. Meanwhile, yet another party of apprentices made the long journey to the limestone quarries and returned with the crushed catalyst in leather bags slung upon the backs of the baggage bullocks. When the master smiths had grudgingly approved the quality of charcoal and limestone, then the building of the rows of clay kilns could begin. Each kiln was shaped like the torso of a heavily pregnant woman, like a fat, domed belly, in which the layers of iron ore and charcoal and limestone would be packed. At the lower end of the kiln was the crotch guarded by symbolically truncated clay thighs between which was the narrow opening into which would be introduced the buck horn nozzle of the leather bellows. When all was ready, the head smith chopped the head off the sacrificed rooster, and passed down the line of kilns, sprinkling them with hot blood while he chanted the first of the ancient incantations to the spirit of iron. Bazo watched with fascination, and a prickle of superstitious awe on his skin, as fire was introduced through the vaginal openings of the kilns, the magical moment of impregnation which was greeted with a joyous cry by the assembled smiths. Then the young apprentices pumped the leather bellows in a kind of religious ecstasy, singing the hymns which ensured the success of the smelting and set the rhythm for the work on the bellows. When each fell back exhausted, there was another to take his place and keep the steady blast of air driving deeply into the kiln. A faint haze of smoke hung over the workings, like sea fret on a still summer's day, it rose to eddy slowly around the tall bald peaks of the hills. Now at last it was time to draw the smelting, and as the head smith freed the clay plug from the first kiln, a joyous shout of thanksgiving went up from the assembly at the bright glowing rush of the molten metal from the womb of the furnace. Bazo found himself trembling with excitement and wonder, as he had when his first son had been born in one of the caves in these self-same hills. "The birth of the blades," he whispered aloud, and in his imagination he could already hear the dinning "of the hammers as they beat out the metal, and the sizzling hiss of the quenching that would set the temper of the edge and point of the broad stabbing spears. A touch on his shoulder startled him from his reverie, and he glanced up at the woman who stood over him, and then he smiled. She wore the leather skirt, decorated with beads, of the married woman, but there were no bangles nor bracelets on her smooth young limbs. Her body was straight and hard, her naked breasts symmetrical and perfectly proportioned. Although she had already suckled a fine son, they were not marred by stretch marks. Her belly was concave as a greyhound's, while the skin was smooth and drum-tight. Her neck was long and graceful, her nose straight and narrow, her eyes slanted above the Egyptian arches of her cheekbones. Her features were those of a statuette from the tomb of some long-dead pharaoh. "Tanase," said Bazo, "another thousand blades." Then he saw her expression and broke off. "What is it?"he asked with quick concern. "Riders," she said. "Two of them. White men coming from the southern forests, and coming swiftly.". Bazo rose in a single movement, quick as a leopard alarmed by the approach of the hunters. Only now his full height and the breadth of his shoulders were evident, for he towered a full head over the iron smiths about him. He lifted the buckhom whistle that hung on a thong about his neck and blew a single sharp blast. Immediately all the scurry and bustle amongst the kilns ceased and the master smith hurried to him. "How long to draw the rest of the smelting and break down the kilns?" Bazo demanded. "TWO days, oh Lord," answered the iron-worker, bobbing respectfully. His eyes were bloodshot from the smoke of the furnace, and the smoke seemed to have stained his cap of white woolly hair to dingy yellow. "You have until dawn.-" "Lord!" "Work all night, but screen the fires from the plain." Bazo turned from him and strode up the steep incline to where twenty other men waited below the granite cap of the hill. Like Bazo, they wore only simple leather kilts, and were unarmed, but their bodies were tempered and fined down by war and the training for war, and there was the warrior's arrogance in their stance as they rose to acknowledge their and una and their eyes were bright and fierce. There was no doubt that these were Matabele, not aniahoh dogs. "Follow!" ordered Bazo, and led them at a trot along the lower contour of the hill. There was a narrow cave in the base of the cliff, and Bazo drew aside the hanging creepers that screened the mouth and stopped into the gloomy interior. The cave was only ten paces deep, and it ended abruptly in a scree of loose boulders. Bazo gestured and two of his men went up to the end wall of the cave and rolled aside the boulders. In the recess beyond there was the glint of polished metal like the scales of a slumbering reptile. As Bazo moved out of the entrance, the slanting rays of the setting sun struck deeply into the cave, lighting the secret arsenal. The assegais were stacked in bundles of ten and bound together with rawhide thongs. The two warriors lifted out a bundle, broke the thongs and swiftly passed the weapons down the line Of men, until each was armed. Bazo hefted the stabbing spear. The shaft was of polished red heartwood of mukusi, the blood-wood tree. The blade was hand-forged, wide as Bazo's palm and long as his forearm. He could have shaved the hair from the back of his hand with the honed edge. He had felt naked until that moment, but now, with the familiar weight and balance in his hand, he was a man again. He gestured to his men to roll the boulders back into place covering the cache of bright new blades, and then he led them back along the path. On the shoulder of the hill, Tanase waited for him on the ledge of rock which commanded a wide view across the grassy plains, and beyond them the blue forests dreamed softly in the evening light. "There, she pointed, and Bazo saw them instantly. Two horses, moving at an easy canter. They had reached the foot of the hills and were riding along them, scouting for an easy route. The riders peered up at the -tangle of boulders and at the smooth pearly sheets of granite which offered no foothold. There were only two access trails to the valley of the iron smiths each of them narrow and steep, with necks which could be easily defended. Bazo turned and looked back. The smoke from the kilns was dissipating, there were only a few pale ribbons twisting along the grey granite cliffs. By morning there would be nothing to lead a curious traveller to the secret place, but there was still an hour of daylight, less perhaps, for the night comes with startling rapidity in Africa -above the Limpopo river. "I must delay them until dark, Bazo said. "I must turn them before they find the path." "If they will not be turned?" Tanase asked softly, and in reply Bazo merely altered his grip on the broad assegai in his right hand, and then quickly drew Tanase back off the rocky ledge, for the horsemen had halted and one of them, the taller and broader man, was carefully sweeping the hillside with a pair of binoculars. "Where is my son?" Bazo asked. "At the cave,"Tanase replied. "You know what to do if-" he did not have to go on, and Tanase nodded. "I know," she said softly, and Bazo turned from her and went bounding down the steep pathway with twenty armed amadoda at his back. At the narrow place which Bazo had marked, he stopped. He did not have to speak, but at a single gesture of his free hand his men slipped off the narrow trail and disappeared into the crevices and cracks of the gigantic boulders that stood tall on either hand. In seconds there was no sign of them, and Bazo broke off a branch from one of the dwarfed trees that grew in a rocky pocket, and he ran back, sweeping the trail of all sign that might alert a wary man to the ambush. Then he placed his assegai on a shoulder-high ledge beside the path and covered it with the green branch. It was within easy reach if he were forced to guide the white riders up the trail. "I will try to turn them, but if I cannot, wait until they reach this place," he called to the hidden warriors. "Then do it swiftly." His men were spread out for two hundred paces along both sides of the trail, but they were concentrated here at the bend. A good ambush must have depth to it, so if a victim breaks through the first. rank of attackers, there will be others waiting for him beyond. This was a good ambush. in bad ground on a steep narrow trail where a horse could not turn readily nor go ahead at full gallop. Bazo nodded to himself with satisfaction, then unarmed and shield less he went springing down the trail towards the plain, agile as a klipspringer over the rough track. "It will be dark in half an hour," Harry Mellow called after Ralph. "We should find a place to camp." "There must be a path," Ralph rode with one fist on his hip and the felt hat pushed back on his head, looking up the wild cliff. "What do you expect to find up there?" "I don't know, and that's the devil of it." Ralph grinned over his shoulder. He was unprepared and twisted off balance, so when his horse shied violently under him, he almost lost a stirrup and had to grab at the pommel of the saddle to prevent himself going over, but at the same time he yelled to Harry. "Cover me!" and with his free hand Ralph tugged the Winchester rifle from its leather boot under his knee. His horse was rearing and skittering in a tight circle so he could not get the rifle up. He knew that he was blocking Harry's line of fire, and that for those long seconds he was completely defenceless, and he swore helplessly, anticipating a rush of dark spearmen out of the broken rock and scrub at the foot of the cliff. Then he realized there was only one man, and that he was unarmed, and again he yelled at Harry, with even more urgency, for he had heard the clash of the breech block behind him as the American loaded and cocked. "Hold it! Don't shoot!" The gelding reared again, but this time Ralph jerked it down and then stared at the tall black man who had stepped so silently and. unexpectedly out of the crevice of a fractured granite block. "Who are you?" he demanded, his voice rasping with the shock, which still screwed his guts into a ball and charged his veins with a quick rush of blood. "Damn you, I nearly shot you." Ralph caught himself, and this time repeated in fluent Sindebele, the Matabele language, "Who are you?" The tall man in the plain leather cloak inclined his head slightly, but his body remained absolutely still, the empty hands hanging at his side. "What manner of question is that," he asked gravely, "for one brother to ask another?" Ralph stared at him. Taking in the and una head ring on his brow and the gaunt features, scored and riven by the crags and deep lines of some terrible suffering, a sorrow or an illness that must have transported this man to the frontiers of hell itself. It moved Ralph deeply to look upon that riven face, for there was something, the fierce dark eyes and the tone of the deep measured voice that was so familiar, and yet so altered as to be unrecognizable. "Henshaw," the man spoke again, using Ralph Ballantyne's Matabele praise name. "Henshaw, the Hawk, do you not know me? Have these few short years changed us so?" Ralph shook his head in disbelief, and his voice was full of wonder. "Bazo, it is not you surely, it is not you? Did you not after all die with your impi at Shanganir Ralph kicked both feet out of the stirrups and jumped to the ground. "Bazo. It is you!" He ran to embrace the Matabele. "My brother, my black brother," he said, and there was the lift and lilt of pure joy in his voice. Bazo accepted the embrace quietly, his hands still hanging at his sides, and at last Ralph stood back and held him at arm's length. "At Shaingani, after the guns were still, I left the wagons and walked out across the open pan. Your men were there, the Moles-that-burrow-under-a-mountain." That was the name that King Lobengula himself had given to Bazo's impi, Izinivukuzane Ezembintaba. "I knew them by their red shields, by the plumes of the marabou. stork and the headbands of fur from the burrowing mole." These were the regimentals bestowed upon the impi by the old king, and Bazo's eyes turned luminous with the agony of memory as Ralph went on. "Your men were there, Bazo, lying upon each other like the fallen leaves of the forest. I searched for you, rolling the dead men onto their backs to see their faces, but there were so many of them." "So many," Bazo agreed, and only his eyes betrayed his emotion. "And there was so little time to look for you," Ralph explained quietly. "I could only search slowly, with care, for some of your men were fanisa file." It was an old Zulu trick to sham dead on the battlefield and wait for the enemy to come out to loot and count the kill. "I did not want an assegai between my shoulder-blades. Then the laager broke up and the wagons rolled on towards the king's kraal. I had to leave." "I was there," Bazo told him, and drew aside the leather cloak. Ralph stared at the dreadful scars, and then dropped his gaze, while Bazo covered his torso again. "I was lying amongst the dead men." "And now?" Ralph asked. "Now that it is all over, what are you doing here?" "What does a warrior do when the war is over, when the imp is are broken and disarmed, and the king is dead?" Bazo shrugged. "I am a hunter of wild honey now." He glanced up the cliff at where the last smoke wisps were blending into the darkening sky as the sun touched the tops of the western forest. "I was smoking a hive when I saw you coming." "Ah!" Ralph nodded. "It was that smoke that led us to YOU-" "Then it was fortunate smoke, my brother Henshaw." "You still call me brother?" Ralph marvelled gently. "When it might have been I who fired the bullets--" He did not complete the sentence, but glanced down at Bazo's chest. "No man can be held to account for what he does in the madness of battle," Bazo answered. "If I had reached the wagons that day," he shrugged, "you might be the one who carried the scars." "Bazo," Ralph gestured to Harry to ride forward, this is Harry Mellow, he is a man who understands the mystery of the earth, who can find the gold and the iron which we seek." "Nkosi, I see you." Bazo greeted Harry gravely, calling him "Lord" and not allowing his deep resentment to show for an instant. His king had died and his nation had been destroyed by, the weird passion of the white men for that accursed yellow metal. "Bazo and I grew up together on the Kimberley diamond fields. I have never had a dearer friend," Ralph explained quickly, and then turned impetuously back to Bazo. "We have a little food, you will share it with us, Bazo. "This time Ralph caught the shift in Bazo's gaze, and he insisted. "Camp with us here. There is much to talk about." "I have my woman and my son with me," Bazo answered. "They are in the hills." "Bring them," Ralph told him. "Go quickly, before darkness, falls, and bring them down into camp." Bazo alerted his men with the dusk call of the francolin, and one of them stepped out of the ambush onto the path. "I will hold the white men at the foot of the hills for tonight," Bazo told him quietly. "Perhaps I can send them away satisfied, without trying to find the valley. However, warn the iron smiths that the kilns must be quenched by dawn tomorrow, there must be no shred of smoke." Bazo went on giving his orders, the finished weapons and freshly smelted metal to be hidden and the paths swept clear of spoor, the iron smiths to retreat along the secret path deeper into the hills, the Matabele guards to cover their retreat. "I will follow you when the white men have gone. Wait for me at the peak of the Blind Ape." "Nkosi." They saluted him, and slipped away, silent as the night-prowling leopard, into the failing light. Bazo took the fork in the path, and when he reached the rocky spur on the prow of the hill, there was no need for him to call. Tanase was waiting for him with the boy carried on her hip, the roll of sleeping-mats upon her head and the leather grain-bag slung on her back. "It is Henshaw," he told her, and heard the serpentine hiss of her breath. Though he could not see her expression, he knew what it must be. "He is the spawn of the white dog who violated the sacred places-" "He is my friend," Bazo said. "You have taken the oath," she reminded him fiercely. "How can any white man still be your friend?" "He was my friend, then." "Do you remember the vision that came to me, before the powers of divination were torn from me by this man's father?" "Tanase," Bazo ignored the question, "we must go down to him. If he sees my wife and my son are with me, then there will be no suspicions. He will believe that we are indeed hunting the honey of wild bees. Follow me." He turned back down the trail, and she followed him closely, and her voice sank to a whisper, of which he could clearly hear every word. He did not look back at her, but he listened. "Do you remember my vision, Bazo? On the first day that I met this man whom you call the Hawk, I warned you. Before the birth of your son, when the veil of my virginity was still un pierced before the white horsemen came with their three-legged guns that laugh like the river demons that live in the rocks where the Zambezi river falls. When you still called him "brother" and "friend", I warned you against him." "I remember." Bazo's own voice had sunk as low as hers. "In my vision I saw you high upon a tree, Bazo." "Yes," he whispered, going on down the trail without looking back at her. There was a superstitious tremor in Bazo's voice now, for his beautiful young wife had once been the apprentice of the mad sorcerer, Pemba. When Bazo at the head of his impi had stormed the sorcerer's mountain stronghold, he had hacked off Pemba's head and taken Tanase as a prize of war, but the spirits had claimed her back. On the eve of the wedding-feast when Bazo would have taken the virgin Tanase as his first bride, as his senior wife, an ancient wizard had come down out of the Matopos Hills and led her away, and Bazo had been powerless to intervene, for she had been the daughter of the dark spirits and she had come to her destiny in these hills. "The vision was so clear that I wept," Tanase reminded him, and Bazo shivered. In that secret cave in the Matopos the full power of the spirits had descended upon Tanase, and she had become the Umlimo, the chosen one, the oracle. It was Tanase, speaking in the weird voices of the spirits, who had warned Lobengula of his fate. It was Tanase who had foreseen the coming of the white men with their wonderful machines that turned the night to noon day, and their little mirrors that sparkled like stars upon the hills, speeding messages vast distances across the plains. No man could doubt that she had once had the power of the oracle, and that in her mystic trances she had been able to see through the dark veils of the future for the Matabele nation. However, these strange powers had depended upon her maidenhead remaining un pierced She had warned Bazo of this, pleading with him to strip her of her virginity and rid her of these terrible powers, but he had demurred, bound by law and custom, until it had been too late and the wizards had come down from the hills to claim her. At the beginning of the war which the white men had carried so swiftly to Lobengula's kraal at GuBulawayo, a small band had detached from the main army, they were the hardest and cruel lest led by Bakela the Fist, himself a hard fierce man. They had ridden swiftly into these hills. They had followed the secret path that Bakela had discovered twenty-five years or so before, and galloped to the secret cavern of the Umlimo. For Bakela knew the value of the oracle, knew how sacred she was, and how her destruction would throw the Matabele nation into despair. Bakela's riders had shot down the guardians of the caverns, and forced their way within. Two of Bakela's troopers had found Tanase, young and lovely and naked in the deepest recesses of the cave, and they had violated her, savagely tearing the maidenhead that she had once offered so lovingly to Bazo. They had rutted upon her until her virgin blood splattered the floor of the cavern and her screams had guided Bakela "to them. He had driven his men off her with fist and boot, and when they were alone, he had looked down upon Tanase where she lay bloodied and broken at his feet. , Then strangely, this hard fierce man had been overcome with compassion. Though he had ridden this dangerous road for the sole purpose of destroying the Umlimo, yet the bestial behaviour of his troopers had weakened his resolve, had placed some burden of recompense upon him. Bakela must have known that with her virginity torn from her she had lost her powers, for he told her. "You, who were Umlimo, are Umlimo no longer." He had accomplished her destruction without using rifle or sword, and he turned and strode from the dark cavern, leaving her life in exchange for her virginity and the loss of her dark powers. She had told the story to Bazo many times, and he knew that the mists of time had closed before her eyes and that now they shrouded the future from her, but no man could doubt that she had once possessed the power of the Sight. Thus Bazo shivered briefly, and he felt the ghost fingers touching the nape of his neck as Tanase went on in her husky whisper. "I wept, Bazo my lord, when I saw you upon the high tree, and while I wept, the man you call Henshaw the Hawk was looking up at you and smiling!" "They ate cold bully beef straight from the cans, using the blade of a hunting knife to spoon it out, and "passing the cans from hand to hand. There was no coffee, so they washed down the glutinous mess with sun warmed draughts from the felt-covered water bottles, and then Ralph shared out his remaining cheroots with Harry Mellow and Bazo. They lit them with burning twigs from the fire and smoked in silence for a long time. Close at hand a hyena warbled and sobbed in the darkness, drawn by the firelight and the smell of food, while Further out across the plain, the lions were hunting, sweeping towards the moonrise, not roaring before the kill but coughing throatily to keep in contact with the other animals in the pride. Tanase, with the child on her lap, sat at the edge of the firelight, aloof from the men, and they ignored her. It would have offended Bazo if they had paid undue attention to her, but now Ralph took the cheroot from his mouth and glanced in her direction. "What is your son's name?" he asked Bazo, and there was a heartbeat of hesitation before Bazo replied. "He is called Tungata Zebiwe." Ralph frowned quickly, but checked the harsh words that rose to his lips. Instead he said, "He is a fine boy." Bazo held out his hand towards the child, but Tanase restrained him for a moment with a quiet ferocity. "Let him come to me," Bazo ordered sharply, and reluctantly Tanase let the sleepy child stagger to his father and climb into his arms. He was a pretty, dark toffee colour, with a pot belly and chubby limbs. Except for the bracelets of copper wire at his wrists and a single string of beads around his waist, he was stark naked. His hair was a dark fluffy cap and his eyes were owlish with sleep as he stared at Ralph. "Tungata Zebiwe," Ralph repeated his name, and then leaned across to stroke his head. The child made no attempt to pull away, nor did he show any trace of alarm, but in the shadows Tanase hissed softly and reached out as if to take the child back, then dropped her hand again. "The Seeker after what has been stolen," Ralph translated the child's name, and caught the mother's dark eyes. "The Seeker after justice that is a heavy duty to place upon one so young," he said quietly. "You would make him an avenger of injustice inflicted before his birth?" Then smoothly Ralph seemed to change to a different subject. "Do you remember, Bazo, the day we first met? You were a green youth sent by your father and his brother the king to work on the diamond fields. I was even younger and greener, when my father and I found you in the veld and he signed you to a three-year labour contract, before any other digger could put his brand on you." The lines -of suffering and sorrow that marred Bazo's features seemed to smooth away as he smiled, and for a few moments he was that young guileless and carefree youth again. "It was only later I found out that the reason Lobengula sent you and thousands of other young bucks like you to the fields was to bring home as many fat diamonds as you could steal." They both laughed, Ralph ruefully and Bazo with a vestige of his youthful glee. Tobengula must have hidden a great treasure somewhere. Jameson never did find those diamonds when he captured GuBulawayo." "Do you remember the hunting falcon, Scipio?" Bazo asked. "And the giant spider that won us our first gold sovereigns at the Kimberley spider-fights," Ralph continued, and they chatted animatedly, recalling how they had worked shoulder to shoulder in the great diamond pit, and the mad diversions with which they had broken the dreadful monotony of that brutal labour. Not understanding the language, Harry Mellow rolled in his blanket and pulled the corner of it over his head. In the shadows Tanase sat, still as a beautiful ebony carving, not smiling when the men laughed but with her eyes fastened on their lips as they spoke. Abruptly Ralph changed the subject again. "I have a son also," he said. "He was born before the war, so he is a year or two older than yours." The laughter dried immediately, and although Bazo's expression was neutral, his eyes were wary. "They could be friends, as we are friends," Ralph suggested, and Tanase looked protectively towards her son, but Bazo did not reply. "You and I could work side by side once more," Ralph went on. "Soon I will have a rich gold mine in the forests yonder, and I will need a senior and una in charge of the hundreds of men who will come to work." "I am a warrior," said Bazo, "no longer a mine labourer." "The world changes, Bazo," Ralph answered softly. "There are no longer any warriors in Matabeleland. The shields are burned. The assegai blades are broken. The eyes are no longer red, Bazo, for the wars are finished. The eyes are white now, and there will be peace in this land for a thousand years." Bazo was silent. "Come with me, Bazo. Bring your son to learn the white man's skills. One day he will read and write, and be a man of consequence, not merely a hunter of wild honey. Forget this sad name you have given him, and find another. Call him a joyous name and bring him to meet my own son. Together they will enjoy this beautiful land, and be brothers as we once were brothers! Bazo sighed then. "Perhaps you are right, Henshaw. As you say, the imp is are disbanded. Those who were once warriors now work on the roads that Lodzi is building! The Matabele always had difficulty in pronouncing the sound of W, thus Rhodes was "Lodzi', and Bazo was referring to the system of conscripted labour which the Chief Native Commissioner, General Mungo St. John, had introduced in Matabeleland. Bazo sighed again. "If a man must work, it is better that he work in dignity at a task of importance with somebody whom he respects. When will you begin to dig for your gold, Henshaw?" "After the rains, Bazo. But come with me now. Bring your woman and your son-" Bazo held up one hand to silence him. "After the rains, after the great storms, we will talk again, Henshaw," Bazo said quietly, and Tanase nodded her head and for the first time she smiled, an odd little smile of approval. Bazo was right to dissemble and to lull Henshaw with vague promises. With her specially trained sense of awareness, Tanase recognized that despite the direct gaze of his green eyes and his open, almost childlike smile, this young white man was harder and more dangerous than even Bakela, his father. "After the great storms," Bazo had promised him, and that had a hidden meaning. The great storm was the secret thing that they were planning. "First there are things that I must do, but once they are done, I will seek you out," Bazo promised. Bazo led up the steep gradient of the narrow pathway through the deep gut of the granite hills. Tanase followed a dozen paces behind him. The roll of sleeping-mats and the iron cooking pot were carried easily on her head, and her spine was straight and her step fluid and smooth to balance the load. The boy skipped at her side, singing a childish nonsense in a high piping chant. He was the only one unaffected by the brooding menace of this dark valley. The scrub on each side of the path was dense and armed with vicious thorn. The silence was oppressive, for no bird sang and no small animal rustled the leaves. Bazo stepped lightly across the boulders in the bed of the narrow stream that crossed the trail and paused to look back as Tanase scooped a handful of the cool water and held it to the boy's lips. Then they went on. The path ended abruptly against a sheer cliff of pearly granite, and Bazo stopped and leaned on the light throwing, spear, the only weapon that the white administrator in Bulawayo allowed a black man to carry to protect himself and his family against the predators which infested the wilderness. It was a frail thing, not an instrument of war like the broad stabbing assegai. Leaning his weight on the spear, Bazo looked up the tall cliff. There was a watchman's thatched hut on a ledge just below the summit, and now a quavering old man's voice challenged him. "Who dares the secret pass?" Bazo lifted his chin and answered in a bull-bellow which sent the echoes bouncing from the cliffs. "Bazo, son of Gandang. Bazo, Induna of the Kumalo blood royal." Then, not deigning to await the reply, Bazo stepped through the convoluted portals of granite, into the passageway that split the cliff. The passage was narrow, barely wide enough for two grown men to walk shoulder to shoulder, and the floor was clean white sand with chips of bright mica that sparkled and crunched like sugar under his bare feet. The passage twisted like a maimed serpent, and then abruptly debouched into a sweeping valley of lush green, bisected by a tinkling stream that spilled from the rock