A Falcon Flies

Fanning himself with the beaver hat, Camacho shrugged, and answered the cold grin with his own sunny smile. "Let's drink to your going then With his free hand, he lifted his own water bottle, and shook it slightly. There was a cupful, no more. All their eyes went instinctively to the bottle. Here water was life, even the Abyssinian's single eye fastened on it.

Then Camacho, let it slip from his fingers. It looked like an accident, the bottle rolled to the Abyssinian's feet with clear water glugging out on to the baked earth, and, with an exclamation, the man stooped for it with his right hand, his knife hand.

Nobody really saw Camacho move. He had been holding the knife in the lining of the beaver hat. Suddenly it seemed to reappear behind the Abyssinian's right ear, just the carved bone handle protruding the blade completely buried.

The Abyssinian lifted his hand with a mystified expression and touched the hilt of the knife, blinked his single eye rapidly, opened his mouth and then closed it firmly and fell forward on top of the water bottle.

Camacho was standing over them, a cocked pistol in each hand. Who else wishes to make an oath on Christ's sacred wounds? " he smiled at them, his teeth very big and white and square. "Nobody? Very well then, I will make an oath. I make it on the long-lost maidenheads of your sisters which they sold a hundred times for an escudo the bunch Even they were shocked by such blasphemy, I make it on your flaccid and puny manhoods which it will be my great pleasure to shoot off, he was interrupted, and broke off in mid-sentence.

There was a faint popping sound on the hushed heated morning, so distant, so indistinct, that for a moment none of them recognized it as the sound of gunfire. Camacho recovered first, he thrust the pistols into his waistband. They were no longer needed, and he ran to the crest of the rocky kopie on which they sat.

There was a column of dun-coloured smoke rising into the washed-out blue sky far ahead. In this terrain, it lay a day's march away against the steep and fearsome edge of the escarpment.

Around him his men, once again loyal and filled with fire, were laughing and hugging each other with delight.

It was a pity about the Abyssinian, Camacho conceded, like all his people he had been a good fighter, and now they had found the Englishman, he would be missed.

Camacho cupped the cheroot in both hands and inhaled deeply. Holding the smoke in his lungs, he squinted his eyes against the flat glare of rising noon. The sun had bleached all colour from the landscape, only the shadows were cut clearly, very sharp-edged and black below each tree and rock.

Across the narrow valley the long column of men he was watching moved at the pace of the slowest. Camacho doubted if they were making a single mile in an hour.

He removed the beaver hat from his head and blew the smoke into it gently, so that it dispersed into nothingness instead of standing in the still air to draw the eye of a watcher.

Camacho saw nothing odd in that the leading Hottentot musketeer in the column carried an English flag.

Even in this barren, forsaken corner of the earth, although its gaudy folds were already dulled with dust and the ends shredded by grasping Thorn, it was the promise of protection, a warning to those who might check their passage. All caravans in Africa went under a banner.

Camacho dragged on the black cheroot and considered once again how infallible was the advice of his brother Alphonse. The night was the only time to do the business. Here the column was spread out for more than a mile, there were wide gaps between each of the four divisions, and with himself he had eighteen men left. If he attacked in daylight, he would be forced to concentrate them on the detachments of Hottentot musketeers at the head and tail of the caravan. He imagined vividly what might happen at the first shot. One hundred porters would drop their packs and scatter away into the bush, and when the fighting was over he would have nobody to carry the loot.

It was necessary, furthermore, for him to wait until the Englishman rejoined the caravan. He guessed that Zouga Ballantyne was scouting or hunting, but that he would rejoin the column before nightfall.

The woman was there. He had another glimpse of her at that moment as she stepped up on to a log that lay across the path; for a moment she balanced there, longlegged, in those maddening breeches, and then jumped down off the log. Camacho passed a pleasant few minutes in erotic imaginings. He had been twenty days without a woman and it had put a razor edge to his appetite which even the hot hard trek had not dulled.

He sighed happily, and then squinted his eyes again as he concentrated on the immediate problems. Alphonse was right, they would have to wait until night. And tonight would be a good night for it, three days after the full moon, and yet the moon would rise very late, an hour or so after midnight.

He would let the Englishman come in, let the camp settle down, let the fires die, and let the Hottentot sentries drowse off. Then when the moon rose and the vitality of the camp was at its lowest ebb, he and his men would go in.

Every one of his men was good with the knife, the fact that they had lived so long showed that, Camacho smiled to himself, and they would have an opportunity to prove it again tonight. He personally would mark the position of the sentries while it was still light. They would start with them, Camacho did not expect more than three or four. Alter the sentries, then the Hottentot musketeers that were sleeping. They were the most dangerous, and after them there would be time for indulgence.

He would go to the woman's tent himself, he squirmed slightly at the thought and adjusted his dressing. it was just a terrible pity that he could not take care of the Englishman as well. He would send two of his best men to do that work. He had dreamed of driving a long wooden spike up between the Englishman's buttocks, and then taking wagers on how long he would take to die, amusing himself and the company while regaining some of his previous losses at the same time.

Then reluctantly, and prudently, he had decided not to chance such pleasures, not with a man like that. Best to cut his throat while he still slept. They could have their fun with the woman instead, Camacho decided firmly.

His single regret was that he would have only a short time with her, before the others demanded their turns, though a few minutes would probably be enough for him. Strange how months of craving could be satiated so swiftly, and after that brief out-pouring become indifference and even distaste. . . . 1at was a very philosophical thought, Camacho realized. Once again he had astonished himself with his own wisdom and sensitivity to things of the mind. He had often thought that if he had ever learned to read and write he could have been a great man, like his father the Governor. After all, the blood in his veins was that of aristocrats and Dons, only slightly diluted.

He sighed, yes, five minutes would suffice and then the others could have her, and when they also had finished they could play the betting game with the long wooden stake, and, of course, there was a more amusing place to put it. He chuckled aloud at the thought and took a last draw on the cheroot, and the stub was so short that the ember scorched his fingers. He dropped it and crushed it under his heel. He moved like a panther, slipping quietly over the skyline and circling out stealthily to get ahead of the creeping caravan.

Zouga had left his bearers tending the smoking-racks, feeding the fire with chips of wet wood, and turning the hunks of red meat so they cured evenly. It was wearisome work, for the racks had to be guarded at all times from the hyena and jackals, the crows and kites which hung about the camp, while there was always wood to cut and the baskets of mopani bark to weave in which the smoked meat would be carried.

Jan Cheroot was happy to escape with Zouga as he marched back to find the main caravan and guide it to the buffalo camp. Even the tsetse fly could not repress his high spirits. They had been in "fly-country" for a week or more now. Tom Harkness had called these importunate little insects the guardians of Africa" and certainly they made it impossible for man to move his domestic animals through vast tracts of country.

Here they were one of the many reasons why the Portuguese colonization had been confined to the low coastal littoral. Their cavalry had never been able to penetrate this deadly screen, nor had their draught animals been able to drag their war trains up from the coast.

They were the reason, also, why Zouga. had not attempted to use waggons or beasts of burden to carry his stores. There was not even a dog with the caravan, for only man and wild game were immune to the dreadful consequences of the bite.

in some areas of the "fly-belt" there were so few of the insects as to cause little Annoyance, but in others they swarmed like hiving bees, plaguing and persecuting even during the moonlight periods of the night.

That day on the march back to rejoin the column, Zouga and Jan Cheroot suffered the worst infestation of fly they had yet met with in the valley of the Zambezi.

They rose from the ground to sit thickly upon their legs, and clustered on the backs of their necks and between their shoulder blades, so that he and Jan Cheroot took turns to walk behind each other and brush them off with a freshly cut buffalo tail.

As suddenly as they had entered it, they found themselves out of the fly-belt" and with blessed relief from the torment they settled down to rest in the shade.

Within half an hour they heard distant singing, and as they waited for the caravan to come up, they smoked and chatted in the desultory fashion of the good companions they had become.

During one of the long pauses in their talk Zouga thought he saw vague movement on the far side of the shallow valley in front of them. Probably a herd of kudu or a troop of baboon, both of which were plentiful in the valley, but apart from the buffalo herd the only game they had encountered since leaving Tete.

The approaching caravan would have alarmed whatever it was, Zouga thought, removing his cap and using it to drive away the persistent cloud of tiny black mopani bees which hovered around his head " attracted by the moisture of his eyes and lips and nostrils. The movement in the forest opposite was not repeated. Whatever it was had probably crossed the ridge. Zouga turned back to listen to Jan Cheroot. The rains only stopped six weeks ago, Jan Cheroot was musing aloud. "The water-holes and rivers up on the high ground will still be full, not here, of course, this ground drains too steeply. " He indicated the dry and rocky water course below them. "So the herds spread out, and follow their old roads. " He was explaining the complete lack of elephant, or even recent evidence of elephant herds in the valley, and Zouga listened with attention, for here was an expert speaking. "The old elephant roads, they used to run from the flat mountain of Good Hope to the swamps of the far Sud, he pointed north. But each year they shrink as we, the rasters (hunters), and men like us, follow the herds and drive them deeper and deeper into the interior."

Jan Cheroot was silent again, and his pipe gurgled noisily as he sucked on it. My father told me that he killed the last elephants south of the Olifants river, the river of elephants when he was still a young man. He boasted that he killed twelve elephants that day, he alone with his old roer (muzzle-loader) that was too heavy to hold to the shoulder. He had to rest it on the crutch of a forked stick he carried for it. Twelve elephants in one day, by one man. That is a feat. " He gurgled his pipe again, and then spat a little yellow tobacco juice. "But then my father was even more famous as a liar than he was as a hunter, Jan Cheroot chuckled and shook his head fondly.

Zouga smiled, and then the smile vanished and his head jerked up. He narrowed his eyes, for a tiny dart of reflected sunlight had struck his eye coming from the same place across the valley. Whatever he had seen was still there, and it was neither kudu nor baboon. It had to be a man, for only metal or glass could have shot that reflection. Jan Cheroot had noticed nothing and he was musing on. When I rode with Cornwallis Harris, we found the first elephant on the Cashan mountains, that's a thousand miles further north of where my father killed his herd. There was nothing in between, it had all been hunted bare. Now there are no elephant in the Cashan mountains. My brother Stephan was there two years ago.

He tells me that there are no elephant south of the Limpopo river. The Boers graze their herds where we hunted ivory, perhaps we will find no elephant even up there on the high ground, perhaps there are no elephant left in all the world."

Zouga was not really listening any more. He was thinking about the man on the opposite side of the valley. It was probably somebody from the caravan, a party sent ahead to cut firewood for the night's bivouac, yet it was still early to think of making camp.

The singing of the bearers was louder now. There was a single voice carrying the marching song. Zouga recognized it. The man was a tall Angoni, with a fine tenor voice, and a poet who improvised his own verses, adding to them and altering them on the march. Zouga, cocking his head, could make out the words.

Have you heard the Fish Eagle cry above Malawi?

Have you seen the setting sun turn the snows of Kilimanjaro to blood?

" And then the chorus coming in after him, those haunting African voices, so beautiful, so moving, Who will lead us to these wonders, my brother?

We will leave the women to weep, We will let their sleeping mats grow cold, If a strong man leads, we will follow him, my brother."

Zouga smiled at the next verse, as he recognized his name.

Bakela will lead us like a father leads his children, Bakela will give you a khete of sam-sam beadsBakela will feed you upon the fat of the hippopotamus and meat of the buffalo-Zouga closed his mind against the distraction, concentrating on the man across the valley. Here, a hundred miles from the nearest habitations of men, it must have been somebody from the caravan, woodcutter, honeyhunter, deserter, who knew?

Zouga stood up and stretched, and Jan Cheroot knocked out his pipe and stood with him. The head of the column appeared amongst the trees lower down the slope, the red, white and blue banner flapped lazily open and then drooped again dejectedly.

Zouga glanced once more at the opposite slope, it seemed deserted again. He was tired, the soles of his feet felt as though he had marched across burning embers, for they had been going hard since dawn, and the barely healed knife wound in his hip ached dully.

He should really go up that slope to check what he had seen, but it was steep and rocky. It would take another half an hour of scrambling to reach the crest and return. They went down to meet the caravan, and when Zouga saw Robyn striding along with that easy coltish grace of hers behind the standard bearer, he lifted his cap and waved it above his head.

She ran to meet him, laughing like a child with delight. He had been gone three days.

Below a polished face of smooth black rock, that when the river was in spate would be a roaring cascade, there was a bend in the dry water bed filled with pure white sand.

On the banks above it the wild mahogany stood tall and vigorous, its roots in water and the baboon had been scratching in the sand below the bank.

Robyn and Zouga sat together on the edge of the dry waterfall, watching the men that Zouga had set to digging for water. I pray there will be enough. " Robyn watched them with interest. "I have not used my bath since we left Tete. " Her enamelled hip bath was the expedition's single bulkiest item of equipment. I'll be satisfied with enough for a pot of tea, Zouga replied vaguely, but he was clearly distracted.

Something is worrying you? " she asked. I was thinking of a valley in Kashmir. "Was it like this? "Not really, it is just that, he shagged.

In that far away valley, when he had been a young ensign leading a patrol ahead of the battalion, he had seen something as he had today. Something of no account, a stray movement, a glint of light that might have been off a gunbarrel, or the horn of a wild goat.

Then, as now, it had been too much trouble to check it. That night he had lost three men, killed while they fought their way out of the valley. The fight had earned praise from his Colonel, but the men remained dead.

He glanced up at the slanting sun, there was an hour of light left. He knew he should have climbed that slope.

While Robyn watched him with a puzzled expression, he wavered a few seconds longer and then with an exclamation of exasperation stood up wearily. His feet still ached abominably and he rubbed his hip where the knifewound throbbed.

It was going to be a long walk. back down the valley.

Zouga used a deep and narrow ravine to get out of the camp unobtrusively, and once clear he scrambled out and kept to the thicker bush just above the river-bed until he reached a tangled barrier of driftwood carried down during the recent rains which blocked the dry water-course from bank to bank.

He used this to cover his crossing, and started up the far slope. He went very carefully, dodging from one tree to another and watching and listening before each move.

On the crest there was a faint movement of cooler air, the evening breeze coming down the escarpment that cooled the sweat on his neck and almost made the hard climb worth-while. It seemed that was all the reward he would get. The stony ground was too hard to carry sign, and it was deserted of life, animal or human. However, Zouga was determined to make up for his previous sloth.

He stayed too long. It would be fully dark before he reached the camp again, moon-rise was late, and he risked a broken leg moving over this sort of terrain in the pitch dark.

He turned to go back, and he smelt it before he saw it, and the hair prickled along his forearms and he felt his belly muscles contract, yet it was such a commonplace smell. He stooped and picked up the small squashed brown object. He had smoked the last of his own cheroots two days before, perhaps that was why his nose was so sensitive to the smell of tobacco.

The cigar had been smoked down to a thin rind, and crushed out so it resembled a scrap of dried bark. Without the smell to guide him, he would never have found it. Zouga shredded it between his fingers, and there was still a little residual dampness of saliva in the chewed end. He lifted his fingers and sniffed them. He knew where he had smelled that particular scented type of Portuguese tobacco before.

Camacho left fifteen of his men well back off the crest, in a tumble of rock that looked like a ruined castle, and whose caves and overhangs gave shade and concealment.

They would sleep, he knew, and he grudged it to them.

His own eyelids were drooping as be lay belly down in cover, on the other side of the ridge watching the caravan making camp.

He had only two of his men with him to help him mark the sentries and scherms, the watch fires and the tent sites. They would be able to lead the others in, even in the complete darkness before the moon, if that should become necessary. Carnacho hoped not. In the dark mistakes could be made, and it needed only a shot or a single shout. No, they would wait for the moon, he decided.

The Englishman had come into camp earlier, just before the caravan halted. He had the Hottentot with him, and they both hobbled stiffly like men who had made long, hard marches. Good, he would sleep soundly, was probably doing so already, for Carnacho had not seen him in the last hour. He must be in the tent beside the woman s. He had seen a servant carrying a steaming bucket of water to her.

They had watched the Hottentot Sergeant set only two sentries. The Englishman must be feeling very secure, two sentries merely to watch against lions. They would probably both be fast asleep by midnight. They would never wake again. He, personally, would cut one of them. He smiled in anticipation, and he would send a good knife to cut the other.

The remaining Hottentots had built their usual leanto shelter and thatched it in a rudimentary fashion.

There was no chance of rain, not at this season and not with that unblemished eggshell-blue sky. It was almost two hundred paces from the tents, a groan or a whimper would not carry that far. Good, Camacho nodded again.

It was working out better than he had hoped.

As always, the two tents were set close together, almost touching. The gallant Englishman guarding the woman, Camacho smiled again, and felt his drowsiness lifting miraculously as his groin charged once more. He wished the night away, for he had already waited so long.

Night came with the dramatic suddenness of Africa, within minutes the valley was filled with shadows, the sunset made its last theatrical flare of apricot and old gold light and then it was dark.

For an hour more Carnacho could see the occasional dark figure silhouetted by the flames of the camp fires.

Once the sound of singing carried softly and sweetly to the ridge, and the other camp sounds, the clank of a bucket, the thud of a log thrown on the fire, the drowsy murmur of voices, showed that the routine was unaltered, and the camp completely unaware.

The noises faded and the fires died. The silence and the darkness was disturbed only by the piping lament of a jackal across the valley.

The star patterns turned slowly across the sky marking the passage of the hours, and then gradually paled out before the greater brilliance of the rising moon. Fetch the others, Camacho told the man nearest him, and rose stiffly to his feet, stretching like a cat to relieve numbed muscles. They came silently, and gathered close about Camacho, to listen to his final whispered instructions.

When he finished whispering he looked from one. to the other in turn. Their faces in the bright moonlight had the pale greenish hues of freshly exhumed corpses, but they nodded their agreement to his words, and then followed him down the slope, dark silent shapes like a troop of wolves; they reached the dry water course. in the gut of the valley, and split into their prearranged groups.

Camacho moved up the newly beaten path towards the camp. He carried his knife in his right hand and his musket in the other, and his feet made a barely audible brushing sound through the short dry grass. Ahead of him, beneath the outspread branches of a mukusi tree, he could make out the shape of the sentry, where he had been placed six hours before. The man was asleep, curled like a dog on the hard earth. Camacho nodded with satisfaction and crept closer. He saw the man had pulled a dark blanket over his head. The mosquitoes had bothered him also, Camacho grinned and knelt beside him.

With his free hand he felt softly for the man's head through the blanket, then the hand stilled. He gave a little grunt of surprise, and jerked the blanket aside. It had been arranged over the exposed roots of the mukusi tree to look like the shape of a sleeping man, and Camacho swore quietly but with great vehemence.

The sentry had chosen the wrong time to sneak away from his post. He was probably back in the lean-to shelter snoring happily on a mattress of dry grass. They would get him with the others, when they cleaned out the shelter. Camacho went on up the slope into the camp. In the moonlight the canvas of the tents shone ghostly silver, a beacon on which his lust could concentrate. Camacho slipped the sling of the musket over his shoulder as he hurried forward, towards the left-hand tent, and then checked as another dark figure emerged from the shadows, the knife in his right hand instinctively came up and then he recognized his own man, one of those whom he had sent to cut the Englishman's throat.

The man nodded jerkily, all was well so far and they went forward together, separating only as they approached the two tents. Carnacho would not use the fly opening of the woman's tent, for he knew it would be laced closed, and if there were any surprises they would be at the entrance. He slipped around the side of the tent, and stooped to one of the hooded ventilator openings. He ran the point of the blade into it and then drew it upwards in a single stroke. Although it was heavy canvas, the blade had been whetted expertly, and the side wall split with only a whisper of sound.

Carnacho stepped through the opening, and while he waited for his eyesight to adjust to the deeper darkness of the interior, he fumbled with the fastening of his breeches, grinning happily to himself as he made out the narrow collapsible cot and the little white tent of the muslin mosquito net. He shuffled towards it slowly, careful not to trip over the cases of medical stores that were piled between him and the cot.

Standing over the cot, he ripped the muslin netting aside violently, and lunged full length on to the cot, groping for the womAn's head to smother her cries, the loose ends of his belt flapping at his waist, and his breeches sagging around his hips.

For a moment he was paralysed with shock at the fact that the cot was empty. Then he groped frantically over every inch of it, before coming to his feet again and hoisting his breeches with his free hand. He was confused, disconnected, and wild ideas flashed through his mind.

Perhaps the woman had left the cot to answer a call of nature, but then why was the fly carefully laced closed.

She had heard him and was hiding behind the cases, armed with a scalpel, and he swung round panicking to lash out with the knife, but the tent was empty.

Then the coincidence of the missing sentry and the empty cot struck him with force, and he felt deep and urgent concern. Something was happening that he did not understand. He charged for the rent in the canvas, tripped and sprawled over one of the cases and rolled on to his feet again, nimble as a cat. He ran out, clinching his belt and looking about him wildly, unslinging his musket and only just preventing himself from calling aloud to his men.

He ran to the Englishman's tent, just as his man came running out of the long dark tear in the canvas side, brandishing his knife, his face pale and fearful in the moonlight. He saw Camacho, screamed and struck out at him wildly with the long silver blade.

Silence, you fool, Camacho snarled at him. He's gone, the man panted, craning to stare about into the deep shadows that the moon cast under the q trees. "They've gone. They've all gone. "Come! " snapped Camacho, and led him at a run down towards the lean-to that the Hottentot musketeers had built.

Before they reached it they met their companions running towards them in a disorderly bunch.

Machito? " somebody called nervously. Shut your mouth, Camacho growled at them, but the man blurted on. The scherm is empty, they have gone. "The Devil has taken them. "There is nobody."

There was an almost superstitious frenzy of awe on them all, the darkness and the silent empty camp turned them all into cowards. Carnacho found himself, for once, without an order to give, uncertain of what to do. His men crowded around him helplessly, seeming to take comfort from each other's physical presence, cocking and fiddling with their muskets and peering nervously into the shadows. What do we do now? " A voice asked the question that Camacho had feared, and somebody else threw a log from the pile on to the smouldering watch fire in the centre of the camp. Don't do that, " Camacho ordered uncertainly, but instinctively they were all drawn to the warmth and comfort of the orange tongue of flame that soared up brightly, blowing like a dragon's breath.

They turned their backs towards it, forming a half circle and faced outwards into the dark which in contrast to the flames was suddenly impenetrably black.

It was out of this darkness that it came. There was no warning, just the sudden thunderous burst of sound and flame, the long line of spurting muzzle flashes, blooming briefly and murderously, and then the sound of the striking balls in their midst, like a handful of children's MATbles hurled into a mud puddle, as the musket balls slogged into human flesh.

Immediately men were hurled lightly about by the heavy lead slugs, and the little band about the watch fire was thrown into struggling, shouting confusion.

One of them flew backwards, at a run, doubled in the middle where a ball had taken him low in the belly. He tripped over the burning log and fell full length into the blazing watch fire. His hair and beard flared like a torch of pine needles and his scream rang wildly through the tree tops.

Carnacho himself threw up his musket, aiming blindly into the night from whence the Englishman's voice was chanting the ritual infantry orders for mass volley fire. Section One.

Reload. Section Two. Three paces forward. One round volley fire."

Camacho realized that the devastating blast of close range musketry that had just swept them, would be repeated within seconds. With naild derision Camacho had watched on many a hot afternoon as the Englishman drilled his double line of red-jacketed puppets, the front rank levelling and firing on command, then the second rank taking three paces forward in unison, stepping through the gaps in the first rank and in their turn levelling and firing. The same evolutions which, when magnified ten thousand times, had broken the charge of French cavalry up the slope at Quatre Bras, now filled Camacho with unutterable terror, and he flung up his musket and fired it unsighted into the darkness, in the direction of the cool, precise English voice. He fired at the same instant as one of his own men who had been knocked down by the first volley scrambled to his feet only lightly wounded, directly in front of Camacho's musket muzzle. Carnacho shot him cleanly between the shoulder blades at a range of two feet, so close that the powder burn scorched the man's shirt. It smouldered in little red sparks as he sprawled at full length on his face once more, until the glowing sparks were quenched by the quick flow of the man's heart blood.

Tool! " Camacho howled at the corpse, and turned to run. Behind him the English voice called, "FireV Camacho threw himself down on to hard earth, howling again as his hands and knees sank into the hot ash of the watch fire and he felt his breeches char and his skin blister.

The second volley swept over his head, and around him more men weie falling and screaming, and Camacho rebounded to his feet at a dead run. He had lost both his knife and musket. Section One, three paces forward, one round volley fire."

The night was suddenly filled with running, shouting figures, as the porters burst out of their encampment.

There was no direction or purpose in their flight. They ran like Camacho, driven by gunfire and their own terrible panic, scattering away into the surrounding bush, singly and in small groups.

Before the command ordering the next volley of musket fire, Camacho ducked behind the hillock of porters" packs, which had been piled close to the Englishman's tent and covered with waterproof tarpaulin.

Camacho was sobbing with the agony of his scorched hands and knees, and with the hurmiliation of having walked so guilelessly into the Englishman's trap.

He found his terror giving way to bitter and spiteful hatred. As little groups of terrified porters stumbled towards him out of the darkness, he drew one of the pistols from his belt and shot the leader in the head and then leapt up howling like a demented ghost, they ran and he knew they would not stop until, miles away in the trackless wilderness, they dropped with exhaustion, easy prey for lion or hyena. It gave him a moment's sour satisfaction, and he looked around for some other damage he could wreak.

The pile of stores behind which he crouched and the dying fire in front of the Englishman's deserted tent caught his attention. He snatched a brand from the fire, blew it into flame and tossed it flaring brightly on to the high canvas-covered pile of stores and equipment, then flinched as another volley crashed out of the darkness, and he heard the Englishman's voice. As a line of skirmishers, take the bayonet to them now, men."

Camacho jumped down into the dry river-bed, and blundered through the crunching sugary sand to the far bank, where he scrambled thankfully into the dense riverme bush.

At the re-assembly point on the ridge there were three of his men already waiting, two of them had lost their muskets and all three were as shaken and sweaty and breathless as Camacho himself.

Two more came in while they regained their breath and power of speech. One was badly hit, his shoulders shattered by a musket ball. There won't be any others, he gasped, "those little yellow bastards caught them with bayonets as they were crossing the river."

They'll be here any minute. " Camacho dragged himself to his feet again, looking back down into the valley.

He saw with grim satisfaction that the pile of stores was blazing brightly, despite the efforts of half a dozen tiny dark figures to beat out the flames. He had only moments to enjoy the spectacle, for lower down the slope came the thin, but warlike cries of the Hottentot musketeers and the thud and flash of their musket fire. Help me, cried the man with the shattered shoulderDon't leave me here, my friends, my comrades, give me an arm, he pleaded, trying to struggle back on to his feet, but he was speaking to the empty night, and as the rush of footsteps down the far slope of the hill dwindled, his knees buckled under him and he sank back on to the rock earth sweating with pain and the terror which lasted only until one of the Hottentots drove the point of a bayonet into his chest and out between his shoulder blades.

Zouga strode angrily through the camp in the rising heat and bright sunlight of morning. His face and arms were blackened with soot, his eyes still red and smarting from the smoke of the fires, his beard was scorched and his eyelashes burned half away from fighting the flames.

They had lost most of their stores and equipment for the fire had run away through the tents and thatched shelters. Zouga paused to glance at the charred and trodden scraps of canvas that were all that were left of the tents; they would miss them when the rains broke, but that was the very least of their losses.

He tried to make a mental list of the most grievous damage they had suffered. There were firstly only fortysix porters left out of more than one hundred. Of course, he could expect Jan Cheroot and his Hottentots to bring in a few more. They were at this moment scouring the valleys and hills around the camp for scattered survivors.

He could still hear the kudu-horn trumpets calling in the stragglers. However, many would have risked the long and dangerous journey back to Tete rather than a recurrence of the night's attack, and they would have seized the opportunity to desert. Others would be lost after their midnight flight and panic. They would fall prey to wild animals or succumb to thirst. Half a dozen had been killed by random musketry fire and by the retreating brigands who had deliberately fired into the masses of unarmed porters. Four others were so badly wounded that they would die before nightfall.

That was the most serious loss, for without porters they were helpless. Without porters to carry them, what remained of the carefully selected equipment and trade goods were as useless to them as if they had left them in London or dumped them overboard from Huron's deck.

Of the equipment itself, it would take them hours to count their losses, to find what had burned and what they could salvage from the stinking, smouldering mass of cloth and canvas, what they could pick out of the trodden and dusty mess scattered down the rock hillside.

The scene reminded Zouga forcefully of so many other battlefields, the terrible destruction and waste affronted him, as it had done before.

The few remaining porters were already at work, picking over the field like a line of harvesters, retrieving anything of value from the ash and the dust. Little Juba was with them concentrating on the search for Robyn's medical stores, and books and instruments.

Robyn herself had set up an emergency clinic under the wide green branches of the mukusi tree in the centre of the camp, and when Zouga paused to look at the wounded men who still awaited her attention, and at the dead bodies laid out in a neat row and covered with a blanket or a scrap of charred and dirty canvas, he was angry with himself all over again.

Though what alternative had there been for him, he wondered.

If he had turned the camp into an armed fortress, it would have meant enduring a long drawn-out siege with Camacho's wolves skulking around the perimeter, sniping and harrying them until their opportunity came.

No, he had been right to set the trap and end it at a single stroke. At least now he could be certain that the Portuguese were still in full flight for the coast, but the price had been too high, and Zouga was still angry.

The expedition, so well conceived and lavishly equipped, had ended in disaster before it had achieved a single one of its objectives. The loss of equipment and life had been heavy, but that was not what burned so acidly in Zouga's stomach as he paused at the perimeter of the devastated camp and lifted his eyes longingly towards the high broken ground of the southern escarpment. It was the idea of having to give up, before he had begun, and when he was so close, so very close. Twenty, fifty, not more than a hundred miles ahead of him lay the frontier of the empire of Monornatapa. Behind him, one hundred miles to the north was the dirty little village of Tete, and the wide river which was the beginning of the long ignoble road back to England, back to obscurity, back to a commission in a third-rate regiment, back to conformity and the wearying discipline of the cantonments of the Indian army. Only now that he was doomed to return to that life did he realize how deeply he had hated and resented it, just how much the desire to escape it had brought him here to this wild untouched land. Like a long-term prisoner who has tasted one day of sweet freedom, so the prospect of return to his cage was that much more painful, now. The pain of it cramped his chest, and he had to breathe deeply to control it.

He turned away from the southern vista of ragged peaks and savage black rock cliffs, and he walked slowly to where his sister worked quietly in the shade of the mukusi. She was pale, with dark smudges of fatigue and strain under her green eyes. Her blouse was speckled with spots of her patients" blood, and her forehead appeared blistered with tiny beads of perspiration.

She had started work in the darkness, by the light of a bull's eye lantern and now it was midmorning.

She looked up wearily as Zouga stood over her. We won't be able to go on, he said quietly. She stared at him a moment without change of expression, and then dropped her eyes and went on smearing salve on the badly burned leg of one of the porters. She had treated the worst cases first, and was now finishing with the burns and abrasions. We've lost too much vital equipment, Zouga explained. "Stores that we need to survive. " Robyn did not look up this time, "And we've not enough porters to carry what is left Robyn began bandaging the leg with her full attention. Papa made the Transversa with four porters, she observed mildly. Papa was a man, Zouga pointed out reasonably, and Robyn's hands stilled ominously and her eyes narrowed, but Zouga had not noticed. "A woman cannot travel or survive without the necessities of civilization, he went on seriously. "That is why I am sending you back to Tete.

I'm sending Sergeant Cheroot and five of his Hottentots to escort you. You'll have no difficulty, once you reach Tete. I will send with you what remains in cash, a hundred pounds for the launch down river to Quelimane and a passage to Cape Town on a trader. There you can draw on the money I deposited in Cape Town to pay for a passage on the mailship."

She looked up at him. "And you? " she asked.

Until then he had not made the decision. "The important thing is what happens to you, he told her gravely, and then he knew what he was going to do. "You will have to go back and I am going on alone. "It'll take more than Jan Cheroot and five of his damned Hottentots to carry me, she told him, and the oath was a measure of her determination. Be reasonable, Sissy."

Why should I start now? " she asked sweetly.

Zouga opened his mouth to reply angrily, then closed it slowly and stared at her. There was a hard uncompromising line to her lips, and the prominent, almost masculine, jaw was clenched stubbornly.

I don't want to argue, he said. Good, " she nodded. That way you won't waste any more of your precious time. "Do you know what you are letting yourself in for? " he asked quietly.

As well as you do, she replied.

We won't have trade goods to buy our way through the tribes. " She nodded. "That means we'll have to fight our way through if anyone tries to stop us."

He saw the shadow in her eyes at that, but there was no wavering of her determination. No tents for shelter, no canned food, no sugar or tea."

He knew what that meant to her. "We will live straight off the land, and what we can't scavenge or kill or carry, we go without. We'll have nothing but powder and shot. "You'd be a fool to leave the quinine, she told him quietly, and he hesitated. The bare minimum of medicines, he agreed, "and remember, it won't be for just a week or a month. "We'll probably go a. great deal faster than we have so far, she answered quietly, as she stood up and brushed off the seat of her breeches.

The choice of what to take and what to leave had been nicely balanced, Zouga thought, as he listed and weighed the new loads.

He had chosen paper and writing equipment in place of sugar and most of the tea. His navigational instruments in place of spare boots, for the boots they wore could be resoled with raw buffalo hide. Quinine and other medicines together with Robyn's instruments in place of the extra clothing and blankets. Powder and shot in place of trade beads and cloth.

The pile of abandoned equipment grew steadily, cases of potted jams, bags of sugar, canned foods, insect nets, folding camp chairs and cots, cooking pots, Robyn's enamel hip bath and her flowered chamber pot, trade goods, merkani cloth and beads, hand mirrors and cheap knives. When the pile was complete, Zouga put fire into it, a token of finality and of determination. Yet they watched it burn with trepidation.

There were two small concessions Zouga had made: a single case of Ceylon tea for, as Robyn pointed out, no Englishman could be expected to explore undiscovered territories without that sovereign brew, and the sealed tin which contained Zouga's dress uniform, for their very lives might depend on impressing a savage African potentate. Otherwise they had divested themselves of all but the very essentials.

Chief of these essentials was the ammunition, the sacks of first-grade Curtis and May black powder and the ingots of soft lead, the bullet moulds, the flask of quicksilver to harden the balls and the boxes of copper caps. Out of the remaining forty-six porters, thirty of them carried this powder and shot.

Jan Cheroot's musketeers were horrified when they were informed that their field packs would in future hold two hundred, and not fifty, rounds of Enfield ammunition. We are warriors, not porters, " his Corporal told him loftily. Jan Cheroot used the metal scabbard of his long bayonet to reason with him, and Robyn dressed the superficial wounds in the Corporal's scalp. They now understand the need for carrying extra ammunition, Major, " Jan Cheroot reported to Zouga cheerfully.

It truly was interesting to realize how much fat they could shed, Zouga mused, as he watched the shorter, more manageable column start out. It was less than a hundred and fifty yards from head to tail, and the pace of its march was almost doubled. The main body nearly matched the speed of Zouga's advance party, falling only a mile or so behind during the first day's march.

That first day they reached the scene of the buffalo hunt before noon, and found more than bark baskets of cured black buffalo meat awaiting there. Zouga's head gunbearer, Matthew, came running to meet him through the forest and he was so excited as to be almost incoherent. The father of all elephant, " he gibbered, shaking like a man in fever, "the grandfather of the father of all elephants! " Jan Cheroot squatted beside the spoor and grinned like a gnome in a successful piece of sorcery, his slant eyes almost disappearing in the web of wrinkles and folds of yellow skin. Our luck has come at last, he exulted. "This is indeed an elephant to sing about."

He took a roll of twine out of the bulging pocket of his tunic and used it to measure the circumference of one of the huge pad marks. It was well over five feet, close to six feet around. Double that is how high he stands at the shoulder, " Jan Cheroot explained. "What an elephant, Matthew had at last controlled his excitement enough to explain how he had awoken that dawn, when the light was grey and uncertain, and seen the herd passing close to the camp in deathly silence, three great grey ghostly shapes, moving out of the forest and entering the blackened and barren valley through which the fire had swept.

They were gone so swiftly, that it had seemed that they had never existed, but their spoor was impressed so clearly into the soft layer of fire ash that every irregularity in the immense footprints, the whorls and wavy creases of the horny pads, were clearly visible. There was one of them, bigger and taller than the others, his teeth were long as a throwing spear and so heavy that he held his head low and moved like an old man, a very old man."

Now Zouga also shivered with excitement, even in the stultifying heat of the burned-out valley, where it seemed the blackened earth had retained the heat of the flames. Jan Cheroot, mistaking the small movement, grinned wickedly around the stern of his clay pipe. My old father used to say that even a brave man is frightened three times when he hunts the elephant, once when he sees its spoor, twice when he hears its voice and the third time when he see the beast, big and black as an ironstone kopje."

Zouga did not trouble to deny the accusation, he was following the run of the spoor with his eyes. The three huge animals had moved up the centre of the valley, heading directly into the bad ground of the escarpment rim.

We will follow them, he said quietly. Of course, Jan Cheroot nodded, "that is what we came for."

The spoor led them over the cold grey ash, amongst the blackened and bared branches of the burned-out jessie bush and up the rising funnel of the narrow valley.

Jan Cheroot led. He had discarded his faded tunic for a sleeveless leather jerkin with loops for the Enfield cartridges across the chest. Zouga followed him closely, carrying the Sharps. and fifty extra rounds, together with his two-gallon water bottle. His gunbearers, in strict order of seniority backed him, each with his burden of blankets and water bottles, food ha& powder flask and ball pouch, and of course the big smooth-bored elephant guns.

Zouga was anxious to see Jan Cheroot work. The man talked a very good elephant hunt, but Zouga wanted to know if he was as good on the spoor as he was at telling about it around the camp fire. The first test came swiftly when the valley pinched out against another low cliff of impassable rock, and it seemed as though the great beasts they followed had taken wing and soared away above the earth. Wait, " said Jan Cheroot and cast swiftly along the base of the cliff. A minute later he whistled softly and Zouga went forward.

There was a smudge of dark ash on a block of ironstone, and another above it, seeming to lead directly into sheer rock face.

Jan Cheroot scrambled up over the loose scree at the foot of the cliff, and disappeared abruptly. Zouga slung his rifle and followed him. The blocks of ironstone had fractured in the shape of a giant's staircase, each step as high as his waist so that he had to use a hand to climb.

Even the elephants would have extended themselves to make each step, rising on their back legs as he had seen them do at the circus, for an elephant is incapable of jumping. They must keep two feet on the earth before they can heave their ungainly bulks upwards.

Zouga reached the spot where Jan Cheroot had disappeared and stopped short in amazement at the threshold of the stone portals, invisible from below, which marked the beginning of the ancient elephant road.

The portals were symmetrically formed in fractured rock, and had eroded through the softer layers, leaving straight joints so they seemed to have been worked by a mason. The opening was, so narrow that it seemed impossible that such a large animal could pass through, and looking above the level of his own head, Zouga saw how over the centuries their rough skin had worn the stone smooth as thousands upon thousands of elephant had squeezed through the pp. He reached up and plucked a coarse black bristle, almost as thick as a Swan Vesta, from a crack in the face. Beyond the natural gateway, the gap in the cliffs widened and rose at a more gentle pitch. Already Jan Cheroot was four hundred yards up the pathway.

Come! " he called, and they followed him up.

The elephant road might have been surveyed and constructed by the corps of engineers, for never was the gradient steeper than thirty degrees and when there were natural steps they were never higher than a man or an elephant could comfortably negotiate, although it seemed there were always accidents, for within a quarter of a mile they found where one of the big animals had missed his footing and struck the tip of one tusk against the ironstone edge.

The tusk had snapped above the point, and twenty pounds-of ivory lay in the path. The fragment was worn and stained, so thick around that Zouga could not span it with both hands, but where it had sheared the fresh ivory was a lovely finely grained porcelain white.

Jan Cheroot whistled again when he saw the girth of the fragment of tusk. "I have never seen an elephant so big, "he whispered, and instinctively checked the priming of his musket.

They followed the road out of the rocky pass on to forested slopes, where the trees were different, more widely spaced, and here the three old bulls had paused to strip off long slabs of bark from the msasa trunks before moving on. A mile further along the road, they found the chewed balls of bark still wet and smelling of elephant saliva, a rank gamey smell. Zouga held one of the big stringy balls to his nostrils and inhaled the elephant smell.

It was the most exciting odour he had ever known.

When they rounded a shoulder of the mountain, there was a terrifying drop of open blue space before them in which the tiny shapes of vultures soared. Zouga was sure that it was the end of the road.

, comev Jan cheroot whistled and they stepped out on to the narrow secret ledge, with the deep drop close at hand and followed the road that had been smoothed for them by tens of thousands of roughly padded feet over the centuries.

zouga at last was allowing himself to hope, for the road climbed always, and there seemed to be a definite purpose and direction to it, unlike the meandering game trails of the valley. This road was going somewhere, climbing and bearing determinedly southwards.

Zouga paused a moment and looked back. Far behind and below the sunken plain of the Zambezi shimmered in the blue and smoky haze of heat. The gigantic baobab trees seemed like children's miniatures, the terrible ground over which they had laboured for weeks seemed smooth and inviting, and far away just visible through the haze the serpentine belt of darker, denser vegetation marked the course of the great wide river itself.

Zouga. turned his back upon it and followed Jan Cheroot up around the shoulder of the mountain, and a new and majestic vista opened around him as dramatically as though a theatre curtain had been drawn aside.

Another steep slope stretched away above the cliffs, and there were luxuriant forests of marvellously shaped trees, the colours of their foliage was pink and flaming scarlet and iridescent green. These lovely forests reached up to a rampart of rocky peaks that Zouga was certain must mark the highest point of the escarpment.

There was something different with this new scene, and it took Zouga some moments to realize what it was.

Then suddenly he drew a deep breath of pleasure. The air fanning down from the crest was sweet and cool as that on a summer's evening on the South Downs, but carrying with it the scent of strange shrubs and flowers and the soft exotic perfume of that beautiful pink and red forest of msasa trees.

That was not all, Zouga realized suddenly. There was something more important still. They had left the tsetsefly-belt" behind them. It was many hours and a thousand feet of climbing since he had noticed the last of the deadly little insects. The land ahead of them now was clean, they were entering a land where man could live and rear his animals. They were leaving the killing heat of that harsh and forbidding valley for something softer and cleaner, something good, Zouga was certain of it, at last.

He stared about him with delight and wonder. Below him in the void a pair of vultures came planing in on wide-stretched pinions, so close that he could see every individual feather in their wingtips. and above the shaggy mound of their nest that clung Precariously to a fissure in the sheer rock cliff they beat at the air, hovering, before settling upon the nest site. Clearly Zouga heard the impatient cries of the hungry nestlings.

On the rock shelf high above his head a family of hyrax, the plump rabbit-like rock dassie, sat in a row and stared down at him with patent astonishment, fluffy as children's toys, until at last they took flight and disappeared into their rocky warrens with the speed of a conjurer's illusion.

The sun, sinking through the last quadrant of its course, lit it all with richer and mellower light, and turned the cloud ranges to splendour, tall mushroomshaped thunderheads of silver and brightest gold, touched with fleshy pink tongues and the tinge of wild roses.

Now at last Zouga could not doubt where the elephant road was leading him and he felt his spirits soaring, his body wearied from the climb was suddenly recharged with vigour, with vaulting expectations. For he knew that those rugged peaks above him were the threshold, the very frontiers of the fabled kingdom of Monomatapa.

He wanted to push past Jan Cheroot on the narrow track, and run ahead up the broad beautiful forested slope that led to the crest, but the little yellow Hottentot stopped him with a hand upon his shoulder. Look! he hissed softly.

"There they are! "

zouga followed his outflung arm and saw instantly.

Far ahead amongst those magical red and pink groves something moved, vast and grey and slow, ethereal and insubstantial as a shadow. He stared at it, feeling his heartbeat quicken at this, his first glimpse of an African elephant in its savage habitat, but the slow grey movement was immediately screened by the dense foliage. My telescope. " He snapped his fingers urgently behind his back, never taking his eyes from the spot where the huge beast had disappeared, and Matthew thrust the thick cylinder of cool brass into his hand.

With fingers that shook slightly he pulled out the sections of the spy-glass, but before he could lift it to his eye the tree that had screened the elephant's body began to tremble and shake as though it had been struck by a whirlwind, and faintly they heard the rending crackle of tearing timber, the squealing protest of living wood, and slowly the tall tree leaned outwards and then toppled with a crack that echoed off the cliffs like a cannon shot.

ZOUP lifted the telescope and rested it on Matthew's patient shoulder. He focused the eye-piece. Abruptly, in the rounded field of the glass, the elephant was very close. His head was framed by the foliage of the tree he had uprooted. The vast ears seemed wide as a clipper's mainsail as they flapped lazily and he could see the puffs of dust that their breeze raised from the massive grey withers.

Clearly he could see the dark wet tear-path from the little eye down the sered and wrinkled cheek, and when the animal raised its head, Zouga drew breath sharply at the unbelievable size of the double arches of stained yellow ivories. One -tip was foreshortened, broken off cleanly, and the ivory was brilliant snowy white in the fresh break.

As Zouga watched, the bull used his trunk, with its rubbery fingers of flesh at the tip, to pluck a handful of the delicate new leaves from the fallen tree. He used his trunk with the finesse of an expert surgeon, and then drooped open his triangular lower lip and thrust the leaves far down his own throat, and his rheumy old eyes wept with slow contentment.

An urgent tap on his shoulder disturbed Zoup and irritably he lifted his eye from the telescope. Jan Cheroot was pointing further up the slope.

Two other elephants had drifted into view from out of the forest. Zouga refocused upon them and then gasped.

He had thought the first elephant massive, and here was another bull just as big, yet it was the third elephant which daunted his belief.

Beside him Jan Cheroot was whispering with suppressed tension making his voice hoarse and his slanted black eyes shine.

The younger bulls are his two askari, his indunas.

They are his ears and his eyes. For in his great age he is probably almost deaf and more than half blind, but look at him. is he not still a king?

The oldest bull was tall and gaunt, taller by almost a head than his proteges, but the flesh seemed to have wasted off the ancient frame. His skin hung in baggy folds and creases from the massive framework of bones.

He was thin in the way that some old men are thin; time had eroded him, seeming to leave only skin and stringy sinew and brittle bone. Matthew had been right in his description, the bull moved the way an old man moves, as though each joint protested with rheumatic pangs, and the weight of ivory he had carried for a hundred years was at last too much for him.

The ivory had once been the symbol of his majesty, and it was still perfect, flaring out from the lip and then turning in again so the points almost met. The gracious curves seemed perfectly matched, and the ivory was a lovely, butter yellow, unblemished despite the dominance battles he had fought with them, despite the forest trees that the bull had toppled with them and stripped of their bark or the desert roots he had dug from stony soil with them.

But now, at last, these great tusks were a burden to him, they wearied him and he carried his head low as they ached in his old jaws. It had been many years now since he had used them as fearsome weapons to keep control of the breeding herds. it had been as many years since he had sought the company of the young cows and their noisy squealing calves.

Now the long yellow ivories were a mortal danger to him, as well as a source of discomfort and pain. They made him attractive to man, his only enemy in nature.

Always it seemed that the hunters were camped upon his spoor, and the man-smell was associated with the flash and thudding discharge of muzzle-loading firearms, or the rude stinging intrusion of sharpened steel into his tired old flesh.

There were pieces of beaten iron pot-leg and of round hardened lead ball deep in his body, the shot lying against the bone castle of his skull had become encysted -with gristle and formed lumps as big as ripe apples beneath the skin, while the scars from arrows and stabbing spears, from the fire-hardened wood spikes of the dead-fall-trap had thickened into shiny grey scars and become part of the rough, folded and creased mantle of p his bald grey hide.

Without his two askari he would long ago have fallen to the hunters. It was a strangely intimate relationship that knit the little herd of old bulls, and it had lasted for twenty years or more. Together they had trekked tens of thousands of miles, from the Cashan mountains in the far south, across the burning, waterless wastes of the Kalahari desert, along the dry river beds where they had knelt and with their tusks dug for water in the sand.

They had wallowed together in the shallow lake of Ngami while the wings of the water fowl darkened the sky above them, and they had -stripped the bark from the forests along Linyati and Chobe, and crossed those wide rivers, walking on the bottom with just the tips of their trunks raised above the surface to give them breath.

Over the seasons they had swung in a great circle through the wild land that lay north of the Zambezi, feasting on the fruits of different forests scattered over a thousand miles, timing their arrival as each crop of berries came into full ripening.

They had crossed lakes and rivers, had stayed long in the hot swamps of the Sud where the midday heat, reaching 120, soothed the aches in the old bull's bones. But then the wanderlust had driven them on to complete the circle of their migration, south again over mountain ranges and across the low alluvial plains of the great rivers, following secret trails and ancient passes that their ancestors had forged and which they had first trodden as calves at their mother's flank.

In these last dozen seasons, however, there were men where there had never been men before. There were white-robed Arabs in the north around the lakes, with their long-barrelled jezails. There were big bearded men in the south, dressed in dark rough homespun and hunting from tough shaggy little ponies, while everywhere they met the tiny little bushmen with their wicked poisoned arrows, or the Nguni regiments hunting a thousand strong, driving the game into set positions where the plumed spearmen waited.

With each round of the seasons, the elephant ranges were shrinkin& new terrors and new dangers waited in the ancient ancestral feeding grounds and the old bull was tired and his bones ached and the ivory in his jaws weighed him down. Still he moved on up the slope to the head of the pass with slow determination and dignity, driven on by his instincts, by the need for space about him, by the memory of the taste of the fruits he knew were already ripening in a distant forest on the shores of a far-away lake. We must hurry. " Jan Cheroot's voice roused Zouga, for he had been mesmerized by the sight of the regal old animal, filled with a strange feeling of dejd-vu, as though he had lived this moment before, as though this meeting was part of his destiny. The old bull filled him with awe, with a sense of timelessness and grandeur, so he was reluctant to return to the reality of the moment. The day dies fast, Jan Cheroot insisted, and Zouga glanced over his shoulder to where the sun was setting like a mortally wounded warrior bleeding upon the clouds. Yes, he acknowledged, and then frowned as he realized that Jan Cheroot was stripping off his puttees and breeches, folding them and stuffing them together with his blanket and food bag into a crevice in the rock face beside him. I run faster like this, he answered Zouga's silent enquiry with a twinkling grin.

Zouga followed his example, leaving his own pack and pulling off the webbing belt from which hung knife and compass, stripping down to good running order, but he stopped short of removing his breeches. Jan Cheroot's skinny naked yellow buttocks were totally devoid of dignity and his dangling penis played hide-and-seek from under his shirt tails. There were some conventions that an officer of the Queen must observe, Zouga decided firmly, and one was to keep his breeches on in public.

He followed Jan Cheroot along the narrow ledge, until they stepped off it on to the forested slope and immediately their forward vision was limited to a dozen yards by the lichen-covered tree trunks. From higher up the slope, however, they could hear the crackle and the ripping sound as the bull with the broken tusk fed on the uprooted tree.

Jan Cheroot worked out swiftly across the slope to avoid the askari, to circle around him and come at the lead bull. Twice he paused to check the wind. It held steadily down the slope into their faces and the colourful leaves above their heads quivered and sighed at its passing.

They had gone a hundred yards when the sounds of the feeding bull ceased abruptly; again Jan Cheroot paused and the little group of hunters froze with him, every man instinctively holding his breath as they listened, but there was only the sound of the wind and the singing whine of a cicada in the branches above. He has moved on to join the others, " Jan Cheroot whispered at last.

Zouga was also certain that the bull could not yet have suspected their presence. The wind was steady, he could not have scented them. Zouga knew that the eyesight of the elephant was as weak as his hearing and sense of smell were acute, but they had made no sound.

Yet this was a clear demonstration of the benefits that the three old bulls derived from their association. It was always difficult for the hunter to place each of them accurately, especially in thick forest such as this, and the two askaris seemed always to take station on the lead bull to cover and protect him. To come at him, the hunter must penetrate the screen they threw around him.

Standing now, listening and waiting, Zouga wondered if a genuine affection existed between the three animals, whether they derived the pleasure of companionship from each other, and whether the askaris would mourn or pine when the old bull fell at last with the musket ball in his brain or his heart. Come! Silently Jan Cheroot made the open-handed signal to advance and they went on up the slope, stooping under the low trailing branches, Zouga keeping four paces out on the Hottentot's flank to open his field of vision and fire, concentrating his whole being in his eyes and his ears. Far up the slope there was the snap of a breaking twig and it stopped them dead once more, breathing shallowly with the tension, but the sound fastened all their attention ahead so none of them saw the askari.

The elephant waited with the stillness of granite, his sered bide grey and rough as the lichen-covered tree trunks, the shadows thrown by the low sun barred him and broke up the shape of his great body so he blended into the forest, grey and unearthly as mist, and they tiptoed past him at twenty paces without seeing him.

He let the hunters pass him and get up above the wind and when the acrid stench of carnivorous man was borne thickly down to him through the forest, he took it in his trunk and lifted it to his mouth and sprayed the tainted air over the little olfactory organs under his upper lip, and his smell buds flared open like soft wet pink rose buds and the askari bull squealed.

It was a sound that seemed to bounce against the sky, and ring from the peaks above them, it was an expression of all the hatred and pain, the terrible memories of that acrid min-smell from a hundred other encounters, and the askari bull squealed again and launched his huge body up the slope to destroy the source of that evil odour.

Zouga spun to the piercing din, his shocked eardrums still buzzing with the sound, and the forest shook with the bull's charge. The dense shiny vegetation burst open, like a storm surf running on to rock, and the bull came through.

Zouga was not conscious of his own movements, he was aware only that he was looking at the bull over the open sights of the Sharps rifle, and the blast of shot seemed muted and far off after the ringing squeal that initiated the charge. He saw dust fly from the bull's forehead in a brief little pLff, saw the grey skin ripple like that of a stallion stung by a bee, and he reached back and found the stubby wooden stock of one of the big elephant guns in his hand. Again, there was no awareness of conscious movement, but over the crude vee of the sight the elephant appeared much closer. Zouga seemed to be leaning back to look up at the gigantic head and the long shafts of yellow ivory reached out over him, blotting out the sky. Clearly he could see the bright white porcelain break in one point of the left-hand tusk.

He heard Jan Cheroot beside him, and heard his excited shrieks. Skiet horn! Shoot himV Then the heavy weapon leapt against his own shoulder, driving him back a pace, and he saw the tiny fountain of bright blood squirting out of the elephant's throat like a lovely scarlet flan-dngo feather. He reached back for the next loaded gun, although he knew there would be no time to fire again.

He was surprised that he felt no fear, although he knew he was a dead man. The elephant was on him, his life was forfeit, there could be no question, yet he went on with the motions of living, hefting the new gun, thumbing back the clumsy hammer as he swung the barrel up. The shape of the huge animal above him had altered, it was no longer so close, and he realized with a thrill that the bull was turning, it had been unable to endure the fearful punishment of the heavy-bored guns.

He was turning, passing by them with blood streaming down his head and chest. As he passed, he exposed his neck and flank, and Zouga shot him a hand's span behind the joint of his shoulder on the line of the lungs and the ball slogged into his rib cage.

The bull was going, crashing away up the slope, and with the fourth gun Zouga. hit him high in the back, aiming for the bony knuckles of the spine where they showed through the scabby grey hide of the sloping back and the bull whipped his thick tufted tail at the agony of the strike and disappeared into the forest, gone like a wraith in the failing light of the sunset.

Zouga and Ian Cheroot stared at each other speechlessly, each of them holding a smoking weapon at high port across his chest, and they listened to the run of the bull up the slope ahead of them.

Zouga found his voice first, be turned to his gunbearers. Load! " he hissed at them, for they also were paralysed by the close passage of violent, thundering death, but his command liberated them and they each snatched a handful of black powder from the bag slung at their sides and poured it into the still-hot muzzles of the guns. The lead bull and the other askari will run, lamented Jan Cheroot, himself frantically busy with the ramrod of his Enfield. We can still catch them before the summit, Zouga told him, grabbing the first loaded gun. An elephant goes on a steep uphill at a very measured pace that a good ninner can gain upon, but downhill he goes like a runaway locomotive, nothing can catch him, not even a good horse. We must catch them before the crest, Zouga. repeated, and launched himself at the slope. Weeks of hard going over bad terrain had toughened him, and the driving lust of the hunter was the spur. He flew at the slope.

Awareness of his own lack of experience that had resulted in such poor shootin& made Zouga more fiercely determined to close with the lead bull and vindicate himself. He guessed that as a complete novice he had failed to find the vitals with any of the balls he had fired, he had missed brain and heart and lungs by inches, inflicting pain and mutilation, instead of the quick kill for which the true huntsman strives. He wanted desperately to have another chance to end it cleanly, and he pelted up the slope.

Before he had gone two hundred yards, he had evidence that his shooting had not been as wide as he had at first believed. He checked at a spot where it looked as though someone had thrown a bucket of blood across the stony earth. The blood was a peculiarly bright scarlet, and it frothed with tiny bubbles, lung blood. There was no question, that last ball fired into the bull's back as he went away up the slope must have raked the lungs. It was a killing shot, but a slow killer. The old bull was drowning in his own bright arterial blood, desperately trying to rid himself of it by squirting it out through his trunk as it bubbled up into his throat.

He was dying, but it would take time still, and Zouga raced on after him.

He had not expected the bull to stand again. He expected him to run until he dropped, or until the hunters caught up with him. Zouga knew the folly of attributing human motives and loyalties to wild animals, even so it seemed that the stricken bull had determined to sacrifice himself in order to allow the lead bull and the second askari to escape across the pass at the crest of the mountains.

Up the slope, he was waiting for Zouga, listening for him with those vast grey ears spread wide, his chest with the girth of a Cognac cask of Limousine oak racked and strained to force air into his torn lung.

He charged as soon as he heard the man. His huge ears cocked back and rolled at the tips, trunk curled at his chest, shrilling and squealing, blowing a fine red mist of blood from his trunk, pounding through the forest so the earth trembled with each massive footfall and the branches crackled and broke like a discharge of musketry.

Panting, Zouga stood to meet the charge, ducking his head and weaving for a clean shot through the thick forest. At the last moment the bull broke off the charge, and swerved up the slope again. Each time the hunters began to move forward, he launched another thunderous mock-attack, forcing them to stand to meet him, and then breaking off again.

Minutes passed between each charge, and the hunters were pinned down in the thick forest, fretting with the knowledge that already the lead bull and his surviving protege must have reached the crest and gone away in a rush like an avalanche down the far side.

Zouga was learning two hard lessons: the first, as old Tom Harkness had tried to teach him, was that only a novice or a fool under-guns an elephant. The light ball of the Sharps might be highly effective on American bison, but the African elephant has ten times the body weight and resistance. Standing in the msasa forests, listening to the squealing and crashing of the wounded monster, Zouga. determined never again to use the Ught American rifle on heavy game.

The second lesson he was learning was that if the first ball does not kill, then it seems to numb and anaesthetize heavy game to further punishment. Kill cleanly, or the subsequent shots into heart and lungs seem to be without effect. it was not only anger and provocation which made a wounded animal so dangerous, it was also this shock-induced immortality.

After standing down half a dozen mock charges, Zouga abandoned caution and patience, and he ran forward shouting to meet the next charge. Wh(a there! " he called. "Come on then, old fellow! " This time he got in close, and crashed another ball through the bull's rib cage as he turned away. He had controlled his first wild excitement, and the ball struck precisely at the point of aim. He knew it was a heart shot, but the bull came again squealing, and Zouga fired a last time before the angry trumpeting and shrilling turned to a long sad bellow, that echoed off the peaks and rang out into the blue void of sky beyond the cliffs.

They heard him go down, the impact of the heavy body against the earth made it shiver under their feet.

Cautiously, the little group of hunters went forward through the forest and they found him kneeling, his forelegs folded neatly under his chest, his long, yellow ivories propping up the dusty wrinkled old head, still facing down the slope as though defiant even in death.

Leave him, shouted Jan Cheroot. "Follow the others.

And they ran on past him.

Night caught them before they reached the crest of the slope, the sudden impenetrably black night of central Africa, so they lost the spoor and missed the pass. We will have to let them go, " Jan Cheroot lamented in the darkness, his yellow face a pale blob at Zouga's shoulder. Yes, Zouga agreed. "This time we must let them go."

But somehow he knew there would be another time. The feeling that the old bull was part of his destiny was still strongly with Zouga. Yes, there would be another time, of that he was certain.

That night for the first time Zouga ate the hunter's greatest delicacy: slices of elephant heart threaded on to a green stick with cubes of white fat cut out from the chest cavity, salted and peppered, and roasted over the slow coals of the camp fire, eaten with cold cakes of stone-ground com and washed down with a mug of tea, steaming hot, bitter, strong and unsweetened. He could not remember a finer meal, and afterwards Zouga lay down on the hard earth, covered by a single blanket and protected from the chill of the wind by the huge carcass of the old bull, and slept as though he also had been struck down, without dreams, without rolling over even once in his sleep.

In the morning, by the time they had chopped out one of the tusks and laid it under the rnsasa trees, they could already hear the singing of the porters as the main body of the caravan filed along the narrow ledge, rounding the shoulder of the mountain and then came up on to the slope.

Robyn was a hundred paces ahead of the standardbearer, and when she reached the carcass of the bull she stopped.

'We heard the gunfire last evening, she said. He's a fine old bull, Zouga told her, indicating the freshly chopped tusk. it was the unbroken right-hand ivory, taller than Zouga, but a third of its length had been buried in the skull. This portion was smooth, unblemished white, whereas the rest of it was stained by vegetable juices. it will weigh almost a hundred pounds, he went on, touching the tusks with the toe of his boot. "Yes, he's a fine old bull. "Not any more, he isn't, Robyn told him quietly, watching Jan Cheroot and the gunbearers hacking away at the enormous mutilated head. Little chips of white bone flew in the early sunlight, as they whittled away the heavy skull to free the second tusk. Robyn watched the butchery for a few seconds only before going on up the slope towards the crest.

Zouga was irritated and angry with her, for she had detracted from his own vaulting pleasure in his first elephant hunt.

So, an hour later when he heard Robyn calling to him from higher up the slope, he ignored her cries.

However, she was persistent, as always, and at last with an exclamation of exasperation, he followed her up through the forest. She came running down to meet him, with the unrestrained infectious joy of a child shining on her face. Oh Zouga. " She seized his hand, and began to drag him impetuously up the slope. "Come and see, you must come and see."

The old elephant road crossed the saddle, through a deep pass, guarded on each hand by grey buttresses of rough grey rock and as they took the last few paces over the highest point a new and beautiful world opened below and ahead of them. Zouga gasped involuntarily, for he had not anticipated anything like this.

Low foothills fell away from beneath their feet, regular as the swells of the ocean, covered with stately trees whose trunks were tall and grey as the oaks of Windsor Park, and then beyond the hills the undulating lightly forested grasslands, golden as fields of ripe wheat, spread to a tall blue horizon. There were streams of clear water meandering through the glades of pale grass, where herds of wild game drank or lazed upon the banks.

There were buffalo everywhere Zouga looked, black bovine shapes, standing shoulder to shoulder in dark masses under the umbrella branches of the acacia trees.

Closer at hand a troop of sable antelope, that loveliest of all antelope, jet black above but with snowy bellies, their long symmetrical curve of horn. extended backwards almost to touch the haunches, followed the herd bull in long file to the water, pausing unafraid to stare curiously at the interlopers, forming a frieze of stately, almost Grecian, design.

The endless stretch of land was dotted with hills like ruined natural castles of stone, seeming to have been built in past aeons by giants and ogres from mammoth blocks of stone, and tumbled now in fantastic shapes, some with fairy turrets and spires, others again flat topped, geometrically laid out as though by a meticulous architect with plumb-line and theodolite.

This lovely scene was lit by a peculiar pearly luminosity of the morning light, so that even the furthest hills, probably more than a hundred miles distant, were sharply silhouetted through the sweet clear air. It's beautiful, Robyn murmured, still. holding Zouga's hand. The kingdom of Monomatapa, Zouga answered her, his own voice husky with emotion. No, " Robyn answered softly. "There is no sign of man here, this is the new Eden."

Zouga was silent, letting his eyes rove across the scene, searching for, but not finding, any evidence of man. it was a land untouched, unspoiled. A new land, there for the taking! " he said, still holding Robyn's hand. They were as close, in that moment, as they had ever been or would ever be again, and the land awaited them, wide, limitless, empty and beautiful.

At last, reluctantly, he left Robyn at the head of the pass and went back through the grey rock portals to bring on the caravan. He found the second tusk removed, and both of them bound up with bark rope on to the carryingpoles of newly cut rnsasa wood, but the porters had laid aside their packs and were indulging in an orgy of fresh meat, and that most sought-after of African spoils, thick white globs of elephant fat.

They had cut a trapdoor into the belly of the elephant carcass, and pulled out the entrails, and these glistened in the early sunlight, huge rubbery tubes of purple and yellow guts, already swelling and ballooning with the trapped gases they contained.

Half a dozen porters, stripped mother-naked, had crawled into the interior of the elephant's carcass, disappearing completely from view and wading almost waist-deep in the clotting, congealing bath of trapped blood. They crawled out, painted with it from head to foot, eyes and grinning teeth startlingly white in the grisly shining wet red visages, their arms filled with tidbits of liver and fat and spleen.

These delicacies were hacked into pieces with the blade of an assegai and thrown on the glowing coals of one of half a dozen fires, then snatched up again, black on the outside and more than half raw within to be wolfed down with every appearance of ecstatic pleasure.

There would be no moving them until they were satiated, Zouga realized.

So he left instructions to Jan Cheroot, himself already potbellied with the meat he had gorged, to follow as soon as the carcass had been either eaten or packed up for carrying, and taking the Sharps rifle returned back up the slope to where he had left Robyn.

He called for her, fruitlessly, for almost half an hour, and was really becoming concerned for her safety when her reply echoed off the cliffs, and looking upwards he saw her standing on a ledge a hundred feet above him, waving him to come up to her.

Zouga climbed up swiftly to where she stood on the ledge, and checked the rebuke that he had ready for her when he saw her expression. She was pale, a sickly greyish colour, under the gilding of the sun, and her eyes were reddened and still swimming with tears. What is it, Sissy? " he asked with quick concern, but she seemed unable to reply, the words choking in her throat so she had to swallow thickly, and motion him to follow her.

The ledge on which they stood was narrow, but level - and was cut back under the cliff, forming a low long cavern. The cavern had been used before by other men, for the rocky roof was blackened with the sooty smoke of countless cooking-fires, and the back wall was decorated with the lyrically childlike paintings of the little yellow bushmen who over the centuries must have used this as a regular camp during their endless wanderings.

The paintings lacked both perspective and accurate form, but they captured the essential nature of all they recorded, from the graceful sweep of, the giraffe's neck, to the bulky shoulders of the Cape buffalo with the mournful drooping horns framing the lifted nose.

The bushman artist saw himself and his tribe as frail, sticklike figures, with drawn bows, dancing and prancing about the quarry, and again, out of all proportion to the rest of the paintin& each little man sported a massively erect penis. Even in the heat of the chase, such was the universal conceit of all mate kind, Zouga thought.

Zouga was enchanted by the frozen cavalcade of man and beast which covered the walls of the cave, and he had already determined to camp here so that he could have more time to study and record this treasure house of primitive art, when Robyn was calling him again.

He followed her along the ledge until they reached the point where it ended abruptly, forming a balcony over the dreaming land ahead of them. Zouga's attention was torn between this fresh vista of forest and glade and the cave art at his shoulder, but Robyn summoned him again impatiently.

There were strata of multi-coloured rock running horizontally through the rock face of the cliff. The different layers of rock varied in hardness, and the erosion of a softer layer had formed the long low cavern beyond the ledge.

This layer of rock was a soapy green colour, where it had not been painted over by the bushmen artists or discoloured with the smoke of their fires, and here at the point overlooking the empire of Monomatapa someone had used a metal tool to scrape a smooth square plaque into the green soapstone. The freshly cut surface stood out rawly as though it had been done that very day, but the words gave the lie to that impression.

There was a simple Christian cross chiselled deeply into the stone, and below it the name and the date, the lettering very carefully cut and designed by an expert penman. FULLER MORRIS BALLANTYNEZouga exclaimed aloud at seeing his father's name, so clearly rendered by his father's own hand.

Despite the apparent freshness of the cut, the date was seven years previously, 2, 0th July, i853. After that single exclamation they were both speechless, staring at the inscription, each of them gripped by differing emotion, Robyn by a resurgence of filial love and duty, by a crushing desire to be with her father again after so many years, the vast empty place in her life aching more excruciatingly at the prospect of being soon filled. Her eyes refilled with tears, and they broke from her eyelids and ran down her cheeks. Please, God, she prayed silently, "lead me to my father. Dear God, grant me that I am not too late."

Zouga's emotions were as strong, but different. He felt a corroding resentment that any other man, father or not, should have preceded him through these rocky gates into the kingdom of Monomatapa. This was his land, and he did not want to share it with another. Especially, he did not want to share it with that monster of cruelty and conceit that was his father.

He stared coldly at the inscription that followed the name and date, but inwardly he seethed with anger and resentment. In God's Holy name. " The words were carved below his father's name.

It was typical of Fuller Ballantyne that he should carve his own name here with cross and credentials as the Lord's ambassador, as he had on trees and rocks at a hundred other places across the continent which he regarded as a personal gift from his God. You were right, Zouga dear.

You are leading us to him, as you promised. I should never have doubted you."

If he had been alone Zouga. realized that he might have defaced that inscription, scraped the rock bare with his hunting knife, but as he had the thought, he realized how futile it would be, for such an action would not wipe out the ghostly presence of the man himself.

Zouga turned away from the rock wall and its taunting plaque. He stared out over the new land, but somehow his heady pleasure in it had been dimmed by the knowledge that another man had passed this way ahead of him.

He sat down with his feet dangling over the sheer drop to wait for Robyn to tire of staring at her father's name.

However, the caravan of porters came before she did that. Zouga heard the singing from the forested slope behind the pass long before the head of the line crossed the saddle. The porters had voluntarily doubled their own loads, and they struggled up the slope under the enormous weight of elephant meat and fat and marrow bones, bound up in baskets of green rnsasa leaves and bark rope.

if Zouga had asked them to carry that weight of trade cloth or beads, or even gunpowder, he would have had an immediate mutiny to deal with, he thought grimly, but at least they were carrying the tusks. He could see them near the head of the line. Each tusk slung on a long pole, a man at either end, but even here they had hung extra baskets of meat on the same pole as the tusk.

The total weight must have been well over three hundred pounds, and they struggled up the slope uncomplainingly, even cheerfully.

Slowly, the caravan wound out of the forest and entered the gut of the pass, beginning to move directly under where Zouga sat, the figures of the porters and of Jan Cheroot's Hottentot musketeers foreshortened by the angle. Zouga rose to his feet, he wanted to order Jan Cheroot to camp just beyond the point where the pass debauched on to the foothills. From where Zouga stood, he could see a patch of green grass against the foot of the cliffs far below him, and a pair of pale grey herons hunting flogs in this verdant marshy area. There was certainly a spring, and with the meat upon which they had gorged, his servants would be burning with thirst by nightfall.

The spring would be a good place to camp, and it would allow him the following morning to copy and record the Bushman paintings in the cavern. He cupped his hands to his mouth to hail Jan Cheroot, when a crash like the broadside from a ship-of-the-line filled the pass with thunder that echoed and bounced back and forth between the cliffs.

For many seconds Zouga could not understand what was happening for the thunderous bursts of sound were repeated, almost drowning the thin screams of his porters. They were throwing down their burdens and scattering like a flight of doves under the stoop of the falcon.

Then another movement caught his attention, a large round shape went bounding down the scree slope below the cliffs, charging straight at his panic-stricken caravan.

For a moment Zouga believed it was some sort of living predator that was attacking his servants, and, running along the lip of the ledge, he unslung the Sharps rifle, ready to fire down into the pass as soon as he could get a sight on one of the dark bounding shapes.

Then he realized that at each leap the thing struck sparks and fine grey smoke from the scree slope, and he could smell the faint smell, like burnt salt-petre that the sparks left in the air. He realized abruptly that they were giant rounded boulders rolling down upon his caravan, not one but a dozen or more, each weighing many tons, an onslaught which seemed to spring from the very air itself, and he looked wildly about for its source, goaded by the screams of his men and the sight of the rolling boulders smashing open packs of his precious irreplaceable provisions and scattering them across the rocky ground of the saddle.

Far below him, he heard the thudding report of an Enfield rifle, and glancing back he saw the tiny figure of Jan Cheroot aiming almost directly upwards at the sky, and following the direction of his rifle Zouga saw movement, just a flicker of movement on the edge of the cliff, outlined against the blue soaring vault of the heavens.

The deluge of huge boulders was coming from the very top of the cliff, and as Zouga stared, another and then another came raining down into the pass. Zouga squinted his eyes, head thrown back, as he studied the cliff rim. There was some animal up there. Zouga did not at first think of man, for he had already convinced himself that this new land was devoid of human presence.

He felt an almost superstitious chill of horror that some pack of giant apes was on top of the cliff, bombarding his men with huge rocks, then he shook himself free of the feeling, and looked quickly for some way to get higher up his side of the pass, to reach a position from where he could fire across the rocky gateway at the attackers on the opposite cliff and give some protection to his servants.

Almost immediately he discovered another ledge rising at a steep angle from the one on which he stood.

Only a soldier's eye would have picked it out. The tiny feet of the little rock hyrax that used it had put a light sheen on the rock and it was this that had drawn Zouga's attention to the narrow pathway. Stay here! he shouted at Robyn, but she stepped in front of him. Zouga, what are you going to do? " she demanded, and then before he could answer. "Those are men up there!

You cannot fire upon them! " Her cheeks were still smeared with tears, but her pate face was set and determined.

Get out of the way, he snapped at her. Zouga, it will be murder.

"That's what they are trying to do to my men. "We must bargain with them. " Robyn caught at his arm as he pushed past her, but he shook her off and ran to the higher ledge. It will be murder! Robyn's cry followed him, and as he climbed, Zouga was reminded of the words of old Tom Harkness. The accusation that his father would not stop at killing anybody who stood in his way. This was what he had meant, Zouga. was suddenly sure of it. He wondered if his father had fought his way through this pass, just as Zouga. himself was about to do. if the champion of the Almighty can do it, then what a fine example to follow, " he muttered to himself as he went up the steep ledge.

Below him the Enfield rifle thudded again, the sound muted by distance, almost lost in the roar of a new avalanche of murderous rock. Jan Cheroot could only hope to discourage his attackers with rifle fire from that angle; only if one of them actually leaned far out over the edge of the cliff would he be vulnerable to fire from the gut of the pass.

Zouga climbed in cold anger, stepping unhesitatingly over dangerous spots in the narrow ledge where small pieces of rock crumbled under his boots and went rattling down into the pass hundreds of feet below.

Abruptly he came out on to a broader ledge, formed by the strata of rock, which rose at a gentler pitch so that now Zouga could run along it without fear of losing his footing. He climbed swiftly, it was less than ten minutes since that first boulder had come crashing down into the pass; the attackers were continuing the bombardment, the hills reverberated with the crash and rumble of flying boulders.

Ahead of Zouga. on the ledge, a pair of tiny grey klipspringer went bouncing up over broken rock, seeming to flit on the tips of their elongated hooves, terrified by the men and the rumble of falling rock. They reached the corner of the ledge and one after another they made what seemed suicidal leaps out into space, phenomenal leaps that carried them forty feet to the next sheer wall of rock, rock which seemed devoid of foothold, but they clung to it like flies and scrambled swiftly up out of sight over the top of the cliff.

Zouga envied them that birdlike agility as he toiled up the steep incline, sweat soaking his shirt and streaming stingingly into his eyes. He could not stop to rest, for far below him a thin wailing scream of agony told him that at least one of the flying boulders had struck down a porter.

He turned another steep corner in the goat track, scrambled over the rim, and was suddenly out upon the flat table-like summit, dotted with little clumps of broom-bush and sparse stiff yellow grass, like hedgehog quills.

Zouga threw himself down on the edge of the plateau, heaving and straining for breath and he struck the sweat from his eyes, peering across the deep void of the pass at the cliffs on the opposite side. He found himself on a level with the heights opposite. It was three or four hundred yards across, easy range for the Sharps, though one of the smooth-bore four-to-the-pounds would have been hopelessly inaccurate at that distance.

While he primed the rifle, he studied the ground opposite him and saw almost immediately why the attackers had chosen that side of the pass in preference to the one on which Zouga lay.

They were on a flat-topped pinnacle of sheer rock, with no visible access to it from any direction, what path there was would be secret and highly defensible. The attackers had an inexhaustible supply of missiles for the rounded boulders were scattered everywhere upon the heights, varying in size from that of a man's head to that of an elephant carcass, and as Zouga watched them they were using heavy raw timber baulks to lever one of these over the edge of the cliff.

Zouga's hands were shaking and he fought to bring them under control, but the Sharps rifle wavered as he tried to take a sight on the little group of men across the open void of space. There were not more than two dozen of them, all of them naked except for a brief kilt of leather, their dark skins polished with a sheen of sweat in the sunlight.

He was regaining his breath swiftly, and now he wriggled forward on his belly and propped the stock of the Sharps rifle on a rock in front of him. it was a dead rest, and as he levelled his gaze over the open sights the group of men succeeded in working the huge boulder over the edge of the cliff.

It went with a brief grating that carried clearly to Zouga, and then it fell with the soft rushing of eagle's wings until it struck again in the pass two hundred feet below, and once again the hills rang and rumbled to the force and weight of it.

The little group of black men had drawn back from the edge of the cliff, resting a moment before they selected another missile. Only one of them wore a headdress.

It looked like a cap made from the mane of a male lion, long tawny hair tipped with black. It made the man taller than his companions, and he seemed to be giving orders to them, gesticulating and pushing those nearest to him. You'll do, my beauty" Zouga whispered. He had regained his breath now, and the sweat was cooling his back and his neck. He pushed up the leaf of his backsight to its 300-yard adjustment and then settled down on his elbows to peer over it. The rifle was rock-steady on its rest, while he took a fine bead on the man with the lion headdress.

He touched off the shot, and while the crack of it still stung his eardrums he saw a tiny chip of rock fly from the lip of the cliff across the valley. "Low, but very nicely on line, he told himself, opened the breech of the Sharps and forced the paper cartridge into it.

The shot had startled the little group of men. They peered about them, mystified, not certain of what it was or from where it had come. The tall figure in the headdress moved cautiously forward to the edge of the cliff and stooped to examine the fresh chip on the ironstone rim, touching it with one finger.

Zouga set the cap, and thumbed back the hammer.

He gave it a full bead, and aimed at the waving yellow headdress, set the hair-trigger and then with a lover's touch stroked the curved trigger.

The bullet told loudly, a meaty slap like a housewife beating a carpet, and the man in the lion headdress spun round sharply, his arms jerking out wide, his legs shuffling in a grotesque little dance, they collapsed under him and he flopped on the very edge of the cliff like a harpooned catfish.

His companions stood frozen, making no effort to help him as he slid towards the edge of the cliff, and a final spasmodic jerk of his legs tumbled him into the void.

He fell for a long time, his outspread limbs spinning like the spokes of a wagon wheel, and there was another meaty thump as he landed at last on the broken scree slope far below.

Zouga fired again, into the tight knot of men, not attempting to single out one of them, and he hit two of them with a single bullet, for even at that range the Sharps could drive the hardened lead ball through a man's body with hardly any loss of velocity, and the group was bunched up.

As the ball whacked into them, they split into separate racing figures, their yells of fright carrying clearly to where Zouga lay, and before he could fire again, they had disappeared into a narrow rocky gulley with the miraculous speed of a troop of little furry hyrax.

The silence was sudden and startling after the uproar of falling boulders and heavy gun fire and it lasted for many minutes, broken at last by the shrill voice of Jan Cheroot calling up from the deep gut of the pass. Zouga stood up, and hanging on to the branch of a monkey orange tree, leaned out over the edge of the cliff. Take the caravan through, Sergeant. " He pitched his voice to carry, and the echoes mocked him with his own words. "Sergeant, Sergeant, Sergeant-'I will cover you, cover you, cover you, I taunted the echoes.

Zouga called the little Matabele maiden from the fireside where she knelt beside Robyn, helping her treat one of the porters who had been struck by a flying splinter of rock during the attack, and whose shoulder had been laid open to the bone. Juba, he told her, "I want you to come with me."

And the girl glanced back at Robyn, hesitating to obey him.

Zouga's irritation flared again. He and Robyn had not spoken again since Zouga. had broken up the attack with rifle fire, and Ian Cheroot had reassembled the caravan and led it out of the deadly trap of the gorge to where it was camped now in the foothills beyond the pass. Come, " Zouga repeated, and the child dropped her eyes at his tone and followed him submissively as he started back towards the pass.

Zouga moved back cautiously, pausing every fifty paces or so to survey the clifftops suspiciously, although, he was fairly certain that there would be no renewal of the boulder rolling. However, he kept in close under the sheer rock face so that any boulder would fall beyond them.

The going was difficult over the loose scree, and through the thick scrub that covered it. It took them nearly an hour to get back to the spot where Zouga had marked the fall of the body of the warrior in the lion headdress, and then they had to search for nearly as long again before they found the corpse.

He had fallen into a deep crevice between two rocks, and he lay at the bottom of it on his back. The body appeared unmarked except for the small black bullet hole low on the left side of his naked chest.

The eyes were still wide open, but he had lost his headdress.

After a moment Zouga turned to Juba enquiringly. Who is he? Of what tribe is he? " he asked, and the child showed no concern at the presence of violent death. She had seen very much worse in her short life. Mashona! " she told Zouga scornfully. Juba was Matabele of Zanzi blood, and there was no more noble breeding outside the kraal of King Mzilikazi himself. She felt nothing but contempt for all the other tribes of Africa, especially for these people. Mashona! " she repeated. "Eaters of dirt."

It was the ultimate term of denigration that the Matabele applied to all the tribes that they have taken into slavery, or driven to the very point of extinction. It is always the way these baboons fight. " She indicated the dead man with a toss of her pretty head. "They stand on the hilltops and throw down stones."

Her dark eyes sparkled. "It becomes more difficult each year for our young men to blood their spears, and until they do so the King will not give them leave to marry."

She broke off, and Zouga smiled ironically. The child'sresentment was clearly not so much at the Mashona's alleged lack of sportsmanship, but at the havoc that this wrought on the Matabele marriage markets.

Zouga scrambled down into the rocky crevice, and stooped over the dead warrior. Despite Juba's contempt, the man was well formed, with straight strong limbs, and handsome intelligent features. For the first time Zouga felt a twinge of regret at having fired the ball which had caused that innocuous-looking little wound.

It was a good thing that the warrior lay upon his back for the exit would have been ghastly. A soldier should never examine the bodies of the men he kills in the heat of battle. Zouga had made that discovery long ago in India, for afterwards there was always this moment of guilt and remorse. He shrugged it away, for he had not come either to gloat over the kill or to torture himself with it, but to merely identify his enemy.

Why had these warriors attacked the caravan without warning, he wondered? Were they the border guards of the fabled Monomatapa? It seemed the most likely explanation, though, of course, they could be ordinary bandits, like the dacoits of India wit i W. iom he had made bitter acquaintance.

Zouga stared moodily down at the corpse. Who had he been? And how much danger did his tribe still present to Zouga's caravan? But there was nothing more to learn and Zouga began to straighten up again when he noticed the necklace around the corpse's throat. He knelt again to examine it.

It was made of cheap trade beads on a thong of gut, a gaudy little trifle except for the pendant that had hung on to his chest but had slipped back under the armpit, half concealed so that Zouga noticed it now for the first time.

He pulled it free, examined it a moment and then slipped the entire necklace off over the man's head. When he put his hand around the back of the dead man's head to lift it he felt the pieces of skull grate together deep in his head like shards of broken pottery under his fingers.

He lowered the shattered head and stood up with the necklace twined about his fingers, examining the pendant.

It had been carved from ivory that had yellowed with age, and tiny black cracks formed a fine web across its polished surfaces. Zouga held it to catch the sunlight, and turned it between his fingers to study it from every angle.

He had seen another figurine that was almost a twin to this one, a golden figurine that was now in a bank vault in Cape Town where he had deposited it before they had sailed on board the gunboat Black joke.

This was the same stylized bird-like shape, perched on a round plinth. The plinth was decorated with the same triangular shark's-teeth pattern, and the bird had the same swelling chest and short, sharply pointed wings folded across its back. It could have been a pigeon or a dove, except for one detail. The beak was the curved and hooked weapon of a raptor.

It was a falcon, be knew it beyond any doubt, and it was certain that the heraldic bird had some deep significance. The golden necklace that Tom Harkness had left him must have belonged to a king or a queen or a high priest. The choice of material, gold, was an indication of that. Now here was the same shape, worn by a man who seemed to be a chieftain, and once again the shape was faithfully copied in a precious material, ivory.

The falcon of Monomatapa, Zouga wondered, studying the ancient pendant, ancient it must be, for the ivory had acquired a deep patina and lustre.

Zouga looked up at the little Matabele girl, standing almost naked above him, and watching him with interest.

Do you see this? " he asked. It is a bird. "Have you seen it before?

" Juba shook her head, and her fat little breasts joggled at the movement. It is a Mashona thing, " and she shrugged. What would a daughter of the sons of Senzangakhona and Chaka want with such a nonsense?

On an impulse Zouga lifted the necklace and dropped it over his own head, letting the ivory falcon fall inside the vee of his flannel shirt, where it nested against the darkly springing curls of his body hair. Come! " he told Juba.

"There is nothing more -for us here, and he led the way back towards the camp beyond the pass.

The land into which the old bull had led them by the secret road through the pass was an elephant kingdom.

Perhaps the pressure of the hunters moving up from the far southern tip of the continent had driven them into this unpeopled world. The herds were everywhere. Each day Zouga and Jan Cheroot hunting far ahead of the main caravan came up with the huge grey- pachyderms, and they shot them down.

They shot and killed forty-eight elephant the first month and almost sixty the second, and Zouga meticulously recorded each kill in his journal, the circumstances of the hunt, the weight of each tusk, and the exact location of the cache in which they buried them.

His small band of porters could not carry even a small part of such a mass of ivory, and the distance and direction which they must still travel was uncertain. Zouga buried his treasure, always near a readily recognizable landmark, a distinctive tree, or an unusual rock, a hilltop or a confluence of rivers, to enable him to find it again.

He would return one day for it, and when he did, it would have dried off its excess moisture and be easier for the porters to carry.

In the meantime, he spent all his daylight hours in pursuit of the quarry, walking and running great distances until his body was hard and fit as that of a highly trained athlete, and his arms and face a deep mahogany brown, even his full beard and mustache gilded to shades of gold by the bright sunlight.

Every day he learned from Jan Cheroot the tricks of bush-lore, until he could run a difficult spoor over rocky ground without a check. He learned to anticipate the turns and the twists that the driven herds made to get below the wind and take his scent. He learned to anticipate the pattern of their movements so that by cutting across the circuitous spoor he could save many hours of dogged pursuit. He learned to judge the sex and size and age and ivory of a beast by the mark of its rounded pads in the earth.

He found that if the herd was allowed to settle into that swinging gait between a trot and a canter, then they could keep it -up for a day and a night without pause whereas if they were taken in the full heat of noon, he could run them hard for the first five miles, winding them, bringing the tiny calves to a standstill so the cows stopped with them, flapping their huge ears to fan themselves, thrusting their trunk down their own throat to suck the water out of their belly and spray it over their head and neck.

He learned to find the heart and the brain, the lungs and the spine hidden in that amorphous mountain of grey hide and flesh. He learned to break the shoulder when the beast stood broadside, dropping him as though he had been struck by lightning, or to take the hip-shot as he ran choking in the dust cloud behind the herd, shattering the hip joint and pinning the beast for an unhurried coup-de-grice.

He hunted the herds on the hilltops where they had climbed to catch the soothing evening breeze. At dawn he hunted in the thick forests and the open glades, and at noon he hunted them in the old overgrown gardens of a vanished people. For the land that he had first believed devoid of human presence was not, and had never been so, for unnumbered thousands of years.

Beyond the abandoned gardens where once man had planted his crops, but where now the elephant herds had returned to reclaim their heritage, Zouga found the remains of huge native cities, the long deserted keystones of a once-flourishing civilization, though all that remained were the circular outlines of the thatch-anddaub huts on the bare earth, the blackened hearth stones, and the charred fence poles of the cattle enclosures which must once have penned great herds. judging by the height of the secondary growth in the ancient gardens, no man had farmed here for many decades.

It seemed strange to find these great grey herds of elephant ranging slowly through the ruined towns and fields. Zouga was reminded of a line from that strange exotic poetry that had been published in London the previous year, and which he had read just before sailing.

They say the Lion and the Lizard keep The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep: And Bahrain, that great Hunter, the Wild Ass Stamps o'er his Head, and he ties fast asleep.

Zouga scratched amongst foundations of the huts and found the deep ash, which must once have been the wooden walls and thatched roofs. In one ancient village Zouga counted a thousand such dwellings, before giving up the count. A numerous people, but where had they gone?

He found a partial answer in an ancient battlefield on the open ground beyond the thousand huts. The bones were white as daisies in the sunlight bleached and dried out, most of them half buried in the rich red soil or covered by the dense fields of waving fluffy-topped grass.

The human remains covered an area of many acres and they lay in clumps and chains like newly-cut wheat awaiting the reavers. Nearly every one of the skulls had been crushed in as if by a fierce blow with a club or mace.

Zouga realized that it was not so much a battlefield as a killing ground, for such slaughter could not be called warfare. if this toll had been repeated at each of the ruined towns he had stumbled upon, then the final total of the dead must have been in the tens or even hundreds of thousands. It was small wonder that what human presence remained was in tiny scattered groups, like the handful of warriors that had tried to prevent them crossing the pass of the elephant road. There were others.

Occasionally, Zouga spied the smoke from a cooking fire rising from the highest point of one of the strangelyshaped rock hillocks that dotted the land in all directions. If these were the survivors of the vanished civilization, then they still lived in terror of the fate that had overtaken their forbears.

When Zouga and his hunting party approached any of these tiny elevated settlements, they found the crests were fortified with built up walls of rock, and they were greeted with a hail of boulders rolled down the slope upon them, that forced them to retreat hurriedly. Often there were small cultivated gardens on the level ground below the fortified hill tops.

In the gardens grew millet, ropoko and big sweet yams, but most important for Zouga, dark green native tobacco.

The soil was rich, the ropoko grew twice the height of a man and the corn sprays were loaded with red grain.

The tobacco leaves were thick-stern med, the size of an elephant's ear. Zouga rolled the tip leaves into powerful cigars that had a rich distinction of taste and as he smoked them, he pondered bow the plant had reached this distant land from its far origins. There must once have been an avenue of trade between these people and the coast. The trade beads on the necklace he had taken from the body at the pass, and now these exotic plants proved that, as did the tamarind trees, native of India, which grew amongst the ruins of the ancient villages.

Zouga wondered what a colony of British settlers with their industry and sophisticated agricultural technique, plough and crop rotation, seed selection and fertilization, might make of this lush rich soil, as he moved on slowly through the sparsely populated, well-timbered land that abounded with game and game birds, and was fed by strong clear streams of water.

Whenever he returned to the main body of the caravan, he made his meticulous observations of the sun and worked with chronometer and almanac to compute his exact positions, to add them, and his own succinct descriptions, to the map that old Tom Harkness had bequeathed him. The map increased in value, as new rivers were marked in, new boundaries set to the flybelts and the fly-corridors" extended, as Zouga's observations of the terrain, of soil and vegetation types began to cover the blank portions of the old parchment.

If he was not immersed in his map, then he worked as long as the light was good enough on his journal and the manuscript which was an adjunct to it, and while he did so, Jan Cheroot and the porters brought in the latest harvest of ivory, only just beginning to stink, and buried it.

Totalling the harvest from the lists in his journal, Zouga found that he had over twelve thousand pounds of tusks cached along his route. They were worth six shillings a pound in London, nearly four thousand pounds sterling. The trick was to get it to London. Zouga grinned to himself as he completed the calculation, a dozen wagons, or five hundred porters, and two thousand miles to carry it, that was all it required.

At each river-crossing Zouga took the flat black iron pan, which doubled as laundry tub and cooking pot, and for miles in each direction along the river bed he worked the gravel. He would fill the pan from a likely spot under the bank in the bend of the river, and then set the contents swirling awash, dipping and turning the pan, spilling a little of the lighter gravel at each turn, refilling with water and spinning it again until at last he was left with a smear of the finest and heaviest material lying around the bottom of the pan in a "tail'. Always the tail was dark and uninteresting, without the golden sparkle for which he longed so ardently.

When he detailed all these activities in his journal, only one thing gave Zouga a pause, and that was what to call this new and beautiful land. So far there was no evidence at all that it was the empire of Monornatapa, or even that Monomatapa existed. The timid, scattered and demoralized people he had so far encountered were certainly not the warriors of a powerful emperor. One other consideration decided him not to use that name.

If he did so, it was tacit acknowledgement that the land had already been claimed, and each day that he travelled through the empty wilderness the dreams of himself claiming it for a queen and a nation seemed less farfetched. Zouga began to use the name "Zambezia', the land below the Zambezi river, and that was how he wrote it in his journal and in the thick bundle of pages of his manuscript.

With all this work to impede progress, the pace of the caravan was leisurely, or, as Robyn told Zouga furiously, You would make a snail look like a Derby-winner. " For although Zouga might cover two hundred miles in the sweeping circular patterns of the hunt, the caravan camped and waited for his return, and then waited another four or five days as Jan Cheroot and the porters ferried in the loads of wet ivory. For all you know, Morris Zouga, your own father might be dying out there somewhere for want of a handful of medicine, while you. . . "If he has survived eight years already, the old devil is unlikely to turn up his toes for another few days."

Zouga's light tone covered the irritation he felt. Since he had killed the Mashona at the pass on the elephant road, the feeling between brother and sister had been strained to the point where each of them found it difficult to maintain a civil tone of voice on the few occasions when they spoke together.

Zouga's long and quent a senses from the main body were not entirely on account of his dedication to the chase and exploration of the surrounding countryside. He found it less wearying on the nerves to be away from his sister. That ecstatic mood when they had stood like two children on Christmas morning, hand in hand, upon the heights of the escarpment, was months in the past.

Brooding beside his solitary camp fire, with the hyena giggling and shrieking over the freshly killed elephant carcasses in the nearby forest, Zouga thought how it was really a miracle that two such definite personalities as his and Robyn's whose objects were so widely divergent, should have come this far without serious disagreement.

It had been too good to last indefinitely, and now he wondered how it might end. He should have followed his instincts and sent Robyn back to Tete and Cape Town when he had the excuse to do so, for the collision course on which they were so clearly set could only end in disaster for the entire expedition.

When he rejoined the main body the following day he would have it out with her, one way or the other. She would have at last to accept that he was the leader of the expedition and as such, his decisions were final. If she did so, then he could make some concession to her wishes, though the hunt for Fuller Ballantyne was very low on Zouga's list of priorities. It would probably be best for all of them, Fuller Ballantyne not excluded, if he had long ago been laid by his faithful bearers in a hero's grave.

The thought gave Zouga a prick of guilt, and he knew he would never write it, not even in the most private pages of his journal, nor would he voice it to his sister.

But the idea persisted, even while he rolled into his blanket, with a small fire at his feet and another at his head to break the thick crunching white frost which would cover the earth and grass at dawn, serenaded by Jan Cheroot's snores which took the basso profunda to the soprano of the hyena packs. Zouga fell asleep at last.

Having made the decision to assert his authority, Zouga rolled out of his blanket in the frosty dawn determined on a forced march that would take them back to where he had left Robyn and the caravan twelve days previously. He reckoned it was forty miles, perhaps a little less, to the main camp site and he set a cruel pace, not even taking the usual noon break, but pushing on remorselessly.

Zouga had deliberately left the main body encamped below a distinctively shaped kopje, whose rocky spires could be clearly seen from many miles around and which Zouga had named "Mount Hampden" in memory of a childhood visit to that castle.

They were still far out when Zouga had his first misgivings. There was no smoke rising from the base of the hills, and there should have been. He had left almost a ton of elephant meat curing on the smoking-racks, and on the outward march he had been able to look back and see the rising column of smoke long after the crests of the hills had disappeared below the tops of the forest trees. There is no smoke! " he told Jan Cheroot, and the little Hottentot nodded. I did not want to be the first to say that. "Can Carnacho have followed us this far? "There are other man-eating animals out here beside the Portuguese, Jan Cheroot said, and cocked his head at an inquisitive bird-like angle as Zouga began swiftly to strip down to light mnning order. Then, still without another word, Jan Cheroot followed his example, and handed his breeches and other traps to the bearers. Follow as fast as you can! " Zouga told them, snatching a spare powder-bag from Matthew and turning away and breaking into a run.

Jan Cheroot fell in at his shoulder and they ran As they had run so often before, at the driving pace which could bring a breeding herd of elephant to a winded standstill within a few miles. All Zouga's feelings of antagonism towards his sister were swept away in the rush of deep concern for her safety. A series of horrific images flashed through his mind, of a sacked camp site, of mutilated bodies lying in the bloody trampled grass, shattered by the balls of the Portuguese muskets, or stabbed to death by the broad-bladed assegais of plumed and kilted warhors.

He found himself praying for her safety, repeating the formulas of his childhood which he had used so seldom since then, and unconsciously he increased the pace, until Jan Cheroot grunted a protest at his shoulder, and then slowly fell back, as Zouga forged powerfully ahead.

He reached the foot of the hill a mile ahead of Jan Cheroot, and turned to face the lowering red orb of the sun as he skirted the rocky base, crested a low rise and stopped there, hunting for breath, his chest swelling and subsiding and the sweat running down into his beard.

He stared down at the shaded dell, under the tall mukusi trees where he had left the caravan and his heart plunged. He felt physically nauseated with horror. The camp site was deserted, the fires were cold black ash and the thatched lean-to shelters had already acquired that dejected air of all deserted habitation. Still fighting for breath, Zouga plunged down the gentle slope into the abandoned camp, and looked about him wildly, for the bodies. There were none, and his first thought was of slavers. They would have taken them all, and he shuddered with horror at the thought of what Robyn must have suffered.

Zouga ran to her hut first. It was totally devoid of any trace of her. He ran to the next hut and the next, all of them were empty, but in the last hut he found a single body. It was curled on the sandy floor of the primitive shelter, and wrapped in a blanket. The blanket was drawn up over the head and wound tightly around the trunk.

Reluctant to discover his sister's horribly mutilated corpse, Zouga knelt beside it. Sweat half-blinded him as be reached out a hand that trembled with dread and exhaustion and gently drew back the fold of a grey blanket that covered the still head.

The corpse came to life with a howl of fright and leapt two feet into the air, gibbering wildly, trying to throw off the blanket and lashing out with feet and fists to defend itself. Hellhound! " Zouga had so christened the laziest of his porters, a skinny fellow with a vast appetite for meat and less enthusiasm for anything that involved physical exertion. "What has happened? Where is Nomusa? " Hellhound, once he had been quieted and had sufficiently recovered from shock, had a brief note to answer his questions. The single scrap of paper torn from Robyn's journal was double-folded and sealed with a splash of red wax, it read: Dear Zouga, I am of the opinion that further delay will seriously prejudice the interests of the sponsors of this expedition.

Accordingly, I have decided to move on at a speed better suited to achieving our objects before the onset of the rainy season.

I leave Hellhound to await your eventual return. Do follow at your own speed.

Your affectionate sister, Robyn.

The note was dated ten days previously, and it was all she had left him. There was not even a pouch of salt or a bag of tea leaves, both of which commodities Zouga had been without for days.

Zouga's numbing shock lasted until Jan Cheroot reached the deserted camp, but by the time his exhausted bearers came, black rage had begun to replace all other emotion. He would have made a night march of it in pursuit of the caravan, but though be kicked their ribs as they lay and cursed them coldly, his bearers were so exhausted that they could not rise from where they had thrown themselves down.

Robyn had great difficulty getting the bearers to break camp and take up their packs. Her first efforts to do so were greeted with amusement and light laughter, for none of them believed she was serious. Even Juba could not understand that Nomusa, a woman, was taking command of the caravan.

When all argument failed, Robyn took the hippo-hide kurbash whip to the little yellow Hottentot Corporal, whom Jan Cheroot had left in command of his musketeers. The Corporal shouted frantic orders to his men from the upper branches of the mukusi where Robyn had him treed.

They were on the march within the hour, but the light laughter had given way to scowls and sulks. They were all convinced that the safari was now doomed, for who had ever heard of a woman, a young woman, worst of all a young white woman, leading into the unknown.

Within half a mile most of the porters were complaining of thorns in the feet or bad blood behind the eyes, afflictions common only to porters reluctant to advance.

Robyn got them to their feet again by firing a shot from the big naval Colt revolver over their heads, it almost sprained her wrist, but proved an amazingly effective cure for both feet and eyes, and finally they made a fair day's march of it, south and west, ten miles, as Robyn reckoned it as she marked her journal that night.

Despite the brave countenance she put on before the porters and musketeers, Robyn had her own doubts. She had watched closely as Zouga plotted a course with the prismatic compass, and she had mastered the technique of sighting a distant hill or other feature and marching upon it, before again sighting ahead on another feature.

It was the only way to maintain a direct line of march in this rolling forested country.

She had studied, whenever she had the opportunity, the Harkness map, and had seen the wisdom of Zouga's choice of direction. He was aiming to traverse this wide unexplored land he had called Zambezia, and eventually to hit the road that their grandfather, Robert Moffat, had pioneered from his mission station at Kurunian to the town of the Matabele king, Mzilikazi, at Thabas Indunas.

However, Zouga's intention had been to cut south of the frontiers of the Matabele kingdom, avoiding the Burnt Land where, according to Tom Harkness, the rapacious border impis of Mzilikazi killed all trave ers.

Neither she nor Zouga could trust to their relationship to Moffat to protect them.

Once they gained the wagon road to Kuruman, they would be back in the known world, and the road would lead them to the series of waterholes that grandfather Moffat had marked. At Kuruman, after the family reunion, the road to Cape Town was long and wearying, but well travelled and in less than a year they could be back in London. The delicate part was to grope the way south of Matabele land, through the untold hazards still ahead and to reach the road.

Robyn did not truly anticipate that she would be called upon to perform this feat of navigation entirely on her own. It could only be a matter of days before Zouga reached Mount Hampden camp and then hurried to catch up with the main body. There would be an interesting clash of wills then. However, at the end of it, she was certain that Zouga would be convinced that their father's whereabouts and safety were more important than the slaughter of animals, whose teeth could probably never be retrieved from their burial mounds.

This was a gesture of defiance only, soon Zouga would be with her once more. In the meantime, however, she had an unpleasantly hollow and lonely sensation beneath her ribs as she strode along in her tight-fitting breeches, the Hottentot standard-bearer carrying the grubbied and tattered Union Jack a few paces behind her, and a sullen line of porters straggling along behind that again.

They camped the second night on the edge of a river that had been reduced to a string of still green pools in the sugary white sand of the river bed. On the steep bank stood a small grove of strangler figs, the smooth pale trunk and branches had crept up like thick and sinuous pythons to smother the host trees. The parasites were now taller and more robust than the rotting remains that supported them had ever been, and the clusters of ripening figs covered their branches. Fat green pigeons came to feed on the fruits, flicked their wings and whistled their shrill cry, unlike that of any other pigeon, that to Robyn sounded like "Oh well, oh very well! " and they cocked their heads to peer down through the green leaves at the men camped below.

The porters had cut the scherms of Thorn branches and lit the cooking fires when they all heard the lion roar.

The sound checked the murmur of voices for only a few seconds, for it was very faint and distant, seeming to come from miles downstream, and it was a sound to which they had all long grown accustomed.

There had hardly been a night since they had crossed the pass on the elephant road that they had not heard the lions, and in the morning found the pug marks, sometimes almost the size of a soup plate, in the soft earth around the camp where the big inquisitive cats had circled them during the night.

However, Robyn had never seen one of them for they are almost entirely nocturnal, and her first tremors of trepidation had long turned to indifference. She felt quite secure behind the scherm of thornbush, and now at the distant muttering rumble she hardly bothered to look up from her journal in which she was exaggerating only slightly the competent manner in which she had directed the day's march. We are making as good a time as we ever did when Z was leading, she wrote smugly, but did not go on to mention the mood of the porters.

The lion roared only once, and when it was not repeated, the sullen talk around the cooking fires was resumed and Robyn bowed her head once more over her journal.

A few hours after the setting of the sun the camp settled for the night, and lying under her hastily thatched shelter with Juba curled on the mattress of freshly cut grass beside her, Robyn listened to the melodious African voices of her porters fade gradually into silence. She sighed once, deeply, and fell instantly asleep, to wake with a confusion of sound and movement all around her.

She knew that it was late by the frostiness of the air, the utter darkness and her own sleep-drugged stupor.

The night rang with the terrified shouts of men and the rush of their feet. Then there was the thudding report of a musk. et, the crash of heavy logs being thrown on the watch fires and then, heart-stoppingly, the screams of Juba close to her head. Nomusa! Nomusa! " Still groggy with sleep, Robyn struggled up. She was not certain what she was dreaming and what was reality. What is it?

"A devil! " shrieked Juba. "Devils have come to kill us all."

Robyn flung off her blanket, and ran out of the shelter bare-footed, dressed -only in her flannel nightgown with ribbons in her hair.

At that moment the new logs blazed up on the watch fire, and she saw naked yellow and black bodies, and terrified faces, whites of rolling eyes and open shouting mouths.

The little Hottentot Corporal, stark naked, pranced beyond the fire, brandishing his musket, and as Robyn ran towards him he fired it blindly into the darkness.

Robyn caught his arm as he began to reload.

What is it? " she shouted into his ear. Leeuw! Lion! " His eyes were glittering with fright and bubbles of spittle ran from the corners of his mouth. Where is it?

"It has taken Sakkie! It pulled him out of his blankets. "Quiet! " Robyn shouted. "Keep quiet all of you! " Now, at last, they all turned instinctively to her for leadership. Quiet! " she repeated, and the gabble of fright and uncertainty died swiftly. Sakkie! " she called in the silence, and the missing Hottentot's voice answered her faintly from below the steep bank of the river-bed. Die leeuw het my! The lion has me! Die duiwel goon my dood maak, the devil is going to kill me, and he broke off with a shriek of agony.

Above the high-pitched shriek they all clearly heard the crunch of bone, and the muffled growl like that of a dog with food in its jaws. With a rush of horror that raised goose pimples along her arms, Robyn realized that she was listening to the sounds of a man being eaten alive not fifty yards from where she stood. Hy vreet my bene, the voice out of the darkness rang with unbearable agony. "He is eating my legs, and the gruesome cracking, tearing sounds made Robyn's gorge rise to choke her. Without thinking, she snatched a burning brand from the fire and holding it aloft shouted at the Hottentot Corporal. "Come on! We must save him! " She ran forward to the lip of the bank before she realized she was alone, and unarmed.

She looked back. Not one of the men around the fire had followed her. They stood in a tight group, shoulder to shoulder, clutching muskets or axes or assegais, but rooted where they stood. He is finished The Corporal's voice shook with fright. "Leave him. It's too late. Leave him."

Robyn hurled the burning brand she held down into the river-bed below her feet, and before its flames faded and pinched out she thought she saw something big and dark and terrifying on the edge of the shadows.

Robyn ran back to the group and snatched a musket from one of the Hottentots. Thumbing back the hammer, she ran once more to the river bank and peered down into the dry bed. It was utterly dark, until suddenly there was somebody at her shoulder, holding high a burning branch from the fire. Juba" Go back" Robyn snapped at the child. Juba was completely naked except for a single string of beads about her hips, and the firelight glinted on her sleek black body.

She could not answer Robyn, for tears were rolling down her plump cheeks and her throat was closed with terror, but she shook her head fiercely at the order to retreat.

Below them, outlined against the white sand of the dry river, was that grotesque dark shape. and the screams of the dying man blended with the grisly wet growls of the animal.

Robyn lifted the musket, but hesitated for fear of hitting the Hottentot. Disturbed by the light, the lion rose, becoming huge and black; swiftly it dragged the weakly wriggling body, dangling between its forelegs back into the darkness beyond the feeble circle of light from the flames.

Robyn drew a deep breath and the heavy musket shook in her hands, but she lifted her chin in a gesture of decision and holding up the skirts of her long nightdress in one hand, went down the path into the river-bed. Juba followed her like a faithful puppy, pressing so hard against her that they nearly lost their balance, but she kept the burning brand on high, though it shook, and the flames wavered smokily. Brave girl! Robyn encouraged her.

"Good brave girl!

They stumbled through the loose white sand that covered the ankles of their bare feet at each pace.

Ahead of them, at the extreme limit of their vision, moved the menacing black shadow, and the deep muttering growls seemed to fill the night around them. Leave it! Robyn shouted, her voice quavering and breaking. "Drop it, this instantV Unconsciously she was using the same commands as she had given her terrier as a child when it refused to deliver the rubber ball.

Ahead of her in the darkness Sakkie heard her, and bleated feebly. "Help me, for God's love, help me. " But the lion pulled him away, leaving a long wet drag mark through the sand.

Robyn was tiring rapidly, her arms ached from the weight of the heavy weapon, each breath burned her throat as she panted, but she could not seem to get enough air, for an iron band of fear cramped her chest.

She sensed that the lion would only retreat a certain distance before it lost patience with the shouting and harassment, and her instinct was right.

Suddenly she made out the full shape of the lion ahead of them. it had dropped the maimed body and stood over it now like a tomcat with its mouse, but it was as big as a Shetland pony, with the dark ruff of its mane fully erect, seeming to double its size.

In the light of the flames, its eyes glowed a bright ferocious gold, and it opened its jaws and roared. The very air dinned upon Robyn's eardrums, causing her actual physical pain as that great gust of sound struck her. it rose to an unbearable pitch, so that involuntarily she reeled backwards with Juba clinging to her. The child wailed with despair, losing control of her body so that in the light of the flames her urine shot in sharp little spurts down her legs, and as the lion launched into its charge she dropped the torch into the sand, plunging them all into complete darkness.

Robyn lifted the musket in front of her, as a defensive reflex rather than a planned act of aggression, and when the barrel was at waist-level she pulled the trigger with all her strength. The cap flashed, flaring brightly in the blackness and for an instant she saw the lion. It was so close that the long barrel of the musket seemed to touch its huge shaggy head. The mouth was wide open, still emitting those shattering gusts of sound, and the fangs that lined the deep, meat-red gape of jaws were long and white and cruel. The eyes burned yellow as living flames, and Robyn found that she was screaming, but the sound was lost completely in the roaring of the enraged animal.

Then an instant after the flash of the cap the musket fired, bucking so savagely in her hands that it almost tore itself from her grip, and the butt, not anchored against her shoulder, was driven back into her stomach with a force that expelled the air from her lungs, and sent her reeling in the loose white sand. Juba, clinging to her legs and wailing with despair, tripped her and she went over backwards, sprawling full length at the same moment that the full weight of the lion lunged into her.

If Robyn had not fallen, the charge would have stove in her ribs, and snapped her neck, for the lion was over four hundred pounds weight of driving bone and muscle.

As it was, it knocked her out of her senses for she never knew how long, but she became conscious again, with the strong cat-reek of the lion in her nostrils, and an immense weight crushing her into the sand. She wriggled weakly, but the weight was suffocating her, and gouts of hot blood, so hot it seemed to scald "her, were spurting over her head and neck. Nomusa! " Juba's voice, high with anguish and very close, but those shattering roars were silent. There was just the unbearable weight and the rank smell of lion.

Robyn's strength came back to her with a rush, and she struggled and kicked, and the weight above her rolled loosely aside, slithering off her, and she dragged herself free of it. Immediately Juba clung to her again, throwing her arms about Robyn's neck.

Robyn comforted her as though she were an infant, patting her and kissing her cheek that was wet and hot with tears. It's over! There, now. It's all over, she mumbled, aware that her hair was sodden with the lion's blood, and that a dozen men, led cautiously by the Hottentot Corporal, had lined the high riverbank, each of them holding aloft a torch of burning grass.

In the dim yellow light the lion lay stretched out beside Robyn in the sand. The ball from the musket had struck him full in the nose, passed cleanly through the brain and lodged in the base of his neck, killing the great cat in midair, so the lifeless body had pinned Robyn to the sand. The lion is dead! Robyn quavered as she called to the men, and they came down in a close bunch, timidly, at first and then boldly when they saw the huge yellow carcass. It was the shot of a true huntress, announced the Corporal grandly. "An inch high and the ball would have bounced off the skull, an inch lower and it would have missed the brain. "Sakkie, " Robyn's voice still shook, "where is Sakkie? " He was still alive, and they carried him in his blanket up into the camp. His wounds were fearsome, and Robyn knew there was not the smallest chance of saving him.

One arm from wrist to elbow had been chewed so that not a piece of bone bigger than the top joint of her finger remained. One foot was gone just above the ankle, bitten clean off and swallowed in one piece. He had been bitten through pelvis and spine, while through a tear in his diaphragm below the ribs the mottled pink of his lungs swelled out with each breath.

Robyn knew that to attempt to cut and sew that dreadfully torn flesh or to saw the splintered bone stumps would be inflicting futile agony on the little yellow man.

She had him laid close to the fire, she plugged the worst holes gently, and then covered him with blankets and fur karosses. She administered a dose of laudanum so powerful as to be almost lethal in itself. Then she sat next to Sakkie and held his hand.

A doctor must know when to let a man die with dignity, her professor at St. Matthew's had once told her.

And a little before dawn Sakkie opened his eyes, the pupils dilated widely by the massive dose of the drug and smiled at her just once before he died.

His brother Hottentots buried him in a small cave in one of the granite kopjes and they blocked the opening with boulders that the hyena could not roll aside.

When the Corporal and his Hottentots came down from the hill, they indulged in a brief ritual of mourning which consisted mainly of emitting loud theatrical cries of anguish and firing their muskets in the air to speed Sakkie's soul on its journey, after which they ate a hearty breakfast of smoked elephant meat, and the Corporal came to Robyn, dry eyed and grinning broadly. We are now ready to march, Nomusa! " he told her, and with a stamp of his right foot, which began with the knee lifted under his chin, he gave her one of those widely extravagant salutes, a mark of deep respect that up to that date had been reserved exclusively for Major Zouga Ballantyne.

During that day's march, the porters sang again for the first time since leaving Zouga's camp at Mount Hampden. She is your mother and your father too, She will dress your wounds She will stand over you while you sleep We, your children, greet you, Nomusa, The girl child of mercy."

It was not only the caravan's rate of advance under Zouga. that had irritated and annoyed Robyn. It was also their complete failure to make contact with any of the indigenous tribes, with any of the inhabitants of the scattered and fortified villages.

To her it seemed completely logical that the only way that they would be able to trace Fuller Ballantyne through this wilderness was by asking questions of those who must have seen him pass, and almost certainly had spoken and traded with him.

Robyn could not believe that her father would have adopted the same high-handed actions to force a passage past anybody or anything that stood in the way of the caravan as Zouga. had done.

When she dosed her eyes she could still see clearly in her mind's eye the tiny falling body of the black man in the tall headdress, shot down ruthlessly by her brother.

She had rehearsed in her mind how she or her father would have passed through the elephant road without gunfire and slaughter. The tactful withdrawal, the offering of small gifts, the cautious parley and eventual agreement. It was plain bloody murder! " she repeated to herself for the hundredth time. "And what we have done since then has been blatant robbery Zouga had helped himself to the standing crops of the villages they had passed, to tobacco, millet and yams, not even bothering to leave a handful of salt or a few sticks of dried elephant meat as token payment. We should try to communicate with these people, Zouga, she had remonstrated. They are a sullen and dangerous people.

"Because they expect you to rob and murder them and, as God is my witness, you have not disappointed them, have you? The same argument had run its well-worn course many times, neither of them relenting, each holding stubbornly to their own view. Now at least she was free to attempt to establish contact with these people, Mashona, as Juba called them disparagingly, without her brother's impatience and arrogance to distract her and alarm the timid black people.

on the fourth day after leaving Zouga's camp, they came in sight of an extraordinary geological formation.

It was as though a high dam wall had been constructed across the horizon, a great dyke of rock running almost exactly north and south to the very limit of the eye.

Almost directly in their line of march was the only breach in this rampart, and from the altered vegetation, the denser growth and deeper green, it was clear that a river flowed through the gap. Robyn ordered a small adjustment in their line of march and headed for the pass.

When they were still some miles distant Robyn was delighted to make out the first signs of human habitation that they had come across since leaving Mount Hampden.

There were fortified walls on the cliffs above the breach in the long low hill, high above the river bed, and as they drew closer, Robyn could see the gardens on the banks of the river, defended by high brush and Thorn barriers with little thatched look-out huts standing high on stilts in the centre of the dark luscious green stands of young millet. We will fill our bellies tonight, the Hottentot Corporal gloated. That corn is ripe enough to eat."

We will camp here, Corporal, Robyn told him firmly. But we are still a mile. . ."

Here! Robyn repeated.

They were all puzzled and resentful when Robyn forbade entry to the tempting gardens, and confined them all to the perimeter of the camp, except for the water and wood parties. But resentment turned to genuine alarm when Robyn left the camp herself, accompanied only by Juba, and as far as they could see completely unarmed.

These people are savages, " the Corporal tried to intercept her. They will kill you, and then Major Zouga will kill me.

The two women entered the nearest garden, and carefully approached the look-out hut. On the earth below the rickety ladder that rose to the elevated platform a fire had burned down to ash, but flared again when Robyn knelt and fanned it. Robyn threw a few dry branches upon it and then sent Juba for an armful of green leaves. The column of smoke drew the attention of the watchers on the cliff above the gorge.

Robyn could see their distant figures on the skyline, standing very still and intent. It was an eerie feeling to know that so many eyes were upon them, but Robyn was not relying entirely on the fact that they were women, nor was she relying on their patently peaceful intentions, nor even upon the prayers which she had offered up so diligently to protect them. On the principle that the Almighty helps those who show willing, she had Zouga's big Colt pistol stuffed into the waistband of her breeches and covered by the tail of her flannel shirt.

Next to the smoking beacon fire, Robyn left a half pound of salt in a small calabash gourd, and a bundle of sticks of black smoked elephant meat which was the last of her stock.

Early the next morning Robyn and Juba again visited the garden and found the meat and salt had been taken, and that there were the fresh footprints of bare feet overlaying their own in the dust. Corporal, Robyn told the Hottentot with a confidence she did not feel, "we are going out to shoot meat."

Corporal grinned beatifically. They had eaten the last of the smoked meat, weevils and all, the previous evening, and he flung her one of his more flamboyant salutes, his right arm quivering at the peak of his cap, his fingers spread stiffly, the stamp of his right foot raising dust, before he hurried away shouting orders to his men to prepare for the hunt.

Zouga had long ago declared the Sharps rifle to be too light for elephant, and left it in camp, favouring the big four-to-the-pound smooth bores to the more expensive breech-loading rifle. Robyn took it now and inspected it with trepidation. Previously she had only fired it at a target, and now in the privacy of her grass hut she rehearsed loading and cocking the weapon. She was not sure that she would be capable of cold-bloodedly aiming it at a living animal, and had to reassure herself of the absolute necessity of procuring food for the many mouths and stomachs that now depended upon her. The Corporal did not share her doubts, he had seen her shoot a charging lion between the eyes, and trusted her now implicitly. Within an hour's walk they found a herd of buffalo in the thick reed beds along the river. Robyn had listened to Zouga talking of the hunt with enough attention to know the necessity of keeping below the wind, and in the reeds with visibility down to a few feet and with the commotion created by two hundred cows and bleating calves they crept up to a range at which nobody could miss.

Her Hottentots blazed away with their muskets, while Robyn herself fired grimly into the galloping bellowing bodies that charged wildly past her after the first shot had startled them.

After the dust had settled and the thick bank of powder smoke had drifted away on the faint breeze, they found six of the big black animals lying dead in the reedbeds. Her entourage were delighted, hacking the bodies into manageable chunks which they slung on long poles and carried singing up to the camp. Their delight turned to amazement when Robyn ordered that an entire haunch of fresh buffalo be taken out and left next to the hut in the millet garden. These people are eaters of roots and dirt, Juba explained patiently. "Meat is too good for them. "To kill this meat we have risked our lives, the Corporal began his protest, then caught the look in Robyn's eye, broke off and coughed and shuffled his feet. Nomusa, could we not give them a little less than a haunch? The hooves make a good stew, and these people are savages, they will eat anything, he pleaded. "A whole haunch. . ."

She sent him away muttering and shaking his head sorrowfully.

During the night, Juba woke her, and the two of them sat and listened to the faint throb of drums and the singing that carried down from the hilltop village, clearly the sounds of feasting and jubilation. They have probably not seen so much meat at one time in all their lives, " Juba murmured sulkily.

In the morning Robyn found, in place of the buffalo meat, a bark basket containing fifteen hen's eggs the size of pigeons eggs, and two large earthen pots of millet beer.

The look of the bubbling thin grey gruel almost turned Robyn's stomach. She gave the beer to the Corporal to distribute, and her followers drank it with such obvious relish, smacking their lips and nodding over it like connoisseurs over an ancient bottle of claret, that Robyn controlled her heaving stomach and tasted some; it was tart and refreshing and strong enough to set the Hottentots chattering and laughing raucously.

With Juba following her, each of them carrying a bundle of half-dried buffalo meat, Robyn returned to the gardens, certain that the exchange of gifts had proved it possible to establish friendly contact. They sat under the shelter and waited. The hours passed without a sign of the Masbona appearing. The hushed heat of noon gave way to long, cool shadows of evening, and then, for the first time, Robyn noticed a gentle stir amongst the millet plants that was neither wind nor bird.

Do not move, she cautioned Juba.

Slowly a human shape showed itself, a frail bent figure dressed in tatters of a skin kilt. Robyn could not tell whether it was man or woman, and she didn't dare stare openly at it, for fear of frightening it away.

The figure emerged from the stand of millet, crouched down on its haunches, and it hopped hesitantly towards them, with long pauses between each tentative hop. It was so thin and wrinkled and dried out that it looked like one of the unbandaged mummies that Robyn had seen in the Egyptian section of the British Museum.

It was definitely a man, she realized at last, sneaking a glance in his direction, for with each hop his shrivelled and stringy genitals flapped out from under the short kilt.

Closer still, Robyn saw that his cap of woolly hair was pure white with age, and in the seamed and pouched sockets his eyes wept slow tears of fright, as though these were the last drops of liquid that his desiccated old body contained.

Neither Juba nor Robyn moved or looked directly at him until he squatted a dozen paces from them, then slowly Robyn turned her head towards him. The old man whimpered with fear.

It was clear to Robyn that he had been selected as an emissary because he was the least valuable member of the tribe, and Robyn wondered what threats had been made to force him to come down from the hilltop.

Moving very slowly and calmly, as though she were dealing with a timid wild creature, Robyn held out a stick of half-cured buffalo meat. The old man stared at it, fascinated. As Juba had told her, these people probably existed almost entirely on their meagre crops and such roots and wild fruit as they could glean in the forest.

Meat was a rare treat, and such an unproductive member of the tribe would be given only a very little of what there was.

The way he stared at the piece in Robyn's hand made her believe that the old man had not had so much as a taste of the buffalo haunch. He was more than half starved. He rolled his tongue loosely around in his toothless mouth, gathering his courage, and then shuffled close enough to hold out the claws of his bony fingers, palms cupped upwards in the polite gesture of acceptance. There you are, dearie. " Robyn placed the stick in his hands and the man snatched it to his mouth, sucking noisily upon it, worrying it with his smooth gums, drooling silver strings of saliva as his mouth flooded, his eyes streaming again, this time with pleasure rather than fear.

Robyn laughed with delight, and the old man rapidly blinked his eyes and then cackled around the stick of meat, the sound so comical that Juba laughed also, the laughter of the two younger women rippling and tinkling without restraint. Almost immediately, the dense leaves of the millet garden stirred and rustled, as other dark, half-naked figures came slowly forward, their anxiety relieved by the sound of laughing women.

The hilltop settlement consisted of not more than a hundred individuals men, women and children, and every one of them came out to stare and laugh and clap as Robyn and Juba climbed the steep twisting path. The J old silver-headed man, almost unbearably proud of his achievement, led Robyn by the hand possessively, screeching out explanations to those around, pausing every now and then to perform a little shuffling dance of triumph.

Mothers held up their infants to look at this marvelous being, and the children ran forward to touch Robyn's legs and then squeal with their own courage, skipping away ahead of her up the path.

The pathway followed the contours of the hillside, and it passed between defensive gateways and under terraced walls. Above the path at every steep place were piled boulders, ready to be hurled down upon an enemy, but now Robyn's ascent was a triumphant progress, and she came out into the village surrounded by a welcoming throng of singing, dancing women.

The village was laid out in a circular pattern of thatched and windowless huts. The walls were o p astered clay with low doorways and beside each hut was a granary of the same materials but raised on poles to protect it from vermin. Apart from a few diminutive chickens, there were no domestic animals.

The space between the huts, and the central courtyard was swept, and the whole village had an air of order and cleanliness. The people themselves were handsome, though none of them carried any excess flesh or fat.

Robyn was reminded by their slim, lithe bodies that they were almost exclusively vegetarian.

They had alert and intelligent faces, and the laughter and singing with which they welcomed her was easy and unaffected. These are the people whom Zouga shot down like animals, " she thought, looking around her with pleasure.

They had set a low carved stool in the shade for her and Juba squatted beside her. As soon as Robyn was seated, the old man squealed importantly and a giggling young girl brought her a pot of the millet beer. Only when she had drunk a mouthful of the beer did the crowd fall silent, and draw aside to let a commanding figure come through.

On his head was a tall headdress of animal fur, similar to the one worn by the chieftain on the elephant road pass. He wore a cloak of leopard skin over his shoulders, the skins so worn that they must have been very old, probably the heredity symbol of his chieftainship. He sat down on another stool facing Robyn. He was a man of middle age, with a pleasant humorous face, and a lively imagination, for he followed Robyn's sign language with attention, and then acted out his own replies with facial expressions and gestures that Robyn understood readily.

This way he asked her from where she came and she showed him the north and made a circle of her hands towards the sun for each day's travel. He wanted to know who was her husband and how many children she had. That she was both unmarried and childless was a source of amazement to the whole village.

More beer was brought out in the clay pots and Robyn felt slightly light-headed, and her cheeks turned pink and her eyes shone. Juba was contemptuous of their hosts.

They do not have even a goad" she pointed out scornfully. Perhaps your brave young men have stolen them all, Robyn answered tartly, and raised her beer pot in salute to the chief.

The chief clapped his hands, signalling his drummers to stoop to their instruments. The drums were hollowed tree trunks, beaten with a pair of short wooden clubs. to a frantic rhythm that soon had the drummers running with rivulets of sweat and glassy-eyed with the mesmeric effects of the beat. The chieftain threw off his leopaid-skin cloak and launched himself into the dance, swirling and leaping until his necklaces and bracelets jangled and rattled.

On his chest he wore a pendant of ivory, snowy-white polished ivory, and it caught the firelight, for by now the sun was long set. Robyn had not noticed the ornament before for it had been covered by the cloak, but now she felt her eye drawn repeatedly to the bouncing white disc.

The disc seemed too perfectly shaped, and as the chief came bounding up to her stool to perform a solo pass before her Robyn saw that it was decorated with a regular pattern around its border. The next moment her heart raced with excitement for the decoration was writing, she was not sure in what language, but it was Latin script, that was certain. Then the chief had gone, leaping away to prance in front of his drummers, exhorting them to greater efforts.

Robyn had to wait until the chief exhausted himself, and staggered panting back to his stool to quaff a pot of the thick grey beer, before she could lean forward and get her first close look at the ornament.

She had been mistaken. It was not ivory but porcelain, and its perfect shape and whiteness was immediately accounted for. It was an item of European manufacture, the lid of a small pot, the type in which tooth-powder or potted meats are sold. The writing was English, printed in neat capitals were the words: O PATUM PEPERIUM, THE GENTLEMAN'S RELISH."

She felt her skin go clammy with excitement. Clearly she remembered her father's rage when the pantry at King's Lynn had been bare of this delicacy. She remembered as a small girl running down the village street in the rain to the grocer to buy another pot. It is my one weakness, my only weakness, she remembered her father's exact words while he spread the savoury paste on his toast, his anger mollified so that he came near to making a joke of it. "Without my Gentleman's Relish, I doubt I would have had strength for the Transversa."

When Robyn's mother left for Africa on that last illfated voyage, there had been a dozen cases of the relish in her luggage. There was only one possible way that the porcelain lid could have reached here.

Robyn stretched out a hand and touched it, but the chief's expression changed instantly and he jumped back, out of reach. The singing and drumming came to an abrupt halt, and the consternation of the entire village made Robyn realize that the porcelain lid was a charm of great personal magic, and that it was a disaster that another hand had touched it.

She made an attempt to mollify the chief, but swiftly he covered himself with his leopard cloak and stalked away to his hut at the end of the village. The festivities were clearly ended. The rest of the villagers were subdued and crept away after the chief, leaving only the silver-haired toothless ancient, possessive as ever, to lead Robyn to the hut which had earlier been set aside for her.

She lay awake most of the night on the plaited reed sleeping-mat, excited at the evidence that her father had passed this way, and worried that she had ruined her relationship with the Mashona chief and would learn no more of the ornament and, through it, of her father.

She did not have an early opportunity to meet the chief again, and make amends for her breach of manners. The villagers kept away from her, obviously hoping she would go, but she stayed on stubbornly in the hilltop village, attended only by the faithful old man. For Robyn was the most important thing that had ever happened in his long life, and he was not going to relinquish her for the chief or for anybody else.

In the end, there was nothing for it but to send the chief an extravagant gift. She used the last khete of samsam beads and one of the double-bladed axes.

The chief could not resist such princely bribes, and though his attitude was cooler and more reserved than at first, he listened attentively while Robyn asked her questions, acting out little charades, which the chief discussed seriously with his elders, before giving his answers.

The answer was southwards again, south for five circles of the sun, and the chief would send somebody to guide Robyn. He was obviously pleased to be rid of her at last, for, though her gifts were welcome, the chief was still deeply troubled by the ill-fortune that her sacrilegious action must bring upon the tribe.

For a guide the chief chose the silver-headed old man, ridding himself of a useless mouth and an unwelcome visitor at one stroke.

Robyn had doubted that her guide's thin legs could carry him either very fast or very far. However, the old man surprised her. He armed himself with a long throwing spear which looked as old and frail as he did himself and on his head he balanced a rolled sleeping-mat and a clay cooking pot, these clearly constituted his total worldly possessions. He girded up his tattered kilts and set off southwards at a pace that had Robyn's porters grumbling again. Robyn had to restrain him.

It took a little time to get the old man to understand that he was now her language tutor. As they marched she pointed at herself, and everything around them, naming them clearly in English, and then looking at him enquiringly. He returned the look with equal enquiry in his rheumy old eyes. However, she persevered, repeating her own name "Nomusa" as she touched her chest, and suddenly he understood.

He slapped his own chest. "Karanga, "he squeaked. "Karanga! " Once again his enthusiasm for this new activity was such that she had to restrain him. Within a few days Robyn had dozens of verbs and hundreds of nouns which she could begin stringing together, much to old Karanga's delight.

However, it was four days before Robyn realized that there had been an initial misunderstanding. Karanga was not the old man's name, but the name of his tribe. It was too late to rectify, because by that time everybody in the caravan was calling him "Karanga', and the old man answered to it readily. It was difficult to get him to leave Robyn's side. He followed her wherever she went, much to Juba's disgust and undisguised jealousy. He smells, she told Robyn virtuously. "He smells very bad. " Which was true, Robyn had to admit. But after a while you do not notice it, so much. " There was one thing, however, which could not be so readily overlooked, it appeared from under the old man's kilts whenever he squatted which he did whenever at rest.

Robyn solved this by giving old Karanga a pair of Zougals woollen underwear and taking her chances with her brother's wrath later. The underwear filled old Karanga with almost unbearable pride. He preened and strutted like a peacock, as they flapped around his long thin legs.

Old Karanga led them cautiously wide of every occupied village along their route, although he assured Robyn they were also of the same tribe. There seemed to be no trade nor commerce between these settlements, each perched on its fortified hilltop in suspicious and hostile isolation.

By this time, Robyn could speak enough of the language to find out from Karanga more about the great wizard, from whom the chief had received the magical porcelain talisman, and the story filled her with excitement and anticipation.

Many rainy seasons ago, old Karanga was not sure how many, at his age every season blurred into the one before or the one after, anyway, at some not too far distant date an extraordinary man had come out of the forest, even as she had come, and like her he had been fair skinned.

However, his hair and beard were the colour of flames (he showed her the camp fire), and he was without doubt a magician and prophet and rainmaker, for the day he arrived the long drought had broken with thunderous storms that filled the rivers for the first time in many years.

This pale wizard had performed other rare and wonc erful feats, transforming himself first into a lion and then into an eagle, raising the dead from the grave, and directing the lightning with a wave of his hand. The tale had

lost nothing in the retelling Robyn noted wryly.

Did anybody speak to him? " Robyn asked. We were all too afraid, Karanga admitted, shaking theatrically with terror, "but I myself saw the wizard as an eagle fly over village and drop the talisman from the sky. " He flapped his skinny old arms in pantomime.

The strong anchovy smell would have attracted the bird to the discarded pot, Robyn reflected, but when it proved inedible the bird would have dropped it, by chance over Karanga's village. The wizard stayed a short time near our village and then went away to the south. We have heard that he travelled swiftly, obviously in his guise as a lion. We heard of his miracles, the word shouted from hilltop to hill-top or tapped out by the drums. How he cured others sick to death, how he challenged the ancestral spirits of the Karanga in their most sacred places shouting abuse at them so all who heard him trembled.

rWe heard also how he slew the high priestess of the dead, an Umlimo of vast power in her own stronghold.

This strange pale magician slew her and destroyed her sacred relics."

In fact he had raged through the land like a man-eating lion, which of course he was, until finally he came to rest upon a dark hilltop far to the south, the mountain of iron Thaba Simbi, where he stayed to perform diverse curses and miracles so that the people came to him from far and wide to buy his services with corn and other offerings.

Is he still there? " Robyn demanded.

Old Karanga rolled his watery eyes and shrugged. "It is always difficult and dangerous to predict the comings and goings of wizards and magicians, that eloquent gesture seemed to say.

The journey was not so straightforward as Robyn had hoped, for the further he went from his own village the less certain old Karanga became of his direction, or of the exact location of the Iron Mountain, which he had told her of.

At the beginning of each day's march, he informed Robyn confidently that they would reach their destination that day, and as they went into camp each evening he told her apologetically that it would be the next day for certain.

Twice he pointed out rocky kopies, That is indeed the Iron Mountain', but each time they were driven off with a hail of boulders and throwing spears from the heights. I was mistaken, Karanga mumbled, "there is a darkness in my eyes sometimes, even under the noonday sun. "Have you verily and truly seen this mountain? " Robyn demanded sternly, almost at the end of her patience, and Karanga hung his silver-wrinkled head and with great industry picked at his nostrils with a bony finger to hide his discomfiture. It is true that I have not personally seen this place, not with my own eyes, but I have been told by one who spoke with a man who himself. . . " he admitted, and Robyn was so angry that she shouted at him in English. You naughty old devil, why did you not say so beforeV Old Karanga understood the tone, if not the words, and his misery was so apparent that she could not sustain her anger for more than an hour, his gratitude when she once more allowed him to carry her water bottle and food bag was pathetic to see.

Robyn was now consumed with impatience. She had no way of knowing how far behind her was Zouga and his hunting-party. He might have returned to the camp at Mount Hampden and found her note the very day after her departure, or he might still be killing elephant a hundred miles away, completely unaware that she had marched without him.

Her disapproval of her brother, and her anger at his recent actions, had gradually evoked a sense of competition in her.

She had come so far and accomplished so much on her own, from the contact with the Karanga village to following the traces of her father so far and so doggedly, that she fiercely resented the idea of his arrival when she was at the very point of making the prayed-for and long-delayed reunion with Fuller Ballantyne. She guessed how the tale would be told in Zouga's journal, and in the book that would follow it. She knew who would get all the credit for the arduous search, and its brilliantly successful conclusion.

Once she had thought that fame and praise meant little to her, she believed she would be content to leave that to her brother. She had believed that her own reward would be her father's embrace, and the deep personal knowledge that she had brought some comfort or some surcease to the surf ering black peoples of her Africa. I still do not know myself all that well, she admitted, as she called the third successive tirikeza, double-marching her porters relentlessly to keep ahead of Zouga wherever he might be.

I want to find Pater, I want to find him alone, and I want the world to know I found him."

Pride is sinful, but then I have always been a sinner.

Forgive me, Sweet Jesus, I will make it up in a thousand other ways. Only forgive this one small unimportant sin, she prayed in her rude grass shelter, and as she did so she listened with one ear for the shouts of Zouga's bearers coming into camp, and her heart tripped at each sudden noise. She was tempted to break camp and call a night march towards the next distant hill they had seen on the horizon at sunset and which old Karanga had once again confidently declared to be the Iron Mountain.

The moon was full and would rise in an hour, that one march might be all that was necessary to keep ahead of her brother.

However, her porters were exhausted, even Juba was complaining of thorns in her feet. It seemed that only she and old Karanga were able to maintain this pace for day after day. She must let them rest.

The next morning she had them away when the grass was still bent under the weight of dew drops, and before she had gone a mile her breeches were soaked to the thighs. During the last few days, march the character of the land had altered. The elevated plateau of rolling grassland and open forest across which they had marched so long now seemed to be dipping southwards, and the single peak which she had seen the night before slowly evolved into a whole series of hills stretching across her horizon from west to east, and she felt her spirits sag.

What chance would she ever have of finding one man's camp, one single hilltop, amongst so many? But she slogged on doggedly, and she and Karanga reached the first foothills before noon well ahead of the column. She checked Zouga's barometer nestling in its velvet-lined wooden case, and found that the altitude was still well over 1,200 feet, though they had dropped two hundred feet in the last two days, march.

Then, followed closely by Karanga, and at a little distance by Juba, she climbed the roc; shoulder of one of the foothills an from its height had a clearer view ahead over the con used an ground. She could see that the hills descended sharply into the south. Perhaps they had crossed the highlands and before them lay the descent to one of the known rivers that Tom Harkness had marked upon his map. She tried to remember the names, Shashi and Toti and Madoutsi.

Suddenly she was starting to feel very lonely and uncertain again. The land was so vast, she felt like a tiny insect pinned to an endless plain beneath the high pitiless blue sky.

She turned and looked back into the north, using the long, brass-bound telescope to search for any signs of Zouga's party. She was not certain if she was relieved or disappointed to find none. Karanga! " she called, and he scrambled to his feet readily and looked up at her on the pinnacle of rock on which she stood. His expression was trusting as that of a petdog. Which way now? " she demanded, and he dropped his eyes and stood on one bird-thin leg, scratching his calf with the other foot as he pondered the question. Then with an apologetic gesture he indicated the nearest half dozen promontories along the skyline ahead with a hesitant all-embracing gesture, and Robyn felt her heart sink further. She had to admit at last that she was lost.

She knew then that she would have to do one of two things. Either camp where she was until Zouga came up, or turn back along her own spoor until she met him.

Neither alternative was attractive, and she put off the decision until the morrow.

There was water in the river-bed below her, the usual shallow warm green pools, foul with bird and animal droppings.

Suddenly she felt very tired. While the expectations of success had buoyed her up she had not noticed it, but now she felt deflated and the marrow of her bones ached with weariness. We will camp here, she told the Corporal. "Take two men and find meat."

They had marched so hard and long since leaving Karanga's village that there had been no time to hunt. By this time the last of the dried buffalo meat smelt like badly cured hides and was full of bacon beetles. She could only eat it in a strong curry and the curry powder was almost finished. They needed fresh meat desperately, but she was too dispirited to lead the hunting partyThe porters had not finished thatching the low leanto roof that would be her home for the night when she heard a fusillade of musket fire dose by in the forest, and an hour later the Corporal came into camp. They had found a large herd of the lovely sable antelope, Harris buck, as Zouga insisted on calling them, and had succeeded in bringing down five fat chocolate-coloured COWS. The porters, chattering happily, left en masse to help bring in the meat, and Robyn wandered listlessly down the river-bed, accompanied only by Juba, until she found a secluded pool. I must smell as good as old Karanga, she thought, scrubbing herself with handfuls of white sand for she had weeks previously used the last of her soap. She washed out her clothing and spread it to dry on the smooth, water-worn rocks around the pool. Then, still naked, she sat in the sunlight and Juba knelt behind her and combed out her hair so that it could dry.

Juba was obviously pleased to have Robyn to herself again, without old Karanga hovering nearby. Even though Robyn was silent and dejected, Juba loved to play with her hair and delighted in the reddish lights that flared in the sunlight as the comb stroked through it.

She chatted merrily as she worked and gurgled with laughter at her own sallies, so that neither of them heard the footsteps in the sand, and it was only when the shadow fell at Robyn's feet that she realized that they were not alone. With a cry of alarm she rose, snatching UP her still wet breeches and holding them to her breast to cover her nudity.

The woman who stood before her was unarmed, nervous as she was and shy.

Not a young woman, though her skin was smooth and unlined and she had all her teeth still. She was almost certainly Mashona with the finer, more Egyptian features than the Nguni, and she wore the short kilt that left her upper body bare. Her naked breasts were large, out of proportion to the slim upright body, the nipples were raised and drawn-out as though she had recently been nursing an infant. I heard the guns, " she whispered shyly, and Robyn felt a lift of relief when she understood the language. It was Karanga. "I came when I heard the guns. I came to lead you to Manali."

Robyn felt the quick rush of tears scald her eyes at the name, and the leap of her heart made her gasp aloud.

Manali, the man who wears a red shirt, her father had always stoutly maintained that the colour red discouraged tsetse fly and other stinging insects, and that good thick flannel staved off the ague of fever.

Robyn jumped to her feet, completely oblivious now of her nudity and rushed to the woman, seizing her arm and shaking it.

Manali! " she cried, and then in English. rWhere is he?

Oh, take me to him this instant."

it was more than mere chance, and old Karanga's faltering guidance, that had led her, Robyn decided exultantly as she followed her new guide along one of the narrow winding game paths. It was blood calling to blood.

Instinctively, like a migrating swallow, she had flown straight to her father.

She felt like shouting aloud, singing her joy to the forest while the woman went swiftly ahead of Robyn, her narrow, smoothly muscled back and shoulders hardly moved above the gliding roll of her hips, that graceful walk of the African woman trained from childhood to carry a burden upon her head so smoothly that not a drop spills from a brimming pot.

She did not move swiftly enough for Robyn's expectations. Already Robyn could imagine the powerful figure of her father striding towards her, the great flaming bush of his beard, the deep compelling voice as he called her name, and swung her high as he had when she was a child, then the crushing embrace of his arms.

She imagined his joy matching hers, and after the first heady moments of reunion, then the serious hours of discussion, the recital of the long years between, the growing trust and intimacy between them that they had lacked before, so that finally they could march together to a common goal. In the long years ahead, he could hand the torch to her confident that his faith and work would go forward in loving and loyal hands.

What would be his first words when he saw and recognized her? How immense his surprise? She laughed aloud breathlessly, of course, he would he deeply touched and grateful that she had come so far, so determinedly to be with him, and she, Robyn, knew that she would not be able to hold back her own tears of joy, she could imagine her father tenderly wiping them away. The tone of his voice would betray the pent-up love of all the intervening years that had parted them, and which would be so sweet that she could hardly bear it.

Ahead of her, in the fading light of a dying day the Mashona woman led them on to a steep pathway, climbing at a traverse across the western slope of the highest hill. Robyn laughed again when she realized that it was the same hill that old Karanga had pointed out from twenty miles away. He had been right in the end, she must praise him lavishly for that. In her own happiness she wanted to give joy to all the world.

The path came out on a level shelf just below the crest, with a shallow cliff at the back of it and the slope of the hill falling away steeply towards the sunset, and a breathtaking view across the forest and savannah. The entire land turned pink and gold in the low sun and the stupendous flat-topped thunderheads of cloud rose along the dark blue horizon. The setting was right for this magical moment, but Robyn glanced at it only once and then her full attention fastened on what lay ahead of her.

in the face of the cliff was the mouth of a low cave, the slanting rays of the sun struck fully into it showing that it was not very deep, but had been occupied for a long time. The roof and walls were blackened with the soot of the cooking fire, the floor had been swept bare except for the fire at the entrance, with its circle of blackened hearth stones and a small clay pot standing upon them.

The clearing in front of the cave was bare also, trodden by feet over many years, and there was the offal of human occupation scattered about it, the bare bones of small animals, scraps of fur, chips of wood and shards of broken pottery. There was the odour of rotting food fragments, unwashed leather garments, wood smoke and human excrement that confirmed the other evidence that men had lived here for a long time.

There was a single human figure crouched over the smoky little fire, an old crone, bowed by age, a mere bundle of filthy fur blankets, moth-eaten and ragged, looking more like an ancient ape than a human being.

It did not stir, and Robyn barely glanced at it for something else held her attention.

In the back of the cave, lit by the last fleeting sunlight stood a bed. It was made of rudely cut poles, and to together with bark rope, yet it stood on four legs in European style, not the African sleeping-mat, and it was piled with a stained fur kaross that might have contained a human shape.

On a ledge directly above the bed stood a brass telescope, a teak box similar to the one that held Zouga's sextant and chronometer, but scarred and battered with age, and a small cheap tin chest. The chest was much battered also, most of the original paint chipped away so the bare metal showed.

Robyn remembered that box so vividly, open in Uncle William's study at Kings Lynn, the papers from it overflowing on to the desk top and her father bowed over them, steel-rimmed spectacles on the end of his beaked nose, tugging at his thick red beard as he worked.

Robyn gave a little choking cry, and ran forward passing the old crone sitting at the fire, crossing the cave, and flinging herself on her knees beside the crude bedstead. Pater! " Her voice husked over with emotion rasped her own throat. "Pater! It's me, Robyn There was no movement beneath the fur blanket and she put out a hand, then stopped before it touched. He is dead, she thought miserably. "I am too late!

She forced her hand to move again, and touched the malodorous pile of old furs. They collapsed under her touch, and it took her seconds to realize that she had been mistaken. The bed was empty, the discarded blanket had fallen in the shape of a man, but the bed was empty.

Bewildered, Robyn rose to her feet and turned back towards the entrance of the cave. The Karanga woman stood by the fire, watching her expressionlessly, while little Juba hung back fearfully at the far side of the clearing. Where is he? " Robyn spread her hands to emphasize the question. "Where is Manali?

The Karanga woman dropped her eyes. For a moment Robyn did not understand, and then she too looked down at the grotesque figure that crouched by the fire at her feet.

She felt a cold steel band lock about her chest and squeeze her heart so that it took an effort of will to force her feet to move back across the swept floor of the cave.

The Mashona woman was watching Robyn expressionlessly. She had clearly not understood the English question, but she waited with the endless patience of Africa.

Robyn was about to appeal to her again, when the skeletal figure across the smoky little fire started to rock from side to side agitatedly, and a querulous slurred old man's voice began to chant some strange litany, like a magical incantation.

it took Robyn some moments to realize that the accents were faintly Scots and the words, though blurred and jumbled, were a parody of the 23rd psalm. Yea! Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil."

As suddenly as it had begun the chanting broke off, and the rocking ceased. The frail figure froze into stillness and silence again. Across the fire, the Mashona woman stooped and gently as a mother with a child, she drew back the kaross from the head and shoulder of the figure at her feet.

Fuller Ballantyne had shrivelled, his face lined and roughened like the bark of an old oak. It seemed as though the smoke of the fire had etched his skin, collecting in the creases, crusting it with soot.

His hair and beard had fallen out in clumps, as though from some disgusting disease, and what was left of it was pure white but stringed and darkened with dirt to a tobacco yellow at the corners of the mouth and at the nostrils.

only his eyes still seemed to live, they rolled in their sockets, and it needed only one look at them for Robyn to realize that her father was mad. This was not Fuller Ballantyne, this was not the great explorer, the powerful evangelist and enemy of slavery. He had gone long ago, leaving a filthy shrivelled lunatic in his place. Pater, " she stared at him in disbelief, feeling the world spin and lurch beneath her. Pater, she repeated, and across the fire the crouched figure gibbered with abrupt falsetto girlish laughter, and then began to rave incoherently, snatches of English giving way to a half-dozen dialects of Africa, the cries becoming more agitated, his thin pale arms thrown wildly in the air. I have sinned against thee, my God, he screamed and clawed at his own beard, a tuft of the thin pale hair coming away in the hooked fingers. "I am not worthy to be thy servant. " He tore at himself again this time leaving a thin livid scratch down the pouched and wrinkled cheek, though it seemed that the wasted body had no blood left to shed.

The Mashona. woman leaned over him and caught the bony wrist, restraining him. The action was so familiar that she must have performed it often. Then gently she stooped and lifted him. The body seemed to weigh no more than that of a child for she carried him without visible effort to the crude pole bed. One of his legs was bound up in a rudimentary splint and stuck straight out ahead of him.

Robyn stayed on beside the fire, hanging her head. She found that she was still shivering, until the woman came back to her, touching her arm. He is very sick."

Only then could Robyn force back her revulsion. and her horror. She stood, hesitated only a moment longer, and then went to her father. With Juba and the Mashona woman helping her, she began her examination, taking refuge behind her professional rituals and procedures while she regained control of her emotions. He was thinner than she had ever seen a living human body, thinner than the starved brats of gin-soaked slum sluts. There has been little food, said the woman, "and what there is, he will not eat. I have had to feed him like a small baby. " Robyn did not then understand what she meant, but she went on grimly with her examination.

The starved body was verminous, the bunches of little white nits hanging like grapes in the thin white pubic hair, and his whole body was crusted with filth and traces of his own incontinence.

Feeling under the staring rib cage her fingertips encountered the hard distended shape of liver and spleen, and Fuller Ballantyne screamed when she did so, The swelling and extreme tenderness were certain indications of massive malarial infection of long duration, and evidence of terrible neglect. Where is the medicine, the umuthi, of Manali? "It was long ago finished, together with the powder and shot for the gun. Everything was finished long ago, the woman shook her head, "long, long ago, and when it was finished, the people no longer came with gifts to feed us. " It was suicidal to remain in a malarial area without supplies of quinine. Fuller Ballantyne of all people knew that. The acknowledged world expert on malarial fever and its treatment, how could he have neglected his own often-repeated advice. She found the reasons almost immediately, as she opened his mouth, forcing open his lower jaw despite his feeble protests.

Most of his teeth had been rotted out by the disease, and his throat and palate were covered by the characteristic lesions.

She released his jaw, allowing him to close the ruined mouth, and gently she touched the bridge of his nose, feeling the soggy collapsing bone and gristle.

There could be no doubt at all, the disease was far advanced, had long ago begun its final assault upon the once magnificent brain. It was syphilis, in the terminal stages, the general paralysis of the insane. The disease of the lonely man that led inevitably to this lonely madman's death.

As Robyn worked, so her horror and revulsion gave way swiftly to the compassion of the healer, to the sympathy of one who had lived with human weakness and folly and had come far along the road of understanding.

She knew now why her father had not turned back when his supplies of vital medicines ran perilously low, the half-destroyed brain had not recognized the dangers which he had previously described so clearly.

She found herself praying for him as she worked, praying silently but with the words coming more readily than they usually did. Judge him as he was, Oh Lord, judge him by his service in your name, not by his small sins, but by his great achievements. Look not upon this ruined pathetic thing, but on the strong and vital man who carried your work forward without flinching."

As she prayed, she lifted the heavy kaross off his legs, and the smell of corruption made her blink and the frail figure began immediately to struggle with renewed strength, that needed of Ju a an t Mashona woman to control.

Robyn stared at the legs, and realized the other reason why her father had never left this land. He had been physically unable to do so. The splints that held the leg had been whittled out of native timber. The leg had been fractured, probably at more than one place below the hip.

Perhaps the hip joint itself had gone, that vulnerable neck of the femur. But what was certain was that the breaks had not mended cleanly. Perhaps the bindings of the splints had been too tight, for the deep suppurating ulcerations went down to the very bone, and the smell was a solid jarring thing.

Quickly she covered his lower body, there was nothing she could do until she had her medical chest and instruments, and now she was merely inflicting unnecessary pain and humiliation. Her father was still struggling and bleating like a petulant child, rolling his head from side to side, the toothless mouth darkly agape.

The Mashona woman leaned over him, and took one of her own dark tight breasts in her hand, squeezing out the nipple between her fingers, and then she paused and looked up shyly, imploringly at Robyn.

Only then did Robyn understand, and respecting the privacy of woman and the poor maimed thing that had been her father, she dropped her eyes and turned away towards the entrance of the cave. I must fetch my umuthi. I will return here later tonight."

Behind her, the childlike bleats gave way abruptly to small snuffling sounds of comfort.

Robyn felt no shock or outrage as she went down the steep pathway in. the moonlight. Instead she felt immense pity for Fuller Ballantyne who had made the full circle back to infancy. She felt also a deep gratitude to the woman, and a sense of wonder at her loyalty and dedication. How long had she stayed on with Fuller Ballantyne after all reason for staying was gone?