Leopard Hunts in Darkness

"Fungabera!" Tungata snapped. "It's him! As he said it, Tungata threw open the door at his side and clambered up the outside of the cab to reach the ring mounted machine-gun. Despite his size and weakness, he was so quick that he reached the gun and swung it and got off a long burst before the Dakota was out of range. Tracer flew under the Dakota's port wing, close enough to alarm the pilot, and make him throw the aircraft into a tight climbing turn.

"They are climbing up to drop altitude!" Craig shouted.

Surely Fungabera had seen and recognized the blue and silver Cessna. He would have realized that it was the escape plane and that the truck was heading for a rendezvous at the airstrip. His paratroopers could be more swiftly deployed by dropping, than by landing the Dakota. He was going to drop in and seize the airstrip with his par as before the Cessna could take off again. A thousand feet was safe drop altitude, but these were crack troopers. The Dakota levelled out on its drop run five hundred feet, Craig estimated, and they were going to make the drop down the length of the airstrip.

The Cessna was just coming in over the fence at the far end of the strip. As Craig glanced back at her Sally-Anne touched down and then taxied at speed down the strip towards the racing Toyota.

Above the airstrip the tiny figure of a man fell clear of the lumbering Dakota and the green silk parachute flared open almost instantly. He was followed in rapid succession by a string of other par as and the sky was filled with a forest of sinister mushrooms, poisonous green and swaying gently in the light morning breeze, but sinking towards the parched brown turf of the airstrip.

The Cessna reached the end of the strip and swung around sharply in a 180-degree turn. Only then did Craig realize that Sally-Anne had been far-seeing enough to assess the danger and urgency, and that she had landed with the wind behind her, accepting the hazard of the r approach speed and the longer roll-out in order to be able immediately to turn back into the wind for her take-off which would be with a full load, and under attack from the par as

On the cab, Tungata was firing up into the sky, measured controlled bursts, hoping more to intimidate the descending par as than to inflict casualties. A man dangling on swinging parachute-shrouds makes an almost impossible target.

Sally-Anne was leaning out of the open cockpit door, shouting and waving-them on, already she was running up her engine to full power, holding the Cessna on the wheel brakes. They bumped over the verge of the runway and Craig swung the Toyota into a brake-squealing skid, parking so as to screen and protect the aircraft and themselves while they Tade the transfer.

"Get out," he yelled4 at Sarah, and she jumped down and ran to the aircraft. 4;ally-Anne grabbed her arm and helped her swing up and tumble into the back seat.

On the cab, Tungata fired a last burst with the heavy machine-gun.

The first three par as were down, their green parachutes rolling softly in front of the light breeze, and Tungata's bullets kicked dust amongst them. Craig saw one of the par as fall and drag away loose and lifeless on his shrouds. Craig grabbed the AK 47 and the bag of spare ammunition and shouted, "Let's go, Sam. Let's go!" They ran to the Cessna, and Tungata, weak and sick, fell at the steps, and Craig had to drag him to his feet and shove him up.

Sally-Anne let go d-te brakes before Tungata was aboard, and Craig ran beside the Cessna as it gathered speed.

Tungata fell into the back seat beside Sarah, and Craig jumped up and got a hold. Though he was hampered by the AK rifle and bag, he dragged himself into the front seat beside Sally-Anne.

"Get the door closed!" Sally' Anne screamed, without looking at him, all her attention on the strip ahead. The dangling seat-belt was jammed in the door and Craig wrestled with it as they built up to rotation speed. Craig managed to extricate the strap and slam the door closed.

When he looked up, he saw paratroopers sprinting forward from the edge of the strip to intercept the Cessna.

It did not need the shiny general's star on the front of his helmet to identify Peter Fungabera. The set of his shoulders, the way he carried his head, and the fluid catlike grace of his run were all distinctive. His men were spread out be hind him they were almost directly ahead of the Cessna, only four or five hundred paces ahead.

Sally-Anne rotated and the Cessna lifted its nose, bounced lightly and became airborne. Peter Fungabera and his line of paratroopers disappeared from view under the nose and engine section as the Cessna climbed away, but the aircraft would have to pass directly over the top of their heads at little more than a few hundred feet.

"Oh mother!" Sally-Anne spoke in almost conversational tones. "This is id" And as she said-it, the instrument panel in front of Craig exploded, covering him with fine chips of glass like sugar crystals. Hydraulic fluid sprayed over the front of his shirt.

Machine-gun fire came in through the floor of the cabin and tore out through the thin metal roof so that the interior was filled with a gale of swirling wind as the slipstream found the holes.

In the back seat,. Sarah cried out, and the body of the machine was racked and jarred by the storm of AK 47 bullets. Craig felt the seat under him jump as bullets smacked into the metal frame. jagged punctures appeared miraculously in the wing roots just outside his window.

Sally-Anne shoved the control wheel forward and the Cessna dived back towards the airstrip again with a gut swooping rush, ducking under the maelstrom of machine-gun fire and giving them a moment's respite. The brown earth came up at them, and Sally-Anne caught the Cessna's suicidal dive and held it off, but the wheels hit the surface and they bounced wildly thirty feet back into the air. Craig saw two paratroopers dive to the side as the plane raced towards them.

The wild dive towards the earth had pushed their speed way up, so that Sally-Anne could instantly throw the Cessna into a maximum rate turn, the port wingtip brushing the earth. Her face was contorted and the muscle stood proud in her forearms with the effort of holding the Cessna's nose up in the turn and preventing her from going in. Ahead of them on the left-hand side of the airstrip, only a hundred yards or so from the verge, stood a single tree with dense, widespread branches.

It was a morula, ninety feet tall.

Sally-Anne levelled out for an instant and flew for the morula, her wingt* almost touched its outermost branches, and y immediately she threw the Cessna into an opposite turn, neatly placing the tree between them and the line of paratroopers on the airstrip behind them.

She kept at ground level, her undercarriage brushing the tops of the maize plants in the open fields, glancing up in the rear-view mirror above her head to keep the morula tree exactly behind the Cessna's tail, blanketing the paratroopers" field of fire.

"Where is the Dakota?" Craig asked, raising his voice above the rush of wind through the cabin.

"It's going in to land," Tungata called, and, twisting in his seat, Craig had a glimpse of the big grey machine going in low over the tree-tops behind them, lined up for the airstrip.

"I can't get the undercarriage up." Sally-Anne was thumbing the rocker switch but the three green eyes of the undercarriage warning light still glared at her from the console. "We have damage there, it's stuck." The forest beyond the open fields rushed towards them and as she eased back on the control wheel to lift the Cessna over the tree-tops, a hydraulic lead burst under the shot-ruptured engine housing and hydraulic fluid sprayed in viscous sheets over the windscreen.

"Can't seeP Sally-Anne cried, and pulled open her side window, flying by reference to the horizon under her wingtip.

"We've got no instruments," Craig checked the shattered panel. "Airspeed's gone, rate of climb, artificial horizon, altimeter, gyro compass-"

"The undercarriage-" Sally-Anne interrupted him.

"Too much drag, it will cut down our range we'll never make it back!" She was still climbing, but gradually starting to come around onto her course, using the compass in its glass oil bath above her head, when the engine stuttered, almost cut and then surged again in full power.

Quickly Sally-Anne adjusted pitch and power-settings.

"That sounded like fuel starvation," she whispered. "They must have hit a fuel line." She switched the fuel-tank selector cock from 'starboard" to "both" and then glanced up at Craig and grinned. "Hi there! I missed you something awful "Me too." He reached across and squeezed her thigh.

"Time check." Businesslikeagain.

"05-17 hours," Craig told her and looked over side The brown snake of the Tuti road was angling away towards the north, and they were crossing the first line of hills Vusamanzi's village would be out there a few miles beyond the road.

The engine missed again, and Sally-Anne's expression was taut with apprehension.

"Time?"she demanded again "05.27,"Craig told her.

"We will be out of sight of the airstrip by now. Out of earshot too."

"Fungabera won't know where we are, where we are heading." "They've got a helicopter gunship at Victoria Falls." Tungata leaned forward over the seats. "If they guess that we are heading for Botswana, they will send it down to intercept."

"We can outrun a helicopter," Craig guessed.

"Not with our undercarriage down," Sally-Anne contradicted him, and without another warning, the engine cut out completely.

It was suddenly eerily quiet, just the whistle of the wind through the bullet-holes in the fuselage, the propeller windmilling softly for a few seconds longer, and then with a jerk stopping dead and pointing skywards likea headsman s blade.

"Well," Sally-Anne said softly, "it's all immaterial now.

Engine out. We are going in." And then briskly she began her preparations for a 11n f0fed landing as the Cessna started to sink gently away, towards the broken hilly and forested land beneath them. She pulled on MI flap to slow their airspeed.

"Seat-belts, everybody," she said. "Shoulder-straps also." She was switching off the fuel-tanks, the master switches, shutting down to prevent fire on impact.

"Can you see an opening?" she asked Craig, peering hopelessly through the smeared windscreen.

"Nothing." The forest was a dark green mattress below them.

q will try to pick two big trees and knock Our wings off between them that will take the speed off us. But it's still going to be a daddy of a hit," she said, as she struggled with the panel of her side-window.

"I can knock it out for you,"Tungata offered.

Good, "Sally-Anne accepted.

Tungata leaned over and with three blows of his bunched fist smashed the Perspex sheet out of its frame.

Sally-Anne thrust her head out, slitting her eyes against the wind.

The earth came up towards them, faster and faster, the hills seemed to grow in size, beginning to tower above them as Sally-Anne made a gentle gliding turn into a arrow valley. She had no air-speed indicator, so she was now flying by the seat of her pants, holding up the nose to bleed off speed. "Through the hazy smear of the windshield Craig saw the loom of trees.

ered. "Keep "Doors unlocked and open!" Sally-Anne Ord your straps fastened until we stop rolling, then get out as fast as you can, and run likea pack of long thin dogs!" She pulled UP the nose, the Cessna stalled and the nose dropped again likea stone, but she had judged it to a could drop through the horizon micro-second, for before it A she hit the trees. The wings were plucked out of the t ain st their shoulder-straps Cessna, and they were hurled ag with a force that grazed away the skin and bruised the f their speed flesh. But even though the impact took most o off, the dismembered carcass of the aircraft went slithering They were slammed from side and banging into the forest to side and shaken in their seats, the fuselage slewing violently and wrapping sideways around the base of another tree and coming, at last, to rest.

"Out! yelled Sally-Anne. "I can smell gas! Get out and rum" The open doors had been ripped away from their hinges, and they flung off their seat-belts and tumbled out onto the rocky ground, and they ran.

Craig caught up with Sally-Anne. The scarf had come off her head and her long dark tresses streamed behind her.

He reached out and put an arm around her shoulders, guided her towards the lip of a dry ravine and they leaped into it and crouched panting on the sandy bottom, clinging to each other.

"Is she going to flame out? "Sally-Anne gasped.

"Wait for it." He held her, and they tensed themselves for the whooshing detonation of leaking gasoline, and the explosion of the main tanks.

Nothing happened, and the silence of the bush settled over them, so they spoke in awed whispers.

"You fly like an angel, "he said.

"An angel with broken wings." They waited another minute.

"By the way, "he whispered, "what the hell is a long thin dog?"

"A

greyhound," she giggled with reaction from fear. "A dachshund is a long short dog." And he found he was giggling with her as they hugged each other.

"Take a look." She was still laughing nervously. They sto ad up cautiously, and'eered over the rim of the ravine.

The fuselage was crashed and the metal skin of the Cessna had crumpled like aluminium foil, but there was no fire.

They climbed out of the ravine.

"Sam! Craig called. "Sarah!" The two of them stood up from where they had taken cover at the foot of the rocky side of the valley.

"Are you all right?" All four of them were shaken and bruised, Sarah had a bloodied nose and a scratch on her cheek but none of them had been seriously hurt.

"What the hell do we do now?" Craig asked, and they stood in a huddle and looked at each other helplessly.

hey ransacked the shattered carcass of the Cessna the toolbox, the first, aid kit, the survival kit with the flashlight, a five-litre aluminium water the, thermal blankets and malt tablets, the pistol, the ho AK 47 rifle and ammunition, the map-case, and Craig unscrewed the compass from the roof of the cabin. Then they worked for an hour trying to hide all traces of the crash from a searching aircraft. Between them Tungata and Craig dragged the severed wing sections into the ravine and covered them with dried brush. They could not move the fuselage and engine section, but they heaped more branches and brush oven it.

they worked, they heard the sound of an Twice while aircraft in the distance. The resonant throb of twin engines was unmistakable.

"The Dakota," Sally Anne said.

"They are searching for us."

"They can't know that we are down," Sally-Anne protested.

they must know that we took a "No, not for certain, but t realize that real beating," Craig pointed out. "They mus there is a good chance that we are down. They will t the area, and question probably send in foot patrols to scou the villagers."

"The sooner we get out of here-"

"Which way?" rah joined the discussion "May I suggest something?" So deferentially. "We need food and a guide. I think I can lead us from here to my father's village. He will hide us until we have decided what we are going to do, until we are ready to go." Craig looked at Tungata.

"Makes sense any objections, Sam? Okay, let's do it." Before they left the site of the crash, Craig took Sally Anne aside.

Do you feel sad? It was a beautiful aircraft."

"I don't get sentimental over machinery." She shook her head. "Once it was a great little kite, but it's buggered and bent now. I save my sentiments for things that are more cuddly," and she squeezed his hand. "Time to move on, darling." Craig carried the rifle and pointed for them, keeping half a mile ahead and marking the trail. Tungata, lacking stamina, took the drag, with the two girls in the centre.

That evening they dug for water in a dry riverbed and sucked a malt tablet before they rolled into the thermal foil survival blankets.

The girls took the first two sentry goes, while Tungata and Craig spun a coin for the more arduous later watches.

Early the next morning, Craig cut a well-used footpath, and when Sarah came up she recognized it immediately.

Two hours later they were in the cultivated valley below Vusamanzi's hilltop village and while the rest of the party took cover in the standing maize, Sarah climbed up to find her father. When she returned an hour later the old witch doctor was with her.

He came directl u for ata and went down on his arthritically swoIIe'nY1fee'sb7 e him, and he took one of Tungata's feet and placed it upon his silver pate. "Son of kings, I see you," he greeted him. "Sprig of great Mzilikazi, branch of mighty Kurnalo, I am your slave." "Stand up, old man," Tungata lifted him up, and used the respectful term kehla, honoured elder.

"Forgive me that I do not offer refreshment, Vusamanzi apologized, 'but it is not safe here. The Shana soldiers are everywhere. I must lead you to a safe place, and then you can rest and refresh yourselves.

Follow me." He set off at a remarkable pace on his skinny old legs, and they had to lengthen their stride to hold him in view.

They walked for two hours by Craig's wrist-watch, the last hour through dense Thorn thicket and broken to ground. There was no defined footpath, and the heated hush of the bush and the claustrophobic crowding in of the hills was enervating and oppressive.

"I do not like this place," Tungata told Craig softly.

"There are no birds, no animals, there is a feeling here of evil no, not evil, but of mystery and of menace." Craig looked about him. The rocks had the blasted look of slag from the iron furnace and the trees were deformed and crooked, black as charcoal against the sun and leprous silver when the sun's rays struck them full on. Their branches were bearded with trailing lichens, the sickly green of chlorine gas. And Tungata was correct, there were no bird sounds, no rustles of small animals in the undergrowth. Suddenly Craig felt chilled and he shivered in th, sunlight.

"You feel it also," said Tungata, and as he spoke the old man disappeared abruptly, as though he had been swallowed by the black and blasted rock. Craig hurried forward, suppressing a shudder of superstitious dread. He teacher the spot where Vusamanzi had disappeared and looked around, but there was no sign of the old man.

"This way." Vusamanzi's voice was a sepulchral echo.

"Beyond the turn of the rock." The cliff was folded back upon itself, a narrow concealed cleft, just wide enough for a man to squeeze through. Craig stepped round the corner and paused to let his eyes adjust to the poor light.

Vusamanzi had taken a cheap storm lantern from a shelf in the rock above his head and was filling the base with paraffin from the bottle he had carried in his pouch. He struck a match and held it to the wick.

"Come,"he invited, and led them into the passageway.

"These hills are riddled with caves and secret passages," Sarah explained. "They are all dolomite formations." A hundred and fifty yards further on, the passage opened into a large chamber. Soft natural light filtered in through an opening in the domed roof high above their heads.

Vusamanzi extinguished the lantern and set it down on a ledge to one side of a hearth, manmade from blocks of limestone. The rock above the hearth was blackened with soot, and there was a pile of old ash upon the floor. Beside it was a neat stack of firewood.

"This is a sacred place," Vusamanzi told them. "It is here that the apprentice magicians live during the training period. It was here, as a young man, that I served under my own father, and learned the ancient prophecies and the magical arts." He gestured to them to sit down, and all of them slumped thankfully to the rocky floor. "You will be safe here. The soldiers will not find you. In a week or a month, when they grow weary of searching for you, it will be safe for you to leave. Then we will find a man to guide you "It's spooky," Sally-Anne whispered, when Craig translated this for her.

"Some of my women are following us with food. They will come every second &y while you are here, with food and news." Two of Sarah s half-sisters arrived at the cavern before darkness fell. They carried heavy bundles balanced upon their heads, and they set about preparing a meal immedi, lately. Their laughter and merry chatter, the flicker of the flames on the hearth, the smell of woodsmoke and food cooking, partially dispelled the oppressive atmosphere of the cavern.

Craig explained to "You must eat with the women" e old man will be very Sally' Anne "It's the custom- Th unhappy" an old dear, but underneath he turns out "He looks such male chauvinist pig she protested, to be just another passed the beer, pot around their circle, The three men in the centre and the old and ate from the communal bowl man spoke to Tungata between mouthfuls.

"The spirits prevented our first meeting, Nkosi- We waited for you to come that night, but the Shana had taken you. it was a time of sorrow for all of us, but now the spirits have relented they have delivered you from the SP Shana and brought us together at last Vusamanzi looked of great portent that You and I at Craig. "There are things must discuss tribal matters!

"You say that the spirits have arranged my escape from the Shana," Tungata replied. it may be so but if it is, then this white man is their agent. He and his woman have risked their very lives to free me."

"Still, he is a white Man I , said the old man delicately "His family has lived in this land for a hundred years and he is my brother," said Tungata simply.

"You vouch for him, Nkosi?" the old man persisted.

"We are all 4speak, old man," Tungata assured him.

friends, here."

The magician sighed and shuffled and took another handful I of food. "As my lord wishes," he agreed at last, and then abruptly, "You are the guardian of the old king's tomb, are you not?" Tungata's dark eyes hooded in the firelight.

know of these things, old man?" he what do you countered.

when q know that the sons of the house of Kumalo, they reach man hoods are taken to the tomb of the king and made to swear the oath of guardianship-" Tungata nodded reluctantly. This may be so." Do you know the prophecy?) the old man demanded.

d and said, "Mat when the tribe is And Tungata nod de sorely in need, the spirit of the old king will come forth to give them succour." "The spirit of Lobengula will come forth as a fire," the old man corrected him.

"Yes," Tungata agreed. Tobengula's fire."

"And there is more, much more do you know the rest of it, son of Kumalo?"

ell it to me, old father."

"The prophecy goes on thus: The leopard cub will first his chains.

The leopard cub uill first break an oath, then break fly like an eagle, then suim likea fish. When these things have come to pass, the fire of Lobengula uill be freed from the dark places and come forth to SUCCOUr and save his People They were all silent, considering this conundrum.

"The leopard skin is the prerogative of the house of Kumajo," Vusamanzi reminded them. "Thus the leopard cub of the prophecy would be a descendant of the royal house." Tungata grunted noncommittally.

"I do not know that you have broken an oath," the old man went on, 'but you have broken the chains with which the Shana bound you."

"Ehheh!" Tungata nodded his face closed and impassive. A.

"You escaped from)#Tuti in an indeki, flying like an eagle indeed," the old "Man pointed out, and again Tungata nodded, but in English he murmured to Craig, "The beauty of these ancient prophecies is that they can be moulded to fit nearly any circumstances They gain a little or lose a little with each repetition, depending on the mood and the motives of the seer at the time Then he reverted smoothly to Sindebele. "You are wise, old man, and well t tell us what of the swimming of the versed in magic, bu fish? I must warn you that I am not able to swim, and that the only one thing I truly fear is death by drowning. You must seek another fish." Vusamanzi wiped the grease off his chin and looked smug.

"There is something else I must tell you,"Tungata went on. "I have entered Lobengula's tomb. It is empty. The body of Lobengula has gone. The prophecy has been voided long, long ago." The old magician showed no distress at Tungata's words.

Instead he sat back on his heels and unscrewed the stopper of the snuff horn that hung around his neck.

"If you have entered the king's tomb, then you have broken your oath to defend it intact," he pointed out with a wicked twinkle of his eyes. "The oath-breaking of the prophecy could that be it?" He did not wait for a reply but poured red snuff into the palm of his hand and drew it up each nostril. He sneezed ecstatically with tears running down his withered old cheeks.

"If you broke your oath, Nkosi, it was beyond your powers to prevent it. The spirits of your ancestors drove you to it and you are without blame. But, now let me explain the empty tomb." He paused and then seemed to take off at a tangent "Have either of you heard of a man who lived long ago, a man they called Taka-Taka?" They both nodded.

"On the maternal side Taka' Taka was the great-grand, father of Pupho here. "Tungata nodded at Craig. Taka' Taka was a famous white soldier in the old days of Lobengula.

He fought against the king's imp is Taka-Taka is the sound that his machine-guns made when the warriors of the Matabele went against him."

"Old Sir Ralph Ballantyne," Craig agreed. "One of Rhodes" right hand men, and the first prime minister of Rhodesia." He changed back into Sindebele. "Taka-Taka lies buried in the Matopos Hills close by the grave of Lodzi, Of Cecil Rhodes himself."

"That is the one." Vusamanzi wiped the snuff from his upper lip, and the tears from his cheeks with his thumb.

"Taka-Taka, the soldier and the robber of the sacred places of the tribe. It was he who stole the stone birds from the ruined city of Great Zimbabwe. It was he also that came into these very hills to desecrate the tomb of Lobengula, and to steal the fire, stones that hold the spirit of the king." Now both Craig and Tungata leaned forward attentively. "I have read the book that Taka' Taka wrote describing his life-" old Sir Ralph's handwritten diaries were part of Craig's personal treasure that he had left at King's Lynn when Peter Fungabera had driven him out. "I have read the very words of Taka' Taka and he does not tell of reaching Lobengula's tomb. And what are these fire-stones you speak of?" The old man held up a restraining hand. "You go too swiftly, Pupho," he admonished Craig. "Let the son of Kumalo explain these mysteries to us. Have you heard of the fire-stones, Tungata Zebiwe, Who was once Samson Kumalo?"

"I have heard something of them," Tungata agreed cautiously. "I have heard that there was a huge treasure in diamonds, diamonds collected by Lobengula's aniadoda from the white man Lodzi's mines in the south-" Craig started to interrupt, but Tungata silenced him. "I will explain later," he prorriied, and turned back to the old magician.

"What you heard is the truth," Vusamanzi assured him.

"There are five beer, pots filled with the fire-stones."

"And they were stolen by Sir Ralph, by Taka' Taka Craig anticipated.

Vusamanzi looked severe. "You should go to the women's fire, Pupho, for you chatter like one of them." Craig smothered his smile, and sat back suitably chastened while Vusamanzi rearranged his skin cloak before going on.

"When Lobengula was put to earth and his tomb sealed by his half-brother and loyal induna, a man named Gandang'\YIho was my great-great-grandfather," Tungata murmured.

"VA-Lo was your great-great, grandfather the old man agreed. "Gandang placed all the king's treasures with him in the tomb, and then led the vanquished tribe of Matabele back. He went back to treat with Lodzi and this man Taka Taka and the tribe went in to the white man's bondage.

But one man stayed in these hills, he was a famous magician named Insutsha, the arrow. He stayed to guard the king's tomb, and he built a village near the tomb, and took wives and bred sons. Insutsha, the arrow, was my grandfather-2 they made small movements of surprise, and Vusamanzi looked complacent. "Yes, do you see how the spirits work? It is all planned and predestined the three of us are bound by our history and our bloodlines, Gandang and Taka -Taka and Insutsha. The spirits have brought us, their descendants, together in their marvellom fashion."

"Sally-Anne is right it's bloody spooky," said Crail-I and Vusamanzi frowned at his gauche use of a foreign language This TakaJaka as I have hinted already, was a famous rogue, with a nose likea hyena and an appetite likea vulture." Vusamanzi gave this summation with relish and glanced significantly at Craig.

"Got it! Craig smiled inwardly, but kept a solemn expression.

"He learned the legend of the five pots of fire-stones, and he went amongst the survivors of Gandang's impi, the men who had been present at the time of the king's death, and he spoke sweet and gentle words and offered gifts of cattle and gold coins and he found a traitor, a dog of a dog who was not fit to be called Matabele. I will not speak the name of this piece of offal, but I spit on his unmarked and dishonoured grave." Vusamanzi's spittle hit the embers of the fire with a spluttering hiss.

"This dog agreed to lead Taka-Taka to the king's burial place. But before he could do so, there was a great war between the white men, and Taka' Taka went north and fought against the German induna called Hamba-Hamba, "the one-who-marcheshere,and,there,and,is-never caught "Von Lettow'Vorbeck," Craig translated, "the German commander in East Africa during the 1914-1918 war." And Tungata nodded agreement. "When the war was over Taka-Taka returned and he called the Matabele traitor, and they came into these hills with the dog of a dog leading them four white men with Taka' Taka as their chief and they searched for the tomb. They searched for twenty-eight days, for the traitor did not remember the exact location and the tomb was cunningly concealed.

However, with his hyena nose Taka -Taka smelled it out at last, and he opened the royal tomb, and he found wagons and guns, but the kings body and the five beer-pots for which he hungered so violently were gone! "This I have already seen and told you,"Tungata said. It was an anti-climax and Tungata turned one palm up in a gesture of resignation, and Craig shrugged, but Vusamanzi went on resolutely.

"They say that Taka--f-aka's rage was like the first great storms of the rains. " They say he roared likea man-eating lion and that his face went red and then purple and finally black." Vusamanzi chortled with glee. "They say he took his hat from his own head and threw it on the ground, then he took his gun and wanted to shoot the Matabele guide, but his white companions restrained him. So he tied the dog to a tree and beat him with a kiboko until he could see his ribs sticking out of the meat of his back, then he took back the gold coins and cattle with which he had bribed him, then he beat him again and finally, still squealing likea bull elephant in musk, Taka-Taka went away and never came back to these hills!

"It is a good tale," Tungata agreed. "And I will tell it to my children! He stretched and yawned. "Now it grows late!

"The tale is not yet told," said Vusamanzi primly, and placed a hand on Tungata's shoulder to prevent him from rising.

"There is more?"

"There is indeed. We must go back a little, for when Taka' Taka and his companions and the traitor dog first arrived in these hills to begin the search, my grandfather Insutsha grew immediately suspicious. Everybody knew of Taka' Taka They knew he did nothing without purpose.

So Insutsha sent three of his prettiest young wives to where Taka' Taka was camped, bearing small gifts of eggs and sour ns and said milk, and Taka-Taka answered the girls" quest io that he had come into these hills to hunt rhinoceros Vusamanzi paused, glanced at Craig, and elaborated, Taka Taka was also a renowned liar. However, the prettiest of the wives waited for the traitor dog of a Matabele at the touched bathing, pool of the river. Under the water she that thing of which it is said, the harder it becomes, the softer becomes the brain of the man who wields it and the it waggles that fast waggles his tongue. With t Ac faster girl's hand on his man spear, the Matabele traitor spilled out boasts and promises of cattle and gold coins, and the pretty wife ran back to my grandfather's village!

Vusamanzi had all their attention again, and he clearly relished it.

"My grandfather was thrown into terrible consternation.

Taka-Taka had come to desecrate and rob the king's tomb.

Insutsha fasted and sat vigil, he threw the bones and stared Ulto the water-divining vessel, and finally he called his four apprentice witch, doctors to him. One of the apprentices was my own father. They went in the full moon and opened the king's tomb and made sacrifice to placate the king's ghost, and then, with reverence, they bore him away, and they resealed the empty tomb. They took the king's body to a safe place and deposited it there, with the beer-pots of bright stones although my father told me that in their haste one of the beer-pots was overturned and broken, and that they gathered up the fallen stones and placed them in a zebra-skin bag, leaving the broken shards in the tomb."

"Both the apprentices and Taka-Taka overlooked one of the diamonds," Tungata said softly. "We found the clay shards and a single diamond where they had left it."

"Now you may go to sleep if you are still weary, Nkosi." Vusamanzi gave his permission with a gleam in his rheumy old eyes. "What? You want to hear more? There is nothing else to tell. The tale is finished."

"Where did they take the king's body?" Tungata asked.

"Do you know the place, my wise and revered old father?" Vusamanzi grinned. "It is indeed an unexpected pleasure to find respect and honour for age in the young people of this new age, but to answer your question, son of Kumalo: I do know where the king's body is. The secret was passed to me by my father!

"Can you lead me to the place?"

"Di I not te you that mis place in which we now sit "14 is sacred? It is sacred for good reason!

"My God I"

"Herel both Craig and Tungata exclaimed together I and Vusamanzi cackled happily and hugged his bony old knees, well pleased with their reaction.

"In the morning I will take you to view the site of the king's grave," he promised, "but now my throat is dry with too much talking. Pass the beer-pot to an old man." hen Craig woke, the first morning light was diffusing through the hole in the roof of the I! Tcavern, milky and blued by the smoke from the cooking-fire where the girls were busy preparing the morning meal.

While they breakfasted, and with Vusamanzi's reluctant permission, Craig related in English the outlines of the tale of Loberigula's reburial to Sarah and Sally-Anne. They were both enthralled, and immediately on fire to join the expedition.

"It is a difficult place to reach," the old man buffed, "and it is not for the eyes of mere womenfolk." But Sarah smiled "s head and whispered in her sweetest, stroked the old man his ear, and finally, after a further show of gruff severity, he relented.

Under Vusamanzi's direction, the men made a few simple preparations for the expedition. In one of the ancillary branches of the cavern beneath a flat stone was a hidey, hole containing another kerosene lantern, two native axes and three large coils of good-quality nylon rope which the old man clearly prized highly.

"We liberated this fine rope from the army of Smithy during the bush war," he boasted.

"One great blow for freedom," Craig murmured, and Sally-Anne frowned him to silence.

They set off down one of the branches of the cavern, Vusamanzi leading and carrying one of the lanterns followed by Tungata with one of the rope coils, the girls in the centre, and Craig with a second coil of rope and the orb r lantern in the rear.

Vusamanzi strode along the passage as it narrowed and twisted. When the passage forked, he did not hesitate.

Craig opened his clasp-knife and marked the wall of the right, hand fork, and then hurried to catch up with the rest of the party.

The system of tunnels and caves was a three-dimensional maze. Water and seepage had mined the limestone of the hills until it was as perforated as Gruy&e cheese. In some places they scrambled down rock scree, and at one point they climbed a rough, natural staircase of limestone. Craig blazed every twist and turn of the way. The air was cold and dank and musky with the smell of guano. Occasionally there was a flurry of shadowy wings around their heads, and the shrill squeal of disturbed bats echoed down the passageways.

After twenty minutes they came to an almost vertical drop of glossy smooth limestone, so deep that the lantern glow did not reach the depths. Under Vusamanzi's direction, they secured the end of one coil of nylon rope to a pillar of limestone, and one at a time slid down fifty feet to the next stage. This was a vertical fault in the rock formation, where two geological bodies had shifted slightly and formed an open crack in the depths of the earth. It was so narrow that he could touch either wall, and in the lantern light Craig could just make out the bright eyes of the bats hanging inverted from the rocky roof above them.

Uncoiling the second rope Vusamanzi cautiously climbed down the treacherous floor of the crack. The crack widened as it descended, and the roof receded into the gloom above their heads. It reminded Craig of the great gallery in the heart of Claeops" pyramid, a fearsome cleft through living rock, daAgerously steep, so they had to steady themselves with the rope at every pace. They had almost reached the limit of the rope, when Vusamanzi halted and stood tall on a tilted slab, lit by his own lantern, looking likea black Moses descended from the mountain.

"What is it?" Craig called.

"Come on down!" Tungata ordered, and Craig scrambled down the last slope and found Vusamanzi and the others perched on the rock slab peering over the ledge into the still surface of a subterranean lake.

"Now what?" Sally-Anne asked, her voice muted with awe of this deep and secret place.

The lake had filled the limestone shaft. Across the surface, a hundred and fifty feet away, the roof of the shaft dipped into it at the same angle as the floor on which they stood.

Craig used the flashlight that they had salvaged from the wrecked Cessna for the first time. He shone it into the water that had stood undisturbed through the ages so that all sediment had settled out of it, leaving it clear as a trout stream. They could see the inclined floor of the gallery sinking away at the same angle into the depths. Craig F ill switched off the flashlight, conserving the batteries.

"Well, Sam." Craig put one hand on his shoulder. "Here's sh." Tungata's chuckle was your big chance to swim likea ri brief and insincere, and they both looked at Vusamanzi.

"Where now, revered father?"

"When Taka-Taka came to these hills and my grander saved the king's body from defilement, father and my lath J there had been seven long terrible years of drought scorching the land. The level of the water in this shaft was much lower than it is now. Down there," Vusamanzi pointed into the limpid depths, "there is another branch in the rock. In that place they laid Lobengula s body. In the many years since then, good and plentiful rains have blessed the land, and each year the level of these waters has risen. The first time I visited this place, brought here by my father, the waters were below that pointed rock-" Briefly Craig switched on the flashlight and in its beam the splintered limestone lay thirty feet or more below the surface.

"But even then the king's grave was far below the surface."

"So you have never seen the grave with your own eyes?" Craig demanded.

"Never," Vusamanzi agreed. "But my father described it to met Craig knelt at the edge of the lake and put his hand into the water. It was so cold that he shivered and jerked his hand out. He dried it on his shirt, and when he looked up, Tungata was watching him with a quizzical expression.

"Now you just hold on there, my beloved Matabele brother," Craig said vehemently. "I know exactly what that look means and you can forget all about it."

"I cannot swim, Pupho my friend."

"Forget it," Craig advised him.

"We will tie one of the ropes around you. You can come to no harm."

"You know where you can put your ropes."

"The torch is waterproof, it will shine underwater," Tungata went on with equanimity.

"Christ! Craig said bitterly. "African rule number one: when all else fails, look around for the nearest white face."

"Do you remember how you swam across the Limpopo river for a ridiculous wager, a case of beer?" Tungata asked sweetly.

"That day I was drunk, now I'm sober." Craig looked at Sally-Anne for support and was disappointed.

"Not you al soP "There are crocs in the Limpopo, no crocs here she pointed out.

Slowly Craig beg4 nato unbutton his shirt, and Tungata smiled and began readying the rope. They all watched with interest while Craig unstrapped his leg and laid it carefully aside. He stood one-legged in his underpants at the edge of the pool while Tungata fastened the end of the rope around his waist.

"Pupho," Tungata said quietly, "you will need dry clothes afterwards. Why do you wish to wet these?"

"Sarah," Craig explained and glanced at her.

"She is Matabele. Nudity does not offend us."

"Leave him his secrets," Sarah smiled, "though I have none from him." And Craig remembered her nakedness in the water below the bridge. He sat on the edge of the rock slab and pulled off his underpants, tossing them on top of the heap of his clothing. Neither of the girls averted their eyes, and he slid into the water, gasping at the cold. He paddled out gently into the centre of the pool and trod water.

"Time me," he called back to them. "Give me a double tug on the rope every sixty seconds. At three minutes, pull me up regardless, okay?"

"Okay." Tungata had the coils of rope between his feet, ready to feed out.

Craig hung in the water and began to hyperventilate, pumping his lungs likea bellows, purging them of carbon dioxide. It was a dangerous trick, an inexperienced diver could black out from oxygen starvation before the build-up of CO, triggered the urge to breathe again. He grabbed a full lung and flipped his leg and lower body above the surface in a duck dive, and went down cleanly into the cold clear water.

Without a glass face-plate, his vision was grossly distorted, but he held the flashlight beam on the sharp pinnacle of limestone thirty feet below and went down swiftly, the pressure popping and squeaking in his ears.

He reached it and gave himself a push off from the rock.

He was going down more readily now as the water pressure compressed the air in his lungs and reduced his buoyancy.

The steep rocky floor of the pool flew in a myopic blur past his face, and he rolled on his side and scanned the walls of gleaming limestone on each side for an opening.

There was a double tug on the rope around his waist: one minute gone, and he saw the entrance to the tomb below him. It was an almost circular opening in the left-hand wall of the main gallery, and it reminded Craig of the empty eye-socket in a human skull.

He sank down towards it and put out a hand to brace himself on the limestone sill above the opening. The mouth of the tomb was wide enough for a man to stoop through. He ran his hand over the walls and they were polished by running water and silky with a coating of slime. Craig guessed that this was a drain-hole from the earth's surface carved out of the limestone by the filtering of rain waters over the millennia.

He was suddenly afraid. There was something forbidding and threatening about this dark entrance. He glanced back towards the surface. He could see the faint reflected glow of old Vusamanzi's lantern forty feet above him, and the icy water sapped his vitality and courage. He wanted to thrash wildly back towards the surface, and he felt the first involuntary pumping of his lungs.

Something tugged at his waist, and for an instant he teetered on the edge of wild Panic before he realized it was the signal. Two minutes almost his limit.

He forced himself forward into the entrance of the tomb. It angled gently upwards again, round as a sewer pipe. Craig swam for twenty feet flashing the torch beam ahead of him, but the water was turning murky and dark as he stirred up the sediment from the floor.

Abruptly the passagended and he ran his hand over rough rock. His lungm were beginning to pump in earnest and there was a singing in his ears, his vision was clouded with swirling sediment and the beginnings of dizzy vertigo, but he forced himself to stay on and examine the end of the tunnel from side to side and top to bottom, running his free hand over it.

Quickly he realized that he was feeling a wall of limestone masonry, packed carefully into place to block off the tunnel, and his spirits plunged. The old witch-doctors had once again sealed Lobengula's tomb, and in the brief seconds he had left, he realized that they had made a thorough job of it.

His searching fingers touched something with a smooth metallic feel lying at the foot of the wall. He took it up and turned away from the wall, shoving himself down the passage, with panic and the need for air rising in him. He reached the main gallery again, still carrying the metallic object in one hand.

High above him, the lantern glowed and he swam upwards, with his senses beginning to flutter likea candle flame in the wind; darkness and stars of light played before his eyes as his brain starved and he felt the first deadly lethargy turning his hands and his foot to lead.

With a jerk, the rope around his waist came tight, and he felt himself being drawn swiftly upwards. Three minutes, and Tungata was pulling him out. The lantern light spun dizzily overhead as he windmilled on the end of the rope, and he could not pre vent himself, he tried to breathe and freezing water shot down his throat and went into his lungs, stinging like the cut of a razor.

He exploded out through the surface, and Tungata was waist-deep, hauling double-handed on the life-line. The instant he broke through, Tungata seized him, a thick muscled arm around his chest, and he dragged Craig to the edge.

The two girls were ready to grab his wrists and help him up onto the slab. Craig collapsed on his side, doubled up likea foetus, coughing and heaving the water from his lungs and shaking violently with cold.

Sally-Anne rolled him onto his stomach and bore down on his back with both hands. Water and vomit shot up his throat, but his breathing gradually eased and at last he sat up wiping his mouth. Sally-Anne had stripped off her own shirt and was chafing him vigorously with it. In the lantern light his body was dappled blue with cold and he was still shivering uncontrollably.

"How do you feel?" Sarah asked.

"Bloody marvelous," he gasped. "Nothing likea bracing dip "He's all right," Tungata assured them, "as soon as he St. arts snarling, he's all right." Craig cupped his hands over the chimney of the lantern for warmth and gradually his shivering eased. Sarah leaned across to Tungata, and with a wicked smile directed at Craig's naked lower body, whispered something.

"Right on! Tungata chuckled, imitating a black Amen, can accent. "And what's more, these honkys ain't got no rhythm neither." Craig quickly reached for his underpants, and Sally, Anne rushed loyally to his defence. "You're not seeing him at his best, that water is freezing." Craig's hands were stained red, brown with rust, they marked his underpants and he remembered the metal object he had found at the wall of the tomb. It lay where he had dropped it at the" edge of the slab.

"Part of a trek chain," he said, as he picked it up. "From an ox wagon." Vusamanzi had been squatting silently on one side, at the edge of the lantern light. Now he spoke. "That chain was from the king's wag4. My grandfather used it to lower the king's body down the shaft." "So you have found the king's grave?" Tungata asked.

This mundane little scrap of metal was for all of them the proof that changed fantasy to factual reality.

"I think so," Craig began strapping on his leg, "but we will never know for certain." They all watched his face and waited. Craig suffered another paroxysm of coughing, then his breathing settled and he went on, "There is a passage, just as Vusamanzi described. It is about another fifteen feet below that pinnacle and it goes off to die left, a round opening with a shaft that rises sharply. About twenty feet from the entrance, the shaft has been blocked with masonry, big blocks and lumps of limestone, packed closely together. There is no way of telling how thick the wall is, but one thing is certain, it is going to take a lot of work to get through it I had about twenty seconds" endurance at the face, not long enough to prise out even a single block.

Without diving apparatus, nobody is going to get past that seal." Sally-Anne was shrugging on her damp shirt over her white bra, but she stopped and stared at him challengingly.

"We can't just give up, Craig darling, we can't just walk away and never know. It would eat me up not knowing a mystery like that! I'd never be happy, never again as long as I lived."

"I'm open to suggestions," Craig agreed sarcastically.

"Anybody got a scuba tucked in their back pocket? How about paying Vusamanzi a goat and he can make the water jump aside, shades of Moses and the Red Sea."

"Don't be flippant, "said Sally-Anne.

"Come on somebody, be intelligent and inventive what? No takers?

Okay, then let's get back to where there ri is a re and a little sun light." Craig dropped the rusted piece of chain back into the pool.

"Sleep well, Lobengula, "the one who drives like the wind", keep your fire-stones beside you, and shala ease, stay in peace!" he climb back up through the maze of passages and inter leading caverns was a dismal and silent procession, although Craig checked and remarked each turn and juncture as he passed it.

When they reached the main cavern again, it took only a few minutes to blow the embers on the hearth to flames and boil a canteen of water.

The strong, over sweetened tea warmed away the last of Craig's chills and heartened them all.

must return to the village," Vusamanzi told them. "If the Shana soldiers come and do not find me, they will become suspicious they will begin to bully and torture my women. I must be there to protect them, for even the Shana fear my magic." He gathered up his pouch and cloak and his ornately carved staff. "You must remain in the cavern at all times. To leave it is to risk discovery by the soldiers. You have food and water and firewood and blankets and paraffin for the lanterns, there is no need for you to go out. My women will come to you the day after tomorrow with food and news of the Shana." He went to kneel before Tungata. "Stay in peace, great prince of Kumalo. My heart tells me that you are the leopard-cub of the prophecy, and that you will find a way to free the spirit of Lobengula."

"Perhaps I will return here one day with the special machines that are necestry to reach the king's resting place."

"Perhaps," Vusamanz'iagreed. "I will make sacrifice and consult the spirits, They might condescend to show me the way." At the entrance of the cave he paused and saluted them. "When it is safe, I shall return. Stay in peace, my children." And then he was gone.

"Something tells me it's going to be a long, hard time," said Craig, "and not the most attractive place to pass it." They were all active and restlessly intelligent people, and the confinement began to irk almost immediately.

Tacitly they divided the cavern, a communal area around either end for each couple.

the hearth and a private area at The seepage of water down the rock face when collected in a clay pot was sufficient for all their needs, including ablutions, and there was a vertical pothole shaft in one of the passages which served as a natural latrine. But there was nothing to read and a lack that Craig felt keenly no writing material. To alleviate the boredom, Sarah began teaching Sally-Anne Sindebele, and her progress was so rapid that she could soon follow ordinary conversation and respond to it fairly fluently.

Tungata recovered rapidly during those days of enforced inactivity. His gaunt frame filled out, the scabs on his face and body healed rapidly, and he regained his vitality. It was often Tungata who led the long rambling discussions at the fireside, and that irrepressible sense of humour that Craig remembered so well from the old days began to break through the sombre moods that had at first overwhelmed him.

When Sally-Anne made a disparaging remark about the neighbouring South African state and its apartheid polities, Tungata contradicted her with mock severity.

"No, no, Pendula-" Tungata had given her the Matabele name of "the one who always answers back" no, Pendula, rather than condemning them, we black Africans should give thanks for them every time we pray! For they can bring a hundred tribes together with a single rallying cry. It is only necessary for one of us to stand up and shout, "Racist Apartheid Boers!" and all the others stop beating each other over the head and for a moment we become a band of brothers." Sally-Anne clapped her hands. "I'd love to hear you make that speech at the next meeting of the Organization for African Unity!" Tungata chuckled at her, they were becoming good friends. "Another thing we have to be grateful for-" he went on.

"Tell me more, "she incited him.

"Those tribes down there are some of the fight ingest niggers in Africa," Tungata obeyed. "Zulus and Xhosas and Tswanas. We have got our hands full with the Shana.

Imagine if that lot were turned loose on us also. No, from now on my motto is going to be "Kiss an Afrikaner every day'T "Don't encourage him," Sarah pleaded with Sally-Anne.

"One day he is going to talk like this in front of people who will take him seriously." At other times Tungata relapsed back into those intense and dark moods. "It is like Northern Ireland or Palestine, only a hundred times bigger and more complex. This conflict between ourselves and the Shana is a microcosm of the entire problem of Africa."

"Do you see a solution?" Sally-Anne demanded.

"Only a radical and difficult one," he told her. "You see, the European powers in their nineteenth-century scramble for Africa divided the continent up amongst themselves with no thought for tribal boundaries, and it is an entrenched article of the Organization for African Unity that these boundaries are sacrosanct. One possible solution would be to overturn the article and repartition the continent along tribal b(*;ndaries, but after the terrible experience of partitior*ig India and Pakistan, no rational person would support that view. The only other solution seems to me to be a form of federal government, based loosely on the American system, with the state divided into tribal provinces possessing autonomy in their own affairs." Their talk ranged across time, and for the entertainment and instruction of the two girls, both Craig and Tungata related the history of this land between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers, with each of them concentrating on the role played by their own nations and families in the discovery and occupation and the strife that had torn it.

Twice on successive days their talk at the hearth was interrupted by sounds from the world outside the cavern the unmistakable whistling, clattering roar of a helicopter rotor hammering through the air in coarse pitch setting, and they fell silent and looked up at the roof of stone above them until the sound faded. Then the talk would turn to their chances of escape from the forces that pursued and hunted them so relentlessly.

Every second day the women came from Vusamanzi's village, travelling in the darkness of predawn to elude the es in the sky above them. They brought food and news.

ey The Third Brigade troopers had come to the village, surrounding it first and then storming in and ransacking the huts. They had cuffed one of the young girls and they had shouted threats and badgered the old man, but Vusamanzi had faced them down with dignity and in the end his formidable reputation for magic had protected them.

The soldiers had left without stealing much of value, without burning a single hut or killing more than a few chickens but they had promised to return.

However, a massive manhunt was still in progress over the entire area. On foot and from the helicopters the Shana scoured the forest and hills during the hours of daylight and hundreds of the escapees from the camp had already been recaptured. "The girls had seen them being transp reported in heavy trucks, naked and chained together.

As far as vusamanzi knew, the Shana had not yet discovered the wrecked Cessna, but it was still extremely dangerous, and Vusamanzi had ordered the girls to impress upon them they must remain in the cavern. He would come to them in person when he judged it safe to do so.

This news depressed them all and it took all Craig's best storytelling and clowning to lighten the mood in the cavern. He turned their attention back to their perennially favourite topic, the tomb of Lobengula and the vast fortune they liked to believe it contained. They had already discussed in detail the equipment that would be needed to enable a team of divers to open the tomb and reach the burial area, and now Sally-Anne asked Tungata, "Tell us, Sam, if there were a treasure, and if you could reach it, and if it were as rich as we hope, how would you use it?" 11 think it would have to be treated as belonging to the Matabele people. It would have to be placed in trust and used for their benefit, firstly to procure for them a better political dispensation. To be pragmatic, a negotiator with that sort of financial clout behind him would find it easier to get the attention of the British Foreign Office and the American State Department. He could prevail upon them to intervene. The government in Harare would have to take them seriously, options which are at present closed to us would become accessible."

"After that, it would finance all sorts of social programmes education, health, the forwarding of women's rights," Sarah said, for the moment her timidity put aside.

"You would use it to make land-purchases to add to the existing tribal trust lands Craig added, "financial assistance to the peasant farmers, aid for tractors and machinery, blood, stock improvement programmes."

"Craig," Sally-Anne laid her hand on his good leg, "isn't there any way at all to Ach the burial chamber? Couldn't YOU try another dive?"O "My precious girl, for the hundredth time, let me explain that I could probably move a single rock with each dive, and twenty dives would kill me." oh God, it's so frustrating!" Sally-Anne jumped up and began pacing up and down between them and the fire. "I feel so helpless. If we don't do something, I'm going to go mad. I feel as though I am suffocating I need a good breath of oxygen. Can't we just go outside for a few minutes?" And then immediately, she answered herself.

"That just isn't on, I know. Forgive me. I'm being silly." She looked at her wristwatch. "My God, I've lost all track of time, do you realize it's after midnight already?" Craig and Sally-Anne lay on their mattress of cut grass and tanned skins, holding each other close and whispering with their lips touching each other's ears so as not to disturb the other pair at their end of the cavern.

"I am ashamed of my part in having him imprisoned. He is such a marvelous man, darling, sometimes I feel so humble when I listen to him." "He might just make it to greatness," Craig agreed.

Coming back here to free him may be the most important thing that you and I ever do in our lives."

"If we get away with it," Craig qualified.

"There must be some justice in this naughty world."

"It's a nice thought."

"Kiss me goodnight, Craig." Craig loved to listen to her sleeping, the gentle sound of her breathing, and to feel the total relaxation of her body against his, with only the occasional little snuggling movement in his arms, but tonight he could not follow her into sleep.

Something was snagged in his subconscious likea burr in his sock, and the longer he lay, the fiercer became its irritation. Something somebody had said that evening, he figured it that far, but every time it started to rise to the he tried too hard and it sank away surface of his mind, again. At last he resorted to the old trick of emptying his mind, imagining a wastepaper-basket, and as each unbidden thought came, he tore it in half, crumpled it, and dropped it into the imaginary basket.

"Christ!" he said loudly, and sat bolt upright. Sally-Anne came up beside him, pushing the hair was jolted awake and out of her eyes, and mumbling drowsily.

"What is it?"Tungata called across the cavern.

"Oxygen!" cried Craig. Sally-Anne had said, "I am suffocating I need a good breath of oxygen."

"I don't understand," Sally' Anne mumbled, still more asleep than awake.

"Darling, wake up! Come on!" He shook her gently.

"Oxygen! The Cessna is equipped for high-altitude flight, isn't it?"

"Oh sweet heavens," she stared at him. "Why didn't we think of it before?"

"Life-jackets do you have them?"

"Yes. When I was doing the flamingo survey over Lake Tanganyika, I had to have them installed. They are under the seat cushions."

"And the oxygen system, is it a recycling circuit?"

"Yes."

"Pupho!" Tungata had lit the lantern and carried it across to them with Sarah naked and unsteady on her feet trailing behind him likea sleepy puppy. "Tell us, Pupho, what is happening?"

"Sam, you beauty," Craig grinned at him, as he reached for his pants. "You and rare going for a little walk."

"Now?"

"Now, while it is still dark." here was e oug moon to light their way as far as 'i Vusaman s "Village. They bypassed the hilltop, not wanting to alarm the old man. A village dog yapped at them, but they found the footpath and hurried along it.

Morning found them still on the footpath.

Twice they were forced to take cover. The first time was when they almost ran head-on into a patrol of camouflage clad Shana troopers.

Tungata, who was on point, warned Craig with the hand-signal for dire danger. They lay in arM

Ir F

thick yellow stand of elephant grass beside the path and watched them go padding silently past. Afterwards, Craig found that his heart was racing and his hands shaking.

"I'm getting too old for this, "he whispered.

"Me too," Tungata agreed.

The second time they were warned by the whacking beat of helicopter rotors, and they dived into the ravine beside the path. The ungainly machine dragon-flyed down the far crest of the valley, with a machine-gunner in the fuselage port and the helmeted heads of an assault squad popping up behind him like poisonous green toadstools.

The helicopter passed swiftly and did not return.

They overran the spot where they had originally intersected the footpath, and had to back-track for almost a mile, so it was late afternoon when they approached the wreck site.

They closed in with elaborate caution, circling the area and casting for in going spoor, checking with infinite patience that the wreck had not been discovered and staked, out Finally, when they walked up, they discovered that it was undisturbed and exactly as they had left it.

Tungata climbed back up the side of the valley, and stood guard with the AK 47, while Craig began stripping the equipment they had come for. The four inflatable lifejackets were under the seats, as Sally-Anne had told him.

They were of excellent quality, impregnated nylon, each with a carbon dioxide cartridge for inflation and a non return valve on the mouthpiece for topping up. Attached to the bosom cushions were a whistle and blessings upon the manufacturer a light globe powered by a long-life battery. Under the pilot seat was a thousand more blessings a repair kit for the jackets, with scissors and scraper and two tubes of epoxy cement.

The steel oxygen bottles were bolted into a rack behind the rear bulkhead of the passenger compartment. There were three of them, each of two-litre capacity. From them flexible plastic tubing carried along behind the panelling to each seat, and terminated in a face-mask with two builtin valves. The user inhaled pure oxygen and exhaled a mixture of unused oxygen, water vapour and carbon dioxide. This was passed through the exit valve and ran through the two metal canisters under the floorboards. The first canister contained silica gel which removed the water vapour, the second canister was packed with soda lime which removed the carbon dioxide, and the purified oxygen was cycled back to the face-masks. When the pressure of pure oxygen in the system fell to that of ambient atmosphere, it was automatically supplemented from the three steel bottles. The flexible tubing was fitted with top-quality aluminium couplings, T-pieces and bends, all of the bayonet-fitting type.

Working as carefully as time would permit, Craig stripped out the system and d-len converted the heavy duty canvas seat-covers into carry bags. He packed the salvaged equipment into them, making up two heavy bundles.

It was dark by the time that he whistled Tungata down from the hillside. Each, of them shouldered a bundle and they started back.

When they intersected the footpath, they spent nearly half an hour sweeping their tracks, and hiding any sign of their detour from the path.

"You think it will hold good in daylight?" Craig said doubtfully. "We don't want to signpost the wreck."

"It's the best we c.aA do." They stepped it out on the path, pushing hard, and despite their heavy, uncomfortable packs, they shaved an hour off their return time and reached the cavern just after dawn.

Sally-Anne said nothing when Craig stepped into the cavern. She merely stood up from the fire, came to him and pressed her face against his chest. Sarah bobbed the traditional curtsey to Tungata and brought him the beer-pot, letting him refresh himself before bothering him with greetings. Only after he had drunk did she kneel beside him, clap her hands softly and whisper in Sindebele, see you, my lord, but dimly, for my eyes are filled with tears of joyP he Shana sergeant had been on foot patrol for t lirty-t Aree. Iours wit-lout rest. previous morning they had made a brief and indecisive contact with a small band of the escapees they were hunting, an exchange of fire that had lasted less than three minutes, then the Matabele guerrillas had pulled out and splintered into four groups. The sergeant had gone after one group with five men, followed them until dark and then lost them on the rocky rim of the Zambezi valley. He was bringing in his patrol now for resupply and new orders.

Despite the long patrol and the trauma of a good contact and hot pursuit, the sergeant was still vigilant and alert.

There was an elastic spring in his stride, his head turned restlessly from side to side as he moved down the footpath, and the whites of his eyes under the brim of his jungle hat showed clear and sharp.

Suddenly he gave the urgent hand signal for deployment, and as he changed the AK 47 from one hip to the other to cover his left flank and dropped into cover, he heard his men spread and go down behind, covering him and backing him. They lay in the elephant grass beside the track, searching and waiting while the sergeant examined the small sign that had alerted him. It was a bunch of long grass on the opposite side of the path: the stems had been broken and then lifted carefully to try to disguise the break, but they had sagged slightly again. It was the type of sign a man might make when leaving the path to set up an ambush beside it.

The sergeant lay for two minutes, and when there was no hostile fire, he doubled forward ten paces and then went flat again, rolling twice to throw off an enemy's aim, and he waited two minutes longer.

Still no fire and he came up cautiously, and went forward to the damaged clump of grass. It was man sign: a small band of men had left the path here or joined it, and they had swept their spoor. A man only took this much trouble if he was anticipating pursuit. The sergeant whistled up his tracker and put him to the spoor.

The tracker worked out from the path, casting ahead, and within minutes he reported, "Two men, wearing boots.

One of them walks with a slight favour to his left leg. They were headed down the valley." He touched one of the footprints in a sandy patch. An antlion had built its tiny cone-shaped trap in the toe of the spoor, giving the tracker an accurate timing.

"Six to eight hours," said the tracker, "during the night.

They went on the path, but we cannot follow them, their spoor has been covered by others."

"If we cannot find where they are going, then we will see where they came from," said the sergeant. "Backtrack them! Three hours later, th8 4sergeant walked up to the wreck of the Cessna.

raig slept for a few hours and then by the light of the paraffin lantern began modifying the oxygen equipment for use underwater. The central part of his primitive oxygen rebreathing set was the bag. For this he used one of the inflatable life-jackets. Oxygen from the steel bottle was introduced into the bag through the oneway valve of the mouthpiece, the connection made with a length of flexible tubing.

As he worked, Craig explained, "At a depth of forty feet underwater, the pressure will be greater than two atmospheres you remember your high school physics: thirty-three feet of water equals one atmosphere, plus the pressure of the air above it two atmospheres, right?" His interested audience of three made affirmative sounds.

"Right! So for me to be able to breathe freely, the oxygen has to be fed into my lungs at the same pressure as the surrounding water the oxygen in the bag is under the same ambient pressure as I am, et voild!"

"My old daddy always used to say, it's brains what counts!" Sally-Anne applauded him.

"The chemicals in these two canisters remove the water vapour and carbon dioxide from the air that I exhale, and the purified oxygen goes back into the bag via this tube, and I breathe it again." He was sealing the new connections to the bag with epoxy cement from the repair kit.

"As I use up the oxygen in the bag, I keep topping it up with fresh oxygen from the steel bottle strapped on my back. Like this-" he cracked the tap of the black-and white-coded bottle and there was an adder hiss of escaping gas.

"There are a few problems, of course-" Craig began work on altering the shape of the face-mask to give him a watertight fit.

"Such as? "Sally-Anne asked.

"Buoyancy," Craig answered. "As I use up the oxygen in the bag I will become less buoyant, and the steel bottle will pull me down likea stone. When I top up the bag I'll tend to shoot up likea balloon." "How will you beat that?" J will weight myself with rocks to get down to the tomb entrance, and once I'm there, I'll rope myself down to stay there." Craig was making up a backpack on which were suspended the two canisters and the oxygen bottle. Carefully he positioned the steel bottles so that he could reach the tap over his shoulder.

"However, buoyancy isn't the big problem," he said.

"You've got more?" Sally-Anne demanded.

"As many as you ask for," Craig grinned. "But did you know that pure oxygen breathed for an extended period at more than two atmospheres absolute, that is at any depth below thirty-three feet, becomes a deadly gas, as lethal as the carbon monoxide in the exhaust fumes of an automobile?"

"What can you do about that?"

"Not much," Craig admitted. "Except limit the duration of each dive, and monitor my own reactions very carefully while I am working at the wall of the tomb."

"Can't you work out how much safe time you will have before it starts to poison-" Craig interrupted. "No, the formula would be too complicated and there are too many variables to calculate, from my body mass to the exact water depth. Then there is a cumulative effect %f the poisoning. Each successive dive will become mar risky."

"Oh my God, darling." Sally-Anne stared at him.

"We will keep the dives short, and we will work out a series of signals," Craig reassured her. "You will give me a rope signal from the surface every minute, and if I don't reply or if my reply is not immediate and decisive, you will haul me out. The poisoning is insidious but gradual, it will affect my reactions to the signal before I go out completely.

It gives us a little leeway." He set the bulky equipment carefully aside, close to the fire, so that the warmth would hasten the setting of the epoxy cement.

"As soon as the joints are sealed, we can test it, and then go for the bank."

"How long?"

"It's twenty-four-hour epoxy."

"So long?"

"Rest will increase my resistance to the effects of oxygen poisoning." he forest was too dense to allow the helicopter to alight. It hovered above the tree-tops, and the flight engineer on the winch lowered Genenil Peter Fungabera into a hole in the mat of dark green vegetation below them.

Peter turned slowly on the thin steel cable, and th down-draught from the rotors fluttered his camouflage battle, smock about his torso. Six feet above the earth, he slipped out of the padded sling and dropped clear, landing neatly as a cat. He returned the salute of the Shana sergeant who was waiting for him, cleared the drop area quickly and looked up as the next man was lowered from the hovering helicopter.

Colonel Bukharin was also dressed in camouflage and jump helmet. His scarred face seemed impervious to the tropical sun, it was bloodless and almost as pale as those cold arctic eyes. He shrugged off the helping hands of the Shana sergeant and strode on up the valley. Peter Fungabera fell in beside him and neither man spoke until they reached the crumpled and shattered fuselage of the Cessna.

"There is no doubt?" Bukharin asked.

"The registration, ZS-KYA. You must remember I have flown in this aircraft," Peter Fungabera replied, as he went down on one knee to examine the belly of the fuselage. "If further proof is needed," he touched the neat puncture in the metal skin, "machine-gun fire from directly below."

"No corpses?"

"No." Peter Fungabera straightened up, and leaned into the cockpit. "No blood, no indication that any of the occupants was injured. And the wreck has been stripped."

"It could easily have been looted by local tribesmen."

"Perhaps," Peter agreed. "But I don't think so. The trackers have examined the sign, and this is their reconstruction. After the crash twelve days ago, four people left the site, two of them women, and one of the men with an unbalanced gait. Then within the last thirty-six hours, two men returned to the wreck. They are certain it was the same two the boot prints match, and one of them has the same favour to his left leg." Bukharin nodded.

"On the second visit the wreck was stripped of much loose equipment. The two men left the area carrying heavy packs and joined the footpath that crossed the head of the valley about six miles -from.

here. There the tracks have been confused and covered by other traffic."

"I see," Bukharin was watching him. "Now tell me your other conclusions."

"There are two black and two white persons. With my own eyes I saw them at. Tuti airstrip. The one black is undoubtedly Minister Tdhgata Zebiwe - I recognized him "Wishful thinking? He is your one last hope of making good our bargain."

"I would know that man anywhere."

"Even from an aircraft?"

"Even then."

"Go on," Bukharin invited.

"The other black person I did not recognize. Nor did I get a good enough view to positively identify either of the whites, but the pilot is almost certainly an American OIL Sk woman named Jay. Although the aircraft belongs to the World Wildlife Trust, she had the use of it. The other white is probably her lover, a British writer of sensational fiction, who has an artificial leg, accounting for the unbalanced tracks. These three are unimportant and expendable. The only one of importance is Zebiwe. And now we know that he is still alive."

"We also know that he has eluded you, my dear General," Bukharin pointed out.

J do not think he will continue to do so much longer." Peter Fungabera turned to the sergeant who was standing attentively behind him. "You have done well. Very well, so far."

"Mambo!" "I believe that this Matabele dog and his white friends are being hidden and fed by the local people."

"Mambo!"

"We will question them."

"Mambo!"

"We will start with the nearest village, which is it?"

"The village of Vusamanzi lies beyond this valley and the next."

"You will move in and surround it. Nobody must leave or escape, not a goat, not a child." "Mambo!"

"When you have secured the village, I will come to supervise the interrogation." raig and Tungata made three climbs down to Lobengula's pool at the foot of the grand gallery, carrying the makeshift diving gear, the spare oxygen bottles, the underwater lamps that Craig had made up with the batteries and globes scavenged from the life, jackets, firewood and fur blankets to warm Craig after each dive, and provisions to avoid the necessity of climbing back to the upper cavern for meals.

After discussion it was agreed that the two girls would take turns at remaining in the upper cavern, to meet the messengers from Vusamanzi's village and to carry down a warning to the others in the event of a Shana patrol stumbling on the entrance.

Before testing the diving equipment, Craig and Tungata made a careful survey of the route down to the pool, choosing the positions on which they would fall back if they were ever forced to defend the inner recesses of the cave system against a Shana attack. Although neither of them mentioned it, they were both acutely aware that there was no final position, no ultimate escape hole from the mountain depths, and that any defence must end at the icy waters of the pool.

Tungata made the only open acknowledgement of this when, in plain sight of the other three, he took four 7.62 bullets for the Tokarev pistol, wrapped them in a scrap of goat-skin, and wedged them in a crack in the limestone wall beside the pool. The -two girls watched him with sickly fascination, and though Craig made a show of checking his breathing equipment, they all understood. This was the final assurance against torture and slow mutilation, one bullet for each of them.

"Okay!" Craig's voice was overloud for the silence of the gallery.

"I'm going to see h*w efficiently this contraption is going to drown me." Tungata lifted the set and Craig knelt and slipped his head through the yoke of the life-jacket. Sally' Anne and Sarah settled the bottle and canisters on his back, and then strapped them in place with strips of canvas cut from the seat covers. Craig checked the knots. If the set ever failed, he must be able to jettison it in a hurry.

At last he hopped into the pool, shuddered at the cold as he fitted the mask over his mouth and nose, secured the strap behind his head and half-filled his chest bag with oxygen. He gave the three on the bank a thumbsup sign, and lowered himself below the surface.

As he had anticipated, buoyancy was his first problem.

The pull of the bag on his chest rolled him onto his back likea dead fish, and with the thrust of his one leg, he was unable to right himself. He paddled back to the slab, and began the irksome business of experimenting with rock weights to adjust his attitude in the water.

In the end he found that the only way to do it was to hold an excessively heavy stone and let it draw him down headfirst. However, as soon as he released the stone, he was borne irresistibly upwards.

"At least the joints are watertight," he told them when he surfaced again. "And I'm getting oxygen. There is a lot of water leaking in around the edges of the mask, but I can purge that in the usual way." He demonstrated the trick of holding the mask at the top and forcing the accumulated water out of the bottom with a sharp exhalation of breath.

"When are you going to go for the wall?"

"I guess I'm as ready now as I'll ever be," Craig admitted reluctantly.

"V* ou must understand that I wish to be as a father to you," Peter Fungabera smiled gently. "I look upon you as my children."

"I

can understand this Shana chattering as little as I can the barking of baboons from the hilltops Vusamanzi replied courteously, and Peter Fungabera made a gesture of irritation as he turned to his sergeant.

"Where is that translator?"

"He will be here very soon, mambo." Tapping his swagger-stick against his thigh, Peter Fungabera walked slowly down the ragged rank of villagers that his troopers had gathered in from their hoeing on the maize fields and had flushed from the huts.

Apart from the old man, they were all women and children. Some of the women were as ancient as the witch-doctor, with white woolly pates and wizened dugs hanging to their waists, others were still capable of child-bearing with fat infants strapped to their backs, or standing naked at their knees; snot had dried white around the toddlers" nostrils and flies crawled unnoticed on their lips and at the corners of their eyes, and they stared up at Peter as he passed with fathomless eyes. There were still younger women with firm full breasts and glossy skin, pre-pubescent girls and uncircumcised boys. Peter Fungabera smiled kindly at them, but they stared back at him without expression.

"My Matabele puppies, we will hear you yap a little before this day is done," he promised softly, and turned at the end of the line. He walked back slowly to where the Russian waited in the shade of one of the huts.

"You will get nothing qut of the old one." Bukharin took the ebony cigarette-holder from between his teeth and coughed softly, covering his mouth with his hand. "He is dried up, beyond pain, beyond suffering. Look at his eyes.

Fanatic."

"I agree, these sangoma are capable of self-hypnosis, he will be impervious to pairWPeter Fungabera shot back the cuff of his battle-sino and glanced impatiently at his watch. "Where is that translator?" It was another hour before the Matabele trusty from the rehabilitation centre was hustled up the path from the valley. He fell on his knees before Peter Fungabera, blubbering and holding up his manacled hands.

"Get up!" Then, to the sergeant, "Remove his manacles.

Bring the old man here." Vusamanzi was led into the centre of the village square.

"Tell him I am his father," Fungabera ordered.

"Mambo, he replies that his father was a man, not a hyena."

"Tell him that although I cherish him and all his people, I am displeased with him."

"Mambo, he replies that if he has made Your Honour unhappy, then he is well content."

"Tell him he has tied to my men."

"Mambo, he hopes for the opportunity to do so again."

"Tell him that I know he is protecting and feeding four enemies of the state."

"Mambo, he suggests that Your Honour is demented.

There are no hidden enemies of the state."

"Very well. Now address all these people. Repeat that I wish to know where the traitors are hidden. Tell them that if they lead me to them, then nobody in the village will come to any harm." The translator stood before the silent rank of women and children, and made a long and passionate plea, but when he ended, they stared back at him stolidly. One of the infants began to scream petulantly, and its mother swung it under her arm and pressed her swollen nipple into its tiny mouth. There was silence again.

"Sergeant!" Peter Fungabera gave terse orders, and Vusamanzi's hands were snatched behind his back and bound at the wrists. One of the troopers fashioned a hangman's noose in a length of nylon rope and tossed the free end of 0, the rope over one of the main supports of an elevated maize bin at the edge of the square. They stood Vusamanzi under the maize bin and dropped the noose over his head.

"Now tell his people that when any one of them agrees to lead us to the traitors, this punishment will end immediately." The translator raised his voice, but he had not finished "my before Vusamanzi called over him in a firm voice, UI curse upon any of you who speak to this Shana pig. I command silence upon you, no matter what is done he who breaks it will be visited by me from beyond the grave.

1, Vusamanzi, master of the waters, command this thing!"

"Do it!" Peter Fungabera ordered, and the sergeant inched in the slack of the rope. The noose closed around the old man's neck, and gradually he was forced up onto his tiptoes.

"Enough!" Peter Fungabera ordered and d-icy secured the free end of the rope.

Now, let them come forward and speak." The translator moved down the rank of women, urging them and finally pleading unashamedly, but Vusamanzi glared at his women fiercely, unable to speak but still commanding them with all his will.

"Break one of his feet," ordered Peter Fungabera, and the sergeant faced the old man and, with a dozen blows, using the butt of his rifle likea maize stamp, he crushed Vusamanzi's left foot. As the women heard the brittle old bones snap like kindling for the hearth, they began to wail and ululate.

"Speak!" Peter Fungal5era commanded.

Vusamanzi stood on one leg, his neck twisted to one side at the pull of the rope. His damaged foot began to swell, likea balloon being inflated, to three times its natural size, the skin stretched black and shiny as an overripe fruit on the point of splitting open.

"Speak!" Peter Fungabera ordered the second time, and the mournin cries of die women drowned him out.

"Break his other food" he nodded to the sergeant.

As the rifle-butt shattered the complex of small bones in Vusamanzi's right foot, he fell sideways against the rope, and the sergeant stepped back, grinning at the contortions of the old man as he tried frantically to relieve the pressure of the rope by taking his weight on his mutilated flet.

All the women were screaming now, and the children's cries swelled the anguished chorus. One of the old women, the senior wife, broke the line and ran forward with both thin arms outstretched towards her husband of fifty years.

"Leave her! Peter Fungabera ordered the guards who would have restrained her. They stepped aside.

The frail old woman reached her husband and tried to lift him, crying out her love and her compassion, but she did not have d -te strength even for Vusamanzi's emaciated body. She succeeded only in relieving the pressure on his L I larynx enough to prolong the agonies of his strangulation.

The old man's mouth was open, hunting for air, and white froth coated his lips. He was making a harsh, cawing sound, and the old wife's antics were ludicrous.

"Listen to the Matabele rooster crow, and his ancient hen cackle! Peter Fungabera smiled, and his troopers guffawed delightedly.

It took a long time, but when at last Vusamanzi hung still and silent with his face twisted up to the sky, his wife sank to the earth at his feet and rocked her body rhythmically as she began the keen of mourning.

Peter Fungabera. walked back to the Russian, and Bukharin lit another cigarette and murmured, "Crude and ineffective."

"There was never any chance with the old fool. We had to get him out of the way, and set the mood." Peter dabbed at his chin and forehead with the tail of his scarf. "It was effective, Colonel, just look at the faces of the women He tucked the scarf back into the neck of his smock and strolled back to the women.

"Ask them where the enemies of the state are hidden." But as the translator began to speak, the old woman sprang to her feet and rushed back to face them.

"You saw your lord die without speaking," she screeched.

"You heard his command. You know that he will return!" Peter Fungabera. altered the grip on his swagger, stick and with little apparent effort drove the point of it up under the old woman's ribs. She screamed and collapsed.

Her spleen, enlarged by endemic malarial infection, had ruptured at the blow.

"Get rid of her," Peter ordered, and one of the troopers seized her ankles and dragged her away behind the huts.

"Ask them where the enemies of the state are hidden." Peter walked slowly along the rank, looking into their faces, evaluating the degree of terror that he saw in each pair of black Matabele eyes. He took his time over the selection, coming back at last to the youngest mother, barely more than a child herself, her infant strapped upon her back with a strip of patterned blue cloth.

He stood in front of her and stared her down, then, when he judged the moment, he reached out and took her wrist. He led her gently to the centre of the open square, where the remains of the watch-fire still burned.

He kicked the smouldering ends of the logs together, and, still holding the girl, waited until they burst into flames again. Then he twisted the girl's arm, forcing her to her knees. Slowly silence fell over the other women, and they watched with deadly fascination.

Peter Fungabera loosened the blue cloth and lifted the infant off the girl's back. It was a boy. A chubby infant, with skin the colour of wild honey, his little pot-belly was gorged with his mother's milk, and there were creases of fat like bracelets, at his wrists and ankles.

Peter tossed him up lightly and as he fn seized one ankle. The child shrieked with shocked oAt rage dangling upside down from Peter's fist.

"Where are the enemies of the state hidden?" The child's face was swelling and darkening with blood.

"She says she does not know." Peter Fungabera lifted the child high above the flames.

"Where are the enemies of the state?" Each time he repeated the question he lowered the infant a few inches.

"She says she does not know." Suddenly Peter lowered the little wriggling body into the very heart of the flames, and the child squealed with a totally new sound. Peter lifted it clear of the flames after a second and dangled it in front of its mother's face. The flames had frizzled away the child's eyelashes and the tight little criss,curls from its scalp.

"Tell her that I will roast this little piglet slowly and then I will force her to eat it." The girl tried to snatch her child back, but he kept it just beyond her reach. The girl started screaming a single phrase, repeating it over and over again, and the other women sighed and covered their faces.

"She says she will lead you to them." Peter Fungabera. dropped the infant into her arms and strolled back to the Russian. Colonel Bukharin inclined his head slightly in grudging admiration.

arty feet down Craig hung suspended before the wall4 of the tomb. He had anchored his waist strap to a lump of limestone, and by the feeble yellow light of the lamp from one of the life-jackets was carefully exam OF

ming the masonry for a weak point of entry. Using his hands to supplement his water-distorted vision, he found that there was no break or aperture, but that the foot of the wall was composed of much larger lumps of limestone than the top. Probably the availability of large rocks within easy portability of the tomb had been exhausted as the work progressed and the old witch-doctor and his apprentices had fallen back on smaller material, and yet the smallest was larger than a man's head.

Craig seized one of these and struggled to dislodge it.

His hands had been softened by the water, and a tiny puff of blood clouded the water as his skin split on the sharp file edge of the stone, but there was no pain for the cold had numbed him.

Almost immediately the bloodstain in the water was obscured by a darker shadow as the dirt and debris that had lain so long undisturbed swirled into suspension at his efforts. Within seconds he was totally blinded as the water was filthied, and he switched off the lamp to conserve the battery. Small particles of dirt irritated his eyes, and he closed them tightly, working only by sense of touch.

There are degrees Of darkness, but this was total. It was a darkness that seemed to have physical weight and it crushed down upon him, emphasizing the hundreds of feet of solid rock and water above him. The oxygen he drew into his mouth had a flat chemical taste, and every few breaths a spurt of water would find its way around the ill fitting seal of his mask and he choked upon it, forcing himself not to cough, for a coughing fit might dislodge the mask entirely.

The cold was likea terminal disease, sapping and destroying him, affecting his judgement and reactions, making it more and more difficult to guard against the onset of oxygen poisoning, and each signal on the rope from the surface seemed to be an eternity after the last.

But he worked at the wall with a grim determination, beginning to hate the long, dead ancestors of Vusamanzi for their thoroughness in inlding it.

By the time his half-hour shift finally ended, he had pulled down a pile of rock from the head of the wall and had tunnelled a hole three or four feet mito the masonry just wide enough to accommodate his upper body with its bulky oxygen equipment strapped to it, but there was still no indication as to just how much thicker the wall was.

He cleared the rock he had dislodged, kicking it down the incline of the chute and letting it fall away into the depths of the grand gallery. Then, with soaring relief, he untied the anchor rope and slid down after it and began the long ascent to the surface of the pool.

Tungata helped him clamber out of the water onto the slab, for he was weak as a child and the equipment on his back weighed him down. Tungata pulled the set off over his head, while Sarah poured a mug of black tea and ladled sticky brown sugar into it.

"Sally-Anne?"he asked.

Tendula is standing guard in the upper cavern,"Tungata answered.

Craig cupped his hands around the mug, and edged closer to the smoky little fire, shaking with the cold.

"I have started a small hole in the top of the wall and gone into it about three feet, but there is no way of guessing how thick it is or how many more dives it will need to get through it." He sipped the tea.

"One thing we have overlooked: I will need something to carry the goodies, if we find them." Craig crossed his fingers and Sarah made her own sign to ward off misfortune. "The beer-pots are obviously brittle old Insutsha broke one and they will be awkward to carry. We will have to use the bags I made from the canvas seat covers. When Sarah goes up to relieve Pendula, she must send them down." As the numbness of cold was dispelled by the fire and hot tea, so the pain in his head began. Craig knew that it was the effect of breathing high-pressure oxygen, the first symptom of poisoning. It was likea high-grade migraine, crushing in on his brain so that he wanted to moan aloud.

He fumbled three painkillers from the first-aid kit and washed them down with hot tea.

Then he sat in a dejected huddle and waited for them to take effect. He was dreading his return to the wall so strongly that it sickened his stomach and corroded his will.

He found that he was looking for an excuse to postpone the next dive, anything to avoid that terrible cold and die suffocating press of dark waters upon him.

Tungata was watching him silently across the fire, and Craig slipped the frir cape off his shoulders and handed the empty mug back to Sarah. He stood up. The headache had degraded to a dull throb behind his eyes.

"Let's go," he said, and Tungata laid a hand on his upper arm and squeezed it before he stooped to lift the oxygen set over Craig's head.

Craig quailed at this new contact with the icy water, but he forced himself into it, and the stone he held weighted him swiftly into the depths. In his imagination the entrance to the tomb no longer resembled an eyeless socket, but rather the toothless maw of some horrible creature from African mythology, gaping open to ingest him.

He entered it and swam up the inclined shaft, and anchored himself before the untidy hole he had burrowed into the wall. The sediment had settled, and in the glow of his lamp the shadows and shapes of rock crowded in upon him, and he wrestled with another attack of claustrophobia, anticipating the clouds of filth which would soon render him blind. He reached out and the rock was brutally rough on his torn hands. He prised a lump of limestone free, and a small slide of the surrounding stones sent sediment billowing around his head. He switched off his lamp and began the cold blind work again.

The rope signals at his waist were his only contact with reality and finite time A somehow they helped him to control his mount in terror of the cold and darkness.

Twenty minutes, and his headache was breaking through the drugs with which he had subdued it. It felt as though a blunt nail was being driven with hammer blows into his temple, and as though the iron point was cutting in behind his eyes.

"I can't last another ten minutes," he thought. "I'm going up now." He began to turn away from the wall and then just managed to prevent himself.

"Five minutes," he promised himself "Just five minutes more." He forced his upper body into the opening, and the steel oxygen cylinder struck a rock and rang likea bell. He groped around the edges of a triangular-shaped rock that had been frustrating his efforts for the past few minutes.

Once again he wished for a short jeremy bar to -get into that crack and break it open. His fingers ached as he used them instead, getting them in under the rock, and then he wedged himself against the sides of the hole and began to jerk at it, slowly exerting more strength with each heave, until his back was bunched with muscle and his belly ached with the effort.

Something moved and he heard rock grate on rock. He heaved again and the crack closed on his fingers and he screamed with pain into his mask. But the pain of his crushed fingertips unlocked reserves of strength he had not yet tapped. He flung all of this against the rock and it rolled, his fingers came free and there was a rumbling, clanking roar of falling sliding stone blocks.

He lay in the hole and hugged his injured fingers to his chest, whimpering into his mask, half drowning in the water that flooded in when he screamed.

"I'm going up now," he decided. "That's it. I've had enough." He began to wriggle out of the aperture, gingerly putting out one hand to push himself backwards. He felt nothing. In front of him, his hand was waving around in the open. He lay still, the water sloshing in his mask, trying to make a decision. Somehow he knew that if he pulled out now and surfaced, he would not be able to force himself to enter the pool again.

Once again he groped ahead, and when he touched nothing, he inched forward and reached out again. His anchor-line held him and he slipped the knot, crept forward a little further and the pack on his back jammed u p under the stone roof He rolled half onto his side, and was able to free it. Still he could touch nothing ahead of him. He was through the wall, and a sudden superstitious dread seized him.

He pulled back and the pack hit the roof again, and this time it jammed solidly. He was stuck fast, and immediately he began to fight to be free. His breathing hunted, beating the mechanical efficiency of the valves in his mask so that he could get no more oxygen and as he starved, his heart began to race and the pulse in his ears deafened him.

He could not go backwards, and he kicked with his one good leg, and with his stump got a purchase against smooth rock. He pushed forward with both legs and, in a sudden rush similar to the moment of childbirth, he slid forward through the hole in the wall of the tomb into the space beyond.

He groped wildly about him and one hand hit the smooth wall of the shaft at his side, but now he was free of his anchor and the buoyancy of the bag on his chest bore him helplessly upwards. He threw up both hands to prevent his head striking the roof of the shaft, and to grab a handhold. Under his numb fingertips the rock was slippery as soaped glass, and as he ascended, so the oxygen in the bag expanded with the release of pressure and he went up more swiftly, only the signal rope at his waist slowing his headlong upward rush. As he struggled to stabilize himself, the excess oxygen poured. out of the sides of the mask, and panic a t last rode him 66mpletely. He was swirled aloft in total terrifying darknAs.

rfac Suddenly he burst out through the s,u e and lay on his back bobbing around likea cork. He tore the mask off his face and took a lungful of air. It was clean, but faintly tainted with the smell of bat guano. He lay on the surface and sucked it down gratefully.

The rope tugged rapidly at his waist. Six tugs repeated.

It was the code question from Tungata. "Are you all right?" His uncontrolled ascent must have ripped rope off the coil Emma-_

that lay between Tungata's feet and thoroughly alarmed him. Craig signalled back to reassure him and fumbled with the switch of his lamp.

The dim glow of light was dazzling to his eyes that had been blinded so long and they smarted from the irritation of the muddied waters. He blinked around him.

The passage had come up at a sharply increased angle from the masonry wall, until it was now a vertical shaft.

The old witch-doctors had been forced to chip niches in the walls and build in a ladder of rough-hewn timber to enable them to make the ascent. The poles of the ladder were secured with bark rope and were latticed up the open shaft above Craig's head, but the light of his lantern was too feeble to illuminate the top of the steep shaft. The ladder disappeared into the gloom.

Craig paddled to the side and steadied himself with a iandhold on the primitive wooden ladder while he ass em led his thoughts and figured out the lay of the shaft and its probable shape. He realized that by returning to water level, he must have ascended forty feet after his access through the wall. He must have travelled an approximately U-shaped journey the first leg was down the grand gallery, the bottom of the U was along the shaft to the wall, and the last leg was up the steeper branch of the shaft to return to water level again.

He tested the timber ladder work and though it creaked and sagged a little, it bore his weight. He would have to jettison the diving-gear and leave it floating in the shaft while he climbed up the rickety ladder, but first he must rest and regain full control of himself. He put both hands to his head and squeezed his temples, the pain was scarcely bearable.

At that moment, the rope at his waist jerked taut three tugs, repeated. The urgent recall the signal for mortal danger something was desperately wrong, and Tungata was sending a warning and a plea for help.

Craig crammed the mask back onto his face and signalled, "Pull me up!" The rope came taut and he was drawn swiftly below the surface.

he young Matabele mother was allowed to keep her infant strapped to her back, but she was manacled by her wrist to the wrist of the Third Brigade sergeant.

Peter Fungabera was tempted to use the helicopter to speed the pursuit and recapture of the fugitives, but finally he made the decision to go in on foot, silently. He knew the quality of the men he was hunting. The beat of a helicopter would alert them and give them a chance to slip away into the bush once again. For the same reasons of stealth, he kept the advance party small and manageable twenty picked men, and he briefed each of them individually.

"We must take this -Matabele alive. Even if your own life is the exchange, I want him alive!" The helicopter would be called in by radio as soon as they had good contact, and another three hundred men could be rushed up to seal off the area.

The small force moved swiftly. The girl was dragged along by the big Shana Argeant, and, weeping with shame at her own treachelryloshe pointed out the twists and forks of the barely distinguishable path.

"The villagers have been feeding and supplying them," Peter murmured to the Russian. "This path has been used regularly."

"Bad place for an ambush." Bukharin glanced up at the slopes of the valley that overlooked the path. "They may have elements of the escapees with them."

"An ambush will mean a contact I pray for it," Peter told him softly. And once again the Russian felt satisfaction at his choice of man. This one had the heart for the task. Now it needed only a small change in the fortunes of war and his masters in Moscow would have their foothold in central Africa.

Once they had it, of course, this man Fungabera would need careful watching. He was not just another gorilla to be manipulated with a heavy pressure on the puppet strings. This one had depths which had not yet been fathomed, and it would be Bukharin's task to undertake this exploration. It would require subtlety and finesse. He looked forward to the work, he would enjoy it just as he was enjoying the present chase.

He swung easily along the track behind Peter Fungabera, pacing him without having to exert himself fully, and there was that delicious tightness in his guts and the stretching of the nerves, the heightening of all the senses that special rapture of the manhunt.

Only he knew that the hunt would not end with the taking of the Matabele. After that there would be other quarry, as elusive and as prized. He studied the back of the man who strode ahead of him, delighting in the way he moved, in the long elastic strides, in the way he held his head upon the corded neck, in the staining of sweat through the camouflage cloth yes, even in the odour of him, the feral smell of Africa.

Bukharin smiled. What a set of trophies to crown his long and distinguished career, the Matabele, the Shana and the land.

These mental preoccupations had in no way distracted Bukharin's physical senses. He was fully aware that the valley was narrowing down upon them, of the increased steepness of the slopes above and the peculiar stunted and deformed nature of the forest. He reached forward to touch Peter's shoulder, to draw his attention to the change in the geological formation of the cliff beside them, the contact of dolomite on country rock, when abruptly the Matabele woman began to shriek. Her voice echoed shrilly off the cliffs and repeated through the surrounding forest, shattering the hot and brooding silences of this strangely haunted valley. Her screams were unintelligible, but the warning they carried was unmistakable.

Peter Fungabera. took two swift strides up behind her, reached over her shoulder and cupped his hand under her chin; he placed his other forearm at the base of her neck and with a clean jerk pulled her head back against it. The girl's neck broke with an audible snap, and her screams were cut off as abruptly as they had begun.

As her lifeless body dropped, Peter spun and urgently signalled his troopers. "They reacted instantly, diving off the path and circling swiftly out ahead in the hooking MOvement of encirclement.

When they were in position, Peter glanced back at the Russian and nodded. Bukharin moved up silently beside him, and they went forward together, weapons held ready, quickly and warily.

The faint track led them to the base of the Cliff, and then disappeared into a narrow vertical cleft in the rock.

Peter and Bukharin darted forward and flattened themselves against the cliff on each side of the opening.

"The burrow of the Matabele fox," Peter gloated quietly.

"I have him now!" he Shana are here!" The scream came from the entrance of the cavern, muted by the fold of the rock and the screening brush. "The Shana have come for you! Run! The Shana-" a woman's voice cut off suddenly.

Sarah sprang up from the fire, overturning the three legged iron cooking-pot, and she fled across the cavern, snatching up the lantern as she went, racing into the maze of passages.

From the head of the steep natural staircase into the grand gallery she screamed her warning down towards the pool, "The Shana are here, my lord! They have discovered usP And the echoes magnified the terror and urgency of her voice.

"I am coming to yaup Tungata boomed back up the gallery, and he came bounding up the shaft into the light of her lantern. He climbed the stone staircase, swinging himself up on the rope, and placed an arm around her shoulders.

"Where are they?"

"At the entrance there was a voice, one of our women calling a warning I could hear the fear in her and then it was cut off. I think she has been killed."

"Go down to the pool. Help Pendula to bring Pupho up."

"My lord, there is no escape for us, is there?"

"We will fight," he said. "And in fighting we may find a Hill way. Go now, Pupho will tell you what to do." Carrying the AK 47 at the trail, Turigata disappeared into the passage leading upwards towards the main cavern.

Sarah scrambled down the rock ramp way in her haste failing the last few feet, barking her knees.

"Pendula!" she called, desperate for the comfort of human contact.

"Here, Sarah. Help me." When she reached the slab at the bottom of the gallery, Sally-Anne was waist-deep at the edge of the pool, straining on the rope.

"Help me, it's stuck!" Sarah jumped down beside her, and grabbed the tail of the rope.

"The Shana have found us." She heaved on the rope.

"Yes. We heard you."

"What shall we do, Pendula?"

"Let's get Craig out of here first. He will think of something." Suddenly the rope gave, as forty feet below Craig managed to force himself through the narrow opening in the wall) and the two girls hauled him upwards hand over hand.

Oxygen bubbles burst in a seething rash on the surface of the pool, and they saw Craig coming up through the gin-clear water, the masking transforming him into some grotesque sea monster. He reached the surface and ripped the mask off his head, snorting and coughing at the fresh air.

"What is it?" he choked as he splashed to the edge of the rock slab.

"The Shana are here." Both girls together, in English and Sindebele.

"Oh GaR Craig collapsed weakly onto the slab. "Oh GaR "What shall we do, Craig?" They were both staring at him piteously, and the cold and the pain in his head seemed to paralyse him.

Abruptly the air around their heads reverberated as d-lough they were within the sounding body of a kettledrum beaten at a furious tempo.

"Gunfire!" Craig whispered, covering his ears to protect them. "Sam has made contact."

"How long can he hold them

"Depends if they use grenades, or gas-" he left it hanging and straightened up, shivering violently. He stared back at them. They seemed to sense his despair, and looked away.

"Where is the pistol?" Sarah asked fearfully, glancing up at the twist of goat-skin in the crack of the rock wall.

"No," Craig snapped. "Not that." He reached out and caught her arm. He pulled hi mse If together, shaking off despair as he shook the water from his hair.

"Have you ever used an aqualung?" he demanded of Sally-Anne. She shook her head.

"Well, now is as good a time-"

"I couldn't go in the reP Fearfully Sally' Anne stared into the pool.

"You can do anything you have to do," he snarled at her.

"Listen, I have found another branch of the shaft that comes up above surface. It will take three or four minutes-"

No, "Sally-Anne cringed away from him.

"I'll take you through first," he said. "Then I will come back for Sarah."

"I would rather die here, Pupho," the black girl whispered.

"Then you'll get your wish." Craig was already changing the oxygen bottle, screwing on one of the fresh cylinders, and he turned his attention back to Sally-Anne.

"You put your arms around me and breathe slowly and easily. Hold each breath as long as you can, then let it out carefully. The hole in the wall is narrow, but you are smaller than I am, you'll make it easily." He lifted the oxygen set over her head and lowered it onto her shoulders. "I will go through first, and pull you behind me. Once we are through it is straight up. As we go up just remember to exhale as the oxygen in your lungs expands again or you will pop likea paper bag. Come on.

"Craig, I'm afraid."

"Never thought I'd hear you say that." Waist-deep in the pool he fitted the mask over the lower half of her face.

"Don't fight it," he told her. "Keep your eyes closed and relax. I will tow you. Don't struggle, for God's sake, don't struggle." She nodded at him, gagged by the mask, and again the gallery echoed to the deafening roar of automatic rifle-fire from above.

"Closer, Craig muttered. "Sam is being driven back." Then he called to Sarah on the slab above them.

"Give me my leg!" Sarah handed it down to him. He strapped it to his belt. "While I'm away, pack all the food you can find into the canvas bags. The spare lamps and batteries also I'll be back for you inside ten minutes." He began to hyperventilate, holding to his chest the boulder that would weigh them down. He gestured to Sally-Anne and she waded up behind him and put her arms around him under his armpits.

"Take a good breath and play dead," he ordered, and filled his own lungs for the last time. He fell forward with ally-Anne clinging to his back and they dropped together down towards the tomb entrance.

Halfway down Craig heard the click of the valves in her mask, and felt Sally-Anne's chest subside and swell as she breathed, and he tensed for her coughing fit. There wasn't one.

They reached the entrance and he dropped the stone and drew her up to the wall. Gently he disentangled her hands, trying to make his movements calm and unhurried.

He backed into the aperture, holding both her hands, and pulled her in after him. Unencumbered by the oxygen gear he slid through easily.

He heard her hr e again. "Good girlP he applauded th silently. "Good brave girl!" For a moment her gear jammed in the aperture, but he reached forward and freed it, then eased her towards him.

She was through. Thank you, God, she was through.

Now up! They were accelerating, pressure squeaking in his ears. He prodded her sharply in the ribs, and heard the rush of bubbles as she released the expanding oxygen from her lungs.

PeT "Clever girl." He squeezed her hand, and she squeezed back.

The ascent took so long that he began to fear he had lost his way, and taken a false branch of the tunnel, and then suddenly they broke out through the surface and he pumped for air.

Gasping, he reached across and switched on her lamp.

"You're not good," he panted. "You are simply bloody marvelous!" He towed her to the foot of the ladder and began stripping off her oxygen gear.

"Get up the ladder, out of the water," he grunted. "Here, strap my leg to the rung. I'll be back soonest." He did not waste time on the difficult task of donning the gear while treading water, instead he tucked the canisters under his arm.

He had no stone to weight himself down so he depressed the valve and emptied the oxygen bag. The set was now negatively buoyant starting to pull him under.

He could not use oxygen so he would have to free-dive again. He hung onto a rung of the ladder work while he pumped his lungs with air, and then duck-dived.

At the wall he slid backwards through the opening and pulled the empty set after him. With the bag deflated, it came through readily enough. At the entrance to the grand gallery, he opened the tap of the oxygen cylinder. Gas hissed into the bag, swelling it, and immediately it was buoyant again. It drew Craig rapidly up to the surface of the pool.

Sarah was perched on the edge of the slab, but she had the canvas bags packed and ready.

"Come on!" Craig gasped.

Tupho, I cannot."

"Get your little black arse down here! he rasped hoarsely.

"Here, take the bags, I will stay."

Craig reached up and caught her ankle. He yanked her off the slab, and she splashed into the water and clung to him.

"Do you know what the Shana will do to you?" Roughly he pulled the yoke of the set over her head, and there was another burst of machine-gun fire above them, the ricochets wailing off the upper walls of the gallery.

Craig pressed the mask over her face.

"BreathePhe ordered. She sucked air through the mask.

"Do you see how easy it is?" She nodded.

"Here, hold the mask on your face with both hands.

Breathe slowly and easily. I will carry you lie still. Do not move!" She nodded again. He strapped the canvas bags to his waist and picked up the weight stone. He began hyperventilating.

From above them came the packing report of a grenade launcher something clattered down the gallery and the entire cavern was lit by the fierce blue glare of a phosphorus flare.

With a rock tucked under one arm, and Sarah under the other, Craig ducked below the surface. Halfway down he felt Sarah try to breathe and immediately he knew they were in trouble. She took water, and began choking and wheezing into her mask. Her body convulsed against him, and she began writhing. and struggling. He held her with difficulty; she was surprisingly strong and her hard slim body twisted in his ms.

They reached the entrance to the shaft, and as Craig let the weight fall, their buoyancy altered drastically. Sarah whirled on top of him, and drove her elbow into his face.

The blow stunned him and for a moment he relaxed his grip. She broke away from him, starting to rise rapidly, kicking and windmilling.

He reached up and just managed to grip her ankle.

Anchoring himself on the sill of the entrance, he hauled her down again and in the lamp glow saw that she had torn the mask off her face.

It was snaking wildly about her head on its hose.

He dragged her bodily towards the wall, and she clawed at him and kicked him in the lower belly, but he raised his knees to protect his groin and swung her bodily around.

Holding her from behind, he dragged her to the hole, and she fought him with the maniacal strength of terror and panic. He got her halfway through the wall before the hose caught in a crack in the rock, anchoring them.

While he struggled to free it, Sarah began to weaken, her movements became spasmodic and uncoordinated. She was drowning.

Craig got both his hands on the hose, and a foothold on the rock of the wall. He pulled with all the strength of his arms and his body and the hose ripped out of the oxygen bag. The gas escaped through the rent in a roar of silver bubbles, but Sarah was free.

He pulled her out of the hole and started pedalling upwards, his one leg only just pushing them against the weight of the purged oxygen set and the drag of the canvas food-bags at his waist.

Craig's struggles to subdue Sarah had burned up his own oxygen reserves. His lungs were on fire, and his chest spasmed violently. He kept on pedalling. Sarah was quiescent in his arms, and he felt that despite all his efforts they were no longer moving, that they were hanging in the black depths, both of them drowning slowly. Gradually the urge to breathe passed, and it all ceased to be worth further effort. It was much easier just to relax and let it happen.

Slowly he became aware of a mild pain. Through his indifference he wondered vaguely about that, but it was only when his head broke surface that he realized that someone had him by the hair.

Even in his half-drowned state, he realized that Sally Anne must have seen the lamp glow below the surface and recognized their predicament. She had dived down to them, seized Craig by the hair and dragged him up to the surface.

As he struggled for breath, he realized also that he still had his grip on Sarah's arm. The black girl was floating face-down on the surface beside him.

"Help mePhe choked on his own breath. "Get her out! Between them, they stripped the damaged oxygen set off her and lifted the unconscious girl onto the first rung of the ladder work above the water, where Sally-Anne cradled her face-down over her lap. Sarah hung there likea drowned black kitten.

Craig put his finger into her mouth, making sure that her tongue was clear, and then pressed the finger down into her throat to trigger the retching reflex. Sarah spewed up a mixture of water and vomit, and began to make small uncoordinated twitching movements.

Hanging in the water beside her, Craig splashed the vomit off her lips and then covered her mouth with his own, forcing his breath down into her lungs while Sally Anne cradled the limp body as best she could on the awkward perch.

"She's breathing again." Craig lifted his mouth off Sarah's. He felt sick and dizzy and weak from his own near-drowning.

"The diving set is buggered," he whispered, "the hose is torn out." He groped or6bnd for it, but it had sunk into the shaft.

(Sam," he whispered. "I've got to go back for Sam." enough. You'll kill "Darling, you can't you've done e yourself."

"Sam," he repeated. "Got to get Sam." Clumsily he untied the straps of the canvas food-bags and hung them beside his leg on the ladder. He clung to the ladder, breathing as deeply as his aching lungs would allow. Sarah was coughing and wheezing, but trying to sit up. Sally-Anne lifted her and held her on her lap likea child.

"Craig, darling, come back safely," she pleaded.

"Too right," he agreed, allowing himself the indulgence Of another half-dozen breaths of air, before he pushed himself off the ladder and the cold waters closed around his head again.

The underwater section of the grand gallery, even down as deep as the mouth of the shaft, was lit by the phosphorus flares, and as Craig ascended, so the intensity of the light increased to a crackling electric blue like the glare of brute arc-lamps.

As he broke through the surface of the pool, he found that the upper gallery was filled with the swirling smoke of the burning flares.

He gasped for air and immediately pain shot down his throat into his chest and his eyes burned and smarted so that he could barely see.

"Tear gas," he realized. The Shana were gassing the cavern.

Craig saw Tungata was in the water, crouched waistdeep behind the slab of rock. He had torn a strip from his shirt, wet it and bound it over his mouth and nose, but his eyes were red and running with tears.

"The whole cavern is swarming with troopers," he told Craig, his voice muffled by the wet cloth, and he stopped as a stentorian disembodied voice echoed down the gallery, its English distorted by an electronic megaphone.

"If you surrender immediately, you will not be harmed." As if to punctuate this announcement, there was the "Pock" of a grenade-launcher and another tear-gas canister came flying down the gallery, bouncing off the limestone floor likea football, belching out white clouds of the irritant gas.

"They are down the staircase already, I couldn't stop them." Tungata bobbed up from behind the edge of the slab and fired a short burst up the gallery. His bullets cracked and whined from the rock, and then the AK went silent and he ducked down.

"The last magazine," he grunted and dropped the empty rifle into the water. He groped for the pistol on his belt.

"Come on, Sam," Craig gasped. "There is a way through beyond this pool."

"I can't swim." Tungata was checking the pistol, slapping the magazine into the butt and jerking back the slide to load.

"I got Sarah through." Craig was trying to breathe through the searing clouds of gas. "I'll get you through." Tungata looked up at him.

"Trust me, Sam."

"Sarah is safe?"

"I promise you, she is." Tungata hesitated, fighting his fear of the waters.

"You can't let them take you," Craig told him. "You owe it to Sarah and to your people." Perhaps Craig had discovered the only appeal that would move him. Tungata pushed the pistol back into his belt.

"Tell me what to do," he said.

it was impossible to hyperventilate in the gas-laden atmosphere.

"Get what air you can, and hold it. Hold it, force yourself not to breathe again," Craig wheezed. The tear gas was ripping his lungs all he could feel the cold and deadly spread of lethargy like liquid in his veins. It was going to be a long, hard road home.

down. "Fresh air!" There was "Here!" Tungata pulled him still a pocket of clean air trapped below the angle of the slab. Craig drank it in greedily.

He took Tungata's hands and placed them on the canvas belt. "Hold on! I he ordered, and when Tungata nodded, he pulled one last long breath, and they ducked under together. They went down fast.

When they reached the wall there was no bulky oxygen set to encumber them, and Craig pulled Tungata through with what remained of his strength. But he was slowing and weakening drastically, once again losing the urge to breathe, a symptom of anoxia, of oxygen starvation.

They were through the wall, but he could not think what to do next. He was confused and disorientated, his brain playing tricks with him. He found he was iggling weakly, precious air bubbling out between his lips. The glow of the lamp turned a marvelous emerald green, and then split into prisms of rainbow light. It was beautiful, and he examined it drunkenly, starting to roll onto his back. It was so peaceful and beautiful, just like that fall into oblivion after an injection of pentathol. The air trickled out of his mouth and the bubbles were bright as precious stones. He watched them rise upwards.

"Upwards!" he thought groggily. "Got to go up!" and he kicked lazily, pushing weakly upwards.

Immediately there was a powerful heave on his waist belt and he saw Tungata's legs driving like the pistons of a steam locomotive in the lamplight. He watched them with the weighty concentration of a drunkard, but slowly they faded out into blackness. His last thought was, "If this is dying, then it's better than its publicity," and he let himself go into it with a weary fatalism.

He woke to pain, and he tried to force himself back into that comforting womb darkness of death, but there were hands bullying and pommelling him, and the rough barked timber rungs of the ladder cutting into his flesh.

Then he was aware that his lungs burned and his eyes felt as though they were swimming in concentrated acid. His nerve ends flared up, so that he could feel every aching muscle and the sting of every scratch and abrasion on his skin.

Then he heard the voice. He tried to shut it out.

"Craig! Craig darling, wake upP And the painful slap of a wet hand against his cheek. He rolled his head away from it.

"He's coming round!" hey were like drowning rats at the bottom of a well, clinging half-submerged to the rickety ladder work all of them shivering with the cold.

The two girls were perched on the lower rung, Craig was strapped to the main upright with a loop of canvas under his armpits, and Tungata, in the water beside him, was holding his head, preventing it from flopping forward.

With an effort Craig peered around at their anxious faces and then he grinned weakly at Tungata. "Sam, you said you couldn't swim well, you could have footed me!"

"We can't stay here." Sally' Anne teeth chattered in her head.

"There is only one way" they all looked up the gloomy shaft above them.

Craig's head still felt wobbly on his neck, but he pushed Tungata's hand away, and forced himself to begin examining the condition of the timberwork.

It had been built sixty years ago. The bark rope that had been used by the old witch, doctors to bind the joints together had rotted, and now hung in brittle strings like the shavings from the floor of a carpentry shop. The entire structure seemed to0 have sagged to one side, unless the original builder's eye had not been straight enough to erect a plumb-line.

"Do you think it will hold us all?" Sarah voiced the question.

Craig found it difficult to think, he saw it all through a fine mesh of nausea and bone, weariness

"One at a time," he mumbled, "lightest ones first. You Sally-Anne, then Sarah--2 he reached up and untied his leg from the rung. "Take the rope up with you. When you get to the top, pull up the bags and the lamps." Obediently Sally-Anne coiled the rope over her shoulder, and began to climb up the ladder.

She went swiftly, lightly, but the ladder work creaked and swayed under her. As she went upwards, her lamp chased the shadows ahead of her up the shaft. She drew away until only the lamp glow marked her position, then even that disappeared abruptly.

"Sally-Anne!"

"All right!" Her voice came echoing down the shaft.

"There is a platform here."

"How big?"

"Big enough I'm sending down the rope." It came snaking down to them, and Tungata secured the bags to the end.

"Haul away!" The bundle went jerkily up the shaft, swinging on the rope.

"Okay, send Sarah." Sarah climbed out of sight, and they heard the whisper of the girls" voices high above. Then, "Okay next!"

"Go, SamP "You are lighter than I am."

"Oh for Chrissake, just do it! Tungata climbed powerfully, but the timberwork shook under his weight. One of the rungs broke free, and fell away beneath his feet.

"Look out below!" Craig ducked under the surface, and the pole hit the water above him with a heavy splash.

Tungata clambered out of sight, and his voice came "Carefully, Pupho! The ladder is breaking up! back, Craig pulled himself out of the water, and sitting on the bottom rung strapped on his leg.

OW

God, that feels good." He patted it affectionately, and gave a few trial kicks.

"I'm coming up," he called.

He had not reached the halfway point when he felt the structure move under him and he flung himself upwards too violently.

One of the poles broke with a report likea musket shot, and the entire structure lurched sideways. Craig grabbed the side frame, just as three or four cross-rungs broke away under him and fell, hitting the water below with a resounding series of splashes. His legs were dangling in space, and every time he kicked for a foothold, he felt the timberwork sag dangerously.

"Pupho!" I'm stuck. I can't move or the whole bloody thing will come down."

"Wait!" A few seconds of silence and then Tungata's voice again. "Here's the rope. There is a loop in the end." it dropped six feet from him.

"Swing it left a little, Sam." The loop swung towards him.

"A little more! Lower, a little lower!" It dangled within reach.

"Hold hard! Craig made a lunge,4i it and got his arm through the loop.

"I'm coming on!" He released his hold on the side frame and swung free.

He was too weak to climb.

"Pull me up!" Slowly he was drawn upwards, and even in that dangerously exposed position, Craig appreciated the strength that it needed to lift a full-grown man this way- Without Tungata, he would never have made it.

He saw the glow of the lamp reflected off the walls of the shaft and getting closer, and then Sally-Anne's head peering over the edge of the platform at him.

"Not far now. Hold on!" He came level with the edge of the rock platform, and there was Tungata braced against the far wall, a loop of the rope over his back and shoulder, hauling doublehanded on the rope with the cords standing out in his throat and his mouth open, grunting with the effort. Craig hooked his elbow over the edge and then as Tungata heaved again he kicked wildly and wriggled over the edge on his belly.

It was many minutes before he could sit up and take an interest in his surroundings again. The four of them were huddled, shivering and sodden, on a canted platform of water-worn limestone, just large enough to accommodate them.

Above them, the vertical shaft continued upwards, disappearing into darkness, the walls smooth and unseal, able. The ladder work built by the old witch-doctors reached only as high as this platform. In the silence, Craig could hear the drip of water somewhere up there in the darkness and the squeak of bats disturbed by their voices and movements. Sally' Anne held the lamp high, but they could not make out the top of the shaft.

Craig looked about the ledge. It was about eight feet Hill wide, and then in the far wall he saw the entrance to a subsidiary branch of the tunnel, much lower and narrower than the main shaft, cutting into the rock on the horizontal.

"That looks like the only way to go," Sally' Anne whispered. "That's where the old witch, doctors were headed." Nobody replied. They were all exhausted by the climb and chilled to the bone.

"We should keep going!" Sally-Anne insisted, and Craig roused himself.

(Leave the bags and rope here." His voice was still hoarse and scratchy from the tear gas and he coughed painfully.

"We can come back for them when we need them." He did not trust himself to stand. He felt weak and unsteady and the black drop of the shaft was close at his side. He crawled on hands and knees to the opening in the far wall.

"Give me the lamp." Sally-Anne handed it to him and he crawled into the low entrance.

There was a passage beyond. After fifty feet the roof lifted so that he could rise into a crouch and, steadying himself against the wall with his free hand, go on a little faster. The others were following him. Another hundred feet, and he stooped through a last low natural doorway of stone and then stood to his full height. He looked about him with swiftly rising wonder. The others coming out of the opening behind him jostled him, but he hardly noticed it. He was so enraptured by his new surroundings.

They stood in a group, close together, as if to draw comfort and courage from each other, and they stared.

Their heads revolved slowly, craning upwards and from side to side.

"My God, it's beautiful," whispered Sally-Anne. She took the lamp from Craigi hand and lifted it high.

They had entered # cavern of lights, a cavern of crystal.

Over countless ages I the sugary crystalline calcium had been deposited by water seepage over the tall vaulted ceiling and down the walls. It had dripped onto the floor and solidified.

It had crafted marvelous sculptures in glittering iridescent light. On the walls there were traceries, like ancient Venetian lace, so delicate that the lamplight shone through them as though through precious porcelain. There r were cornices and pillars of monolithic splendour Joining the high roof to the floor, there were suspended marvels of rainbow colours shaped like the wings of angels in flight.

Huge spiked stalactites hung as menacingly as the bur rushed sword of Damocles, or as the white teeth in the upper jaw of a man-eating shark. Others suggested gigantic chandeliers, or the pipes of a celestial organ, while from the floor the stalagmites rose in serried ranks, platoons and squadrons of fantastic shapes, hooded monks dressed in cassocks Of mother-of-pearl, wolves and hunchbacks, heroes in gleaming armour, ballerinas and hobgoblins, graceful and grotesque, but all burning with a million tiny crystalline sparks in the lamplight.

Still in a small group, hesitantly, a step at a time, they moved forward down the length of the cavern, picking their way through the gallery of tall stalagmitic statues and stumbling over the dagger like points of limestone that had broken off the ceiling and littered the floor like ancient arrowheads.

Craig stopped again, and the others pressed up so closely to him that they were all touching.

The centre of the cavern was open. The floor had been swept of fallen debris, and in the open space human hands had built, from gleaming limestone, a square platform, a stage or a pagan altar. On the altar, with legs drawn up against his chest, clad in the golden and dappled skin of a leopard, sat the body of a man.

"Lobengula." Tungata sank down on one knee. "The one who drives like the wind: Lobengula's hands were clasped over his knees, and they were mummified, black and shrunken. His fingernails had continued growing after death. They were long and curved, like the claws of a predatory beast. Lobengula. must once have worn a tall headgear of feathers and fur, but it had fallen from his head and now lay on the altar beside him.

The heron feathers were still blue and crisp, as though plucked that very day.

Perhaps by design, but more likely by chance, the sitting corpse had been placed directly beneath one of the seepages from the roof. Even as they stood before the altar, another droplet fell from high above and, with a soft tap, burst upon the old king's forehead, and then snaked down over his face like slow tears. Millions upon millions of drops must have fallen upon him, and each drop had laid down its deposit of shining calcium on the mummified head.

Lobengula was being transformed into stone, already his scalp was covered with a translucent helmet, like the tallow from a guttering candle. It had run down and filled his eye-cavities with the pearly deposit, it had lined his withered lips and built up the line of his jaw. Lobengula's perfect white teeth grinned out of his stone mask at them.

The effect was unearthly and terrifying. Sarah whimpered with superstitious dread and clutched at Sally' Anne who returned her grip as fervently. Craig played the lamp beam over that dreadful head and then slowly lowered it.

On the rock altar in front of Lobengula had been placed five dark objects. Four beer-pots, hand-moulded from clay with a stylized diamond pattern inscribed around each wide throat, and the mouth of each pot had been sealed with the membrane from the, ladder of a goat. The fifth object was a bag, made from the skin of an unborn zebra foetus, the seams stitched -with animal sinew.

"Sam, you-" Craig started, and his voice cracked. He cleared his throat, and started again. "You are his descendant. You are the only one who should touch anything here." Tungata was still down on one knee, and he did not reply. He was staring at the old king's transformed head, and his lips moved as he prayed silently. Was he addressing Sir, the Christian God, Craig wondered, or the spirits of his ancestors?

Sally-Anne's teeth chattered spasmodically, the only sound in the cavern, and Craig placed his arms around the two girls. They pressed against him gratefully, both of them shivering with the cold and with awe.

Slowly Tungata rose to his feet and stepped forward to the stone altar. "I see you, great Lobengula,"he spoke aloud.

Samson Kumalo, of your totem and of your blood, greet you across the years!" He was using his tribal name again, claiming his lineage as he went on in a low but steady voice. "If I am the leopard cub of your prophecy, then I ask your blessing, oh king. But if I am not that cub, then strike my desecrating hand and wither it as it touches the treasures of the house of Mashobane." He reached out slowly and placed his right hand on one of the black clay pots.

Craig found that he was holding his breath, waiting for he was not sure what, perhaps for a voice to speak from the king's long-dead throat, or for one of the great stalactites to crash down from the roof, or for a bolt of lightning to blast them all.

The silence drew out, and then Tungata placed his other hand on the beer pot and slowly lifted it in a salute to the corpse of the king.

There was a sharp crack and the brittle baked clay split.

The bottom fell out of the pot, and from it gushed a torrent of glittering light that paled and rendered insipid the crystalline coating of the great cavern. Diamonds rattled and bounced on the altar stone, tumbling and slithering over each other, piled in a pyramid, and lay smouldering like live coals in the lamplight.

cannot believe these are diamonds," Sally-Anne whispered. "They look like pebbles, pretty, shiny pebbles, but pebbles." They had poured the contents of all four pots and of the zebra-skin bag into the canvas food-bag, and leaving the empty clay pots at the feet of the old king's corpse, they retreated from Lobengula's presence to the end of the crystal cavern nearest the entrance passage.

"Well, first thing," Craig observed, "legend was wrong.

Those pots weren't a gallon each, more likea pint."

"Still, five pints of diamonds is better than a poke in the eye with a rhino horn,"Tungata countered.

They had salvaged a dozen poles from the top section of the ladder work in the shaft and built a small fire on the cavern floor. As they squatted in a circle around the pile of stones, their damp clothing steamed in the warmth from the flames.

"If they are diamonds," Sally-Anne was still sceptical.

"They are diamonds," Craig declared flatly, "every single one of them. Watch this!" Craig selected one of the stones, a crystal with a knife edge to one of its facets. He drew the edge across the lens of the lamp. It made a shrill squeal that set their teeth on edge, but it gouged a deep white scratch in the glass.

"That's proof! That's a diamond!"

"So big!" Sarah picked, out the smallest she could find.

"Even the smallest is bigAr than the top joint of my finger." She compared them.

"The old Matabele labourers picked only those large enough to show up in the first wash of gravel," Craig explained. "And remember that they will lose sixty per cent or more of their mass in the cutting and polishing.

That one will probably end up no bigger than a green pea."

"The colours," Tungata murmured, "so many different colours." Some were translucent lemon-coloured, others dark r amber or cognac, with all shades in between, while again there were those that were un tinted clear as snow-melt in a mountain stream, with frosted facets that reflected the flames of the smoky little fire.

"Just look at this one." The stone Sally-Anne held up was the deep purplish blue of the Mozambique current when the tropic midday sun probes its depths.

"And this." Another as bright as the blood from a spurting artery.

"And this." Limpid green, impossibly beautiful, changing with each flicker of the light.

Sally-Anne laid out a row of the coloured stones on the cavern floor in front of her.

"So pretty," she said. She was grading them, the yellows and golds and ambers in one row, the pinks and reds in another.

"The diamond can take any of the primary colours. It seems to take pleasure in imitating the colours proper to other gems. John Mandeville, the fourteenth-century tray eller, wrote that." Craig spread his hands to the blaze. "And jj it can crystallize to any shape from a perfect square to octahedron or dodecahedron."

"Blimey, mate," Sally-Anne mocked him, "what's an octahedron, pray?"

"Two pyramids with triangular sides and a common base."

"Wow! And a dodecahedron?" she challenged.

"Two rhombs of lozenge shape with common facets."

"How come you know so much?" 41 wrote a book remember?" Craig smiled back. "Half the book was about Rhodes and Kimberley and diamonds."

"Enough already, "she capitulated.

"Not nearly enough," Craig shook his head. "I can go on.

The diamond is the most perfect reflector of light, only IL chromate of lead refracts more light, only chrysolite disperses it more. But the diamond's combined powers of reflection, refraction and dispersion are unmatched."

"Stop!" ordered Sally-Anne, but her expression was still interested, and he went on.

"It's brilliance is un decaying though the ancients did not have the trick of cutting it to reveal its true splendour.

For that reason, the Romans treasured pearls more highly and even the first Hindu artisans only rubbed up the natural facets of the Kohinoor. They would have been appalled to know that modern cutters reduced the bulk of that stone from over seven hundred carats to a hundred and six."

"How big is seven hundred carats?" Sarah wanted to know.

Craig selected a stone from the ranks that Sally-Anne had set out.

It was the size of a golf ball.

"That is probably three hundred carats it might cut to a paragon, that is a first, water diamond over a hundred carats. Then men will give it a name, like the Great Mogul or the Orloff or the Shah, and legends will be woven around it." Tobengula's Fire, Sarah hazarded.

"Good!" Craig nodded. "A good name for it. Lobengula's Fire!" "How much?" Tungata wanted to know. "What is the value of this pile of pretty stones?"

"God knows," Craig "khrugged. "Some of them are rubbish-" He picked out a huge amorphous lump of dark grey colour, in which the black specks and fleckings of its imperfections were obvious to the naked eye and the flaws and fracture lines cut ffirough its interior like soft silver leaves. "This is industrial quality, it will be used for machine tools and the cutting edges in the head of an oil drill, but some of the others the only answer is that they are worth as much as a rich man will pay. It wou impossible to sell them all at one time, the market could not absorb them. Each stone would require a special buyer and involve a major financial transaction."

"How much, Pupho?" Tungata insisted. "What is the least or the most?"

"I truly don't know, I could not even hazard." Craig picked out another large stone, its imperfect facets frosted and stippled to hide the true fire in its depths. "Highly skilled technicians will work on this for weeks, perhaps months, charting its grain and discovering its flaws. They will polish a window on it, so they can microscopically examine its interior. Then, when they had decided how to make" the stone, a master cutter with nerves of steel will cleave it along the flaw line with a tool likea butcher's cleaver. A false hammer stroke and the stone could explode into worthless chips. They say the master cutter who cleaved the Cullinan diamond fainted with relief when he hit a clean stroke and the diamond split perfectly." Craig juggled the big diamond thoughtfully. "If this stone "makes" perfectly, and if its colour is graded "D", it could be worth, say, a million dollars."

"A

million dollars! For one stone!" Sarah exclaimed.

"Perhaps more," Craig nodded. "Perhaps much more."

"If one stone is worth that, Sally -Anne lifted a cupped double handful of diamonds and let them trickle slowly through her fingers, "how much will this hoard be worth?"

"As little as a hundred million, as much as five hundred million," Craig guessed quietly, and those impossible sums seemed to depress them all, rather than render them delirious with joy.

Sally-Anne dropped the last few stones, as though they had burned her fingers, and she hugged her own arms and shivered. Her damp hair hung in lank strands down her face and the firelight underscored her eyes with shadow.

They all of them looked exhausted and bedraggled.

"Then as we sit here," said Tungata, "we are probably as rich as any man living and I would give it all for one glimpse of sunlight and one taste of freedom."

"Pupho, talk to us, , Sarah pleaded. "Tell us stories."

"Yes," Sally-Anne joined in. "That's your business. Tell us about diamonds. Help us forget the rest. Tell us a story."

"All right," Craig agreed, and while Tungata fed the fire with splinters Of wood, he thought for a moment. "Did you know that Kohinoor means "Mountain of Light" and that Baber, the Conqueror, set its value at half the daily expense of the entire known world? You would think there could be no other gem like it, but it was only one of the great jewels assembled in Delhi. That city outstripped imperial Rome or vainglorious Babylon in its treasures. The other great jewels of Delhi had marvelous names also. Listen to these: the Sea of Light, the Crown of the Moon, the Great Mogul___2 Craig ransacked his memory for stories to keep them from dwelling on the hopelessness of their position, from the despair of truly realizing that they were entombed alive deep in the earth.

He told them of the" faithful servant whom de Sang entrusted with the great Sang diamond, when he sent it to Henry of Navarre to add to the crown jewels of France.

"Thieves learned of his journey, and they waylaid the poor man in the forest. They cut him down and searched his clothing and his corpse.-When they could not find the diamond, they buried, him hastily and fled. Years afterwards, Monsieur de-So'ncy found the grave in the forest, and ordered the servant's decomposed body to be gutted.

The legendary diamond was found in his stomach."

"Ghastly," Sally-Anne shuddered.

"Perhaps," Craig agreed with her. "But every noble diamond has a sanguine history. Emperors and rajahs and sultans have intrigued and mounted campaigns for them, others have used starvation or boiling oil or hot irons to prick out eyes, women have used poison or prostituted themselves, palaces have been looted and temples have been profaned. Each stone seems to have left a comet's train of blood and savagery behind it. And yet none of these terrible deeds and misfortunes ever seemed to discourage those who lusted for them. Indeed when ShahShuja stood before Runjeet Singh, "The Lion of the Punjab", starved to a skeleton and with his wives and family broken and mutilated by the tortures that had at last forced him to give up the Great Mogul, the man who had once been his dearest friend, gloating over the huge stone in his fist, asked, "Tell me, Shah-Shuja, what price do you put upon it?"

"Even then ShahShuja, broken and vanquished, knowing himself at the very threshold of ignoble death, could Still answer, "It is the price of fortune. For the Great Mogul has always been the bosom talisman of those who have triumphed mightily."" Tungata grunted as the tale ended, and prodded the pile of treasure in the firelight before him with a spurning finger. "I wish one of these could bring us just a little of that good fortune." And Craig had run out of stories, his throat had closed painfully from cold and talking and the searing tear gas, and none of the others could think of anything to say to cheer them. They ate the unappetizing scorched maize cakes in silence and then lay down as close to the fire as they could get. Craig lay and listened to the others sleeping, but despite his fatigue, his brain spun in circles, chasing its tail and keeping him awake.

The only way out of the cavern was back through the subterranean lake and up the grand gallery, but how long would the Shana guard that exit? How long could they last out here? There was food for a day or two, water seepage from the cavern roof would give them drink, but the batteries of the two lamps were failing, the light they gave J;

was turning yellow and dull, the timber from the ladder might feed the fire for a few days more, and then the cold and the darkness. How long before it drove them crazy? How long before they were forced to attempt that terrible swim back through the shaft into the arms of the waiting troopers at the Craig broodings were violently interrupted. The rock on which he lay shuddered and jumped under him, and he scrambled to his hands and knees.

From the shadows of the cavern roof one of the great stalactities, twenty tons of gleaming limestone, snapped off likea ripe fruit in a high wind, and crashed to the floor barely ten paces from where they lay. It filled the cavern with billows of limestone dust. Sarah awoke screaming with terror, and Tungata was thrashing around him and shouting as he came up from deep sleep.

The earth tremor lasted for seconds only, and then the stillness, the utter silence of the earth's depths, fell over them again and they looked into each other's frightened faces across the smouldering fire.

"What the hell was that?" Sally-Anne asked, and Craig was reluctant to answer. He looked to Tungata.

"The Shana-" Tungata. said softly" - I think they have dynamited the grand gallery. They have sealed us off."

"Oh my God." Slowly Sally' Anne covered her mouth with both hands.

"Buried alive." Sarah Aid it for them.

he shaft was just over 160 feet deep from the edge of the platform to water level. Tungata plumbed it with the nylon rope before Craig began the descent. It was deep enough to kill or maim anybody who slipped and fell into the chasm.

They secured the end of the rope to one of the poles wedged like an anchor in the opening of the tunnel that led to the crystal cavern, and Craig abseiled down the rope to the water at the bottom of the shaft once more. Gingerly he committed his weight to the rickety remains of the ladder work as he neared the surface of the water and then lowered himself into the water.

Craig made one dive. It was enough to confirm their worst fears. The tunnel leading into the grand gallery was blocked by a heavy fall of rock. He could not even penetrate as far as the remains of the wall built by the witch-doctors. It was sealed off with loose rock that had fallen from the roof, and it was dangerously unstable. His groping hands brought down another avalanche of rumbling rolling rock all around him.

He backed out of the tunnel, and fled thankfully back to the surface. He clung to the timber ladder work panting wildly from the terror of almost being pinned in the tunnel.

Tupho, are you all right?"

"Okay!" Craig yelled back up the shaft.

"But you were right. The tunnel has been dynamited. There is no way out.

When he climbed back to the platform, they were waiting for him. Their expressions were grim and taut in the firelight.

"What are we going to do?" Sally Anne asked.

"The first thing to do is to explore the cavern minutely." Craig was still gasping from the swim and the climb. "Every corner and nook, every opening and branch of every tunnel. We will work in pairs. Sam and Sarah, start working from the left use the lamps with care, save the batteries." Three hours later by Craig's Rolex, they met back at the fire. The lanterns were giving out only a feeble yellow glow by now, the batteries drained and on the point of failing.

"We found one tunnel at the back of the altar," Craig reported. "It looked good for quite a way, but then it pinched out completely. And you? Anything?" Craig was cleaning a scrape on Sally-Anne's knee where she had fallen on the treacherous footing. "Nothing," Tungata admitted. Craig bound the knee with a strip torn from the tail of Sally-Anne's shirt. "We found a couple of likely leads, but they all petered out."

"What do we do now?"

"We will eat a little and then rest.

We have got to try and sleep. We will need to keep our strength up." Craig realized it was an evasion even as he said it, but surprise ingly, he did sleep.

When he awoke, Sally-Anne was cuddled against his chest, and she coughed in her sleep. It was a rough phlegmy sound. The cold and damp was affecting them all, but the sleep had refreshed Craig and given him strength.

Although his own throat and chest were still painful from the gas, they seemed to have eased a little and he felt more cheerful. He lay back against the rock wall, careful not to disturb Sally'Arme. Tungata was snoring across the fire, but then he grunted and rolled over and was silent.

The only sound in the cavern now was the drip of water from the seepages in the roof, and then, very faintly, another sound, a whispering, so low that it might have been merely the echoes of silence in his own ears. Craig lay and concentrated his hearing. The sound annoyed him, niggled at his mind as heried to place it.

"Of course," he recdknized it, "bats!" He remembered hearing it more clearly when he had first reached the platform. He lay and thought about it for a while and then gently eased Sally-Anne's head off his shoulder. She made a soft gurgling in her throat, rolled over and subsided again.

Craig took one of the lanterns, and went back into the tunnel that led to the platform and the shaft. He flashed the lantern only once or twice, conserving what was left in the batteries, and in darkness he stood on the platform with his back against the rock wall and listened with all his being.

There were long periods of silence, broken only by the musical pinging of water drips on rock, and then suddenly a soft chorus of squeaks that echoed down the chimney of the shaft, then silence again.

Craig flicked on the lantern, and the time was five o'clock. He was not certain if it was morning or evening, but if the bats were roosting up there, then it must still be daylight in the outside world.

He squatted down and waited an hour, at intervals checking the slow passage of time, and then there was a new outburst of faroff bat sounds, no longer the occasional sleepy squeaks, but an excited chorus, many thousands of the tiny rodents coming awake for the nocturnal hunt.

The chorus dwindled swiftly into silence, and Craig checked his watch again. Six-thirty, five He could imagine somewhere up above the airborne horde pouring out of the mouth of a cave into the darkening evening sky, like smoke from a chimney pot.

He moved carefully to the edge of the platform, steadied himself on the side wall and leaned out over the drop very cautiously, keeping a handhold. He twisted his head to look up the shaft, holding the lantern out to the full stretch of his arm. The feeble yellow light seemed only to emphasize the blackness above him.

The shaft was semicircular in plan, about ten feet across to the far wall. He gave up on trying to penetrate the upper darkness and concentrated on studying the rock of the shaft wall opposite him, prodigally using up the battery of the lamp" It was smooth as glass, honed by the water that had bored it open. No hold or niche, nothing, except- He strained out over the drop for an extra inch. There was a darker mark on the rock just at the very edge of his vision, directly opposite him, and well above the level of his head.

Was it a stratum of colour, or was it a crack? He could not be sure, and the light was fading. It could even be a trick of shadow and light.

"Pupho," Tungata's voice spoke behind him and he pulled back. "What is it?"

"I think this is the only way open to the surface." Craig switched off the lantern to save it.

"Up that chimney?" Tungata's voice was incredulous in the darkness. "Nobody could get up there."

"The bats they are roosting up there somewhere."

"Bats have wings," Tungata reminded him, and then after a while, "How high up there?" don't know, but I think there may be a crack or a ledge on the other side. Shine the other lamp, its battery is stronger." They both leaned out and stared across.

"What do you think?"

"There is something there, I think."

"If I could get across to it!" Craig switched off again.

"How?"

"I don't know, let me think." They sat with their backs against the wall, their shoulders just touching.

After a while Tungata murmured, "Craig, if we ever get out of here the diamonds. You will be entitled to a share "Do shut up, Sam. I'm thinking." Then, after many minutes, "Sam, the poles, the longest pole in the ladder do you think it would reach across to the other side?" They built a second fire on the ledge, and it lit the shaft with an uncertain wavering light. Once again Craig went down the rope, onto the remains of the timber ladder, and this time he examined each pole in the structure. Most of them had been axed to shorter lengths, probably to make it easier to carry them down through the tunnels and passages from the surface, but the side frames were in longer pieces. The longest of these was not much thicker than Craig's wrist, but the bark was the peculiar pale colour that gave it the African name of "the elephant tusk tree'.

Its common English name was lead wood one of the toughest, most re silent woods of the veld.

Moving along it, measuring it with the span of his arms, Craig reckoned this pole was almost sixteen feet long. He secured the end of the rope to the upper end of the pole, shouting up to the platform to explain what he was doing, and then he used his clasp-knife from the kit to cut the bark rope holding the pole into the ladder work There was the terrifying moment when the pole finally broke free and hung on the rope, swinging likea pendulum, and the entire structure, deprived of its kingpins began to break up and slide down the shaft.

Craig hauled himself up the rope and flung himself thankfully onto the platform, and when he had recovered his breath, the pole was still dangling down the shaft on the end of the rope, although the rest of the ladder work had collapsed into the water at the bottom.

"That was the easy part," Craig warned them grimly.

With Tungata and himself providing the brute strength, and the two girls coiling and guiding the rope, they worked the pole up an inch at a time until the tip of it appeared above the level of the platform. They anchored it, and Craig lay on his belly and used the free end of the rope to lasso the bottom end of the pole. Now they had it secured at both ends and could begin working it up and across.

After an hour of grunting and heaving, and coaxing, they had one end of the pole resting against the wall of the shaft opposite them, and the other end thrust back into the tunnel behind them.

"We have got to lift the far end," Craig explained while they rested, "and try and get it into that crack on the far wall if it is a crack." Twice they nearly lost the pole as it rolled out of their grip and almost fell into the well below, but each time they just held it on the rope and then began the heart-breaking task all over again.

It was after midnight by Craig's Rolex before they at last had the tip of the pole worked up the far wall to the height of the dark mark only just visible in the beam of the lamp.

"Just an inch to the right," Craig grunted, and they rolled it gently, felt the pole slide in their hands, and then with a small bump the tip of it lodged in the crack in the wall opposite them and both Craig and Tungata sagged onto their knees and hugged each other in weary congratulations.

Sarah fed the fire with fresh wood and in the flare of light they reviewed their work. They now had a bridge across the shaft, rising from the platform on which they stood at a fairly steep angle, the rear end jammed solidly against the wall behind them, and the far end wedged in the narrow crack in the opposite wall.

"Somebody has to cross that." Sally' Anne voice was small and unsteady.

"And what happens on the other side?" Sarah asked.

"We'll find out when we get there," Craig promised them.

"Let me go,"Tungata said quietly to Craig.

"Have you ever done Ony rock climbing?" Tungata shook his head. "Well, thato answers that," Craig told him with finality. "Now we'll take two hours" rest try to sleep." However, none of them could sleep, and Craig roused them before the two hours were up. He explained to Tungata how to set himself up firmly as anchorman, sitting flat with both feet braced, the rope around his waist and up over his back and shoulder.

"Don't give me too much slack, but don't cramp me," Craig explained. "If I fall I'll shout "I'm off!", then jam the rope like this and hold with everything you've got, okay?" He hung one of the lanterns over his shoulder with a strip of canvas as a sling and then, with both the girls sitting on the end of the pole to hold it firmly, Craig straddled it and began working out along it with both feet dangling into the void. The loop of rope hung behind him as Tungata fed it out.

Within a few feet Craig found that the upward angle was too steep, and he had to lie flat along the pole with his ankles hooked over it, and push himself upwards with his legs. He moved quickly out of the firelight, and the black emptiness below him was mesmeric and compelling. He did not look down. The pole flexed under the weight of each of his movements and he heard the far tip of it grating against the rock above him, but at last his fingertips touched the cold limestone of the shaft wall.

He groped anxiously for the crack, and felt a little lift of his spirits as his fingers made out the shape of it. It ran vertically up the shaft, the outside lips about three inches apart, just enough to accommodate the end of the pole, then it narrowed quickly as it went deeper.

"It's a crack all right! he called back. "And I'm going to have a shot at it."

"Be careful, Craig."

"Christ!" he thought. "What a stupid bloody thing to say.) He reached up to a comfortable stretch of his left arm and thrust his hand, with the fingers folded into a loose fist, as deeply as it would go into the crack. Then he bunched his fist, and as it changed shape it swelled and Ja mined firmly in the crack and he could put his weight on it.

He pulled himself into a sitting position on the pole bridge, drew one knee up to his chest and with his free hand reached down and locked the clip on his artificial ankle. The ankle was now rigid.

He took a full breath, and said softly, "Okay, here we go He reached up with his free hand, pushed it into the crack and made another "jam hold" with his right fist. He used the strength of both arms to pull himself up onto his knees, balancing on the pole.

He relaxed the lower hand and it slipped easily out of the crack. He reached up as high as he could and thrust it into the crack and expanded his fist again. He pulled himself upright, and he was standing on the pole facing the wall.

He stepped up with his artificial foot, turning it so the toe went into the crack as deeply as the instep and then when he straightened his leg the toe twisted and bit into both sides of the rock crack. He stepped up, leaving the pole below him.

"Good old tin toes," he grunted. His good leg and foot could not have home the weight, not without specialized climbing boots to protect and strengthen them.

He reached up and took a jam hold with each hand, and lifted himself by the strength of his arms alone. As soon as the weight came off his leg, he twisted the foot, slipped it out of the crack and pulled up his knee to make another toe-hold eighteer*.inches higher. Suspended alternately on his arms and then on his one leg, he pushed upwards, and the rope slithered up after him.

He was now right out of the firelight and into the darkness. He had only his sense of touch to guide him, and the dark drop seemed to suck at his heels, as he hung out backwards from the sheer wall. He was counting each step upwards, reckoning each at eighteen inches, and he had gone up forty feet when the crack started to widen. He had to reach deeper into it each time to make a jam, and in consequence each of his steps became shorter and placed more strain on his arms and leg.

il, Forced contact with the stone had abraded the skin off k his knuckles, making every successive hold more agonizing, and the unaccustomed exercise was cramping the muscles on the inside of his thigh and groin into knots of fire.

He couldn't go on much longer. He had to rest. He found himself pulling in against the wall, pressing himself to it, touching the cold limestone with his forehead likea worshipper. To lie against die wail is to die, that is the first law of the rock climber. It is the attitude of defeat and despair. Craig knew it, and yet he could do nothing to prevent it.

He found he was sobbing. He took one fist out of the, I crack, and flapped it with loose fingers, forcing blood back into it, and then he held it to his mouth and licked die broken skin. He changed hands, whimpering as fresh blood flowed back into the cramped hand.

"Pupho, why have you stopped?" The rope was no longer paying out. They were anxious.

"Craig, don't give up, darling. Don't give up." Sally, Anne had sensed his despair. There was that something in her voice that gave him new strength.

Gradually he pushed himself outwards, hanging back from the wall, coming into balance again, his weight on the leg, and he reached up, one hand at a time, left and right, hold hard, pull up the leg, step up and again, and then the whole hellish torturous thing again, and yet again.

Another ten feet, twenty feet he was counting in the darkness.

Reach up with the right hand and and nothing.

Open space.

Frantically he groped for the crack nothing. Then his hand struck rock out to one side, the crack had opened wide into a deep V-shaped niche, wide enough for a man to force his whole body into it.

"Thank you, God, oh thank you, thank you-" Craig dragged himself up into it, wedging his hips and shoulders, and hugging his damaged hands to his chest.

"Craig!"Tungata's shout rang up the shaft.

"I'm all right," Craig called back. "I've found a niche. I'm resting. Give me five." He knew he couldn't wait too long, or his hands would stiffen and become useless. He kept flexing them as he rested.

"Okay!"he called down. "Going up again." He pushed himself upwards with the palms of his hands on each side of the cleft, facing outwards into the total darkness of the shaft.

Swiftly the cleft opened, and became a wide, deep chimney so that he could no longer reach across it with his arms. He had to turn sideways, wedge his shoulders on one side of it, and walk up the other side with his feet, wriggling his shoulders and pushing up with his palms on the stone under him a few inches at a time. It went quickly, until abruptly the chimney ended. It closed to a crack so narrow that reaching upwards he could not even fit his finger into it.

He reached around the top of the chimney out onto the wall of the shaft. He groped as high as he could reach and there was no hold or irregularity in the smooth limestone above him.

"End of the road!" hi whispered and suddenly every muscle in his body began to shriek in silent spasms of pain, and he felt crushed under a load of weariness. He did not have the energy for that long dangerous retreat back down the chimney, and he did not have the strength to keep himself wedged awkwardly in the rocky cleft.

Then abruptly a bat squeaked shrilly above him. It was so close and clear that he almost relaxed his grip with shock. He caught himself, and though his legs juddered under the strain, he worked his way sideways to the outermost edge of the chimney. The bat squeaked again, and was answered by a hundred others. It must be dawn already, the bats were returning to their roosts somewhere up there.

Craig balanced himself, so that he had his outside hand free. He groped for the lantern on its strip of canvas around his neck, and held it out into the open shaft. Then he twisted his head, and wriggled even further outwards until he was holding with only the point of one shoulder, and his head was protruding around the sharp corner of the chimney into the open shaft.

He switched on the lantern. Instantly there was i hubbub of alarmed bats their terrified shrills and the flutter of their wings and three feet above Craig's head, impossibly out of reach, there was a window in the rock wall, from which the sounds reverberated as though from the brass throat of a trumpet. He reached for it, but his fingers were twelve inches short of the sill.

As he yearned upwards, so the yellow glow of the lantern faded away. For some seconds the filaments still burned redly in their tiny glass ampoule and then they too died, and the darkness rushed back to engulf Craig, and he retreated into the chimney.

In frustration he hurled the useless lantern from him, and it clattered against the rock as it fell, each rattle becoming fainter until seconds later there was a distant splash as it hit the water far below.

"Craig!" E "Okay, I dropped the light." He heard the bitterness and despondency in his own voice, but in darkness he tried once more to reach the window above him. His fingernails scratched futilely on the stone, and he gave up and began slipping back down the chimney. In the V-shaped niche where the crack and chimney met, he wedged himself again.

"What is happening, Craig?"

"It doesn't go," he called down. "There is no way out.

We are finished, unless--'he broke off.

"What is it? Unless what?"

"Unless one of the girls will come up and help me." There was silence in the darkness below him.

"I'll come,"Tungata broke the silence.

"No good. You are too heavy. I couldn't hold you." Silence again, and then Sally' Anne said, "Tell me what to do."

"Tie on to the end of the rope. Use a bowline knot."

"Okay."

"All right, come out across the pole. I'll be holding you." Peering down he could see her silhouetted against the glow of the fire, as she worked her way across.

He took up the slack in the rope carefully, ready to jam it if she fell.

"I'm across."

"Can you find the crack?"

"Yes.

"I'm going to pull you up. You must help me by pushing with your toes in the crck." Okay.

"Go!" He felt her full weight come on the rope, and it bit into his shoulder.

"Push up!" he ordered, and as he felt the load lighten, he grabbed the slack.

"Push!" She came up another four inches.

"Push!" It seemed to go on and on, and then she screamed and the rope burned out in a hard, heavy run across his shoulder. He was almost jerked out of his niche.

He fought it, jamming hard, feeling the skin smear off his palms on the harsh nylon until he stopped it. Sally Anne was still screaming, and the rope pendulumed back and forth as she swung sideways along the wall.

"Shut up!" he roared at her. "Get a hold of yourself." She stopped screaming, and gradually her swings became shorter.

"I lost my footing." Her voice was almost a sob.

"Can you find the crack again?"

"Yes."

"All right, tell me when you are ready."

"Ready!"

"Push up!" He thought it would never end, and then he felt her hand touch his leg.

"You made it," he whispered. "You marvelous bloody female." He made a space for her in the chimney below him and he helped her into it. He showed her how to wedge herself securely, and then he held her shoulder, squeezing hard.

I can't go any further." Her first words after she recovered.

"That was the worst, the rest is easy." He wouldn't tell her about the window not yet.

"Listen to the bats," he cheered her instead. "The surface must be close, very close. Think of that first glimpse of sunlight, that first breath of sweet dry air."

"I'm ready to go on," she said at last, and he led her up the chimney.

As soon as it was wide enough to cross over, he made her climb ahead of him so that he could place her feet with his hands, and help her to push upwards when the chimney became too wide for her to be able to exert her full strength.

"Craig. Craig! It's closed. It has pinched in. It's a dead end." Her panic was just below the surface and he could feel she was shaking as she choked down her sobs.

"Stop it," he snapped. "Just one more effort. just one, I promise you." He waited for her to quieten, then he went on, "There is a window in the wall just above your head, just around the corner of the chimney. Only a foot or two-" I won't be able to reach it."

"Yes! Yes, you will. I'm going to make a bridge for you with my body. You will stand on my stomach, you'll reach it easily. Do you hear me? Sally-Anne, answer me."

"No." Very small and faint. "I can't do it." "Then none of us are going anywhere," he said sharply.

"It's the only way out. You do it or we rot here. Do you hear me?" He worked up close beneath her, so that her sagging buttocks were pressed into his belly. Then he braced with all his strength, pressing with both legs into one side of the chimney and with his shoulders into the other, forming a human bridge beneath her.

"Slowly let go," he whispered. "Sit on my stomach."

"Craig, I'm too heavy."

"Do it, damn you. Do id" Her weight came onto him, and the pain was too much to bear. His sinews and muscles were tearing, his vision filled with flashing lights.

"Now straighten up,"he blurted.

She came up onto her -knees; her kneecaps bit into his flesh like crucifixion n.41s.

"Stand!"he groaned. Quickly!" She tottered on the unsteady platform of his body as she came upright.

"Reach up! High as you can!"

"Craig, there is a hole up here!" "Can you get into it?" No reply. She shifted her stance on him, and he cried aloud with the effort of holding her.

She bounced, and then her weight was gone. He heard her feet scrabbling against the shaft and the brush of the rope as she drained herself upwards and it followed her likea monkey's tail.

"Craig, it's a shelf a cave!"

"Find somewhere to tie your end of the rope." A minute, and another he couldn't hold out, his limbs were numb, his shoulders were'I've tied it! It's safe." He tugged on the rope and it came up firm and secure.

He took a loop around his wrist and let his feet go. He swung out of the chimney and dangled into the open shaft.

He pulled himself up the rope, hand over hand, and then he tumbled over the sill into the stone window, and Sally-Anne hugged him to her bosom. Too far gone to speak, he clung to her likea child to its mother.

"What is happening up there?" Tungata could not contain his impatience.

"We have found another lead," Craig called back. "It must be open to the surface somewhere there are bats."

"What must we do?"

"I am going to drop the rope. There will be a loop in it.

Sarah first. She will have to cross the pole and get into the loop. The two of us will be able to pull her up." It was a long message to shout. "Do you understand?"

"Yes. I'll make her do it." Craig tied a loop in the end of the rope, and then, in complete darkness, crawled back to the anchor point that Sally' Anne had chosen. He ran his hands over it. It was a pinnacle of rock, twelve feet back from the ledge and her knot was good. He went back and dropped the looped end down into the shaft. He lay on his stomach and peered down into the echoing darkness. The fire glow was far below, a dull furnace redness. He could hear the whisper of their voices.

"What's keeping you?" he demanded.

Then he saw the dark shape, only just visible in the firelight, moving out across the pole bridge. It was too big to be one person, and then he realized that both Tungata and Sarah were on the pole together. Tungata was coaxing her across, riding out backwards and drawing her after him.

They moved out of sight, directly below the window.

"Pupho, swing the rope to the left." Craig obeyed, and felt the tug on it as Tungata grabbed the swinging loop.

"All right, Sarah is in the loop."

"Explain to her that she must walk up the rock as we pull her." Sally-Anne sat directly behind Craig, the rope running over his shoulder to her. Craig had his feet braced against the side wall.

"Pull!" he ordered, and quickly she picked up the rhythm of it. Sarah was small and slim, but it was a long haul and Craig's hands were raw. It was five minutes of hard work before they dragged her over the sill and the three of them rested together.

"All right, Sam. We are ready for you now." He dropped the loop into the shaft.

There were three of them on the rope now, sitting one behind the other, but Tungata was a big, heavy man. Craig could hear the girls whimpering and sobbing with the effort.

"Sam, can you jam V6urself into the chimney?" Craig gasped. "Give us a re5tr He felt the weight go off the rope, and the three of them lay in a heap and rested.

"All right, let's go again." Tungata seemed even heavier now, but finally he came tumbling into the window, and none of them could talk for a while.

Craig was the first to find his voice. "Oh, shit, we forgot the diamonds! We left the bloody diamonds."

PP

There was a click and a yellow glow of light as Tungata switched on the second lantern that he had brought up with him. They all blinked owlishly at each other, and Tungata chuckled hoarsely.

"Why do you think I was so heavy?" He held the canvas bag in his lap, and as he patted it, the diamonds crunched together with a sound likea squirrel chewing nuts.

"Hero!" Craig grunted with relief. "But switch off, there are only a few minutes" life left in that battery." They used the lantern in flashes. The first flash showed them that the rock window opened into a low-roofed cave, so wide that they could not make out the side walls. The roof was coated with a furry mass of bats. Their eyes were a myriad pinpricks of reflected light and their naked faces were pink and hideous as they stared down at them, hanging upside down.

The floor of the cave was carpeted with their droppings.

The reeking guano had filled every irregularity, and the floor was level and soft underfoot, deadening their footfalls as they went forward in a group, holding hands to keep contact in the darkness.

Tungata led them, flashing the lantern every few minutes to check the floor ahead and to reorientate himself.

Craig was in the rear with the coiled rope looped over his shoulder. Gradually the floor started to slope upwards under them and the roof hung lower.

Voit," said Sally-Anne. "Don't switch on the light again."

"What is it?"

"Ahead up the slope. Is it my imagination?" There are degrees of darkness. Craig stared into the blackness ahead, and slowly out of it emerged a faint nimbus, a lessening of the utter blackness.

"Light," he whispered. "There is light up there." They started forward, bumping into each other in their haste, running and pushing, laughing as the light strengthened and they could make out each other's shapes, the laughter becoming wild hysteria. The light turned to a golden glory ahead and they fought their way up the soft yielding slope of guano towards it.

Gradually the roof pressed down onto them, forcing them to their knees, and then onto their bellies, and the light was a thin horizontal blade that blinded them with its brilliance. They clawed their way towards the light, stirring the guano dust so that it coated their faces and choked them, but they whooped and shouted hysterically through it.

Craig saw that Sarah was weeping unashamedly, tears shining on her face. Tungata was bellowing with wild laughter, and Craig flung himself forward and grabbed his ankles just as he reached the low slitted entrance of the cave.

"Wait, Sam. Be careful." Tungata tried to kick his hands away and crawl on, but Craig held him.

"Shana! There are Shana out there." That name halted and silenced them. They lay just within the threshold 4 the cavern, and their euphoria evaporated.

"Craig and I will go ahead to scout the lay of the land." Tungata groped in the guano and passed a rock the size of a baseball back to Craig. "It's the best weapon I have. You two girls will stay here until we call you, okay?" Craig took a double handful of the guano and blackened his face and limbs with it. Then he slipped the coil of rope off his shoulder, and crawled up beside Tungata. He was content to let Tungata take control now. In the cavern, Craig had been the leader, but out there was Tungata's world. In the bush Tungata was a leopard man.

They crawled up the last few feet to the entrance. It was a low horizontal slit in the rock, less than eighteen inches high and screened by golden elephant grass growing just beyond the threshold. It was facing east for the early morning sunshine was blazing into their faces. They lay for a while, letting their eyes adjust to its glare after those days of darkness.

Then Tungata slid forward likea black mambal barely moving the tall grass as he went through it.

Craig gave him a count of fifty and then followed him.

He came out on a hillside with the stratum of limestone forming buttresses across it, over which grew the stunted desiccated brush and wiry elephant grass. They were just below the summit, and the slope dropped away steeply below them into the heavily forested valley. Already the morning sun was hot and Craig revelled in it.

Tungata was lying below him, and he gave Craig the hand-signal, "Cover my left side." Craig moved carefully into position, walking on his elbows and dragging his legs.

"Search!" Tungata gave him the peremptory signal, and they lay for fully ten minutes scrutinizing the ground below, above and on both sides, covering every inch, every bush and rock and field.

"All clear," Craig signalled, and Tungata began to move along the contour of the slope towards the shoulder of the hill. Craig kept behind and above him, covering him.

A bird came towards them, a black and white bird with a disproportionately large yellow beak, a huge, semitically curved yellow bill that gave it its common name of hornbill, and its nickname of Yiddish canary. Its flight was characteristically erratic and swooping, and it settled on a low bush just ahead and below Tungata but almost immediately it let out a harsh squawk of alarm and hurled itself into the air again, swooping away down the hillside.

"Danger!" Tungata made the urgent hand-signal, and they froze.

Craig stared at the clump of rock and grass and bush from which the hornbill had fled, trying to discover what had alarmed it.

Something moved, a tiny stirring, and it was so close that Craig clearly heard the flare of a match being struck and lit. A feather of ethereal smoke drifted from the clump of brush and prickled his nostrils with the stink of tobacco burning. Then he made out the shape of a steel battle helmet covered with camouflage net. It moved away as the man wearing it drew again on his cigarette.

Now Craig saw the whole picture. In his camouflage smock, the man was lying behind a light machine-gun on a tripod, the barrel of the weapon was bound with streamers of hessian to disguise its stark outline.

"How many?" Tungata signalled the question, and then Craig saw the second man. He was sitting with his back to the base of the low Thorn tree. The shadow of the branches over his head blended perfectly with the tiger stripes of his camouflage. He was a big man, bare-headed, with a sergeant's chevrons on his arm, and an Uzi machine-gun laid beside him.

Craig was about to signal, "Two," when the man slipped a soft pack of cigarettes out of his breast-pocket and held it out. A third man who had been lying flat on his back in the shade, sat up and accepted the pack. He tapped out a cigarette and then tossed the pack to a fourth man, who rolled onto his elbow to catch it, revealing himself for the first time.

Tour!" Craig signalled.

It was a machine-gun post, perfectly sited on the shoulder of the hill to cover the slopes below. Peter Fungabera had obviously anticipated the existence of bolt holes from the main cavern. The hills must all be staked out with nests of machine guns It was mere fortune that had brought them out above this post. "Me gunner was facing downhill, his mates were stretched out, relaxed and bored from days of unrewarded vigil.

"Move into attack position,"Tungata signalled.

"Query?" Craig flicked his thumb. "Four! Query?" Craig questioned the odds.

"Go right!" Tungata signalled, and then enforced the order with the clenched fist. "Imperative!" Craig felt his blood charging with adrenaline the heat of it spreading down his limbs, his mouth drying out. He clutched the round stone in his right hand.

They were so close that he could see the wet spit on the tip of the cigarette as the machinegunner took it from his lips. The nest was littered with their rubbish: paper wrappers and empty food cans and cigarette butts. Their weapons were laid carelessly aside. The man lying on his back had covered his eyes with his elbow and the burning cigarette stuck up likea candle from his lips. The sergeant against the tree was whittling a piece of wood with his trench-knife. The third had unbuttoned his smock and was minutely searching his own chest hair for body vermin.