Men of Men

She looked up at Louise Sint John. She was still very pale, but the sweat of nausea had dried on her forehead.

She had grit, Robyn conceded grudgingly, and that was one thing she could admire, much more than her exotic beauty.

"Madam, I am about to go after the ball now," she said.

"I shall only have time for one attempt."

She knew from Lister's writing and her own observation how risky it was to use her bare hands in a wound , but that risk was preferable to leading with a sharp instrument into the nest of veins, arteries and nerves in the groin.

She had guessed the location of the ball by the restricted movement of the femur within its pelvic socket, and by the focus of intense pain when she had palpated the area while Mungo was conscious. She probed with her forefinger, boldly up into the tissue above the raw scraped area of the bone. The direction of the shot, from ahead and upwards, must be on this line.

She met resistance and tried again, and then again.

Suddenly her finger slid into a narrow canal in the hot meat of his thigh, right in to its full length, and then at the very limit of her reach she touched something hard.

It could have been the head of the femur or the lower ridge of pelvic bone, but she took up the scalpel.

A fine needle jet of blood from a severed blood vessel sprayed her cheek and forehead before she could twist it closed, and she could hear Louise gagging again, but her hands with the swab barely shook as she wiped away the blood so that Robyn could cut again, and there was a rush of thick creamy yellow matter out of the cut like a dam burst by muddy flood waters. In the flood were little chips and fragments of shattered metal, rotting threads of woollen cloth and other detritus.

"Praise God!" whispered Robyn, and brought her hand out, dripping with the reeking yellow discharge, but with the distorted, misshapen lump of bluish lead held firmly between thumb and forefinger.

The twins had long ago discovered the literary treasure trove that Robyn kept in the locked cupboard against the far wall of her bedroom. Of course, they could only visit it when their parents and elder sisters were fully occupied elsewhere, for instance when King Ben had summoned them to Gubulawayo and Salina was cooking and Cathy was painting or reading.

Then they could sneak into the bedroom and push the chair against the wall so that Vicky standing on Lizzie's shoulders could reach the key.

There were more than fifty books in the cupboard. The great majority unfortunately contained no illustrations.

These had proved unrewarding, as the twins" efforts at deciphering the text had been shipwrecked on too many rock-hard words; at other times, just when it was becoming intensely interesting, they would encounter a solid slab of foreign language which they suspected was either Latin or Greek.

The twins avoided these ones, but the ones with pictures were a forbidden delight, greatly enhanced by danger and guilt. There was even one that had drawings of the inside of women, with and without a baby inside, and another of the baby in the process of emerging.

However, their perennial favourite was the one they called "The Devil Book", for there was an illustration on each facing page vivid, lifelike and explicit, of souls in torment and the devils who attended them. The artist who had interpreted this edition of Dante's Inferno had dwelt ghoulishly on decapitation and disembowelment, on red-hot irons and hooks, lolling tongues and bulging eyes. Even the briefest stolen perusal of this masterpiece was enough to ensure that the twins would spend most of the following night clinging together in their bed, shivering with delicious terror.

However, this particular visit to the forbidden cupboard was in the interest of scientific research, otherwise they would never have taken the risk while Robyn Ballantyne was actually at Khami mission.

They chose the time of morning xwhen Mama would certainly be in the church clinic attending her patients, when Daddy would be mucking out the sties, and Salina and Cathy at their chores.

The raid went with the precision of repeated rehearsal.

They left their open readers on the dining-room table, and were down the verandah and had the key within the time it takes to draw a long breath.

Lizzie took guard at the window from where she could cover kitchen, the church and the pigsties, while Vicky got the cupboard open and the "Devil Book" out and open at the correct page.

"See!" she whispered. "I told you so."

There he was, Satan, Lucifer, King of the Underworld and Vicky had been right. He did not have horns. All the lesser demons had horns, but not the Devil, not the very Devil himself. What he did have was a tail, a magnificent tail with a point like the blade of a Matabele assegai upon the end of it.

"He's got a beard in this picture," Lizzie pointed out, reluctant to abandon her position.

"He probably shaved it off, to fool us," Vicky told her.

"Now look!" She took a pin out of her hair and used the black round tip to cover one of Lucifer's eyes. Immediately the resemblance was undeniable, the thick dark curls, the broad forehead, the beaked nose and the piercing eye under arched brow, and the smile, the same satanically mocking smile.

Lizzie shuddered luxuriously. Vicky was right, it was him all right.

"Kitty Cat!" Vicky hissed a warning. Salina was coming out of the kitchen, and they had the book back on its shelf, the cupboard locked, the key back in its hidingplace, and were once more seated at the table poring over their readers by the time that Salina had crossed the yard and looked in upon them.

"Good." She smiled at them tenderly, they were such an angelic pair, sometimes. "Good girls," she said, and went back towards the kitchen.

"Where does he put it?" Lizzie asked softly, without looking up from her reader.

"What?"

"His tail., "Watch!" Vicky ordered. "And I'll show you."

Napoleon, the aged yellow mongrel, was sleeping in the patch of sunlight on the verandah. He had a ridge down his back, and grey hair around his muzzle. Every few minutes a dream of rabbits and guineafowl made his back legs gallop spasmodically and he would puff off an evil-smelling fart of excitement.

"Bad dog!" Vicky said loudly. "Napoleon, you are a bad, bad dog!"

Napoleon sprang to his feet, appalled by this unjust accusation, and wriggled his entire body ingratiatingly, while his upper lip lifted in a simpering sycophantic grin.

At the same time his long whippy tail disappeared between his legs and curled up under his belly.

"That's how he tucks it away. just like Napoleon," Vicky announced.

"How do you know?

"If you look carefully, you can see the bulge where it comes out in front of him."

They worked on distractedly for a few seconds, then Lizzie could not restrain herself further.

"Do you think we could see his tail?"

"How?"

"What if we -" Halfway through propounding her scheme, Lizzie faltered. Even she realized that it would be impossible to modify the latrine, drilling a peephole through the back wall, without being apprehended; and their motives could never be convincingly explained, especially not to Mama.

"Anyway," Vicky quashed the plan effectively, "Devils are probably like fairies, they just don't go."

Silence fell again. Obviously relieved that nobody had followed up the original accusation, Napoleon re-composed himself to his dreams, and it seemed the project was abandoned, until Vicky looked up with a determined gleam in her eyes.

"We are going to ask him."

"But," stammered Lizzie, "but Mama forbade us to talk to him -" She knew her protest to be unavailing, that gleam in Vicky's eye was familiar.

Ten days after she had removed the pistol ball, Robyn came down to the guest-house with a crutch carved from mopani wood.

"My husband made it for you," she told Mungo Sint John.

"And you are going to use it every day from now on."

The first day Mungo managed one halting circuit of the yard, and at the end of it he was pale and sweating.

Robyn checked the leg and the stitches had all held, but the muscles of the thigh had withered and contracted, pulling the leg an inch shorter than the other. The next morning she was there to watch him at exercise. He moved more easily.

After fifteen days she removed the last catgut stitches, and though the scar was raised and thickened, a livid purplish red, yet there was no indication of mortification. It looked as though it had healed by first intention, the drastic use of strong antiseptic on living tissue seemed to have been justified.

After five weeks, Mungo abandoned the crutch in favour of a stout stick, and took the footpath that girded the kopje behind the Khami Mission.

Each day he walked farther and stayed out longer. It was a relief to be away from the bitter arguments with Louise which punctuated the long periods of her icy withdrawal.

He had found a viewpoint beyond the sharp northern ridge of the kopje, a natural platform and bench of dark serpentine rock under the spreading branches of a lovely old leadwood tree, where he could sit and brood out over the gently undulating grassland to the far blue silhouette of hills that marked the site of Lobengula's kraal.

His instinct warned him that there was an opportunity there. It was the instinct and the awareness of the cruising shark which could detect the presence of prey at distances and depths beyond the range of other senses. His instinct had seldom failed him, and there had been a time when he had seized every opportunity with boldness, with the ruthless application of all his skills and all his strength.

Sitting under the leadwood, his hands upon the head of the cane and his chin upon his hands, he cast his mind back to his triumphs: to the great ships that he had won and sailed to the ends of the oceans and brought back laden with treasures, with tea and coffee and spices or holds filled with black slaves. He remembered the rich fertile lands to which he had held title, and the sweet smell of sugar-cane fields when the harvest was being cut. He remembered piles of gold coins, carriages and beautiful horses, and women.

So many women, too many women perhaps; for they were the cause of his present low condition.

He let himself think of Louise at. last. She had been a fire in his blood, which grew fiercer the more often he tried to slake it, and she had weakened him, distracted him, diverted him from his ruthless purpose of old.

She had been the daughter of one of his overseers on Fairfields, his vast Louisiana estate. When she was sixteen years of age he had allowed her to exercise his wife's Palarnino horses; when she was seventeen he arranged for her to move into the big house as companion and maid to his wife and when she was eighteen he had raped her.

His wife was in the next-door bedroom, suffering from one of her black headaches, and he had torn Louise's clothes off her body, possessed by a madness that he had never known before. She had fought him with the savagery of one of her Blackfoot Indian ancestors, but in some perverse fashion her resistance maddened him as much as the glimpses of her hard young flesh, as it was revealed a gleaming flash at a time.

She had clawed red lines down his chest, and bitten him until he bled, but through it all she had not uttered a word or a sound, although a single scream would have brought her mistress or the house servants running.

in the end, he had borne her down onto the thick white pelt of a polar bear in the middle of the floor, naked except for the tatters of her petticoats hanging from her long fine legs, and with his full weight he had spread her and entered her.

Only then had she made any sound, she had gripped him with the same atavistic savagery, legs and arms encircling him, and she had whispered hoarsely, brokenly. "I love you, I have always loved you, I shall always love you."

When the Armies of the North had marched against them, and his wife had fled with the children to her native France, Louise had stayed with him. When she could she had been in the field with him, and when she could not she had waited for him, filling in the days and most of the nights nursing the wounded at the Confederate Hospital in Galveston, and there she had nursed him when he was brought in half blinded and terribly hurt from the battlefield.

She had been with him when he went back to Fairfields for the last time, and shared his desolation at the burnt fields and ruined buildings, and she had been at his side ever since. Perhaps if she had not, things would have been different now, for she had weakened him; she had dulled the edge of his resolve.

So many times he had smelled out the opportunities the chances for the coup which would restore it all, and each time she had caused him to waver.

"I could never respect you again," she had said once.

"Not if you did that., "I never suspected you were capable of that, Mungo.

It's wrong morally wrong."

Gradually it had changed, until sometimes, after another abortive attempt to restore his fortunes, she would look at him with a coldness, a kind of icy contempt.

"Why do you not leave me?" he had challenged her then.

"Because I love you," she had replied. "And, oh, sometimes how I wish I did not."

In Perth, when he had forced her to bait the trap for him, luring in the intended victim, she had for the first time rebelled. She herself had ridden to warn the man, and they had been forced to run again, shipping out on a little trading schooner only an hour or so ahead of the constables with the warrant for Mungo's arrest.

He had never trusted her again, although he had never been able to make the decision to desert her. He found that he needed her still. At Cape Town a letter had finally caught up with Mungo. It was one of five copies sent out by his brother-in-law, the Duc de Montijo, a copy to each of the addresses that Mungo had occupied in the years since his wife had left him. Solange, his wife, had taken a chill while out riding and had died five days later of pneumonia. Her children were in the care of the Duc, being educated with his own, and the Duc hinted that he would resist any attempt by Mungo Sint John to assume custody.

At last Mungo was free to make good his promise to Louise, the solemn promise he had made to her as they knelt hand in hand before the altar in London's church of Sint Martin-in-the-Fields. He had sworn in the sight of God that just as soon as he was able to do so, he would marry Louise.

Mungo had read through his brother-in-law's letter three times, and then held it in the flame of the candle.

He had crushed the ashes to powder, and never mentioned the letter or its news to Louise. She had gone on believing that he was married, and their relationship had limped on, sickening and staling.

Yet still she could influence him, even when she was not physically present. At the dark crossroads south of Kimberley, even when he had seen the diamonds gleam in Hendrick Naaiman's hands, he had not been able to banish Louise's image from his mind: Louise with contempt in her eyes and cold accusation on her lovely lips.

Expert marksman that he was, the shade of Louise had spoiled his aim. He had fired a wink too late, and a touch wide. He had not killed the Bastaard, but if he had too done so, Louise's reaction could have been no more severe.

When he rode back to where she waited, reeling in the saddle, the wounded stallion dragging under him, he had seen her face in the moonlight. Even though she caught him when he might have fallen, and though she had tended his wounds and gone for succour, he had realized that they had crossed a dividing line over which there was no return.

As if to confirm it, he had seen Zouga Ballantyne staring at her in the lantern light with that unmistakable look in his eyes. Many men had looked at her like that over the years, but this time she had returned Zouga's scrutiny openly, making no attempt to hide it from either man.

On the long road northwards, as she walked beside the cart in which he lay wounded, he had challenged her again and she had not denied it.

At least Zouga Ballantyne is a man of honour."

"Then why do you not leave me?"

"You know I cannot leave you now, not as you are She left it unfinished, and they had not spoken of it again, though in her icy silences he had sensed the presence in her mind of the other man, and he knew that no matter how desperately unhappy a woman might be she will seldom leave a relationship until she has the prospect of something better to replace it. Louise had that prospect now, and they were both aware of it.

He wondered if he would let Louise go if she finally made the decision. There had been a time not long ago when he would have killed her first; but since they had reached Khami, everything had begun altering even more swiftly. They were rushing towards some climax, and Mungo had sensed that it would be explosive.

For Mungo had forgotten the magnetism that Robyn Ballantyne had once exerted upon him, but now he had been vividly reminded by the mature woman, Robyn Codrington. She was even more attractive to him now than she had been as a girl. He sensed that her strength and assurance would provide a secure port for a man tired to his guts and the marrow of his bones by the storms of life.

He knew that she was the trusted confidante of the Matabele king, and that if his fortune awaited him here in the north, as he had come to suspect, then her intercession with the Matabele would be invaluable.

There was something else, some other darker need within him. Mungo Sint John never forgave or forgot an injury. Clinton Codrington had commanded the Royal Naval cruiser which had seized Huron off the Cape of Good Hope, an action which seemed to Mungo to mark the beginning of his long decline, and herald his dogged misfortune. Codrington was vulnerable. Through this woman Mungo could be avenged, and the prospect was strangely compelling.

He sighed and shook his head, roused himself and used the stick to push himself erect. He found himself confronted by the two small figures. Mungo Sint John liked all women of whatever age, and though he had not seen his own children in many years, the youngest would be about the same age as these two.

They were pretty little things. Though he had seen them only fleetingly or at a distance, he had felt the stirring of his paternal instincts; and now their presence was a welcome relief from his dark thoughts, and from the loneliness of the past weeks.

"Good afternoon, ladies." He smiled, and bowed as low as his leg would allow. His smile was irresistible, and some of the rigidity went out of the two small bodies, but their expressions remained pale and fixed; their eyes, huge with trepidation, were fastened upon the fly of his breeches, so that after a few seconds silence even Mungo Sint John felt disconcerted, and he shifted uncomfortably.

What service can I be to you?" he asked.

"We would like to see your tail, sir."

"Ah!" Mungo knew never to show himself at a loss in front of a female, of no matter what age. "You aren't posed to know about that," he said. "Are you, now?"

SUP They shook their heads in unison, but their eyes remained fixed with fascination below his waist. Vicky was right, there was definitely something there.

"Who told you about it?" Mungo sat down again, bringing his eyes to the level of theirs, and their disappointment was evident.

"Mama said you were the Devil, and we know the Devil has a tail."

"I see." Mungo nodded. With a huge effort, he fought back his laughter, and kept his expression serious, his tone conspiratorial.

"You are the only ones that know,"he told them. "You won't tell anybody, will you?" Quite suddenly Mungo realized the value of having allies at Khami, two pairs of sharp bright eyes that saw everything and long ears that heard all.

"We won't tell anybody," promised Vicky. "If you show us.

"I can't do that." And there was an immediate wail of disappointment.

"Why not?"

"Didn't your mother teach you that it's a sin to show anybody under your clothes?"

They glanced at each other, and then Vicky admitted reluctantly. "Yes, we aren't even really allowed to look at ourselves there. Lizzie got whacked for it."

"There." Mungo nodded. "But I'll tell you what I will do, I'll tell you the story of how I got my tail."

"Story!" Vicky clapped her hands, and they spread their skirts and squatted cross-legged at Mungo's feet. If there was one thing better than a secret, it was a story, and Mungo Sint John had stories, wonderful scary, bloodthirsty stories, the kind that guaranteed nightmares.

Each afternoon when he reached the lookout under the leadwood tree, they were waiting for him, captives of his charisma, addicted to those amazing stories of ghosts and dragons, of evil witches and beautiful princesses who always had Vicky's hair or Lizzie's eyes when Mungo Sint John described them.

Then after each of Mungo's stories, he would tactfully initiate a lively discussion of the affairs of Khami Mission. On a typical day he would learn that Cathy had begun painting a portrait of Cousin Ralph from memory, and that it was the considered and unanimous verdict of the twins that Cathy was not only "soft" but, much worse, "sloppy" about Cousin Ralph.

He learned that King Ben had commanded the entire family to attend the Chawala ceremony at the new moon, and the twins were ghoulishly anticipating the slaughter of the sacrificial black bull. "They do it with their bare hands," Vicky gloated. "And this year we are going to be allowed to watch, now that we are eleven."

He was told in detail how Papa had demanded from Mama at the dinner table how much longer "that infamous pirate" was to remain at Khami, and Mungo had to explain to the twins what "infamous" meant "famous, but only more so".

Then on one such afternoon, Mungo learned from Lizzie that King Ben had once again "khombisile" with his indunas. Gandang, one of the king's brothers, had told Juba, who was his wife, and Juba had told Mama.

"Khombisile?" Mungo asked dutifully. "What does that mean?"

it means that he showed them."

"Showed them what?"

The treasure," Vicky cut in, and Lizzie rounded on her.

"I'm telling him!"

"All right, Lizzie." Mungo was leaning forward, interest tempering the indulgent smile. "You tell me."

"It's a secret. Mama says that if other people, bad people, heard about it, it would be terrible for King Ben.

Robbers might come."

"It's a secret then," Mungo agreed.

"Cross your heart."

And Lizzie was telling it before he had made the sign of good faith. Lizzie was determined that Vicky would not get in ahead of her, this time.

"He shows them the diamonds. His wives rub fat all over him, and then they stick the diamonds onto the fat."

"Where did King Ben get all these diamonds?" Scepticism warred with the need to believe.

"His people bring them from Kimberley. Juba says it isn't really stealing. King Ben says it is only the tribute that a king should have."

"Did Juba say how many diamonds?"

"Pots full, pots and pots of them."

Mungo Sint John turned his single eye from her flushed and shining face and looked across the grassy golden plains to the Hills of the Indunas, and his eye was flecked golden yellow like one of the big predatory cats of Africa.

Jordan looked forward to this early hour of day. it was one of his duties to check each evening in the nautical -almanac the time of sunrise, and to waken mister Rhodes an hour beforehand.

Rhodes liked to see the sun come up, whether it was from the balcony of his magnificent private railway coach or drinking coffee in the dusty yard of the corrugated iron cottage that he still maintained behind Market Square in Kimberley, from the upper deck of an ocean-going liner or from the back of a horse as they rode the quiet pathways of his estate on the slopes of Table Mountain.

It was the time when Jordan was alone with his master, the time when ideas which mister Rhodes called his "thoughts" would come spilling out of him. Incredible ideas, sweeping and grand or wild and fanciful, but all fascinating.

It was the time when Jordan could feel that he was part of the vast genius of the man, as he scribbled down mister Rhodes" draft speeches in his shorthand pad, speeches that would be made in the lofty halls of the Cape Parliament to which mister Rhodes had been elected by the constituents of what had once been Griqualand, or at the board table of the governors of De Beers, of which he was chairman. De Beers was the mammoth diamond company which mister Rhodes had welded together out of all the little diggers" claims and lesser competing companies. Like some mythical boa constrictor, he had swallowed them all, even Barney Barnato, the other giant of the fields. mister Rhodes owned it all now.

On other mornings they would ride in silence, until mister Rhodes would lift his chin from his chest and stare at Jordan with those stark blue eyes. Every time he had something startling to say. Once it was, "You should thank God every day, Jordan, that you were born an Englishman."

Another time it was, "There is only one real purpose behind it all, Jordan. It is not the accumulation of wealth. I was fortunate to recognize it so early. The real purpose is to bring the whole civilized world under British rule, to recover North America to the crown, to make all the Anglo-Saxon race into one great empire."

It was thrilling and intoxicating to be part of all this, especially as so often the big burly figure would rein his horse and turn his head and look to the north, towards a land that neither he nor Jordan had ever seen, but which, during the years that Jordan had been with him, had become a part of both their existences.

"My thought," he called it. "My north, my idea."

"That's where it will really begin, Jordan. And when the time comes, I shall send you. The person I can trust beyond any other."

It had never seemed strange to Jordan that those blue eyes had looked in that direction, that the open land to the north had come to loom so large in mister Rhodes' magination, that it had taken on the aura of a sacred quest.

Jordan could mark the day that it had begun, not only the day but the hour. For weeks after Pickering had been buried in the sprawling cemetery on the Cape Road, Jordan had respected mister Rhodes" mourning. Then, one afternoon, he had left his office early. He had returned to the camp.

He retrieved the bird image from where it had "been abandoned in the yard, and with the help of three black workmen, he moved it into the cottage. The living-room had been too small to hold it; it hindered access to both the dining-table and the front door.

In the small cottage, there was only one free wall, and that was in mister Rhodes" bedroom, at the head of his narrow cot. The statue fitted perfectly into the space beyond the window. The next morning, when Jordan went to call him, mister Rhodes had already left his cot and, wearing a dressing-gown, was standing before the statue.

In the fresh pink light of sunrise, as they rode down to the De Beers offices, mister Rhodes had said, suddenly: ` I have had a thought, Jordan, one which I'd like to share with you. While I was studying that statue, it came to me that the north is the gateway, the north is the hinterland of this continent of ours." That is how it had begun, in the shadow of the bird.

When the architect, Herbert Baker, had consulted mister Rhodes on the decoration and furnishings of the mansion that they were building on his Cape Estate, "Groote Schuur", "The Great Barn", Jordan had sat aside from the two men. As always in the presence of others he was unobtrusive and self-effacing, taking the notes that mister Rhodes dictated, supplying a figure or a fact only when it was demanded, and then with his voice kept low, the natural lilt and music of his rich tenor subdued.

mister Rhodes had jumped up from his seat on the box against the wall of the cottage and begun to pace, with that sudden excitable and voluble mood upon him.

"I have had a thought, Baker. I want there to be a theme for the place, something which is essentially me, which will be my motif long after I am gone, something that when men look at it, even in a thousand years" time, they will immediately recall the name Cecil John Rhodes."

"A diamond, perhaps?" Baker had hazarded, sketching a stylized stone on his pad.

"No, no, Baker. Do be original, man! First I have to scold you for being stingy, for trying to build me a mean little hovel and now that I have prevailed on you for magnificently barbaric size and space, you want to spoil it., "The bird," said Jordan. He had spoken despite himself, and both men looked at him with surprise.

"What did you say, Jordan?"

"The bird, mister Rhodes. The stone bird. I think that should be your motif."

Rhodes stared at him for a moment, and then punched his big fist into the palm of his left hand.

"That's it, Baker. The bird, sketch it for me. Sketch it now."

So the bird had become the spirit of Groote Schuur.

There was barely one of the huge cavernous rooms without its frieze or carved door jambs depicting it, even the bath, eleven tons of chiselled and polished granite was adorned at its four corners with the image of the falcon.

The original statue had been shipped down from Kimberley, and a special niche prepared for it high above the baronial entrance hall, from where it stared down blindly upon everyone who came through the massive teak front doors of the mansion.

On this morning they had ridden out even earlier than usual, for mister Rhodes had slept badly and had summoned Jordan from his small bedroom down the corridor.

It was cold. A vindictive wind came down off the mountains of the Hottentots Holland and as they took the path up towards the private zoo, Jordan looked back.

Across the wide Cape flats he saw the snow on the distant peaks turning pink and gold in the early light.

mister Rhodes was in a morose mood, silent and heavy in the saddle, his collar pulled up over his ears, and the broad hat jammed down to meet it. Jordan surreptitiously pushed his own mount level and studied his face.

Rhodes was still in his thirties, and yet this morning he looked fifteen years older. He took no notice of the first unseasonal flush of blue plumbago blooms beside the path, though on another morning he would have exclaimed with delight, for they were his favourite flowers.

He did not stop at the zoo to watch the lions fed, but turned up into the forest; and on the prow of land that led to the steeper cliffs of the flat-topped massif they dismounted.

At this distance the thatched roof of Groote Schuur with its twirling barley-corn turrets looked like a fairy castle, but Rhodes looked beyond it.

"I feel like a racehorse," he said suddenly. "Like a thoroughbred Arab with the heart and the will and the need to run, but there is a dark horseman upon my back that checks me with a harsh curb of iron or pricks me with a cruel spur." He rubbed his closed eyes with thumb and forefinger, and then massaged his cheeks as though to set the blood coursing in them again. "He was with me again last night, Jordan. Long ago I fled from England to this land and I thought I had eluded him, but he is back in the saddle. His name is Death, Jordan, and he will give me so little time." He pressed his hand to his chest, fingers spread as though to slow the racing of his damaged heart. "There is so little time, Jordan. I must hurry." He turned and took the hand from his heart and placed it on Jordan's shoulder. His expression became tender, a small sad smile touched his white lips. "How I envy you, my boy, for you will see it all and I shall not."

At that moment Jordan thought his own heart might break and, seeing his expression, Rhodes lifted his hand and touched his cheek.

"It's all too short, Jordan, life and glory, even love it's all too short. "He turned back to his horse. "Come, there is work to do."

As they rode out of the forest, the course of that mercurial mind had changed again. Death had been pushed aside and he said suddenly: "We shall have to square him, Jordan. I know he is your father, but we shall have to square him. Think about it and let me have your thoughts, but remember time is running short and we cannot move without him."

The road over the neck between the main massif of Table Mountain and Signal Hill was well travelled and Jordan passed twenty coaches or more before he reached the top, but it was another two miles and the road became steadily less populous, until at last it was a lonely deserted track which led into one of the ravines in the Mountainside.

In this winter season the protea bushes on the slopes beyond the sprawling thatched building were drab and their blooms had withered and browned on the branches.

The waterfall that smoked down off the mountain polished the rocks black and cold, and the spray dripped from the clustering trees about the pool.

However, the cottage had a neat cared-for look. The thatch had recently been renewed. It was still bright gold, and the thick walls had been whitewashed. With relief Jordan saw smoke curling from the chimney stack.

His father was at home.

He knew that the property had once belonged to the old hunter and explorer Tom Harkness, and that his father had purchased it with 150 pounds of his royalties from A Hunter's Odyssey. A sentimental gesture perhaps for old Tom had been the one who had encouraged and counselled Zouga Ballantyne on his first expedition to Zambezia.

Jordan dismounted and hitched the big glossy hunter from the stables of Groote Schuur to the rail below the verandah, and he walked to the front steps.

He glanced at the pillar of blue marbled stone that stood at the head of the steps like a sentinel, and a little shadow flitted over his face as he remembered the fateful day that Ralph had hacked it out of the Devil's Own claims and brought it to the surface.

It was the only thing that remained to any of them from all those years of labour and travail. He wondered not only that his father had transported it so far with so much effort, but that he had placed it so prominently to rebuke him.

For a moment he laid his hand upon the stone, and he felt the faint satiny bloom that other hands had made on the same spot on the surface, like the marks of worshippers" hands on a holy relic. Perhaps Zouga also touched it every time he passed. Jordan dropped his hand and called towards the shuttered cottage.

"Is anybody there?"

There was a commotion in the front room, and the front door burst open.

"Jordan, my Jordie!"howled Jan Cheroot, and came bounding down the steps. His cap of peppercorn hair was pure white at last, but his eyes were bright and the web of wrinkles around them had not deepened.

He embraced Jordan with the wiry strength of brown arms; but even from the advantage of the verandah step he did not reach to Jordan's chin.

"So tall, jordie," he chuckled. "Whoever thought you'd grow so tall, my little jordie."

He hopped back and stared up into Jordan's face. "Look at you, I bet a guinea to a baboon turd that you've broken a few hearts already."

"Not as many as you have." Jordan pulled him close again, and hugged him.

"I had a start," Jan Cheroot admitted, and then grinned wickedly. "And I've still got the wind left for a sprint or two."

"I was afraid that you and Papa might still be away."

"We got home three days ago."

"Where is Papa?"

jordan!"

The familiar, beloved voice made him start and he broke from Jan Cheroot's embrace and looked beyond him to Zouga Ballantyne standing in the doorway of the cottage.

He had never seen his father looking- so well. It was not merely that he was lean and hard and sun-browned.

He seemed to stand taller and straighter with an easy set to his shoulders, so different from the defeated slump with which he had left the diamond fields.

"Jordan!" he said again, and they came together and shook hands, and Jordan studied his father's face at closer range.

The pride and the purpose that had been burnt away in the diamond pit had returned, but with their quality subtly changed. Now he had the look of a man who had worked out the terms on which he was prepared to live.

There were the shadows of a new thoughtfulness in his green eyes, the weight of understanding and compassion in his gaze. Here was a man who had tested himself almost to the point of destruction, had explored the frontiers of his soul and found them secure.

"Jordan," he said again quietly for the third time, and then he did something that demonstrated the profound change he had undergone. He leaned forward and briefly he pressed the soft golden curls of his beard to Jordan's cheek.

"I have thought of you often," he said without embarrassment. Thank you for coming." Then with his Arm about his shoulders he ushered Jordan into the front room.

This room always pleased Jordan, and he moved across to the log fire in the walk-in hearth and held out his hands to the blaze while he looked about him. It was a man's room, shelves filled with men's books, encyclopaedias and almanacs and thick leatherbound volumes of travel and exploration.

Weapons hung upon the walls, bows and quivers of poisoned Bushman arrows, shields and assegais of Matabele and Zulu, and, of course, the tools of the trade to which Zouga had reverted, firearms, heavy calibre sporting rifles by famous gunsmiths, Gibbs, Holland and Holland, Westley Richards. They were racked on the wall facing the fireplace, blued steel and lovingly carved wood.

With them were the souvenirs and trophies of Zouga's work, horns of antelope and buffalo, twisting or curved or straight as a lance, the zig-zag stripes of a zebra hide, the tawny gold bushed mane of the Kalahari lion, and ivory, great yellow arcs reaching higher than a man's head, yellow as fresh butter and translucent as candlewax in the cold winter light from the doorway.

"You had a good trip?" Jordan asked, and Zouga shrugged.

"It gets more difficult each season to find good specimens for my clients."

His clients were rich and aristocratic sportsmen, come out to Africa for the chase.

"But at least the Americans seem to have discovered Africa at last. I have a good party booked for next season young fellow called Roosevelt, Secretary of the Navy."

He broke off. "Yes, we are managing to keep body and soul together, old Jan Cheroot and I, but I don't have to ask about you."

He glanced down at the expensive English cloth of Jordan's suit, the soft leather of his riding boots which creased perfectly around his ankles like the bellows of a concertina, the solid silver spurs and the gold watch chain in his fob pocket, and then his eye paused on the white sparkle of the diamond in his cravat.

"You made the right choice when you decided to go with Rhodes. My God, how that man's star rises higher and brighter with. each passing day."

"He is a great man, Papa."

"Or a great rogue." Then Zouga smiled apologetically.

"I am sorry, I know how highly you think of him. Let's have a glass of sherry, Jordie, while Jan Cheroot makes lunch for us." He smiled again. "We miss your cooking.

You will find it poor fare, I'm afraid."

While he poured sweet Cape sherry into long glasses, he asked over his shoulder: "And Ralph, what do you hear of Ralph?"

"We meet often in Kimberley or at the railhead. He always asks after you."

"How is he?"

"He will be a big man, Papa. Already his wagons run to Pilgrims" Rest and those new goldfields on the Witwatersrand. He has just won the fast coach contract from Algoa Bay. He has trading posts at Tati and on the Shashi river."

They ate in front of the fire, sour bread and cheese, a cold joint of mutton and a black bottle of Constantia wine, and Jan Cheroot hovered over Jordan, scolding him fondly for his appetite and recharging his glass when it was barely a quarter empty.

At last they finished and stretched out their legs towards the fire, while Jan Cheroot brought a burning taper to light the cigars which Jordan pro from a gold pocket case.

Jordan spoke through the perfumed wreaths of smoke.

"Papa, the concession, "And for the first time an angry arrowhead creased the skin between Zouga's eyes.

"I had hoped that you came to see us," he said coldly.

"I keep forgetting that you are Rhodes" man, ahead of being my son."

"I am both," Jordan contradicted him evenly. "That's why I can talk to you like this."

"What message has the famous mister Rhodes for me this time?" Zouga demanded.

"Maund and Selous have both accepted his offers. They have sold their concessions to mister Rhodes, and both are ten thousand pounds richer."

Maund was a soldier and an adventurer. Fred Selous, like Zouga, a hunter and explorer. Also, like Zouga, Selous had written a well-received book on the African chase A Hunter's Wanderings in Africa. Both of these men had at different times prevailed on Lobengula to grant them concessions to ivory and minerals in his eastern dominions.

"mister Rhodes wants me to point out to you that both the Maund and Selous concessions are over the same territory as the concession that Mzilikazi granted to you.

He owns both of them now, the validity of all the treaties is hopelessly confused and hazy."

"The Ballantyne concession was granted first, by Mzilikazi; the ones that followed have no force," snapped zouga.

"mister Rhodes" lawyers have advised "Damn mister Rhodes and his lawyers. Damn them all to hell."

Jordan dropped his eyes and was silent, and after a long pause Zouga sighed and stood up. He went to the yellow wood cupboard and took out a stained and dog-eared document, so ragged that it had been pasted onto a backing to prevent it falling to pieces.

The ink had faded to brown, but the script was bold and spiky, the hand of an arrogant and cocksure young man.

The document was headed: EXCLUSIVE CONCESSION TO MINE GOLD AND HUNT IVORY IN THE SOVEREIGN TERRITORY OF MATABELELAND And at its foot was a crude wax seal with the image of a bull elephant, and the words:

KKOSI NKHULU, GREAT KING Below it a shaky cross in the same faded ink:

MZILIKAZI, his mark Zouga laid the document on the table between them, and they both stared at it.

"All right," Zouga capitulated. "What do mister Rhodes' lawyers advise?"

"That this concession could be set aside on separate points of law."

"I would fight him."

"Papa. He is a determined man. His influence is enormous. He will be Prime Minister of the Cape Parliament at the next session, there is little doubt of that." Jordan touched the red wax seal. "His fortune is vast, perhaps ten million pounds, "

"Still I will fight him," Zouga said, and then stopped Jordan speaking with a hand on his arm. "Jordan, don't you understand. A man must have Something, a dream, a light to follow in the darkness. I can never sell this, it has been all of my life for too long. Without it I shall have nothing."

"Papa "I know what you will say, that I can never make this into reality. I do not have the money it would need. You might even say that I no longer even have the strength of purpose. But, Jordan, while I have this piece of paper I can still hope, I still have my dream to follow. I can !" never sell it."

"I told him that, and he understood immediately. He wants you to be a part of it."

Zouga lifted his head and stared at his son.

"A seat on the Board of Governors of the company for which mister Rhodes will petition a Royal Charter from Her Majesty. Then you will have grants of farm land, gold claims, and an active command in the field. Don't you see, Papa, he is not taking your dream away from you, he is making it come true at last."

The silence drew out, a log crumbled and crashed softly in the hearth; sparks shot up and the flare lit Zouga's face.

"When will he see me?" he asked.

"We can be at Groote Schuur in four hours" ride."

"It will be dark by then."

"There are fifteen bedrooms for you to choose from," Jordan smiled, and Zouga laughed like a man who has been given back all the excitement and eagerness of youth.

"Then why are we sitting here?" he asked. "Jan Cheroot, bring my heavy coat."

Zouga strode out onto the verandah of the cottage, and on the top step he checked and reached out with his right hand to the pillar of blue stone. He touched it with a strangely formal caress, and with the same hand touched his own lips and forehead, the gesture with which an Arab greets an old friend.

Then Zouga glanced at Jordan, and smiled.

"Superstition," he explained. "Good luck."

"Good luck?" Jan Cheroot snorted from below the steps where he held Zouga's horse. "Damn stone, all the way from Kimberley, trip over the thundering rubbish." He went on muttering to himself as Zouga mounted.

Jan Cheroot would pine away if he didn't have something to complain about." Zouga winked at Jordan, and they trotted out from under the milkwood trees onto the track.

"I often think back to that day when we hit the blue," Jordan said. "If we had only known!"

"How could we know?"

"It was I, I feel sure of that. It was I who convinced you that the blue ground was barren."

"Jordan, you were only a boy."

"But I was supposed to be the diviner of diamonds. If I had not been so certain that it was dead ground, you would never have sold the Devil's Own."

"I never sold it. I gambled it away."

"Only because you thought it was worthless. You would never have accepted mister Rhodes" bet if you had known that the blue was not the end, but only the beginning."

"Nobody knew that, not then."

"mister Rhodes sensed it. He never lost faith. He knew what the blue was. He knew it with a certain instinct that nobody else had."

"I have never been back to Kimberley, Jordie." Zouga settled down in the saddle, riding with long stirrups like a Boer hunter. "I never wanted to go back, but of course the news filters down the line of rail. I heard that when Rhodes and Barnato made their deal, they valued the Devil's Own claims at half a million pounds."

"They were the keys to the field," Jordie explained. "It just happened that they were the central claims in the main enrichment. But you could never have guessed that, Papa."

Strange how right one man's instincts can be," Zouga brooded. "And how wrong another man's. I always knew, or thought I knew, that my road to the north began in that hole, that terrible hole."

"Perhaps it still does. The money to take us all to the north will still come from it. mister Rhodes" millions."

"Tell me about the blue. You have been with Rhodes through it all. Tell me about it."

"It changes," Jordan said. "It's as simple as that, it alters."

Zouga shook his head. "It's like some sort of miracle."

"Yes," Jordan nodded. "Diamonds are nature's beautiful miracles. I'll never forget my own astonishment when mister Rhodes showed it to me. That hard blue rock is unyielding as any granite when it comes out of the earth, and yet after it has been laid out in the stacking fields for a year or two it starts to crumble. It's the sunlight, we think, that does it. It crumbles up like a loaf of stale bread, and the diamonds, oh Papa, the diamonds. Incredible stones, eleven thousand carats of diamonds each day. The blue is the mother lode, the blue is the heart."

He broke off in embarrassment. "Sometimes I run away with myself," he confessed, and Zouga smiled with him.

Who could resist this beautiful young man, that was the word to describe him, not handsome, not good-looking, but beautiful, with a quality of gentleness and goodness that seemed to form an aura about him.

"Papa." Jordan sobered. "Oh Papa, you will never know how happy I am that you are to be part of it, after all.

You and mister Rhodes."

"mister Rhodes," Zouga thought indulgently. "Always mister Rhodes. And yet it's a good thing for a young man to have a hero. Pity this poor world of ours when the last hero passes."

Can you judge a man by his books? Zouga wondered.

The library was choked with them. One complete wall packed to the ceiling with the sources and references which Gibbon had consulted for his Decline and Fall.

So impressed had Rhodes been with this work that he had ordered Hatchards of London to collect and, if necessary, translate and bind the complete authorities. Jordan said it had cost him 8000 pounds thus far, and was not yet complete.

Ranked beside this formidable array were all the published lives of Alexander, of Julius Caesar and of Napoleon. What dreams of empire they must sustain. Zouga smiled inwardly as he listened to the high hypnotic voice of the burly figure with the flushed swollen face as he sat behind the vast desk into whose panels were chiselled the stylized figures of the bird, the falcon of Zimbabwe.

"You are an Englishman, Ballantyne, a man of honour and dedication; these things have always attracted me to you." He was irresistible, able to conjure up a gamut of emotions with a few words, and Zouga smiled at himself again. He was in danger of the same hero worship as his own son.

"I want you even more than this concession of yours.

You understand, you know what it is we seek, not merely wealth and personal aggrandizement. No, no, it is something beyond that, something sacred."

Then he came to it abruptly, without flourish.

"There," Rhodes said. "You know what I need, you and your concession. What do you want from me in return?"

"What task will I perform?" Zouga asked.

"Good." Rhodes nodded the untidy leonine head. "Glory before gold. You please me, Ballantyne, but to business.

I had thought to ask you to lead the occupying expedition, to guide it over the ground you know so well but other men can do something as simple as that. I shall let Selous do it. I have something more important for you. You will be my alter-ego at the kraal of the Matabele king. The savages know and respect you, you speak their language, know their customs, you are a soldier, I have read your military paper on the tribe, and we must not deceive ourselves, Ballantyne, it may come to a military option. Few other men can do all these things, have all these qualities."

They stared at each other across the desk, both men leaning forward, and then Rhodes spoke again.

"I am not a mean man, Ballantyne. Do the job for me and you can name your rewards. Money, ten thousand pounds, land, each land grant will be four thousand acres, gold claims, each will be five hundred yards square. How many shall we say, five of each, ten thousand pounds in cash, twenty thousand acres of prime land of your choice, five claims on the rich gold reef over which you shot the great elephant that you described in Hunter's Odyssey. What do you say, Ballantyne?"

"Ten of each," said Zouga. "Ten thousand pounds, ten land grants, ten gold claims."

"Done!" Rhodes slapped the desk. Write it down, Jordan, write it down. But what of your salary while you are agent at Lobengula's kraal? Two thousand, four thousand per annum? I am not a mean man, Ballantyne."

"And I am not a greedy one."

"Four thousand, then, and we are all agreed, so we can go to lunch."

Zouga stayed five days at Groote Schuur, days of talking and planning and listening.

It amused him to see the legend dispelled. The idea of Rhodes as a solitary and brooding man, withdrawn to some high Olympus where other men could not follow, was proved to be a myth.

For Rhodes surrounded himself with men; there was not a meal at which less than fifteen sat to his generous board. What men they were, clever or rich or both, belted earls or farm-born Boers, politicians and financiers, judges and soldiers. And if they were not wealthy, they were powerful or useful or merely amusing. At one dinner there was even a poet, a bespectacled little shrimp of a man on passage from Indian Service back to England.

Jordan had read his Plain Tales from the Hills and secured an invitation for him, and despite his appearance, the company was quite taken with him. Rhodes invited him to return and write about Africa: "The future is here, young Kipling, and we shall need a poet to sing it for us."

Men by the dozen, and never a woman. Rhodes refused to have a woman servant in the house. There was not even a painting of a woman on the walls.

And the taciturn, brooding figure of legend never stopped talking.

From the back of a horse as they rode through the estate, striding over the lawns with his clumsy uncoordinated gait, seated behind the teak desk or at the head of the long, laden dining-table, he talked.

Figures and facts and estimates poured from him without reference to notes, other than an occasional glance at Jordan for confirmation. Then came the ideas, fateful, ludicrous, prophetic, fascinating or fantastic, but neverending.

To a visiting member of the British Parliament: "We have to make a practical tie with the old country, for future generations will be born beyond its shores; it must be useful, physical and rewarding for both, or we shall drift apart."

To an American senator: "We could hold Parliament for five years in Westminster and for the next five in Washington."

To a rival financier who enviously sniped at his monopoly of the diamond industry: "Without me, the price of diamonds would not make it worthwhile turning over a stone to pick one up. Kimberley would revert to desert and thirty thousand would starve."

When they began to plan the grand expedition to the north, Zouga had imagined that Rhodes would concern himself with each detail. He was wrong.

He defined the objective: "We need a document from Lobengula, ratifying and consolidating all these grants into a single concession, that I can take to London." Then he picked the man. "Rudd, you have the legal mind." And gave him carte blanche. "Go and do it. Take Jordan with you. He speaks the language. Take anyone else you need."

Then to Zouga: "We need an occupying force, small enough to move fast, large enough to protect itself against Matabele treachery. Ballantyne, that will be your first concern. Let me know what you decide, but remember there is little time."

What might have taken another man six months, was accomplished in five days, and when Zouga left Groote Schuur, Jordan rode with him as far as the neck of the mountain. The wind had gone up into the north-west, and then came down like a ravenous beast, roaring dully against the crags of the mountain and bringing in cold, steely-grey rain squalls off the Atlantic.

It could not blunt their spirits, and although their wind-driven oilskins flogged their bodies and the horses shivered and drooped their ears, they shouted above the wind.

"Isn't he a great man? Every minute spent in his company is like a draught of fine wine, intoxicating with excitement. He is so generous."

"Though he is the one who profits most from his generosity," Zouga laughed.

"That's mean, Papa."

"A saint does not make such a fortune in so short a time. But if anybody can do this thing, then it is Rhodes, and for that I will follow him into hell itself."

"Let's pray that won't be necessary."

At the top of the pass the wind was stronger still, and Jordan had to turn his horse in until their knees touched.

"Papa, the column, the occupying column. There is one person who has the wagons, who knows the route, can requisition the supplies and recruit the men."

"Who is that, Jordie?"

"Ralph."

Zouga watched Jordan ride back down the pass, towards the wind-darkened waters of Table Bay and the sprawling white buildings that clung to the lower slopes of the mountain under the dingy scudding sky. Then he turned his own mount into the wind and went down the other side.

The excitement stayed with him. He realized that it was Rhodes" particular genius to awaken this feeling in men around him. Even though there were quicksands ahead in which he knew he might soon be engulfed, the enthusiasm and quickness of spirit persisted.

Ten land grants meant forty thousand acres of land, but it would take more than 10000 pounds to hold it. Homestead and wells and fences to build, cattle to stock it, men to work it, all that would cost money, a great deal of money.

The gold claims, he could not even begin to imagine how much it might cost to transport stamp mills and sluice boxes from the railhead.

Of course, for lack of money to exploit them, he would have to pass by a hundred opportunities that the new land would offer. in the beginning the land grants of other men would be for sale at bargain prices, hundreds of thousands of acres of the land that he had always thought of as his own, and because he did not have the money, it would go to others.

None of this could break the mood, not the cold rain in his face that numbed his cheeks, not the realization that his dream was still merely a dream. For now at last they were on the move at the breakneck pace set by an impatient man, towards the realization of that dream.

So Zouga could lift his chin and sit up straight in the saddle, ignoring the icy snakes of rainwater that wriggled down inside his collar, buoyed high above mundane doubts by the gambler's certainty that at last his luck had changed, the dice were hot for him and every time he rolled the aces would flash like spearheads.

The sheets of rain hid the cottage from Zouga until he turned in under the milkwood grove; then a fluke of the wind opened the slanting silver sheets of water, and his mood popped like a bubble.

He had been mistaken, his luck had not changed, it had all been words and illusion, the caravan of his misfortunes rolled on unchecked, for before him his home was partially destroyed.

one of the ancient milkwoods, weary of resisting the gales of a hundred winters, had succumbed at last; it had come crashing down across the front of the cottage. The roof had given under the blow, and sagged in. The supports of the verandah had shattered and a tangle of fallen roof beams and milkwood branches blocked the front entrance. The living-room would be swamped with rain his books, his papers.

Appalled at the havoc, he dismounted and stood before it, and his spirits slid further. He felt his ribs constricting his breathing and dread uncoiled in his guts like an awakening serpent. It was the superstitious terror of one who has offended the gods.

The pillar of blue marbled rock that he had set to guard his threshold had been thrown down. It lay half under the tumbled thatch with the shattered verandah support beside it. Once it had been hard and smooth as granite, but the sunlight and the air had rotted it and the fall had shattered it like chalk.

Zouga went down on one knee and touched a rough, irregular lump of the smashed blue ground. The destruction of his home was as nothing. This was the only one of his possessions that was irreplaceable, and the omen of its destruction struck frost into the secret places of his soul.

Almost as a chorus to his dread, a fresh rain squall came booming down the valley, thrashing the trees and ripping at the scattered thatch. Rain beat down onto the broken surface of the rock he was touching, and at Zouga's fingertips there was a tiny burst of white lightning so dazzling, so searing, that it seemed it could flay the skin from his finger as he touched it. But it was cold, cold as a crystal of Arctic ice.

It had never been exposed to the light of day, not once in the two hundred million years since it had assumed its present form, and yet it seemed in itself to be a drop of distilled sunlight.

Zouga had never seen anything so beautiful, nor touched anything so sensual, for it was the beacon and the lodestone of his life. It made all the striving and the heartbreak seem worthwhile, it was justification for the years he had believed squandered, it exonerated his once firmly held belief that his road to the north began in the gaping chasm of De Beers New Rush.

With hands that shook like those of a very old man, he fumbled open the blade of his clasp knife and gently prised that rainbow of light from its niche in the shattered blue rock, and held it up before his own eyes.

"The Ballantyne diamond," he whispered, and staring into its limpid liquid depths like a sorcerer into his divining ball of crystal, he saw light and shadow ripple and change and in his imagination become vistas of enchanted pastures rich with sweet grass; he saw slow herds of cattle and the headgear of winding wheels of fabulous gold mines spinning against a high blue sky.

They didn't expect him. He came so swiftly that no runner brought word ahead of him. He had left Rudd and the zest of the party to follow from the Shashi and ridden on ahead, leading two spare horses and changing as soon as the mount beneath him tired. The horses were the pick of De Beers" stables, and it took him five days from the frontier of Matabeleland to Khami Mission.

"I'm Jordan Ballantyne," he said, and looked down on the family that had hastily assembled on the front verandah of the Mission. The siege was over without a shot fired; he walked in with his curls shining and that warm, almost shy, smile on his lips, and took their hearts, every one of them, by storm.

The gifts he brought had been chosen with obvious care, and spoke of a knowledge of each of them and their individual needs.

There were two dozen packets of seeds for Clinton unusual vegetables and rare herbs, cornfrey and okra, horseradish and turmeric, shallot and sou-sou. For Robyn a box of medicines, which included a bottle of chloroform, and a folding wallet of shiny, sharp surgical instruments.

The latest volume of Tennyson's poetry for Salina, a pair of marvellous lifelike china dogs with moving eyes for the twins, and for Cathy the best of all, a box of oil paints, a bundle of brushes, and a letter from Ralph.

in the first week, while he waited for Rudd and the rest of the party to come up from the Shashi, Jordan used a green twig to divine water, an art that Clinton had never acquired, and helped him dig the new well. They hit clear, sweet water ten feet down. He recited to Cathy a biography of Ralph from the day and hour of his birth, which was so minutely detailed that it took instalments over the entire week to complete, while she listened with a fixed avidity.

He rolled up his sleeves and from the black woodburning stove produced a flow of culinary phenomena !" i quenelles and souffles, croques-en-bouche and meringues, sauces both Holliandaise and Bearnaise, and while Salina hovered near him, eager to learn and help, he quoted to her the entire "In Memoriam" of Alfred Lord Tennyson, from memory: "So fret not, like an idle girl, That life is dash'd with flecks of sin.

Abide: thy wealth is gathered in, When Time hath sunder'd shell from pearl., And she was utterly enchanted by his golden spell.

He showed the twins how to cut and fold from a piece of newspaper all manner of fantastic bird and animal shapes, and he told stories that were the best they had heard since Mungo Sint John had left Khami.

For Robyn he had the latest news from the Cape. He was able to describe for her the rising stars on the political horizon, and categorize their strengths and weaknesses. He had the latest assessments of the political scene at home. Members of both Houses of Parliament, Cape and home, were constant guests at Groote Schuur, so he could repeat the gossip of that "wild and incomprehensible old man", as the Queen had called Gladstone.

He could explain the Home Rule issue and tell her what the odds were for a Liberal victory at the next election, even after Gladstone's failure to rescue Gordon from Khartoum and his consequential loss of popularity.

"At the Queen's jubilee the common people on the pavements cheered him, but the aristocracy hissed him from the balconies," he told her.

For Robyn, this was nectar to a woman lost over twenty years in the wilderness.

Dinners at Khami usually finished by the fall of dark, and the family was abed an hour later, but after Jordan's arrival, the talk and laughter sometimes lasted until midnight.

"Jordan, there is no doubt that if we want Mashonaland, we shall have to square your aunt. I hear that Lobengula will not make a major decision without Doctor Codrington. I want you to go on ahead of Rudd and the others. Go to Khami and talk to your aunt." That had been mister Rhodes" parting injunction to him, and Jordan's conscience found no conflict between this duty and his family loyalties.

Again and again in that week Jordan returned to extol mister Rhodes to Robyn, his integrity and sincerity, his vision of a world at peace and united under one sovereign power.

Instinctively he knew which areas of Rhodes" character to emphasize to Robyn, patriotism, charity, his sympathetic treatment of his black workers, his opposition to the Stropping Act in the Cape Parliament which, if passed, would have given employers the right to lash their black servants, and only when he judged that she was swayed to his views, did Jordan mention the concession to her. Yet, despite his preparations, her opposition was immediate and ferocious.

"Not another tribe robbed of its lands," she cried.

"We do not want Matabeleland, Aunty. mister Rhodes would guarantee Lobengula's sovereignty and protect him "I read the letter you wrote to the Cape Times, Aunty, expressing your concern over the Matabele raids into Mashonaland. With the British flag flying over the Shona tribes, they would be protected by British justice."

"The Germans and Portuguese and Belgians are gathering like vultures, you know, Aunty, that there is only one nation fit to take on the sacred trust."

Jordan's arguments were calculated and persuasive, his manner without guile and his trust in Cecil John Rhodes touching and infectious, and he kept returning to his most poignant argument.

"Aunty, you have seen the Matabele bucks returning from Mashonaland with the blood caked on their blades and the captured Shona girls roped together. Think of the havoc that they have left behind them, the burned villages, the murdered infants and grey heads, the slaughtered Shona warriors. You cannot deny the Shona people the protection that we will offer."

That night she spoke to Clinton, lying beside him in the darkness in the narrow cot on the hard straw-filled mattress; and his reply was immediate and simple: "My dear, it has always been clear to me as the African sun that God has prepared this continent for the protection of the only nation on earth that has the public virtue sufficient to govern it for the benefit of its native peoples."

"Clinton, mister Rhodes is not the British nation."

"He is an Englishman."

"So was Edward Teach, alias Blackbeard the pirate."

They were silent for many minutes and then Robyn said suddenly: "Clinton, have you noticed anything wrong with Salina?"

His concern was immediate. "Is she sickening?"

"I'm afraid so, incurably. I think she is in love."

"Good gracious." He sat abruptly upright in the bed.

"Who on earth is she in love with?"

"How many young men are there at Khami at the present time?"

In the morning, on the way to her clinic in the church, she stopped at the kitchen. The previous evening Clinton had slaughtered a pig, and now Salina and Jordan were making sausages. He was turning the handle of the mincing machine while she forced lumps of pork into the funnel. They were so absorbed, chatting so gaily together, that while Robyn stood in the doorway watching them they were unaware of her presence.

They made a beautiful couple, so beautiful indeed, that Robyn felt a sense of unreality as she watched them, and it was followed immediately by uneasiness, nothing in life was that perfect.

Salina saw her, and started, and then unaccountably blushed so that her pixie pointed ears glowed.

"Oh Mama, you startled me."

Robyn felt a rush of empathy, and, strangely, of envy for her eldest daughter. She wished that she were still capable of that pure and innocent emotion, and suddenly she had the contrasting image of Mungo Sint John, lean and scarred and unscrupulous, and what she felt shocked her so her voice was brusque.

"Jordan, I have made up my mind. When mister Rudd arrives, I will go with you to Lobengula's kraal, and I will speak for your case."

After a prolonged and unprofitable trading expedition as far as the Zambezi, Mungo had returned with Louise to the kraal at Gubulawayo, where they were kept almost seven months. But Lobengula's procrastinations worked in Mungo Sint John's favour.

Robyn Codrington had refused to speak to the king on Mungo's behalf, and consequently he was only one among dozens of white concession-seekers camped around Lobengula's royal kraal.

The king would not have let Mungo leave, even if he had wanted to.

He seemed to enjoy talking to him, and listened eagerly to Mungo's accounts of the American War and of Mungo's sea voyages. Every week or so he would summon Mungo to an audience and question him through his interpreter, for hours at a time.

The destructive power of cannon fascinated him, and he demanded detailed descriptions of sundered walls and human bodies blown to nothingness. The sea was another source of intense interest, and he tried to grasp the immensity of waters and the blast of storm and gale across it. However, when Mungo delicately hinted at a land grant and trading concession, Lobengula smiled and sent him away.

"I will call for you again, One Bright Eye, when I have thought on it more heavily. Now is there aught you lack in food or drink? I will send my women to your camp with it."

Once he gave Mungo permission to go out into the hunting veld so long as he stayed south of the Shangani river and killed neither elephant nor hippopotamus. On this expedition Mungo shot a huge cock ostrich and salted and dried the skin with its magnificent plumage intact.

On three other occasions the king allowed him to return to Khami Mission Station when Mungo complained that his leg was paining him. Mungo's predatory instinct was that Robyn Codrington was disturbed and excited by these returns, and each time he was able to draw out the visit for days, gradually consolidating his position with her so that when he again asked her to intercede with Lobengula on his behalf, she actually thought about it for a full day before refusing once more.

"I cannot set a cat upon a mouse, General Sint John."

"Madam, I freed my own slaves many years ago."

"When you were forced to," she agreed. "But who will control you here in Matabeleland?"

"You, Robyn, and gladly would I submit to that."

She had flushed and turned her face away from him to hide the colour.

"Your familiarity is presumptuous, sir." And she had left him so that he could keep his revived assignations under the leadwood tree with the twins. His absence since those first encounters in his convalescence had not dimmed their fascination for him. They had become invaluable allies. Nobody else could have extracted from Juba the vital information he needed for his planning.

Mungo had expressed doubts as to the existence of the diamonds, and declared that he would only be convinced if the twins could tell him where Lobengula kept the treasure.

Juba never suspected danger from such an innocent pair, and in the late afternoon, when she had drunk a gallon pot of her own famous brew, she was always genial and garrulous.

"Ningi keeps the diamonds under her sleeping place, Vicky informed Mungo.

"Who is Ningi?"

"The king's sister, and she is almost as fat as King Ben is."

Ningi would be the most trusted of all Lobengula's people, and her hut in the sanctuary of the forbidden women's quarters was the most secure in all Matabeleland.

"I believe you now. You are clever girls, both of you," Mungo told them, and they glowed with pleasure. There was nothing he could not ask of them.

"Vicky, I need some paint. It's for a secret thing, I will tell you about it later, if you can get the paint for me."

"What colour?" Lizzie cut in. "I'll get it for you."

"Red, white and yellow."

In the end Lizzie stood guard while Vicky raided Cathy's paintbox, and they delivered their offering to Mungo and basked in his extravagant praise.

In his planning, it was not enough merely to get the diamonds into his hands; even more vital was to escape the consequences. No man or woman could hope to reach the frontier without the king's permission; it was hundreds of miles of wild country patrolled by the border impis.

He could not grab and run. He had to use guile and perhaps turn the Matabele dread of darkness and witchcraft to his own advantage.

So he planned with meticulous concentration" and waited for the right moment with the patience of the stalking leopard, for he knew that this was his last attempt. If he failed this time, then not even his white skin nor his status as a guest of the king could save him.

If he failed, the Black Ones would wield their knobkerries, crushing in his skull, and his corpse would be flung from the cliffs to the waiting vultures or into the flooded river pools where the crocodiles would rip it into chunks with their spiky yellow saurian teeth. Louise would suffer the same fate, he knew, but it was a chance he was prepared to take.

He was careful to conceal his preparations from her and this was made easier by the distance that she had for long now been maintaining between them. Though they shared the thatched hut that Lobengula's men had built for them in the grove beyond the royal kraal, and though they ate the same meals of beef and sour milk and stone-ground maize cakes that the king sent down to them each evening, Louise spent her days alone, riding out on one of the mules in the early morning and not returning until dusk. Her mattress of straw in the farthest recesses of the hut she had screened with the tattered canvas sunshade from the cart, and he only once tried to pass the screen.

"Not again," she hissed at him. "Never again!" And she showed him the knife that she kept under her skirts.

So he was able to work uninterrupted, during the day, and to hide his equipment under his own mattress each evening. He carved the mask from the naturally curved portion of a hollow tree trunk, a hideous grimacing apelike visage with staring eyes and a gaping mouth full of white fangs, and he painted it with the colours from Cathy's paintbox.

From the plumed ostrich skin he tailored a cloak that reached from neck to ankles, and for his feet and hands he made grotesque mittens of black goatskin. In full costume he was enough to paralyse even the bravest warrior with supernatural terror. He was the very embodiment of the Tokoloshe of Matabele mythology.

Robyn Codrington had given him repeated doses of laudanum for the persisting pain in his leg, but he had saved these for the occasion. He had decided on one of the Matabele festivals, and he waited until the third night when every man and woman of the entire nation, surfeited with beer and thtee days and nights of wild dancing, had fallen asleep where they fell.

At nightfall he gave the laudanurn to Louise in a cup of soured milk, and the tart flavour concealed the musky taste of the drug. An hour after dark he crept across the hut, drew aside the screen and listened to her even breathing for a minute before leaning over her and slapping her cheeks lightly. She did not move nor murmur, and the rhythm of her breathing did not alter.

He dressed swiftly in the feather cloak, not yet donning the mask and mittens, but blackening his face and limbs with a mixture of crushed charcoal and fat. Then with the mask and a length of rope under one arm and a heavy assegai in the other hand, he crept out of the hut.

The grove was deserted, no Matabele would venture here when the spirits were abroad, so he hurried through it, and from the treeline surveyed the stockade of the royal kraal.

There was a sliver of the old moon rising, and it gave just enough light for him to pick his way, but not enough to betray him to watchful eyes. There would be few eyes open on this night. Even so he crouched low as he crossed the open ground; the cloak made a shaggy hyena shape that would excite no real interest.

At the outer stockade he paused to look and listen, then flicked the length of manila rope over the barrier of sharpened poles.

He climbed up carefully, favouring his bad leg, and peered into the kraal.

It was deserted, but a low watch-fire burned infront of the barred gateway.

Mungo slid down the rope and he crossed quickly to the shadows of the nearest hut, and there paused to pull on his mittens and settle the cumbersome mask over his head before creeping on again towards the inner stockade that guarded the women's quarters.

In the preceding weeks, using his brass telescope from the vantage point of the nearest hilltop, he had been able to see over the walls and to study the layout of the wives" quarters.

There was a double circle of huts, like the concentric rings of a target, but at the centre, the bull's-eye, was a larger hut with intricate patterns of thatch and lacing proclaiming its greater importance. His guess that this was the king's sister's residence had been confirmed when he had seen, through the telescope, Ningi's elephantine gleaming naked body, escorted by a dozen hand-maidens, emerging into the early sunlight from the low doorway.

Now he reached the gateway in the inner stockade, and studied it from around the sheltering wall of the nearest hut. Again his luck held. He had been prepared to use the assegai here, but both the guards were stretched out, wrapped in their furs, and neither of them moved as Mungo stepped over their prostrate bodies.

From inside one hut he heard the low regular snores of one fat wife, and in another a woman coughed and muttered in her sleep, but though his nerves jumped, he went on swiftly.

The door to Ningi's hut was closed. Mungo, had honed the edge of the assegai to a razor edge, and with it he sawed through the fastenings of bark rope that secured the opening. The rasp and rustle of the blade sounded thunderous in his ears, and his skin prickled as he waited for a shouted challenge from within. It did not come, but he found that he was sweating as he stepped back and brought out the bladders of goats" blood from under the cloak.

He slit the bladders and splashed the stinking, congealing blood over the portals of the doorway. He had learned from the twins, who were authorities on the supernatural, that a Tokoloshe always spurted blood on any doorway through which it passed. It was one of the creature's more endearing characteristics.

Now with the assegai gripped in his right hand, Mungo stooped into the hut and, crouched in the doorway, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom.

The fire in the centre of the large hut had burned low.

There was just enough light to make out two figures curled like dogs on the sleeping-mats on each side of it and beyond it the ponderous bulk of the princess under her furs.

Her snores started as a low grumbling like a volcano, and rose to a whistling crescendo that covered any sound Mungo might make as he slipped across to the first of the sleeping hand-maids.

Before she could stir he had slipped a gag of goat's skin into her mouth and trussed her at the ankles and wrists with a leather thong. She did not struggle, but stared up at his horrific mask with huge white eyes in the firelight.

He tied and gagged the second woman before crossing to Ningi's sleeping platform.

That afternoon, as one of the king's guests, Mungo had watched Ningi sitting beside her brother and swilling pot after pot of French champagne. She went on snoring and grunting as he bound her arms and legs. Only when he thrust the gag into her gaping mouth did she snuffle and moan and come out of her alcoholic slumbers.

He rolled her off the platform and she fell with a thump to the clay floor. He dragged her across to where her bound servants lay. It was heavy work, for she weighed 300 pounds or more.

He threw a log on the fire, and when it flared he pranced and capered around his captives, thrustin his hideous mask into their faces and gibbering at them in fiendish menace. In the firelight their sweat of fear burst out and ran in little rivulets down their bodies as they writhed and wriggled against their bonds.

Suddenly there was a spluttering explosive rush as Ningi voided her bowels with sheer terror, and the hot stink of faeces filled the hut. Mungo threw a fur kaross over them and immediately they were still, their grunts and muffled groans ceased.

He moved quickly then. Returning to the sleeping platform he threw the furs aside, and found a pallet of woven bamboo. It lifted like a trap door, and in the low recess below it were a dozen small clay pots.

His hands began to shake as he reached for one and lifted it out of the recess. His own sweat half blinded but through his blurred vision he saw the soapy him gleam of reflected firelight in the mouth of the pot.

He could not take it all, there was too much for him to carry and too much for him later to conceal. Moreover, his survivor's instinct warned him that the more he took the more remorseless would be the search and pursuit.

He spilled the contents of all twelve pots into a glittering heap beside the fire, and in its uncertain light made his choice of the biggest and brightest stones from the hundreds that teased him with their twinkling smiles.

Thirty of them filled the leather drawstring bag he had brought with him. He tied it back at his waist, snatched up the assegai and slipped out of the hut.

The guards at the inner stockade still slept, and he passed them silently. Below the wall of the outer stockade he stripped off his cloak, mittens and mask and dropped them on the untended watch-fire. Then he heaped branches over them, there would be only ash by morning.

He went up the rope swiftly, hand over hand, and pulled it up after him. The royal kraal behind him was silent in heavy midnight stupor, and he climbed lightly down the outer wall of the stockade.

He bathed in the pool below the camp, washing off the charcoal and fat, and then found his shirt and breeches where he had left them in the hollow of a tree trunk beside the pool.

in the hut he knelt beside Louise and placed one hand, still icy cold from the pool, upon her cheek. She sighed and rolled over onto her side. He felt like laughing and shouting his triumph out loud. Instead, he hid the bag of precious stones under his mattress and rolled into his blanket. He did not sleep for the rest of the night, and in the dawn he heard the hubbub of superstitious fear from the king's kraal, the screams of women and the shouts of men, loudly bolstering their courage against the spirits and the demons.

"This is a cruel thing for a good king to do," Robyn told Lobengula bitterly.

"Nomusa, you are a wise woman, the wisest that I have ever known, but you do not understand the spirits and demons of Matabeleland."

"I understand that the world is full of evil men, but that there are very few evil spirits."

"The thing that entered my sister's hut came from the air. All the gates to the kraal were guarded by men unsleeping; they have sworn to me that they stood at their posts from dusk to dawn, with eyes wide and spears in their hands. Nothing passed them."

"Even your best men can doze, and then lie to protect themselves."

"Nobody dare lie to the king. It came from air, and it sprayed rotten stinking blood upon the portals of Ningi's hut., Lobengula shuddered despite himself. "On Chaka's scrawny buttocks, that is a Tokoloshe trick. No man can do that."

"Except if he carry blood in a pot to hurl on the doorway."

"Nomusa -" Lobengula shook his head sorrowfully.

"My sister and her servants saw this great hairy thing black as midnight and stinking of the grave, with blood and not sweat oozing from its skin. Its eyes were like the full moon, and its voice that of lion and eagle, it had no hands and no feet, just hairy pads."

Lobengula shuddered again.

"And it stole diamonds," Robyn told him. "What does a demon want with diamonds?"

"Who knows what a demon needs for his spells or his magic, or to please his dark master?"

"Men lust after diamonds."

"Nomusa, to black men diamonds have no value, so it could not have been a black man. On the other hand, if a white man had entered my sister's hut he would not have been satisfied with a few stones. A white man would have taken them all, for that is their way. So it could not have been either a white man or a black man, what is left but a demon?"

"Lobengula, Great King, you cannot allow this thing to happen."

"Nomusa, there has been a terrible witchcraft perpetrated within the royal kraal. An evil person or many evil persons have conjured up a black demon, and I would be no king at all if I allowed them to live.

The evil ones must be smelled out, and my birds must feast before we are cleansed of this filthy thing."

"Lobengula "Say no more, Girlchild of Mercy, words cannot divert my purpose, for you and your family and all the guests at my kraal are summoned to see justice done."

It took ten days for the Matabele people to come in to Gubulawayo; they came in their regiments, warriors and maidens, ringed indunas and fruitful matrons, the toddlers and the greyheaded toothless old droolers, in their thousands and tens of thousands; and on the morning that Lobengula had appointed, the nation assembled, rank upon rank, regiment upon regiment, a black ocean of humanity that overflowed the great cattle stockade.

There was a peculiar stillness over such an immense gathering, only the plumed headdresses moved softly in the small restless breeze, and a pall of fear hung over them, so palpable that it seemed to take the heat from the sun and dim its very rays.

The silence was oppressive; it seemed to crush the breath from their lungs. Only once when a black crow flew low over the serried ranks and screeched its raucous cry into the silence, all their heads lifted and a soft sigh shook them, like the wind through the top branches of the forest. Before the gates of the royal kraal, facing this huge concourse, were drawn up the senior indunas of the Matabele, Somabula and Babiaan and Gandang and the lesser princes of Kumalo, while behind them again, their backs to the poles of the stockade, were Lobengula's white guests, almost one hundred of them, Germans and Frenchmen, Dutchmen and Englishmen, hunters and scholars and businessmen and adventurers, petitioners and missionaries and traders. Soberly clad in broadcloth, wearing hunting leathers and bandoliers or dressed in spangled and gaudy uniform, they waited in the sweltering silence.

There were only two white women present, for Robyn had flatly refused to bring her daughters from Khami for the smelling-out ceremony, and Lobengula. had relented and made an exception for them.

The king had given permission for the two women to be seated. Robyn sat beside the entrance to the stockade, and Clinton stood over her protectively while the members of mister Rhodes" deputation flanked her. mister Rudd, redfaced and whiskered, with his Derby hat set four square on his head, and Jordan Ballantyne, bare-headed and golden-haired at Robyn's other hand.

Further down the line of guests, Louise Sint John sat on a Stool of leather thongs. Her thick sable plaits hung to the waist of her simple white dress, and the eyes of the men around her kept returning surreptitiously to her exotic high-cheeked beauty. Behind her stood Mungo Sint John, one eye hidden by the black patch, leaning easily on his cane and smiling to himself as he saw the direction of the eyes of the men about him.

The nation surged like a slumbering black sea struck by a sudden gale of wind, and the plumes tossed like spume. There was a single clap of sound like the volley of massed cannon as every right leg was lifted shoulder high and brought down to stamp the hard earth, and every throat corded and strained to the royal salute.

"Bayete!"

The Great Black Elephant of Matabele came through the gateway, and behind him his wives led by Ningi swayed and shuffled and sang his praises.

With the toy spear of kingship in his hand, Lobengula paced towards the mound of packed clay on which the bath chair, which had been his father's throne, was set, and Gandang and Babiaan, his brothers, came forward to help him ascend the steps.

From his platform, Lobengula looked upon his people, and those closest to him saw the terrible sorrow in his eyes.

"Let it begin," he said, and slumped into his chair.

There was a ragged chorus of shrieks and whines and maniacal laughter from beyond the stockade walls, and through the gateway came a horrid procession of beldams and crones, of prancing hell-hags and gibbering necromancers.

At their throats and waists were hung the trappings of their wizardry, skull of baboon and infant, skin of reptile, of python and iguana, carapace of tortoise, and stoppered horns, rattles of lucky bean pods and bones, and other grisly relics of man and animal and bird.

Wailing and hooting they assembled before Lobengula's throne.

"Dark sisters, can you smell the evil ones?"

rwe smell their breaths, they are here! They are here!" One of the witches collapsed in the dust, with froth bubbling over her toothless gums; her eyes rolled back into her skull and her limbs twitched spasmodically.

One of her sisters dashed the red powder from a snuffhorn in her face, and she shrieked and leaped into the air.

"Dark sisters, will you bring forth the evil-doers?" Lobengula asked.

"We will bring them to you, Great Bull of Kumalo. We will deliver them up, son of Mzilikazi."

"Go!"ordered Lobengula. "Do what must be done!"

Some of them went whirling and cavorting, brandishing their divining rods, one the tail of a giraffe, another the inflated bladder of a jackal on a staff of red tarnbooti wood, still another the stretched and sun-dried penis of a black-maned lion, the rods with which they would point out the evil ones.

Others crept away, slinking and sly as the night-prow- in ling hyena. Others again crawled on all fours, snuffling the earth like hunting hounds quartering for the scent as they spread out amongst the rows of waiting people.

One of the witches came down the line of white guests, hopping like an ancient baboon, her empty teats flapping against her withered belly, her skin crusty grey with filth and her charms clattering and jangling; and she stopped in front of Mungo Sint John and lifted her nose to sniff the air, then she howled like a bitch in season.

Mungo Sint John took the long black hand-rolled cheroot of native tobacco from between his lips and inspected the ash on its tip. The crone hopped closer and looked up into his face, and he returned the cheroot to his lips and returned her stare without interest.

She leapt up to thrust her face inches from his and noisily sniff the breath of his nostrils, and then she danced away, until she faced him again, lifted the long giraffe tail above her head, shrieked like a stooping owl and rushed at Mungo, the tail raised to strike into his face.

In front of him she froze in the act of striking, and Mungo Sint John took the cheroot from his mouth and he blew a perfect smoke ring, that spun upon itself until it broke in the witch's face and blew away in soft wisps.

She cackled, wildly, madly, and passed on down the line to pause in front of Robyn Codrington.

"You stink like the hyena that spawned you," Robyn told her evenly in perfect Matabele, and the witch whirled and raced away to where Juba stood in the front line of noble matrons; she raised the switch to strike and looked back at Robyn, gloating loathsomely.

Robyn had gone white as bone, and came to her feet clutching her own bosom.

"No," she whispered. "Please, fair sister, let her be."

The witch dropped her arm and came back to strut and preen in front of Robyn; then again she shrieked, whirled and rushed at Juba, this time she struck, and the tail hissed and snapped on black flesh, but at the very last second the witch had diverted her aim, and the blow flew into the startled face of the young woman who stood beside Juba.

"I smell evil," shrieked the witch, and the woman fell to her knees. "I smell blood."

The witch struck again and again, the tail cutting stingingly into the woman's unprotected face until the tears started and ran down her cheeks.

The executioners came forward and pulled her to her feet. The woman's legs were paralysed, so they dragged her unprotesting before Lobengula, and he looked down on her, saddened and helplessly compassionate, before he lifted the forefinger of his right hand.

One of the executioners swung his war club, a full blow that stove in the back of the woman's skull. The bone crunched like a footstep in loose gravel, and the woman's eyes were driven from their sockets like overripe grapes by the force of it. When she fell face forward in the dust there was a bloodless depression in the back of her head into which a man could have placed his fist.

The witch scurried away to continue the hunt, and Juba looked across at Robyn. Robyn had fallen back on her chair, trembling and pale, while Clinton put an arm around her shoulders to steady her.

In the packed ranks there was another triumphant shriek, and the executioners dragged a fine-looking young warrior from his place. He threw off their hands and strode to drop on one knee before Lobengula's throne.

"Father of the nation, hear my praises. Great Thunderer, Black Bull, let me die with your name on my lips.

Oh Lobengula who drives like the wind The king lifted his finger and the club fell with the flute of a goose's wing.

The chorus of howls and shrieks was unending now as the sisters warmed to their work, and the victims were dragged out and slaughtered, until their corpses were a high mound before the king's throne, a tangle of black limbs and shattered heads, that grew and grew.

A hundred, two hundred, were added to the pile, while the sun reached its zenith and the dust and heat and terror formed a suffocating miasma, and the blue metallic flies swarmed in the staring eyes and open mouths of the dead, and the witches cavorted and giggled and struck with their rods.

Here and there a maiden, overcome with the fear and the blazing heat, fell swooning from her place and the witches pounced upon this irrefutable evidence of guilt and rained blows upon her bare back or glossy breasts, and the executioners hurried to keep pace with their dreadful task.

The sun began its slow descent towards the western horizon, and at last one at a time the witches crept back to the mountain of death they had created. They staggered with exhaustion, the dust had caked on their running sweat, but they bayed and whined like dogs as they pored over the corpses, selecting those they would take with them, back to their caves and secret places, a sliver of the womb of a virgin was a powerful fertility charm, a slice of the heart of a blooded warrior was a wonderful talisman in battle.

"Is the work done?" Lobengula asked.

"It is done, oh king."

"Are all the evil ones dead?"

"They are all dead, son of Mzilikazi."

"Go then, and go in peace," Lobengula said wearily.

"Stay in peace, Great King." They chuckled and hooted and, bearing their gruesome plunder with them, they shuffled away through the gateway of the stockade.

Three times in as many weeks Mungo Sint John petitioned the king, asking him to "give the road" to the south, but each time the king chatted affably for an hour and then waved him away. "I will sleep on it, One Bright Eye, but are you unhappy here? Does the beef and beer I send you not fill your belly? Perhaps you would like to go once again on the hunt?"

"I want to go south, oh King."

"Perhaps in the next full moon, One Bright Eye, and then again perhaps after the rain has passed, or after the Chawala Ceremony, who knows? We will see in good season."

Then one morning Louise rode out early, as had become her custom, but after she had been gone some hours Mungo realized that this time she had the rifle and bandolier of ammunition, her blanket roll and the gallon water bottle with her.

He puzzled over her behaviour for the rest of that day, but he was not alarmed until night fell and she had not returned. He sat up beside the fire all that night, and at first light he took the second mule and crossed the river to where Rudd's party was camped in grand style in a pleasant glade of the forest. They had six wagons and as many tents made of best quality waterproof canvas, each with sun flysheets.

The horses on the picket line were all blood Arabs, one of which would carry Mungo and his small bag of precious stones to the Shashi river in six days or less.

He was eyeing them hungrily, when Robyn Codrington stooped out of one of the tents. She saw him and would have gone in again, but he called to her and jumped down from the mule.

"Doctor Codrington, please, it is a matter of extreme urgency.

Reluctantly she turned back.

"My wife is missing, she did not come in last night."

Immediately her distant expression changed to one of concern.

"Did she say where she was going?"

He shook his head. "I can only think that she might have ridden back to Khami, you know she was becoming friendly with your elder daughter, "

"I shall send a servant to the mission."

"Can you not ask the king to let me go?"

"The king has gone in to his wives, nobody, not even I dare disturb him until he comes out from the women's quarters."

"How long will that be?"

"A day, a week, there is no way of telling. I shall send word to you as soon as I have news."

That night Mungo waited again, and then in the dawn as he crouched, haggard and bleary-eyed, over the smoky fire, listening for the hoof beats of the mule or the sound of Louise's voice out of the darkness, he was struck instead by a thought that chilled his blood and made his guts slide with dread.

He leapt up from the fire, ran into the hut and scrabbled frantically under the mattress. With a blessed soaring relief his fingers closed on the bag, and he pulled it out and fumbled the drawstring open. He poured the bright stones into the palm of his hand. They were all there, but with them was something that had not been there before. It was a folded sheet of paper, and he took it to the fire and held it to catch the light.

"When you find this you will know why I have gone.

Even as I write this the memory of those poor wretches who died in their hundreds to pay for your greed rises before me to torment me. With them died the last of my love for you.

"I leave you those blood-spattered stones in the certain knowledge that they are accursed.

"Do not follow me. Do not send after me. Do not think of me again."

She had not signed it.

Rudd's party was at breakfast under the open-sided dining-tent.

It was a fresh and cool morning. The conversation around the table was intelligent, informed and yet quick and witty, Robyn revelled in it.

She sat at the head of the trestle table and the gentlemen deferred to her. mister Rudd had been very obviously taken with her from their first meeting, and addressed all his remarks to her directly.

Jordan had supervised the preparation of a gargantuan q English breakfast, fresh eggs and grilled gammon, salted kippers and tinned pork sausage, potted shrimps and bloater paste, with freshly-chumed yellow butter and hot scones.

Mister Rudd, quite carried away with the spontaneous festive mood, called for a bottle of champagne that had been hung overnight in a wet sack to cool.

"Well," he lifted his glass to Robyn, "I am sure we shall be able to survive this rough life and rude fare until the good king makes up his mind."

Despite Robyn's intercession, Lobengula had not yet ratified the concession that they sought. His senior indunas had been in secret conclave for weeks, but could not reach a consensus of agreement, while Lobengula vacillated and reacted to mister Rudd's insistence by retiring to his women's quarters where nobody could reach him.

"It may take months yet." Robyn lifted her own glass and returned Rudd's salute. "I would not expect Lobengula to make a decision on such an important matter without going into the Matopos Hills to consult the oracle, the Umlimo."

Suddenly Clinton looked down towards the river, frowned and whispered to Robyn. "It's that scoundrel Sint John, what does he want coming here?"

Mungo Sint John had dismounted at the periphery of the camp, but he did not approach the company under the open-sided marquee.

Robyn stood up quickly. "Please excuse me, gentlemen. General Sint John's wife is missing, and he is naturally worried."

"Thank you for coming," Mungo said, as she hurried to him. "I have nobody else to turn to, Robyn."

She tried to ignore the intimacy of his appeal, and the little jolt that his use of her given name always gave her.

"Do you have news?" she asked.

"I have discovered a note that Louise left for me."

"Let me see it." Robyn held out her hand.

"I am sorry. It contains most personal and, I fear, embarrassing, references," Mungo told her. "But what is important is that Louise is trying to leave Matabeleland by the southern road."

"That is madness," Robyn whispered. "Without the king's permission, without an escort. The road is obscure, the country wild and infested with lions, she cann of hope to pass the border impis, and they have orders to kill all who do not have the road from Lobengula."

She knows all this," Mungo said.

"Then what possessed her to make the attempt?"

"We argued. She resented the feeling which she knows that I still have, for you."

Robyn fell back a pace, her cheeks paling and her breath catching in her throat.

"General Sint John, I forbid you to talk in that fashion."

"you asked me, Robyn, and once, long ago, I told you that I would never forget that night aboard Huron "Stop it! Stop it, this instant!

How can you speak like this when your wife is in dire danger?"

"Louise was never my wife," he said quietly, staring into her green eyes with that single penetrating gaze.

"She was my travelling companion, never my wife."

Robyn faltered, colour rushed back into her cheeks, and with it came a strange unaccountable pagan joy.

"You told me, once, that you were married."

"I was, Robyn. Not to Louise. That other lady died many years ago in Navarre in France."

Robyn confounded herself. She was married to a brave, kind man, in his own way a saintly man, while before her stood the embodiment of evil, the veritable serpent of Eden; and yet she could not suppress this wicked unconscionable elation at the knowledge that he was free, free for she knew not what, or could not bring herself to think on it.

"I shall go to the king," she said, painfully aware of the quaver in her voice. "I shall ask him to send men after your, after the lady.

I shall ask him also to give you the road, General, and I would consider it full repayment if you would take it immediately, and never return to Matabeleland."

"what is between us can never be denied, Robyn, as long as we both live."

"I do not wish to see you again." With an effort of all her will she steadied her voice and met his eye.

"Robyn!"

"I shall send a messenger to you with the king's reply."

"Robyn!"

"Please." Her voice cracked again. "In God's holy name, please leave me alone."

However, it was two more days before Robyn sent Jordan Ballantyne to Mungo's camp.

"Doctor Codrington bids me tell you, sir, that the king has already sent one of his trusted indunas with a picked body of warriors after your wife. They have orders to protect her from the border guards and to escort her to the Shashi river."

"Thank you, young man."

"Furthermore, she asked me to tell you that the king has given you the road. You may follow your wife immediately."

"Again my thanks to Doctor Codrington."

"General Sint John, you do not remember me "I am afraid -" Mungo frowned up at Jordan on the back of the dancing Arab mare.

"Jordan, Zouga Ballantyne's son. We met in Kimberley some years ago."

"Ali! Of course, forgive me. You have changed."

"General, I know that it is none of my business, but as you are a trusted friend of my father's, it is my duty to warn you that there were unpleasant rumours after your departure from Kimberley."

"I did not know," Mungo told him indifferently. "Still, it is one of life's unpleasant truths that the more prominent a man becomes, the more determined are the mean little men to tear him down."

"I know that, General. I am associated with a great man, "Jordan checked himself. "However, a police agent, a Griqua named Hendrick Naaiman claimed that you attended an I.D.B. rendezvous and that when you realized it was a trap you attempted to kill him."

Mungo made an impatient gesture. "Why should somebody of my standing, my estate, take such a ridiculous risk as to indulge in I.D.B?"

"That was what mister Rhodes said, sir. He has repeatedly expressed certainty of your innocence."

"After I have found my wife I shall return immediately to Kimberley to confront this Naaiman person."

"General Sint John, that will be neither necessary nor possible. Naaiman was killed some months ago in a knife fight in one of the drinking canteens. He cannot give evidence for or against you. Without either witness or accuser, your innocence is presumed."

"Damn it -" Mungo frowned to cover his immense relief. "I should have welcomed the chance to force his words down his lying throat, now there will always be doubts in some men's minds."

to nly in the minds of the mean little men." Jordan touched the brim of his cap. "I shall not detain you further; you must be anxious to follow and find your wife. Good luck and God speed. I am sure we shall meet again, General."

Mungo Sint John stared after Jordan as he rode away. It was hard to grasp the extent of his good fortune, the spectre of unrelenting justice that had pursued him from the south had vanished; he had the road to leave Matabeleland, and an immense fortune in diamonds to carry with him.

An hour later he had visited one of the traders and exchanged the cart and the other meagre possessions he no longer needed for a good rifle and one hundred rounds of ammunition, and he sat the broad comfortable back of the mule, its head pointed southwards, as it skirted the granite hills of the indunas.

Mungo looked neither left nor right: his eye was fixed ahead, towards the south, so that he did not see the slim almost boyish figure on the slopes high above him.

Robyn shaded her eyes with the brim of her bonnet and peered after him until the little feather of dust raised by the mule's big heavy hooves subsided into the mimosa forests.

Louise Sint John was driven on by her need to keep ahead of any pursuit, obsessed with the knowledge that she must avoid the kraals along the road, ridden by the guilt she knew she must share with Mungo, her senses and emotions in terrible turmoil, so that she did not have a chance to regret her hasty action, taken in the shock of discovering the diamonds, nor did she realize the depths of her loneliness, until she had successfully skirted the last of the great kraals and left the pleasant grasslands of the plateau.

Now ahead of her the escarpment fell into the wild land, hot and heavily forested, which she knew was teeming with wild animals and guarded by the merciless border impis.

It was a measure of her desperate need to be free of Mungo Sint John and all he stood for that she never once considered turning back, though she knew there was sanctuary for her at Khami Mission, though she knew that Robyn Codrington would go to the king on her behalf and he would give her an escort of warriors to the border.

She could not go back, she could not bear the prospect of being close to Mungo Sint John ever again. The love she had once borne him had sickened into a total revulsion.

No risk was too high to escape him and she had to do it now. There was no going back.

She lay the last night beside the wagon ruts that were her tenuous link with civilization and life itself, her own thread through the maze of the Matabele Minotaur, and she listened to the mule cropping grass close at hand and, far away down the escarpment, the faint roar of a hunting lion, while she tried to reconstruct in her mind the map that had formed the frontispiece to Zouga Ballantyne's book A Hunter's Odyssey. The account of Zouga's Tourneys had fascinated her, even before she had met him, and she had studied the map with minute attention.

She judged that from where she now lay the Tati river was not more than one hundred miles due west. No pursuer would expect her to take that direction. No impi would guard that desolate untravelled quarter, and the Tati river was the border between Matabeleland and Khama's country. By all accounts King Kharna was a gentle and honourable man; his country was under suzerainty of the British crown, and British justice was ensured by the presence of Sir Sidney Shippard at Khama's kraal.

If she could reach the Tati river and follow it south until she met some of Khania's people who could take her to Sir Sidney, then he would see to it that she was sent on southwards to Kimberley.

The thought of that town made her realize the true reason for her desperate haste. For the first time she became aware of the terrible hunger within her to be with a man whom she could trust, whose strength would shield her and make her strong again. The man to whom she could at last acknowledge she had transferred the love which Mungo Sint John had long ago forfeited. She must reach Zouga, and reach him soon, that was the only thing certain in her confusion, and her despair, but first there were a hundred miles of wilderness to cross.

She rose in the first pale light of day, kicked sand over the fire, saddled the mule, and slid the rifle into its scabbard, she buckled the water-bottle and blanket to the pommel and swung up onto his back. With the unearthy red glow of the sunrise at her back, she urged the mule forward, and after fifty paces, when she glanced back, the faint double track of wagon wheels was no longer discernible.

The land through which she rode had a harsh and forbidding grandeur; the horizons were infinite and the sky was tall and milky blue. It was empty of all life, she saw no bird nor animal, and the sunlight was white and fierce. In the nights the stars filled the heavens with whorls and eddies of cold bright light and she felt herself shrinking under the immensity and loneliness of it all.

On the third evening, she knew that she was lost, hopelessly and irretrievably lost. She was barely certain of the direction of the sunset, but she had no idea of distances and her memories of the sketch map which she had thought vivid and clear, had become fuddled and confused.

The gallon water-bottle was empty. She had drunk the last bloodwarm mouthful a little before noon. She had seen no game to provide meat, and she had eaten the last stale maize cake the previous evening. The mule was too exhausted and thirsty to graze. He stood miserably under the wild sycamore tree that she had chosen for her night's camp; but though she put the knee halter on him, she knew that he would not wander. His head hung to his knees. An arrowhead of flint had lacerated the frog of his left fore. He was dead lame, and she had no idea how much farther it was to the Tati, nor in which direction the river lay.

She put a little round white pebble under her tongue to draw her saliva and lay down next to the fire. Exhausted sleep came like sudden black death, and she woke as though she were struggling up from the depths of hell itself.

The moon was up, full and yellow, but it was the mule's fearful snorts and the stamp of his hooves on the stony earth that had roused her. She dragged herself up with the help of the sycamore trunk and peered about her. Something moved at the edge of her vision, something big and ghostly pale, and as she stared at it she could smell the acrid ammoniaical whiff of cat. The mule whinnied with terror and broke into a maimed lunging gallop, the halters holding his forelegs so that he was awkward and slow, and the big pale thing came flashing lightly upon him, rising like a huge white bat against the moonlit sky, and settled upon the mule's back.

The mule screamed once and clearly Louise heard his spinal column break as the lioness on his back bit into his neck and in the same movement reached forward to sink her claws into his cheek and twist his head backwards against the hold of her jaws.

The mule went down with a thumping impact on the hard earth, and the lioness immediately flattened herself behind the shuddering and spasmodically kicking carcass and began ripping into the soft skin around the anus making an opening into the belly cavity through which to reach the titbits of kidney and spleen and liver and guts.

Behind her Louise saw other pale cat shapes coming out of the shadows, and she had just presence of mind enough to snatch up the rifle before she scrambled up into the fork of the sycamore and climbed upwards, driven by a suffocating terror.

She clung to an upper branch and listened to the grisly feast below her, the growling and squabbling of a dozen lions over the carcass, the lapping sounds as they licked the meat off the bones with tongues like wood rasps, and the awful guttural purring and slurping.

As the light of day slowly strengthened, so the noises subsided. The big cats had eaten their fill and slunk away into the bush. Then Louise looked down the trunk of the sycamore into two implacable yellow orbs that seemed to search out new depths in her terror.

A full-maned lion stood at the base of the tree. He seemed as broad across the back as a carthorse, and his colour was a dark bluish-grey in the bad light. He was looking up at her, and as she stared in horror, the great black ruff of his mane came erect in excitation, so that he seemed to swell in size to fill the whole field of vision.

Suddenly he reared up on his hindlegs and reached up towards her, the long, curved, yellow claws unsheathing from their massive pads, and he ripped long parallel wounds down the bark of the sycamore from which the sap swelled in white milky beads.

Then the lion opened his jaws, and she stared into the deep pink cave of his throat. The long velvety tongue curled like the fleshy petal of some weird orchid, and each gleaming ivory fang was long as a man's forefinger and sharp as the point of a guardsman's pike.

The lion roared up at her. It was a gale of sound that struck her like a blow from a mailed fist. It drove in her eardrums and it jellied every muscle in her body. Then the huge beast came up the tree. It climbed in a series of lunges, the yellow claws raking slabs of wet bark off the trunk as it bunched its quarters and drove upwards, those painful gusts of sound still bursting from its throat, So the enormous yellow eyes fastened upon her coldly and remorselessly.

Louise began to scream and the tree rocked, the branches tossed and crackled as the great tawny body forced its way through them with a speed and power she would never have believed possible. Still screaming, she pushed the long barrel of the rifle downwards, without aiming she jerked at the trigger and nothing happened except that the lion was closer still.

In her panic she had forgotten the safety catch of the rifle. It was almost too late; the lion reached up and struck the barrel with one enormous paw. The blow jarred her wrists and numbed her -arms, but she kept her grip and slid the catch forward with her thumb And thrust the muzzle into the animal's jaws as she pulled the trigger again. The shot was almost drowned in the lion's roars.

The recoil broke her grip on the weapon and it went spinning away, clattered against the branches, leaving her utterly defenseless. Just below her perch the lion still clung to the tree trunk, but the huge shaggy head was thrown back on the arch of the thick neck, and a bright fountain of blood spurted up out of the open jaws, and the gleaming fangs turned rosy red as it washed over them.

Slowly the hooked claws released their deep grip on the bark of the tree trunk, and the cat fell, twisting and convulsing in mid-air until it struck the ground at the foot of the tree. Lying on its side, it stretched out its limbs and arched its back, one last breath choked with blood rattled up its throat, and then it slumped and softened into the total relaxation of death.

Timidly Louise clambered down from the sycamore and, keeping well clear of the carcass, she retrieved the rifle. The butt was cracked through and the breech block jammed solid. She struggled with it futilely for a few minutes, and then dropped it.

Terror still stifled her breathing, and congested her bladder, but she did not pause to relieve it. Frantically she snatched up the small canvas bag that contained her tinder-box and steel, a clasp knife and a few items of jewellery and other personal oddments. She left the bandolier and blanket and the empty water-bottle, for she was desperately driven by the need to leave this place, and she stumbled away from the sycamore.

Once only she looked back. A pair of jackals were already at the lion's carcass, and out of the lemon-pate morning sky the first vulture came planing down on wide elegant wings to roost, hump-backed, in the top branches of the sycamore. It bobbed its foul boiled-looking naked head in gluttonous anticipation.

Louise began to run. She ran with a panicky desperation, looking over her shoulder, so that the thorn bushes ripped at her and her high-heeled riding boots tottered over the broken ground. She almost exhausted herself in that wild run, and when she fell at last she lay face down, racked by the sob of each breath, and with the tears of fear and despair mingling with the sweat of her cheeks.

It took her until almost noon to recover her strength, and gather her determination and get her racing terror under control.

Then she went on.

In the mid-afternoon one heel broke off her boot, and she twisted her ankle painfully. She hobbled on until darkness gathered around her and with it all her fears returned.

She climbed to the high fork of a mopani tree. The cramped position on the hard trunk, the cold and her own fears prevented her from sleeping. In the dawn she climbed down. Her ankle had swollen and turned a deep purple-rose colour. She knew that if she removed her boot once more she would never get it on again. She pulled up the straps as hard as she could and cut a branch of mopani to use as a crutch.

The noon was windless and fiercely hot. The mucous membrane of her nostrils had dried out and swollen so that she was forced to breath through her mouth. Her lips cracked and began to bleed. The metallic salt of her own blood seemed to scald her tongue. The crutch of raw rough mopani rubbed the skin from her armpit and flank, and by midafternoon her tongue had swollen into a choking gag like a ball of oakum jammed into her mouth.

That night she did not have the strength to climb to a tree fork. She crouched at its base, and when at last exhausted sleep assailed her, she was tormented by dreams of running mountain streams, from which she woke mumbling and coughing to the worse torment of reality.

Somehow she dragged herself up again when the light woke her. Each step now was an effort to which she had to steel herself. She leaned on the staff, staring through bloodshot eyes and swollen lids at the spot where she would place her foot, then she lunged forward and swayed to catch her balance before she drew her injured foot up beside the other.

"Five hundred and four -" She counted each step, and then steeled herself for the next pace. At every count of one thousand" she rested and peered around her at the wavering heat mirage.

In mid-afternoon she lifted her head during one of the rest pauses and saw ahead of her a file of human figures.

Her joy was so intense that for a moment her vision darkened, then she roused herself and tried to shout. No sound came out of her dry, cracked, swollen mouth.

She lifted the crutch and waved it at the oncoming figures, and realized at that moment that the mirage and her own hallucinations had tricked her. In her wavering, uncertain vision the line of human figures resolved into a troop of wild ostrich, and they scattered away across the plain.

There were no tears to tell the depths of her disappointment. Her tears had dried long ago. At dusk she fell face down, and her last conscious thought was, "It's over. I cannot go on."

But the dawn chill roused her and she lifted her head painfully and in front of her face she saw a stalk of grass curved under the weight of the drops of dew that hung from it, trembling precariously and sparkling like precious jewels. She reached out her hand and touched it, and instantly the lovely drops fell into the dry baked earth and left no trace of their going.

She crawled to the next stalk and this time let the liquid diamonds fall into her black swollen mouth. The pleasure was so intense as to change its shape to pain.

The sun came up swiftly to dry the dew, but she had taken enough strength at least to push herself upright and go on.

The following night there was a small warm breeze that nagged at her while she slept, and because of it there was no dew, and she knew that this was the day she would die. It would be easier to do it here where she lay, and she closed her eyes, then opened them again and struggled into a sitting position.

Each thousand paces seemed to take an infinity, and she was hallucinating again. Once her grandfather walked beside her for a while. He wore his war bonnet of eagle feathers, and his beaded and tasselled buckskins.

When she tried to talk to him he smiled sadly at her and his face folded into ancient leathery brown seams, and he disappeared.

At another time Mungo Sint John galloped past on Shooting Star. He did not look in her direction and the great golden stallion's hooves made no sound. They whirled way into the dusty distances. Then suddenly the earth opened under her and she fell, lightly as a feather from the breast of a goose, lightly as a snowflake, twisting and turning, down and down, then a jarring impact shocked her back to reality.

She lay face down in a bed of sugary white sand. For a moment she thought it was water, and she scooped a double handful and lifted it to her lips, but the dry sharp grains were like salt on her tongue. She looked about her and realized with a sort of bitter triumph that she had at last reached the Tati river and that she lay now in the parched river bed. The fine sand, white as salt, reached from bank to bank, she was about to die of thirst in a river.

"A pool, " she thought. "There must be a pool! She began to crawl through the sand, down towards the first bend in the course.

it opened to another long vista of tall banks, and overhanging trees, but the white glittering unbroken sand taunted her. She knew she did not have the strength to crawl as far as the next bend. Her vision was starring and breaking up again; but she frowned with concentration at the piles of brown ball-shaped lumps in the centre of the river bed, and vaguely realized that they were heaps of elephant dung, and that near them were mounds of sand, like children's sandcastles on the beach.

She remembered suddenly a description of the elephant digs from Zouga Ballantyne's book, and it gave her the final burst of strength to pull herself onto her feet and stagger to the nearest sandcastle. The elephants had kicked aside the sand, and made an excavation in the bottom of the river bed as deep as a man's waist. She slid down into it and began frantically to dig with her bare hands. Within minutes her nails were broken and her fingertips bleeding, and the sand kept collapsing back into her hole, but she dug on doggedly.

Then the white sand changed colour, became damp and firm, and at last there was a glint in the very bottom.

She tore a strip of cloth from the hem of her ragged skirt and pressed it down into the hole, then after a moment lifted it to her mouth, and with bleeding fingers squeezed out a drop of water onto her cracked and blackened tongue.

It was as Zouga had always imagined that it would be. He crossed the Shashi river an hour before high noon on a hot windless day, with the silver and blue thunderheads piled on the far horizons and the teeming forests and hunting veld of Matabeleland ahead.

He sat astride a fine salted horse, and at his right hand rode his eldest son, a man full grown, straight and strong, a man to delight his father's heart.

"There she is, Papa." Ralph swept his hat from his head and gestured with it to include the horizon of smokyblue hills and green forests. "There is your north at last.

We are coming to take her now."

Zouga laughed with him, his golden beard glowing in the sunlight and his teeth as white and even as his son's.

"Not quite yet, my boy. This time we have come to woo her, and the next time to take her as a bride."

Zouga had broken his journey three months at Kimberley, and with the full resources of De Beers Diamond Mines at his disposal had done the planning that Rhodes had ordered.

He had decided on a band of two hundred men to take and hold Mashonaland, to ride the boundaries of the farms and peg the gold reefs. They were to be supported by a detachment of Sir Sidney Shippard's Bechuanaland Police from Khama's kraal, and another detachment of Rhodes" own police which he would raise. Zouga detailed the arms and equipment that they would need one hundred and sixteen pages of schedules and lists and Rhodes approved it with that bold sweeping signature and a curt injunction. "Do it!" Four days later Ralph had come into Kimberley with two dozen wagons from the Witwatersrand goldfields, and Zouga. sat with him all night in his suite in Lil's new hotel.

In the morning Ralph had whistled with excitement.

It's so big so many men, so much equipment" Can you do it, Ralph?"

"You want me to tender for a price to recruit the men, buy the equipment and assemble it here at Kimberley, provide the wagons and oxen to carry it all, horses for the men, rifles and ammunition, machine-guns, a steam engine to power a searchlight; then you want me to tender to build a road to get it all to a map reference, a place which you call Mount Hampden, somewhere in the wilderness, and you want it all to be ready to leave in nine months?"

"You have grasped it fairly," Zouga smiled. "Can you do it?

"Give me a week," Ralph said, and five days later he was back.

"It's too big for me, I'm afraid, Papa," he said, and then grinned mischievously at Zouga's expression of disappointment. "I had to take in a partner, Frank Johnson."

Johnson was another young man in a hurry, and, like Ralph, had already acquired a reputation for being able to get things done.

"Have you and young Johnson worked out a price?"

"We'll do it for eighty-eight thousand two hundred and fifty-five pounds and ten shillings." Ralph handed him ei the signed tender and Zouga studied it in silence. When at last he looked up he asked: "Tell me, Ralph, what is that ten shillings on the end for?"

Why, Papa? Ralph widened his eyes disarmingly.

"That is our profit on the deal."

Zouga had cabled the tender price to Rhodes at Claridge's Hotel in London, and the following day Rhodes had cabled back his acceptance in principle.

All that was still needed was Lobengula's ratification of the consolidated concessions, and Zouga was under Rhodes" orders to go immediately to Gubulawayo and find out from Rudd the reasons for the delay.

Ralph had immediately elected to ride with Zouga.

"Once mister Rhodes gives us the word to go, there will be no time for anything else. I have some unfinished business in Matabeleland, at Khami Mission and beyond -" And an uncharacteristic dreamy look had come into Ralph's eyes. "This is the time to do it. While I still have the chance."

So now, side by side, Zouga and Ralph spurred their mounts up the bank of the Shashi river and rode into Matabeleland.

"We will outspan here for a few days, Papa," Ralph said; it was still strange for Zouga to have his son make decisions without deferring to him. "The grazing is good and sweet, and we will rest the oxen and do a little hunting; there is still plenty of game up near the confluence of the Tati river."

At the beginning of this long journey together, Zouga had been disconcerted by his son's competitive spirit that turned even the most mundane task into a contest.

He had forgotten this trait of Ralph's in the time they had been separated but found now that it had grown stronger and fiercer during that period.

His energy daunted Zouga, who found that on this journey, for lack of other opposition, he was a foil for his son's need to compete.

They shot bird, on foot in heavy cover, guinea-fowl and francolin, Ralph counted the bag and scowled when Zouga outgunned him. They sat late at each outspan over the ivory dice, or the greasy dog-eared pack of cards, and Ralph glowed when he won a shilling, and growled when he lost one.

So now, when he said, "We'll hunt together tomorrow, Papa," Zouga knew he was in for an early start, and a long hard day.

They rode out from the wagons an hour from first limmer of dawn.

"Old Tom is getting madala, he's getting old, but I have a sovereign that says he'll run rings around that fancy beast of yours," Ralph offered.

"I cannot afford that sort of money," Zouga told him.

He was hard and fit, his long professional hunting expeditions had kept him that way but the pace that Ralph set once he was aroused would be punishing.

There was something else that troubled Zouga. When Ralph hunted competitively, he could be murderous. if he were challenged, there was only one consideration for him, the size of the bag.

Zouga had been a hunter for the greater part of his life.

He had hunted for ivory, and for the peculiar fascination of the beautiful and noble animals he pursued. It was almost a form of love, that made a man want to study and understand and finally take the quarry irrevocably for his own.

These last seasons he had hunted, of necessity, with many men, but he had never yet met a man who hunted like his own son when his blood was up. It seemed as if the game were merely counters in another of Ralph's contests, the score all that counted. "I don't want to be a sportsman, Papa. I leave that to you. I just want to be a winner."

"I cannot afford that sort of money," Zouga repeated, trying lightly to defuse Ralph's escalating tension.

"You can't afford a sovereign?" Ralph threw back his darkly handsome head, and his green eyes flashed as he laughed delighted. "Papa, you have just sold that fat diamond of yours for thirty thousand pounds."

"Ralph, let's make an easy day of it. If we get one giraffe, or a buffalo, that's all we need."

"Papa, you are getting old. A sovereign. If you can't pay immediately, why then, your credit is always good! In midmorning they cut the spoor of a troop of giraffe, feeding slowly eastward along the river bank.

"I make out sixteen of them." Ralph leaned from the saddle to examine the huge double bean-shaped spoor in the sandy earth. "They'll not be an hour ahead of us."

And he put his heels into old Tom's flanks.

The forest alternated with open glades through which meandered little streams, draining the escarpment down to the Shashi river. They were dry at this season of the year, but that did not account for the paucity of game.

When Zouga had first travelled this road, going south from old King Mzilikazi's kraal, the herds had darkened every one of these open glades. In one day's ride he had counted over a hundred monstrous grey rhinoceros, but there had been no counting the silvery herds of fat zebra and clowning purple wildebeest.

In those days, after a man had fired a shot, the dust rising from the galloping herds had looked like the smoke from a bush fire, and yet this day they had ridden since dawn without seeing a single wild animal.

Zouga brooded on it as he rode stirrup for stirrup with his son. Of course, this area was on the direct road to Lobengula's kraal, over which steadily more and more wagons and travellers passed. There were still vast areas beyond where the herds were thick as the grass on which they grazed. But after the road they would cut into Mashonaland, and the railway line that would follow he wondered what would remain.

Perhaps one day his grandchildren would live in a land of which every corner was as barren as this. He did not envy them the prospect; and even as he thought that, his trained hunter's eye picked up the tiny speck just above the forest line, far ahead.

For a moment he was reluctant to call Ralph's attention to it. It was the head of a giraffe, raised inquisitively high above the mimosa tree on which it was feeding.

For the first time in the hunting veld Zouga felt sick to the gut at the slaughter he knew was about to follow and he thought to distract Ralph's attention from the herd of huge spotted animals in the mimosa forest ahead.

But at that moment Ralph shouted gaily: "There they are, I'll be damned! They are shy as blushing virgins, they are off already."

There had been a time when Zouga had been able to ride up to within two hundred yards of a herd before they took alarm. These were still a mile away and already galloping from the two horsemen.

"Come on, Papa. We'll catch them when they try to cross the Shashi," and they tore into the stand of flowering mimosa.

"Tally-ho!"yelled Ralph. His hat came off and, hanging on its thong, it slapped against his back; while his long dark hair fluttered in the wind of their gallop. "By God, Papa, you'll have to work to win your sovereign today," he warned laughingly.

They crashed out of the forest onto another level open lain. The entire herd of huge vulnerable animals were Spread before them: bulls and cows and calves, but that was not what caught Zouga's attention.

He pulled his horse down out of its gallop and swung his head away to the west.

"Ralph," he shouted, "let them go!"

Ralph looked back at him through the flying dust. His face was flushed with the hunter's fever.

"Warriors," Zouga shouted. "War party, Ralph. Close up!"

For a moment it seemed that Ralph would not obey but then his good sense prevailed. It would be reckless to separate when there was a war party out, and he broke back to Zouga's side and let the panic-driven giraffe tear away towards the river.

He reined Tom to a halt. "What do you make of them?" he asked, shading his eyes and peering through the heatdistorted air at the squiggly black line, like a shoal of tadpoles in the bottom of a rippling'pool, which moved across the far side of the open plain. "Kharna's men? Bamangweto raiders? We are only a few miles from the frontier."

"We won't take any chances until we know," Zouga told him grimly. "Let the horses blow. We may have to make a run But Ralph interrupted him. "Long shields! And they are red, those are the Moles, Bazo's fellows," Ralph urged Tom towards the approaching impi. "And I'll be damned if that isn't Bazo himself out front."

By the time Zouga came up, Ralph had dismounted and, leaving Tom to stand, had run to embrace his old comrade, and he was already joshing Bazo cruelly.

"Hau! the Moles-that-burrow-under-a-mountain are returning from a raid without women or cattle. Did Khama's people give you the steel farewell?"

Bazo's delighted smile slid off his face at such levity, and he shook his plumes sternly.

"Not even in jest, Henshaw, do not talk like a giggling girl. If the king had sent us to Khama," and he stabbed the air with his assegai, "there would have been a beautiful killing." He broke off as he recognized Zouga.

"Baba!" he said. "Bakela, I see you, and my eyes are white with joy."

"It has been too long, Bazo but now you have the headring on your brow and an impi at your back, we shall shoot a beast and feast together this night."

"Ah Bakela, it grieves me, but I am on the king's business. I return to Gubulawayo in haste to report the woman's death to the king."

"Woman?" Zouga asked without real interest.

"A white woman. She ran from Gubulawayo without the king's word, and the king sent me after her-" Bazo broke off with an exclamation. "Hau! But you know this woman, Bakela."

"It is not Nomusa, my sister?" Zouga asked with quick concern. "Not one of her daughters?"

"No, not them."

"There are no other white women in Matabeleland."

"She is the woman of One-Bright-Eye. The same woman who raced her horse against yours at Kimberley and won. But now she is dead."

"Dead?" All the blood had drained from Zouga's face, leaving his tan muddy and yellow. "Dead?" he whispered, and swayed in the saddle so that, had he not grabbed at the pommel, he would have fallen.

"Louise, dead."

Zouga found the sycamore that Bazo described to him, merely by back-tracking the impi.

They had left a good wide spoor, and Zouga reached the tree in the middle of the afternoon.

He did not know why he tortured himself so. There could be no reasonable doubt that she was dead. Bazo had showed him the pathetic relics he had retrieved. The damaged rifle and bandolier, the empty water bottle, and the tatters of cloth and saddlery ripped and chewed by the omnivorous jaws of the hyena.

The ground under the sycamore was beaten and swept of all traces of Louise by the pads of jackal and hyena, by the fluttering wings and the talons of hundreds of feeding, squabbling vultures. It smelled like a chicken coop, smeared with vulture dung, and loose feathers blew aimlessly hither and thither on the soft dry breeze.

Except for a few splinters of bone and tufts of hair, every trace of animal carcasses and the human body had been devoured. The hyena would have gobbled up even the leather of Louise's boots and belt, and the few remaining shreds of blanket and cloth were bloodstained.

It was quite easy to reconstruct what had happened.

Louise had been set upon by a pride of lion. She had managed a single shot, there was an empty shell in the breech of the damaged rifle, and had killed one of the cats before being pulled off the mule.

Zouga could imagine every moment of her agony, almost hear her screams as the great jaws crunched through her bone and the yellow claws hooked into her flesh. It left him physically nauseated and weakened. He wanted to pray on the spot where she had died, but he did not seem to have the energy for even such small effort. It was as though the very force of life had gone out of him. Until that moment he had not realized what Louise's memory had meant to him, how the certainty that their lives were intertwined had sustained him while they were apart, how his belief in their eventual reunion had given his life purpose and direction. She had become part of his dream, and now it had been snuffed out on this wild and bloody patch of earth.

Twice he turned back to his horse to mount and leave, but each time he hesitated and then wandered back to sift through the reeking dust with his fingers for some last trace of her.

At last he looked at the sun. He could not reach the wagons before nightfall. He had told Ralph to leave Jan Cheroot and the spare horses at the drift of the Shashi when he went on with the wagons, so there was no urgency. There was no hurry. Without Louise there was no flavour in his life. Nothing really mattered any more, but he crossed to his horse, clinched the girth and mounted. He took one more lingering look at the trampled earth and then turned his horse's head back towards the Shashi and the wagons. He had not gone fifty yards when he found himself circling. It was not a conscious decision to begin casting for outgoing spoor. He knew it was futile, but his reluctance to leave the place dictated his actions.

once he circled the sycamore, leaning out of the saddle and examining the broken and stony earth, then he moved farther out and circled again, then again, each time opening the radius of the circle. Suddenly his heart leaped against his ribs, and new hope flooded his devastated soul, but he had to steel himself to lean from the saddle and examine the thorn twig, in case he was to be disappointed once again.

The white tear had caught his eye, the twig had been broken half-through and now hung from the main branch at the level of a man's waist. The soft green leaves had wilted, the break was two or three days" old, but that was not what made Zouga's fingers shake.

From one of the curved red-tipped thorns hung a fine red thread of spun cotton. Zouga lifted it reverently and then touched it to his lips as though it were a sacred relic.

He was to the west of the sycamore; he could just make out the top branches above the surrounding bush, which meant that Louise had left that thread on the grasping thorn after she had run from the tree. The height above ground showed she had been on foot, and the broken twig and shredded cloth were evidence of her haste.

She had run from the sycamore and kept going in the direction which she had been stubbornly following, westwards, towards the Tati and Khama's country.

Zouga thumped his heels into the horse's flanks and galloped in the same direction. It was useless to look for spoor three days" old on this rocky ground. The wind had blown steadily for most of that time, and it would have scoured the last traces.

He must rely on luck and speed. He had seen the empty water-bottle and he knew what were the chances of survival on foot, without water, in this country between the rivers. He galloped on the line of her flight, quartering from side to side, searching grimly, not allowing himself to doubt again, concentrating all his mind on the search for another tiny sign. In the last minutes of dusk he found it.

It was the heel of a brown riding boot torn from the sole. The gleam of the steel nails had caught his eye. He drew the rifle from its holder and fired three spaced shots into the darkening sky.

He knew she had no rifle to reply, but if somewhere out ahead she heard his signal, it might give her hope and strength. He waited beside a small fire until the moon came up, and then by its light he went on, and every hour he stopped and fired signal shots into the great starry silence, and afterwards he listened intently, but there was only the shriek of a hunting owl overhead and the yipping of a jackal far out across the silvery plain.

In the dawn he reached the wide white course of the Tati river. It was dry as the dunes of the Kalahari Desert, and the hopes which he had kept alive all night began to wane.

He searched the morning sky for the high spiral of turning vultures which would show a kill, but all he saw was a brace of sand grouse slanting down on quick stabbing wings. Their presence proved that there was surface water, somewhere. She might have found it, that was the only chance. Unless she had found water she would be dead by now. He took a cautious mouthful from his own bottle, and his horse whickered when he smelt the precious liquid. Soon the thirst would begin wearing him down as well.

He had to believe that if Louise had reached the river, she would follow it downstream. She was part Indian, and she would surely be able to get her direction from the sun and to know that her only chance was southwards towards the confluence with the Shashi. He turned in that direction, staying up on the bank, watching the river bed and the far bank and the sky.

Elephant had been digging in the bed, but their holes were dry now. He trotted on along the edge of the high bank. Ahead of him there was a rush of big purple-beige bodies as a herd of gemsbuck burst through the rank undergrowth on the far bank. Their long straight horns were like lances against the pale horizon sky, and the diamond-patterned face masks that gave their name seemed theatrical and frivolous. They galloped away into the deserts of Khania's country.

They could live without water for months at a time, and their presence gave Zouga no hope, but as he watched them go, his attention shifted to another distant movement much farther out on the flat open ground beyond the river.

There was a chacma baboon foraging there, the humanoid shape was quite distinctive. He looked for the rest of the troop, perhaps they were in the treeline beyond the plain. Chacina baboon would drink daily, and he shaded his eyes against the glare to watch the distant moving dark blob. It seemed to be feeding on the green fruit of the vine of the wild desert melons, but at this range it was difficult to be certain.

Then abruptly he realized that he had never before encountered baboon this far to the west, and at the same moment he was convinced that there was no troop. It was a solitary animal, unheard of with such a gregarious species, and immediately after that he saw that this animal was too big to be a baboon, and that its movements were uncharacteristic of an ape.

With a singing, soaring joy he launched into a full gallop, and the hooves beat an urgent staccato rhythm on the iron-hard earth, but as he dragged his horse down to a plunging halt and swung down out of the saddle, his JOY shrivelled.

She was on her knees, and they were scratched bloody by the stony ground. Her clothing was mostly gone, and her tender flesh was exposed in the rents. The sun had burned her arms and legs into red raw blisters. Her feet were bound up in the remains of her skirt, but blood had soaked through the rags.

Her hair was a dry tangled bush about her head, powdered with dust and with the ends split and bleached.

Her lips were black scabs, burned and cracked down into the living meat. Her eyelids were swollen as though stung by bees and she peered up at him like a blind old crone through slits that were caked with dried yellow mucus. The flesh had fallen off her body and her face.

Her arms were skeletal and her cheekbones seemed to push through the skin. Her hands were blackened claws the nails torn down into the quick.

She crouched like an animal over the flat leaves of the vine, and she had broken open one of the wild green melons with her fingers and stuffed pulp into her ruined mouth. The juice ran down her chin, cutting a ninnel through the dirt that plastered her skin.

"Louise." He went down on one knee, facing her.

"Louise! -" His voice choked.

She made a little mewling sound in her throat and then touched her hair in a heartbreakingly feminine gesture, trying to smooth the stiff dust-caked tresses.

"Is it?" she croaked " peering at him with bloodshot eyes from slits of sun-swollen red lids. "It isn't Fumbling, she tried to cover one soft white breast with the rags of her blouse. She started to shake, wildly and uncontrollably, and then she closed her eyes tightly.

He reached out gently and at his touch she collapsed against his chest, still shaking, and he held her. She felt light and frail as a child.

"I knew -" she mumbled. "It didn't make sense, but I knew somehow that you would come."

"Will you not dowse the lantern, Ralph" Cathy whispered, and her eyes were huge and dark and piteous as she crept in under the canvas of his wagon.

"Why?" he asked, smiling, propping himself on one elbow on the wagon cot.

"Somebody may come."

"Your father and mother are still at Lobengula's kraal.

There is nobody "My sister, Salina "Salina is long ago asleep, dreaming of brother Jordan, no doubt. We are alone, Cathy, all alone. So why should we put out the lantern?"

"Because I am shy, then," she said, and blushed a new shade of scarlet. "All you ever do is tease me. I wish I had never come."

"Oh Cathy." His chuckle was fond and indulgent, and he sat up on his cot, and the blanket slid to his waist.

Quickly she averted her eyes from his naked chest and muscled upper arms. The skin was so white and marble-smooth in comparison to his brown forearms and face.

it set strange unfamiliar emotions loose within her.

"come!" He caught her wrist and drew her towards the cot, but she hung back until he jerked her for-ward and, taken off balance, she fell across his legs.

Before she could break free, he had taken a handful of the thick dark hair at the back of her head and turned her pale face up to his mouth. For a while she continued to struggle unconvincingly, and then her whole body softened, like wax in the candle flame, and seemed to melt over him.

"Do you still wish you had not come, Cathy?" he asked, but she could not reply; instead she tightened her arms around his neck convulsively. Once more she searched for his mouth with hers, and made a little moaning sound.

He goaded her with his mouth and tongue, the way Lil had first taught him so long ago, and she was defenceless as a beautiful soft-bodied insect in the spider's gossamer toils. It excited him as none of the practised and calculating women on whom he had spent his gold sovereigns ever had.

His own breathing started to bunt roughly, and his fingers shook at the lacings of her bodice. The skin of her shoulder was without blemish, silky and warm. He touched it with the tip of his tongue, and she shuddered and gasped, but when he pulled down the light cotton, she shrugged her shoulders to let the cloth come free. It caught for a moment and then slid to the level of her lowest rib.

He was unprepared for those tender and terribly vulnerable young breasts, so pale and rosy-tipped and yet at the same time hard and jubilant in their marvellous symmetry.

He stared at her body, and she watched him through half-closed lids, but made no effort to cover herself, though her cheeks were wildly flushed and her lips trembled as she whispered.

"No, Ralph, I don't want to go, not now, or ever."

"The lantern -" He reached for it, but now she caught his hand.

"No, Ralph, I'm not ashamed of you and me. I don't want darkness, I want to see your dear face."

She jerked the ribbon loose from her waist and then lifted her dress over her head and let it flutter to the wagon floor. Her limbs were long and coltish, her hips still bony as a boy's, and her belly concave as a greyhound's above the dark triangular bush of her womanhood. Her skin shone in the lanternlight with that peculiar lustre of healthy, vibrant youth. He stared at it for only an instant and then she had lifted the corner of the rough woollen blanket and slid in under it. The long slim arms and legs wrapped around him.

"There is nothing I would not do for you. I would steal and lie and cheat, and even kill for you, my wonderful, beautiful Ralph," she whispered. "I'm not sure what a man and woman do, but if you show me I will be the happiest girl on this earth to do it with you."

"Cathy, I didn't mean this to happen -" He tried with a last sudden lash of his conscience to push her away.

"I did," she said, clinging stubbornly to him. "Why else do you think I came here?"

"Cathy, "

"I love you, Ralph, I loved you from the very first moment I ever saw you."

"i love you, Cathy." And he was amazed to find that what he said was the truth. "I really and truly love you," he said again, and then later, much later: "I didn't realize how much until now."

"I didn't know that it would be like this," she whispered. "I have thought about it often, every day since you first came to Khami. I even read about it in the Bible it says that David knew her. Do we know each other now, Ralph?"

"i want to know you better, and more often," he grinned at her, his tousled hair still damp with sweat.

"I felt as though I had fallen through a dark hole in my soul into another beautiful world, and I didn't want to come back again."

Cathy's voice was awed and marvelling, as though she were the first in all the infinite lists of creation to experience it. "Didn't you feel that, Ralph?"

They held each other close under the blanket, and they talked softly, examining each other's faces in the yellow lantern light, breaking off every few minutes to kiss the other's throat and eyelids and lips.

It was Cathy who pulled away at last. "I don't want to know the time, but listen to the birds, it will be light too soon." Then, with a rush of words, "Oh Ralph, I don't want you to go."

it will not be for long, I promise you. Then I will be back."

"Take me with you."

"You know I can't."

"Why not, because it's dangerous, isn't it?"

But he avoided the question by trying to kiss her again.

She put her hand over his mouth.

"I'll die a little every moment of the time you are gone, but I'll pray for you. I'll pray that Lobengula's warriors do not find you."

"Don't worry about me," he chuckled fondly. "We'll fall through that dark hole in your soul again soon."

"Promise," she whispered, and brushed the damp curls off his forehead with her lips. "Promise me you will come back, my beautiful, darling Ralph."

Ralph started his wagon train south again on the road to the Shashi, and for the first morning he rode at the head of the unusually lightly loaded vehicles. At noon he gave the order to outspan. He and Isazi slept away the hot afternoon, while the bullocks and horses grazed and rested.

Then at dusk they cut the five chosen bullocks out of the herd and tied them to the wagon wheels by leather reins around the boss of their horns while they fitted the back packs. Ralph and Isazi had selected these beasts for their strength and willingness, and during the long trek up from Kimberley he had trained them to accept these unusual burdens with resigned docility.

Jordan had provided Ralph with the precise measurements and weight of the bird statue that now graced the entrance to mister Rhodes" new mansion, Groote Schuur, and Ralph had used these figures to design the back packs and constructed them with his own hands, not trusting anyone else with his secret intentions.

Each pack could carry two statues like the one at Groote Schuur. They would be slung in woven nets of good mania rope on each side of the bullock, and Ralph had worked meticulously to ensure a perfect fit of the saddle to protect the beasts" back from galling, and prevent the load from shifting even over the roughest ground or on the steepest inclines.

Now, when Isazi, the little Zulu driver, led the file of three bullocks quietly out of the camp and disappeared into the darkening forest, they followed meekly. Ralph stayed behind just long enough to repeat his orders to the other drivers.

"You will double-march to the Shashi river. If the border impis question where I am, you will tell them I am hunting to the east with the king's permission, and that you expect me to rejoin the wagons at any time. Do you understand?"

"I understand, Nkosi," said Umfaan, who, although now promoted from voorlooper to driver, still answered to the name of "Boy".

"Once you cross the Shashi, you will trek on as far as the Bushman wells five days" march beyond the frontier.

Lobengula's impis'will not follow you that far. Wait there until I come, do you understand, Umfaan?"

"I understand, Nkosi."

"Then repeat it to me."

Satisfied at last, Ralph stepped up into Tom's stirrup and looked down at them from his back.

"Go swiftly," he said.

"Go in peace, Nkosi."

He trotted out of camp, following Isazi's bullock train and dragging behind him a bulky branch of thorn mimosa to sweep their spoor clean. By mid-morning the following day they were well clear of the wagon road and had entered the mystical Matopos Hills. While the oxen grazed and rested, Ralph rode ahead to mark a trail between the soaring granite kopjes, and through the deep an d sullen gorges. At dark they resaddled the bullocks with their packs and went on.

The next day Ralph made a noon observation of the sun with the old brass sextant. From experience he made allowance for the cumulative error in his boxed chronometer, and worked out a position which he knew was accurate to within ten miles. Also from experience, he knew that his father's observations, made before he was born, were usually as accurate. Without them he would never have found the caches of ivory which had been the start of his growing fortune.

His calculations compared to his father's showed that he was one hundred and sixty miles west of the ancient ruined city that the Matabele called Zimbabwe, the burial place of the old kings.

Then, while he waited for darkness to resume the march, he took from his saddle-bags the sheaf of notes which Zouga had given him as a parting gift when he first left Kimberley. He read the description of the route to Zimbabwe, and of the city itself, for possibly the hundredth time.

"How much longer must we march through these hills?" Isazi broke his concentration. He was cooking maize cakes on a small smokeless fire of dry wood. "My beasts suffer on these rocks and steep places," he grumbled. "We should have gone farther south and passed below the hills on the open ground."

"Where Lobengula's bucks wait and pray every day for the chance to stick an assegai through a skinny little Zulu," Ralph smiled.

"There is the same danger here."

"No," Ralph shook his head. "No Matabele comes into these sacred hills without good reason. We will find no impi here, and once we come out on the far side, we will be beyond the farthest regimental kraals., "And this place of stone to which we go? There will be no impi waiting for us there?"

"Lobengula forbids any man even to look into the valley in which the stones stand. It is a death-marked place, cursed by Lobengula and his priests., azi shifted uncomfortably. "Who sets store by the Is curse of a fat Matabele dog?" he demanded, and touched the charm on his belt which warded off devils and hobgoblins and other dark secret things.

Despite his assurances to Isazi, Ralph moved with utmost caution in threading the maze of the Matopos.

During daylight he hid the bullocks in some thick patch of bush in a rock gorge, and he went ahead to reconnoitre every yard of the way and to mark it for Isazi to follow with a discreetly blazed tree trunk or a broken twig of green leaves at every turning or difficult place.

These precautions saved him from disaster. On the third day he had tied Tom in good cover and gone forward on foot to the ridge from where he could look into the next valley.

Just below the brow he was alerted by the raucous alarm call of a grey lourie, the "Go-Away" bird of the African bush. The cry came from just beyond the ridge, and as he froze to listen he heard a gentle susurration like the wind in tall grass; he ducked and jumped off the path, sprawling on his belly with his rifle tucked into the crook of his elbows, and rolled under the spreading branches of a low red berry bush, just as the first rank of Matabele warriors came sweeping over the rise ahead of him, with their cloaks and kilts and headdresses rusthng, the sound which had warned him.

From where he lay under the bush beside the path, Ralph could see only as high as their knees as they passed, but their gait was that determined businesslike trot which the Matabele call "minza h1abathi", to eat the earth greedily.

He counted them. Two hundred warriors in all went d the soft rustle of their feet dwindled, but past, an Ralph lay frozen beneath his bush, not daring even to creep deeper into the undergrowth. Minutes later, he heard the soft chant of bearers coming up from the next valley, and then they were trotting past his hiding-place, singing the praise song to the king in their deep melodious voices.

Ralph could tell by the spacing and weight of their gait that they were carrying a heavy litter.

He had guessed that the leading band was merely a vanguard. This was the main party, while the person on the litter was without any doubt Lobengula himself, and following him were his attendants, his high indunas and other important personages. After them again, more bearers carrying sleeping-mats and karosses of fur, beer pots and leather sacks of maize meal and other burdens. They filed past and disappeared, but still Ralph did not rise from hiding.

Another long silence, and then, with only a soft warriing rustle, came the rear guard, two hundred more picked warriors trotting past. After five minutes Ralph felt it was safe to crawl out onto the path and dust the damp leaf mould from his knees and elbows.

From the top of the ridge he stared back in the direction which Lobengula's party had taken, puzzled as to where they were all headed and why. He knew from Cathy that Rudd and his party were still at Gubulawayo and that Clinton Codrington and Robyn were with them, negotiating the concession that mister Rhodes so desperately needed.

Why would Lobengula leave such important guests at his kraal and come up here into these sacred and deserted hills?

There was no answer, and Ralph had to be content with having so narrowly escaped discovery, and to be now alerted to the presence of large parties of warriors in the area.

He moved forward with even more caution than before so that it took three more nights of travel at the pace of A the bullocks before they came out of another pass between bald granite cliffs and saw the open forests of tall and lovely trees rolling away below them, silver and charcoal in the moonlight.

n the dawn Ralph climbed the cliff to the peak of the last of the Matopos Hills, and on the eastern horizon almost exactly where he had hoped to find it, he picked out the far blue silhouette of a solitary kopje standing above the forested plain. It was still thirty miles distant, but the shape of a crouching lion was unmistakable, and it fitted exactly the description in Zouga Ballantyrie's notes: "The bill which I have named "Lion's Head" stands high above the surrounding terrain, and points the traveller unerringly towards great Zimbabwe A man might have walked in the shadow of the massstone walls and never known they were there, so ive dense was the growth that covered them. It was a jungle of hana and flowering creepers, while from the very walls themselves grew the twisting serpentine roots of the strangler figs, wedging open the mortarless joints of the stonework and bringing it down in screes of fallen blocks.

Above the level of the high walls soared the heads of other tall trees, grown to giants in the time since the last inhabitant had fled this place or died within its labyrinth of passages and courtyards. When Zouga Ballantyne had discovered this massive keep before Ralph's birth, it had taken him almost two days to find the narrow gateway under this mass of tangled vegetation, but now his directions and descriptions led Ralph immediately to it.

Ralph stood before the ancient portals and looked up at the pattern of chevron stone blocks which decorated the top of the wall thirty feet above his head, and was seized with a primeval superstitious awe.

Though he could see the marks of his father's axe, and the old stumps cut away on each side of the opening, a veil of trailing plants had regrown to screen the gateway , proof that no human being had entered it since Zouga's visit more than twenty-five years before.

The steps that led up to the gateway had been dished by the passage of the feet of the ancient inhabitants over the centuries. Ralph drew a deep breath, and silently reminded himself that he was a civilized Christian; but his superstitious fears lingered as he climbed the stairs, ducked under the trailing creepers and stepped through the gateway.

He found himself in a narrow twisted stone gut between high walls open to the sky. He followed the passage, clambering over fallen stonework blocks and forcing his way through brush and undergrowth that choked it, until abruptly he came out into a wide courtyard, dominated by an immense cylindrical tower of lichen-coated grey granite.

It was exactly as his father had described it, even to the damaged parapet of the tower where Zouga had broken in to discover whether the interior of the towering structure contained a secret treasure chamber.

He knew that his father had ransacked the ruins for treasure, he had even torn up and sieved the earth of this temple enclosure for gold. He had retrieved almost a thousand ounces of the yellow metal, small beads and flakes of foil, finely woven gold wire and tiny ingots the size of an infant's finger, and Ralph knew that the only treasure left for him were the idols of green soapstone.

A With a stoop of his spirits, Ralph thought for a moment that someone else had forestalled him. According to Zouga, the stone falcons should have been here in this courtyard, and he started forward, his superstitious chills forgotten in the bleaker fear of having -been deprived of his booty.

He plunged into the waist-high undergrowth and waded through it towards the tower, and he tripped over the first of the statues, and almost fell. He crouched over it and with his hands tore away the tangle that covered it, and then he looked into the blank cruel eyes above the curved beak that he remembered so well from his childhood. It was the identical twin of the statue that had stood on the verandah of Zouga's cottage at Kimberley, but this falcon had been cast down and lay half buried by roots and brush.

He ran his hands over the satiny green soapstone, then with one finger traced the well-remembered shark'stooth pattern around the plinth.

"We've come for you at last," he whispered aloud, and then looked around him quickly. His voice had echoed eerily against the surrounding walls, and he shivered though the sun was still high. Then he stood up and went on searching.

There were six statues, as Zouga had counted them.

One was shattered as though by the blows from a sledgehammer, the battered head lay beside it. Three others were damaged to a lesser extent, but the remaining two statues were perfect.

"This is an evil place," a sepulchral voice intoned unexpectedly, and Ralph started and spun to face it.

Isazi had followed and stood close behind him, preferring the terrors of the narrow passages and ominous walls to the greater terror of remaining alone at the gateway to the city.

"When can we leave here, Nkosi?" Isazi shot restless little glances into the dismal corners of tumbled passageways. "It is not a place where a man should stay overlong."

"How soon can we load these onto the oxen?" Ralph squatted and patted one of the fallen images. "Can we do it before nightfall?"

"Yebho, Nkosi." Isazi promised fervently. "By nightfall we will be a good march away from here. You have my word upon it."

The king had once again chosen Bazo for a special task and Bazo's heart was big with pride as he led the vanguard of his impi along the secret road that took them deeper and deeper into the dreaming Hills of the Matopos.

The road was well beaten, wide enough for two warriors to run abreast with their shields just touching, for it had been used since the time when Mzilikazi, the old king, had first brought the nation up from the south.

Mzilikazi himself had blazed the trail to the secret cavern of the Umlimo. At every crisis in the nation's history, the old king had followed this road, in drought or pestilence or plague, he had come to hear the words of the chosen one. Every season he had come for advice on the herds and the crops, or to help him decide in which direction to send his raiding impis.

Lobengula, himself an initiate of the lesser mysteries, had first entered the cavern of the Umlimo as a youth led by the crazed old magician who had been his mentor and his tutor. It had been the Umlimo's word which had placed the toy spear of kingship in Lobengula's hand when Mzilikazi had let it fall from his grasp. It was the Umlimo who had chosen Lobengula in preference to Nkulumane or the other older brothers of nobler birth and it was the Umlimo who had made him the favourite of the ancestral spirits and had sustained him in the darkest hours of his reign.

Thus it was that Lobengula, plagued by the importunate demands of the emissaries of a white man whom he had never seen, confused by scraps of paper whose signs he could not read, troubled by doubts and tormented by fears, badgered and pulled by the conflicting advice of his senior indunas, was at last returning to the secret cavern.

He lay on his litter, on a mattress of the soft yellow and black spotted furs of the leopard, rocked by the motion of the trotting bearers, so that the naked folds and bulges of his gross black body shook and rippled, and he looked ahead with dark and haunted eyes.

Lodzi, that was the name on every white man's lips.

Everywhere he turned, Lobengula heard the name Lodzi.

"Is this Lodzi a king, as I am a king?" he had asked the white man with the red face; for Lobengula, as a Matabele, could not pronounce the "R" of the name.

"mister Rhodes is not a king, yet he is greater than a king," Rudd had said.

"Why does not Lodzi come to me himself?"

Rhodes has gone across the sea, he sends us lesser men to do this business."

"If I could look upon the face of Lodzi, then I would know if his heart was great."

But Rhodes would not come, and day after day Lobengula had listened to the insistence of Lodzi's minions, and in the nights his indunas cautioned and questioned him, and argued amongst themselves.

"If you give the white men a finger, they want the hand," Gandang told him, "and having the hand, they desire the arm and then the chest and the heart and the head."

"Oh King, Lodzi is a man of pride and honour. His word is like Lobengula's own. He is a good man," said Nomusa, whom he trusted as he trusted few others.

"Give each of the white men a little, and give the same thing to each of them," counselled Kamuza, one of his youngest but most cunning indunas, a man who had lived with the white men and knew their ways. "Thus white man becomes the enemy of the other. Set every one dog on the other, lest the pack set upon you."

"Choose the strongest of the white men and make him our ally" said Somabula. "This Lodzi is the herd bull.

Choose him."

And Lobengula had cocked his ear to each of them in turn, and become more desperate and more confused with every conflicting view, until now there was only one path open to him, the path into the Matopos.

Behind his litter came the bearers with the gifts for the oracle, rolls of copper wire, leather bags of coarse salt, pots of trade beads, six great tusks of yellow ivory, bolts of bright cloth, knives made by his master smith with handles of rhinoceros horn, a considerable treasure to pay for the words which he hoped would give him solace.

The path twisted down like a maimed serpent into the gut of the hills, so that the sun was lost and there was only a narrow strip of blue sky showing between the tops of the granite cliffs.

The rank and thorny vegetation crowded the pathway and at last met overhead, forming a dreary tunnel, and the silence was a heavy oppressive presence, for no bird sang and no animal squeaked or scurried in the undergrowth.

But Bazo led on at the same pace, his head swinging from side to side, scanning for danger or menace, and his grip on the shaft of his stabbing spear was firm, his sweat-oiled muscles tense as the springs of a mantrap, ready to hurl his body forward to meet an enemy at any twist in the path.

There was a stream of slow green water and algae-slick boulders across the track, and Bazo leapt it easily with barely a break in his stride; and fifty paces farther on the bush thinned and the cliffs pinched in to form a natural gateway of stone that led into the looming precipice.

Here a determined spearman could hold a thousand and Bazo surveyed it with the swift appraisal of a soldier; and then he raised his gaze to the ledge high above on which was perched a small thatched watch-hut.

Bazo grounded the butt of his long red shield, and called up the cliff. "I, Bazo, induna of one thousand, demand passage." His voice boomed and broke into a myriad echoes against the stone walls.

in whose name do you come to trouble the spirits of the air and earth?" a querulous old man's voice replied, and a sticklike figure, foreshortened by the height of the cliff, appeared upon the lip.

"I come in the king's name, Lobengula the Black Bull of Matabele."

Bazo scorned to wait on permission or favour and, sweeping his shield up onto his shoulder, he sprang forward through the ominous portals.

The passageway beyond was so narrow that his warriors follow only in single file, and the grey sand nors co that covered the floor sparkled with starry chips of mica and crunched under their bare feet. The passageway curved upon itself and then opened again without warning over a hidden valley.

The valley was completely enclosed by sheer cliffs, and this narrow passage was its only entrance. The bowl of the floor was lush with green grass, and watered by a clear fountain that sprang from the cliff face beside the gateway and meandered down into the valley bottom.

In the centre of the valley, a thousand paces ahead, was a tiny village, twenty or so thatched huts laid out in a neat circle. Bazo led his warriors down and, with a gesture of his assegai, formed them into a double rank on each side of the pathway that led to the huts.

They waited in stillness and silence until the distant chant of the litter-bearers grew louder, and at last the king's party emerged into the hidden valley, and Bazo led his men in a deep chorus of praise and salutation.

The royal party camped two days beside the tiny stream, waiting on the Umlimo's pleasure.

Each day her attendants came to Lobengula to receive gifts and tribute on the oracle's behalf. They were a strange and macabre motley of lesser wizards and witches; some of them, touched by the spirits they served, were crazed and wild-eyed, others were young nubile girls, their bodies painted and their eyes blank and empty like the smokers of the hemp pipe. There were children with wise old eyes who did not laugh or play like other children, and ancients with withered bodies and sly eyes who spoke with the king in low, wheedling tones and took his gifts and promised: "Perhaps tomorrow; who knows when the power of divination will descend upon the Umlimo."

Then on the dawn of the third day Lobengula sent for Bazo, and when he came to the king's camp fire, his father Gandang was already with the king, dressed in full regimentals, plume and fur and tassels of valour at elbow and knee, and with him were six of the other senior indunas.

"Bazo, my fine axe with a sharp edge, I have chosen you to stand by my shoulder when I face the Umlimo to guard my back against treachery," ordered Lobengula, and Bazo felt his chest swell with pride at such a mark of the king's trust.

A witch led them, prancing and mumbling and mouothing, through the village and up the far side of the valley. Burdened by his great bulk, Lobengula paused often on the climb, his breathing sobbing in his throat, and he rested on Gandang's arm before going on again, until at last they reached the foot of the sheer high Cliff.

Here there was a cave in the rock. Its entrance was a hundred paces wide, but its roof low enough for a man to reach up and touch. Some time long ago the entrance had been walled up with square blocks of dressed stone, but the wall had tumbled down, leaving dark gaps like the missing teeth in an old man's mouth.

At a nod from his father, Bazo placed the king's carved stool facing the cave and Lobengula lowered his great black haunches upon it gratefully. Bazo stood at the king's back, his assegai gripped underhand and pointed forward towards the dark entrance in the rock.

Suddenly there came the terrible spitting, tearing snarl of an angry leopard from the cave mouth, so loud and close and real that the band of hardened old warriors started and swayed, and stood their ground only with an obvious effort of will. The old witch giggled and spittle ran down her chin.

The silence fell again, but charged with promise and the threat of an unseen presence watching them from the utter darkness of the cave's recesses.

Then there was a voice, the voice of a child, sweet and piping clear. It issued not from the cave but from the air head, so that all of them raised their above the king's eyes. There was nothing there except the voice.

"The stars will shine upon the hills, and the Black Bull will not quench them."

The little group of indunas drew closer together as though to take comfort from one another, and the silence fell again. Bazo felt himself shivering, although his sweat tickled like an insect as it ran down between his shoulder blades. Then he jerked his head as another voice spoke. It came from the ground at the king's feet, and it used the liquid purring tones of a beautiful and seductive woman.

"The sun will shine at midnight, and the Great Elephant will not dim it."

Again that fraught and frightening silence, before something croaked from the cliff high above them, a hoarse inhuman sound, like the croak of a carrion crow.

"Heed the wisdom of the vixen before that of the dogfox, Lobengula, King of The voice broke off abruptly, and there was a scuffling sound deep in the black maw of the cave, and the old crone who had been nodding and grinning at Lobengula's feet scrambled up and shouted an order in an unknown tongue.

Now there was a flash of movement within the cave, and it caused consternation to Lobengula and his indunas, for they had visited the cave a hundred times and more but they had never seen the Umlimo nor had any glimpse of her presence in the depths of the cave.

This was something beyond ritual and custom, and the crone hopped forward, shouting angrily; and now they could make out what was happening in the gloom. It seemed that two of the macabre attendants of the Umlimo were trying to restrain a smaller and more agile figure. They were unsuccessful, for the person threw off their clutching, claw-like hands and ran forward to the threshold of the cave, where the early sunlight revealed the Umlimo at last.

She was so beautiful that all of them, even the king, gasped and stared. Her skin was oiled and polished to the colour of dark amber.

Her limbs were long and supple as a heron's neck, her feet and hands finely shaped. She was in the prime of her womanhood, her body not yet distorted by childbearing; although her belly was luscious as a ripening fruit her waist was narrow as a lad's. All she wore was a single string of crimson beads about her waist, knotted at the level of the deeply sculptured pit of her navel. Her hips flared with a delicate line, forming a broad basin to contain the spade-shaped wedge of her sex. It nestled there like a dark furry little animal possessed of separate life and existence.

Her head was perfectly balanced on the long stem of her neck; the neat cap of her hair set off the marvellous domed contours of her skull and exposed the small neat shape of her ears. Her features were oriental, the huge eyes slanted, her cheekbones high and her nose delicate and straight, but her mouth was twisted with anguish and her eyes blinded with tears as she stared at the young induna who stood at the king's back.

Slowly she lifted one hand and reached out towards him; the long, delicate palm was pink and soft, the gesture infinitely sad.

"Tanase!" whispered Bazo, staring at her, and his hands shook so that the blade of his assegai clattered against the rim of his shield.

This was the woman he had chosen and who had been so cruelly taken from him. Since her going Bazo had sought no other to wife, though the king had chided him, and others whispered that it was unnatural, yet Bazo had held to the memory of this bright, sweet maid. He wanted to rush to her and seize her, to swing her high upon his shoulder and bear her away, but he stood rooted, her anguish reflected in his own eyes.

For though she stood before him, she was as remote as the full moon. She was a child of the spirits and protected by their horrid servants, far beyond the reach of his loving hands and constant heart.

Her attendants came now from the cave behind her, to scold and whine. Slowly Tanase lowered her arm, though for a moment longer her whole body yearned towards Bazo, and then her lovely head wilted like a flower upon the long, graceful stalk of her neck and she allowed them to take her arms.

"Tanase!" Bazo said her name for the last time, and her shoulders jerked at the sound of his voice.

Then a terrible thing happened. A shuddering convulsion ran up Tanase's back, from the perfect globes of her tight, hard buttocks to the nape of her neck, so that the nerves and muscles twitched and contracted on each Side of her spine. Then her spine began to bend backwards like a hunter's bow.

"The spirit is upon her," shrieked the old witch. "Let the spirit take her!"

They let her be, drawing back from her wracked body.

Every muscle in her body was under such strain that it stood out in clear and separate definition under her glossy skin, and her spine arched to an impossible angle, the base of her skull almost touching the soft flesh at the back of her knees.

Her face was contorted with the unbearable agony of divination; her eyes rolled back into her head so that only the whites showed. Her lips were drawn back so that the small perfect white teeth were exposed in a frozen rictus and creamy froth bubbled from the corners of her mouth.

Though her lips did not move, a voice boomed from her tortured throat. It was the deep bass of a man, the stentorian voice of a warrior, and it bore no trace of the terrible travail of the young woman from whom it issued.

"The falcons! The white hawk has torn open the nest of stone. The falcons are flying. Save the falcons! The falcons!"

The voice rose abruptly into a wild shriek, and Tanase collapsed and writhed like a squashed insect upon the earth.

"No black man, neither Matabele nor Rozwi nor Karanga, none of them would dare desecrate the nest of the falcons," said Lobengula, and the circle of indunas nodded. "Only a white man would have the effrontery to defy the word of the king and chance the wrath of the spirits."

He paused and took snuff, drawing out the little ritual to put off the moment of decision.

"If I send an impi to Zimbabwe and we take a white man in the red act of plundering the ancient place, dare I send steel through his heart?" Loberigula turned to Somabula, and the old man lifted his grey head and looked sadly at his king.

"Kill one of them, and the others will come swarming like ants," he said. "Set not a feast for the birds, when it will bring a pride of lions instead."

Lobengula sighed and looked to Gandang: "Speak, my father's son."

"Oh King, Somabula is wise and his words have the same weight as boulders of black ironstone. Yet the king's words are heavier still, and the king's words have been given, the despoilers of the ancient places must die. Those are the words of Lobengula."

The king nodded slowly.

"Bazo!" he said softly, and the young induna dropped on one knee before the king's stool.

"Take one of the wizards to guide your impi to the nest of the falcons. If the stone birds are gone, follow them. Find the despoiler. If it is a white man, take him where no other eyes can see you, not even those of your most trusted warriors. Kill the man and bury him in a secret place, and speak of it to no man but your king.

Do you hear the words of Lobengula?"

"i hear, oh Great King and to hear is to obey."

Dutchman, the bullock with the narrowest spread of horns, was the only one which Isazi could coax down the narrow passageways and over the tumbled stonework into the temple enclosure of the ruins. In the baskets on his sturdy, dappled back, they ferried out the bird images, even the damaged ones, and repacked them onto the backs of the other oxen which waited outside the massive walls.

With Isazi's skilful handling of the bullocks and their burdens, the work was finished by midafternoon, and they roped the oxen in single file. With patent relief, Isazi led them away through the forest towards the south.

Ralph's relief was every bit as intense. He had been uneasy ever since that chance encounter with the Matabele impi in the hills. Now he let Isazi go on with the oxen, while he circled back across their incoming tracks to the north-west of the ruined city, examining the ground with the hunter's eye for any sign that they had been followed, or that there were any other human beings in the area. It need not be a war party, even a band of honey-gatherers or a hunter could carry word back to Lobengula's kraal or alert the border impis.

He knew what he would have to do if he found a wanderer or solitary hunter, and he eased the rifle in the leather boot at his knee. These forests were populous.

He saw troops of big-eared striped kudu, sable antelope with snowy bellies and sweeping scimitar horns, big black bovine buffalo and spreading herds of plump zebra with alert pricked ears and stiff, black manes, but there was no sign of human presence.

He was only slightly mollified when he turned back and picked up the spoor of the bullock file five miles on the other side of the ruins. He trotted along the widely beaten sign, and his misgivings returned at full strength.

This was too easy to follow.

He caught up with Isazi and his bullock train as the dusk was falling, and he helped him lift the heavy packs down from the backs of the oxen and examine them for galling or saddle sores, before hobbling them and letting them graze. More than once during the night he started awake, and listened for the sound of men's voices, but heard only the yipping of jackal.

In the early light they entered a wide grassy plain; the trees on the far side were a dark line on the horizon, and there were huge troops of zebra grazing out in the open.

They lifted their heads to watch the strange little caravan." an go past, and sounded their curiosity and concern with their sharp, almost dog-like, barks.

Halfway across the plain Ralph turned the bullock train at a right angle to their track, and they marched due east until noon, when they re-entered the forest. Still Ralph headed on cast until darkness fell and they camped.

Isazi muttered and complained about the wasted day, and the detour of so many miles out of their direct route towards the Limpopo river and the Bushman wells beyond, where Umfaan waited for them with the wagons.

"Why do we do this?"

"For the benefit of anyone who follows us."

"They will still be able to follow the spoor we have laid," Isazi protested.

"i will change that, in the morning," Ralph assured him, and in the dawn he allowed Isazi to resume the southerly direction again.

"if I do not rejoin you, do not wait for me. Keep on until you reach the wagons, we'll beyond the frontier of the Matabele. Wait for me there," he ordered, and he left Isazi and rode back on their spoor of the previous day.

He reached the open grassland where they had made such a dramatic change of direction the preceding morning, and the zebra barked at him. Their stripes were indistinguishable at this distance, and the herds were moving silver-grey masses on the yellow grassland.

"You are going to enjoy this, old Tom." Ralph patted the horse's neck and then trotted out onto the plain towards the nearest herd of zebra. There were more than a hundred animals in the group, and they let horse and rider approach to within a few hundred paces before bunching up and galloping away.

"After them, Tom!"Ralph whooped, and they tore into the bellowing dust cloud, gaining swiftly on the chubby, striped ranks of bobbing hindquarters. Ralph quartered and turned them, and they gathered up another herd, and then another, until there were two or three thousand zebra in stampede ahead of them.

He rode out onto one flank and pushed the herd over the ground which his bullock train had crossed the previous day. Thousands of broad hooves churned the earth into soft explosions of dust. When they reached the far side of the plain, Ralph forced Tom ahead of the leading zebras and rode across their front, yelling and waving his hat about his head. The dense mass of animals turned like a living whirlpool, and the dust boiled up into the sky.

Back they went across the open ground with Tom delighting in the chase, and Ralph worked them northward until the zebra herds reached the forest line and swung parallel with the trees, and they scoured the earth with driving hooves in a swathe five hundred yards wide.

Back and forth again Ralph drove them, sheep-dogging them deliberately over the bullock tracks on each pass, until at last even Tom's pace was short and knocked up, and he was sweating in black streaks down his shoulders and flanks and blowing like a south-easterly gale over False Bay.

Ralph off-saddled in the shade of the treeline, while out on the plain the zebra herds, skittish and nervous at the harassment, still galloped in aimless circles, or snorted and pawed the torn earth.

"Nobody, not even a Bushman, will be able to pick the spoor through that," Ralph told Tom, and stooped to lift each of his hooves in turn.

With his clasp knife Ralph prised off Tom's iron horseshoes and bundled them into the saddle-bag.

Without shoes, Tom's tracks were almost identical to those of a zebra stallion. He might go lame before they reached the wagons at Bushman wells, but they could limp in at their own speed, sure at last that there would be no pursuit. Once they reached the wagon, there was forge and anvil to re-shoe him, and Tom would suffer no lasting injury.

Ralph wiped Tom down with the saddle blanket and let him rest for another hour before re-saddling. Then he rode back amongst the scattered zebra herds to mingle and lose Tom's hoof prints amongst theirs before deliberately turning westwards, the opposite direction to Isazi's bullocks. He settled down in the saddle to lay a false trail into the forest before circling back southwards to find Isazi.

Ralph slept until sunrise the following morning, secure at last, and the temptation to drink coffee was to much for him. He chanced a small fire and delighted in the strong hot brew.

When they rode on, the sun was well up, and clear of the forest tops. Ralph let old Tom amble along at his own pace to save his unshod hooves, and he pushed his hat onto the back of his head and repeated the opening bars of Yankee Doodle over and over in a flat tuneless whistle.

The morning was cool and fresh. He felt elated at the success of his coup; already he was planning the sale of the statues. He would send letters to the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

Out on his right a red-breasted cuckoo uttered its staccato call that sounded like a greeting "Pete-my-friend!".

Tom flicked his ears but Ralph went on whistling happily, slouched down in the saddle.

Old J. B. Robinson, one of the Kimberley millionaires who had made millions more on the new Witwatersrand goldfield, would buy at least one of the birds simply because Rhodes had one. He could not bear In the grassy glade ahead of Ralph a francolin called harshly, "Kwali!

Kwali!" only twice, and it rang falsely to Ralph's ear. These brown partridges usually called five or six times, not twice.

Ralph checked Tom and stood up in the stirrups. Carefully he surveyed the narrow open strip of head-high elephant grass. Suddenly a covey of brown partridge burst out of the grass and whirled away on noisy wings.

Ralph grinned and slouched down again in the saddle, and Tom trotted into the waving stand of coarse grass and instantly it was full of dark figures of dancing plumes and red shields. They swarmed around Tom and the sunlight sparkled on the long silver blades.

"Go, Tom!" Ralph urged, and kicked his heels into his flank, while he jerked the rifle from its bucket and held it against his hip.

As Tom lunged forward, one of the plumed warriors leapt to catch his bridle, and Ralph fired. The heavy lead bullet hit the Matabele in the jaw and blew half of it away; for a moment teeth and white bone flashed in the shattered face, and then were smothered in an eruption of bright blood.

Tom bounded into the gap in their line that the man had left, but as he went through, one of them darted in from the side and grunted with the strength of his stroke.

With a thrill of horror Ralph saw the long steel blade go into Tom's ribs, an inch in front of his toe cap. He swung the empty rifle at the warrior's head, but the man ducked under it, and while Ralph twisted in the saddle, a second Matabele darted in, and Tom's whole body shuddered and convulsed between Ralph's knees as the man stabbed deep and hard into Tom's neck, an inch in front of his plunging shoulder.