Rage

'That's enough for you also, young lady." She ignored Isabella's howls of protest and stripped off her bathing costume.

'You're hurting me,' Isabella wailed as Tara scrubbed her sodden hair with a rough dry towel and then wrapped her in it.

Isabella ran to her father, still snivelling and tripping over the tails of the towel.

'Mommy won't let me swim." She crawled into his lap.

'Life is full of injustice." Shasa hugged her, and she gave one last convulsive sob and then cuddled her damp curls against his shoulder.

'All right, I am an ineffectual dilettante." Tara flopped down on the rug again. She had regained her composure and sat cross-legged facing him. 'But what if I refuse to give up? What if I continue to follow the dictates of my conscience?" 'Tara, don't try and force a confrontation,' he said softly.

'You always get what you want, don't you, Shasa?" She was goading him, but he shook his head, refusing the challenge.

'I want to discuss this logically and calmly,' he said, but she could not prevent herself flouting him, for the insult rankled.

'I would get the children - you must know that, your clever lawyers must have warned you of that." 'God damn it, Tara, you know that's not what I had in mind,' Shasa said coldly, but he hugged the child closer and Isabella reached up and touched his chin.

'You are all scratchy,' she murmured happily, unaware of the tension. 'But I still love you, my daddy." Yes, my angel, I love you also,' he said, and then to Tara, 'I wasn't threatening you." 'Not yet,' she qualified. 'But that comes next, if I know you - and I should." Can't we discuss this sensibly?" 'It's not necessary,' Tara capitulated suddenly. 'I had already made up my mind. I had already seen the futility of our little protests. I have known for some time that it was a waste of my life. I know I have neglected the children and during this last visit to Johannesburg I decided that I should take up my studies again and leave politics to the professionals. I had already decided to resign from the Sash and close down the clinic or hand it over to somebody else." He stared at her in amazement. He distrusted any victory too easily won.

'What do you want in return?" he asked.

'I want to go back to university and take a Ph.D. in archaeology,' she said crisply. 'And I want complete freedom to travel and pursue my studies." 'You have a bargain,' he agreed readily, not even attempting to conceal his relief. 'You keep your nose clean politically, and you can go where and when you want." And then despite himself his eyes dropped back to her breasts. He was right, they had filled out beautifully and bulged from the thin silken cups of her bikini. He felt a quick hot need of her.

She saw that look on his face. She knew it so well, and she was revolted by it. After what he had just told her, after the insults he casually offered her, after his betrayal of that which she held sacred and dear, she knew she could never take him again. She pulled up the top of her bikini and reached for her robe.

Shasa was delighted with their bargain, and though he seldom drank more than a glassful, this afternoon he finished the rest of the Riesling while he and the boys cooked their lunch on the barbecue pit.

Sean took his duties as assistant chef seriously. Only one or two of the chops landed up in the dirt, but as Sean explained to his younger brothers, 'Those are yours, and if you don't let your teeth touch, then you won't even feel the grit." At the table in the summer-house Isabella helped Tara prepare the salads, dousing herself liberally with French dressing in the process, and when they sat down to eat Shasa had the children shrieking with laughter at his stories. Only Tara sat aloof from the general hilarity.

When the children were given permission to leave the table with the injunction not to swim again for an hour while their food digested, Tara asked him quietly, 'What time are you leaving tomorrow?" 'Early,' he replied. 'I have to be in Johannesburg before lunch.

Lord Littleton is arriving on the Comet from London. I want to be there to meet him." 'How long will you be away this time?" 'After the launching David and I will be going on tour,' he replied.

He had wanted her to attend the launching party which would celebrate and publicize the opening of the subscription lists for shares in the new Silver River mine. She had found an excuse but she noticed that he did not repeat the invitation now.

'So you'll be gone about ten days?" Every quarter Shasa and David made a tour of all the company's operations, from the new chemical factory at Chaka's Bay, and the paper pulp mills in the eastern Transvaal to the H'am Diamond Mine in the Kalahari Desert, which was the company's flagship.

'Perhaps a little longer,' Shasa demurred. 'I'll be in Johannesburg at least four days,' and he thought happily of Marylee from MIT and her IBM

David Abrahams had persuaded Shasa to hand the Silver River launching over to one of those public relations consultants, a breed that had recently sprung up but which Shasa viewed with suspicion.

Despite his original misgiving hewas now reluctantly prepared to concede that it wasn't such a bad idea as he had first believed, even though it was going to cost over five thousand pounds.

They had flown out the editors of the London Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, with their wives, and afterwards would be taking them on for five days in the Kruger National Park with all expenses paid. All the local press and radio journalists were invited and as an unexpected bonus the television team that had come out from New York to do a series called 'Focus on Africa' for North American Broadcasting Studios had also accepted an invitation to attend the launching party.

In the entrance lobby of the Courtney Mining Co. offices they had set up a twenty-five-foot-high working replica of the mine headgear that would be erected above the Silver River main, and had surrounded it with an enormous display of wild proteas designed and executed by the same team which had won a gold medal at the Chelsea Flower Show in London the previous year. Appreciating that journalism is thirsty work, David had laid in one hundred cases of Mot & Chandon, although Shasa had vetoed the idea of a vintage cru.

'Even non-vintage is too damn good for them." Shasa did not have a lofty view of the profession of journalism.

David had also hired the chorus line from the Royal Swazi Spa to provide a floor-show. The promise of a flash of bared bosom would be almost as big a draw as the champagne; to the South African censors the female nipple was every bit as dangerous as Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto.

On arrival every guest was handed a presentation pack which contained a glossy colour brochure, a certificate made out in his or her name for one œ1 share in the Silver River Mining Co. and a genuine miniature bar of twenty-two carat South African gold, stamped with the company logo. David had sought Reserve Bank authority to have these bars struck by the South African mint, and at almost thirty dollars each they had been a major part of the advertising budget, but the excitement they created and the subsequent publicity fully justified the expense.

Shasa made his address before the Mot & Chandon could soften the wits of his guests or the floor-show distract them. Speaking in public was something that Shasa had always enjoyed. Neither the fusillade of camera flashes nor the sultry brilliance of the arc lights set up by the NABS television camera team detracted from his enjoyment this evening.

Silver River was one of the major achievements of his career to date. He alone had recognized the chance that the gold reef spurred at depth from the main run of the Orange Free State series, and personally he had negotiated the drilling options. Only when the diamond drills had finally intercepted the narrow black band of the gold-bearing carbon leader almost a mile and a half below the surface of the arid plain had Shasa's decision been vindicated. The strike was rich beyond even his expectations, running at over twenty-six penny-weights of pure gold to the ton of reef.

Tonight was Shasa's night. It was his particular gift that he was able to extract from everything he did the last ounce of enjoyment, and he stood in the arc lights tall and debonair in his immaculately tailored evening dress, the black eye-patch giving him a rakish and dangerous air, so obviously at ease and in control of himself and the company he commanded, that he carried them all along with him effortlessly.

They laughed and applauded at the right places, and they listened with fascinated attention as he explained the scale of the investment that was called for and how it would help to strengthen the bonds of kinship that tied South Africa so securely to England and the British Commonwealth of Nations, and set up new lines of friendship with the investors of the United States of America from where he hoped almost thirty percent of the necessary capital for the project would come.

When he ended to prolonged applause, Lord Littleton, as head of the underwriting bank, stood up to reply. He was lean and silver haired, his evening dress just that touch archaic in cut, with wide cuffs to the trousers, as if to underline his aristocratic scorn of fashion. He told them of his bank's strong relationship with Courtney Mining and the intense interest that this new company had aroused in the City of London.

'From the very beginning we at Littleton Bank were pretty damned certain that we were going to earn our underwriting fees very easily.

We knew that there would be very few unsubscribed shares for us to take up. So it gives me a deal of pleasure to stand before you here this evening and say, I told you so." There was a buzz of comment and speculation which he raised a hand to silence. 'I am going to tell you something that not even Mr Shasa Courtney knows yet, and which Ionly learned myself an hour ago." He reached into his pocket and brought out a telex flimsy which he waved at them.

'As you are aware, the subscription lists for shares in Silver River Mining opened this morning at 10 a.m. London time, two hours behind South African time. When my bank closed a few hours ago, they sent me this telex." He placed gold-rimmed reading glasses on his nose.

'I quote: "Please convey congratulations to Mr Courtney and Courtney Mining and Finance as promoters of Silver River Gold-Mining Co. Stop as of 4 pm London time today the Silver River issue was oversubscribed by four times Ends Littleton Bank."' David Abrahams seized Shasa's hand, the first to congratulate him. In the roar of applause they grinned at each other happily, until Shasa broke away and jumped down off the dais.

Centaine Courtney-Malcomess was in the first row of his audience and she sprang lightly to her feet to meet him. She was dressed in a sheath of gold lam and wearing her full suite of diamonds, each stone carefully picked from thirty years' production of the H'am Mine. Slim and glittering and lovely, she went to meet her son.

'Now we have it all, Mater,' he whispered as he hugged her.

No, chbri, we'll never have it all,' she whispered back. 'That would be dull. There is always something more to strive for." Blaine Malcomess was waiting to congratulate him, and Shasa turned to him with an arm still around Centaine's waist.

'Big night, Shasa." Blaine took his hand. 'You deserve it all." 'Thank you, sir." What a pity Tara couldn't be here,' Blaine went on.

'I wanted her to come." Shasa was immediately defensive. 'But as you know she decided she couldn't leave the children again so soon." The crowd surged around them, and they were laughing and replying to congratulations, but Shasa saw the public relations director hovering and eased his way through to her.

'Well, Mrs Anstey, you have done us proud." He smiled at.her with all his charm. She was tall and rather bony but with silky blond hair that hung in a thick curtain over her bare shoulders.

'I always try to give full satisfaction." Jill Anstey hooded her eyes and pouted slightly to give the remark an ambiguous slant. They had been teasing each other ever since they had met the previous day. 'But I'm afraid I have some more work for you, Mr Courtney.

Will you bear with me just once more?" 'As often as you wish, Mrs Anstey." Shasa played the game out, and she placed her hand on his forearm to lead him away, squeezing just a little more than was necessary.

'The television people from NABS want to do a five-minute interview with you, for inclusion in their "Africa in Focus" series. It could be a wonderful chance to speak directly to fifty million Americans." The TV team was setting up their equipment in the boardroom; the lights and cameras were being trained on the far end of the long room, where Centaine's portrait by Annigoni, hung on the stinkwood panelling. There were three men in the camera crew, all young and casually dressed but clearly highly professional and competent, and with them was a girl.

'Who will do the interview?" Shasa asked, glancing around curiously.

'That's the director,' Jill Anstey said. 'And she'll talk to you." It took him a moment to realize that she meant the girl, then he saw that without seeming to do so, the girl was directing the set-up, indicating a camera angle or a lighting change with a word or a gesture.

'She's just a child,' Shasa protested.

'Twenty-five and smart as a bunch of monkeys,' Jill Anstey warned him. 'Don't let the little-girl look fool you. She's a professional and a strong corner with a big following in the States. She did that incredible series of interviews with Jomo Kenyatta, the Mau Mau terrorist, not to mention the "Heartbreak Ridge" story in Korea.

They say she'll get an Emmy for it." South Africa did not have a TV network, but Shasa had seen 'Heartbreak Ridge' on BBC television during his last stay in London.

It was a gritty, totally absorbing commentary on the Korean war, and Shasa found it hard to believe that this child had done that. She turned now and came directly to him, holding out her hand, frank and friendly, a fresh-faced ingbnue.

'Hello, Mr Courtney, I'm Kitty Godolphin." She had an enchanting southern accent and there were fine golden freckles across her cheeks and her small pert nose, but then he saw that she had good bone structure and interesting planes to her face that would render her highly photogenic.

'Mr Courtney,' she said. 'You speak so well, I couldn't resist trying to get a little more of you on film. I hope I haven't put you out too much." She smiled at him, a sweet engaging smile, but he looked beyond it into eyes as hard as any diamonds from the H'am Mine, eyes that were bright with a sharp cynical intelligence and ruthless ambition. That was unexpected and intriguing.

'Here's a show that will be worth the entrance fee,' he thought and glanced down. Her breasts were small, smaller than he usually chose, but they were unsupported and he could see their shape beneath her blouse. They were exquisite.

She led him to the leather chairs she had arranged to face each other under the lights.

'If you would sit on this side we'll get right into it. I'll do my introduction later. ! don't want to keep you any longer than I have to." 'As long as you like." 'Oh, I know that you have a room full of important guests." She glanced at her crew and one of them gave her a thumbs-up. She looked back at Shasa. 'The American public knows very little about South Africa,' she explained. 'What I am trying to do is capture a cross-section of your society and figure out how it all works. I will introduce you as a politician, mining tycoon and financier, and tell them about this fabulous new gold-mine of yours. Then we'll cut to you. Okay?" 'Okay!" He smiled easily. 'Let her roll." The clapper loader snapped the board in front of Shasa's face, somebody said 'Sound?" and solnebody else replied 'Rolling' and then 'Action'.

'Mr Shasa Courtney, you have just told a meeting of your shareholders that your new gold-mine will probably be one of the five richest in South Africa, which makes it one of the richest in the world. Can you tell our viewers just how much of that fabulous wealth will be going back to people from which it was stolen in the first place?" she asked with breathtaking candour. 'And I am, of course, referring to the black tribes who once owned the land." Shasa was off-balance for only the moment that it took him to realize that he was in a fight. Then he responded easily.

'The black tribes who once owned the land on which the Silver River mine is situated were slaughtered, to the last man, woman and child, back in the 1820s by the impis of Kings Chaka and Mzilikazi, those two benevolent Zulu monarchs who between them managed to reduce the population of southern Africa by fifty percent,' he told her. 'When the white settlers moved northwards, they came upon a land denuded of all human life. The land they staked was open, they stole it from nobody. I bought the mineral rights from people who had clear undisputed title to it." He saw a glint of respect in her eyes, but she was as quick as he had been. She had lost a point but she was ready to play the next.

'Historical facts are interesting, of course, but let's return to the present. Tell me, if you had been a man of colour, Mr Courtney, say black or an Asiatic businessman, would you have been allowed to purchase the concessions to the Silver River mine?" 'That's a hypothetical question, Miss Godolphin." 'I don't think so --' she cut off his escape. 'Am I wrong in thinking that the Group Areas Act recently promulgated by the parliament of which you are a sitting member, prevents non-white individuals and companies owned by blacks from purchasing land or mineral rights anywhere in their own land?" 'I voted against that legislation,' Shasa said grimly. 'But yes, the Group Areas Act would have prevented a coloured person acquiring the rights in the Silver River mine,' he conceded. Too clever to labour a point well taken, she moved on swiftly.

'How many black people does the Courtney Mining and Finance Company employ in its numerous enterprises'' she asked with that sweet open smile.

'Altogether through eighteen subsidiary companies, we provide work for some two thousand whites and thirty thousand blacks." 'That is a marvelous achievement, and must make you very proud, Mr Courtney." She was breathlessly girlish. 'And how many blacks do you have sitting on the boards of those eighteen co ' '' mpames.

Again he had been wrong-footed, and he avoided the question.

'We make a point of paying well above the going rate for the job, and the other benefits we provide to our employees --' Kitty nodded brightly, letting him finish, quite happy that she could edit out all this extraneous material, but the moment he paused, she came in again: 'So there are no black directors on the Courtney companies' boards. Can you tell us how many black departmental managers you have appointed?" Once long ago, hunting buffalo in the forests along the Zambezi river, Shasa had been attacked by a heat-maddened swarm of the big black African honey-bees. There had been no defence against them, and he had only escaped at last by diving into the crocodile infested Zambezi river. He felt that same sense of angry helplessness now, as she buzzed around his head, effortlessly avoiding his attempts to swat her down and darting out to sting painfully almost at will.

'Thirty thousand black men working for you, and not a single director or manager amongst them!" she marvelled ingenuously. 'Can you suggest why that might be?" 'We have a predominantly tribal rural black society in this country and they come to the cities unskilled and untrained --' 'Oh, don't you have training programmes?" Shasa accepted the opening. 'The Courtney group has a massive training programme. Last year alone we spent two and a half million pounds on employee education and job training." 'How long has this programme been in operation, Mr Courtney?" 'Seven years, ever since I became chairman." 'And in seven years, after all that money spent on education, not one black of all those thousands has been promoted to managerial status? Is that because you have not found a single capable black, or is it because your job reservation policy and your strict colour bar prevent any black, no matter how good--' He was driven back inexorably until in anger he went on the offensive. 'If you are looking for racial discrimination, why didn't you stay in America?" he asked her, smiling icily. 'I'm sure your own Martin Luther King would be able to help you more than I can." 'There is bigotry in my country,' she nodded. 'We understand that, and we are changing it, educating our people and outlawing its practice, but from what I have seen, you are indoctrinating your children in this policy you call apartheid and enshrining it in a monumental fortress of laws like your Group Areas Act and your Population Registration Act which seeks to classify all men by the colour of their skin alone." 'We differentiate,' Shasa conceded, 'but that does not mean that we discriminate." 'That's a catchy slogan, Mr Courtney, but not original. I have already heard it from your minister of Bantu affairs, Dr Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd. However, I suggest to you that you do discriminate. If a man is denied the right to vote or to own land merely because his skin is dark, that in my book is discrimination." And before he could respond, she had switched again.

'How many black people do you number amongst your personal friends?" she asked engagingly, and the question transported Shasa instantly back across the years. He remembered as a lad standing his first shifts on the H'am Mine and the man who had been his friend.

The black boss-boy in charge of the weathering grounds on which the newly mined blue ore from the pit was laid out to soften and crumble to the point at which it could be carted to the mill.

He hadn't thought about him for years, yet he remembered his name without effort, Moses Gama, and he saw him in his mind's eye, tall and broad-shouldered, handsome as a young pharaoh with skin that glowed like old amber in the sunlight as they toiled side by side. He remembered their long rambling discussions, how they had read and argued together, drawn together by some unusual bond of the spirit. Shasa had lent him Macaulay's History of England, and when Moses Gama was fired from the H'am Mine on the instigation of Centaine Courtney as a direct result of the unacceptably intimate friendly relationship between them, Shasa had asked him to keep the book. Now he felt again a faint echo of the sense of deprivation he had experienced at the time of their enforced parting.

'I have only a handful of personal friends,' he told her now. 'Ten thousand acquaintances, but only a very few friends --' He held up the fingers of his right hand. 'No more than that, and none of them happen to be black. Though once I had a black man as a friend, and I grieved when our ways parted." With the sure instinct which made her supreme in her craft, Kitty Godolphin recognized that he had given her a perfect peg on which to hang the interview.

'Once I had a black man as a friend,' she repeated softly. 'And I grieved when our ways parted. Thank you, Mr Courtney." She turned to her camera man. 'Okay, Hank, cut it and get the studio to print it tonight." She stood up quickly and Shasa towered over her.

'That was excellent. There is a great deal of material there we can use,' she enthused. 'I am really grateful for your cooperation." Smiling urbanely Shasa leaned close to her. 'You are a devious little bitch, aren't you?" he said softly. 'A face like an angel and a heart of hell. You know it isn't like you made it sound, and you don't care.

As long as you get a good story, you don't give a damn whether it's true or not or who it hurts, do you?" Shasa turned from her and strode out of the boardroom. The floor-show had started and he went to the table at which Centaine and Blaine Malcomess were sitting, but the night had been spoiled for him.

He sat and glowered at the swirling dancers, not really seeing their long naked limbs and gleaming flesh but thinking furiously of Kitty Godolphin instead. Danger excited him, that was why he hunted lion and buffalo and flew his own Tiger Moth and played polo.

Kitty Godolphin was dangerous. He was always attracted to intelligent and competent women, with strong personalities - and this one was devastatingly competent and made of pure silk and steel.

He thought about that lovely innocent face and childlike smile and the hard gleam of her eyes, and his fury was compounded by his desire to subjugate her, emotionally and physically, and the fact that he knew it would be difficult made the thought all the more obsessive.

He found that he was physically aroused and that increased his anger.

He glanced up suddenly, and from across the room Jill Anstey, the public relations director, was watching him. The coloured lights played on the Slavic planes of her face and glinted on the platinum sheet of her hair. She slanted her eyes at him and ran the tip of her tongue over her lower lip.

'All right,' he thought. 'I have to take it out on somebody and you will do." He inclined his head slightly, and Jill Anstey nodded and slipped out of the door behind her. Shasa murmured an apology to Centaine, then stood up and moved through the pounding music and semi-darkness towards the door through which Jill Anstey had disappeared.

Shasa got back to the Carlton Hotel at nine o'clock in the morning. Still in black tie and dinner jacket, he avoided the lobby and went up the back stairs from the underground garage. Centaine and Blaine were in the company suite, and Shasa had the smaller suite across the passage. He dreaded meeting either of them dressed as he was at this time in the morning, but he was lucky and got into his lounge uninterrupted.

Somebody had slipped an envelope under his door and he picked it up without particular interest, until he saw the Killarney Film Studios crest on the flap. Kitty Godolphin was working out of that studio and he grinned and split the flap with his thumbnail.

Dear Mr Courtney, The rushes are just great - you look better than Errol Flynn on film. If you want to see them, call me at the studio.

Kitty Godolphin His anger had cooled and he was amused by her cheek, and though he had a full day ahead - lunch with Lord Littleton and meetings all afternoon - he phoned the studio.

'You just caught me,' Kitty told him. 'I was on my way out. You want to see the rushes? Okay, can you get up here at six this evening?" She was smiling that sweet childlike smile and mocking him with a malicious green sparkle in her eyes as she came down to the reception desk of the studio to shake his hand and lead him to her hired projection room in the complex.

'I knew I could rely on your masculine vanity to get you up here,' she assured him.

Her film crew were sprawled untidily over the front row of seats in the projection room, smoking Camels and drinking Cokes, but Hank, the camera man, had the film clip in the projector ready to run, and they watched it through in silence.

When the lights went up again, Shasa turned to Kitty and conceded.

'You are good - you made me look a real prick most of the time.

And, of course, you can always lose the parts where I held my own on the cutting-room floor." 'You don't like it?" she grinned, wrinkling her small nose so the freckles on it gleamed like tiny gold coins.

'You are a bushwhacker, shooting from cover, and I'm out there with my back wide open." 'If you accuse me of faking it,' she challenged him, 'how about you taking me and showing me the way it really is. Show me the Courtney mines and factories and let me film them!" So that was why she had called him. He smiled to himself, but asked, 'Have you got ten days?" 'I've got as long as it takes,' she assured him.

'All right, let's start with dinner tonight." 'Great!" she enthused, and then turned to her crew. 'Mazeltov, boys, Mr Courtney is standing us all dinner." 'That's not exactly what I had in mind,' he murmured.

'Do tell?" She gave him her innocent little girl look.

Kitty Godolphin was a rewarding companion. Her interest in everything he said or showed her was flattering and unfeigned. She watched his eyes or his lips as he spoke, and often leaned so close to listen that he could feel her breath on his face, but she never actually touched him.

For Shasa her appeal was heightened by her personal cleanliness.

In the days they spent together, hot dusty days in the desert of the far west or in the eastern forests, tramping through pulp mills or fertilizer factories, watching the bulldozers strip the overburden from the coal deposits in billowing clouds of dust, or baking in the depths of the great excavation of the H'am Mine, Kitty was always freshfaced and cool-looking. Even in the dust her eyes were clear and her small even teeth sparkled. When or where she had an opportunity to rinse her clothes he could never decide, but they were always clean and crisp and her breath when she leaned close to him was always sweet.

She was a professional. That impressed Shasa also. She would go to any lengths to get the film footage she wanted, taking no account of fatigue or personal danger. He had to forbid her riding on the outside of the mine cage on the H'am main incline shaft to film the drop into the pit, but she went back later, while he was in a meeting with his mine manager, and got exactly the shot she wanted and then smiled away his fury when he found out. Her crew treated her with an ambivalence that amused Shasa. They held her in fond affection and were immensely protective of her, as though they were her elder brothers, and their pride in her achievements was unconcealed. However, at the same time they were much in awe of her ruthless search for excellence, to which they knew she would sacrifice them and anything else that got in her way. Her temper, although not often displayed, was merciless and vitriolic and when she gave an order, no matter how quietly or how sweet the smile that accompanied it, they jumped.

Shasa was also affected by the deep feelings which she had conceived for Africa, its land and its people.

'I thought America was the most beautiful country in all the world,' she said quietly one evening as they watched the sun set behind the great desolate mountains of the western deserts. 'But when I look at this, I have to wonder." Her curiosity took her into the compounds where the Courtney Company employees were housed, and she spent hours talking to the workers and their wives, filming it all, the questions and answers of black miners and white overseers and shift bosses, their homes and the food they ate, their recreations and their worship, and at the end Shasa asked her, 'So how do you like the way I oppress them9' 'They live well,' she conceded.

'And they are happy,' he pushed her. 'Admit it. I hid nothing from you. They are happy." 'They are happy like children,' she agreed.

'As long as they look up to you like big daddy. But just how long do you think you can keep fooling them? How long is, it going to be before they look at you in your beautiful airplane flying back to parliament to make a few more laws for them to obey and say to themselves, "Hey man!

I'd like to try that also"?" 'For three hundred years under white government the people of this land have woven a social fabric which has held us all together. It works, and I would hate to see it torn asunder without knowing what will replace it." 'How about democracy for a start?" she suggested. 'That's not a bad thing to replace it with - you know, the will of the majority must prevail!" 'You left out the best bit,' he flashed back at her. 'The interests of the minority must be safeguarded. That doesn't work in Africa. The African knows and understands one principle: winner takes all and let the minority go to the wall. That's what will happen to the white settlers in Kenya if the British capitulate to the Mau Mau killers." So they wrangled and sparred during the long hours of flying which took them over the enormous distances of the African continent. From one destination to the next, Shasa and Kitty went ahead in the Mosquito, and the helmet and oxygen mask were too large for her and made her appear even younger and more girlish. David Abrahams piloted the slower and more commodious company De Havilland Dove, the camera equipment and the crew flying with him, and even though most of Shasa's time on the ground was spent in meetings with his managers and administrative staff, there was still much time that he could devote to the seduction of Kitty Godolphin.

Shasa was not accustomed to prolonged resistance from any female who warranted his concentrated attention. There might be a token flight, but always with coy glances over the shoulder, and usually they chose to hide from him in the nearest bedroom, absentmindedly forgetting to turn the key in the lock, and he expected it to go very much the same way with Kitty Godolphin.

Getting into her blue jeans was his first priority; convincing her that Africa was different from America and that they were doing the best job they could came second by a long way. At the end of the ten days he had succeeded in neither endeavour. Both Kitty's political convictions and her virtue remained intact.

Kitty's interest in him, however wide-eyed and intense, was totally impersonal and professional, and she gave the same attention to an Ovambo witchdoctor demonstrating how he cured abdominal cancer with a poultice of porcupine dung, or a muscled and tattooed white shift-boss explaining to her that a black worker should never be punched in the stomach as their spleens were always enlarged from malaria and could easily rupture - hitting them in the head was all right, he explained, because the African skull was solid bone anyway and you couldn't inflict serious damage that way.

'Mary Maria!" Kitty breathed. 'That was worth the trip in itselfl' So on the eleventh day of their odyssey, they flew out of the vastness of the Kalahari Desert from the remote H'am Diamond Mine on its mystic and brooding range of hills, into the town of Windhoek, capital of the old German colony of South West Africa which had been mandated to South Africa at the Treaty of Versailles.

It was a quaint little town, the German influence still very obvious in the architecture and the way of life of the inhabitants. Set in the hilly uplands above the arid littoral, the climate was pleasant and the Kaiserhof Hotel, where Shasa kept another permanent suite, offered many of the creature comforts that they had lacked during the previous ten days.

Shasa and David spent the afternoon with their senior staff in the local office of the Courtney Company, which before its move to Johannesburg had been the head office, but which was still responsible for the logistics of the H'am Mine. Kitty and her team, never wasting a moment, filmed the German colonial buildings and monuments and the picturesque Herero women on the streets. In 1904 this tribe of warriors had engaged the German administration in their worst colonial war which finally left eighty thousand Hereroes dead of famine and battle out of a total population of a hundred thousand. They were tall and magnificent-looking people and the women wore full-length Victorian skirts in butterfly colours and tall matching headdresses. Kitty was delighted with them, and late that afternoon came back to the hotel in ebullient mood.

Shasa had planned carefully, and had left David at the Courtney Company offices to finish the meeting. He was waiting to invite Kitty and her team through to the beer garden of the hotel where a traditional oom-pa-pa band in Lederhosen and alpine hats was belting out a medley of German drinking songs. The locally brewed Hansa Pilsner was every bit as good as the original of the Munich beerhalls, with a clear golden colour and thick creamy head. Shasa ordered the largest tankards, and Kitty drank level with her crew.

The mood turned festive until Shasa drew Kitty aside and under cover of the band told her quietly, 'I don't quite know how to break this to you, Kitty, but this will be our last evening together. I had my secretary book seats on the commercial flight for you and your boys to fly back to Johannesburg tomorrow morning." Kitty stared at him aghast. 'I don't understand. I thought we were flying down to your diamond concessions in the Sperrgebiet." She pronounced it 'Spear Beat' in her enchanting accent. 'That was going to be the main act." 'Sperrgebiet means "Forbidden Area",' Shasa told her sadly. 'And it means just that, Kitty, forbidden. Nobody goes in there without a permit from the government inspector of mines.

'But I thought you had arranged a permit for us,' she protested.

'I tried. I telexed our local office to arrange it. The application was denied. The government doesn't want you in there, I'm afraid." 'But why not?" 'There must be something going on in there that they don't want you to see or film,' he shrugged, and she was silent but he saw the play of fierce emotion across her innocent features and her eyes blazed green with anger and determination. He had early on discovered that the infallible means of making anything irresistibly attractive was to deny it to Kitty Godolphin. He knew that now she would lie, cheat or sell her soul to get into the Sperrgebiet. 'You could smuggle us in,' she suggested.

He shook his head. 'Not worth the risk. We might get away with it, but if I were caught it could mean a fine of œ100,000 or five years in the slammer." She laid her hand on his arm, the first time she had deliberately touched him. 'Please, Shasa. I want so badly to film it." He shook his head sorrowfully. 'I'm sorry, Kitty, can't be done, I'm afraid,' and he stood up. 'Got to go up and change for dinner.

You can break it to your crew while I'm away. Your flight back to Jo'burg leaves ten o'clock tomorrow." It was obvious at the dinner-table that she hadn't warned her crew of the change of plans, for they were still jovial and garrulous with good German beer.

For once Kitty took no part in the conversation, and she sat morosely at the end of the table, nibbling without interest at the hearty Teutonic fare and occasionally darting a sulky glance at Shasa.

David skipped coffee to go and make his nightly phone call to Matty and the children, and Hank and his crew had been told of a local night spot with hot music and even hotter hostesses.

'Ten days with no feminine company except the boss,' Hank complained. 'My nerves need soothing." 'Remember where you are,' Shasa warned him. 'In this country black velvet is royal game." 'Some of the poohtang I've seen today would be worth five years' hard labour,' Hank leered.

'Did you know that we have a South African version of Russian roulette?" Shasa asked him. 'What you do is take a coloured girl into a telephone booth. Then you phone the police flying squad and see who comes first." Kitty was the only one who didn't laugh, and Shasa stood up.

'I've got some papers to go over. We'll save the farewells until breakfast." In his suite he shaved and showered quickly, then slipped on a silk dressing-gown. As he went through to check that there was ice in the bar, there was a light tap on the door of the suite.

Kitty stood on the threshold looking tragic.

'Am I disturbing you?" 'No, of course not." He held the door open and she crossed the lounge and stood staring out of the window.

'Can I get you a night-cap?" Shasa asked.

'What are you drinking?" she asked.

'A rusty nail." 'I'll have one also - whatever it is." While he mixed Drambuie and malt whisky, she said, 'I came to thank you for everything you've done for me these last ten days. It's going to be hard to say goodbye." He carried the glasses across to where she stood in the middle of the floor, but when he reached her she took both glasses from him and placed them on the coffee table. Then she stood on tiptoe, slid both arms around his neck and turned her face up for his kiss.

Her lips were soft and sweet as warm chocolate, and slowly she pushed her tongue deeply into his mouth. When at last their mouths parted with a little wet sucking sound, he stooped and hooked an arm around the back of her knees and lifted her against his chest.

She clung to him, pressing her face against his throat as he carried her through to the bedroom.

She had the lean hips and flat belly of a boy, and her buttocks were white and round and hard as a pair of ostrich eggs. Like her face, her body seemed childlike and immature except for those tight little pear-shaped breasts and the startling burst of thick dark hair at the base of her belly, but when he touched her there he found to his surprise that it was fine as silk and soft as smoke.

Her love-making was so artful as to seem totally uncontrived and spontaneous. She had the trick of telling him exactly what he was doing to her in the coarsest barnyard terms, and the obscenities on that soft innocent-looking mouth were shockingly erotic. She took him to those heights that he had seldom scaled before, and left him completely satiated.

In the dawn glow she snuggled against him and whispered, 'I don't know how I am going to be able to bear being parted from you after this." He could see her face in the wall mirror across the room, although she was unaware of his scrutiny."Damn it - I can't let you go,' he whispered back. 'I don't care what it costs I'm taking you down to the Sperrgebiet with me." In the mirror he watched her smile, a complacent and smug little smile. He had been correct, Kitty Godolphin used her sexual favours like trumps in a game of bridge.

At the airport her crew were packing their equipment into the Dove under David Abrahams' supervision when Shasa and Kitty drove up in the second company car, and Kitty jumped out and went to David.

'How are you going to work it, Davie?" she asked, and he looked puzzled.

'I don't understand the question." 'You'll have to fake the flight plan, won't you?" Kitty insisted.

Still mystified, David glanced at Shasa. Shasa shrugged and Kitty became exasperated.

'You know very well what I mean. How are you going to cover the fact that we are going into the Sperrgebiet without permits?" 'Without permits?" David echoed, and fished a handful of documents out of the zip pocket of his leather flying-jacket. 'Here are the permits. They were issued a week ago - all kosher and correct." Kitty wheeled and glared speechlessly at Shasa, but he refused to meet her eyes and instead ambled off to make his walk-around check of the Mosquito.

They didn't speak to each other again until Shasa had the Mosquito at twenty thousand feet, flying straight and level, then Kitty said into his earphones, 'You son of a bitch." Her voice shook with fury.

'Kitty, my darling." He turned and smiled at her over the oxygen mask, his single eye glinting happily. 'We both got what we wanted, and had a lot of fun in the process. What are you so mad about?" She turned her face away and stared down at the magnificent lioncoloured mountains of the Kharna's Hochtland. He left her to sulk.

Some minutes later he heard an unusual stuttering sound in his headset, and he frowned and leaned forward to adjust the radio.

Then, from the corner of his eye he saw that Kitty was hunched up in the seat shaking uncontrollably and that the stuttering sound was coming from her.

He touched her shoulder and she turned her face to him, it was swollen and crimson with suppressed laughter and tears of mirth were squeezing out of the corners of her eyes with the pressure. She couldn't hold it any longer, and she let out a snort.

'You crafty bastard,' she sobbed. 'Oh, you tricky monster--' and then she became incoherent as laughter overwhelmed her.

A long time later she wiped away her tears. 'We are going to get on just fine together, you and me,' she declared. 'Our minds work the same way." 'Our bodies don't do too badly either,' he pointed out, and she unclipped her oxygen mask and leaned across to offer him her mouth again. Her tongue was sinuous and slippery as an eel.

Their time in the desert together passed too swiftly for Shasa, for since they had become lovers he found her a constant joy to be with.

Her quick and curious mind stimulated his own, and through her observant eyes he saw old familiar things afresh.

Together they watched and filmed the elephantine yellow caterpillar tractors ripping the elevated terraces that had once been the ocean bed. He explained to Kitty how in the time when the crust of the earth was soft and the molten magma still burst through to the surface, the diamonds, conceived at great depth and heat and pressure, were carried up with this sulphurous outpouring.

In the endless rains of those ancient times the great rivers scoured the earth, running down to the sea, washing the diamonds down with them, until they collected in the pockets and irregularities of the seabed closest to the river mouth. As the emerging continent shrugged and shifted, so the old seabed was lifted above the surface.

The rivers had long ago dried up or been diverted, and sediment covered the elevated terraces, concealing the diamond-bearing pockets. It had taken the genius of Twenty-man-Jones to work out the old river courses. Using aerial photography and an inherent sixth sense, he had pinpointed the ancient terraces.

Kitty and her team filmed the process by which the sand and rubble churned up by the dozer blades was screened and sieved, and finally dry-blown with great multi-bladed fans, until only the precious stones - one part in tens of millions - remained.

In the desert nights the mine hutments, lacking air-conditioning, were too hot for sleep. Shasa made a nest of blankets out amongst the dunes, and with the faint peppery smell of the desert in their nostrils, they made love under a blaze of stars.

On their last day Shasa commandeered one of the company jeeps and they drove out into a land of red dunes, the highest in all the world, sculptured by the incessant winds off the cold Benguela Current, their ridges crested like living reptiles as they writhed high against the pale desert sky.

Shasa pointed out to Kitty a hrd of gemsbok, each antelope large as a pony, but with a marvellously patterned face mask of black and white and slender horns, straight and long as they were tall, that were the original unicorn of the fable. They were beautiful beasts, so adapted to their harsh country that they need never drink from surface water, but could survive only on the moisture they obtained from the silvery sun-scorched grasses. They watched them dissolve magically into the heat mirage, turning to squirming black tadpoles on the horizon before they disappeared.

'I was born here. Somewhere in these deserts,' Shasa told her as they stood hand in hand on the crest of one of the dunes and looked down a thousand feet to where they had left the jeep in the gut of the sand mountains.

He told her how Centaine had carried him in her womb through this terrible terrain, lost and abandoned, with only two little Bushmen as her guides and companions, and how the Bushwoman, for whom the H'am Mine was named, acted as midwife at his birth and named him Shasa - 'Good Water' - after the most precious substance in her world.

The beauty and the grandeur affected them both so they drew close together in the solitude, and by the end of that day Shasa was sure that he truly loved her and that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.

Together they watched the sun sink towards the red dunes and the sky turned to a screen of hot hammered bronze, dented with flecks of blue cloud as though by blows from a celestial blacksmith's hammer. As the sky cooled, the colours chameleoned into puce and orange and lofty purples until the sun sank behind the dunes - and at the instant it disappeared, a miracle occurred.

They both gasped in wonder as in a silent explosion the entire heavens flared into electric green. It lasted only as long as they held their breath, but in that time the sky was as green as the ocean depths or the ice in the gaping cracks of a high mountain glacier.

Then it faded swiftly into the drab gun-metal of dusk, and Kitty turned to him with a silent question in her eyes.

'We saw it together,' Shasa said softly. 'The Bushmen call it the Green Python. A man can live a lifetime in the desert without seeing it. I have never witnessed it, not until this moment." 'What does it mean.9' Kitty asked.

'The Bushmen say it is the most fortuitous of all good omens." He reached out and took her hand. 'They say that those who see the Green Python will be specially blessed - and we saw it together." In the fading light they went down the slip face of the dune to where Shasa had parked the jeep. They sank almost knee-deep in the fluffy sun-warm sand, and laughing they clung to each other for support.

When they reached the jeep, Shasa took her by the shoulders, turned her to face him and told her, 'I don't want it to end, Kitty.

Come with me. Marry me. I'll give you everything that life has to offer." She threw back her head to laugh in his face. 'Don't be daft, Shasa Courtney. What I want from life isn't yours to give,' she told him. 'This was fun, but it wasn't reality. We can be good friends for as long as you want, but our feet are set on different paths, and we aren't going in the same direction." The next day when they landed at Windhoek airport, a telegram addressed to her was pinned to the board in the crew room. Kitty read it swiftly. When she looked up she wasn't seeing Shasa any longer.

'There is another story breaking,' she said. 'I have to go." 'When will I see you again?" Shasa asked, and she looked at him as though he were a complete stranger.

'I don't know,' she said, and she and her crew were on the commercial flight that left for Johannesburg an hour later.

Shasa was angry and humiliated. He had never offered to divorce Tara for any other woman - had never even contemplated it - and Kitty had laughed at him.

There were well-explored avenues down which he knew he could cure his anger, one was the hunt. For Shasa nothing else existed in the world when the hunter's passion thrilled in his blood, when a bull buffalo, big as a mountain and black as hell, came thundering down upon him, bloody saliva drooling from its raised muzzle, the polished points of its curved horns glinting, and murder in its small piglike eyes. However, this was the rainy season and the hunting grounds in the north would be muggy wet and malarial, and the grass high above a man's head.

He could not hunt so he turned to his other sure panacea, the pursuit of wealth.

Money held endless fascination for Shasa. Without that obsessive attraction he could not have accumulated such a vast store of it, for that required a devotion and dedication that few men are capable of.

Those that lack it console themselves with old platitudes about it not buying happiness and being the root of all evil. As an adept, Shasa knew that money was neither good nor evil, but simply amoral. He knew that money had no conscience, but that it contained the most powerful potential for both good and evil. It was the man who possessed it who made the ultimate choice between them, and that choice was called power.

Even when he had believed himself to be totally absorbed with Kitty Godolphin, his instinct had been in play. Almost subconsciously he had noticed those tiny white specks way out on the green Benguela Current of the Atlantic. Kitty Godolphin had not been gone from his life for an hour before he stormed into the offices of Courtney Mining and Finance in Windhoek's main street and started demanding figures and documents, making telephone calls, summoning lawyers and accountants, calling in favours from men in high places in government, despatching his minions to search the archives of the registrar and the local newspapers, assembling the tools of his trade, facts, figures and influence, and then losing himself happily in them, like an opium-eater with his pipe.

It was another five days before he was ready to bring it all together, and make the final weighing up. He had kept David Abrahams with him, for David was an excellent sounding-board in a situation like this one, and Shasa liked to bounce ideas off him and catch the returns.

'So this is what it looks like,' Shasa began the summing up. There were five of them in the boardroom, sitting under the magnificent Pierneef murals that Centaine had commissioned when the artist was in his prime, Shasa and David, the local manager and secretary of Courtney Mining, and the German lawyer based in Windhoek whom Shasa kept on permanent retainer.

'It looks like we have been asleep on our feet. In the last three years an industry has sprung up under our noses, an industry that last year alone netted twenty million pounds, four times the profits of the H'am Mine, and we have let it happen." He glowered cyclops-eyed at his local manager for an explanation.

'We were aware of the recommencement of the fishing industry at Walvis Bay,' that unfortunate gentleman sought to explain. 'The application for pilchard trawling licences was gazetted, but I didn't think that fishing would match up with our other activities." 'With due respect, Frank, that's the kind of decision I like to make myself. It's your job to pass on all information, of whatever nature, to me." It was said quietly, but the three local men had no illusions as to the severity of the reprimand and they bowed their heads over their notepads. There was silence for ten seconds while Shasa let them suffer.

'Right, Frank,' Shasa ordered him. 'Tell us now what you should have told us four or five years ago." 'Well, Mr Courtney, the pilchard-fishing industry was started in the early 1930s at Walvis Bay and although initially successful, it was overtaken by the depression, and with the primitive trawling methods of those days was unable to survive. The factories closed down and became derelict." As Frank spoke, Shasa's mind went back to his childhood. He remembered his first visit to Walvis Bay and blinked with the realization that it had been twenty years ago. He and Centaine had driven down in her daffodil-coloured Daimler to call in the loan she had made to De La Rey's canning and fishing company and to close down the factory. Those were the desperate years of the depression when the Courtney companies had survived only through his mother's pluck and determination - and ruthlessness.

He remembered how Lothar De La Rey, Manfred's father, had pleaded with his mother for an extension of the loan. When his trawlers lay against the wharf, loaded to the gunwales with their catch of silver pilchards, and the sheriff of the court, on Centaine': orders, had put his seals on the factory doors.

That was the day he had first met Manfred De La Rey. Manfret had been a bare-footed, cropped-head hulk of a lad, bigger and stronger than Shasa, burned dark by the sun, dressed in a navy-blue fisherman's jersey and khaki shorts that were smeared with dried fish-slime, while Shasa had worn immaculate grey slacks, white open neck shirt and a college sweater with polished black shoes on his feet.

Two boys from different worlds, they had come face to face on the main fish wharf and their hostility had been instantaneous, their hackles rising like dogs, and within minutes, gibes and insults had turned to blows and they had flown at each other furiously, punching and wrestling down the wharf while the coloured trawlermen had egged them on delightedly. He remembered clearly even after all this time Manfred De La Rey's pale ferocious eyes glaring into his as they fell from the wharf on to the slippery, stinking cargo of dead pilchards, and he felt again the dreadful humiliation as Manfred had forced his head deeply into the quagmire of cold dead fish and he had begun to drown in their slime.

He jerked his mind back to the present, to hear his manager saying, 'So the position is now that the government has issued four factory licences to catch and process pilchards at Walvis Bay. The department of fisheries allocates an annual quota to each of the licensees, which is presently two hundred thousand tons." Shasa contemplated the enormous profit potential of those quantities of fish.

According to their published accounts, each of those four factories had averaged two million pounds profit in the last fiscal year.

He knew he could improve on that, probably double it, but it didn't look as though he was going to get the chance.

'Approaches to both the Fisheries Department, and to higher authority-' Shasa had taken the administrator of the territory himself to dinner, 'have elicited the firm fact that no further licences will be issued. The only way to enter the industry would be to buy out one of the licensees." Shasa smiled sardonically for he had already sounded out two of the companies. The owner of the first one had told Shasa in movingly eloquent terms to commit an unnatural sexual act on himself and the other had quoted a figure at which he might be prepared to negotiate which ended with a string of zeros that reached to the horizon. Despite his gloomy expression, it was the kind of situation in which Shasa revelled, seemingly hopeless, and yet with the promise of enormous rewards if he could find his way around the obstacles.

'I want a detailed breakdown of balance sheets on all four companies,' he ordered. 'Does anybody know the director of fisheries?"

'Yes, but he's straight up and down,' Frank warned him, knowing how Shasa's mind worked. 'His fists are tight Closed, and if we try to slip him a little gifty, he'll raise a stink they'll smell in the high court in Bloemfontein." 'Besides which the issue of licences is outside his jurisdiction,' the company secretary agreed with him. 'They are granted exclusively by the ministry in Pretoria, and there won't be any more. Four is the limit. That is the decision of the minister himself." Five more days Shasa remained in Windhoek, covering every possible lead or chance with a total dedication to detail that was one of his strengths, but at the end of that time he was no closer to owning a factory licence at Walvis Bay than he had been when he had first spotted the little white trawlers out on the green ocean. The only thing he had achieved was to forget that malignant little sprite, Kitty Godolphin, for ten whole days.

However, when at last he admitted to himself that there was nothing more to be gained by staying on in Windhoek and he climbed into the pilot's seat of the Mosquito, Kitty Godolphin's memory mocked him from the empty seat beside him. On impulse, instead of laying a course direct to Cape Town, he detoured westwards, heading for the coast and Walvis Bay, determined to have one long look at the site before finally abandoning the idea.

There was something else besides Kitty's memory that plagued him as the Mosquito dropped down the escarpment towards the sea.

It was a burr of doubt, a prickle of discomfort that he had overlooked something important in his investigations.

He saw the ocean ahead, wreathed in tendrils of fog where the cold current brushed the land. The high dunes writhed together like a nest of razor-backed vipers, the colour of ripe wheat and copper, and he banked the Mosquito and followed the endless beaches upon which the surf broke in regular snowy lines until he saw the horn of the bay spike into the restless ocean and the lighthouse on Pelican Point winked at him through the fog banks.

He throttled back the Rolls Royce Merlins and went down, brushing the tops of the scattered fog banks and in the gaps he saw the trawler fleet at work. They were close in to the land, on the edge of the current line. Some of the boats had their nets full, and he saw the silver treasure glittering through the water as the trawlermen raised it slowly to the surface, while over them hung a shimmering white panoply of seabirds, greedy for the feast.

Then a mile away he picked out another boat hunting, cutting a foaming arabesque with its wake as it stalked yet another pilchard shoal.

Shasa pulled on flap and banked the Mosquito steeply, turning above the trawler to watch the hunt develop. He saw the shoal, a dark shadow as though a thousand gallons of ink had been spilled into the green waters, and he was amazed by its size, a hundred acres of solid fish, each individual no longer than his hand, but in their multitudes dwarfing leviathan.

'Millions of tons in one shoal,' he whispered. As he translated it into terms of wealth, the acquisitive passion flared up in him again.

He watched the trawler beneath him throw its net around a tiny part of the gigantic shoal, and then he levelled out and flew at a hundred feet, skimming the fog banks, towards the maw of the bay. There were the four factory buildings, standing on the edge of the water, each with its own jetty thrusting out into the shallow waters, and black smoke billowing from the chimney stacks of the furnaces.

'Which one belonged to old De La Rev."?" he wondered. On which of those flimsy structures had he fought with Manfred and ended with his ears and nose and mouth filled with fish slime.`? He grinned ruefully at the memory.

'But surely it was farther north,' he puzzled, trying to cast his mind back twenty years. 'It wasn't down here so close to the hook of the bay." He banked the Mosquito and flew back parallel to the beach, and then a mile ahead he saw the line of palings, rotted and black, running in an irregular line out into the waters of the bay, and on the beach the roofless old ruins of the factory.

'It's still there,' he realized, and ins-tantly his skin prickled with excitement. 'It's still there, deserted and forgotten all these years." He knew then what he had overlooked.

He made two more passes, so low that the blast of his propellers raised a miniature sandstorm from the tops of the dunes. On the seaward wall of the derelict factory whose corrugated iron covering was gnawed and streaked with red rust, he could still make out the faded lettering: SOUTH WEST AFRICAN CANNING AND FISHING CO.

LTD.

He pushed on throttle and lifted the Mosquito's nose into a gentle climbing turn, bringing her out of the turn on course for Windhoek.

Cape Town and his promise to his sons and Isabella to be home before the weekend were forgotten. David Abrahams had flown the Dove back to Johannesburg, leaving a few minutes before Shasa that morning, so there was nobody in Windhoek whom Shasa would trust to conduct the search. He went down to the registrar of deeds himself and an hour before the deed office closed for the weekend he found what he was looking for.

The licence to capture and process pilchards and all other pelagic fish was dated 20 September 1929 and signed by the administrator of the territory. It was made out in favour of one Lothar De La Rey of Windhoek, and there was no term of expiry. It was good now and for all time.

Shasa stroked the crackling, yellowing document, smoothing out the crumples in it lovingly, admiring the crimson revenue stamps and the administrator's fading signature. Here in these musty drawers it had lain for over twenty years - and he tried to put a value on this scrap of paper. A million pounds, certainly - five million pounds, perhaps. He chuckled triumphantly and took it to the deeds clerk to have a notarized copy made.

'It will cost you a pretty penny, sir,' the clerk sniffed. 'Ten and six for the copy and two pounds for the attestation." 'It's a high price,' Shasa agreed, 'but I can just afford it." Lothar De La Rey came bounding up the wet black rocks, surefooted as a mountain goat, dressed only in a pair of black woollen bathing trunks. In one hand he carried a light fishing rod and in the other he held the trace on the end of which a small silver fish fluttered.

'I've got one, Pa,' he called excitedly, and Manfred De La Rey roused himselfi He had been lost in thought; even on this, one of his rare vacations, his mind was still concentrated on the work of his ministry.

'Well done, Lothie." He stood up and picked up the heavy bamboo surf rod that lay beside him. He watched his son gently unhook the small bait fish and hand it to him. He took it from him. It was cold and firm and slippery, and when he pressed the sharp point of his large hook through its flesh, the tiny dorsal fin along its back came erect and its struggles were frantic.

'Man, no old kob will be able to resist that." Manfred held the live bait up for his son to admire. 'It looks so good, I could eat it myself." He picked up the heavy rod.

For a minute he watched the surf break on the rocks below them, and then timing his momen he ran down to the edge, moving lightly for such a big man. The foam sucked at his ankles as he poised, and then swung the bamboo rod in a full whipping action. The cast was long and high, the live bait sparkled as it spun a parabola in the sunlight and then hit the green water a hundred yards out, beyond the first line of breakers.

Manfred ran back as the next wave dashed head-high at him. With the rod over his shoulder and line still streaming from the big Scarborough reel he beat the angry white surf and regained his seat high up on the rocks.

He thrust the butt of the rod into a crack in the rocks and jammed his old stained felt hat against the reel to hold it. Then he settled down on his cushion with his back to the rock and his son beside him.

'Good kob water,' he grunted. The sea was discoloured and cloudy, like home-made ginger beer, the perfect conditions for the quarry they were seeking.

'I promised Ma we would bring her a fish for pickling,' Lotbar said.

'Never count your kob before it's in the pickle barrel,' Manfred counselled, and the boy laughed.

Manfred never touched him in front of others, not even in front of his mother and the girls, but he remembered the enormous pleasure it had given him when he was Lothar's age to have his own father's embrace, and so at times when they were alone together like this he would let his true feelings show. He let his arm slip down off the rock and fall around the boy's shoulders and Lothar froze with joy and for a minute did not dare to breathe. Then slowly he leaned closer to his father and in silence they watched the tip of the long rod nod in rhythm to the ocean.

'And so, Lothie, have you decided what you want to do with your life when you leave Paul Roost Paul Roos was the leading Afrikaans medium school in the Cape Province, the South African equivalent of Eton or Harrow for Afrikaners.

'Pa, I've been thinking." Lothar was serious. 'I don't want to do law like you did, and I think medicine will be too difficult." Manfred nodded resignedly. He had come to terms with the fact that Lothar was not academically brilliant, but just a good average student. It was in all the other fields that he excelled. Already it was clear that his powers of leadership, his determination and courage, and his athletic prowess were all exceptional.

'I want to join the police,' the boy said hesitantly. 'When I finish at Paul Roos, I want to go to the police academy in Pretoria." Manfred sat quietly, trying to hid'lde his surprise. It was probably the last thing he would have thought of himself.

At last he said. 'Ja, why not! You'd do well there." He nodded.

'It's a good life, a life of service to your country and your Volk." The more he thought about it, the more he realized that Lothar was ..... making.a, perfect, cheic.- and-all caurserthe laet- that hid's :father ;,'as---minister of police wouldn't hurt the boy's career either. He hoped he would stick to it. 'Ja,' he repeated, 'I like it." 'Pa, I wanted to ask you--' Lothar started, and the tip of the rod jerked, bounced straight, and then arced over boldly. Manfred's old hat was thrown clear of the spinning reel as the line hissed from it in a blur.

Father and son leapt to their feet and Manfred seized the heavy bamboo and leaned back against it to set the hook.

'It's a monster,' he shouted, as he felt the weight of the fish, and the flow of line never checked, even when he thrust the palm of the leather mitten he wore against the flange of the reel to brake it.

Within seconds blue smoke burned from the'friction of reel and leather glove.

When it seemed that the last few turns of line would be stripped from the spindle of the reel, the fish stopped, and two hundred yards out there under the smoky grey waters it shook its head doggedly so the rod butt kicked against Manfred's belly.

With Lothar dancing at his side, howling encouragement and advice, Manfred winched in the fish, pumping the rod to recover a few turns of line at a time, until the reel was almost full again and he expected to see the quarry thrashing in the surf below the rocks.

Then suddenly the fish made another long heavy run, and he had to begin the laborious back-straining task all over again.

At last they saw it, deep in the water below the rocks, its side shining like a great mirror as it caught the sun. With the rod bent taut as a longbow, Manfred forced it up until it flapped ponderously, washing back and forth in the suck and thrust of the waves, gleaming in marvelous iridescent shades of rose and pearl, its great jaws gaping with exhaustion.

'The gar' Manfred shouted. 'Now, Lothie, now!" and the boy sprang down to the water's edge with the long pole in his hands and buried the point of the gaff hook into the fish's shoulder, just behind the gills. A flush of blood stained the waters pink, and then Manfred threw down his rod and jumped down to help Lothar with the gaff pole.

Between them they dragged the fish, flapping and thumping, up the rocks above the high-water mark.

'He's a hundred pounds if he's an ounce,' Lothar exulted. 'Ma and the girls will be up till midnigtit pickling this one." Lothar carried the rods and the fishing box while Manfred slung the fish over his shoulder, a short loop of rope through its gills, and they trudged back around the curve of white beach. On the rocks of the next headland, Manfred lowered the fish for a few minutes to rest. Once he had been Olympic light heavyweight champion, but he had fleshed out since those days, his belly was softening and spreading and his breath was short.

'Too much time behind my desk,' he thought ruefully, ,and sank down on a black boulder. As he mopped his face he looked around him.

This place always gave him pleasure. It grieved him that he could find so little time in his busy life to come here. In their old student days he and Roelf Stander, his best friend, had fished and hunted on this wild unspoiled stretch of coast. It had belonged to Roelf's family for a hundred years, and RoeIf would never have sold the smallest piece of it to anybody but Manfred.

In the end he had sold Manfred a hundred acres for one pound. 'I don't want to get rich on an old friend,' he had laughed away Manfred's offer of a thousand. 'Just let us have a clause in the contract of sale that I have a right of first option to buy it back at the same price at your death or whenever you want to sell." There beyond the headland on which they sat was the cottage that he and Heidi had built, white stucco walls and thatch, the only sign of human habitation. Roelf's own holiday house was hidden beyond the next headland, but within easy walking distance so they could be together whenever both families were on holiday at the same time.

There were so many memories here. He looked out to sea. That was where the German U-boat had surfaced when it had brought him back in the early days of the war. Roelf had been on the beach, waiting for him, and had rowed out in the darkness to fetch him and his equipment ashore. What mad exciting days those had been, the danger and the fighting, as they had struggled to raise the Afrikaner Volk in rebellion against the English-lover Jan Christian Smuts, and to declare South Africa a republic under the protection of Nazi Germany - and how very close they had come to success.

He smiled and his eyes glowed at the memory. He wished he could tell the boy about it. Lothie would understand. Young as he was, he would understand the Afrikaner dream of republic and he would be proud.

However that was a story that could never be told. Manfred's attempt to assassinate Jan Smuts and precipitate the rebellion had failed. He had been forced to fly the country, and to languish for the rest of the war in a far-off land,-while RoeIf and the other patriots had been branded traitors and hustled into Jannie Smuts' internment camps, humiliated and reviled until the war ended.

How it had all changed. Now they were the lords of this land, although nobody outside the inner circle knew the part that Manfred De La Rey had played in those dangerous years. They were the overlords, and once again the dream of republic burned brightly, like a flame on the altar of Afrikaner aspirations.

His thoughts were broken up by the roar of a low-flying aircraft overhead, and Manfred looked up. It was a sleek blue and silver machine, turning away steeply to line up for the airstrip that lay just beyond the first line of hills. The airstrip had been built by the public works department when Manfred had achieved full ministerial rank.

It was essential that he was in close contact with his department at all times, and from that landing-field an airforce plane could fetch him within hours if he were needed in an emergency.

Manfred recognized this machine and knew who was flying it, but frowned with annoyance as he stood up and hefted the huge carcass of the fish again. He treasured the isolation of this place, and fiercely resented any unwarranted intrusion. He and Lothar set off on the last leg of the long haul back to the cottage.

Heidi and the girls saw them coming, and ran down the dunes to meet them and then surrounded Manfred, laughing and squealing their congratulations. He plodded up the soft dunes, with the girls skipping beside him, and hung the fish on the scaffold outside the kitchen door.

While Heidi went to fetch her Kodak camera, Manfred stripped off his shirt which was stained with fish blood and stooped to the tap of the rainwater tank and washed the blood from his hand and the salt from his face.

As he straightened up again, with water dripping from his hair and running down his bare chest, he was abruptly aware of the presence of a stranger.

'Get me a towel, Ruda,' he snapped, and his eldest daughter ran to his bidding.

'I was not expecting you." Manfred glowered at Shasa Courtney.

'My family and I like to be alone here." 'Forgive me. I know I am intruding." Shasa's shoes were floury with dust. It was a mile walk from the airstrip. 'I am sure you will understand when I explain that my business is urgent and private." Manfred scrubbed his face with the towel while he mastered his annoyance, and then, when Heidi came out with the camera in her hand, he introduced her gruffly.

Within minutes Shasa had charmed both Heidi and the girls into smiles, but Lothar stood behind his father and only came forward reluctantly to shake hands. He had learned from his father to be suspicious of Englishmen.

'What a tremendous kob,' Shasa admired the fish on the scaffold.

'One of the biggest I have seen in years. You don't often get them that size any more. Where did you catch it?" Shasa insisted on taking the photographs of the whole family grouped around the fish. Manfred was still bare-chested, and Shasa noticed the old bluish puckered scar in the side of his chest. It looked like a gunshot wound, but there had been a war and many men bore scars of that nature now. Thinking of war wounds, he adjusted his own eye-patch self-consciously as he handed the camera back to Heidi.

'You will stay to lunch, Meneer?" she asked demurely.

q don't want to be a nuisance." 'You are welcome." She was a handsome woman, with a large high bosom and wide fruitful hips. Her hair was dense and golden blond, and she wore it in a thick plaited rope that hung almost to her waist, but Shasa saw Manfred De La Rey's expression and quickly transferred all his attention back to him.

'My wife is right. You are welcome." Manfred's natural Afrikaner duty of hospitality left him no choice. 'Come, we will go to the front stoep until the women call for us to eat." Manfred fetched two bottles of beer from the ice-chest and they sat in deckchairs, side by side, and looked out over the dunes to the wind-flecked blue of the Indian Ocean.

'Do you remember where we first met, you and I?" Shasa broke the silence.

'da,' Manfred nodded. 'I remember very well." 'I was back there two days ago." 'Walvis Bay?" 'Yes. To the canning factory, the jetty where we fought,' Shasa hesitated, 'where you thumped me, and pushed my head into a mess of dead fish." Manfred smiled with satisfaction at the memory. 'da, I remember." Shasa had to control his temper carefully. It still rankled and the man's smugness infuriated him, but the memory of his childhood victory had softened Manfred's mood as Shasa had intended it should.

'Strange how we were enemies then, and now we are allies,' Shasa persisted, and let him think about that for a while before he went on.

'I have most carefully considered the offer you made to me. Although it is difficult for a man to change sides, and many people will put the worst construction on my motives, I now see that it is my duty to my country to do what you suggest and to employ what talent I have for the good of the nation." 'So you will accept the prime minister's offer?" 'Yes, you may tell the prime minister that I will join the government, but in my own time and my own way. I will not cross the floor of the House, but as soon as parliament is dissolved for the coming elections, I will resign from the United Party to stand for the National Party." 'Good,' Manfred nodded. 'That is the honourable way." But there was no honourable way, Shasa realized, and was silent for a moment before he went on.

'I am grateful for your part in this, Meneer. I know that you have been instrumental in affording me this opportunity. In view of what has happened between our families, it is an extraordinary gesture you have made." 'There was nothing personal in my decision." Manfred shook his head. et was simply a case of the best man for the job. I have not forgotten what your family has done to mine - and I never will." 'I will not forget either,' Shasa said softly. 'I have inherited guilt rightly or wrongly, I will never be sure. However, I would like to make some reparation to your father." 'How would you do that, Meneer?" Manfred asked stiffly. 'How would you compensate a man for the loss of his arm and for all those years spent in prison? How will you pay a man for the damage to his soul that captivity has inflicted?" 'I can never full compensate him,' Shasa agreed. 'However, suddenly and unexpectedly I have been given the opportunity to restore to your father a large part of that which was taken from him." 'Go on,' Manfred invited. 'I am listening." 'Your father was issued a fishing licence in 1929. I have searched the records. That licence is still valid." 'What would the old man do with a fishing licence now? You don't understand - he is physically and mentally ruined." 'The fishing industry out of Walvis Bay has revived and is booming. The number of licences has been severely limited. Your father's licence is worth a great deal of money." He saw the shift in Manfred's eyes, the little sparks of interest swiftly screened.

'You think my father should sell it?" he asked heavily. 'And by any chance would you be interested in buying it?" He smiled sarcastically.

Shasa nodded. 'Yes, of course I'd like to buy it, but that might not be best for your father." Manfred's smile withered, he hadn't expected that.

'What else could he do with it?" 'We could re-open the factory and work the licence together as partners. Your father puts up thelicence, and I put up the capital and my business skills. Within a year or two, your father's share will almost certainly be worth a million pounds." Shasa watched him carefully as he said it. This was more, much more than a business offer. It was a testing. Shasa wanted to reach beyond the man's granite crust, that monumental armour of puritanical righteousness. He wanted to probe for weaknesses, to find any chinks that he could exploit later.

'A million pounds,' he repeated. 'Perhaps even a great deal more." And he saw the sparks in the other man's fierce pale eyes again, just for an instant, the little yellow sparks of greed. The man was human after all. 'I can deal with him now,' Shasa thought, and to cover his relief he lifted his briefcase from the floor beside his deckchair and opened it on his lap.

'I have worked out a rough agreement--' he took out a sheaf all typed blue foolscap sheets '--you could show it to your father, discuss it with him." Manfred took the sheets from him. 'da, I will see him when I return home next week." 'There is one small problem,' Shasa admitted. 'This licence was issued a long time ago. The government department may wish to repudiate it. It is their policy to allow only four licences--' Manfred looked up from the contract. 'That will be no problem,' Manfred said, and Shasa lifted his beer tankard to hide his smile.

They had just shared their first secret. Manfred De La Rey was going to use his influence for personal gain. Like a lost virginity, the next time would be easier.

Shasa had realized from the beginning that he would be an outsider in a cabinet of Afrikaner Nationalists. He desperately needed a trustworthy ally amongst them, and if that ally could be linked to him by shared financial blessings and 'a few off-colour secrets, then his loyalty would be secured. Shasa had just achieved this, with the promise of vast profits to himself to sweeten the bargain. A good day's work, he thought, as he closed the briefcase with a snap.

'Very good, Meneer. I'm grateful to you for having given me your time. Now I will leave you to enjoy what remains of your holiday undisturbed." Manfred look up. 'Meneer, my wife is preparing lunch for us. She will be very unhappy if you leave so soon." At last his smile was genial. 'And this evening I will have a few good friends visit me for a braaivleis, a barbecue. There are plenty of spare beds. Stay the night.

You can leave early tomorrow morning." 'You are very kind." Shasa sank back in his chair. The feeling between them had changed, but Shasa's intuition warned him there were hidden depths in their ?elationship which still had to be plumbed, and as he smiled into Manfred De La Rey's topaz-coloured eyes, he felt a sudden small chill, a cold wind through a chink in his memory. Those eyes haunted him. He was trying to remember something. It remained obscure but somehow strangely menacing. Could it have been from their childhood fight? he wondered. But he did not think so. The memory was closer than that, and more threatening.

He almost grasped it, and then Manfred looked down at the contract again, almost as though he had sensed what Shasa was searching for, and the shape of the memory slipped away beyond Shasa's grasp.

Heidi De La Rey came out on to the verandah in her apron, but she had changed out of her faded old skirt and twisted her plaited hair up on top of her head.

'Lunch is ready - and I do hope you eat fish, Meneer Courtney." Shasa set out to charm the family during lunch. Heidi and the girls were easy. The boy Lothar was different, suspicious and withdrawn. However, Shasa had three sons of his own, and he drew him out with stories of flying and hunting big game, until despite himself the boy's eyes shone with interest and admiration.

When they rose from the table, Manfred nodded grudgingly. 'Ja, Meneer, I must remember never to underestimate you." That evening a small group comprising a man and woman and four children came straggling over the dunes from the south, and Manfred's children rushed out to meet them and lead them up on to the verandah of the cottage.

Shasa stayed in the background throughout the noisy greetings of the two families. Theirs was obviously a close relationship of long standing.

Of course, Shasa recognized the head of the other family. He was a big man, even heavier in build than Manfred De La Rey. Like him, he had also been a member of the boxing team that had participated in the Berlin Olympic Games of 1936. He had been a senior lecturer in law at Stellenbosch University, but had recently resigned to become a junior partner in the firm of Van Schoor, De La Rey and Stander, the firm in which Manfred De La Rey had become the senior partner after the death of old Van Schoor some years before.

Apart from his law practice, Roelf Stander acted as Manfred's chief party organizer and had managed Manfred's 1948 campaign for him. Although not himself a member of parliament, he was a leg man of the National Party and Shasa knew that he was almost certainly a member of the Broederbond, the Brotherhood, that clandestine society of elite Afrikaners.

When Manfred De La Rey began to introduce them, Shasa saw that Roelf Stander recognized him and looked a little sheepish.

'I hope you aren't going to throw eggs at me again, Meneer Stander,' Shasa challenged him, and Roelf chuckled.

'Only if you make another bad speech, Meneer Courtney." During the 1948 election, in which Shasa had been defeated by Manfred De La Rey, this man had organized the gang of bully boys who had broken up Shasa's election meetings. Though Shasa was smiling now, his resentment was almost as fierce as it had been at the time. It had always been standard Nationalist tactics to break up the meetings of their opponents. Manfred De La Rey sensed the hostile feelings between them.

'We will soon be on the same side,' he said, as he stepped Between them placatingly and placed a hand on each of their arms. 'Let me find a beer for both of you and we'll drink to letting bygones be bygones." The two of them turned away and quickly Shasa scrutinized RoeIf Stander's wife. She was thin, almost to the point of starvation, and there was an air of resignation and weariness about her, so it took a moment for even Shasa's trained eye to see how pretty she must once have been, and how attractive she still was. She was returning his scrutiny, but dropped her eyes the moment they met Shasa's single eye.

Heidi De La Rey had not missed the exchange and now she took the woman's arm and led her forward.

'Meneer Courtney, this is my dear friend Sarah Stander." 'Aangename kennis,' Shasa bowed slightly. 'Pleasant meeting, Mevrou." 'How do you do, Squadron Leader,' the woman replied quietly, and Shasa blinked. He had not used his rank since the war. It was, of course, poor form to do so.

'Have we met?" he asked, for once off-balance and the woman shook her head quickly and turned to Heidi to speak about the children. Shasa was unable to pursue the matter, for at that moment Manfred handed him a beer and the three men carried their tankards down off the stoep to watch Lothar and the Standers' eldest boy, Jakobus, build the fire for the barbecue. Though the masculine conversation was informed and their views interesting - both Manfred and Roelf Stander were educated and highly intelligent men - Shasa found his thoughts returning to the thin pale woman who had used his airforce rank. He wished for the opportunity to speak to her alone, but realized that was unlikely and dangerous. He knew very well how protective and jealous the Afrikaners were of their women, and how easy it would be to precipitate an ugly and damaging incident. So he kept away from Sarah Stander, but for the rest of the evening observed her carefully, and so gradually became aware of undercurrents of emotion in the relationships of the two families: The two men seemed very close and it was obvious that their friendship was of long standing, but with the women it was different. They were just too kind and considerate and appreciative of each other, the certain indications of deep-seated female antagonism. Shasa stored that revelation, for human relationships and weaknesses were essential tools of his trade, but it was only later in the evening that he made two other important discoveries.

He intercepted an unguarded look that Sarah Stander directed at Manfred De La Rey while he was laughing with her husband, and Shasa recognized it instantly as a look of hatred, but that particularly corrosive type of hatred that a woman can conceive for a man whom she once loved. That hatred explained for Shasa the weariness and resignation that had almost ruined Sarah Stander's beauty. It explained also the resentment that the two women felt for each other.

Heidi De La Rey must realize that Sarah had once loved her husband, and that beneath the hatred she probably still did. The play of feelings and emotions fascinated Shasa, he had learned so much of value and had achieved so much in a single day that he was well satisfied by the time that Roelf Stander called his family together.

'It's almost midnight, come on, everybody. We have a long walk home." Each of them had brought a flashlight, and there was a flurry of farewells, the girls and women exchanging kisses, while first Roelf Stander and then his son Jakobus came to shake Shasa's hand.

'Goodbye,' Jakobus said, with the innate good manners and respect for elders that every Afrikaner child is taught from birth. 'I would also like to hunt a black-maned lion one day." He was a tall well-favoured lad, two or three years older than Lothar; he had been as fascinated as Lothar by Shasa's hunting stories but there was something familiar about him that had ni'ggled Shasa all evening. Lothar stood beside his friend, smiling politely, and suddenly it dawned on Shasa. The boys had the same eyes, the pale cat-eyes of the De La Reys. For a moment he was.at a loss to explain it, and then it all fell into place.

The hatred he had observed in Sarah Stander was explained. Manfred De La Rey was the father of her son.

Shasa stood beside Manfred on the top stair of the stoep and they watched the Stander family climb the dunes, the beams of their flashlights darting about erratically and the shrill voices of the children dwindling into the night, and he wondered if he could ever piece together the clues he had gleaned this evening and discover the full extent of Manfred De La Rey's vulnerability. One day it might be vital to do so.

It would be easy enough discreetly to search the records for the marriage date of Sarah Stander and compare it to the birth date of her eldest son, but how would he ever coax from her the true significance of her use of his military rank. She had called him 'Squadron Leader'.

She knew him, that was certain, but how and where? Shasa smiled. He enjoyed a good mystery, Agatha Christie was one of his favourite authors. He would work on it.

Shasa woke with the grey of dawn lining the curtains over his bed, and a pair of bokmakierie shrikes singing one of their complicated duets from the scrub of the dunes. He stripped off the pyjamas Manfred had lent him and shrugged on the bathrobe, before he crept from the silent cottage and went down to the beach.

He swam naked, slashing over-arm through the cold green water and ducking under the successive lines of breaking white surf until he was clear; then he swam slowly parallel to the beach but five hundred yards off. The chances of shark attack were remote, but the possibility spiced his enjoyment. When it was time to go in he caught a breaking wave and rode it into the beach, and waded ashore, laughing with exhilaration and the joy of life.

He mounted quietly to the stoep of the cottage, not wanting to disturb the family, but a movement from the far end stopped him.

Manfred sat in one of the deckchairs with a book in his hands. He was already shaved and dressed.

'Good morning, Meneer,' Shasa greeted him. 'Are you going fishing again today?" 'It's Sanday,' Manfred reminded him. 'I don't fish on a Sunday." 'Ah, yes." Shasa wondered why he felt guilty for having enjoyed his swim, then he recognized the antique leather-covered black book that Manfred was holding.

'The Bible,' he remarked, and Manfred nodded.

'Ja, I read a few pages before I begin each day, but on Sunday or when I have a particular problem to face, I like to read a full chapter." 'I wonder how many chapters you read before you screwed your best friend's wife,' Shasa thought, but said aloud, 'Yes, the Book is a great comfort,' and tried not to feel a hypocrite as he went through to dress.

Heidi laid an enormous breakfast, everything from steak to pickled fish, but Shasa ate an apple and drank a cup of coffee before he excused himself.

'The forecast on the radio is for rain later. I want to get back to Cape Town before the weather closes in." 'I will walk up to the airstrip with you." Manfred stood up quickly.

Neither of them spoke until the track reached the ridge, and then Manfred asked suddenly, 'Your mother - how is she?" 'She is well. She always is, and she never seems to age." Shasa watched his face, as he went on, 'You always ask about her. When last did you see her?" 'She is a remarkable woman,' Manfred said stolidly, avoiding the question.

'I have tried to make up in some way for the damage she has done your family,' Shasa persisted, and Manfred seemed not to have heard. Instead he stopped in the middle of the track, as if to admire the view, but his breathing was ragged. Shasa had set a fast pace up the hill.

'He's out of condition,' Shasa gloated. His own breathing was unruffled, and his body lean and hard.

'It's beautiful,' Manfred said, and only when he made a gesture that swept the wide horizon, did Shasa realize that he was talking about the land. He looked and saw that from the ocean to the blue mountains of the Langeberge inland, it was indeed beautiful.

'And the Lord said unto him, "This is the land which I sware unto Abraham, unto Isaac and unto Jacob, saying, I will give it unto thy seed",' Manfred quoted softly. 'The Lord has given it to us, and it is our sacred duty to keep it for our children. Nothing else is important compared to that duty." Shasa was silent. He had no argument with that sentiment, although the expression of it was embarrassingly theatrical.

'We have been given a paradise.-We must resist with our lives all efforts to despoil it, or to change it,' Manfred went on. 'And there are many who will attempt just that. They are gathering against us already. In the days ahead we will need strong men." Again Shasa was silent, but now his agreement was tinged with scepticism. Manfred turned to him.

'I see you smile,' he said seriously. 'You see no threat to what we have built up here on the tip of Africa?" 'As you have said, this land is a paradise. Who would want to change it?" Shasa asked.

'How many Africans to do you employ, Meneer?" Manfred seemed to change course.

'Almost thirty thousand altogether,' Shasa frowned with puzzlement.

'Then you will soon learn the poignancy of my warning,' Manfred grunted. 'There is a new generation of trouble-makers who have grown up amongst the native people. These are the bringers, of darkness. They have no respect for the old orders of society which our forefathers so carefully built up and which have served us so faithfully for so long. No, they want to tear all that down. As the Marxist monsters destroyed the social fabric of Russia, so they seek to destroy all that the white man has built up in Africa." Shasa's tone was disparaging as he replied. 'The vast bulk of our black peoples are happy and law-abiding. They are disciplined and accustomed to authority, their own tribal laws are every bit as strict and circumscribing as the laws we impose. How many agitators are there amongst them, and how great is their influence? Not many and not much, would be my guess." 'The world has changed more in the short time since the end o the war than it ever did in the hundred years before that." Manfrec had recovered his breath now, and he spoke forcefully and eloquent in his own language. 'The tribal laws which governed our black peoples are eroded as they leave the rural areas and flock to the cities in search of the sweet life. There they learn all the white man' vices, and they are ripened for the heresics of the bringers of darkness. The respect that they have for the white man and hi, government could easily turn to contempt, especially if they detecl any weakness in us. The black man respects strength and despise, weakness, and it is the plan of this new breed of black agitators to test our weaknesses and expose them." 'How do you know this?" Shasa asked and then immediately wa, angry with himself. He did not usually deal in banal questions, bul Manfred answered seriously.

'We have a comprehensive system of informers amongst the blacks it is the only way a police force can do its job efficiently. We kno that they are planning a massive campaign of defiance of the law especially those laws that have been introduced in the last few year, -the Group Areas Act and the Population Registration Act and the pass laws, the laws necessary to protect our complicated society frorr the evils of racial integration and miscegenation." 'What form will this campaign take?" 'Deliberate disobedience, flouting of the law, boycotts of white businesses and wild-cat strikes in mining and industry." Shasa frowned as he made his calculation. The campaign woulc directly threaten his companies. 'Sabotage?" he asked. 'Destructior of property - are they planning that?" Manfred shook his head. 'It seems not. The agitators are dividec amongst themselves. They even include some whites, some of the olc comrades from the communist party. There are a few amongst theft who favour violent action and sabotage, but apparently the majority are prepared to go only as far as peaceful protest - for the moment.

Shasa sighed with relief, and Manfred shook his head. 'Do not be too complacent, Meneer. If we fail to prevent them, if we sho weakness now, then it will escalate against us. Look what is happening in Kenya and Malaya." 'Why do you not simply round up the ringleaders now, before il happens?" 'We do not have such powers,' Manfred pointed out.

'Then you should damned well be given them." 'Ja, we need them to do our job, and soon we will have them. Bul in the meantime we must let the snake put its head out of the hole before we chop it off." 'When will the trouble begin?" Shasa demanded. 'I must make my arrangements to deal with the strikes and disturbances--' 'That is one thing we are not certain of, we do not think the ANC itself has as yet decided--' 'The ANC,' Shasa interjected. 'But surely they aren't behind this?

They have been around for forty years or so, and they are dedicated to peaceful negotiations. The leaders are decent men." 'They were,' Manfred corrected him. 'But the old leaders have been superseded by younger more dangerous men. Men like Mandela and Tambo and others even more evil. As I said before, times change - we must change with them." 'I had not realized that the threat was so real." 'Few people do,' Manfred agreed. 'But I assure you Meneer, that there is a nest of snakes breeding in our little paradise." They walked on in silence, down to the clay-surfaced airstrip where Shasa's blue and silver Mosquito stood. While Shasa climbed into the cockpit and readied the machine for flight, Manfred stood quietly at the wingtip watching him. After Shasa had completed all his checks, he came back to Manfred.

'There is one certain way to defeat this enemy,' Shasa said. 'This new militant ANC." 'What is that, Meneer?" 'To pre-empt their position. Take away from our black people the cause of complaint,' Shasa said.

Manfred was silent, but he stared at Shasa with those implacable yellow eyes. Then Manfred asked, picking his words carefully, 'Are you suggesting that we give the natives political rights, Meneer? Do you think that we should give in to the parrot cry of "One man, one vote" - is that what you believe, Meneer?" On Shasa's reply rested all Manfred's plans. He wondered if he could have been so wrong in his selection. Any man who believed that could never be a member of the National Party, let alone bear the responsibility of cabinet rank.

His relief was intense as Shasa dismissed the idea contemptuously.

'Good Lord, no! That would be the end of us and white civilization in the land. Blacks don't need votes, they need a slice of the pie. We must encourage the emergence of a black middle class, they will be our buffer against the revolutionaries. I never saw a man yet with a full belly and a full wallet who wanted to change things." Manfred chuckled. 'That's good, I like it. You are correct, Meneer.

We need massive wealth to pay for our concept of apartheM. It will be expensive, we accept that. That is why we have chosen you. We look to you to find the money to pay for our future." Shasa held out his hand and Manfred took it. 'On a personal level, Meneer, I am pleased to hear that your wife has taken notice of whatever you said to her. Reports from my special branch indicate that she has given up her liberal left wing associations and is no longer taking any part in political protests." 'I convinced her how futile they were,' Shasa smiled. 'She has decided to become an archaeologist instead of a Bolshevik." They laughed together, and Shasa climbed back into the .cockpit.

The engines started with a stuttering roar and a mist of blue smoke blew from the exhaust ports, clearing quickly. Shasa lifted a hand in salute and closed the canopy.

Manfred watched him taxi down to the end of the strip then come thundering back, and hurtle aloft in a flash of silver and blue. He shaded his eyes to watch the Mosquito bank away towards the south, and he felt again that strange almost mystic bond of blood and destiny to the man under the perspex canopy as Shasa waved in farewell. Though they had fought and hated each other, their separate people were bound together by a similar bond and at the same time held apart by religion and language and political beliefs.

'We are brothers, you and I,' he thought. 'And beyond the hatred lie the dictates of survival. If you join us, then other Englishmen may follow you, and neither of us can survive alone. Afrikaner and Englishman, we are so bound together that if one goes down, we both drown in the black ocean."' 'Garrick has to wear glasses,' Tara said, and poured esh coffee into Shasa's cup.

'Glasses?" He looked up from his newspaper. 'What do you mean glasses?" 'I mean eye glasses - spectacles. I took him to the optician while you were away. He is shortsighted." 'But nobody in our family has ever worn glasses." Shasa looked down the breakfast table at his son, and Garrick lowered his head guiltily. Until that moment he had not realized that he had disgraced the entire family. He had believed the humiliation of spectacles was his alone.

'Glasses." Shasa's scorn was undisguised. 'While you are having him fitted with glasses, you might as well get them to fit a cork in the end of his whistle to stop him wetting his bed also." Sean let out a guffaw and dug an elbow into his brother's ribs, and Garrick was stung into self-defence. 'Gee, Dad, I haven't wet my bed since last Easter,' he declared furiously, red-faced with embarrassment and close to tears of humiliation.

Sean made circles with his thumbs and forefingers and peered through them at his brother.

'We will have to call you "Owly Wet Sheets",' he suggested, and as usual Michael came to his brother's defence.

'Owls are wise,' he pointed out reasonably. 'That's why Garry came top in his class this term. Where did you come in yours, Sean?".

and Sean glared at him wordlessly. Michael always had a mild but stinging retort.

'All right, gentlemen." Shasa returned to his newspaper. 'No bloodshed at the breakfast table, please." Isabella had been out of the limelight for long enough. Her father had given far too much of his attention to her brothers, and she hadn't yet received her dues. Her father had arrived home late the previous evening, long after she was in bed, and the traditional ceremony of home-coming had not been fully enacted. Certainly he had kissed and pampered her and told her how beautiful she was, but one vital aspect had been neglected, and though she knew it was bad manners to ask, she had contained herself long enough.

'Didn't you even bwing me a pwesent?" she piped, and Shasa lowered his newspaper again.

'A pwesent? Now what on earth is a pwesent?" 'Don't be a silly-billy, Daddy - you know what it is." 'Bella, you know you mustn't beg for presents,' Tara chided.

'If I don't tell him, Daddy might just forget,' Isabella pointed out reasonably, and made her special angel face at Shasa.

'My goodness gracious me." Shasa snapped his fingers. 'I did almost forget!" And Isabella hopped her lace-clad bottom up and down on her high stool with excitement. 'You did You did bring me one!" 'Finish your porridge first,' Tara insisted, and Isabella's spoon clanked industriously on china as she devoured the last of it and scraped the plate clean.

They all trooped though from the breakfast room to Shasa's study.

'I'm the likklest one. I get my pwesent first." Isabella made up the rules of life as she went along.

'All right, likklest one. Step to the front of the line, please." Her face a masterpiece of concentration, Isabella stripped away the wrappings from her gift.

'A doll!" she squeaked and showered kisses upon its bland china face. 'Her name is Oleander, and I love her already." Isabella was the owner of what was probably one of the world's definitive collections of dolls, but all additions were rapturously received.

When Sean and Garry were handed their long packages, they went still with awe. They knew what they were - they had both of them pleaded long and eloquently for this moment and now that it had arrived, they were reluctant to touch their gifts in case they disappeared in a puff of smoke. Michael hid his disappointment bravely; he had hoped for a book, so secretly he empathized with his mother when she cried with exasperation, 'Oh, Shasa, you haven't given them guns?" All three rifles were identical. They were Winchester repeaters in .22 calibre, light enough for the boys to handle.

'This is the best present anybody ever gave me." Sean lifted his weapon out of the cardboard box and stroked the walnut stock lovingly.

The too." Garrick still couldn't bring himself to touch his. He knelt over the open package in the middle of the study floor, staring raptly at the weapon it contained.

'It's super, Dad,' said Michael, holding his rifle awkwardly and his smile was unconvincing.

'Don't use that word, Mickey,' Tara snapped. 'It's so American and vulgar." But she was angry with Shasa, not Michtel.

'Look." Garry touched his rifle for the first time. 'My name - it's got my own name on it." He stroked the engraving on the barrel with his fingertip, then looked up at his father with myopic adoration.

'I wish you'd brought them anything but guns,' Tara burst out. 'I asked you not to, Shasa. I hate them." 'Well, my dear, they must have rifles if they are coming on a hunting safari with me." 'A safari!" Sean shouted gleefully. 'When?" 'It's time you learned about the bush and the animals." Shasa put his arm around Sean's shoulders. 'You can't live in Africa without knowing the 'difference between a scaly anteater and a chacma baboon." Garry snatched up his new rifle and went to stand as close to his father's side as he could, so that Shasa could also put his other arm around his shoulders - if he wanted to. However, Shasa was talking to Sean.

'We'll go up to south west in the June hols, take a couple of trucks from the H'am Mine and drive through the desert until we reach the Okavango Swamps." 'Shasa, I don't know how you can teach your own children to kill those beautiful animals. I really don't understand it,' Tara said bitterly.

'Hunting is a man's thing,' Shasa agreed. 'You don't have to understand - you don't even have to watch." 'Can I come, Dad?" Garry asked diffidently, and Shasa glanced at him.

'You'll have to polish up your new specs, so you can see what you're shooting at." Then he relented. 'Of course you are coming, Garry,' and then he looked across at Michael, standing beside his mother. 'What about you, Mickey? Are you interested?" Michael glanced apologetically at his mother before he replied softly. 'Gee, thanks Dad. It should be fun." 'Your enthusiasm is touching,' Shasa grunted and then, 'Very well, gentlemen, all the rifles locked in the gun room, please.

Nobody touches them again without my permission and my supervision. We'll have our first shooting practice this evening when I get back home." Shasa made a point of getting back to Weltevreden with two hours of daylight in hand, and he took the boys down to the range he had built over which to sight in his own hunting rifles. It was beyond the vineyards and far enough from the stables not to disturb the horses or any of the other livestock.

Sean with the coordination of a born athlete, was a natural shot.

The light rifle seemed immediately an extension of his body, and within minutes he had mastered the art of controlling his breathing and letting the shot squeeze away without effort. Michael was nearly as good, but his interest wasn't really in it and he lost concentration quickly.

Garry tried so hard that he was trembling, and his face was screwed up with effort. The horn-rimmed spectacles which Tara had fetched from the optician that morning kept sliding down his nose and misting over as he aimed, and it took ten shots for him finally to get one on the target.

'You don't have to pull the trigger so hard, Garry,' Shasa told him with resignation. 'It won't make the bullet go any farther or any faster, I assure you." It was almost dark when the four of them got back to the house, and Shasa led them down to the gun room and showed them how to clean their weapons before locking them away.

'Scan and Mickey are ready to have a crack at the pigeons,' Shasa announced, as they trooped upstairs to change for dinner. 'Garry, you will need a little more practice, a pigeon is more likely to die of old age than one of your bullets." Sean shouted with laughter. 'Kill them with old age, Garry." Michael did not join in. He was imagining one of the lovely blue and pink rock pigeons that nested on the ledge outside his bedroom window, dying in a drift of loose feathers, splattering ruby drops as it fluttered to earth. It made him feel physically sick, but he knew his father expected it of him.

That evening as usual the children came one at a time to say goodnight to Shasa as he was tying his black bow tie. Isabella was first.

'I'm not going to sleep a wink until you come home tonight, Daddy,' she warned him. 'I'm just going to lie all by myself in the dark." Sean came next. 'You are the best Dad in the world,' he said as they shook hands. Kissing was for sissies.

'Will you let me have that in writing?" Shasa asked solemnly.

It was Michael who was always the most difficult to answer. 'Dad, do animals and birds hurt a lot when you shoot them?" 'Not if you learn to shoot straight,' Shasa assured him. 'But, Mickey, you have too much imagination. You can't go through life worrying about animals and other people all the time." 'Why not, Dad?" Michael asked softly, and Shasa glanced at his wristwatch to cover his exasperation.

'We have to be at Kelvin Grove by eight. Do you mind if we go into that some other time, Mickey?" Garrick came last. He stood shyly in the doorway of Shasa's dressing-room, but his voice shook with determination as he announced, 'I'm going to learn to be a crack shot, like Sean. You'll be proud of me one day, Dad. I promise you." Garrick left his parents' wing and crossed to the nursery. Nanny stopped him at Isabella's door.

'She's asleep already, Master Garry." In Michael's room they discussed the promised safari, but Mickey's attention kept wandering back to the book in his hands, and after a few minutes Garry left him to it.

He looked into Sean's room cautiously, ready to take flight if his elder brother showed any signs of becoming playful. One of Sean's favourite expressions of fraternal affection was known as a chestnut and consisted of a painful knuckling of Garry's prominent ribcage.

However, this evening Sean was hanging backwards over his bed, heels propped on the wall and the back of his head almost touching the floor, a Superman comic book held at arm's length above his face.

'Goodnight, Sean,' Garry said.

'Shazam!" said Sean without lowering the comic book.

Garrick retreated thankfully to his own room and locked the door.

Then he went to stand before the mirror and regard the reflection of his new horn-rimmed spectacles.

'I hate them,' he whispered bitterly, and when he removed them they left red indentations on the bridge of his nose. He went down on his knees, removed the skirting board under the built-in wardrobe and reached into the secret recess beyond. Nobody, not even Sean, had discovered this hiding place.

Carefully he withdrew the precious package. It had cost him eight weeks of his accumulated pocket money, but was worth every penny.

It had arrived in a plain wrapper with a personal letter from Mr Charles Atlas himself. 'Dear Garrick,' the letter had begun, and Garry had been overcome with the great man's condescension.

He laid out the course on his bed and stripped to his pyjama pants as he revised the lessons.

'Dynamic tension,' he whispered aloud, and he took up his stance before the mirror. As he began the sequence of exercises he kept time with the soft chant of, 'More and more in every way, I'm getting better every day." When he finished he was sweating heavily but he made an arm and studied it minutely.

'They are bigger,' he tried to put aside his doubts as he poked the little walnut of muscle that popped out of his straining biceps, 'they really are!" He stowed the course back in its hidy-hole and replaced the skirting board. Then he took his raincoat from the wardrobe and spread it on the bare boards..

Garrick had read with admiration how Frederick Selous, the famous African hunter, had toughened himself as a boy by sleeping uncovered on the floor in winter. He switched out the light and settled down on the raincoat. It was going to be a long uncomfortable night, he knew from experience, already the floor boards were like iron, but the raincoat would prevent Sean detecting any nocturnal spillage when he made his morning inspection, and Garrick was certain that his asthma had improved since he had stopped sleeping on a soft mattress with a warm eiderdown over him.

'I'm getting better every day,' he whispered, closing his eyes tightly and willing himself to ignore the cold and the hardness of the floor.

'And then one day Dad will be proud of me -just like he is of Sean." 'I thought your speech this evening was very good, even for you,' Tara told him, and Shasa glanced at her with surprise. She had not paid him a compliment for a long time now. 'Thank you, my dear." 'I sometimes forget what a gifted person you are,' she went on.

'It's just that you make it seem so easy and natural." He was so moved that he might have reached across to caress her, but she was leaning away from him and the Hooper coachwork of the Rolls was too wide for him to reach her.

'I must say, you look absolutely stunning this evening,' he compromised with a matching compliment, but as he had expected, she dismissed it with a grimace.

'Are you really going to take the boys on safari?" 'My dear, we have to let them make up their own minds aboul life. Sean will love it, but I'm not too sure about Mickey." Shas replied, and she noticed that he hadn't mentioned Garrick.

'Well, if you are determined, then I'm going to take advantage all the boys' absence. I have been invited to join the archaeological dig at the Sundi caves." 'But you are a novice,' he was surprised. 'That's an important site.

Why would they invite you?" 'Because I offered to contribute two thousand pounds to the cost of the dig, that's why." 'I see, this is straight blackmail." He chuckled sardonically as he saw the reason for her flattery. 'All right, it's a deal. I'll give you a cheque tomorrow. How long will you be away?" 'I'm not sure." But she thought, 'as long as I can be close to Moses Oama." The site at Sundi Caves was only an hour's drive from the house at Rivonia. She reached under the fur coat and touched her stomach.

It would begin to show soon - she had to find excuses to keep away from the eyes of the family. Her father and Shasa would not notice, she was sure of that, but Centaine de Thiry Courtney-Malcomess had eyes like a hawk.

'I presume that my mother has agreed to care for Isabella while you are away,' Shasa was saying, and while she nodded, her heart was singing.

'Moses, I'm coming back to you - both of us are coming back, to you, my darling." Whenever Moses Gama came to Drake's Farm it was like a king returning to his own realm after a successful crusade. Within minutes of his arrival, the word was flashed almost telepathically through the vast sprawling black township, and a sense of expectancy hung over it, as palpable as the smoke from ten thousand cooking fires.

Moses usually arrived with his half brother, Hendrick Tabaka, in the butcher's delivery van. Hendrick owned a chain of a dozen butcher shops in the black townships along the Witwatersrand, so the signwriting on the side of the van was authentic. In sky blue and crimson, it declared: PHUZA MUHLE BUTCHERY BEST MEAT AT BEST PRICES

From the vernacular 'Phuza Muhle' translated as 'Eat Well' and the van provided a perfect cover for Hendrick Tabaka wherever he went. Whether he was genuinely delivering slaughtered carcasses to his butcheries or goods to his general dealer stores, or was engaged in less conventional business: the distribution of illicitly brewed liquor, the notorious skokiaan or township dynamite, or ferrying his girls to their places of business nearer the compounds that housed the thousands of black contract workers of the gold-mines so that they could briefly assist them in relieving their monastic existence, or whether he was on the business of the African Mineworkers Union, that close-knit and powerful brotherhood whose existence the white government refused to acknowledge - the blue and red van was the perfect vehicle. When he was at the wheel, Hendrick wore a peaked driver's cap and a khaki tunic with cheap brass buttons. He drove sedately and with meticulous attention to all the rules of the road, so that in twenty years he had never been stopped by the police.

When he drove the van into Drake's Farm, with Moses Gama sitting in the passenger seat beside him, they were entering their own stronghold. This was where they: had established themselves when together they had arrived from the wastelands of the Kalahari twenty years before. Although they were sons of the same father, they had been different in almost every way. Moses had been young and tall and marvellously handsome, while Hendrick was years older, a great bull of a man with a bald, scarred head and gapped and broken teeth.

Moses was clever and quick, self-educated to a high standard, charismatic and a leader of men, while Hendrick was the faithful lieutenant, accepting his younger brother's authority and carrying out his orders swiftly and ruthlessly. Though Moses Gama had conceived the idea of building up a business empire, it was Hendrick who had made the dream a reality. Once he was shown what to do, Hendrick Tabaka was as much a bulldog in tenacity as he was in appearance.

For Hendrick, what they had built between them, the business enterprises both illicit and legitimate, the trade union and its private army of enforcers known and dreaded throughout the compounds where the mineworkers lived and through the black townships as 'The Buffaloes', all these were an end in themselves. But for Moses Gama it was different. What they had achieved thus far was only the first stage on his quest for something so much greater that although he had explained it many times to Hendrick, his brother could not truly grasp the enormity of Moses Gama's vision.

In the twenty years since they had arrived here, Drake's Farm had changed entirely. In those early days it had been a small squatters' encampment, hanging like a parasite tick on the body of the huge complex of gold-mines that made up the central Witwatersrand. I had been a collection of squalid hovels, built of scrap lumber ant wattle poles and old iron sheets, flattened paraffin cans and tarpape on the bleak open veld, a place of open drains and cesspools, lacking reticulated water or electricity, without schools or clinics or police protection, not even recognized as human habitation by the white city fathers in Johannesburg's town hall.

It was only after the war that the Transvaal Divisional Council had decided to recognize reality and to expropriate the land from the absentee landowners. They had declared the entire three thousand acres an official township set aside for black occupation under the Group Areas Act. They had retained the original name, Drake's Farm, for its picturesque connotations to old Johannesburg, unlike the more mundane origin of the nearby Soweto, which was merely an acronym for South Western Townships. Soweto already housed over half a million blacks, while-Drake's Farm was home to less than half that number.

The authorities had fenced off the new township and covered the greater part of it with monotonous lines of small three-roomed cottages, each identical except for the number stencilled on the cement brick front wall. Crowded close together and separated by narrow lanes with dusty untarred surfaces, the flat roofs in galvanized corrugated iron shone like ten thousand mirrors in the brilliant highveld sunlight.

In the centre of the township were the administrative buildings where, under a handful of white municipal supervisors, the black clerks collected the rents and regulated the basic services of reticulated water and refuse removal. Beyond this Orwellian vision of bleak and soulless order, lay the original section of Drake's Farm, its hovels and shebeens and whorehouses - and it was here that Hendrick Tabaka still lived.

As he drove the delivery van slowly through the new section of the township, the people came out of their cottages to watch them pass.

They were mostly women and children, for the men left each morning early, commuting to their employment in the city and returning only after nightfall. When they recognized Moses, the women clapped and ululated shrilly, the greeting for a tribal chief, and the children ran beside the van, dancing and laughing with excitement at being so close to the great man.

They drove slowly past the cemetery where the untidy mounds of earth were like a vast mole run. On some of the mounds crudely wrought crosses had been set while on the others raggedy flags fluttered in the wind and offerings of food and broken household utensils and weirdly carved totems had been placed to placate the spirits, Christian symbols side by side with those of the animists and witch-worshippers. They went down into the old township, into the higgledy-piggledy lanes, where the stalls of the witchdoctors stood side by side with those offering food and trade cloth and used clothes and stolen radios. Where the chickens and pigs rooted in the muddy ruts of the road and naked toddlers with only a string of beads around their fat little tummies defecated between the stalls and the young whores strutted their wares and the stink and the noise were wondrous.

This was a world no white men ever entered, and where even the black municipal police came only on invitation and under sufferance.

It was Hendrick Tabaka's world, where his wives kept nine houses for him in the centre of the old quarter. They were sturdy well-built houses of burned brick, but the exteriors were left deliberately shabby and uncared for, so they blended into the general squalor. Hendrick had learned long ago not to draw attention to himself and his material possessions. Each of his nine wives had her own home, built in a circle around Hendrick's slightly more imposing house, and he had not limited himself to women of his own Ovambo tribe. His wives were Panda and Xhosa and Fingo and Basuto, but not Zulu.

Hendrick would never trust a Zulu in his bed.

They all came out to greet him and his famous brother as Hendrick parked the van in the lean-to at the back of his own house.

The obeisances of the women and their soft clapping of respect ushered the men into the living-room of Hendrick's house where two plush chairs covered with tanned leopard skins were set like thrones at the far end. When the brothers were seated the two youngest wives brought pitchers of millet beer, freshly brewed, thick as gruel, tart and effervescent and cold from the paraffin refrigerator, and when they had refreshed themselves, Hendrick's sons came in to greet their father and pay their respects to their uncle.

The sons were many, for Hendrick Tabaka was a lusty man and bred all his wives regularly each year. However, not all his elder sons were present today. Those of them whom Hendrick considered unworthy had been sent back to the country to tend the herds of cattle and goats that were part of Hendrick's wealth. The more promising boys worked in the butchery shops, the general dealers or the shebeens, while two of them, those especially gifted with intelligence, were law students at Fort Hare, the black university in the little town of Alice in the eastern Cape.

Only Hendrick's younger boys were here to kneel respectfully before him, and of these there were two whom Moses Gama looked upon with particular pleasure. They were the twin sons of one of Hendrick's Xhosa wives, a woman of unusual accomplishments.

Apart from being a dutiful wife and a breeder of sons, she was an accomplished dancer and singer, an amusing story-teller, a person all shrewd common sense and intelligence, and a noted sangoma, a healer and occult doctor with sometimes uncanny powers of prescience and divination. Her twins had inherited most of her gifts together with their father's robust physique and some of their uncle Moses' fine features.

At their birth, Hendrick had asked Moses to name them, and he had chosen their names from his treasured copy of Macaulay's History of England. Of all his nephews they were his favourites, and he smiled now as they knelt before him. They were already thirteen years old, Moses realized.

'I see you, Wellington Tabaka,' he greeted first the one and then the other. 'I see you, Raleigh Tabaka." They were not identical twins.

Wellington was the taller lad, lighter-skinned, toffee-coloured against Raleigh's mulberry-stain black. His features had the same Nilotic cast as Moses' own, while Raleigh was more negroid, flat-nsed and thick-lipped, his body heavier and squatter.

'What books have you read since we last met?" Moses changed into English, forcing them to reply in the same language. 'Words are spears, they are weapons with which to defend yourself and with which to attack your enemies. English words have the sharpest blades, without them you will be warriors disarmed,' he had explained to them, and now he listened attentively to their halting replies in that language.

However, he noted the improvements in their command of the language and remarked on it. 'It is still not good enough, but you will learn to speak it better at Waterford,' and both boys looked uncomfortable. Moses had arranged for them to write the entrance examination for this elite multi-racial school across the border in the independent black kingdom of Swaziland, and the twins had both passed and been accepted and how were dreading the day not far away when they would be uprooted from this comfortable familiar world of theirs and packed off into the unknown. In South Africa all education was strictly segregated, and it was the declared policy of the minister of Bantu affairs, Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, not to educate black children to the point of discontentment. He had told parliament quite frankly that education for blacks should not conflict with the government policy of apartheid and should not be of such a standard as to evoke in the black pupil expectations which could never be fulfilled. The annual expenditure by the state on each white pupil was œ60 while that on a black student was œ9 per annum. Those black parents who could afford it, the chiefs and small businessmen, sent their children out of the country to be educated, and Waterford was a favourite choice.

The twins escaped from the daunting presence of their father and uncle with relief, but their mother was waiting for them in the yard beside the blue and crimson van, and with a sharp inclination of her head ordered them into her own parlour.

The room was a sorceress's lair from which the twins were usually barred, and now they crept in with even more trepidation than they had entered their father's house. Against the far wall stood their mother's gods and goddesses carved in native woods and dressed in feathers and skins and beads, with eyes of ivory and mother-of-pearl, and bared teeth of dog and baboon. They were a terrifying assembly, and the twins shivered and dared not look directly upon them.

Before the family idols were arranged offerings of food and small coins, and from the other walls hung all the gruesome accoutrements of their mother's craft, gourds and clay pots of ointments and medicines, bundles of dried herbs, snake skins and mummified iguana lizards, bones and baboon skulJ.x, glass jars of hippopamus and lion fat, musk of crocodile, and other nameless substances which festered and bubbled and stank so foully that it made the teeth ache in their jaws.

'You wore the charms I gave you?" Kuzawa, their mother, asked.

She was incongruously handsome in the midst of her unholy and hideous tools and medicines, full-faced and glossy-skinned with very white teeth and liquid gazelle eyes. Her limbs were long and gleamed with secret and magical ointments and her breasts under the necklaces of ivory beads and charms were big and firm as wild Kalahari melons.

In response to her question, the twins nodded vehemently, too overcome to speak, and unbuttoned their shirts. The charms were hung around their necks, each on a thin leather thong. They were the horns of the little grey duiker, the open ends sealed with gum arabic, and Kuzawa had taken all the twelve years of their lives to assemble the magical potion that was contained in each of them. It was made up of samples of all the bodily excretions of Hendrick Tabaka, the father of the twins, his faeces and urine, his spittle and nasal mucus, his sweat and his semen, the wax from his ears and the blood from his veins, his tears and his vomit. With these, Kuzawa had mixed the dried skin from the soles of his feet, the clippings of his nails, the shavings of his beard and his pate and pubes, the'lashes of his eyes plucked in his sleep, and the crusted scabs and pus from his wounds. Then she had added herbs and fats of wonderful efficacy, and spoken the words of power over them and finally, to make the charm infallible, she had paid a vast sum to one of the grave-robbers who specialized in such procurements to bring her the liver of an infant drowned at birth by its own mother.

All these ingredients she had sealed in the two little duiker horns, and the twins were never allowed irrto their father's presence except that they wore them hung around their necks. Now Kuzawa retrieved the two charms from her sons. They were far too precious to leave in the children's possession. She smiled as she weighed them in the smooth pink palms of her delicately shaped hands. They had been worth all the expense and the patience and the meticulous application of her skills to create.

'Did your father smile when he saw you?" she asked.

'He smiled like the rise of the sun,' Raleigh replied, and Kuzawa nodded happily.

'And were his words kind, did he make enquiry of you fondly?" she insisted.

'When he spoke to us he purred like a lion at meat,' Wellington whispered, still intimidated by his surroundings. 'And he asked us how we raed at school, and he commended us when we told him." 'It is the charms that have ensured his favour,' Kuzawa smiled contentedly. 'As long as you wear them, your father will prefer you over all his other children." She took the two little buckhorns and went to kneel before the central carved figure in the array of idols, a fearsome image with a headdress of lion's mane that housed the spirit of her dead grandfather.

'Guard them well, oh venerable ancestor,' she whispered, as she hung them around the neck of the image. 'Keep their powers strong until they are needed once again." They were safer there than in the deepest vault of the white man's banks. No human being, and only the most powerful of the dark ones, would dare challenge her grandfather's spirit for possession of the charms, for he was the ultimate guardian.

Now she turned back to the twins, took their hands and led them out of her lair into the family kitchen next door, putting aside the mantle of the witch and assuming that of the loving mother as she passed through the door and closed it behind her.

She fed the twins, bowls piled with fluffy white maize meal and butter beans and stew swimming with delicious fat, food that befitted the family of a rich and powerful man. And while they ate, she tended them lovingly, questioning and chaffing them, pressing more food upon them, her dark eyes glowing with pride, and finally reluctantly letting them go.

They fled from her, delirious with excitement, into the narrow fetid lanes of the old quarter. Here they were entirely at their ease.

The men and women smiled and called greetings and pleasantries as they passed and laughed delightedly at their repartee for they were the favourites of all, and their father was Hendrick Tabaka.

Old Mama Nginga, fat and silver-haired, sitting at the front door of the shebeen that she ran for Hendrick, shouted after them, 'Where are you going, my little ones?" 'On secret business we cannot discuss,' Wellington shouted back, and Raleigh added: 'But next year our secret business will be with you, old mama. We will drink all your skokiaan and stab all your girls." Mama Nginga wobbled with delight, and the girls sitting in the windows shrieked with laughter. 'He is the cub of the lion, that one,' they told each other.

As they scurried through the lanes, they called out and from the hovels and the shanties of the old quarter and from the new brick cottages that the white government had built, their comrades hurried out to join them, until there were fifty or more lads of their own age following them. Some of them carried long bundles, carefully wrapped and bound up with rawhide thongs.

At the far end of the township the high fence had been cut, the gap concealed from casual scrutiny by a clump of scrub. The boys climbed through the gap and in the plantation of bluegums beyond, they gathered in an excited jabbering cluster and stripped off the shabby western European clothing they wore. They were uncircumcised, their penises althoogh beginning to develop were still surmounted by the little wrinkled caps of skin. In a few years' time they would all of them go into the initiation class and endure the ordeal of the isolation and hardship, and the agony of the blade together. This, even more than their tribal blood, bound them together; all their lives they would' be comrades of the circumcision knife.

They set aside their clothing carefully - any losses would have to be accounted for to angry parents - and then naked, they gathered around the precious rolls and watched impatiently as they were opened by their acknowledged captains Wellington and Raleigh Tabaka, and each of them were issued with the uniform of the Xhosa warrior - not the true regalia, the cow-tails and rattles and headdress - those were for circumcised amadoda only. These were childish replicas, merely skins of dogs and cats, the strays and pariahs of the township, but they donned them as proudly as if they were genuine, and bound their upper arms and thighs and foreheads with strips of fur, and then took up their weapons.

Again these were not the warriors' long-bladed assegais, but were merely the traditional fighting-sticks. However, even in the hands of these children the long limber staves were formidable weapons. With a stick in each hand they were immediately transformed into shrieking demons. They brandished and swung the staves, using a practised wrist action that made them hiss and sing and whistle, they rattled them together, crossing them to form a guard against which the blows of their peers clattered, and they leapt and cavorted and danced, aiming blows at each other, until Raleigh Tabaka blew a sharp fluting command on his buckhorn whistle, and they fell in behind him in a compact, disciplined column.

He led them away. In a swaying stylized trot, fighting-sticks held high, singing and humming the battle chants of their tribe, they left the plantation and went out into the open undulating veld. The grass was knee-high and brown, and the chocolate red earth showed through it in raw patches. The ground fell away gently to a narrow stream, its rocky bed enclosed by steep banks and then climbed again to meet the pale sapphire of the highveld sky.

Even as they started down the slope, the clean sweep of the far skyline was interrupted, a long line of waving headdresses showed above it, and then another band ai' lads appeared, clad like them in loincloths of skin, legs and arms and torsos bare. Carrying their fighting-sticks high, they paused along the crest, and as they saw each other, both bands gave tongue like hounds taking the scent.

'Zulu jackals,' howled Raleigh Tabaka, and his hatred was so intense that a fine sheen of sweat burst out upon his brow. For as long and as far back as his tribal memory reached, this had been the enemy; his hatred was in his blood, deep and atavistic. History did not record how often this scene had been repeated, how many thousands of times over the centuries armed impis of Xhosa and Zulu had faced each other thus; all that was remembered was the heat of the battle and the blood and the hatred.

Raleigh Tabaka leapt as high as the shoulder of his brother beside him, and screamed wildly, his treacherous voice breaking into a girlish squeak at the end.

'I am thirsty. Give me Zulu blood to drink!" and his warriors leapt and screamed.

'Give us Zulu blood!" The threats and insults and challenges were flung back at them from the opposite ridge, carried to them on the wind. Then spontaneously both impis started down, singing and prancing into the shallow valley, until from the steep red banks they faced each other across the narrow streambed, and their captains strode forward to exchange more insults.

The Zulu induna was a lad the same age as the twins. He attended the same class as they did in the government secondary school in the township. His name was Joseph Dinizulu, and he was as tall as Wellington and as broad across the chest as Raleigh. His name and his strutting arrogance reminding the world that he was a princeling of the royal house of Zulu.

'Hey, you eaters of hyena dung,' he called. 'We smelt you from a thousand paces against the wind. The smell of Xhosa makes even the vultures puke." Raleigh leapt high, turning in the air and lifting the skirts of his loincloth to expose his buttocks. 'I cleanse the air of the Zulu stench with a good clean fart!" he shouted. 'Sniff that, you jackal-lovers,' and he blew a raspberry so loud and long that the Zulus facing him hissed murderously and rattled their fighting-sticks.

'Your fathers were women, your mothers were monkeys,' Joseph Dini7ulu cried, scratching his own armpits. Your grandfathers were baboons,' he imitated a simian lollop, and your grandmothers were--' Raleigh interrupted this recital of his ancestral line with a blast on the buckhorn whistle and leapt from the bank into the streambed. He landed on his feet, light as a cat, and with a bound was across. He went up the far bank so fast that Joseph Dinizulu, who had expected the exchange of pleasantries to last a little longer, fell back before his onslaught.

A dozen of the other Xhosa lads had responded to his whistle and followed him across, and Raleigh's furious attack had won a bridgehead for them on the far bank. They bunched up behind him with sticks hissing and singing, and drove into the centre of the opposing impi. The battle lust was on Raleigh Tabaka. He was invincible, his arms tireless, his hands and wrists so cunning that his sticks seemed to have separate life, finding the weak places in the guards of the Zulus who opposed him, thudding on flesh, cracking on bone, cutting open skin so that soon their sticks shone wet with blood and little droplets of it flew in the sunlight.

It seemed nothing could touch him, until abruptly something crashed into his ribs just below his raised right arm, and he gasped with pain and the sudden awareness of his own humanity. For a minute there he had been a warrior god, but suddenly he was a small boy, almost at the end of his strength, hurting very badly, and so tired that he could not mouth another challenge while before him danced Joseph Dinizulu, who seemed to have grown six inches in as many seconds. Again his fighting-stick whistled in, aimed at Raleigh's head, and only with a desperate defence he deflected it. Raleigh fell back a pace and looked around him.

He should have known better than to attack a Zulu so boldly.

They were the most treacherous and sly of all adversaries, and the stratagem of encirclement was always their master-stroke. Chaka Zulu, the mad.dog who had founded this tribe of wolves, had called the manoeuvre 'the Horns of the Bull'. The horns surrounded the enemy while the chest crushed him to death.

Joseph Dinizulu had not fallen back out of fear or surprise, it was his instinctive cunning, and Raleigh had led his dozen stalwarts into the Zulu trap. They were alone, none of the others had followed them across the stream. Over the heads of the encircling Zulus he could see them on the far bank, and Wellington Tabaka, his twin brother, stood at their head, silent and immobile.

'Wellington!" he screamed, his voice breaking with exhaustion and terror. 'Help us! We have the Zulu dog by the testicles. Come across and stab him in the chest!" That was all he had time for. Joseph Dinizulu was on him again and each stroke of his seemed more powerful than the last. Raleigh's chest was agony, and then another blow crashed through his guard and caught him across the shoulder, paralysing his right arm to the fingertips, and the stick flew from his grasp.

'Wellington!" he screamed again.. 'Help us!" and all around him his men were going down, some of them beaten to their knees, others simply dropping their sticks and cowering in the dust, screaming for mercy while the Zulu boys crowded in with their sticks rising and falling, the blows flogging into soft flesh, the Zulu war cries rising in jubilant chorus like hounds crowding in to rend the hares.

'Wellington!" He had one last glimpse of his brother across the stream and then a blow caught him on the forehead jut above his eye, and he felt the skin split as warm blood poured down his face.

Just before it blinded him he caught a last glimpse of Joseph Dinizulu's face, crazy with blood lust, and then his legs collapsed under him and he flopped face-first into the dirt, while the blows still thudded across his back and shoulders.

He must have lost consciousness for a moment, for when he rolled on to his side and wiped the blood from his eyes with the back of his hand, he saw that the Zulus had crossed the stream in a phalanx and that the remnants of his impi were racing away in wild panic towards the bluegum plantation pursued by Dinizulu's men.

He tried to push himself upright, but his senses reeled and darkness filled his head, as he toppled once again. When next he came to, he was surrounded by Zulus, jeering and mocking, covering him with insults. This time he managed to sit up, but then the tumult around him quieted and was replaced by an expectant hush. He looked up and Joseph Dinizulu pushed his way through the ranks and sneered down at him.

'Bark, Xhosa dog,' he ordered. 'Let us hear you bark and whine for mercy." Groggy, but defiant, Raleigh shook his head, and pain flared under his skull at the movement.

Joseph Dinizulu placed a bare foot on his chest and shoved hard.

He was too weak to resist and he toppled over on his back. Joseph Dinizulu stood over him, and lifted the front of his loincloth. With his other hand he drew back his foreskin exposing the pink glans, and he directed a hissing stream of urine into Raleigh's face.

'Drink that, you Xhosa dog,' he laughed. It was hot and ammoniacal and burned like acid in the open wound on his scalp - and Raleigh's rage and humiliation and hatred filled all his soul.

'My brother, it is only very seldom that I try to dissuade you from something on which you have set your mind." Hendrick Tabaka sat on the leopard-skin covering of his chair, leaning forward earnestly with his elbows on his knees. 'It is not the marriage in itself, you know how I have always urged you to take a wife, many wives, and get yourself sons - it is not the idea of a wife I disapprove of, it is this Zulu baggage that makes me lie awake at night. There are ten million other nubile young women in this land - why must you choose a Zulu? I would rather you took a black mamba into your bed." Moses Gama chuckled softly. 'Your concern for me proves your love." Then he became serious. 'Zulu is the largest tribe in southern Africa. Numbers alone would make them important, but add to that their aggressive and warlike spirit, and you will see that nothing will change in this land without Zulu. If I can form an alliance with that tribe, then all the dreams I have dreamed need not be in vain." Hendrick sighed, and grunted and shook his head.

'Come Hendrick, you have spoken with them. Have you not?" Moses insisted, and reluctantly Hendrick nodded.

'I sat four days at the kraal of Sangane Dinizulu, son of Mbejane who was the son of Gubi, who was the son of Dingaan, who was the brother of Chaka Zulu himself. He deems himself a prince of Zulu, which he is at pains to point out means "The Heavens" and he lives in grand style on the land that his old master, General Sean Courtney, left him on the hills above Ladyburg, where he keeps many wives and three hundred head of fat cattle." 'All this I know, my brother,' Moses interrupted. 'Tell me about the girl." Hendrick frowned. He liked to begin a story at the beginning and work through it, sparing no detail, until he reached the end.

'The girl,' he repeated. 'That old Zulu rogue whines that she is the moon of his night and the sun of his day, no daughter has ever been loved as he loves her - and he could never allow her to marry any man but a Zulu chief." Hendrick sighed. 'Day after day I heard the virtues of this Zulu she-jackal recounted, how beautiful she is, how talented, how she is a nurse at the government hospital, how she comes from a long line of son-bearing wives --' Hendrick broke off and spat with disgust. 'It took three days before he mentioned what had been on his mind from the first minute - the lobola, the bride price,' and Hendrick threw up his hands in a gesture of exasperation.

'All Zulus are thieves and dung-eaters." 'How much?" Moses asked with a smile. 'How much did he need to compensate him for a marriage outside the tribe?" 'Five hundred head of prime cattle, all cows in calf, none older than three years,' Hendrick scowled with outrage. 'All Zulus are thieves and he claims to be a prince, which makes him a prince of thieves." 'Naturally you agreed to his first price?" Moses asked.

'Naturally I argued for two more days." 'The final price?" 'Two hundred head,' Hendrick sighed. 'Forgive me, my brother. I tried, but the old dog of a Zulu was like a rock. It was his very lowest price for the moon of his night." Moses Gama leaned back in his chair, and thought about it. It was an enormous price. Prime cattle were worth œ50 the head, but unlike his brother, Moses Gama had no yen for money other than as a means to procure an end.

'Ten thousand pounds?" he asked softly. 'Do we have that much?" 'It will hurt. I will ache for a year as though I have been whipped with a sjambok,' Hendrick grumbled. 'Do you realize just how much else a man could buy with ten thousand pounds, my brother? I could get you at least ten Xhosa maidens, pretty as sugar birds and plump as guinea fowl, each with her maidenhead attested by the most reliable midwife --' 'Ten Xhosa maidens would not bring the Zulu people within my reach,' Moses cut him off. 'I need Victoria Dinizulu." 'The lobola is not the only price demanded,' Hendrick told him.

'There is more." 'What else?" 'The girl is a Christian. If you take her, there will be no others.

She will be your only wife, my brother, and listen to a man who has paid for wisdom in the heavy coin of experience. Three wives are the very minimum a man needs for contentment. Three wives are so busy competing with one another for their husband's favour, that a man can relax. Two wives are better than one. However, a single wife, a one and only wife, can sour the food in your belly and frost your hair with silver. Let this Zulu wench go to someone who deserves her, another Zulu." 'Tell her father that we will pay the price he asks and that we agree to his terms. Tell him also that if he is a prince, then we expect him to provide a marriage feast that befits a princess. We expect a marriage that will be the talk of Zululand from the Drakensberg Mountains to the ocean. I want every chieftain and elder of the tribe there to see me wed, I want every counseller and induna, I want the king of the Zulus himself to come and when they are all assembled, I will speak to them." 'You might as well talk to a troop of baboons. A Zulu is too proud and too full of hatred to listen to sense." 'You are wrong, Hendrick Tabaka." Moses laid his hand on his brother's arm. 'We are not proud enough, nor do we hate enough.

What pride we do have, the little hatred that we do have, is misspent and ill-directed. We waste it on each other, on other black men. If all the tribes of this land took all their pride and all their hatred and turned it on the white oppressor - then how could he resist us? This is what I will talk about when I speak at my wedding feast. This is what I have to teach the people. It is for this that we are forging Umkhonto we Sizwe, the Spear of the Nation'.

They were silent awhile. The depth of his brother's vision, the terrible power of his commitment, always awed Hendrick.

'It will be as you wish,' he agreed at last. 'When do you wish the wedding to take place?" 'On the full moon of mid-winter." Moses did not hesitate. 'That will be the week before our campaign of defiance begins." Again they were silent, until Moses roused himself. 'It is settled then. Is there anything else we should discuss before we take the evening meal?" 'Nothing." Hendrick rose to his feet and was about to call his women to bring their food, when he remembered. 'Ah. There is one other thing. The white woman, the woman who was with you at Rivonia - do you know the one?" Moses nodded. 'Yes, the Courtney woman." 'That is the one. She has sent a message. She wishes to see you again." 'Where is she?" 'She is close by, at a place called Sundi Caves. She has left a telephone number for you. She says it is an important matter." Moses Gama was clearly annoyed. 'I told her not to try and contact me,' he said. 'I warned her of the dangers." He stood up and paced the floor. 'Unless she learns discipline and self-control, she will be of no value to the struggle: White women are like that, spoiled and disobedient and self-indulgent. She must be trained --' Moses broke off and went to the window. Something in the yard had caught his attention, and he called out sharply. 'Wellington!

Raleigh! Come here, both of you." A few seconds later the two boys shuffled self-consciously into the room, and stood just inside the door, hanging their heads guiltily.

'Raleigh, what has happened to you?" Hendrick demanded angrily.

The twins had changed their furs and loincloths for their ordinary clothing, but the gash in Raleigh's forehead was still weeping through the wad of grubby rags he had strapped on it. There were speckles of blood on his shirt, and the swelling had closed one eye.

'Babo!" Wellington started to explain. 'It was not our fault. We were set upon by the Zulus." And Raleigh darted a look of contempt at him before he contradicted his twin.

'We arranged a faction fight with them. It went well, until some of us ran away and left the others,' Raleigh raised his hand to his injured head. 'There are cowards even amongst the Xhosa,' he said, and again glanced at his twin. Wellington stood silent.

'Next time fight harder and show more cunning,' Hendrick Tabaka dismissed them and when they scurried from the room he turned to Moses.

'Do you see, my brother. Even with the children, what hope do you have of changing it?" 'The hope is with the children,' Moses told him. 'Like monkeys, you can train them to do anything. It is the old ones who are difficult to change." Tara Courtney parked her shabby old Packard on the edge of the mountain drive and stood for a few seconds looking down on the city of Cape Town spread below her. The south-easter was whipping the waters of Table Bay to cream.

She left the car and walked slowly along the verge, pretending to admire the flush of wild flowers which painted the rocky slope above her. At the head of the slope the grey rock bastion of the mountain rose sheer to the heavens, and she stopped walking and tilted her head back to look up at it. The clouds were driving over the top, creating the illusion that the wall of rock was falling.

Once again she darted a glance along the road up which she had driven. It was still empty. She was not being followed. The police must have finally lost interest in her. It was weeks since last she had been aware of being tailed.

Her aimless behaviour altered and she returned to the Packard and took a small picnic basket from the boot, then she walked quickly back to the concrete building that housed the lower cable station. She ran up the stairs and paid for a return ticket just as the attendant opened the doors at the end of the waiting room, and the small party of other passengers trooped out to the gondola and crowded into it.

The crimson car started with a jerk and they rose swiftly, dangling below the silvery thread of the cable. The other passengers were exclaiming with delight as the spreading panorama of ocean and rock and city opened below them, and Tara inspected them surreptitiously. Within a few minutes she was convinced that none of them were plain-clothes members of the special branch and she relaxed and turned her attention to the magnificent view.

The gondola was climbing steeply, rising almost vertically up the face of the cliff. The rock had weathered into almost geometrical cubes, so that they seemed to be the ancient building blocks of a giant's castle. They passed a party of rock-climbers roped together inching their way hand over hand up the sheer face. Tara imagined being out there, clinging to the rock with the empty drop sucking at her heels, and vertigo made her sway dizzily. She had to clutch the handrail to steady herself, and when the gondola docked at the top station on the brink of the thousand-foot-high cliff, she escaped from it thankfully.

In the little tearoom, built to resemble an alpine chalet, Molly was waiting for her at one of the tables and she jumped up when she saw her friend.

Tara rushed to her and embraced her. 'Oh Molly, my dear dear Molly, I have missed you so." After a few moments they drew apart, slightly embarrassed by their own display and the smiles of the other teashop customers.

'I don't want to sit still,' Tara told her. 'I'm just bursting with excitement. Come on, let's walk. I've brought some sandwiches and a Thermos." They left the tearoom and wandered along the path that skirted the precipice. In mid-week there were very few hikers on the mountain, and before they had gone a hundred yards they were alone.

'Tell me about all my old friends in the Black Sash,' Tara ordered.

'I want to know everything you have been doing. How is Derek and how are the children? Who is running my clinic now? Have you been there recently? Oh, I so miss it all, all of you." 'Steady on,' Molly laughed. 'One question at a time --' and she began to give Tara all the news. It took time, and while they chatted, they found a picnic spot and sat with their legs dangling over the cliff, drinking hot tea from the Thermos, and with scraps of bread feeding the fluffy little hyrax, the rock rabbits that crept out of the crevices and cracks of the cliff.

At last they exhausted their stocks of news and gossip, and sat ir companionable silence. Tara broke it at last. 'Molly, I'm going to have another baby." 'Ah ha!" Molly giggled. 'So that's what has been keeping you busy.

She glanced at Tara's stomach.

'It doesn't show yet. Are you certain?" 'Oh, for Pete's sake, Molly. I'm hardly the simpering virgin, you know. Give me credit for the four I have already! Of course I'm certain." 'When is it due?" 'January next year." 'Shasa will be pleased. He dotes on the kids. In fact, apart from money, they are the only things I've ever seen Shasa Courtney sentimental about. Have you told him yet?" Tara shook her head. 'No. You are the only one I've told. I came to you first." 'I'm" natterea. I wish you both joy." Then she paused as she noticed Tara's expression and studied her more seriously.

'For Shasa there will be little joy in it, I'm afraid,' Tara said softly.

'It's not Shasa's baby." 'Good Lord, Tara! You of all people --' then she broke off, and thought about it. 'I'm going to ask another silly question, Tara darling, but how do you know it isn't Shasa's effort?" 'Shasa and I - we haven't - well, you know - we haven't been man and wife since - oh, not for ages." 'I see." Despite her affection and friendship, Molly's eyes sparkled with interest. This was intriguing. 'But, Tara love, that isn't the end of the world. Rush home now and get Shasa's pants off.

Men are such clots, dates don't mean much to them, and if he does start counting, you can always bribe the doctor to tell him it's a preen." 'No, Molly, listen to me. If ever he saw the infant, he would know." x 'I don't understand." 'Molly, I am carrying Moses Gama's baby." 'Sweet Christ!" Molly whispered.

The strength of Molly's reaction brought home to Tara the full gravity of the predicament in which she found herself.

Molly was a militant liberal, as colour-blind as Tara was herself, and yet Molly was stunned by the idea of a white woman bearing a black man's infant. In this country miscegenation was an offence punishable by imprisonment, but that penalty was as nothing compared to the social outrage it would engender. She would become an outcast and a pariah.

'Oh dear,' Molly moderated her language. 'Oh dear, oh dear! My poor Tara, what a mess you are in. Does Moses know?" 'Not yet, but I hope to see him soon and I'll tell him." 'You will have to get rid of it, of course. I have an address in Lourenqo Marques. There is a Portuguese doctor there. We sent one of our girls from the orphanage to him. He's expensive, but clean and good, not like some dirty old crone in a back room with a knitting needle." 'Oh Molly, how could you think that of me? How could you believe I would murder my own baby?" 'You are going to keep it?" Molly gaped at her.

'Of course." 'But, my dear, it will be --' 'Coloured,' Tara finished for her. 'Yes, I know, probably carb all lait in colour and with crispy black hair and I will love it with all my heart. Just as I love the father." 'I don't see how --' 'That's why I came to you." Tll do whatever you want -just tell me what that is." 'I want you to find me a coloured couple. Good decent people, preferably with children of their own, who will take care of the infant for me until I can arrange to take it myselfi Of course, they will have all the money they need and more --' her voiced trailed off and she stared at Molly imploringly.

Molly considered for a minute. 'I think I know the right couple.

They are both school-teachers and they have four of their own, all girls. They'll do it for me - but, Tara, how are you going to hide it?

It will begin to show soon, you were huge with Isabella. Shasa might not notice, he's so busy looking into his cheque book, but your mother-in-law is an absolute tartar: You couldn't get anything by her." 'I've already made plans to cover that. I have convinced Shasa that I have conceived a burning interest in archaeology to replace my political activities and I've got a job on the dig at Sundi Caves with the American archaeologist, Professor Marion Hurst, you know." 'Yes, I've read two of her books." 'I've told Shasa that I will only be away for two months, but once I'm out of his sight I'll just keep postponing my return. Centaine will look after the children, 'I've arranged that also, she loves doing it and, the Lord knows, the kids will benefit from it. She's a much better disciplinarian than I am. They'll be perfectly behaved angels by the time my beloved mother-in-law is finished with them." 'You'll miss them,' Molly stated, and Tara nodded.

'Yes, of course, I shall miss them, but it's only another six months to go." 'Where will you have the child?" Molly persisted.

'I don't know. I can't go to a recognized hospital or nursing home.

Oh God, could you imagine the fuss if I produced a little brown bundle on their clean whites-only sheets, in their lovely clean whitesonly maternity hospital. Anyway, there is plenty of time to arrange all that later. The first thing is to get away to Sundi, away from Centaine Courtney-Malcomess' malevolent eye." 'Why Sundi, Tara, what made you choose Sundi?" 'Because I will be near to Moses." 'Is it that important?" Molly stared at her mercilessly. 'Do you feel like that about him? It wasn't just a little experiment, just a little kinky fun to find out what it is really like with one of them?" Tara shook her head.

'Are you sure, Tara? I mean I've had the same urge occasionally. I suppose it's natural to be curious, but I've never been caught at it." 'Molly, I love him. If he asked me, I would lay down my life for him without a qualm." 'My poor sweet Tara." Tears started in Molly's eyes, and she reached out with both arms. They hugged desperately and Molly whispered, 'He is far beyond your reach, my darling. You can never, never have him." 'If I can have a little piece of him, for even a little while. That will be enough for me." Moses Gama parked the crimson and blue butchery van in one of the visitors' bays and switched off the engine. In front of him stretched lawns on which a single small sprinkler was trying to atone for all the frosts and drought of the highveld winter, but the Kikuyu grass was scared and lifeless. Beyond the lawn was the long doublestoried block of the Baragwanath nurses' home.

A small group of black nurses came up the pathway from the main hospital. They were in crisp white uniform, neat and efficientlooking, but when they drew level with the van and saw Moses at the wheel, they dissolved into giggles, hiding their mouths with their hands in the instinctive gesture of subservience to the male.

'Young woman, I wish to speak to you." Moses leaned out of the window of the van. 'Yes, you!" The chosen nurse was almost overcome with shyness. Her friends teased her as she approached Moses and paused timidly five paces from him.

'Do you know Sister Victoria Dinizulu?" 'Eh he!" the nurse affirmed.

'Where is she?" 'She is coming now. She is on the day shift with me." The nurse looked around for escape, and instead picked out Victoria in the middle of the second group of white-clad figures coming up the path.

'There she is. Victoria! Come quickly!" the girl cried, and then fled, taking the steps up into the nurses' home two at a time. Victoria recognized him, and with a word to her friends, left them and cut across the dry brown lawns, coming directly to him. Moses climbed out of the van, and she looked up at him.

'I'm sorry. There was a terrible bus accident, we were working in theatre until the last case was attended to. I have kept you waiting." Moses nodded. 'It's not important. We have plenty of time still." 'It will take me only a few minutes to change into street clothes,' she smiled up at him. Her teeth were perfect, so white that they seemed almost translucent and her skin had the lustre of health and youth. 'I am so pleased to see you again - but I do have a very big bone to pick with you." They were speaking English, and although hers was accented, she seemed confident in the language with a choice of words which matched his own fluency.

'Good,' he smiled gravely. 'We will have your bone for dinner which will save me money." She laughed, a fine throaty chuckle. 'Don't go aw/ty, I will be back." She turned and went into the nurses' home, and he watched her with pleasure as she climbed the steps. Her waist was so narrow that it accentuated the swell of her buttocks under the white uniform.

Although her bosom was small, she was full-bottomed and broadhipped; she would carry a child with ease. That kind of body was the model of Nguni beauty, and Moses was strongly reminded of the photographs he had seen of the Venus de Milo. Her carriage was erect, her neck long and straight, and although her hips swayed as though she danced to a distant music, her head and shoulders never moved. It was obvious that as a child she had taken her turn with the other young girls at carrying the brimming clay pots up from the water-hole, balancing the pot on her head without spilling a drop.

That was how the Zulu girls acquired that marvellously regal posture.

With her round madonna face and huge dark eyes, she was one of the handsomest women he had ever seen, and while he waited, leaning against the bonnet of the van, he pondered how each race had its ideal of feminine beauty, and how widely they differed. That led him on to think of Tara Courtney, with her huge round breasts and narrow boyish hips, her long chestnut hair and soft insipid white skin. Moses grimaced, faintly repelled by the image, and yet both women were crucial to his ambitions, and his sensual response to them - attraction or revulsion - was completely irrelevant. All that m. attered was their utility.

Victoria came back down the steps ten minutes later. She was wearing a vivid crimson dress. Bright colours suited her, they set off that glossy dark skin. She slid into the passenger's seat of the van beside him, and glanced at the cheap gold-plated watch on her wrist.

'Eleven minutes sixteen seconds. You cannot really complain,' she announced, and he smiled and started the engine.

'Now let us pick your thighbone of a dinosaur,' he suggested.

'Tyrannosaurus Rex,' she corrected him. 'The most ferocious of the dinosaurs. But, no, we'll keep that for dinner as you suggested." Her banter amused him. It was unusual for an unmarried black girl to be so forthcoming and self-assured. Then he remembered her training and her life here at one of the world's largest and busiest hospitals. This wasn't a little country girl, empty-headed and giggling, and as if to make the point, Victoria fell into an easy discussion of General Dwight Eisenhower's prospects for election to the White House, and how that would affect the American civil rights struggle - and ultimately their own struggle here in Africa.

While they talked, the sun began to set and the city, with all its fine buildings and parks, fell behind them, until abruptly they entered the half world of Soweto township where half a million black people lived. The dusk was thick with the smell of wood-smoke from the cooking fires, and it turned the sunset a diabolical red, the colour of blood and oranges. The narrow unmade sidewalks were crowded with black commuters, each of them carrying a parcel or a shopping bag, all hurrying in the same direction, back to their homes after a long day that had begun before the sun with a tortuous .journey by bus or train to their places of work in the outer world, and that now ended in darkness with the reverse journey which fatigue made even longer and more tedious.

The van slowed as the streets became more crowded, and then some of them recognized Moses and ran ahead of them, clearing the way.

'Moses Gama! It's Moses Gama, let him pass!" And as they went by, some of them shouted greetings. 'I see you, Nkosi." 'I see you, Babo!" They called him father and lord.

When they reached the community centre which abutted the administration buildings, the huge hall was overflowing, and they were forced to leave the van and go on foot for the last hundred yards.

However, the Buffaloes were there to escort them. Hendrick Tabaka's enforcers pushed a way through the solid pack of humanity, tempering this show of force with smiles and jokes so the crowd made way for them without resentment.

'It is Moses Gama, let him pass,' and Victoria hung on to his arm and laughed with the excitement of it.

As they went in through the main doors of the hall, she glanced up and saw the name above the door: H. F. VERWOERD COMMUNITY HALL.

It was fast becoming a custom for the Nationalist governmentto name all state buildings, airports, dams and other public works after political luminaries and mediocrities, but there was an unusual irony in nanling the community hall of the largest black township after the white architect of the laws which they had gathered here to protest.

Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd was the minister of Bantu affairs, and the principal hi'chitec of apartheid.

Inside the hall, the noise was thunderous. A permit to use the hall for a political rally would have been denied by the township administration, so officially this had been billed and advertised as a rock 'n' roll concert by a band that gloried in the name of'The Marmalade Mambas'.

They were on the stage now, four of them dressed in tight-fitting sequined suits that glittered in the flashing coloured lights. A bank of amplifiers sent the music crashing over the packed audience, like an aerial bombardment, and the dancers screamed back at them, swaying and writhing to the rhythm like a single monstrous organism.

The Buffaloes opened a path for them across the dance floor and the dancers recognized Moses and shouted greetings, trying to touch him as he passed. Then the band became aware of his presence and broke off in the middle of the wild driving beat to give him a trumpet fanfare and a roll of drums.

Dozens of willing hands helped Moses up on to the stage, while Victoria remained below with her head at the level of his knees, trapped in the press of bodies that pressed forward to see and to hear Moses Gama. The band leader attempted to introduce him but even the power of the electronic amplifiers could not lift his voice above the tumultuous welcome that they gave Moses. From four thousand throats a savage sustained roar rose and went on and on without diminution. It broke over Moses Gama like a wild sea driven by a winter gale, and like a rock he stood unmoved by it.

Then he lifted his arms, and the sound died away swiftly until a suppressed and aching silence hung over that great press of humanity, and into that silence Moses Gama roared.

'Amandla! Power!" As a single voice they roared back at him, 'Amandla!" He shouted again, in that deep thrilling voice that rang against th rafters and reached into the depths of their hearts. 'Mayibuye!" They bellowed the reply back at him 'Afrika! Let Africa persist." And then they were silent again, expectant and wound up wit[ excitement and tension, as Moses Gama began to speak. 'Let us talk of Africa,' he said.

'Let us talk of a rich and fruitful land with tiny barren pockets or which our people are forced to live.

'Let us speak of the children without schools and the mother, without hope.

'Let us speak of taxes and passes.

'Let us speak of famine and sickness.

'Let us speak of those who labour in the harsh sunlight, and in the depths of the dark earth.

'Let us speak of those who live in the compounds far from their families.

Let us speak of hunger and tears and the hard laws of the Boers." For an hour he held them in his hands, and they listened in silence except for the groans and involuntary gasps of anguish, and the occasional growl of anger, and at the end Victoria found she was weeping. The tears flowed freely and unashamedly down her beautiful upturned moon face.

When Moses finished, he dropped his arms and lowered his chin upon his chest, exhausted and shaken by his own passion and a vast silence fell upon them. They were too moved to shout or to applaud.

In the silence Victoria suddenly flung herself on to the stage and faced them.

'Nkosi sikelel' iAfrika,' she sang.

'God save Africa,' and immediately the band picked up the refrain, while from the body of the hall their magnificent African voices soared in haunting chorus. Moses Gama stepped up beside her and took her hand in his, and their voices blended.

At the end it took them almost twenty minutes to escape from the hall, their way was blocked by the thousands who wanted the experience to last, to touch them and to hear their voices and to be a part of the struggle.

In the course of one short evening the beautiful Zulu girl in the flaming crimson dress had become part of the almost mystic legend that surrounded Moses Gama. Those who were fortunate enough to be there that evening would tell those who had not, how she had looked like a queen as she stood and sang before them, a queen that befitted the tall black emperor at her side.

'I have never experienced anything like that,' Vicky told him, when at last they were alone again, and the little blue and crimson van was humming back along the main highway towards Johannesburg. 'The love they bear you is so powerful --' she broke off. 'I just can't describe it." 'Sometimes it frightens me,' he agreed. 'They place such a heavy responsibility upon me." 'I don't believe you know what fear is,' she said.

'I do." He shook his head. 'I know it better than most." And then he changed the subject. 'What time is it? We must find something to eat before curfew." 'It's only nine o'clock." Victoria looked surprised as she turned the dial of her wristwatch to catch the light of a street lamp. 'I thought it would be much later. I seem to have lived a lifetime in one short evening." Ahead of them a neon sign flickered: 'DOLLS' HOUSE DRIVEIN. Tasty Eats." Moses slowed and turned the van into the parking lot. He left Vicky for a few minutes to go to the counter of the replica dolls' house, then he returned with hamburgers and coffee in two paper mugs.

'Ah, that's good!" she mumbled through a mouthful of hamburger.

'I didn't realize I was so hungry." 'Now what about this bone you threaten me with?" Moses asked, and he spoke in fluent Zulu.

'You speak Zulu!" She was amazed. 'I didn't know. When did you learn?" she demanded in the same language.

'I speak many languages,' he told her. 'If I want to reach all the people, there is no other way." And he smiled. 'However, young woman, you don't change the subject so easily. Tell me about this bone." 'Oh, I feel so stupid talking about it now, after all we have shared this evening --' she hesitated. 'I was going to ask you why you sent your brother to speak to my father before you had said anything to me. I'm not a country girl of the kraals, you know. I am a modern woman with a mind of my own." 'Victoria, we should not discard the old traditions in our struggle for liberation. What I did was out of respect for you and for your father. I am sorry if it offended you." 'I was a little ruffled,' she admitted.

'Will it help at all if I ask you now?" he smiled. 'You can still refuse. Before we go any further, think very deeply. If you marry me, you marry the cause. Our marriage will be part of the struggle of our people, and the road before us will be hard and dangerous, with never an end in sight." 'I do not need to think,' she said softly. 'Tonight when I stood there before our people with your hand in mine, I knew that was the reason why I was born." He took both her hands in his and drew her gently towards him, but before their mouths could touch, the harsh white beam of a powerful spotlight shone into their faces. Startled, they drew apart, shielding their eyes with raised hands.

'Hey, what is this?" Moses exclaimed.

'Police!" a voice answered from the darkness beyond the open side window. 'Get out both of you!" They climbed out of the van, and Moses went around the bonnet to stand beside Victoria. He saw that while they had been engrossed with each other, a police pick-up had entered the parking lot and parked beside the restaurant building. Now four blue-uniformed constables with flashlights were checking the occupants of all the parked vehicles in the lot.

'Let me see your passes, both of you." The constable in front of him was still shining the light in his eyes, but beyond it Moses could make out that he was very young.

Moses reached into his inner pocket, while Victoria searched in her purse, and they handed their pass booklets to the constable. He turned the beam of the flashlight on them and studied them minutely.

'It's almost curfew,' he said in Afrikaans, as he handed them back. 'You Bantu should be in your own locations at this time of night." 'There is still an hour and a half until curfew,' Victoria replied sharply, and the constable's expression hardened.

'Don't take that tone with me, maid." That term of address was insulting and again he shone the flashlight in her face. 'Just because you've got shoes on your feet and rouge on your face, doesn't mean you are a white woman. Just remember that." Moses took Victoria's arm and firmly steered her back to the van.

'We are leaving right away, officer,' he said placatingly, and once they were both in the van, he told Victoria, 'You will accomplish nothing by getting us both arrested. That is not the level at which we should conduct the struggle. That is just a callow little white boy with more authority than he knows how to carry." 'Forgive me,' she said. 'I just get so angry. What were they looking for anyway?" 'They were looking for white men with black girls, their Immorality Act to keep their precious white blood pure. Half their police force spends its time trying to peer into other people's bedrooms." He started the van and turned into the highway.

Neither of them spoke again until he parked in front of the Baragvanath nurses' home." 'I hope we will not be interrupted again,' Moses said quietly, and placing an arm around her shoulders turned her gently to face him.

Although she had seen how it was done on the cinema screen, and although the other girls in the hostel endlessly discussed what they referred to as 'Hollywood style', Victoria had never kissed a man. It was not part of Zulu custom or tradition. So she lifted her face to him with a mixture of trepidation and breathless expectation, and was amazed at the warmth and softness of his mouth. Swiftly the stiffness and tension went out of her neck and shoulders and she seemed to mould herself to him.

The work at Sundi Caves was even more interesting than Tara Courthey had expected it to be, and she adapted rapidly to the leisurely pace and life and intellectually stimulating companionship of the small specialist team of which she was now a part.

Tara shared a tent with two young students from the University of the Witwatersrand, and she found with mild surprise that the close proximity of other women in such spartan accommodation did not bother her. They were up long before dawn to escape the heat in the middle of the day, and after a quick and frugal breakfast, Professor Hurst led them up to the site and allocated the day's labours. They rested and ate the main meal at noon, and then as the day cooled, they returned to the site and worked on until the light failed. After that they had only enough energy for a hot shower, a light meal and the narrow camp beds.

The site was in a deep kloof. The rocky sides dropped steeply two hundred feet-to the narrow riverbed in the gut. The vegetation in the protected and sun-warmed valley was tropical, quite alien to that on the exposed grasslands that were scoured by wind and winter frosts. Tall candelabra aloes grew on the upper slopes, while farther down it became even denser, and there were tree ferns and cycads, and huge strangler figs with bark like elephant hide, grey and wrinkled.

The caves themselves were a series of commodious open galleries that ran with the exposed strata. They were ideal for habitation by primitive man, located high up the slope and protected from the prevailing winds yet with a wide view out across the plain on to which the kloof debouched. They were close to water and readily defensible against all marauders, and the depth of the midden and accumulated detritus on the floor of the caves attested to the ages over which they had been occupied.

The roofs of the caves were darkened with the smoke of countless cooking fires and the inner walls were decorated with the engravings and childlike paintings of the ancient San peoples and their predecessors. All the signs of a major site with the presence of very early hominids were evident, and although the dig was still in its early stages and they had penetrated only the upper levels, spirits and optimism were high and the whole feeling on the dig was of a close-knit community of persons bound by a common interest cooperating selflessly on a project of outstanding importance.

Tara particularly liked Marion Hurst, the American professor in charge of the excavations. She was a woman in her early fifties, with cropped grey hair, and a skin burned to the colour and consistency of saddle-leather by the suns of Arabia and Africa. They had become firm friends even before Tara discovered that she was married to a negro professor of anthropology at Cornell. That knowledge made their relationship secure, and relieved Tara of the necessity of any subterfuge.

One night she sat late with Marion in the shed they were using as a laboratory, and suddenly Tara found herself telling her about Moses Gama and her impossible love, even about the child she was carrying. The elder woman's sympathy was immediate and sincere.

'What iniquitous social order can keep people from loving others - of course, I knew all about these laws before I came here. That is why Tom stayed at home. Despite my personal feelings, the work here was just too important to pass up. However, you have my promise that I will do anything in my power to help the two of you." Yet Tara had been on the dig for five weeks without having heard from Moses Gama. She had written him a dozen letters and telephoned the Rivonia number, arid the other number in Drake's Farm township. Moses was never there, and never responded to her urgent messages.

At last she could stand it no longer, and she borrowed Marion's pick-up truck and went into the city, almost an hour's drive with the first half of the journey over clay roads that were rutted and bumpy, and finally over wide black-top highways in a solid stream of heavy traffic, coming up from the coalfields at Witbank.

She parked the pick-up under the bluegum trees at the back of Puck's Hill and was suddenly afraid to see him again, terrified that it had all changed and he would send her away. It took all her courage to leave the cab of the pick-up and go around the big unkempt house to the front verandah.

At the far end there was a man sitting at the desk and her heart soared and then as swiftly plunged as he turned and saw her and stood up. It was Marcus Archer. He came down the long verandah towards her, and his smile was spiteful and vinegary.

'Surprise!" he said. 'The last person I expected to see." 'Hello, Marcus. I was looking for Moses." 'I know who you are looking for, dearie." 'Is he here?" Marcus shook his head. 'I haven't seen him for almost two weeks." 'I have written and telephoned - he doesn't reply. I was worried." 'Perhaps he doesn't reply, because he doesn't want to see you." 'Why do you dislike me so, Marcus?" 'Oh my dear, whatever gave you that idea?" Marcus smiled archly.

'I'm sorry to have bothered you." She began to turn away and then paused. Her expression hardened. 'Will you give him a message, when you see him?" Marcus inclined his head, and for the first time she noticed the grey hairs in his ginger sideburns and the wrinkles in the corners of his eyes. He was much older than she had thought.

'Will you tell Moses that I came to find him, and that nothing has changed. That I meant every word I said." 'Very well, dearie. I'll tell him." Tara went down the steps, but when she reached the bottom, he called after her.

'Tara." And she looked up. He leaned on the railing of the verandah. 'You'll never have him. You know that, don't you?

He will keep you only as long as he needs you. Then he will cast you aside. He will never belong to you." 'Nor to you either, Marcus Archer,' she said softly, and he recoiled from her. 'He belongs to neither of us. He belongs to Africa and his people." And she saw the desolation in his eyes. It gave her no satisfaction, and she went slowly back to the pick-up and drove away.

At Level Six in the main gallery of the Sundi Caves they exposed an extensive deposit of clay pottery fragments. There were no intact artefacts, and it was obviously a dumping site for the ancient potters.

Nevertheless, the discovery was of crucial importance in dating the levels for the pottery was of a very early type.

Marion Hurst was excited by the find, and transmitted her excitement to all of them. By this time Tara had been promoted from the heavy work of grubbing in the dirt at the bottom of the trenches.

i She had displayed a natural aptitude for the puzzle game of fitting the fragments of bone and pottery together in their original form, and she now worked in the long prefabricated shed under Marion Hurst's direct supervision and was making herself an invaluable member of the team.

Tara found that while she was absorbed with the fragments, she could suppress the ache of longing and the turmoil of uncertainty and guilt. She knew that her neglect of her children and her family was unforgivable. Once a week she telephoned Rhodes Hill and spoke to her father and Centaine and to Isabella. The child seemed quite content, and in a strangely selfish way Tara resented the fact that she seemed not to pine for her mother but was accepting her grandmother as a happy substitute. Centaine was friendly and made no criticism of her continued absence, but Blaine Malcomess, her beloved father, was as usual bluntly outspoken.

'I don't know what you are trying to run away from, Tara, but believe me it never works. Your place is here with your husband and your children. Enough of this nonsense now. You know your duty, however unpleasant you may find it - it's still your duty." Of course, Shasa and the boys would soon be returning from their grand safari, and then she could procrastinate no longer. She would have to make a decision, and she was not even certain of the alternatives. Sometimes in the night, in those silent small hours when human energy and spirits are at their lowest ebb, she even considered following Molly's advice and aborting the child from her womb and turning her back on Moses, going back to the seductive and destructively soft life of Weltevreden.

'Oh, Moses, if only I could see you again. Just to speak to you for a few hours - then I would know what to do." She found herself withdrawing from the company of the other workers on the excavation. The cheerful carefree attitude of the two university students she shared her tent with began to irritate her.

Their conversation was so naive and childlike, even the music they played endlessly on a portable tape recorder was so loud and uncouth that it rasped her nerves.

With Marion's blessing she purchased a small bell tent of her own and erected it near the laboratory where she worked, so that when the others took their noonday siesta, she could slip back to her work bench and forget all her insoluble problems in the totally absorbing task of fitting together the shattered scraps. Their antiquity seemed to soothe her and make the problems of the present seem trivial and unimportant.

It was here, at her bench, in the middle of a hot somnolent highveld afternoon, that the light from the open doorway was blocked suddenly, and she looked up frowning, wiping back the sweaty wisps of hair from her forehead with the back of her hand, and then her mouth went dry and her heart seemed to freeze for a long moment and then race wildly.

The sunlight was behind him, so his was a tall silhouette, broad shouldered, slim-hipped and regal. She sobbed and sprang up from the bench and flew to him, wrapping her arms around his chest and pressing her face to his heart so that she could feel it beat against her cheek. She could not speak, and his voice was deep and gentle above her.

'I have been cruel to you. I should have come to you sooner." 'No,' she whispered. 'It doesn't matter. Now that you are here, nothing else matters." He stayed only one night, and Marion Hurst protected them from the other members of the expedition so that they were alone in her small tent, isolated from the world and its turmoil. Tara did not sleep that night, each moment was far too precious to waste.

In the dawn he said to her. 'I must go again soon. There is something that you must do for me." 'Anything!" she whispered.

'Our campaign of defiance begins soon. There will be terrible risk and sacrifice by thousands of our people, but for their sacrifice to be worth while it must be brought to the attention of the world." 'What can I do?" she asked.

'By a most fortunate coincidence, there is an American television team in the country at this very moment. They are making a series called "Africa on Focus"." 'Yes, I know about them. They interviewed --' she broke off. She didn't want to mention Shasa, not now, not during this treasured interlude.

'They interviewed your husband,' he finished for her. 'Yes, I know.

However, they have almost finished filming and I have heard that they plan to return to the United States within the next few days. We need them here. We need them to film and record our struggle. They must show it to the world - the spirit of our people, the indomitable will to rise above oppressi6n and inhumanity." 'How can I help?" 'I cannot reach the producer of this series on my own. I 'need a gobetween. We have to prevent them leaving. We have to make certain they are here to film the defiance when it begins. You must speak to the woman in charge of the filming. Her name is Godolphin, Kitty Godolphin, and she will be staying at the Sunnyside Hotel in Johannesburg for the next three days." 'I will go to her today." 'Tell her that the time is not yet agreed - but when it is, I will let her know, and she must be there with her camera." 'I will see that she is,' Tara promised, and he rolled her gently on to her back and made love to her again. It seemed impossible, but for Tara every time was better than the last, and when he left her and rose from the campbed, she felt weak and soft and warm as molten wax.

'Moses,' she said softly, and he paused in buttoning the pale blue open-neck shirt.

'What is it?" he asked softly.

She had to tell him about the child she was carrying. She sat up, letting the rumpled sheet fall to her waist and her breasts, already heavy with her pregnancy, were dappled with tiny blue veins beneath the ivory smooth skin.

'Moses,' she repeated stupidly, trying to find the courage to say it, and he came to her.

'Tell me,' he commanded, and her courage failed her. She could not tell him, the risk that it would drive him away was too great.

'I just wanted to tell you how grateful I am that you have given me this opportunity to be of service to the struggle." It was much easier to contact Kitty Godolphin than she had expected it to be. She borrowed Marion's pick-up and drove five miles to the nearest village, and she telephoned from the public booth in the little single-roomed post office. The operator in the Sunnyside Hotel put her through to the room, and a firm young voice with a Louisiana lilt said, 'Kitty Godolphin. Who is this please?" 'I'd rather not give my name, Miss Godolphin. But I would like to meet you as soon as possible. I have a story for you, an important and dramatic story." 'When and where do you want to meet?" 'It will take me two hours to reach your hotel." 'I'll be waiting for you,' said'Kitty Godolphin, and it was as easy as that.

Tara checked with Reception and the girl at the desk phoned through to Miss Godolphin's suite and then told her to go up.

A young girl, slim and pretty, in a tartan shirt and blue jeans opened the door to Tara's ring.

'Hello, is Miss Godolphin in? She's expecting me." The girl looked her over carefully, taking in her khaki bush skirt and mosquito boots, her tanned arms and face and the scarf tied around her thick auburn hair.

'I'm Kitty Godolphin,' said the girl, and Tara could not hide her surprise.

'Okay, don't tell me. You expected an old bag. Come on in and tell me who you are." In the lounge Tara removed her sunglasses and faced her.

'My name is Tara Courtney. I understand you know my husband.

Shasa Courtney, Chairman of Courtney Mining and Finance." She saw the shift in the other woman's expression, and the sudden hard gleam in those eyes that she had thought were frank and innocent.

'I meet a lot of people in my business, Mrs Courtney." Tara had not expected the hostility, and hurriedly she tried to forestall it.

'I'm sure you do --' 'Did you want to talk to me about your husband, lady? I don't have a lot of time to waste." Kitty looked pointedly at her wristwatch.

It was a man's Rolex and she wore it on the inside of her wrist like a soldier.