Rage

'No, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to give you that impression. I have come here on behalf of someone else, someone who is unable to come to you himselfi' 'Why not?" Kitty asked sharply,' and Tara readjusted her early estimate of her. Despite her childlike appearance, she was as tough and sharp as any man Tara had ever met.

'Because he is being watched by the police special branch, and because what he is planning is dangerous and illegal." Tara saw instantly that she had said the right things and had aroused the newswoman's instinct.

'Sit down, Mrs Courtney. Do you want some coffee?" She picked up the house phone and ordered from room service, then turned back to Tara.

'Now tell me. Who is this mysterious person?" 'You probably have never heard of him, but soon the whole world will know his name,' Tara said. 'It's Moses Gama." 'Moses Gama, hell!" Kitty Godolphin exclaimed. 'For six weeks now I've beefi trying to catch up with him. I was beginning to think he was just a rumour, and that he didn't really exist. A scarlet pimpernel." 'He exists,' Tara assured her.

'Can v9u et me an interview_with_him2',KitI'.emande.oanfious that she leaned across and grasped Tara's wrist impulsively. 'He's an Emmy score, that one. He is the one person in South Africa I really want to talk to." 'I can do a whole lot better than that,' Tara promised her.

?

Shasa Courtney was determined that his sons would not grow up believing that the affluent white suburbs of Cape Town and Johannesburg were all of Africa. This safari was to show them the old Africa, primeval and eternal, and to establish for them a firm link with their history and their ancestors, to engender in them a sense of pride in what they were and in those who had gone before them.

He had set aside six whole weeks, the full period of the boys' school holidays, for this venture, and that had taken a great deal of planning and considerable heart-searching. The affairs of the company were so many-faceted and complex that he did not like leaving them, even in such capable hands as those of David Abrahams. The shaft-sinking at Silver River was going ahead apace, and they were down almost a thousand feet already while work on the plant was also far advanced. Apart from that, the first six pilchard trawlers for the factory at Walvis Bay were due for delivery in three weeks' time, and the canning plant was on the water from the suppliers in the United Kingdom. There was so much happening, so many problems that could demand his immediate decision.

Centaine was, of course, always on hand for David to consult with, but of late she had withdrawn more and more from the running of the company, and there were many eventualities that might arise that could only be dealt with by Shasa personally. Shasa weighed up the chances of this happening against what was necessary, in his view, for his sons' education and understanding of their place in Africa and their inherited duties and responsibilities, and decided he had to risk it. As a last resort he arranged a strict itinerary for the safari, of which both Centaine and David had a copy, so that they would know exactly where he was during every day of his absence, and a radio contact would be maintained with the H'am Mine so that an aircraft could reach any of his camps in the deep bush within four or five hours.

'If you do call me out, then'the reason had better be ironclad,' Shasa warned David grimly. 'This is probably the only time in our lives that the boys and I will be able to do this." They left from the H'am Mine the last week in May. Shasa had taken the boys out of school a few days early, which in itself was enough to put everybody in the right mood and ensure a splendid beginning. He had commandeered four of the mine's trucks and made up a full team of safari boys, including drivers, camp servants, skinners, trackers, gunbearers and the chef from the H'am Mine Club. Of course, Shasa's own personal hunting vehicle was always kept in the mine workshops, tuned to perfection and ready to go at any time. It was an ex-army jeep which had been customized and modified by the mine engineers without regard to expense. It had everything from long-range fuel tanks and gun racks to a shortwave radio set, and the seats were upholstered in genuine zebra skin while the paintwork was an artistic creation in bush camouflage. Proudly the boys clipped their Winchester .22 repeaters into the gun rack beside Shasa's big .375 Holland and Holland magnum, and dressed in their new khaki bush jackets, scrambled into their seats in the jeep. As was the right of the eldest, Sean sat up front beside his father, with Michael and Garry in the open back.

'Anybody want to change his mind and stay at home.9' Shasa asked as he started the jeep, and they took the question seriously, shaking their heads in unison, eyes shining and faces pale with excitement, too overcome to speak.

'Here we go then,' Shasa said and they drove down the hill from the mine offices with the convoy of four trucks following them.

The uniformed mine guards opened the main gates and gave them a flashy salute, grinning widely as the jeep passed, and behind them the camp boys on the backs of the open trucks started to sing one of the traditional safari songs.

Weep, oh you women, tonight you sleep alone The long road calls us and we must go -Their voices rose and fell to the eternal rhythm of Africa, full of its promise and mystery, echoing its grandeur and its savagery, setting the mood for the magical adventure into which Shasa took his sons.

They drove hard those first two days to get beyond the areas which had been spoiled by men's too frequent intrusions with rifle and four-wheel drive vehicle, where the veld was almost bare of large game and those animals that they did see were in small herds that were running as soon as they heard the first hum of the jeep engine and were merely tiny specks in their own dust by the time they spotted them.

Sadly Shasa realized how much had changed since his earliest memory of this country. He had been Sean's age then and the herds of springbok and gemsbok had been on every side, great herds, trusting and confiding. There had been giraffe and lion, and small bands of Bushmen, those fascinating little yellow pygmies of the desert. Now, however, wild men and beast had all retreated before the inexorable advance of civilization deeper and deeper into the wilderness. Even now, Shasa could look ahead to the day when there would be no more wilderness, no more retreat for the wild things, when the roads and the railway lines would criss-cross the land and the endless villages and kraals would stand in the desolation they had created. The time when the trees were all cut down for firewood, and the grass was eaten to the roots by the goaps and the top soil turned to dust and blew on the wind. The vision filled him with sadness and a sense of despair, and he had to make a conscious effort to throw it off so as not to spoil the experience for his sons.

'I owe them this glimpse of the past. They must know a little of the Africa that once was, before it has all gone, so that they will understand something of its glory." And he smiled and told them the stories, reaching back in his memory to bring out for them all his own experiences, and then going back farther, to what he had learned from his own mother, and from his grandfather, trying to make clear to them the extent and depth of their family's involvement with this land, and they sat late around the camp fire that first night, listening avidly until, despite themselves, their eyelids drooped and their heads began to nod.

On they went, driving hard all day over rutted tracks, through desert scrub and grassland and then through mopani forest, not yet stopping to hunt, eating the food they had brought with them from the mine, though that night the servants muttered about fresh meat.

On the third day they left the rudimentary road they had been following since dawn. It was nothing more than a double track of tyres that had last been used months before, but now Shasa let it swing away towards the east and they went on northwards, breaking fresh ground, weaving through the open forest until abruptly they came out on the banks of a river, not one of the great African rivers like the Kavango, but one of its tributaries. Still, it was fifty feet wide, but green and deep, a formidable barrier that would have turned back any hunting safari before them that had come this far north.

Two weeks previously Shasahad reconnoitred this entire area fromz the air, flying the Mosquito low over the tree tops so that he could count the animals in each herd of game, and judge the size of the ivory tusks that each elephant carried. He had marked this branch of the river on his large-scale map, and had navigated the convoy back to this exact spot. He recognized it by the oxbow bend of the banks and the giant makuyu trees on the opposite side, with a fish eagle nest in the upper branches.

They camped another two days on the southern river bank while every member of the safari, including the three boys and the fat Herero chef, helped to build the bridge. They cut the mopani poles in the forest, thick as a fat woman's thigh and forty feet long, and dragged them up with the jeep. Shasa kept guard against crocodiles, standing high on the bank with the .375 magnum under his arm while his naked gangs floated the poles out into the centre of the river and set them into the mud of the bottom. Then they lashed the cross-ties to them with ropes of mopani bark that still wept glutinous sap, red as blood.

When at last the bridge was complete, they unloaded the vehicles to lighten them, and one at a time Shasa drove them out on to the rickety structure. It swayed and creaked and rocked under them, but at last he had the jeep and all four trucks on the far bank.

'Now the safari truly begins,' he told the boys. They had entered a pocket of country, protected by its remoteness and its natural barriers of forest and river from men's over-exploitation, and from the air Shasa had seen the herds of buffalo thick as domestic cattle and the clouds of white egrets hovering over them.

That night he told the boys stories about the old elephant hunters -'Karamojo' Bell, and Frederick Selous and Sean Courtney their own ancestor, Shasa's great-uncle and the namesake of his eldest son.

'They were tough men, all of them, incredible shots and natural athletes. They had to be to survive the hardships and the tropical disease. When he was a young man, Sean Courtney hunted on foot in the tsetse-fly belt of the Zambezi valley where the temperature reaches 115ø at noon, and he could run forty miles in a day after the big tuskers. His eye was so sharp he could actually see the flight of his bullet." The boys listened with total fascination, pleading with him to continue whenever he paused, until at last he told them, 'That's enough. You have to be up early tomorrow. Five o'clock in the morning. We are going to hunt for the first time." In the dark they drove slowly along the northern bank of the river in the open jeep, all of them bundled up against the cold for the frost lay thick in the open vleis and crunched under the jeep's tyres. In the first feeble light of dawn they found where a herd of buffalo had drunk during the night and then gone back into the heavy bush.

They left the jeep on the river bank, and stripped off their padded anoraks. Then Shasa put his two Ovambo trackers to the spoor and they followed the herd on foot. As they moved silently and swiftly through the dense second-growth mopani thickets, Shasa explained it all to the boys, speaking in a whisper and relying on hand signals to point out the different hoof prints of old bull and cow and calf, or to draw their attention to other smaller but equally fascinating animals and birds and insects in the forest around them.

A little before noon they finally came up with the herd. Over a hundred of the huge cow-like beasts, with their trumpet-shaped ears and the drooping horns that gave them such a lugubrious air. Most of them were lying in the mopani shade, ruminating quietly, although one or two of the herd bulls were dozing on their feet. The only movement was the lazy flick of their tails as the stinging flies swarmed over their flanks.

Shasa showed the boys how to work in close. Using the breeze and every stick of cover, freezing whenever one of the great horned heads swung in their direction, he took them within thirty feet of the biggest of the bulls. They could smell him, the hot rank bovine reek of him, and they could hear his breathing puffing through his wet drooling muzzle, hear his teeth grinding on his cud, so close they could see the bald patches of age on his shoulders and rump and the balls of dried mud from the wallow that clung in the stiff black hairs of his back and belly.

While they held their breaths in delicious terror and watched in total fascination, Shasa slowly raised the heavy rifle and aimed into the bull's thick neck, just forward of his massive shoulder.

'Bang!" he shouted, and the great bull plunged forward wildly, crashing into the screen of thick mopani, and Shasa gathered his sons and drew them into the shelter of one of the grey tree trunks, keeping his arms around them while on all sides the panicking herd galloped, huge black shapes thundering by, the calves bawling and the old bulls grunting.

The sounds of their flight dwindled away into the forest though the dust of their passage hung misty in the air around them, and Shasa was laughing with the joy of it as he let his arms fall from their shoulders.

'Why did you do that?" Sean demanded furiously, turning his face up to his father. 'You could have shot him easily - why didn't you kill him?" 'We didn't come out here to kill,' Shasa explained. 'We came here to hunt." 'But --' Sean's outrage turned to bewilderment '-- but what's the difference?" 'Ah! That's what you have to learn. That bull was a big one, but not big enough, and we have all the meat we need, so I let him go.

That's lesson number one. Now, for lesson number two - none of you is going to kill anything until you know all about that animal, understand its habits and life cycle, and learn to respect it and hold it in high esteem. Then and only then." In camp that evening he gave them each two books, which he had had bound in leather with their own names on the cover: Roberts' Mammals of South Africa and his Birds of South Africa.

'I brought these especially for you, and I want you to study them,' he ordered. Sean looked appalled, he hated books and studying, but both Garry and Mickey hurried to their tent to begin the task.

Over the days that followed he questioned them on every animal and bird they saw. At first the questions were elementary, but he made them progressively more difficult and soon they could quote the biological names and give him full details of sizes and body weights of males and females, their calls and behaviour patterns, distribution and breeding, down to the smallest detail. Set an example by his younger brothers, even Sean mastered the difficult Latin names.

However, it was ten days before they were allowed to fire a shot and then it was only bird-hunting. Under strict supervision, they were allowed to hunt the fat brown francolin and speckled guinea fowl with their strange waxen yellow helmets in the scrub along the river. Then they had to clean and dress their kill and help the Herero chef to prepare and cook it.

'It's the best meal I've ever eaten,' Sean declared, and his brothers agreed with him enthusiastically through full mouths.

The next morning Shasa told them, 'We need fresh meat for the men." In camp there were thirty mouths to feed, all with an enormous appetite for fresh meat. 'All right, Sean, what is the scientific name for impala?" 'Aepyceros Melampus,' Sean gabbled eagerly. 'The Afrikaners call it rooibok and it weighs between 130 and 160 pounds." 'That will do,' Shasa laughed. 'Go and get your rifle." In a patch of whistling thorn near the river, they found a solitary old ram, an outcast from the breeding herd. He had been mauled by a leopard and was limping badly on one foreleg, but he had a fine pair of lyre-shaped horns. Sean stalked the lovely red brown antelope just as Shasa had taught him, using the river bank and the wind to get within easy shot, even with the light rifle. However, when the boy knelt and raised the Winchester to his shoulder, Shasa slipped the safety-catch of his heavy weapon, ready to render the coup de gr5ce, if it was needed.

The impala dropped instantly, shot through the neck, dead before it heard the shot, and Shasa went to join his son at the kill.

As they shook hands, Shasa recognized in Sean the deep atavistic passion of the hunter. In some contemporary men that urge had cooled or been suppressed - in others it still burned brightly. Shasa and his eldest son were of that ilk, and now Shasa stooped and dipped his forefinger in the bright warm blood that trickled from the tiny wound in the ram's neck and then he traced his finger across $eon's forehead and down each cheek.

'Now you are blooded,' he said, and he wondered when that ceremony had first been performed, when the first man had painted his son's face with the blood of his first kill, and he knew instinctively that it had been back before recorded time, back when they still dressed in skins and lived in caves.

'Now you are a hunter,' he said, and his heart warmed to his son's proud and solemn expression. This was not a moment for laughter and chatter, it was something deep and significant, something beyond mere words. Sean had sensed that and Shasa was proud of him.

The following day they drew lots and it was Michael's turn to kill.

Again Shasa wanted a solitary impala ram, so as not to alarm the breeding herd, but an animal with a good pair of horns as a trophy for the boy. It took them almost all that day of hunting before they found the right one.

Shasa and his two brothers watched from a distance as Michael made his stalk. It was a more difficult situation than Sean had been presented with, open grassland and a few scattered flat-top acacia thorns, but Michael made a stealthy approach on hands and knees, until he reached a low ant heap from which to make his shot.

Michael rose slowly and lifted the light rifle. The ram was still unaware, grazing head down thirty paces off, broadside on and offering the perfect shot for either spine or heart. Shasa was ready with the Holland and Holland to back him, should he wound the impala. Michael held his aim, and the seconds drew out. The ram raised its head and looked around warily, but Michael was absolutely still, the rifle to his shoulder, and the ram looked past him, not seeing him. Then it moved away unhurriedly, stopping once to crop a few mouthfuls. It disappeared into a clump of taller grass and without having fired, Michael slowly lowered his rifle.

Sean jumped to his feet, ready to rush out and challenge his brother, but Shasa restrained him with a hand on his shoulder. 'You and Garry go and wait for us back at the jeep,' he said.

Shasa walked out to where Michael was sitting on the ant heap with the unfired Winchester held across his lap. He sat down beside Michael and lit a cigarette. Neither of them said anything for almost ten minutes and then Michael whispered, 'He looked straight at me. - and he had the most beautifut eyes." Shasa dropped the butt of his cigarette and ground it out under his heel. They were silent again, and then Michael blurted, 'Do I really have to kill something, Dad? Please don't make me." 'No, Mickey,' Shasa put his arm around his shoulders. 'You don't have to kill anything. And in a different sort of way, I'm just as proud of you as I am of Sean." Then it was Garrick's turn. Again it was a solitary ram with'a beautiful head of wide-curved horns and the stalk was through scattered bush and waist-high grass.

His spectacles glinting determinedly, Garry began his stalk under Shasa's patient supervision. However, he was still a long way out of range of the ram, when there was a squawk and Garry disappeared into the earth. Only a small cloud of dust marked the spot where he had been. The impala raced away into the forest, and Shasa and the two boys ran out to where Garry had last been seen. They were guided by muffled cries of distress, and a disturbance in the grass.

Only Garry's legs were still above ground, kicking helplessly in the air. Shasa seized them and heaved Garry out of the deep round hole in which he was wedged from the waist.

It was the entrance to an antbear burrow. Intent on his stalk, Garry had tripped over his own bootlace and tumbled headlong into the hole. The lenses of his spectacles were thick with dust and he had skinned his cheek and torn his bushjacket. These injuries were insignificant when compared to the damage to his pride. In the next three days Garry made as many attempts to stalk. All of these were detected by his intended victim, long before he was within gunshot.

Each time as he watched the antelope dash away, Garry's dejection was more abject and Sean's derision more raucous.

'Next time we will do it together,' Shasa consoled him, and the following day he coached Garry quietly through the stalk, carrying the rifle for him, pointing out the obstacles over which Garry would have tripped, and leading him the last ten yards by the hand until they were in a good position for the shot. Then he handed him the loaded rifle.

'In the neck,' he whispered. 'You can't miss." The ram had the best trophy horns they had seen yet, and he was twenty-five yards away.

Garry lifted the rifle and peered through spectacles that were misted with the heat of excitement and his hands began to shake uncontrollably.

Watching Garry's face screwed up with tension, and seeing the erratic circles that the rifle barrel was describing, Shasa recognized the classic symptoms of 'buck fever' and reached out to prevent Garry firing. He was too late, and the ram jumped at the sharp crack of the shot, and then looked around with a puzzled expression.

Neither Shasa nor the animal, and least of all Garry, knew where the bullet had gone.

'Garry? Shasa tried to prevent him, but he fired again as wildly, and a puff of dust flicked from the earth half-way between them and the ram.

The impala went up into the air in a fluid and graceful leap, a.

flash of silken cinnamon-coloured skin and a glint of sweeping horns and then it was bounding away on those long delicate legs, so lightly it seemed not to touch the earth.

They walked back to the jeep in silence, Garry trailing a few paces behind his father, and his elder brother greeted him with a peal of merry laughter.

'Next time throw your specs at him, Garry." 'I think you need a little more practice before you have another go at it,' Shasa told him tactfully. 'But don't worry. Buck fever is something that can attack anyone - even the oldest and most experienced." They moved camp, going deeper into the little Eden they had discovered. Now every day they came across elephant droppings, knee-high piles of fibrous yellow lumps the size of tennis balls, full of chewed bark and twigs and the stones of wild fruit in which the baboons and red-cheeked francolin delved delightedly for titbits.

Shasa showed the boys how to thrust a finger into the pile of dung to test for body heat and judge its freshness, and how to read the huge round pad-marks in the dust. To differentiate between bull and cow, between front and rear foot, to tell the direction of travel and to estimate the age of the animal. 'The tread is worn off the feet of the old ones - smooth as an old car tyre." Then, at last, they picked up the spoor of a huge old bull elephant, with smooth pad-marks the size of garbage-bin lids, and they left the jeep and followed him on foot for two days, sleeping on the spoor, eating the hard rations they carried. In the late afternoon of the second day, they caught up with the bull. He was in almost impenetrable jess bush through which they crept on hands and knees, and they were almost within touching distance when they made out the loom of the colossal grey body through the interlaced branches.

Eleven foot high at the shoulder, he was grey as a storm cloud, and his belly rumbled like distant thunder. One at a time Shasa took the boys up closer to have a good look at him, and then they retreated out of the jess bush and left the outcast to his eternal wanderings.

'Why didn't you shoot him, Dad?" Garry stuttered. 'After following all that way?" 'Didn't you see? One tusk was broken off at the tip and despite his bulk, the other tusk was pretty small." They limped back over the miles on feet that were covered in blisters, and it took two rest days in camp for the boys to recover from a march that had been beyond their strength.

Often during the nights they were awakened and lay in their narrow camp beds, thrilling to the shrieking cries of the hyena scavenging the garbage dump beside the lean-to kitchen. They were accompanied by the soprano yelping bark of the little dog-like jackals. The boys learned to recognize all these and the other sounds of the night - the birds such as the night jar and the dikkop, the smaller mammals, the night ape, the genet and the civet, and the insects and reptiles that squealed and hummed and croaked in the reeds of the waterhole.

They bathed infrequently, in matters of hygiene Shasa was more easy-going than their mother and a thousand times more so than their grandmother, and they ate the delicious concoctions that the Herero chef dreamed up for them with plenty of sugar and condensed milk. School was far away and they were happy as they had ever been with their father's complete and undivided attention and his wonderful stories and instruction.

'We haven't seen any signs of lions yet,' Shasa remarked at breakfast one morning. 'That's unusual. There are plenty of buffalo about, and the big cats usually keep close to the herds." Mention of lions gave the boys delightful cold shivers, and it was as though Shasa's words had conjured'up the beast.

That afternoon as the jeep bumped and weaved slowly through the long grass avoiding antbear holes and fallen logs, they came out on the edge of a long dry vlei, one of those grassy depressions of the African bush that during the rainy season become shallow lakes and at other times are treacherous swamps where a vehicle can easily bog down, or in the driest months are smooth treeless expanses resembling a well-kept polo ground. Shasa stopped the jeep in the tree line and searched the far side of the vlei, panning his binoculars slowly to pick up any game standing amongst the shadows of the tall grey mopani trees on the far side.

'Only a couple of bat-eared foxes,' he remarked, and passed the binoculars to the boys. They laughed at the antics of these quaint little animals, as they hunted grasshoppers in the short green grass in the centre of the vlei.

'Hey, Dad!" Sean's tone changed. 'There is a big old baboon in the top of that tree." He passed the binoculars back to his father.

'No,' Shasa said, without lowering the glasses. 'That's not a baboon. It's a human being!" He spoke in the vernacular to the two Ovambo trackers in the back of the jeep, and there was a quick but heated discussion, everybody taking differing views.

'All right, let's go and take a look." He drove the jeep out into the open vlei, and before they were half-way across there was no longer any doubt. In the top branches of a high mopani crouched a child, a little black girl dressed only in a loin cloth of cheap blue trade cotton.

'She's all alone,' Shasa exclaimed. 'Out here, fifty miles from the V' nearest 11age.

Shasa sent the jeep roaring across the last few hundred yards then pulled up in a rolling cloud of dust and ran to the base of the mopani.

He shouted up at the almost naked child. 'Come down!" and gestured to reinforce the command that she would certainly not understand.

She neither moved nor raised her head from the branch on which she lay.

Shasa looked around him quickly. At the base of the tree lay a blanket roll which had been ripped open, the threadbare blankets had been shredded and torn. A skin bag had also been xi.pned.and_ .... the-dry-maize--mea'r?t--contaiiaed had poured into the dust, there was a black three-legged pot lying on its side, a crude axe with the blade rough forged from a piece of scrap mild steel, and the shaft of a spear snapped off at the back of the head, but the point was missing.

A little farther off were scattered a few rags on which blood stains had dried black as tar, and some other objects which were covered by a living cloak of big shimmering iridescent flies. As Shasa approached, the flies rose in a buzzing cloud, revealing the pathetic remains on which they had been feasting. There were two pairs of human hands and feet, gnawed off at the wrists and ankles, and then - horribly - the heads. A man and a woman, their necks chewed through and the exposed vertebrae crushed by great fangs. Both heads were intact, although the mouths and nostrils and empty eyesockets were filled with the white rice pudding of eggs laid by the swarming flies. The grass was flattened over a wide area, crusted with dried blood, and the trodden dust was patterned with the unmistakable pug-marks of a fully grown male lion.

'The lion always leaves the head and hands and feet,' his Ovambo tracker said in a matter-of-fact voice, and Shasa nodded and turned to warn the boys to stay in the car. He was too late.

They had followed him and were studying the grisly relics with varied expressions - Sean with ghoulish relish, Michael with nauseated horror and Garry with intense clinical interest.

Swiftly Shasa covered the severed heads with the torn blankets.

He smelt that they were already in an advanced state of decomposition: they must have lain here many days. Then once again he turned his attention to the child in the branches high above them, calling urgently to her.

'She is dead,' said his tracker. 'These people have been dead four days at least. The little one has been in the tree all that time.

She is surely dead." Shasa would not accept that. He removed his boots and safari jacket and climbed into the mopani. He went up cautiously, testing each hand-hold and every branch before committing his weight to it.

To a height of ten feet above the ground the bark of the tree had been lacerated by claws. When the child was directly above him, almost within reach, Shasa called to her softly in Ovambo and then in Zulu.

'Hey, little one, can you hear me?" There was no movement and he saw that her limbs were thin as sticks, and her skin ash-grey with that peculiar dusty look that in the African presages death. Shasa eased himself up the last few feet and reached up to touch her leg. The skin was warm, and he felt an unaccountable rush of relief. He had expected the soft cold touch of death. However, the child was unconscious and her dehydrated body was light as a bird as Shasa gently loosened her grip on the branch and lifted her against his chest. He climbed down slowly, shielding her from any jarring or rough movement and when he reached the ground carried her to the jeep and laid her in the shade.

The first-aid kit contained a comprehensive collection of medical equipment. Long ago, Shasa had been forced to minister to one of his gunbearers mauled by a wounded buffalo and after that he never hunted without the kit, and he had learned to use all of it.

Swiftly he prepared a drip set and probed for the vein in the child's arm. The vein had collapsed, her pulse was weak and erratic, and he had to try again in the foot. This time he got the canula in and administered a full bag of Ringers lactate, and while it was flowing he added ten ccs of glucose solution to it. Only then did he attempt to make the child take water orally, and her swallowing reflex was still evident. A few drops at a time he got a full cup down her throat, and she showed the first signs of life, whimpering and stirring restlessly.

As he worked, he gave orders to his trackers over his shoulder.

'Take the spade, bury those people deep. It is strange that the hyena haven't found them yet, but make sure they don't do so later." One of the trackers held the child on his lap during the rough journey back to camp, protecting her from the jolts and heavy bumps. As soon as they arrived, Shasa strung the aerial of the short-wave radio to the highest tree in the grove, and after an hour of frustration finally made contact, not with the H'am Mine, but with one of the Courtney Company's geological exploration units that was a hundred miles closer.

Even then the contact was faint and scratchy and intermittent, but with many repetitions he got them to relay a message to the mine. They were to send an aircraft, with the mine doctor, to the landing strip at the police post at Rundu as soon as possible.

By this time, the little girl was conscious and talking to the Ovambo trackers in a weak piping voice that reminded Shasa of the chirping of a nestling sparrow. She was speaking an obscure dialect of one of the river people from Angola in the north, but the Ovambo was married to a woman of her tribe and could translate for Shasa.

The story she told was harrowing.

She and her parents had been on a journey to see her grandparents at the river village of Shakawe in the south, a trek on foot of hundreds of miles. Carrying all their worldly possessions, they had taken a short cut through this remote and deserted country when they had become aware that a lion was dogging them, following them through the forest - at first keeping its distance and then closing in.

Her father, an intrepid hunter, had realized the futility of stopping and trying to build some sort of shelter or of taking to the trees where the beast would besiege them. Instead he had tried to keep the lion off by shouting and clapping while he hurried to reach the river and the sanctuary of one of the fishing villages.

The child described the final attack when the animal, its thick ruff of black mane erect, had rushed in at the family, grunting and roaring. Her mother had only time enough to push the girl into the lowest branch of the mopani before the lion was on them. Her father had stood gallantly to meet it, and thrust his long spear into its chest, but the spear had snapped and the lion leapt upon him and tore out his bowels with a single swipe of curved yellow claws. Then it had sprung at the mother as she was attempting to climb into the mopani and hooked its claws into her back and dragged her down.

In her small birdlike voice the child described how the lion had eaten the corpses of her parents, down to the heads and feet and hands, while she watched from the upper branches. It had taken two days over the grisly feast, at intervals pausing to lick the spear wound in its shoulder. On the third day it had attempted to reach the child, ripping at the trunk of the mopani and roaring horribly. At last it had given up and wandered away into the forest, limping heavily with the wound. Even then the child had been too terrified to leave her perch and she had clung there until at last she had passed out with exhaustion and grief, exposure and fear.

While she was relating all this, the camp servants were refuelling the jeep and preparing supplies for the journey to Rundu. Shasa left as soon as this was done, taking the boys with him. He would not leave them in the camp while there was a wounded man-eating lion roaming in the vicinity.

They drove through the night, recrossing their jerry-built bridge and retracing their tracks until the following morning they intersected the main Rundu road, and that afternoon they finally arrived, dusty and exhausted, at the airstrip. The blue and silver Mosquito that Shasa had left at H'am Mine was parked in the shade of the trees at the edge of the strip and the company pilot and the doctor were squatting under the wing, waiting patiently.

Shasa gave the child into the doctor's care, and went quickly through the pile of urgent documents and messages that the pilot had brought with him. He scribbled out orders and replies to these, and a long letter of instruction to David Abrahams. When the Mosquito took off again, the sick girl went with them. She would receive first-rate medical attention at the mine hospital, and Shasa would decide what to do with the little orphan once she was fully recovered.

The return to the safari camp was more leisurely than the outward journey, and over the next few days the excitement of the lion adventure was forgotten in the other absorbing concerns of safari life, not least of which was the business of Garry's first kill. Bad luck now combined with his lack of coordination and poor marksmanship to cheat him of this experience that he hungered for more than any other, while on the other hand Sean succeeded in providing meat for the camp at every attempt.

'What we are going to do is practise a little more on the pigeons,' Shasa decided, after one of Garry's least successful outings.

In the evenings the flocks of fat green pigeons came flighting in to feast on the wild figs in the grove beside the waterhole.

Shasa took the boys down as soon as' the sun lost its heat, and placed them in the hides they had built of saplings and dried grass, each hide far enough from the next and carefully sited so that there was no danger of a careless shot causing an accident. This afternoon Shasa put Sean into a hide at the near end of the glade, with Michael, who had once again declined to take an active part in the sport, to keep him company and pick up the fallen birds for him.

Then Shasa and Garry set off together for the far side of the grove. Shasa was leading with Garry following him as the game path twisted between the thick yellow trunks of the figs. Their bark was yellow and scaly as the skin of a giant reptile, and the bunches of figs grew directly on the trunks rather than on the tips of the branches. Beneath the trees the undergrowth was tangled and thick, and the game path was so twisted that they could see only a short distance ahead, The light was poor this late in the afternoon, with the branches meeting overhead.

Shasa came around another turn and the lion was in the game path, walking straight towards him only fifty paces away. In the instant he saw it, Shasa realized that it was the man-eater. It was a huge beast, the biggest he had ever seen in a lifetime of hunting. It stood higher than his waist, and its mane was coal-black, long and shaggy and dense, shading to blue grey down the beast's flanks and back.

It was an old lion, its flat face criss-crossed with scars. Its mout was gaping, panting with pain as it limped towards him, and he so, that the spear wound in the shoulder had mortified, the raw ties crimson as a rose petal and the fur around the wound wet and slicke, down where the lion had been licking it. The flies swarmed to th wound, irritating and stinging, and the lion was in a vicious mood sick with age and pain. It lifted its dark and shaggy head and Shas looked into the pale yellow eyes and saw the agony and blind rag, they contained.

'Garry!" he said urgently. 'Walk backwards! Don't run, but ge out of here,' and without looking around he swung the sling of the rifle off his shoulder.

The lion dropped into a crouch, its long tail with the black bust of hair at the tip lashed back and forth like a metronome, as il gathered itself for the charge, and its yellow eyes fastened on Shasa.

a focus for all its rage. ú Shasa knew there would be time for only a single shot, for it would cover the ground between them in a blazing blur of speed. The light was too bad and the range was too far for that single shot to be conclusive, he would let it come in to where there could be no doubt, and the big 300-grain soft-nosed bullet from the Holland and Holland would shatter its skull and blow its brains to a mush.

The lion launched into its charge, keeping low to the earth, snaking in and grunting as it came, gut-shaking bursts of sound through the gaping jaws lined with long yellow fangs. Shasa braced himself and brought up the rifle, but before he could fire, there was the sharp crack of the little Winchester beside him and the lion collapsed in the middle of his charge, going down head first and cartwheeling, flopping over on its back to expose the soft butter-yellow fur of its belly, its limbs stretching and relaxing, the long curved talons in its huge paws slowly retracting into the pads, the pink tongue lolling out of its open jaws, and the rage dying out of those pale yellow eyes. From the tiny bullet hole between its eyes a thin serpent of blood crawled down to dribble from its brow into the dirt beneath it.

In astonishment Shasa lowered his rifle and looked round. Beside him stood Garry, his head at the level of Shasa's lowest rib, the little Winchester still at his shoulder, his face set and deadly pale, and his spectacles glinting in the gloom beneath the trees.

'You killed it,' Shasa said stupidly. 'You stood your ground and killed it." Shasa walked forward slowly and stooped over the carcass of the man-eater. He shook his head in amazement, and then looked back at his son. Garry had not yet lowered the rifle, but he was beginning now to tremble with delayed terror. Shasa dipped his finger into the blood that dribbled from the wound in the man-eater's forehead, then walked back to where Garry stood. He painted the ritual stripes on the boy's forehead and cheeks.

'Now you are a man and I'm proud of you,' he said. Slowly the colour flushed back into Garry's cheeks and his lips stopped trembling, and then his face began to glow. It was an expression of such pride and unutterable joy that Shasa felt his throat close up and tears sting his eyelids.

Every servant came from the camp to view the man-eater and to hear Shasa describe the details of the hunt. Then, by the light of the lanterns, they carried the carcass back. While the skinners went to work, the men sang the song of the hunter in Garry's honour.

Sean was torn between incredulous admiration and deepest envy of his brother, while Michael was fulsome in his praises. Garry refused to wash the dried lion's blood from his face when at last, well after midnight, Shasa finally ordered them to bed. At breakfast he still wore the crusted stripes of blood on his beaming grubby face and Michael read aloud the heroic poem he had written in Garry's honour. It began: With lungs to blast the skies with sound And breath hot as the blacksmith's forge Eyes as yellow as the moon's full round And the lust on human flesh to gorge Shasa hid a smile at the laboured rhyming, and at the end applauded as loudly as the rest of them. After breakfast they all trooped out to watch the skinners dressing out the lion-skin, pegging it fur side down in the shade, scraping away the yellow subcutaneous fat and rubbing in coarse salt and alum.

'Well, I still think it died of a heart attack,' Sean could suppress his envy no longer, and Garry rounded on him furiously.

'We all know what a clever dick you are. But when you shoot your first lion, then you can come and talk to me, smarty pants. All you are good for is a few little old impala!" It was a long speech, delivered in white heat, and Garry never stumbled nor stuttered once. It was the first time Shasa had seen him stand up to Sean's casual bullying, and he waited for Sean to assert his authority. For seconds it hung in the balance, he could see Sean weighing it up, deciding whether to tweak the spikes of hair at Garry's temple or to give him a chestnut down the ribs. He could see also that Garry was ready for it, his fists clenched and his lips set in a pale determined line. Suddenly Sean grinned that charming smile.

'Only kidding,' he announced airily, and turned back to admire the tiny bullet-hole in the skull. 'Wow! Right between the eyes? It was a peace offering.

Garry looked bemused and uncertain. It was the first time that had forced Sean to back down, and he wasn't able immediately grasp that he had succeeded.

Shasa stepped up and put his arm around Garry's shoulders. 'E you know what I'm going to do, champ? I'm going to have the he fully mounted for the wall in your room, with eyes and everythin he said.

For the first time, Shasa was aware that Garry had develope hard little muscles in his shoulders and upper arm. He had alwa, thought him a runt. Perhaps he had never truly looked at the chi] before.

Then suddenly it was over, and the servants were breaking camp an packing the tents and beds on to the trucks, and appallingly th prospect of the return to Weltevreden and school loomed ahead c them. Shasa tried to keep their spirits jaunty with stories and song on the long drive back to H'am Mine but with every mile the boy were more dejected.

On the last day when the hills which the Bushmen call the 'Plac, of All Life' floated on the horizon ahead of them, detached from th earth by the shimmering heat mirage, Shasa asked, 'Have you gentle men decided what you are going to do when you leave school?" I was an attempt to cheer them up, more than a serious enquiry. 'Who about you, Sean?" 'I want to do what we have been doing. I want to be a hunter, or] elephant hunter like great-grand-uncle Sean." 'Splendid? Shasa agreed. 'Only problem I can see is that you are at least sixty years too late." 'Well then,' said Sean, Tll be a soldier - I like shooting things." A shadow passed behind Shasa's eyes before he looked at Michael.

'What about you, Mickey?" 'I want to be a writer. I will work as a newspaper reporter and in my spare time I'll write poetry and great books." 'You'll starve to death, Mickey,' Shasa laughed, and then he swivelled around to Garry who was leaning over the back of the driving seat.

'What about you, champ?" 'I'm going to do what you do, Dad." 'And what is it ! do?" Shasa demanded with interest.

'You are the chairman of Courtney Mining and Finance, and you tell everybody else what to do. That's what I want to be one day, chairman of Courtney Mining and Finance." Shasa stopped smiling and was silent for a moment, studying the child's determined expression, then he said lightly, 'Well then, it looks as though it's up to you and me to support the elephant hunter and the poet." And he ran his hand over Garry's already unruly hair. It no longer required any effort to make an affectionate gesture towards his ugly duckling.

They came singing across the rolling grasslands of Zululand, and they were one hundred strong. All of them were members of the Buffaloes and Hendrick Tabaka had carefully picked them for this special honour guard. They were the best, and all of them were dressed in tribal regalia, feathers and furs and monkey-skin capes, kilts of cow-tails. They carried only fighting-sticks, for the strictest tradition forbade metal weapons of any kind on this day.

At the head of the column Moses Gama and Hendrick Tabaka trotted. They also had set aside their European clothing for the occasion, and of all their men they alone wore leopard-skin cloaks, as was their noble right. Half a mile behind them rose the dust of the cattle herd.

This was the lobola, the marriage price, two hundred head of prime beasts, as had been agreed. The herd-boys were all of them sons of the leading warriors who had ridden in the cattle trucks with their charges during the three-hundred-mile journey from the Witwatersrand. In charge of the herd-boys were Wellington and Raleigh Tabaka and they had detrained the herd at Ladyburg railway station. Like their father, they had discarded their western-style clothing for the occasion and were dressed in loincloths, and armed with their fighting-sticks, and they danced and called to the cattle, keeping them in a tight bunch, both of them excited and filled with self-importance by the task they had been allotted.

Ahead of them rose the high escarpment beyond the little town of Ladyburg. The slopes were covered with dark forests of black wattle and all of it was Courtney land, from where the waterfall smoked with spray in the sunlight around the great curve of hills. All ten thousand acres of it belonged to Lady Anna Courtney, the relict of Sir Garrick Courtney and to Storm Anders, who was the daughter of General Sean Courtney. However, beyond the waterfall lay a hundred choice acres of land which had been left to Sangane Dinizulu in terms of the will of General Sean Courtney, for he had been a faithful and beloved retainer of the Courtney family as had his lath Mbejane Dinizulu before him.

The road descended the escarpment in a series of hairpin bend and when Moses Gama shaded his eyes and stared ahead, he so another band of warriors coming down it to meet them. They we many more in number, perhaps five hundred strong. Like Mose party they were dressed in full regimentals, with plumes of fur an feathers on their heads and war rattles on their wrists and ankle The two parties halted at the foot of the escarpment, and from hundred paces faced each other, though still they sang and stampe and brandished their weapons.

The shields of the Zulus were matched, selected from dapple cowhides of white and chocolate brown, and the brows of the wal riors that carried them were bound with strips of the same dapple hide while their kilts and their plumes were cow-tails of purest whit They made a daunting and warlike show, all big men, their bodie gleaming with sweat in the sunlight, their eyes bloodshot with din and excitement and the pots of millet beer they had already downec Facing them Moses felt his nerves crawl with a trace of the terra that these men had for two hundred years inspired in all the other tribes of Africa, and to suppress it he stamped and sang as loudly a his Buffaloes who pressed closely around him. On this his weddinl day, Moses Gama had put aside all the manners and mores of th west, and slipped back easily into his African origins and his hear pumped and thrilled to the rhythms and the pulse of this horst continent.

From the Zulu ranks opposite him sprang a champion, a magnificent figure of a man with the strip of leopard skin around hi, brow that declared his royal origins. He was one 'of Victorin Dinizulu's elder brothers, and Moses knew he was a qualified lawyel with a large practice at Eshowe, the Zululand capital, but today he was all African, fierce and threatening as he swirled in the giya, the challenge dance.

He leapt and spun and shouted his own praises and those of his family, daring the world, challenging the men who faced him, while behind him his comrades drummed with their sticks on the ravhide shields, and the sound was like distant thunder, the last sound that a million victims had ever heard, the death-knell of Swazi and Xhosa, of Boer and Briton in the days when the impis of Chaka and Dingaan and Cetewayo had swept across the land, from Isandhlawana, the Hill of the Little Hand, where seven hundred British infantry were cut down in one of the worst military reverses that England had ever suffered in Africa, to the 'Place of Weeping' which the Boers named 'Weenen' for their grief for the women and children who died to that same dreadful drum roll when the impis came swarming down across the Tugela river, to a thousand other nameless and forgotten killing grounds where the lesser tribes had perished before the men of Zulu.

At last the Zulu champion staggered back into the ranks, streaked with sweat and dust, his chest heaving and froth upon his lips, and now it was Moses' turn to giya, and he danced out from amongst his Buffaloes, and leapt shoulder-high with his leopard-skins swirling around him. His limbs shone like coal freshly cut from the face, and his eyes and teeth were white as mirrors flashing in the sunlight. His voice rang from the escarpment, magnified by the echoes, and though the men facing him could not understand the words, the force and meaning of them was clear, his haughty disdain evident in every gesture. They growled and pressed forward, while his own Buffaloes were goaded by his example, their blood coming to the boil, ready to rush forward and join battle with their traditional foe, ready to perpetuate the bloody vendetta that had already run a hundred years.

At the very last moment, when violence and inevitable death were only a heartbeat away, and rage was as thick in the air as the static electricity of the wildest summer thunderstorm, Moses Gama stopped dancing abruptly, posing like a heroic statue before them - and so great was the force of his personality, so striking his presence, that the drumming of shields and the growl of battle rage died away.

Into the silence Moses Gama called in the Zulu language. 'I bring the marriage price!" and he held his stick aloft, a signal to the herdboys who followed the marriage party.

Lowing and bawling, adding their dust to the dust of the dancers, the herd was driven forward and immediately the mood of the Zulus changed. For a thousand years, since they had come down from the far north, following the tsetse-fly-free corridors down the continent with their herds, the Nguni peoples from which the Zulu tribe would emerge under the black emperor Chaka, had been cattle men. Their animals were their wealth and their treasure. They loved cattle as other men love women and children. Almost from the day they could walk unaided, the boys tended the herds, living with them in the veld from dawn to dusk of every day, establishing with them a bond and almost mystic communion, protecting them from predators with their very lives, talking to them and handling them and coming to know them completely. It was said that King Chaka knew every individual beast in his royal herds, and that out of a hundred thousand head he would know immediately if one were missing and would ask for it with a complete description, and not hesitate to order his executioners with their knobkerries to dash out the brains of even the youngest herd-boy if there was even a suspicion of his negligence.

So it was a committee of strict and expert judges who put asi the dancing and posturing and boasting, and instead applied the selves to the serious business of appraising.the bride price. Ea animal was dragged from the herd, and amid a buzz of cornroe and speculation and argument, was minutely examined. Its lien and trunk were palpated by dozens of hands simultaneously, its ja were forced open to expose the teeth and tongue, its head twisted that its ears and nostrils could be peered into, its udders stroked or weighed in the palm, its tail lifted to estimate its calf-bearing histo: and potential. Then finally, almost reluctantly, each animal w declared acceptable by old Sangane Dinizulu himself, the father the bride. No matter how hard they tried, they could find no groun( for rejecting a single animal. The Ovambo and the Xhosa love the cattle every bit as much as the Zulu, and are as expert in their judgement. Moses and Hendrick had exercised all their skills in makin their selection, for pride and honour were at stake.

It took many hours for every one of the two hundred animals to b examined while the bridegroom's party, still keeping aloof from th Zulus, squatted in the short grass on the side of the road, pretendin indifference to the proceedings. The sun was hot and the dust aggra voted the men's thirst, but no refreshment was offered while th, scrutiny went on.

Then at last Sangane Dinizulu, his silver pate shining in the sun but his body still upright and regal, called his herd-boys. JosepI Dinizulu came forward. As the senior herdsman, the old man gay the herd into his care. Although his exhortations were severe and he scowled most ferociously, the old man's affection for his youngesl son was ill-concealed, as was his delight at the quality of the stock which made up the marriage price. So when he turned and for the first time greeted his future son-in-law, he was having great difficulty in suppressing his smiles, they kept shooting out like beams of sunlight through cloud holes and were just as swiftly extinguished.

With dignity he embraced Moses Gama, and though he was a tall man, he had to reach up to. do so. Then he stepped back and clapped his hands, ' calling to the small party of young women who were sitting a little way off.

Now they rose and helped each other to settle the enormous clay pots of beer upon each other's heads. Then they formed a line and came forward, singing and undulating their hips, although their heads remained steady and not a drop slopped over the rims of the pots. They were all unmarried girls, none of them wore the high clay headdress or the matron's leather cloak, and above their short beaded skirts their bodies were oiled and stark naked so their pert young breasts joggled and bounced to the rhythm of the song of welcome and the wedding guests murmured and smiled appreciatively.

Although deep down old Sangane Dinizulu disapproved of marriage outside the tribe of Zulu, the lobola had been good and his future son-in-law was, by all accounts, a man of stature and importance.

None could reasonably object to suitors of this calibre, and as there might be others like him in the bridegroom's party, Sangane was not loath to show off his wares.

The girls knelt in front of the guests, hanging their heads and averting their eyes shyly. Giggling in response to the knowing looks and sly sallies of the men, they proffered the brimming beer-pots, and then withdrew swinging their hips so their skirts swirled up and pert young buttocks peeked provocatively from beneath them.

The beer-pots were so heavy that they required both hands to lift, and when they were lowered, there were thick white moustaches on the upper lips of the guests. Noisily they licked them away and the laughter became more relaxed and friendly.

When the beer-pots were empty, Sangane Dinizulu stood before them and made a short speech of welcome. Then they formed up again and started up the road that climbed the escarpment, but now Zulu ran shoulder to shoulder with Ovambo and Xhosa. Moses Gama had never believed he would see that happen. It was a beginning, he thought, a fine beginning, but there remained to be scaled a range of endeavour as high as the peaks of the Drakensberg mountains which rose out of the blue distances before them as they topped the escarpment.

Sangane Dinizulu had set the pace up the slope, although he must be all of seventy years of age, and now he led the cavalcade of men and animals down to his kraal. It was sited on a grassy slope above the river. The huts of his many wives were arranged in a circle, beehives of smooth thatch each with an entrance so low that a man must stoop to enter. In the centre of the circle was the old man's hut.

It also was a perfect beehive, but much grander than the others, and the thatch had been plaited into intricate patterns. It was the home of a chieftain of Zulu, a son of the heavens.

On the grassy slope was assembled a multitude, a thousand or more of the most important men of the tribe with all their senior wives. Many of them had travelled for days to be here, and they squatted in clumps and clusters down the slope, each chieftain surrounded by his own retainers.

When the bridegroom's party came over the crest, they rose as one man, shouting their greetings and drumming their shields, and Sangane Dinizulu led them down to the entrance of the kraal where he paused and spread his arms for silence. The wedding guests settled down again comfortably in the grass. Only the chieftains sat on their carved stools of office, and while the young girls carried the beer pots amongst them, Sangane Dinizulu made his wedding speech.

First he related the history of the tribe, and particularly of hi own clan of Dinizulu. He recited their battle honours and the valian deeds of his ancestors. These were many and it took a long time, bu the guests were well content for the black beer-pots were replenishe( as swiftly as they were emptied, and although the old ones knew tN history of the tribe as intimately as did Sangane Dinizulu, it repetition gave them endless satisfaction, as though it were an anchol in the restless sea of life. As long as the history and the custom persisted, the tribe was secure.

At last Sangane Dinizulu was done, and in a voice that was hoarse and scratchy, he ended, 'There are those amongst you who have queried the wisdom of a daughter of Zulu marrying with a man all another tribe. I respect these views, for I also have been consumed by doubts and have pondered long and seriously." Now the older heads in the congregation were nodding, and a few hostile glances were shot at the bridegroom's party, but Sangane Dinizulu went on.

'I had these same doubts when my daughter asked my permission to leave the hut of her mother and journey to goldi, the place of gold, and to work in the great hospital at Baragwanath. Now I am persuaded that what she has done was right and proper. She is a daughter of which an old man can be proud. She is a woman of the future." He faced his peers calmly and resolutely, seeing the doubt in their eyes, but ignoring it.

'The man who will be her husband is not of Zulu - but he also is a man of the future. Most of you have heard his name. You know him as a man of force and power. I am persuaded that by giving him my daughter in marriage I am once again doing what is right - for my daughter and for the tribe." When the old man sat down' on his stool they were silent, serious and withdrawn, and they looked uneasily towards the bridegroom where he squatted at the head of his party.

Moses Gama rose to his feet, and strode up the slope from where he could look down upon them. He was silhouetted against the sky, his height was emphasized and the royal leopard skin declared his lineage.

'Oh people of Zulu, I greet you." That deep thrilling voice reached to everyone of them, carrying clearly in the silence, and they stirred and murmured with surprise as they realized that he was speaking fluent Zulu.

'I have come to take one of the most comely daughters of your tribe, but as part of the marriage price I bring you a dream and a promise,' he began, and they were attentive but puzzled. Slowly the mood changed as he went on to set out his vision for them, a unification of the tribes and a sloughing off of the white domination under which they had existed for three hundred years. The older men became more and more uneasy as they listened, they shook their heads and exchanged angry glances, some of them muttered aloud, an unusual discourtesy towards an important guest, but what he was suggesting was a destruction of the old ways, a denial of the customs and orders of society which had held together the fabric of their lives. In its place he was offering something strange and untested, a world turned upside down, a chaos in which old values and proven codes were discarded with nothing to replace them except wild words - and like all old men, they were afraid of change.

With the younger men it was different. They listened, and his words warmed them like the flames of the camp fire in the frosty winter night. One of them listened more intently than all the rest.

Joseph Dinizulu was not yet fourteen years of age, but the blood of great Chaka charged his veins and pumped up his heart. These words, strange at first, began to sing in his head like one of the old fighting chants, and his breath came quicker as he heard Moses Gama end his bridal speech.

'So, people of Zulu, I come to give you back the land of your fathers. I'come to give you the promise that once again a black man will rule in Africa, and that as surely as tomorrow's sun will rise, the future belongs to us." All of a sudden Joseph Dinizulu was struck by a sense of destiny.

'A black man will rule in Africa." For Joseph Dinizulu, as for many others there that day, the world would never be the same again.

Victoria Dinizulu waited in her mother's hut. She sat on the earthen floor with a tanned kaross of hyrax fur under her. She wore the traditional dress of a Zulu bride. The beadwork had been sewn by her mother and her sisters, intricate and beautiful, each pattern carrying a hidden message. There were strings of coloured beads around her wrists and her ankles, and necklaces of beads, while her short skirt of leather strips was beaded and strings of beads were plaited into her hair and draped around her waist. In one respect only did her costume differ from that of the traditional Zulu bride: her breasts were covered, as they had been since puberty when she had been baptized into the Anglican Church. She wore a blouse of striped silk in gay colours which complemented the rest of her co, tume.

As she sat in the centre of the hut, she listened intently to th voice of her bridegroom from without. It carried clearly to her, through] she had to shush the other girls when they whispered and giggled Every word struck her with the force of an arrow, and she felt he love and duty for the man who uttered them swell until they threatened to choke her.

The interior of the hut was gloomy as an ancient cathedral lo: there were no windows, and the air was hazy with wood smoke that uncoiled lazily from the central fire and rose to the small hole in th summit of the belled roof. The cathedral atmosphere enhanced bel mood of reverence, and when the voice of Moses Gama ceased, th silence seemed to enter her heart. No cheers or shouted agreemenl followed his speech. The men of Zulu were silent and disturbed by it.

Victoria could feel it even where she sat in the darkened hut.

'It is time now,' her mother whispered, and lifted her to her feet.

'Go with God,' she whispered, for her mother was a Christian and had introduced her to that religion.

'Be a good wife to this man,' she instructed, and led her to the entrance of the hut.

She stepped outside, into the dazzling sunlight. This was the moment for which the guests had been waiting, and when they saw how beautiful she was, they roared like bulls and drummed their shields. Her father came to greet her and lead her to the carved ebony stool at the entrance of the kraal, so that the cimeza ceremony could begin.

The cimeza was the 'closing of the eyes' and Victoria sat with her eyes tightly closed as the representatives of the various clans came forward one at a time to place their gift before her. Only then was Victoria allowed to open her eyes and exclaim in wonder at the generosity of the givers. There, were gifts of pots and blankets and ornaments, marvellously woven beadwork, and envelopes of money.

Shrewdly old Sangane calculated the value of each as he stood behind her stool, and he was grinning with satisfaction when at last he gave the signal to his son Joseph to drive in the feast. He had set aside twelve fat steers for the slaughter, a gesture that proved him to be even more generous than the bearers of the wedding gifts, but then he was a great man and head of a noble clan. The chosen warriors came forward to slaughter the steers, and their mournful death bellows and the rank smell of fresh blood in the dust soon gave way to the aroma from the cooking fires that drifted blue smoke across the hillside.

At a gesture from old Sangane Moses Gama strode up the slope to the entrance of the kraal and Victoria rose to her feet to meet him. They faced each other and once again a silence fell. The guests were awed by this couple, the groom so tall and commanding, the bride beautiful and nubile.

Involuntarily they craned forward as Victoria unclipped the ucu string of beads from around her waist. This was the symbol of her virginity, and she knelt before Moses and, with both hands cupped in the formal and polite gesture, she offered him the beads. As he accepted her and her gift, a great shout went up from the guests. It was done, Moses Gama was her husband and her master at last.

Now the feasting and the beer-drinking could begin in earnest, and the raw red meat was heaped upon the coals and snatched off again barely singed, while the beer-pots passed from hand to hand and the young girls went swinging down the slope bearing fresh pots upon their heads.

Suddenly there was an uproar and a band of plumed warriors came dashing up the slope towards where Victoria sat at the kraal entrance. They were her brothers and half-brothers and nephews, even Joseph Dinizulu was amongst them, and they shouted their war cries as they came to rescue their sister from this stranger who would take her from their midst.

However, the Buffaloes were ready for them, and with Hendrick at their head and sticks whistling and hissing, they rushed in to prevent the abduction. The women wailed and ululated and the fighting-sticks clattered and whacked on flesh, and the warriors howled and circled and charged at each other in a fine mist of dust.

It was for this that all metal weapons were strictly banned from the ceremony, for the fighting, which was at first playful, soon heated up and blood dripped and bones cracked before the abductors allowed themselves to be driven off. The blood was staunched with a handful of dust clapped on the wound, and both victors and vanquished had worked up a fine thirst and shouted to the girls to bring more beer. The uproar subsided for only a few minutes to be resumed almost immediately as from the top of the slope came the rumble of motor cars.

The children raced up the hill and began to clap and sing as two big motor cars appeared over the brow and came bumping slowly over the rough track that led to the kraal.

In the leading vehicle was a large white woman, with a red face as lined and craggy as that of a bulldog, and a wide-brimmed oldfashioned hat on her head from under which grey hair curled untidily.

'Who is she?" Moses demanded.

'Lady Anna Courtney,' Victoria exclaimed. She was the one who encouraged me to leave here and go into the world." Impulsively Victoria ran forward to meet the vehicle, and when Lady Anna descended ponderously, she embraced her.

'So, my child, you have come back to us." Lady Anna's accent was still thick, though she had lived thirty-five years in Africa.

'Not for long." Victoria laughed and Lady Anna looked at her fondly. Once the child had served in the big house as one of her house maids, until her bright beauty and intelligence had convinced Lady Anna that she was superior to such menial work.

'Where is this man who is taking you away?" she demanded, and Victoria took her hand.

'First you must greet my father, then I will introduce you to my husband." From the second motor car a middle-aged couple climbed down to be enthusiastically greeted by the crowd that pressed forward around them. The man was tall and dapper, with the bearing of a soldier.

He was tanned by the sun and his eyes had the far-away look of the outdoor man. He twirled his moustaches and took his wife on his arm. She was almost as tall and even slimmer than he was, and despite the streaks of grey in her hair, she was still an unusually handsome woman.

Sangane Dinizulu came to greet them.

'I see you, Jamela!" His dignity was somewhat tempered by a happy grin of welcome, and Colonel Mark Anders answered him in perfectly colloquial Zulu.

'I see you, old man." The term was one of respect. 'May all your cattle and all your wives grow fat and sleek." Sangane turned to his wife Storm, who was the daughter of old General Scan Courtney. 'I see you, Nkosikazi, you bring honour to my kraal." The bond between the two families was like steel. It went back to another century and had been tested a thousand times.

'Oh, Sangane, I am so happy for you this day - and for Victoria." Storm left her husband and went quickly to embrace the Zulu girl.

'I wish you joy and many fine sons, Vicky,' she told her, and Victoria answered, 'I owe you and your family so much, Nkosikazi. I will never be able to repay you." 'Don't ever try,' Storm told her with mock severity. 'I feel as though my own daughter is getting married today. Introduce us to your husband, Vicky." Now Moses Gama came towards them, and when Storm greeted him in Zulu, he replied gravely in English, 'How do you do, Mrs Anders. Victoria has spoken of you and your family very often." When at last he turned to Mark Anders, he proffered his right hand.

'How do you do, Colonel?" Moses asked, and a wry smile flitted across his lips as he saw the white man hesitate momentarily before accepting the handshake. It was unusual for men to greet each other thus across the dividing line of colour, and despite his fluency in the language and his pretended affection for the Zulu people, Moses recognized this man.

Colonel Mark Anders was an anachronism, a son of the English Queen Victoria, a soldier who had fought in two world wars, and the warden of Chaka's Gate National Park which he had saved from the poachers and despoilers by dedication and sheer bloody-mindedness, and made into one of Africa's most celebrated wild-life sanctuaries.

He loved the wild animals of Africa with a kind of paternal passion, protecting and cherishing them, and to only a slightly less degree his attitude towards the black tribes, especially the Zulus, was the same, paternalistic and condescending. By this definition he was the mortal enemy of Moses Gama, and as they looked into each other's eyes, they both recognized this fact.

'I have heard the lion roar from afar,' Mark Anders said in Zulu.

'Now I meet the beast face to face." 'I have heard of you as well, Colonel,' Moses replied, pointedly speaking English.

'Victoria is a gentle child,' Mark Anders persisted in his use of Zulu. 'We all hope you will not teach her your fierce ways." 'She will be a dutiful wife,' Moses said in English. 'She will do what I ask of her, I am sure." Storm had been following the exchange, sensing the innate hostility between the two men and now she intervened smoothly.

'If you are ready, Moses, we can all go down to Theuniskraal for the ceremony." Victoria and her mother had insisted on a Christian ceremony to reinforce the traditional tribal wedding. Now Sangane and most of the other guests who were pagan and ancestor-worshippers, remained at the kraal, while the diminished bridal party crowded into the two motor vehicles.

Theuniskraal was the home of Lady Anna Courtney and the original seat of the Courtney family. It stood amongst its sprawling lawns and unruly gardens of palms and bourgainvillaea and pride of India trees at the foot of the Ladyburg escarpment. It was a rambling old building of oddly assorted architectual styles, and beyond the gardens stretched endless fields of sugar cane, that dipped and undulated to the breeze like the swells of the ocean.

The wedding party trooped into the house to change into garb more suitable than beads and furs and feathers for the second ceremony while Lady Anna and the family went to greet the Anglican priest in the marquee that had been set up on the front lawn.

When the bridegroom and his attendants came out on to the lawns half an hour later, they wore dark lounge suits and Victoria's elder brother, who had pranced and swirled his plumes in the giya just a few hours before, now wore his Law Association tie in an impeccable Windsor knot and aviator-style dark glasses against the glare of Theuniskraal's whitewashed walls, as he chatted affably with the Courtney family, while they waited for the bride.

Victoria's mother was decked out in one of Lady Anna's cast-off caftans, for the two ladies were of similar build, and she was already sampling the fare that was laid out on the long trestle table in the marquee. Colonel Mark Anders and the Anglican priest stood a little aside from the main group; men of the same generation, they both found the proceedings disquieting and unnatural. It had taken all Storm's powers to persuade the priest to perform the ceremony, and then he had only agreed on condition that the wedding was not held in his own church in the village where his conservative white congregation might take offence.

'Damned if we weren't all a sight better off in the old days when everybody knew their place instead of trying to ape their betters,' Mark Anders grumbled, and the priest nodded.

'No sense in looking for trouble --' He broke off as Victoria came out on to the wide verandah. Storm Anders had helped her select her full-length white satin wedding dress with a wreath of tiny red tea roses holding the long veil in place around her brow. The contrast of red and white against her dark and glossy skin was striking and her joy was infectious. Even Mark Anders forgot his misgivings for the moment, as Lady Anna at the piano struck up the wedding march.

x At her father's kraal, Victoria's family had built a magnificent new hut for her nuptial night. Her brothers and half-brothers had cut the wattle saplings and the trunk for the central post and plaited the stripped green branches into the shape of the beehive. Then her mother and sisters and half-sisters had done the women's work of thatching, carefully combing the long grass stems and lacing the crisp bundles on to the wattle framework, packing and trimming and weaving them until the finished structure was smootll and symmetrical and the brushed grass stems shone like polished brass.

Everything the hut contained was new, from the three-legged pot to the lamp and the blankets and the magnificent kaross of hyrax and monkeyskins which was the gift of Victoria's sisters, lovingly tanned and sewn by them into a veritable work of art.

At the cooking fire in the centre of the hut Victoria worked alone, preparing the first meal for her husband, while she listened to the shouted laughter of the guests outside in the night. The millet beer was mild. However, the women had brewed hundreds of gallons and the guests had been drinking since early morning.

Now she heard the bridegroom's party approaching the hut. There was singing and loud suggestive advice, cries of encouragement and rude exhortations to duty and then Moses Gama stooped through the entrance. He straightened and stood tall over her, his head brushing the curved roof and outside the voices of his comrades retreated and dwindled.

Still kneeling, Victoria sat back on her heels and looked up at him. Now at last she had discarded her western clothing and wore for the last time the short beaded skirt of the virgin. In the soft ruddy light of the fire her naked upper body had the dark patina of antique amber.

'You are very beautiful,' he said, for she was the very essence of Nguni womanhood. He came to her and took her hands and lifted her to her feet.

'I have prepared food for you,' she whispered huskily.

'There will be time later to eat." He led her to the piled kaross and she stood submissively while he untied the thong of her apron and then lifted her in his arms and laid her on the bed of soft fur.

As a girl she had played the games with the boys in the reed banks beside the waterhole, and out on the open grassy veld where she had gone with the other girls to gather firewood conveniently close to where the cattle were being herded. These games of touching and exploring, of rubbing and fondling, right up to the forbidden act of intromission, were sanctioned by tribal custom and smiled at by the elders, but none of them had fully prepared her for the power and skill of this man, or for the sheer magnificence of him. He reached deeply into her body and touched her very soul so that much later in the night she clung to him and whispered: 'Now I am more than just your wife, I am your slave to the end of my days." In the dawn her joy was blighted, and though her lovely moon face remained serene, she wept within when he told her, 'There will 0my be one more night - on the road back to Johannesburg. Then I must leave you." 'For how long?" she asked.

'Until my work is done,' he replied, then his expression softened and he stroked her face. 'You knew that it must be so. I warned you that when you married me, you were marrying the struggle." 'You warned me,' she agreed in a husky whisper. 'But there'was no way that I could guess at the agony of your leaving." They rose early the following morning. Moses had acquired a secondhand Buick, old and _slbbvenJg.b.not toex.('itehntrs,* o_,- but one of Hendrick Tabaka's expert mechanics had overhauled the engine and tightened the suspension, leaving the exterior untouched.

In it they would return to Johannesburg.

Though the sun had not yet risen, the entire kraal was astir, and Victoria's sisters had prepared breakfast for them. After they had eaten came the hard part of taking leave of her family. She knelt before her father.

'Go in peace, my daughter,' he told her fondly. 'We will think of you often. Bring your sons to visit us." Victoria's mother wept and keened as though it were a funeral, not a wedding, and Victoria could not comfort her although she embraced her and protested her love and duty until the other daughters took her away.

Then there were all her stepmothers and her half-brothers and half-sisters, and the uncles and aunts and cousins who had come from the farthest reaches of Zululand. Victoria had to make her farewells to all of them, though some partings were more poignant than others. One of these was her goodbye to Joseph Dinizulu, her favourite of all her relatives. Although he was a half-brother and seven years younger than she was, a special bond had always existed between them. The two of them were the brightest and most gifted of their generation in the family, and because Joseph lived at Drake's Farm with one of the elder brothers, they had been able to continue their friendship.

However, Joseph would not be returning to the Witwatersrand.

He had written the entrance exams and been accepted by the exclusive multi-racial school, Waterford, in Swaziland, and Lady Anna Courtney would be paying his school fees. Ironically, this was the same school to which Hendrick Tabaka was sending his sons, Wellington and Raleigh. There would be opportunity for their rivalry to flourish.

'Promise me you will work hard, Joseph,' Vicky said. 'Learning makes a man strong." 'I will be strong,' Joseph assured her. The elation that Moses Gama's speech had aroused in him still persisted. 'Can I come and visit you and your husband, Vicky? He is a man, the kind of man I will want to be one day." Vicky told Moses what the child had said. They were alone in the old Buick, all the wedding gifts and Vicky's possessions filling the boot and piled in the back seat, and they were leaving that great littoral amphitheatre of Natal, going up over the tail of the Drakensberg range on to the high veld of the Transvaal.

'The children are the future,' Moses nodded, staring ahead at the steep blue serpent of road that climbed the escarpment, past the green hill of Majuba where the Boers had thrashed the British in the first of many battles with them. 'The old men are beyond hope. You saw them at the wedding, how they kicked and baulked like unbroken oxen when I tried to show them the way - but the children, ah the children!" He smiled. 'They are like fresh clean sheets of paper. You can write on them what you will. The old men are stone-hard and impermeable, but the children are clay, eager clay waiting for the shaping hands of the potter." He held up one of his hands. It was long and shapely, the hand of a surgeon or an artist and the palm was a delicate shade of pink, smooth and not calloused by labour.

'Children lack any sense of morality they are without fear, and death is beyond their conception. These are all things they acquire later, by the teaching of their elders. They make perfect soldiers for they question nothing and it takes no great physical strength to pull a trigger. If an enemy strikes them down they become the perfect martyrs. The bleeding corpse of a child strikes horror and remorse into even the hardest heart. Yes, the children are our key to the future. Your Christ knew it when he said "Suffer the little children to come unto me"." Victoria twisted on the leather bench seat of the Buick and stared at him.

'Your words are cruel and blasphemous,' she whispered, torn by her love for him and her instinctive rejection of what he had just said.

'And yet your reaction proves their truth,' he said.

'But --' she paused, reluctant to ask, and fearful to hear his reply, 'but are you saying that we should use our children --' She broke off, and an image of the paediatric section of the hospital came into her mind. She had spent the happiest months of all her training amongst the little ones. 'Are you suggesting that you would use the children in the front line of the struggle - as soldiers?" 'If a child cannot grow up a free man, then he might as well die as a child,' Moses Gama said. 'Victoria, you have heard me say this before. It is time now that you learn to believe it. There is nothing I would not do, no price I would not pay, for our victory. If I have to see a thousand little children dead so that a hundred thousand more may live to grow up free men, then for me the bargain is a fair one." Then, for the very first time in her life, Victoria Dinizulu was trul' afraid.

That night they stayed at Hendrick Tabaka's house in Drake's Farn Township, and it was well after midnight before they could go to th small bedroom that had been set aside for them because there were many who demanded Moses' attention, men from the Buffaloes and the Mineworkers' Union, a messenger from the council of the AN( and a dozen petitioners and supplicants who came quietly as jackak, to the lion when the word flashed through the township that Mose, Gama had returned.

At all these meetings Victoria was present, although she nevei spoke and sat quietly in a corner of the room. At first the men .were surprised and puzzled, darting quick glances across at her and reluctant to come to their business until Moses pressed them. None of them was accustomed to having women present when serious matters were discussed. However, none of them could bring themselves to protest, until the ANC messenger came into the room. He was invested with all the power and importance of the council he represented, and so he was the first to speak about Victoria's presence.

'There is a woman here,' he said.

'Yes,' Moses nodded. 'But not just a woman, she is my wife." 'It is not fitting,' said the messenger. 'It is not the custom. This is men's business." 'It is our purpose and our aim to tear down and burn the old customs and to build up the new. In that endeavour we will need the help of all our people. Not just the men, but the women and children also." There was a long silence while the messenger fidgeted under Moses' dark unrelenting stare.

'The woman can remain,' he capitulated at last.

'Yes,' Moses nodded. 'My wife will remain." Later in the darkness of their bedroom, in the narrowness of the single bed, Victoria pressed close to him, the soft plastic curves of her body conforming to his hardness and she said: 'You have honoured me by making me a part of your struggle.

Like the children, I want to be a soldier. I have thought about it and I have discovered what I can do." 'Tell me,' he invited.

'The women. I can organize the women. I can begin with the nurses of the hospital, and then the other women - all of them. We must take our part in the struggle beside the men." His arms tightened around her. 'You are a lioness,' he said. 'A beautiful Zulu lioness." 'I can feel your heartbeat,' she whispered, 'and my own heart beats in exact time to it." In the morning Moses drove her to the nurses' home at the hospital. She stood at the top of the steps and did not go into the building. He watched her in the rear-view mirror as he drove away and she was still standing there when he turned into the traffic, heading back towards Johannesburg and the suburb of Rivonia.

He was one of the first to arrive at Puck's Hill that morning to attend the council meeting to which the previous night's messenger had summoned him.

Marcus Archer met Moses on the verandah, and his smile was vitriolic as he greeted him. 'They say a man is incomplete until he marries - and only then is he finished." There were two men already seated at the long table in the kitchen which had always been used as their council chamber. They were both white men.

Brain Fischer was the scion of an eminent Afrikaner family whose father had been a judge-president of the Orange Free State. Though he was an expert on mining law, and a QC at the Johannesburg bar, he had also been a member of the old Communist Party and was a member of the ANC, and lately his practice had become almost entirely the defence of those accused under the racial laws that the Nationalist government had enacted since 1948. Although he was a charming and erudite man with a real concern for his countrymen of all races, Moses was wary of him. He was a starry-eyed believer in the eventual miraculous triumph of good over evil, and firmly opposed the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe, the military branch of the ANC. His pacifist influence on the rest of the Congress set a brake on Moses' aspirations.

The other white man was Joe Cicero, a Lithuanian immigrant.

Moses could guess why he had come to Africa - and who had sent him. He was one of the eagles, fierce hearted as Moses was himself, and an ally when the need for direct and even violent action was discussed. Moses went to sit beside him, across the table from Fischer. He would need Joe Cicero's support this day.

Marcus Archer, who loved to cook, set a plate of devilled kidneys and oenœs ranchero in front of him, but before Moses had finished his breakfast, the others began to arrive. Nelson Mandela and his faithful ally Tambo, arrived together, followed quickly by Walter Sisulu and Mbeki and the others, until the long table was crowded and cluttered with papers and dirty plates, with coffee cups and ashtrays which were soon overflowing with crushed cigarette butts.

The air was thick with tobacco smoke and Marcus's cooking aromas, and the talk was charged and serious as they tried to decide and agree exactly what were the objects of the defiance campaign.

'We have to stir the awareness of our people, to shake them out of their dumb cowlike acceptance of oppression." Mandela put the premier proposition, and across from him Moses leaned forward.

'More important, we must awaken the conscience of the rest of the world, for that is the direction from which our ultimate salvation will come." 'Our own people--' Mandela began, but Moses interrupted him.

'Our own people are powerless without weapons and training. The forces of oppression ranged against us are too powerful. We cannot triumph without arms." 'You reject the way of the peace then?" Mandela asked. 'You presuppose that freedom can only be won at the point of the gun?" 'The revolution must be tempered and made strong in the blood of the masses,' Moses affirmed. 'That is always the way." 'Gentlemen! Gentlemen!" Brain Fischer held up his hand to stop them. 'Let us return to the main body of the discussion. We agree that by our campaign of defiance we hope to stir our own people out of their lethargy and to attract the attention of the rest of the world.

Those are our two main objects. Let us now decide on our secondary objects." 'To establish the ANC as the only true vehicle of liberation,' Moses suggested. 'At present we have less than seven thousand members, but by the end of the campaign we should aim to have enrolled one hundred thousand more." To this there was general agreement, even Mandela and Tambo nodded and when the vote was taken it was unanimous and they could go on to discuss the details of the campaign.

It was a massive undertaking, for it was planned that the campaign should be nationwide and that it hould be conducted simultaneously in every one of the main centres of the Union of South Africa so as to place the utmost strain on the resources of the government and to test the response of the forces of law and order.

'We must fill their gaols until they burst. We must offer ourselves up for arrest in our thousands until the machinery of tyranny breaks down under the strain,' Mandela told them.

For three more days they sat in the kitchen at Puck's Hill, working out and agreeing every minute detail, preparing the lists of names and places, putting together the timetable of action, the logistics of transport and communication, establishing the lines of control from the central committee down through the provincial headquarters of the movement, and ultimately to the regional cadres in every black township and location.

It was an onerous task but at last there was only one detail left to decide - the day on which it would begin. Now they all looked to Albert Luthuli at the head of the table and he did not hesitate.

'June the twenty-sixth,' he said, and when there was a murmur of agreement, he went on, 'So be it then. We all know our tasks." And he gave them the salute of upraised thumbs. 'Amandla.t Power!

Ngawethu.t' When Moses went out to where the old Buick was parked beneath the gum trees, the sunset was filling the western sky with furnace colours of hot orange and smouldering red, and Joe Cicero was waiting for him. He leaned against the silvery trunk of one of the bluegum trees, with his arms folded over his broad chest, a bearlike figure, short and squat and powerful.

He straightened up as Moses came towards him.

'Can you give me a lift in to Braamfontein, comrade?" he asked, and Moses opened the door of the Buick for him, and they drove in silence for ten minutes before Joe said quietly, 'It is strange that you and I have never spoken privately." His accent was elusive, but The planes of his pale face above the short dark fringe of beard were flat and Slavic and his eyes were dark as tar pools. 'Why is it so strange?" Moses asked.

'We share common views,' Joe replied. 'We are both true sons of the revolution." 'Are you certain of that?" 'I am certain,' Joe nodded.

'I have studied you and listened to you with approval and admiration. I believe that you are one of the steely men that the revolution needs, comrade." Moses did not reply. He kept his eyes on the road, and his expression impassive, letting the silence draw out, forcing the other man to break it.

'What are your feelings towards mother Russia?" Joe asked softly at last, and Moses considered the question.

'Russia has never had colonies in Africa,' Moses answered carefully. 'I know that she gives support to the struggle in Malaya and Algeria and Kenya. I believe she is a true ally of the oppressed peoples of this world." Joe smiled and lit another Springbok cigarette from the flat maroon and white pack. He was a chain-smoker and his stubby fingers were stained dark brown.

'The road to freedom is steep and rocky,' he murmured. 'And the revolution is never secure. The proletariat must be protected from itself by the revolutionary guards." 'Yes,' Moses agreed. 'I have read the works of both Marx and Lenin." 'Then I was correct,' Joe Cicero murmured. 'You are a believer.

We should be friends - good friends. There are difficult days ahead and there will be a need for steely men." He reached over the back seat and picked up his attach case. 'You can let me out at th, central railway station, comrade,' he said.

It had been fully dark for two hours by the time Moses reached th camp in the gorge below the Sundi Caves and parked the Buick behind the Nissen hut that was the expedition's office and laboratory, and he went up the path to Tara Courtney's tent, stepping softly sc as not alarm her. He saw her silhouette against the canvas side. She was lying on her stretcher bed reading by the light of the petromax lantern, and he saw her start as he scratched on the canvas.

'Don't be afraid,' he called softly. 'It's me." And her reply was low but quivering with joy. 'Oh God, I thought you'd never come." She was in a frenzy for him. Her other pregnancies had always left her feeling nauseous and bloated, and the thought of sexual contact during that time had been repugnant. But now, even though she was over three months pregnant, her wanting was a kind of madness.

Moses seemed to sense her need, but did not try to match it. He lay naked upon his back on the stretcher, and he was like a pinnacle of black granite. Tara hurled herself upon him to impale herselfi She was sobbing and uttering little cries and yelps. At once both clumsy and adroit, her body, not yet swollen by the child within her, thrashed and churned above him as he lay quiescent and unmoving, and she went off beyond physical endurance, beyond the limits of flesh, insatiable and desperate for him, until exhaustion at last overcame her and she rolled off him and lay panting weakly, her chestnut hair darkened by her own sweat and plastered to her forehead and neck, and there was a thin pink co19uring of blood on the front of her thighs, so wild had been her passion.

Moses drew the sheet over her and held her until she had stopped shaking and her breathing had quietened, and then he said, 'It will begin soon - the date has been agreed." Tara was so transported that for a while she did not understand, and she shook her head stupidly.

'June the twenty-sixth,' Moses said. 'Across the land, in every city, all at the same time. Tomorrow I will be going to Port Elizabeth in the eastern Cape to command the campaign there." That was hundreds of miles from Johannesburg, and she had come to be near him. With the melancholy of after-love upon her, Tara felt cheated and abused. She wanted to protest but with an effort checked herself.

'How long will you be away?" 'Weeks." 'Oh Moses!" she began, and then warned by his quick frown, she relapsed into silence.

'The American woman - the Godolphin woman. Have you contacted her? Without publicity the value of our efforts will be halved." 'Yes." Tara paused. She had been on the point of telling him that it was all arranged, that Kitty Godolphin would meet him any time he wanted, but she stopped herself. Instead of handing her over to Moses and standing aside, here was her chance to stay close to him.

'Yes, I have spoken to her. We met at her hotel, she is eager to meet you but she is out of town at the moment, in Swaziland." 'That is no good,' Moses muttered. 'I had hoped to see her before I left." 'I could bring her down to Port Elizabeth,' Tara cut in eagerly.

'She will be back in a day or two and I will bring her to you." 'Can you get away from here?" he asked dubiously.

'Yes, of course. I will bring the television people down to you in my own car." Moses grunted uncertainly, and was silent while he thought about it, and then he nodded.

'Very well. I will explain how you will be able to contact me when you get there. I will be in the township of New Brighton, just outside the city." 'Can I be with you, Moses? Can I stay with you?" 'You know that is impossible." He was irritated by her persistence.

'No whites are allowed in the township without a pass." 'The television team will not be able to help you much if we are kept out of the township,' Tara said quickly. 'We should be close to you to be of any use to the struggle." Cunningly she had linked herself to Kitty Godolphin, and she held her breath as he thought about it.

'Perhaps,' he nodded, and she exhaled softly. He had accepted it.

'Yes. There might be a way. There is a mission hospital run by German nuns in the township. They are friends. You could stay there. I will arrange it." She tried not to let him see her triumph. She would be with him, that was all that was important. It was madness, but though her body was bruised and sore, already she wanted him again.

It was not physical lust, it was more than that. It was the only way she could possess him, even for a few fleeting minutes. When she had him locked in her body, he belonged to her alone.

Tara was puzzled by Kitty Godolphin's attitude towards her. She was accustomed to people, both men and women, responding immediately to her own warm personality and good looks. Kitty was different, from the very beginning there had been a cold-eyed reserve and an innate hostility in her. Very swiftly Tara had seen beyond the angelic, little-girl image that Kitty so carefully projected, but even after she had recognized the tough and ruthless person beneath, she could find no logical reason for the woman's attitude. After all Tara was offering her an important assignment, and Kitty was examining the gift as though it were a live scorpion.

'I don't understand,' she protested, her voice and eyes snapping.

'You told me we could do the interview here in Johannesburg. Now you want me to traipse off into the deep sticks somewhere." 'Moses Gama has to be there. Something important is about to take place--' 'What is so important.9' Kitty demanded, fists on her lean denimclad hips. 'What we agreed was important also." Most people, from leading politicians and international stars of sport and entertainment down to the lowest nonentity, were ready to risk slipping a spinal disc in their eagerness to appear for even the briefest moment on the little square screen. It was Kitty Godolphin's right, a semi-divine right, to decide who would be accorded that opportunity and who would be denied it. Moses Gama's cavalier behaviour was insulting. He had been chosen, and instead of displaying the gratitude which was Kitty Godolphin's due, he was setting conditions.

'Just what is so important that he cannot make the effort of common courtesy.9' she repeated.

'I'm sorry, Miss Godolphin, I can't tell you that." 'Well then, I'm sorry also, Mrs'Courtney, but you tell Moses Gama from me that he can go straight to hell without passing GO and without collecting his two hundred dollars." 'You aren't serious!" Tara hadn't expected that.

'I have never been more serious in my life." Kitty rolled her wrist to look at her Rolex. 'Now, if you will excuse me, I have more important matters to attend to." 'All right,' Tara gave in at once. 'I will risk it. I'll tell you what is going to happen--' Tara paused while she considered the consequences, and then asked, 'You will keep it to yourselL what I am about to tell you.9' 'Darling, if there is a good story in it, they wouldn't get it out of me with thumbscrew and hot irons - that is, not until I splash it across the screen myself." Tara told her in a rush of words, getting it out quickly before she could change her mind. 'It will be a chance to film him at work, to see him with his people, to watch him defying the forces of oppression and bigotry." She saw Kitty hesitating and knew that she had to think quickly.

'However, I should warn you, there may be danger. The confrontation could turn to violence and even bloodshed,' she said, and she had got it exactly right.

'Hank!" Kitty Godolphin shouted through to the lounge of her suite where the camera crew were strewn over the furniture like the survivors of a bomb blast, listening at full volume of the radio to the new rock 'n' roll sensation warning them to keep off his blue suede shoes.

'Hank!" Kitty raised her voice above Presley's. 'Get the cameras packed. We are going to a place called Port Elizabeth. If we can find where the hell it is." They drove through the night in Tara's Packard, and the suspension sagged under the weight of bodies and camera equipment.

In his travels around the country Hank had discovered that cannabis grew as a weed around most of the villages in the reserves of Zululand and the Transkei. In an environment that the plant found agreeable, it reached the size of a small tree. Only a few of the older generation of black tribesmen smoked the dried leaves, and although it was proscribed as a noxious plant and listed as a dangerous drug, its use was so localized and restricted to the more primitive blacks in the remote areas - for no white person or educated African would lower himself to smoke it - that the authorities made little effort to prevent its cultivation and sale. Hank had found an endless supply of what he declared to be 'pure gold' for the payment of pennies.

'Man, a sack of this stuff on the streets of Los Angeles would fetch a hundred thousand dollars,' he murmured contentedly as he lit a hand-rolled cigarette and settled down on the back seat of the Packard.

The heavy incense of the leaves filled the interior, and after a few draws Hank passed the cigarette to Kitty in the front seat. Kitty drew on the butt deeply and held the smoke in her lungs, as long as she was able, before blowing it out in a pale streamer against the windscreen. Then she offered the butt to Tara.

'I don't smoke tobacco,' Tara told her politely, and they all laughed.

'That ain't baccy, sweetheart,' Hank told her.

'What is it?" 'You call it dagga here." 'Dagga." Tara was shocked.

She remembered that Centaine had fired one of her houseboys who smoked it.

'He dropped my Rosenthal tureen, the one that belonged to Czar Nicholas,' Centaine had complained. 'Once they start on that stuff they become totally useless." 'No thanks,' Tara said quickly, and thought how angry Shasa would be if he knew that she had been offered it. That thought gave her pause and she changed her mind. 'Oh, all right." She took the butt, steering the Packard with one hand. 'What do I do?" 'Just suck it in and hold it down,' Kitty advised, 'and ride the glow." The smoke scratched her throat and burned her lungs, but the thought of Shasa's outrage gave her determination. She fought the urge to cough and held it down.

Slowly she felt herself relaxing, and a mild glow of euphoria made her body seem air-light and cleansed her mind. All the agonies of her soul became trivial and fell behind her.

'I feel good,' she murmured, and when they laughed, she laughed with them and drove on into the night.

In the early morning before it was fully light, they reached the coast, skirting the bay of Algoa where the Indian Ocean took a deep bite out of the continent, and the green waters were chopped to a white froth by the wind.

'Where do we go from here?" Kitty asked.

'The black township of New Brighton,' Tara told her. 'There is a mission run by German nuns, a teaching and nursing order, the Sisters of St Magdalene. They are expecting us. We aren't really allowed to stay in the township, but they have arranged it." Sister Nunziata was a handsome blond woman, not much older than forty years. She had a clear scrubbed-looking skin and her manner was brisk and efficient. She wore the light grey cotton habit of the order, and a white shoulder-length veil.

'Mrs Courtney, I have been expecting you. Our mutual friend will be here later this morning. You will want to bathe and rest." She led them to the cells that had been set aside for them and apologized for the simple comforts they contained. Kitty and Tara shared a cell.

The floor was bare cement, the only decoration was a crucifix on the whitewashed wall, and the springs of the iron bedsteads were covered with thin hard coir mattresses.

'She's just great,' Kitty enthused. 'I must get her on film. Nuns always make good footage." As soon as they had bathed and unpacked their equipment, Kitty had her crew out filming. She recorded a good interview with Sister Nunziata, her German accent lent interest to her statements, and then they filmed the black children in the schoolyard and the out patients waiting outside the clinic.

Tara was awed by the girl's energy, her quick mind and glib tongue, and her eye for angle and subject as she directed the shooting.

It made Tara feel superfluous, and her own lack of talent and creative skill irked her. She found herself resenting the other girl for having pointed up her inadequacies so graphically.

Then everything else was irrelevant. A nondescript old Buick sedan pulled into the mission yard and a tall figure climbed out and came towards them. Moses Gama wore a light blue open-neck shirt, the short sleeves exposed the sleek muscle in his upper arms and neck, and his tailored blue slacks were belted around his narrow waist.

Tara didn't have to say anything, they all knew immediately who he was as Kitty Godolphin breathed softly beside her, 'My God, he is beautiful as a black panther." Tara's resentment of her flared into seething hatred. She wanted to rush to Moses and embrace him so that Kitty might know he was hers, but instead she stood dumbly while he stopped in front of Kitty and held out his right hand.

'Miss Godolphin? At last,' he said, and his voice brought out a rush of goose-bumps down Tara's arms.

The rest of the day was spent in reconnaisance and the filming of more background material, this time with Moses as the central figure in each shot. The New Brighton township was typical of the South African urban locations, rows of identical low-cost housing laid out in geometric squares of narrow roads, some of them paved and others rutted and filled with muddy puddles in which the pre-school children and toddlers, many of them naked or dressed only in ragged shorts, played raucously.

Kitty filmed Moses picking his way around the puddles, squatting to talk to the children, lifting a marvellously photogenic little black cherub in his arms and wiping his snotty nose.

'That's great stuff,' Kitty enthused. 'He's going to look magnificent on film." The children followed Moses, laughing and skipping behind him as though he were the Pied Piper, and the women attracted by the commotion came out of the squalid little cottages. When they recognized Moses and saw the cameras, they began to ululate and dance.

They were natural actresses and completely without inhibition, and Kitty was everywhere, calling for shots and unusual camera angles, clearly delighted by the footage she was getting.

In the late afternoon the working men began to arrive back in the township by bus and train. Most of them were production-line workers in the vehicle assembly plants of Ford and General Motors, or factory-workers in the tyre companies of Goodyear and Firestone, for Port Elizabeth and its satellite town of Uitenhage formed the centre of the country's motor vehicle industry.

Moses walked the narrow streets with the camera following him, and he stopped to talk to the returning workers, while the camera recorded their complaints and problems, most of which were the practical everyday worries of making ends meet while remaining within the narrow lines demarcated by the forest of racial laws. Kitty could edit most of that out, but every one of them mentioned the 'show on demand' clause of the pass laws as the thing they hated and feared most. In every little vignette they filmed Moses Gama was the central heroic figure.

'By the time I've finished with him, he will be as famous as Martin Luther King,' Kitty enthused.

They joined the nuns for their frugal evening meal, and afterwards Kitty Godolphin was still not satisfied. Outside one of the cottages near the mission a family was cooking on an open fire, and Kitty had Moses join them, hunched over the fire in the night with the flames lighting his face, adding drama to his already massive presence as she filmed him while he spoke. In the background one of the women was singing a lullaby to the infant at her breast, and there were the murmurous sounds of the location, the soft cries of the children and the distant yapping of pariah dogs.

Moses Gama's words were poignant and moving, spoken in that deep thrilling voice, as he described the agony of his land and his people, so that Tara, listening to him in the darkness, found tears running down her face.

In the morning Kitty left her team at the mission, and without the camera the three of them, Kitty and Tara and Moses, drove in the Buick to the railway station that served the township and watched the black commuters swarm like hiving bees through the station entrance marked NON WHITES --, NIE BLANKES, crowding on to the platform reserved for blacks, and as soon as the train pulled in, flooding into the coaches set aside for them.

Through the other entrance, marked WHITES ONLY -- BLANKES ALLEENLIK, a few white officials and others who had business in the township sauntered and unhurriedly entered the first-class coaches at the rear of the train where they sat on green leathercovered seats and gazed out through glass at the black swarm on the opposite platform with detached expressions as though they were viewing creatures of another species.

'I've got to try and get that,' Kitty muttered. 'I've got to get that reaction on film." She was busily scribbling notes in her pad, sketching rough maps of the station layout and marking in camera sites and angles.

Before noon Moses excused himself. 'I have to meet the local organizers and make the final plans for tomorrow,' and he drove away in the Buick.

Tara took Kitty and the team down to the seaside at St George's Strand, and they filmed the bathers on the beaches lying under the signboards BLANKES ALLEENLIK -- WHITES ONLY. School was out and tanned young people, the girls in bikinis and the boys with short haircuts and frank open faces lolled on the white sand, or played beach games and surfed the rolling green waves.

When Kitty asked them, 'How would you feel if black pea151e came to swim here?" some of them giggled nervously at a question they had never considered before: 'They aren't allowed to come here - they've got their own beaches." And at least one was indignant. 'They can't come here and look at our girls in bathing-costumes." He was a beefy young man with seasalt caked in his sun-streaked hair and skin peeling from his sunburned nose.

'But wouldn't you look at the black girls in their bathing costumes?" Kitty asked innocently.

'Sis, man!" said the surfer, his handsome tanned features contorted with utter disgust at the suggestion.

'It's just too good to be true!" Kitty marvelled at her own fortune.

'I'll cut that in with some footage I've got of a beautiful black dancer in a Soweto night club." On the way back to the mission Kitty asked Tara to stop at the New Brighton railway station once again, for a final reconnaisanc› They left the cameras in the Packard and two white-uniformed railway constables watched them with idle disinterest as they wandered around the almost deserted platforms that during the rush hours swarmed with thousands of black commuters. Quietly Kitty pointed out to her team the locations she had chosen earlier, and explained to them what shots she would be striving for.

That night Moses joined them for the evening meal in the mission refectory, and though the conversation was light and cheerful, there was a hint of tension in their laughter. When Moses left, Tara went out with him to where the Buick was parked in the darkness behind the mission clinic.

'I want to be with you tonight,' she told him pathetically. 'I feel so alone without you." 'That is not possible." 'It's dark - we could go for a drive to the beach,' she pleaded.

'The police patrols are looking for just that sort of thing,' Moses told her. 'You would see yourself in the Sunday Times next week end." 'Make love to me here, please Moses,' and he was angry.

'Your selfishness is that of a spoilt child - you think only of your.

self and your own desires, even now when we are on the threshold all great events, you would take risks that could bring us down." Tara lay awake most of the night and listened to Kitty's peaceful breathing in the iron bed across the cell.

She fell asleep just before dawn, and awoke feeling nauseous and heavy, when Kitty leapt gaily out of bed in her pink striped pyjamas, eager for the day.

'June twenty-sixth,' she cried. 'The big day at last!" None of them took more than a cup of coffee for an early breakfast. Tara felt too sick and the others were too keyed up. Hank had checked his equipment the previous night, but now he went over it again before he loaded it into the Packard and they drove down to the railway station.

It was gloomy and the few street lights were still burning while under them the hordes of black commuters hurried. However, by the time they reached the station the first rays of the sun struck the entrance and the light was perfect for filming. Tara noticed that a pair of police Black Maria vans were parked outside the main entrance and instead of the two young constables who had been on duty the previous day, there were eight railway policemen in a group under the station clock. They were in blue uniform with black peaked caps and holstered sidearms on their polished leather Sam Browne belts. They all carried riot batons.

'They have been warned,' Tara exclaimed, as she parked across the street from the two vans. 'They are expecting trouble -just look at them." Kitty had twisted around and was giving last-minute instructions to Hank in the back seat, but when Tara glanced at her to assess her reaction to the waiting police, Romething about Kitty's expression and her inability to meet Tara's eyes made her pause.

'Kitty?" she insisted. 'These policemen. You don't seem --' she broke off as she remembered something. The previous afternoon on the way to the beach, Kitty had asked her to stop outside the Humewood post office because she wanted to send a telegram. However, from across the road looking through the post office window, Tara had seen her slip into one of the glass telephone booths. It had puzzled her at the time.

'You!" she gasped. 'It was you who warned the police!" 'Listen, darling,' Kitty snapped at her. 'These people want to get themselves arrested. That's the whole point. And I want film of them getting arrested. I did it for all our sakes --' she broke off and cocked her head. 'Listen!" she cried. 'Here they come!" Faintly on the dawn there was the sound of singing, hundreds of voices together, and the group of policemen in the station entrance stirred and looked around apprehensively.

'Okay, Hank,' Kitty snapped. 'Let's go!" They jumped out of the Packard, and hurried to the positions they had chosen, lugging their equipment.

The senior police officer with gold braid on his cap was a captain.

Tara knew enough of police rank insignia from first-hand experience.

He gave an order to his constables. Two of them began to cross the road towards the camera team.

'Shoot, Hank. Keep shooting!" Tara heard Kitty's voice, and the singing was louder now. The beautifully haunting refrain of Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika carried by a thousand African voices made Tara shiver.

The two constables were halfway across the road when the first rank of protesters marched around the nearest row of shops and cottages and hurriedly the police captain called his constables back to his side.

They were twenty abreast, arms linked, filling the road from pavement to pavement, singing as they came on, and behind them followed a solid column of black humanity. Some of them were dressed in business suits, others in tattered cast-off clothing, some were silver-haired and others were in their teens. In the centre of the front rank, taller than the men around him, bare-headed and straightbacked as a soldier, marched Moses Gama.

Hank ran into the street with his sound technician following him.

With the camera on his shoulder, he retreated in front of Moses, capturing him on film, the sound man recording his voice as it soared in the anthem, full and magnificent, the very voice of Africa and his features were lit with an almost religious fervour.

Hurriedly the police captain was drawing his men up across the whites-only entrance, and they were hefting their batons nervously, pale-faced in the early sunlight. The head of the column wheeled across the road and began to climb the steps, and the police captain stepped forward and spread his arms to halt them. Moses Gama held up one hand. The column came to a jerking shuffling halt, and the singing died away.

The police captain was a tall man with a pleasantly lined face.

Tara could see him over their heads, and he was smiling. That was the thing that struck Tara. Faced with a thousand black protesters, he was still smiling.

'Come on now,' he raised his voice, like a schoolmaster addressing an unruly class. 'You know you can't do this, it's just nonsense, man. You are acting like a bunch of skollies, and I know you are good people." He was still smiling as he picked a few of the leaders out of the front ranks. 'Mr Dhlovu and Mr Khandela - you are on the management committee, shame on you!" He waggled his finger, and the men he had spoken to hung their heads and grinned shamefacedly. The whole atmosphere of the march had begun to change. Here was the father figure, stern but benevolent, and they were the children, mischievous but at the bottom good-hearted and dutiful.

'Off you go, all of you. Go home and don't be silly now,' the captain called, and the column wavered. From the back ranks there was laughter, and a few of those who had been reluctant to join the march began to slip away. Behind the captain his constables were grinning with relief, and the crowd began to jostle as it broke up.

'Good Christ!" Kitty swore bitterly. 'It's all a goddamned anticlimax. I have wasted my time--' Then on to the top steps of the railway station a tall figure stepped out of the ranks and his voice rang out over them, silencing them and freezing them where they stood. The laughter and the smiles died away.

'My people,' Moses Gama cried, 'this is your land. In it you have God's right to live in peace and dignity. This building belongs to all who live here - it is your right to enter, as much as any other person's that lives here. I am going in - who will follow me?" A ragged, uncertain chorus of support came from the front ranks and Moses turned to face the police captain.

'We are going in, Captain. Arrest us or stand aside." At that moment a train, filled with black commuters, pulled into the platform and they hung out of the windows of the coaches and cheered and stamped.

'Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika!" sang Moses Gama, and with his head held high he marched under the warning sign WHITES ONLY. 'You are breaking the law,' the captain raised his voice. 'Arrest that man." And the thin rank of constables moved forward to obey.

Instantly a roar went up from the crowd behind him. 'Arrest me!

Arrest me too!" And they surged forward, picking Moses up with them as though he were a surfer on a wave.

'Arrest me!" they chanted. 'Malan! Malan! Come and arrest us!" The crowd burst through the entrance, and the white police constables were carried with them, struggling ineffectually in the press of bodies.

'Arrest me!" It had become a roar. 'Amandla! Amandla!" The captain was fighting to keep his feet, shouting to rally his men, but his voice was drowned out in the chant of, 'Power! Power!" The captain's cap was knocked over his eyes and he was shoved backwards on to the platform. Hank, the cameraman, was in the midst of it, holding his A rriflex high and shooting out of hand.

Around him the white faces of the constables bobbed like flotsam in a wild torrent of humanity. From the coaches the black passengers swarmed out to meet and mingle with the mob, and a single voice called out.

'Jee!" the battle cry that can drive an Nguni warrior into the berserker's passion, and 'Jee!" a hundred voices answered him and 'Jee!" again. There was the crash of breaking glass, one of the coach windows exploded as a shoulder thrust into it and 'Jee!" they sang.

One of the white constables lost his footing and went sprawling backwards. Immediately he was trampled under foot and he screamed like a rabbit in a snare.

'Jee!" sang the men, transformed into warriors, the veneer of western manners stripped away, and another window smashed. By now the platform was choked with a struggling mass of humanity. From the cab of the locomotive, the mob dragged the terrified enginedriver and his fireman. They jostled and pushed them, ringing them in.

'Jee!" they chanted, bouncing at the knees, working themselves up into the killing madness. Their eyes were glazing and engorging with blood, their faces turning into shining black masks.

'Jee!" they sang. 'Jee!" and Moses Gama sang with them. Let the others call for restraint and passive resistance to the enemy, but all that was forgotten and now Moses Gama's blood seethed with all his pent-up hatred and 'Jee!" he cried, and his skin crawled and itched with atavistic fury and his fighting heart swelled to fill his chest.

The police captain, still on his feet, had been driven back against the wall of the station-master's office. One epaulette had been torn from the shoulder of his uniform and he had lost his cap. There was a fleck of blood at the corner of his mustache where an elbow had struck him in the mouth, and he was struggling with the flap of the holster on his belt.

'Kill!" shouted a voice. 'Bulala!" and it was taken up. Black hands clutched at the police captain's lapels, and he drew the service revolver from its holster and tried to raise it, but the crowd was packed too densely around him. He fired blindly from the hip.

The shot was a great blurt of sound, and somebody yelled with shock and pain, and the crowd around the captain backed away, leaving a young black man in an army surplus greatcoat kneeling at his feet, moaning and clutching his stomach.

The captain, white-faced and panting, lied the revolver and fired again into the air.

'Form up on me!" he shouted in a voice hoarse and breaking with terror and exertion. Another of his men was down on his knees, submerged in the milling crowd, but he managed to clear his revolver from its holster and he fired point-blank, emptying the chamber into the press around him.

Then they were running, blocking the entrance, jamming in it as they sought to escape the gunfire, and all the police constables were firing, some on their knees, all of them dishevelled and terrified, and the bullets told in the mass of bodies with loud, meaty thumps, like a housewife beating the dust from a hanging carpet. The air was thick with the smell of gunsmoke and dust and blood, of sweat and unwashed bodies and terror.

They were screaming and pushing, fighting their way out into the street again, leaving their fallen comrades crumpled on the platform in seeping puddles of blood, or crawling desperately after them dragging bullet-shattered limbs.

And the little group of policemen were running to help each other to their feet, bruised and bloodied in torn uniforms. They gathered up the engine-driver and his fireman and, staggering, supporting each other, drawn revolvers still in their hands, they crossed the platform stepping over the bodies and the puddles of blood and hurried down the steps to the two parked vans.

Across the road the crowd had reassembled and they screamed and shook their fists and chanted as the policemen scrambled into the vehicles and drove away at speed, and then the crowd swarmed into the roadway and hurled stones and abuse at the departing vans.

Tara had watched it all from the parked Packard, and now she sat paralysed with horror, listening to the animal growl of the crowd penetrated by the cries and groans of the wounded.

Moses Gama ran to her and 'shouted into the open window, 'Go and fetch Sister Nunziata. Tell her we need all the help we can get." Tara nodded dumbly and started the engine. Across the road she could see Kitty and Hank still filming. Hank was kneeling beside a wounded man, shooting into his tortured face, panning down on to the pool of blood in which he lay.

Tara pulled away, and the crowd in the road tried to stop her.

Black faces, swollen with anger, mouthed at her through the Packard's windows and they beat with their fists on the roof, but she sounded her horn and kept driving.

'I have to get a doctor,' she shouted at them. 'Let me pass, let me through." She got through them, and when she looked in the rear-view mirror, she saw that in frustration and fury they were stoning the railway station, ripping up the pavement and hurling the heavy slabs through the windows. She saw a white face at one of the windows, and felt a pang for the station-master and his staff. They had barricaded themselves in the ticket office.

The crowd outside the building was solid, and as she drove towards the mission she passed a flood of black men and women rushing to join it. The women were ululating wildly, a sound that maddened their menfolk. Some of them ran into the road to try and stop Tara, but she jammed her palm down on the horn ring and swerved around them. She glanced up into her driving-mirror and one of them picked up a rock from the side of the road and hurled it after the car. The rock crashed against the metal of the cab and bounced away.

At the mission hospital they had heard the sound of gunfire and the roar of the mob. Sister Nunziata, the white doctor, and her helpers, were anxiously waiting on the verandah and Tara shouted up at her.

'You must come quickly to the station, Sister, the police have shot and wounded people - I think some of them are dead." They must have been expecting the call, for they had their medical bags on the verandah with them. While Tara backed and turned the Packard, Sister Nunziata and the doctor ran down the steps, carrying their black bags. They clambered into the cab of the mission's small blue Ford pick-up and turned towards the gate, cutting in front of Tara's Packard. Tara followed them, but by the time she had turned the Packard and driven out through the gates, the little blue pick-up was a hundred yards ahead of her. It turned the corner into the station road and even above the engine-beat Tara heard the roar of the mob.

When she swung through the corner the Ford was stopped only fifty paces head of her. It was completely surrounded by the crowd.

The road from side to side was packed with screaming black men and women. Tara could not hear the words, there was no sense to their fury, it was incoherent and deafening. They were concentraing on the Ford, and took no notice of Tara in the Packard.

Those nearest to the Ford were beating on the metal cab, and rocking the vehicle on its suspension. The side door opened and Sister Nunziata stood on the running board, a little higher than the heads of the howling mob that pushed closely around her. She was trying to speak to them, holding up her hands and pleading with them to let her through to take care of the wounded.

Suddenly a stone was thrown. It arced up out of the crowd and hit the nun on the side of her head. She reeled as she stood, and there was a bright flash of blood on her white veil. Stunned, she raised her hand to her cheek and it came away bloody.

The sight of blood enraged them. A forest of black arms reached up to Sister Nunziata and dragged her down from the vehicle. For a while they fought over her, dragging her in the road and worrying her like a pack of hounds with the fox. Then suddenly Tara saw the flash of a knife, and sitting in the Packard she screamed and thrust her fingers into her mouth to silence herself.

The old crone who wielded the knife was a sangoma, a witchdoctor, and around her neck she wore the necklace of bones and feathers and animal skulls that were her insignia. The knife in her right hand had a handle of rhino horn and the hand-forged blade was nine inches long and wickedly curved. Four men caught the nun and threw her across the engine bonnet of the Ford while the old woman hopped up beside her. The men held Sister Nunziata pinioned, face up, while the crowd began to chant wildly, and the sangoma stooped over her.

With a single stroke of the curved blade she cut through the nun's grey habit and split her belly open from groin to rib cage. While Sister Nunziata writhed in the grip of the men who held her, the crone thrust her hand and naked arm into the wound. Tara watched in disbelief as she brought out something wet and glistening and purple, a soft amorphous thing. It was done so swiftly, so expertly, that for seconds Tara did not realize that it was Sister Nunziata's liver that the crone held in her bloody hands.

With a slash of the curved blade, the sangoma cut a lump from the still living organ and hopped to her feet. Balancing on the curved bonnet of the Ford she faced the crowd.

'I eat our white enemy,' she screeched, 'and thus I take his strength." And the mob roared, a terrible sound, as the old woman thrust the purple lump into her toothless mouth and chewed upon it.

She hacked another piece off thee liver, and still chewing with open mouth, she threw it to the crowd below her.

'Eat your enemy!" she shrilled, and they fought for the bloody scraps like dogs.

'Be strong! Eat the liver of the hated ones!" She threw them more and Tara covered her eyes and heaved convulsively. Acid vomit shot up her throat and she swallowed it down painfully.

Abruptly the driver's door of the Packard beside her was jerked open and rough hands seized Tara. She was dragged out into the road. The blood roar of the crowd deafened her, but terror armed her with superhuman strength, and she tore herself free of the clutching hands.

She was at the edge of the mob, and the attention of most of them was entirely on the ghastly drama around the Ford. The crowd had set the vehicle alight. Sister Nunziata's mutilated body lay on the bonnet like a sacrifice on a burning altar, while trapped in the cab, the doctor thrashed around and beat at the flames with his bare hands, and the crowd chanted and danced around him like children around the bonfire on Guy Fawkes night.

For that instant Tara was free, but there were men around her, shouting and reaching for her, their faces bestial, their eyes glazed and insensate. No longer human, they were driven into that killing madness in which there was no reason nor mercy. Swift as a bird Tara ducked under the outstretched arms and darted away. She found that she had broken out of the mob, and in front of her was a plot of wasteland strewn with old rusted car bodies and rubbish. She fled across it and behind her she heard her pursuers baying like a pack of hunting dogs.

At the end of the open land a sagging barbed-wire fence blocked her way, and she glanced back over her shoulder. A group of men still followed her, and two of them had outdistanced the others. They were both big and powerful-looking, running strongly on bare feet, their faces contorted in a cruel rictus of excitement. They came on silently.

Tara stooped into the space between the strands of the wire. She was almost through when she felt the barbs catch in the flesh of her back, and pain arrested her. For a moment she struggled desperately, feeling her skin tear as she fought to free herself and blood trickled down her flanks - and then they seized her.

Now they shouted with wild laughter as they dragged her back through the fence, the barbs ripping at her clothing and her flesh.

Her legs collapsed under her, and she pleaded with them. 'Please don't hurt me. I'm going to have a baby--' They dragged her back across the waste plot, half on her knees, twisting and pleading in their grip - and then she saw the sangoma coming to meet them, hopping and capering like an ancient baboon, cackling through her toothless mouth, her bones and beads rattling around her scrawny neck and the curved knife in her blood-caked fingers.

Tara began to scream, and she felt her urine squirt uncontrollably down her legs. 'Please! Please don't!" she raved and terror was an icy blackness of her mind and body that crushed her to earth, and she closed her eyes and steeled herself to the stinging kiss of the blade.

Then in the mindless animal roar of the crowd, above the old crone's shrill laughter, there was another voice, a great lion's roar of anger and command that stilled all other sound. Tara opened her eyes and Moses Gama stood over her, a towering colossus, and voice alone stopped them and drove them back. He lifted her in arms and held her like a child. The crowd around the Packard open before him as he carried her to it and placed her on the front sc and then slid behind the wheel.

As he started the engine and swung the Packard away in a ha U-turn, the black smoke from the burning van poured over the and obscured the windscreen for a moment, and Tara smelled Sist Nunziata's flesh roasting.

This time she could not control herself and she flopped forwar, her head 'between her knees, and vomited on the floor of the Pa, kard.

,Ic , , Manfred De La Rey had taken the chair at the top of the long tabl in the operations rooms in the basement of Marshall Square. He ha.

come across from his own office suite in the Union Buildings iJ Pretoria to police headquarters at the centre of the storm, where hid.

could be at hand to consider, with his senior officers, each fresl despatch as it came in from the police provincial HQs around the country.

The entire wall facing Manfred's seat was a large-scale map of the sub-continent. Working in front of it were two junior police officers.

They were placing magnetic markers on the map. Each of the small black discs had a name printed upon it and represented one of the almost five hundred ANC officials and organizers that had been so far identified by the intelligence department.

The discs were clustered most thickly along the great crescent of the Witwatersrand in the centre of the continent, although others were scattered across the entire map as the physical whereabouts of each person was confirmed by the police reports that were coming in every few seconds.

Amongst the rash of black markers were a very few red discs, less than fifty in all. These represented the known members of the central committee of the African National Congress.

Some of the names were those of Europeans: Harris, Marks, Fischer, and some were Asians like Naicker and Nana Sita, but the majority were African. Tambo and Sisulu and Mandela - they were all there. Mandela's red disc was placed on the city of Johannesburg, while Moroka was in the Eastern Cape and Albert Luthuli was in Zululand.

Manfred De La Rey was stony-faced as he stared at the map, and the senior police officers seated around him studiously avoided catching his eye or even looking directly at him. Manfred had a reputation of being the strongman of the cabinet. His colleagues privately referred to him as 'Panga Man' after the heavy chopping knife that was used in the cane fields, and was the favourite weapon of the Mau Mau in Kenya.

Manfred looked the part. He was a big man. The hands that lay on the table before him were still, there was no fidgeting of nervousness or uncertainty, and they were big hard hands. His face was becoming craggy now, and his, jowls and thick neck heightened the sense of power that emanated from him. His men were afraid of him.

'How many more?" he asked suddenly, and the colonel sitting opposite him, a man with the medal ribbons of valour on his chest, started like a schoolboy and quickly consulted his list.

'Four more to find - Mbeki, Mtolo, Mhlaba and Gama." He read out the names on his list that remained unticked, and Manfred De La Rey relapsed into silence.

Despite his brooding stillness and forbidding expression, Manfred was pleased with the day's work. It was not yet noon on the first day and already they had pinpointed the whereabouts of most of the ringleaders. Altogether the ANC had planned the entire campaign with quite extraordinary precision and had exhibited unusual thoroughness and foresight in its execution, Manfred reflected. He had not expected them to be so efficient, the African was notoriously lackadaisical and happy-go-lucky - but then they had the advice and assistance of their white communist comrades. The protests and demonstrations and strikes were widespread and effective. Manfred grunted aloud and the officers at the table looked up apprehensively, but dropped their eyes hurriedly when he frowned.

Manfred returned to his thoughts. No, not bad for a bunch of kaffirs, even with a few white men to help them. Yet their naivety and amateurishness showed in their almost total lack of security and secrecy. They had blabbed as though they were at a beer-drink. Full of their own importance they had boasted of their plans and made little effort to conceal the identities of the leaders and cover their movements. The police informers had had little difficult in picking up the information.

There were, of course, exceptions and Manfred scowled as he considered the lists of leaders still unaccounted for. One name pricked like a burr, Moses Gama. He had made a study of the man's file.

After Mandela, he was probably the most dangerous of them all.

'We must have him,' he told himself. 'We must get those two, Mandela and Gama." And now he spoke aloud, barking the question: 'Where is Mandela?" 'At the moment he is addressing a meeting in the community hal at Drake's Farm township,' the colonel answered promptly, glancinl up at the red marker on the map. 'He will be followed when hid leaves, until we are ready to make the arrests." 'No word of Gama yet?" Manfred asked impatiently, and th officer shook his head.

'Not yet, Minister, he was last seen here on the Witwatersrant nine days ago. He might have gone underground. We may have t( move without him." 'No,' Manfred snapped. 'I want him. I want Moses Gama." Manfred relapsed into silence, brooding and intense. He knew thai he was caught in the cross-currents of history. He could feel the good winds blowing at his back, set fair to carry him away on hL, course. He knew also that at any moment those winds might drop, and the ebb of his tide might set in. It was dangerous - mortally dangerous but still he waited. His father and his ancestors had all been huntsmen. They had hunted the elephant and lion and he had heard them speak of the patience and the waiting that was part of the hunt. Now Manfred was a hunter as they had been, but his quarry, though every bit as dangerous, was infinitely more cunning.

He had set his snares with all the skill at his command. The banning orders, five hundred of them, were already made out. The men and women to whom they were addressed would be driven out from society into the wilderness. Prohibited from attending a goth.

ering of more than three persons, physically confined to a single magisterial district, prohibited also from publishing a single written word and prevented from having their spoken word published by anyone else, their treacherous and treasonable voices would be effectively gagged. That was how he would deal with the lesser enemy, the smaller game of this hunt.

For the others, the fifty big game, the dangerous ones, he had other weapons ready. The warrants of arrest had been drawn up and the charges framed. Amongst them were high treason and furthering the aims of international communism, conspiracy to overthrow the government by violent revolution, incitement to public violenceand these, if proven, led directly to the gallows tree. Complete success was there, almost within his grasp, but at any moment it could be snatched away.

At that moment a voice was raised so loudly in the operations room beyond the cubicle windows that they all looked up. Even Manfred swung his head towards the sound and narrowed his pale eyes. The officer who had spoken was sitting with his back to the window holding the telephone receiver to his ear, and scribbling on the notepad on the desk in front of him. Now he slammed the receiver back on to its bracket, ripped the top sheet off the pad and hurried into the map room.

'What is it."?" demanded the super.

'We've got him, sir." The man's voice was shrill with excitement.

'We've got Moses Gama. He is in Port Elizabeth. Less than two hours ago he was at the head of a riot at the New Brighton railway station. The police were attacked, and were forced to open fire in self-defence. At least seven people have been killed, one of them a nun. She was horribly mutilated - there is even an unconfirmed report that she was cannibalized - and her body has been burned." 'Are they sure it was him?" Manfred asked.

'No doubt, Minister. He was positively identified by an informer who knows him personally and the police captain has identified him by file and photograph." 'All right,' Manfred De La Rey said. 'Now we can move." He looked down at the commissioner of police at the far end of the long table. 'Do it, please, Commissioner,' he said, and picked up his dark fedora hat from the table. 'Report to me the moment you have them all locked up." He rode up in the lift to ground level and his chauffeur-driven limousine was waiting to take him back to his office in the Union Buildings. As he settled back against the leather-padded rear seat and the limousine pulled away, he smiled for the first time that morning.

'A nun,' he said aloud. 'And they ate her!" He shook his head with satisfaction. 'Let the bleeding hearts of the world read that and know what kind of savages we are dealing with." He felt the good winds of his fortune freshen, bearing him away towards those places which only recently he had allowed himself to dream of." When they got back to the mission, Moses helped Tara out of the Packard. She was still pale and shaking like a woman with malaria.

Her clothing was ripped and soiled with blood and dirt, and she could hardly stand unaided.

Kitty Godolphin and her camera crew had escaped the wrath of the mob by running across the railway tracks and hiding in a stormwater drain, then working their way in a wide circle back to the mission.

'We've got to get out of here,' Kitty yelled at Tara as she came out on to the verandah and saw Moses helping her up the steps. 'I've got the most incredible footage of my life. I can't trust it to anybody else. I want to get on the Pan Am flight from Jo'burg tomorrow morning and take the undeveloped cans to New York myself." She was so excited that her voice shook wildly, and like Tara her denim jeans were torn and dusty. However, she was already packed and ready to leave, carrying the red canvas tote bag that was all her luggage.

'Did you film the nun?" Moses demanded. 'Did you film them killing Sister Nunziata?" 'Sure did, sweetheart!" Hank grinned. He was close behind Kitty.

'Got it all." 'How many cans did you shoot?" Moses insisted.

'Four." Hank was so excited he could not stand still. He was bouncing on his toes and snapping his fingers.

'Did you get the police shooting?" 'All of it, sweetheart, all of it." 'Where is the film of the nun?" Moses demanded.

'Still in the camera." Hank slapped the A rriflex that hung by his side. 'It's all here, baby. I had just changed film when they grabbed the nun and ripped her up." Moses left Tara leaning against the column of the verandah, and crossed to where Hank stood. He moved so casually that none of them realized what he was about to do. Kitty was still talking.

'If we leaYe right away, we can be in Jo'burg by tomorrow morning.

The Pan Am flight leaves at 11.30--' Moses had reached Hank's side. He seized the heavy camera, twisting the carrying strap so that Hank was pulled up on his toes helplessly, and he unclipped the round magazine of film from its seat on top of the camera body. Then he turned and smashed the magazine against the brick column of the verandah.

Kitty realized what he was doing and she flew at him like an angry cat, clawing for his eyes with her nails. 'My film,' she screeched.

'God damn you to hell, that's any film." Moses shoved her so violently that she collided with Hank, taking him off balance and they fell over each other, sprawling together on the verandah floor.

Moses hit the magazine again and this time the can burst open.

The ribbon of glistening celluloid spilled out and cascaded over the retaining wall.

'You've ruined it,' Kitty screamed, coming to her feet and charging at him.

Moses tossed the empty can away, and caught Kitty's wrists, lifting her bodily off the ground and holding her effortlessly, though she struggled and kicked at him.

'You have the film of police brutality, the murder of innocent blacks,' he said. 'The rest of it you were not meant to witness. I will not let you show that to the world." He pushed her away. 'You may take the Packard." Kitty glared at him, massaging her wrists where the skin was red from his grip and she spat like a cat.

'I won't forget that - one day you will pay for that, Moses Gama." Her malignancy was chilling.

'Go,' Moses commanded. 'You have a plane to catch." For a moment she hesitated, and then she whirled, picked up her tote bag.

'Come on, Hank,' she called, and she ran down the stairs to the Packard and sprang into the driver's seat.

'You cock-sucking bastard,' Hank hissed at Moses as he passed.

'That was the best stuff I ever scored." 'You've still got three cans,' Moses said softly. 'Be grateful for that." Moses watched them drive away in the Packard and then turned to Tara.

'We must move very fast now - the police will act at once. We have to get out of the township before they cordon it off. I am a marked man - we have to get clear." 'What do you want me to do?" Tara asked.

'Come, I'll explain later,' Moses said and hustled her towards the Buick. 'First, we must get clear." Tara gave the salesman a cheque and waited in the tiny cubicle of his office that stank of cheap cigar smoke while he phoned her bank in Cape Town.

There was a crumplednewspaper on the cluttered desk, and she picked it up and read it avidly.

SEVEN DEAD IN P.E. RIOTS NATIONWIDE DISTURBANCES 500 ACTIVISTS BANNED MANDELA ARRESTED Almost the entire newspaper was devoted to the defiance campaign and its consequences. At the bottom of the page, under the lurid accounts of the killing and the cannibalization of Sister Nunziata, there were accounts of the action taken by the ANC in other sectors of the country. Thousands had been arrested, and there were photographs of protesters being loaded into police vans, grinning cheerfully and giving the thumbs-up sign that had become the protester's salute.

The inner page of the newspaper gave the lists of almost ri hundred persons who had been banned, and explained the const quences of the banning orders - how they effectively terminated tll public life of the victim.

There was also the much shorter list of persons who had bee arrested for high treason and furthering the aims of the communi, party, and Tara bit her lip when she saw Moses Gama's name. Th police spokesman must have anticipated his arrest, but it was proc that the precautions Moses was taking were wise. High treason wa a capital offence, and she had a mental picture of Moses, his hea, hooded, twisting and kicking from the gallows crossbeam. Sh shuddered and thrust the image aside, concentrating on the rest o the newspaper.

There were photographs, most of them murky and indistinct, o the leaders of the ANC, and she smiled humourlessly as she realize( that these were the first fruits of the campaign. Up to this moment not one in a hundred white South Africans had ever heard of Mose Gama, Nelson Mandela, or any of the other leaders, but now the 3

had come bursting in on the national conscience. The world suddenl3

knew who they were.

The middle pages were mostly filled with public reaction to the campaign and to the government's counter measures. It was too soon for the foreign reactions, but local opinion seemed almost unanimous: condemnation of the barbaric murder of Sister Nunziata, and high praise for police courage and the swift action of the minister of police in crushing the communist-inspired plot.

The editor wrote: We have not always been able to commend the actions and utterances of the Minister of Police. However, the need finds the man and we are thankful this day that a man of courage and strength stands between us and the forces of anarchy -Tara's reading was interrupted by the used car salesman. He bustled back into the tiny office to fawn on Tara and to gush.

'My dear Mrs Courtney, you must forgive me. I had no idea who you were, or I would never have subjected you to the humiliation of querying your cheque." He ushered her out to the yard, bowing and grinning ingratiatingly, and held open the door of the 1951-model black Cadillac for which Tara had just given her cheque for almost a thousand pounds.

Tara drove down the hill and parked on the Donkin overlooking the sea. The military and naval outfitters were only half a block down the main street and from their stocks she picked out a chauffeur's cap with a glossy patent-leather peak and a dove-grey tunic with brass buttons in Moses' size which the assistant packed in a brown paper bag.

Back in the new Cadillac she drove slowly down to the main railway station and parked opposite the entrance. She left the key in the ignition and slipped into the back seat. Within five minutes Moses came out. He was dressed in grubby blue overalls and the police constable at the railway entrance did not even glance at him. Moses sauntered down the sidewalk and as he drew level with the Cadillac, Tara passed the paper bag through the open window.

Within ten minutes Moses was back, the overalls discarded, wearing the chauffeur's cap and smart new tunic over his dark slacks and black shoes. He climbed into the driver's seat and started the engine.

'You were right. There is a warrant out for your arrest,' she said softly.

'How do you know?" 'There is a newspaper on the seat." She had folded it open at the report on his arrest. He read it swiftly, and then eased the Cadillac out into the traffic stream.

'What are you going to do, Moses? Will you give yourself up and stand trial?" 'The courtroom would be a platform from which to speak to the world,' he mused.

'And if you were convicted, the gallows would be an even more riveting pulpit,' she pointed out acidly, and he smiled at her in the rear-view mirror.

'We need martyrs - every cause must have martyrs." 'My God, Moses, how can you speak like that? Every cause needs a leader. There are many who would make fine martyrs, but very few who can lead." He drove in silence for a while and then he said firmly, 'We will go to Johannesburg. I must talk to the others before I decide." 'Most of the others have been arrested,' Tara pointed out.

'Not all." He shook his head. 'I must talk to those who have escaped. How much money do you have?" She opened her handbag and counted the notes she had in her purse.

'Over a hundred pounds." 'More than enough,' he nodded. 'Be prepared to play the grand lady when the police stop us." They ran into the first road-block on the outskirts of the city at the Swartkops bridge. There was a line of cars and heavy vehicles and they moved forward slowly, stopping and starting, until two police constables signalled them over and a young police warrant officer came to the passenger window.

'Good aernoon, Mevrou." He touched his cap. 'May we look i the boot of your car?" 'What is this about, officer?" 'The troubles, madam. We are looking for the trouble-makers wh, killed the nun and ate her." Tara leaned forward and spoke sharply to Moses. 'Open the boo for the policeman, Stephen." And Moses climbed out and held the lit open while the constables made a cursory search. Not one of then looked at his face, the chauffeur's uniform had rendered him miraculously invisible.

'Thank you, lady." The warrant officer waved them through and Moses murmured 'That was most unflattering. I thought I was a celebrity now." It was a long and arduous drive from the coast, but Moses drov{ sedately, careful not to give anyone an excuse to stop them ant question them more carefully.

As he drove he tuned the Cadillac's wireless for the South African Broadcasting Corporation's hourly news bulletin. The reception wa intermittent as the terrain varied, but they picked up one excitin item.

The Soviet Union supported by her allies had demanded an urgent debate in the United Nations General Assembly on the situation in the country. This was the first time the UN had ever shown an interest in South Africa. For that alone all their sacrifice had been worthwhile. However, the rest of the news was disquieting. Over eight thousand protesters had been arrested and all the leaders banned or picked up, and a spokesman for the minister of police assured the country that the situation was firmly under control.

They drove on until after dark when they stopped at one of the small Orange Free State hotels that catered mainly for commercial travellers. When Tara asked for board and lodging for her chauffeur, the request was taken as matter of course because all the travellers employed coloured drivers and) Moses was sent around the back to the servants' quarters in the hotel yard.

After the plain and unappetizing fare in the hotel dining-room, Tara telephoned Weltevreden, and $eon answered on the second ring.

They had returned from their hunting safari with Shasa the previous day, and were garrulous and excited. Each of the boys spoke to her in turn, so she was treated to three separate accounts of how Garrick had shot a man-eating lion. Then Isabella came on the line, and her sweet childish lisp tugged at Tara's heart, making her feel dreadfully guilty at her lack of maternal duty. Yet none of the children, Isabella included, seemed to have missed her in the least. Isabella was just as long-winded as her brothers in recounting 11 the things that she and Nana had done together, and the new dress that Nana had bought her and the doll that grandpa Blaine had brought back from England especially for her. None of them asked her how she was and when she was coming home to Weltevreden.

Shasa came on the line last, distant but friendly. 'We are all having a wonderful time - Garry shot a lion --' 'Oh God, Shasa, don't you tell me about it, I've already had three accounts of the poor beast's death." Within a few minutes they had run out of things to say to each other. 'Well then, old thing, take care of yourself. I see the uglies are cutting up rather rough on the Rand, but De La Rey has it well in hand,' Shasa ended. 'Don't get caught up in any unpleasantness." 'I won't,' she promised. 'Now I'll let you go in to dinner." Shasa liked to dine at eight o'clock sharp and it was four minutes before the hour. She knew he was already dressed and checking his watch.

When she hung up she. realized that he hadn't asked her where she was, what she was doing or when she was coming home. 'Saved me from having to lie,' she consoled herself.

From her bedroom she could look over the hotel yard, and the lights were on in the servants' quarters. Suddenly she was overwhelmed with loneliness. It was so chilling, that she seriously thought about creeping across the yard to be with him. It took an effort of will to thrust that madness aside, and instead she picked up the telephone again and asked the operator for the number at Puck's Hill.

A servant, with a marked African accent, answered and Tara's heart sank. It was vital that they find out whether the Rivonia house was still safe. They could be going into a police trap. 'Is Nkosi Marcus there?" she demanded.

'Nkosi Marcus no here, he go away, missus,' the servant told her.

'You Missus Tara?" 'Yes! Yes!" Although she did not remember a servant, he must have recognized her voice, and she was about to go on when Marcus Archer spoke in his normal voice.

'Forgive me, my dear, for the music-hall impression, but the sky has fallen in here. Everybody is in a panic - the pigs have moved much quicker than anybody expected. Joe and I are the only ones to survive, as far as I know. How is our good friend, have they got him?" 'He's safe. Can we come to Puck's Hill?" 'So far it seems as though they have overlooked us here, but do be careful, won't you? There are road-blocks everywhere." Tara slept very little and was up before dawn to begin the last leg of the journey. The hotel chef had made her a packet of corned beef sandwiches and a thermos of hot tea, so they breakfasted as they drove. Any stop would increase their chances of discovery and arrest, and except to refuel, they kept going and crossed the Vaal river before noon.

Tara had been seeking the right moment to tell Moses ever since she had returned to the Transvaal to be near him, but now she knew that there would never be a right moment and that within hours they would be at Puck's Hill. After that nothing was certain except that there would be confusion and great danger for all of them.

'Moses,' she addressed the back of his head in a resolute voice, 'I can't keep it from you any longer. I have to tell you now. I am bearing your child." She saw his head flinch slightly and then those dark mesmeric eyes were glowering at her in the driver's mirror.

'What will you do?" he asked. He had not asked if she were certain nor had he queried his paternity of the child. That was typical of him - and yet he had accepted no responsibility either. 'What will you do?" 'I am not sure yet. I will find a way to have it." 'You must get rid of it." 'No,' she cried vehemently. 'Never. He's mine. I will take care of him." He did not remark on her choice of the masculine pronoun.

'The child will be half-caste,' he told her. 'Are you prepared for that?" 'I will find a way,' she insisted.

'I cannot help you - not at all,' he went on remorselessly. 'You understand that." 'Yes, you can,' she answered. 'You can tell me that you are pleased that I am carrying your son - and that you will love him, as I love his father." 'Love?" he said. 'That is not an African word. There is no word for love in my vocabulary." 'Oh, Moses, that is not true. You love your people." 'I love them as a people entire, not as individuals. I would sacrifice any one of them for the good of the whole." 'But our son, Moses. Something precious that we have made between us - don't you feel anything at all for him?" She watched his eyes in the mirror and saw the pain in them.

'Yes,' he admitted. 'Of course, I do. Yet I dare not acknowledge it. I must lock such feelings away lest they weaken my resolve and destroy us all." 'Then I will love him for both of us,' she said softly.

As Marcus Archer had warned Tara, there were more road-blocks.

As they drew closer to the great industrial and mining complex of the Witwatersrand, they were stopped three times, the last at Halfway House, but each time the chauffeur's uniform and Tara's white face and haughty manner protected him.

Tara had expected Johannesburg to be like a city under siege, but the road-blocks and the news posters on the street corners were the only indications of something unusual afoot. The headgear wheels of the mines they passed were spinning busily, and beyond the perimeter fences they saw the black miners in gumboots and shiny hard hats flocking to the shaft heads.

When they passed through downtown Johannesburg, the city streets were crowded as usual with shoppers of all races and their faces were cheerful and relaxed. Tara was disappointed. She was not sure what she had expected, but at least she had hoped for some visible sign that the people were on the march.

'You cannot expect too much,' Moses told her when she lamented that nothing had changed. 'The forces against us are obdurate as granite, and the resources they command are limitless.

Yet it is a beginning - our first faltering step on the road to liberation." They drove past Puck's Hill slowly. It seemed deserted, and at least there were no signs of police activity. Moses parked the Cadillac in the wattle plantation at the back of the Country Club and left Tara while he went back on foot to make absolutely certain they were not running into a police trap.

He was back within half an hour. 'It's safe. Marcus is there,' he told her as he started the Cadillac and drove back.

Marcus was waiting for them on the verandah. He looked tired and worn, and he had aged dramatically in the short time since Tara had last seen him.

He led them into the long kitchen, and went back to the stove on which he was preparing a meal for them, and while he worked he told them everything that had happened in their absence.

'The police reaction was so massive and immediate that it must have been carefully prepared. We expected a delay while they caught up with the situation and gathered themselves. We expected to be able to exploit that delay, and call upon the masses to join us in the defiance campaign until it gathered its own momentum and became irresistible, but they were ready for us. There are not more than a dozen of the leaders at large now, Moses is one of the lucky ones, and without leaders the campaign is already beginning to grind to a halt." He glanced at Tara with a vindictive sparkle in his eye before he went on.

'However, there are still some pockets of resistance - our little Victoria is doing sterling work. She has organized the nurses at Baragwanath and brought them out as part of the campaign. She won't keep that up much longer - she'll be arrested or banned pretty damn soon, you can bet on that." 'Vicky is a brave woman,' Moses agreed. 'She knows the risks, and she takes them willingly." He looked straight at Tara as he said it, as if daring her to voice her jealousy. She knew of his marriage, of course, but she had never spoken of it. She knew what the consequences would be, and now she dropped her eyes, unable to meet his challenge.

'We have underestimated this man De La Rey,' Moses said. 'He is a formidable opponent. We have achieved very little of what we hoped for." 'Still, the United Nations is debating our plight,' Tara said quietly without looking up again.

'Debating,' Moses agreed scornfully. 'But it requires only a single veto from America or Britain or France, and no action will be taken.

They will talk and talk while my people suffer." 'Our people,' Marcus chided him. 'Our people, Moses." 'My people,' Moses contradicted him harshly. 'The others are all in prison. I am the only leader who remains. They are my people." There was silence in the kitchen, except for the scrape of utensils on the plates as they ate, but Marcus was frowning and it was he who broke the silence.

'So what happens now?" he asked. 'Where will you go? You cannot stay here, the police may swoop at any moment. Where will you go?" 'Drake's Farm?" Moses mused.

'No." Marcus shook his head. 'They know you too well there. The moment you arrive the whole township will know and there are police informers everywhere. It will be the same as turning yourself in at the nearest police station." They were silent again until Moses asked, 'Where is Joe Cicero?"

Have they taken him?" 'No,' Marcus answered. 'He has gone underground." 'Can you contact him?" 'We have an arrangement. He will ring me here - if not tonight, then tomorrow." Moses looked across the table at Tara. 'Can I come with you to the expedition base at Sundi Caves? It's the only safe place I can think of at the moment." And Tara's spirits bounded. She would have him for a little longer still.

Tara explained to Marion Hurst, not attempting to conceal Moses' identity nor the fact that he was a fugitive, and she was not surprised by the American woman's response.

'It's like Martin Luther King coming and asking me for sanctuary,' she declared. 'Of course, I'll do whatever I can to help." As a cover, Marion gave Moses a job in the pottery section of the warehouse under the name of Stephen Khama, and he was absorbed immediately into the company of the expedition. Without asking questions the other members, both black and white, gathered around to shield him.

Despite Marcus Archer's assurances, it was almost a week before he was able to contact Joe Cicero, and another day before he could arrange for them to meet. The hardest possible way they had learned not to underestimate the vigilance of the police, while Joe Cicero had always been secretive and professional. Nobody was certain where he lived or how he maintained himself, his comings and goings were unannounced and unpredictable.

'I have always thought him to be theatrical and over-careful, but now I see the wisdom behind it,' Moses told Tara as they drove into the city. Moses was once more dressed in his chauffeur's uniform.

'From now on we must learn from the professionals, for those ranged against us are the hardest of professionals." Joe Cicero came out of the entrance of the Johannesburg railway station as Moses stopped the Cadillac for the red light at the pedestrian crossing, and he slipped unobtrusively into the back seat beside Tara. Moses pulled away, heading out in the direction of Doornfontein.

'I congratulate you on still being at large,' Joe told Moses wryly, as he lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the last and glanced sideways at Tara. 'You are Tara Courtney,' and smiled at her surprise.

'What is your part in all this?" 'She is a friend,' Moses spoke for her. 'She is committed to us.

You may speak freely in front of her." 'I never speak freely,' Joe murmured. 'Only an idiot does that." They were all silent then until Joe asked suddenly, 'And so, my friend, do you still believe that the revolution can be won without blood?

Are you still one of the pacifists who would play the game by the rules that the oppressor makes and changes at will?" 'I have never been a pacifist,' Moses' voice rumbled. 'I have always been a warrior." 'I rejoice to hear you say it, for it confirms what I have always believed." Joe smiled a sly and inscrutable smile behind the fringeof dark beard. 'If I did not, I would not be sitting here now." Then his tone altered. 'Make a U-turn here and take the Krugersdorp road!" he ordered.

The three of them were silent while Joe turned to scrutinize the following traffic. After a minute he seemed satisfied and relaxed in the back seat. Moses drove out of the built-up areas into the open grassy veld. The traffic around them thinned, and abruptly Joe Cicero leaned forward and pointed ahead to an empty lay-by on the side of the road.

'Pull in there,' he ordered, and as Moses parked the Cadillac he opened the door beside him. As he stepped out he jerked his head.

'Come!" When Tara opened her own door to join them, Joe snapped. 'No, not you! Stay here!" With Moses at his side he walked through the stand of scraggly black wattle into the open veld beyond, out of sight of the road.

'I told you the woman is trustworthy,' Moses said, and Joe shrugged.

'Perhaps. I do do not take chances until it is necessary to do so." And then he changed direction. 'I asked you once what you thought of Mother Russia?" 'And I replied that she was a friend of the oppressed peoples of the world." 'She wishes to be your friend also,' Joe said simply.

'Do you mean me personally - Moses Gama?" 'Yes, you personally - Moses Gama." 'How do you know this?" 'There are men in Moscow who have watched you carefully for many years. What they have seen they approve off They offer you the hand of friendship." 'I ask you again. How do you know this?" 'I am a colonel in the Russian KGB. I have been ordered to tell you this." Moses stared at him. It was moving so fast that he needed a respite to catch up.

x 'What does the offer of friendship entail?" he asked cautiously, buying time in which to think, and Joe Cicero nodded approvingly.

'It is good you ask the terms of our friendship. It confirms our estimate of you. That you are a careful man. You will be given the answer to that in due course. In the meantime be content with the fact that we have singled you out above all others." 'Very well,' Moses agreed. 'But tell me why I have been chosen.

There are other good men - Mandela is one of them." 'Mandela was considered, but we do not believe he has the steel.

We detect a softness in him. Our psychologists believe that he will flinch from the hard and bloody work of the revolution. We know also that he does not have the same high regard for Mother Russia that you do. He has even called her the new oppressor, the colonialist of the twentieth century." 'What about the others?" Moses asked.

'There are no others,' Joe told him flatly. 'It was either you or Mandela. It is you. That is the decision." 'They want my answer now?" Moses stared into the tar pits of his eyes, but they had a strangely lifeless dullness in them and Joe Cicero shook his head.

'They want to meet you, talk to you, make sure you understand the bargain. Then you will be trained and groomed for the task ahead." 'Where will this meeting take place?" Joe smiled and shrugged. 'In Moscow - where else?" And Moses did not let his amazement show on his face, though his hands clenched into fists at his sides.

'Moscow! How will I get there?" 'It has been arranged,' Joe assured him, and Moses lifted his head and stared at the tall thunderheads that rose in silver and blue splendour along the horizon. He was lost in thought for many minutes.

He felt his spirits grow light and take wing up towards those soaring thunder clouds. It had come - the moment for which he had worked and waited a lifetime. Destiny had cleared the field of all his rivals, and he had been chosen.

Like a victor's laurel they were offering a land and a crown.

'I will go to meet them,' he agreed softly.

'You will leave in two days' time. It will take me that long to make the final arrangements. In the meantime keep out of sight, do not attempt to take leave of any friends, do not tell anybody you are going - not even the Courtney woman or your new wife. I will get a message to you through Marcus Archer and if he is arrested before then, I will contact you at the expedition base at Sundi Caves. Professor Hurst is a sympathizer." Joe dropped the butt of his'cigarette and while he ground it under his heel, he lit another. 'Now we will go back to the car." Victoria Gama stood at the top end of the sloping lawns of the Baragwanath nurses' home. She was still dressed in her uniform with the badges of a nursing sister sparkling on her tunic, but she looked very young and self-conscious as she faced the hundred or so off-duty nurses who were gathered on the lawns below her. The white matron had refused permission for them to meet in the dining-hall, so they were standing out under a sky full of towering thunderheads.

'My sisters!" She held out her hands towards them. 'We have a duty to our patients - to those in pain, to those suffering and dying, to those who turn to us in trust. However, I believe that we have a higher duty and more sacred commitment to all our people who for three hundred years have suffered under a fierce and unrelenting oppression --' Victoria seemed to gather confidence as she spoke, and her sweet young voice had a music and rhythm that caught their attention.

She had always been popular with the other nurses, and her winning personality, her capacity for hard work and her unselfish attitude had seen her emerge, not only as one of the most senior nursing staff for her age, but also as an example and a trend-setter amongst the younger nurses. There were women ten and fifteen years older than she was, who listened now to her with attention and who applauded her when she paused for breath. Yheir applause and approval bolstered Victoria and her voice took on a sharper tone.

'Across the land our leaders, in actions rather than pale words, are showing the oppressors that we will no longer remain passive and acquiescent. They are crying to the world for justice and humanity.

What kind of women will we be if we stand aside and refuse to join them? How can we ignore the fact that our leaders are being arrested and harassed by the infernal laws --' There was a stir in the crowd of uniformed nurses, and the faces which had been lifted towards Victoria turned away and the expressions of rapt concentration changed to consternation. From the edges of the crowd one or two of the nurses broke away and scuttled back up the steps of the nurses' home.

Three police vans had driven up to the gates, and the white matron and two of her senior staff had hurried out to confer with the police captain in charge of the contingent as he alighted from the leading vehicle. The matron's white tunic and skirt contrasted with the blue of the police uniforms, and she was pointing at Victoria and talking animatedly to the captain.

Victoria's voice faltered, and despite her resolve, she was afraid. It was an instinctive and corrosive fear. From her earliest remembered childhood the blue police uniforms had been symbols of unquestionable might and authority. To defy them now went against all her instincts and the teaching of her father and all her elders.

'Do not challenge the white man,' they had taught her. 'For his wrath is more terrible than the summer fires that consume the veld.

None can stand before it." Then she remembered Moses Gama, and her voice firmed; she beat down her fear and cried aloud, 'Look at yourselves, my sisters.

See how you tremble and cast your eyes down at the sight of the oppressor. He has not yet spoken nor raised a hand to you, but you have become little children!" The police captain left the group at the gate and came to the edge of the lawn. There he paused and raised a bull-horn to his lips.

'This is an illegal gathering on state-owned property." His voice was magnified and distorted. 'You have five minutes to disperse and return to your quarters." He raised his arm and ostentatiously checked his wristwatch. 'If you have not done so in that time --' The nurses were scattering already, scampering away, not waiting for the officer to complete his warning, and Victoria found herself alone on the wide lawn. She wanted to run and hide also, but she thought about Moses Gama and her pride would not let her move.

The police officer lowered his loud-hailer and turned back to the white matron. They conferred again, and the officer showed her a sheaf of paper which he took from his despatch case. The mattoil nodded and they both looked at Victoria again. Alone now, she still stood at the top of the lawn. Pride and fear held her rigid. She stood stiffly, unable to move as the police captain marched across to where she stood.

'Victoria Dinizulu? he asked her in a normal conversational voice, so different from the hoarse booming of the loud-hailer.

Victoria nodded, and then remembered. 'No,' she denied. 'I am Victoria Gama." The police officer looked confused. He was very fair-skinned with a fine blond mustache. 'I was told you were Victoria Dinizulu - there has been a mess-up,' he muttered, and then he blushed with embarrassment and immediately Victoria felt sorry for him.

'I got married,' she explained. 'My maiden name was Victoria Dinizulu, but now I am Victoria Gama." 'Oh, I see." The captain looked relieved, and glanced down at the document in his hand. 'It's made out to Victoria Dinizulu. I suppose it's still all right though." He was uncertain again.

'It's not your fault,' Victoria consoled him. 'The wrong name, I mean. They can't blame you. You couldn't have known." 'No, you're right." The captain perked up visibly. 'It's not my fault.

I'll just serve it on you anyway. They can sort it out back at HQ." 'What is it?" Victoria asked curiously.

'It's a banning order,' the captain explained. He showed it to her.

'It's signed by the minister of police. I have to read it to you, then you have to sign it,' he explained and then he looked contrite. 'I'm sorry, it's my duty." 'That is all right." Vicky smiled at him. 'You have to do your duty." He looked down at the document again and began to read aloud:

TO VICTORIA THANDELA DINIZUL. U

Notice in terms of Section 9(i) of the Internal Security Act 1950 (Act of 1950). Whereas 1, Manfred De La Rey, Minister of Police, am satisfied that you are engaged in activities which endanger or are calculated to endanger the maintenance of public order -The captain stumbled over the more complicated legal phraseology and mispronounced some of the English words. Vicky corrected him helpfully. The banning document was four typewritten pages, and the policeman reached the end of it with patent relief.

'You have to sign here." He offered her the document.

q don't have a pen." 'Here, use mine." 'Thank you,' said Victoria.

'You are very kind." She signed her name in the space provided and as she handed him back his pen, she had ceased to be a complete person. Her banning order prohibited her from being in the company of more than two other persons at any one time, except in the course of her daily work, of addressing any gathering or preparing any written article for publication. It confined her physically to the magisterial area of Johannesburg and required that she remain under house arrest for twelve hours of the day and also that she report daily to her local police station.

'I'm sorry,' the police captain repeated, as he screwed the top back on his pen. 'You seem a decent girl." 'It's your job,' Victoria smiled back at him. 'Don't feel bad about it." Over the following days Victoria retreated into the strange halfworld of isolation. During working hours she found that her peers and superiors avoided her, as though she were a carrier of plague.

The matron moved her out of the room that she shared with two other nursing sisters and she was given a small single room on the unpopular southern side of the hostel which never received the sun in winter. In this room her meals were served to her on a tray as she was prohibited from using the dining-hall when more than two other persons were present. Each evening after coming off shift she made the two-mile walk down to the police station to sign the register, but this soon became a pleasant outing rather than a penance. She was able to smile and greet the people she passed on the street for they did not know she was a non-person and she enjoyed even that fleeting human contact.

Alone in her room she listened to her portable radio and read the books that Moses had given her, and thought about him. More than once she heard his name on the radio. Apparently a controversial film had been shown on the NABS television channel in the United States which had created a furore across the continent. It seemed that South Africa, which for most Americans was a territory remote as the moon and a thousand times less important, was suddenly a political topic. In the film Moses Gama had figured largely, and such was his presence and stature that he had been accepted abroad as the central figure in the African struggle. In the United Nations debate which had followed the television film, nearly every one of the speakers had referred to Moses Gama. Although the motion in the General Assembly calling for the condemnation of South Africa's racial discrimination had beerr vetoed in the Security Council by Great Britain, the debate had sent a ripple across the world and a cold shiver down the spine of the white government in the country.

South Africa had no television network, but on her portable radio Victoria listened to a pungent edition of 'Current Affairs' on the state-controlled South African Broadcasting Corporation in which the campaign of defiance was described as the action of a radical minority, and Moses Gama was viiifled as a communist-inspired revolutionary criminal who was still at large, although a warrant had been issued for his arrest on a charge of high treason.

Cut off from all other sympathetic human contact, Victoria found herself pining for him with such desperate longing that she cried herself to sleep in her lonely room each night.

On the tenth day of her banning she was returning from her daily report to the police station, keeping to the edge of the pavement in that sensual gliding walk that the Nguni woman practises from childhood when she carries every load, from faggots of firewood to five-gallon clay pots of water, balanced upon her head. A light delivery van slowed down as it approached her from behind, and began to keep pace with her.

Victoria was accustomed to extravagant male attention, for she was the very essence of Nguni female beauty, and when the driver of the vehicle whistled softly, she did not glance in his direction but lifted her chin an inch and assumed a haughty expression.

The driver whistled again, more demandingly, and from the corner of her eye she saw the van was blue with the sign EXPRESS DRY CLEANERS -- SIX HOUR SERVICE painted on the side. The driver was a big man, and although his cap was pulled low over his eyes, she sensed he was attractive and masterful. Despite herself her hips began to swing as she strode on, and her large perfectly round buttocks oscillated like the cheeks of a chipmunk chewing a nut.

'Victoria!" Her name was hissed, and the voice was unmistakable.

She stopped dead and swung round to face him.

'You!" she whispered, and then glanced around her frantically.

For the moment the sidewalk was clear and only light traffic moved down the highway between rows of tall bluegum trees. Her eyes flashed back to his face, almost hungrily, and she whispered, 'Oh Moses, I didn't think you'd come." He leaned across the front seat of the van and opened the door nearest her, and she rushed across and threw herself into the moving van.

'Get down,' he ordered, and she crouched below the dashboard while he slammed the door closed and accelerated away.

'I couldn't believe it was you. I still don't - this van, where did you get it? Oh Moses, you'll never know how much - I heard your name on the radio, many times - so much has happened --' She found that she was gabbling almost hysterically. It had been so long since she had been able to talk freely, and it was as though the painful abscess of loneliness and longing had burst and all the poison was draining in the rush of words.

She began to tell him about the nurses; strike and the banning, and hid of J hei no. ks ulu. had. can.*zted, her- or, qcthe e was- going-rffbe a march by a hundred thousand women, to the government buildings at Pretoria, and she was going to defy her banning order to join the march.

'I want you to be proud of me. I want to be part of the struggle, for that is the only way I can truly be a part of you." Moses Gama drove in silence, smiling a little as he listened to her chatter. He wore blue overalls with the legend 'Express Dry Cleaners' embroidered across his back and the rear of the van was filled with racks of clothing that smelled strongly of cleaning solvent. She knew he had borrowed the van from Hendrick Iabaka.

After a few minutes Moses slowed the van and then turned off sharply on to a spur road which swiftly deteriorated into a rutted track, and then petered out entirely. He bumped the last few yards over tussocks of grass and then parked behind a ruined and roofless building, the windows from whmh the frames had been ripped out were like the eyes of a skull. Victoria straightened up from under the dashboard.

'I have heard about the nurses' strike-and your banning,' he said softly as he switched off the engine. 'And yes, I am proud of you.

Very proud. You are a wife fit for a chief." She hung her head shyly, and the pleasure his words gave her was almost unbearable. She had not truly realized how much she loved him while they had been separated, and now the full force of it rushed back upon her.

'And you are a chief,' she said. 'No, more than that - you are a king." 'Victoria, I do not have much time,' he said. 'I should not have come here at all --' 'I would have shrivelled up if you had not - my soul was droughtstricken --' she burst out, but he laid his hand on her arm to still her.

'Listen to me, Victoria. I have come to tell you that I am going away. I have come to charge you to be strong while I am away." 'Oh, my husband!" In her agitation she lapsed into Zulu. 'Where are you going?" 'I can tell you only that it is to a distant land." 'Can I not journey by your side?" she pleaded.

'No." 'Then I will send my heart to be your travelling companion, while the husk of me remains here to await your return. When will you come back, my husband?" 'I do not know, but it will be a long time." 'For me every minute that you are gone will become a weary day,' she told him quietly, and he raised his hand and stroked her face gently.

'If there is anything you need you must go to Hendrick Tabaka.

He is my brother, and I have placed you in his care." She nodded, unable to speak.

'There is only one thing I can tell you now. When I return I will take the world we know and turn it on its head. Nothing will ever be the same again." 'I believe you,' she said simply.

'I must go now,' he told her. 'Our time together has come to an end." 'My husband,' she murmured, casting down her eyes again. 'Let me be a wife to you one last time, for the nights are so long and cold when you are not beside me." He took a roll of canvas from the back of the van and spread it on the grass beside the parked van. Her naked body was set off by the white cloth as she lay upon it like a figure cast in dark bronze thrown down upon the snow.

At the end when he had spent and lay weak as a child upon her, she clasped his head tenderly to the soft warm swell of her bosom and she whispered to him, 'No matter how far and how long you travel, my love will burn away time and distance and I will be beside you, my husband." Tara was waiting for him, with the lantern lit, lying awake in the cottage tent when Moses returned to the camp. She sat up as he came through the fly. The blanket fell to her waist and she was naked. Her breasts were big and white and laced with tiny bluish veins around the swollen nipples - so different from those of the woman he had just left.

'Where have you been?" she demanded.

He ignored the question as he began to undress.

'You have been to see her, haven't you? Joe ordered you not to." Now he looked at her scornfully, and then deliberately re-buttoned the front of his overalls as he moved to leave the tent again.

'I'm sorry, Moses,' she cried, instantly terrified by the thought of his going. 'I didn't mean it, please stay. I won't talk like that again. I swear it, my darling. Please forgive me. I was upset, I have had such a terrible dream --' she threw aside the blanket and came up on her knees, reaching out both hands towards him. 'Please!" she entreated.

'Please come to me." For long seconds he stared at her and then began once more to unbutton his overalls. She clung to him desperately as he came into the bed.

'Oh Moses - I had such a dream. I dreamed of Sister Nunziata again. Oh God, the look on their faces as they ate her flesh. They were like wolves, their mouths red and running with her blood. It was the most horrific thing, beyond my imagination. It made me want to despair for all the world." 'No,' he said. His voice was low but it reverberated through her body as though she were'the sounding box of a violin trembling to the power of the strings. 'No!" he said. 'It was beauty - stark beauty, shorn of all but the truth. What you witnessed was the rage of the people, and it was a holy thing. Before that I merely hoped, but after witnessing that I could truly believe. It was a consecration of our victory. They ate the flesh and drank the blood as you Christians do to seal a pact with history. When you have seen that sacred rage you have to believe in our eventual triumph." He sighed, his great muscular chest heaved in the circle of her arms and then he went to sleep. It was something to which she could never grow accustomed, the way he could sleep as though he had closed a door in his mind. She was left bereft and afraid, for she knew what lay ahead for her.

Joe Cicero came for Moses in the night. Moses had dressed like one of a thousand other contract workers from the gold-mines in a surplus army greatcoat and woollen balaclava helmet that covered most of his face. He had no luggage, as Joe had instructed him, and when the ramshackle Ford pick-up parked across the road from them and flashed its lights once, Moses slipped out of the Cadillac and swiftly crossed to it. He did not say goodbye to Tara, they had taken their farewells long ago and he did not look back to where she sat forlornly behind the wheel of the Cadillac.

As soon as Moses climbed into the rear of the Ford, it pulled away. The tail lights dwindled and were lost around the first curve of the road, and Tara was smothered by such a crushing load of despair that she did not believe she could survive it.

Franois Afrika was the headmaster of the Mannenberg coloured school on the Cape Flats. He was a little over forty years old, a plump and serious man with a carb all lait complexion and thick very curly hair which he parted in the middle and plastered flat with Vaseline.

His wife Miriam was plump also, but much shorter and younger than he. She had taught history and English at the Mannenberg junior school until the headmaster had married her, and she had given him four children, all daughters. Miriam was president of the local chapter of the Women's Institute which she used as a convenient cover for her political activities. She had been arrested during the defiance campaign, but when that petered out she had not been charged and had been released under a banning order. Three months later, when the furore had died away completely, her banning order had not been renewed.

Molly Broadhurst had known her since before she had married Franqois, and the couple were frequent visitors at Molly's home.

Behind her thick spectacles Miriam wore a perpetual chubby smile.

Her home in the grounds of the junior school was clean as an operating theatre with crocheted antimacassars on the heavy maroon easy chairs, and a mirrorlike shine on the floors. Her daughters were always beautifully dressed with coloured ribbons in their pigtails and like Miriam were chubby and contented, a consequence of Miriam's cookery rather than her genes.

Tara met Miriam for the first time at Molly's home. Tara had come down by train from the expedition base at Sundi Caves two weeks before her baby was due. She had booked a private coup compartment and kept the door locked the entire journey to avoid being recognized. Molly had met her at Paarl station, for she had not wanted to risk being seen at the main Cape Town terminus. Shasa and her family still believed that she was working with Professor Hurst.

Miriam was all that Tara had hoped for, all that Molly had promised her, although she was not prepared for the maternity dress.

'You are pregnant also?" she demanded as they shook hands, and Miriam patted her stomach shyly.

'It's a cushion, Miss Tara, I couldn't just pop a baby out of nowhere, could I? I started with just a small lump as soon as Molly told me, and I've built it up slowly." Tara realized what inconvenience she had put her to, and now she embraced her impulsively. 'Oh, I can never tell you how grateful I am. Please don't call me Miss Tara. I'm your friend and plain Tara will do very well." 'I'll look after your baby like it's my own, I promise you,' Miriam told her, and then saw Tara's expression and hastily qualified her assurance. 'But he will always be yours, Tara. You can come and see him whenever, and one day if you are able to take him - well, Francois and I won't stand in your way." 'You are even nicer than Molly told me!" Tara hugged her. 'Come, I want to show you the clothes I've brought for our hah ' 'Oh, they areall blue." Miriam ,v.in: ..... Y' are going to have a boy.9' -- ......... ,,mcu. you are so sure you 'No question about it - I'm sure." 'So was I,' Miriam chuckled. 'And look at me now - all girls!