The Angels Weep

The crowd of spectators in the bar room, that lined all the walls and even stood on the long bar counter for a better view of the game, were nearly all men of substance, for they had won their grants and gold claims by riding into this land in Doctor Jim's conquering column.

They each owned three thousand acres of the sweet pastured veld, and their share of the herds of Lobengula's captured cattle grazed upon them. Many of them had already driven their claim pegs into the rich surface reefs in which visible gold gleamed in the white Matabeleland sunlight.

Of course some of the reefs were un payable stringers, yet already Ed Pearson had pegged an ancient working between the Hwe Hwe and Tshibgiwe rivers that had panned samples at five ounces the ton. He called it the "Globe and Phoenix, and Harry Mellow, acting on Mr. Rhodes" instructions, had surveyed the reef and estimated that there were 2 million tons of reserves, making it the richest gold mine in existence, except possibly for Ralph Ballantyne's Harkness Mine further south with its estimated 5 million tons of reserves at an incredible twenty ounces to the ton.

There was rich red gold and the good Lord alone knew what other treasure buried in this earth, and the mood was optimistic and boisterous. Bulawayo was a boom town, and the spectators encouraged the two billiard players with raucous banter and extravagant wagers.

General Mungo St. John chalked his cue carefully and then wiped the blue dust from his fingers with a silk handkerchief. He was a tall man with wide shoulders and narrow hips, but as he moved around the green table he favoured one long powerful leg, an old gunshot injury, an affliction that no man dared mention in his presence.

He was coat less with gold expanders holding his white linen shirtsleeves above the elbows, and his waistcoat was embroidered with silver and gold metallic thread. On a lesser man, such theatrical dress would have looked ostentatious, but on Mungo St. John it was correct as an emperor's ermine and purple.

He paused at the corner of the table and surveyed the lie of the ivory balls. His single eye had a predatory gleam to it, tawny yellow and strangely flecked, like the eye of an eagle. The empty socket of the other eye was covered with a black cloth patch and it gave him the air of a genteel pirate as he smiled across the table at his opponent.

"Cannon and losing hazard off red," Mungo St. John announced calmly, and there was a roar of comment in which a dozen voices were offering odds of five to one and better against the play, and Harry Mellow grinned boyishly, and tipped his head in reluctant admiration of the big man's audacity.

The game they were playing was "Zambezi nominated three cushion, which is as far from ordinary billiards as the little gecko lizards on the bar room rafters were from the big gnarled twenty-foot mugger crocodiles of the Zambezi pools. It was a local variation of the game, combining the most difficult elements of English and French billiards.

The player's cue ball had to strike three cushions of the table before completing a scoring coup, but in addition to this monstrous condition, the player had to announce beforehand exactly how he intended scoring.

This prevented him executing a fluke score, and if he did make an unannounced and therefore unintended winning stroke, he was penalized the points he should have won. It was a tough game. The stakes between the players were 5 pounds a point. but naturally the players and the spectators were free to offer side bets for or against the players making their nominated coup. With players of the calibre of Harry Mellow and Mungo St. John on the table, there was 1000 pounds or more riding on each stroke, and the voices that shouted the odds and those that accepted them were hoarse with tension.

Mungo St. John replaced the long black cheroot between his teeth and he made a little tripod with the fingers of his left hand, then he laid the polished maplewood cue into the notch of his thumb and forefinger. There was a final flurry of bets, and then a silence fell over the crowded room. The air was blue with tobacco smoke, and the faces that strained forward were flushed and sweating. Mungo St. John lined up his white cue ball with his single bright eye, and across the table Harry Mellow took a slow breath and held it. If Mungo succeeded with the cannon, it scored two points, and another three points for the hazard off red, but that was not all that was at stake, for Harry had placed a side bet of 50 pounds against the score. He stood to lose or win over 100 guineas.

Mungo St. John's face was grave as a professor of philosophy considering the riddle of the universe as he made a gentle practice stroke that he arrested with the leather button at the tip of the long cue almost touching the white ivory ball. Then he drew back the cue deliberately to its full travel. At the instant that he launched the stroke the voice of a young woman cut through the hated silence of watching men.

"General St. John, you must come quickly." There were only one hundred white women in the entire vast land north of the Shashi and south of the Zambezi rivers, of which probably ninety were already married and most of the others spoken for. A voice with such lovely ringing tones could have turned every male head down both sides of the Champs-Elyskes, but in the billiard saloon of the Grand Hotel of woman-starved Bulawayo, it had the effect of a close-range broadside of grapeshot. A waiter dropped a tray laden with schooners of beer, a heavy wooden bench toppled over backwards with a shattering crash as the six men seated upon it sprang to attention like guardsmen, an inebriated transport rider toppled backwards off the counter on top of the barman who instinctively swung a round-arm punch at him, missed and swept a row of whisky bottles off the shelf.

The sudden uproar in the deep silence would have unnerved a marble statue of Zeus, but Mungo St. John completed his stroke with an almost creamy smoothness, his single yellow eye unblinking in the calm handsome face as it followed the flight of the ball from the tip of his cue. The white ball thumped crisply against the far cushion, doubled the table and the spin hooked it through the corner, striking the cushion at an angle that bled the speed off the ivory. It came trundling back and Mungo St. John lifted his left hand to let it pass under his nose, it touched the other white ball with just sufficient force to deflect it a hair's breadth and send it on to kiss the red ball like a lover. The contact robbed the cue ball of the last of its impetus, and it hovered on the edge of the corner pocket for a weary moment and then dropped soundlessly into the net.

It was a perfect cannon and losing hazard, nominated and executed, and a thousand pounds had been won and lost in those few seconds, but every man in the room except Mungo St. John was staring at the doorway in a kind of mesmeric trance. Mungo St. John lifted his cue ball from the net, and re-spotted it, then as he chalked his cue again, he murmured, "Victoria, MY dear, there are times when even the prettiest young lady should remain silent." Once again he stooped over the table.

"Pot red," he announced, and the company was so entranced by the tall coppery-haired girl in their midst, that no bet was offered nor accepted, but as Mungo St. John took his cue back for the next stroke, Victoria spoke again.

"General St. John, my mother is dying." This time Mungo St. John's head flew up, his single eye wide with shock, and the white ball screwed off down the table -in a violent miscue as he stared at Vicky.

Mungo let the wooden cue drop with a clatter onto the floor and he ran from the bar room.

Vicky went on standing in the doorway of the bar room for a few seconds. Her hair was tangled into thick ropes on her shoulders by the wind, and her breathing was still so rough that her breasts heaved tantalizingly under her thin cotton blouse. Her eyes swept the sea of grinning, ingratiating faces, and then stopped when they reached the tall figure of Harry Mellow in his dark riding-boots and- breeches and the faded blue shirt open at his throat to show a nest of crisp curls in the vee. Vicky flushed and turned to hurry back through the doorway.

Harry Mellow tossed his cue to the barman, and shoved his way through the disappointed crowd. By the time he reached the street, Mungo St. John, still bareheaded and in shirtsleeves, was mounted on a big bay mare, but leaning from the saddle to talk urgently to Vicky, who stood at his stirrup.

Mungo looked up and saw Harry. "Mr. Mellow," he called, "I would be obliged if you could see my stepdaughter -safely out of town. I am needed at Khami." Then he put his heels into the mare's flanks, and she jumped away at a dead run down the dusty street.

Vicky was climbing up onto the driving seat of a rickety little cart drawn by two diminutive donkeys with drooping melancholy ears, and on the seat beside her sat the mountainous black figure of a Matabele woman.

"Miss Codrington," Harry called urgently. "Please wait." He reached the wheel of the cart with a few long strides and looked up -at Vicky.

"I have wanted to see you again so very much." "Mr. Mellow," Vicky lifted her chin haughtily, "the road to Khami Mission is clearly signposted, you could not possibly have lost your way." "Your mother ordered me off the Mission Station you know that damned well."

"Please do not use strong language in my presence, sir," said Vicky primly.

"I apologize, but your mother does have a reputation. They say she fired both barrels at one unwanted visitor." "Well," Vicky admitted, "that is true, but he was one of Mr. Rhodes" hirelings, and it was birdshot, and she did miss with one barrel." "Well, I am one of Mr. Rhodes" hirelings, and she might have upped to buckshot, and the practice might have improved her shooting." "I like a man of determination. A man who takes what he wants and damn the consequences." "That is strong language, Miss Codrington." "Good day to you, Mr. Mellow." Vicky shook up the donkeys, and they stumbled into a dejected trot.

The little cart reached the outskirts of the new town, where the dozen or so brick buildings gave way to grass huts and tattered dusty canvas shelters and where the wagons of the transport riders were parked wheel to wheel on both sides of the track, still laden with the bags, bolts and bales that they had carried up from the railhead.

Vicky was sitting upright on the cart, looking straight ahead but anxiously she told Juba out of the side of her mouth, "Tell me if you see him coming, but don't let him see you looking." "He comes, "Juba announced comfortably. "He comes like a cheetah after a gazelle."

Vicky heard the beat of galloping hooves from behind, but she merely sat a little straighter.

"Haul" Juba smiled with nostalgic sadness. "The passion of a man.

My husband ran fifty miles without stopping to rest or drink, for in those days my beauty drove men mad." "Don't stare at him, Juba." "He is so strong and impetuous, and he will make such fine sons in your belly." "Juba!" Vicky flushed scarlet. "That is a wicked thing for a Christian lady even to think. I shall probably send him back anyway."

Juba shrugged and chuckled. "Ah! Then he will make those fine sons elsewhere. I saw him looking at Elizabeth when he came to Khami."

Vicky's blushes turned a deeper, angrier shade. "You are an evil woman, Juba-" But before she could go on Harry Mellow reined in his rangey gelding beside the cart.

"Your stepfather placed you in my care, Miss Codrington, and it is therefore my duty to see you home as swiftly -as possible." He reached into the cart, and before she realized his intentions, he had whipped a long sinewy arm around her waist, and as she kicked and shrieked with surprise, he swung her up onto the horse's rump behind his saddle.

"Hold on!" he ordered. "Tightly!" And instinctively she threw both arms around his lean hard body. The way it felt shocked her so that she relaxed her grip and leaned back just as Harry urged the gelding forward and Vicky came so perilously close to flying backwards over his haunches into the dusty track that she snatched at Harry with renewed fervour, and tried -to close her mind and shut off her body from these unfamiliar sensations. Her training warned her that anything that raised such a warmth in the base of her stomach, made the skin of her forearms prickle so, and tendered her breathless and deliriously lightheaded, must be unholy and wicked.

To distract herself she examined the fine hairs that grew down the back of his neck, and the soft silky skin behind his ears, and found yet another sensation rising in her throat, a kind of choking suffocating tenderness. She had an almost unbearable compulsion to press her face against the faded blue shirt and breathe in the virile smell of his body. It had the sharp odour of steel struck against flint, underlaid with a warmer scent like the first raindrops on sun-baked earth.

Her confusion was dispelled abruptly by the realization that the gelding was still in a flying gallop and at this pace the journey back to Khami would be brief indeed.

"You are punishing your mount, Sir." Her voice quavered and played her false, so Harry turned his head.

"I cannot hear you." She leaned unnecessarily close so that her loose hair touched his cheek and her lips brushed his ear.

"Not so fast," she repeated. "my mother-" "is not that ill."

"But you told General St. John-" "Do you think Juba and I would have left Khami if there was the least danger?" "St. John?" "It was a fine excuse to get them together again. So romantic, we should allow them a little time alone." Harry reined the gelding down to a more sedate pace, but instead of relaxing her grip Vicky wriggled a little closer.

"My mother does not recognize her own feelings," she explained.

"Sometimes Lizzie and I have to take things into our own hands." Even as she said it, Vicky regretted having mentioned her twin's name. She had also noticed Harry Mellow look at Elizabeth on his only visit to Khami Mission, and she had seen Elizabeth look straight back. After Harry had left Khami in some haste with her mother's ultimate farewells ringing in his ears, Vicky had attempted to negotiate with her sister an agreement that Elizabeth would not encourage further smouldering glances from Mr. Mellow. In reply Elizabeth had smiled in that infuriating way she had. "Don't you think we should let Mr. Mellow decide on that?" If Harry Mellow had been attractive before, Elizabeth's unreasonable tenacity had made him irresistible now, and instinctively Vicky tightened her grip around his waist. At the same time she saw the wooden kopjes that marked Khami Mission Station looming ahead above the low scrubby bush, and she felt a sinking dread.

Soon Harry would be confronted with Elizabeth's honey-brown eyes and that soft dark flood of hair pierced with russet stars of light.

This was the only time in her entire life that Vicky could remember being free from surveillance" without her mother or Juba or, particularly, her twin being within earshot or touching distance. It was an exhilarating sensation added to all the other unfamiliar and clamorous sensations which assailed her, and the last restraints of her strict religious upbringing were swept away in this sudden reckless rebellious mood. She realized with an unerring woman's instinct that she could have what she so dearly wanted, but only if she took direct bold action, and took it immediately.

"It is a sad and bitter thing that a woman should be alone, when she loves somebody so." Her voice had sunk to a low puff, and it affected Harry so that he brought the horse down to a walk.

"God did not mean a woman to be alone," she murmured, and saw the blood come up under the soft skin behind his ears, "nor a man either," she went on, and slowly he turned his head and looked into her green eyes.

It is so hot in the sun," Vicky whispered, holding his gaze. "I should like to rest for a few minutes in the shade." He lifted her down from the saddle, and she stood close to him still, without averting her eyes from his face.

"The wagon dust has covered everything and left us no clean place to sit," she said. "Perhaps we should try further from the road?" And she took his hand, and quite naturally led him through the soft pale knee-high grass towards one of the mimosa trees. Beneath its spreading feathery branches they would be out of sight of any chance traveller upon the road.

Mungo St. John's mare was lathered in dark streaks down her shoulders and his riding-boots were splattered with blown froth from her gaping jaws as he drove her over the top of the neck between the kopjes, and without pause pushed her down towards the white Mission buildings. The mare's hoof beats rang against the hills and echoed from the mission walls, and Elizabeth's slim skirted figure appeared on the wide veranda of the homestead. She shaded her eyes to peer up the slope at Mungo, and when she recognized him, hurried down the steps into the sunlight.

"General St. John, oh, thank God you have come." She ran to take the mare's head.

"How is she? "There was a wild, driven look upon Mungo's bony features. He kicked his feet from the stirrups and jumped down to seize Elizabeth by the shoulders and shake her in his anxiety.

"It started as a game, Vicky and I wanted you to come to Mama because she needs you she wasn't bad, just a little go of fever."

"Damn you, girl," Mungo shouted at her, "what has happened?" At his tone the tears that Elizabeth had been holding back broke with a sob and streamed down her cheeks. "She has changed it must be the girl's blood she is burning up with the girl's blood." "Pull yourself together." Mungo shook her again. "Come on, Lizzie, this isn't like you." Elizabeth gulped once, and then her voice steadied. "She injected blood from a fever patient into herself." "From a black girl?

In God's name, why?" Mungo demanded, but did not wait for her reply.

He left Elizabeth and ran up onto the veranda, and burst in through the door to Robyn's bedroom, but he stopped before he reached the bed.

In the small closed room, the stink of fever was as rank as that of a sty, and the heat from the body in the narrow cot had condensed on the glass of the single window like steam from a kettle of boiling water. Crouched beside the cot like a puppy at its master's feet was Mungo's son. Robert looked up at his father with huge solemn eyes, and his mouth twisted in the thin pale face.

"Son!" Mungo took another step towards the cot, but the child leaped to his feet and silently he darted for the door, ducking nimbly under Mungo's outstretched hand, and his bare feet slapped on the veranda as he raced away. For a moment Mungo yearned after him, and then he shook his head and instead he went to the cot. He stood over it and looked down at the still figure upon it.

Robyn had wasted until the bones of her skull seemed to rise through the pale flesh of her cheeks and forehead. Her eyes were closed, and sunk into deep leaden-purple sockets. Her hair, laced with silver at the temples, seemed dry and brittle as the winter grasses of the parched veld, and as he leaned to touch her forehead, a paroxysm of shivering took her that rattled the iron bedstead and her teeth chattered so violently that it seemed they must shatter like porcelain.

Under Mungo's fingers her skin was almost painfully hot to the touch, and he looked up sharply at Elizabeth who stood beside him with a stricken expression.

"Quinine?"he demanded.

"I have given her more than I should, a hundred grains since this morning, but there is no response." Elizabeth broke off, reluctant to tell him the worst.

"Yes, what is it?" "Before this, Mama had not taken quinine for six weeks. She wanted to give the fever a chance to strike, and to prove her theory." Mungo stared at her aghast. "But, her own studies-" He shook his head in disbelief. "She has shown herself, that abstinence followed by massive doses-" He could not go on, as though the words might conjure up the spectre he feared most.

Elizabeth had anticipated his fears. "Her pallor," she whispered, "the total lack of response to the quinine I am so afraid."

Instinctively Mungo put his arm around Elizabeth's shoulders, and for a few seconds she shrank against him. Mungo had always enjoyed a special relationship with the twins, they had always been his willing accomplices and secret allies at Khami Mission, from the first day that he had arrived, dying of the suppurating gunshot wound in his leg.

Though they had been barely pubescent at that time, the twins had not been proof against the strange mesmeric effect he had on women of all ages.

"Vicky and I tempted fate by telling you that Mama was dying."

"That's enough." He shook her gently. "Has she passed water?" And then, roughly, to cover the embarrassment between them, "Has she urinated?" "Not since last night." Elizabeth shook her head miserably, and he pushed her towards the door. " "We must force her to take liquid. There is a bottle of Cognac in my saddlebag. Get lemons from the garden, a bowl of sugar and a big jug of boiling water." Mungo held Robyn's head, while Elizabeth forced small sips of the steaming liquid between her white lips, and Robyn fought them in her delirium, hounded and driven by the terrible phantoms of malarial fever.

Then, as they worked, the icy chills that had racked Robyn's body gave way abruptly to a baking heat that desiccated her, and though she did not recognize either Mungo or Elizabeth, she drank thirstily from their hands, gulping and choking in her eagerness, even though she was so weak that when she tried to lift her head, it lolled and rolled to one side, so that Mungo had to steady her. His hands, powerful and brutal-looking, were strangely tender and gentle as he cupped her chin and wiped away the drops that dribbled from her lips.

"How much has she taken? "he asked.

"Over four pints," Elizabeth answered, checking the level in the jug.

The light in the room altered as evening began to fall, and Elizabeth stood up and held her back as she went to the door and looked across the veranda at the road that led down from the neck.

"Vicky and Juba should have been home before now," she said, but her mother cried out again, and she closed the door and hurried back to the cot.

Suddenly, as she knelt beside Mungo, she became aware of the sharp ammonia cal odour that pervaded the room. She averted her eyes and said softly, "I must change her." But Mungo did not rise. "She is my wife," he said. "Neither Vicky nor Juba is here, and you will need help."

Elizabeth nodded and drew down the bedclothes, and then whispered huskily, "Oh sweet God." "It is what we feared," Mungo said quietly, hopelessly.

The skirts of Robin's nightdress were tucked up high around her pale girlish thighs. They were sodden, as was the thin mattress beneath her, but it was not the sulphur yellow urine stain that they had hoped to see. Staring bleakly at the soiled bed clothes, Mungo recalled the piece of callous doggerel that he had heard the troopers of Jameson's column sing. "Black as the angel Black as the ace, When the fever waters flow They are as black as disgrace. Soon we'll lay him down below, And chuck dirt in his face." The reeking stain was black, black as old congealing blood, the drainage from kidneys that were trying to purge the bloodstream of the wild-fire anaemia that was coursing through Robyn's body, the destruction of the red corpuscles that was the cause of the dreadful pallor. For the malaria had been transmuted to something infinitely more evil and deadly.

As they both stared helplessly at it, there was a commotion on the veranda and the door burst open. Victoria stood at the threshold. She was transformed, glowing from within, charged with that strange fragile beauty of a young woman awakened for the first time to the wonder and mystery of love.

"Where have you been, Vicky?" Elizabeth asked. Then she saw the tall young man in the doorway behind her twin. She realized what Harry Mellow's bemused yet proud expression meant. She felt no resentment, no envy, only a small quick pleasure for Vicky. Elizabeth had never wanted Harry Mellow, she had teased her sister by pretending interest but her own love was for a. man she could never have, she had long ago resigned herself to that. She was happy for Vicky, but sad for herself, and Vicky misinterpreted her expression.

"What is it?" The glow faded from Vicky's lovely face, and she lifted a hand to her bosom as though to stem the panic that rose within her. "What has happened, Lizzie? What is it?" "Blackwater," Elizabeth answered flatly. "Mother has blackwater fever." She did not have to elaborate. The twins had lived their lives on a hospital station.

They knew that the disease was peculiarly selective. It attacked only white persons, and Robyn's researches had linked that peculiarity to the use of quinine, which was restricted almost entirely to the whites.

Robyn had treated fifty or more cases at the mission over the years.

At first it had been the old ivory hunters and itinerant traders, then more recently the troopers of Jame son's column and the new settlers and prospectors that were swarming across the Limpopo river.

The twins knew that of those fifty cases of blackwater, only three had survived. The rest of them lay in the little cemetery beyond the river. Their mother was under virtual sentence of death, and Vicky flew to the bedside and knelt beside her.

"Oh, Mama," she whispered, stricken with guilt. "I should have been here." Juba heated rounded river stones in the open fire and wrapped them in blankets. They packed them around Robyn's body, and then covered her with four karosses of wild fur. She fought weakly to throw off the covers, but Mungo held her down. Despite the internal heat of the fever and the external temperature of the hot stones trapped under the furs, her skin was burning dry and her eyes had the flat blind glitter of water-worn rock crystal.

Then as the sun touched the tree-tops and the light in the room turned to sombre orange, the fever broke and oozed from the pores of her marble pale skin like the juice of crushed sugar cane from the press. The sweat came up in fat shining beads across her forehead and chin, each drop joining with the others until they ran in thick oily snakes back into her hair, soaking it as though she had been held under water. It ran into her eyes, faster than Mungo could wipe it away. It poured down her neck and wetted and matted the fur of the kaross. It soaked through the thin mattress and pattered like rain on the hard dry floor below.

The temperature of her body plunged dramatically, and when the sweat had passed, Juba and the twins sponged her naked body. She had dehydrated and wasted, so that the rack of her ribs stood out starkly, and her pelvis formed a bony hollowed- basin. They handled her with exaggerated care, for any rough movement might rupture the delicate damaged walls of the renal blood vessels and bring on the torrential haemorrhage which so often ended this disease.

When they had finished, they called Mungo back from where he was sitting with Harry Mellow on the stoep of the Mission. Robyn was comatose. Mungo set the lantern on the floor so that the feeble light would not trouble her.

"I will call you if there is any change." He sent the women away and sat on the stool beside the cot.

Robyn sank slowly during the night, as the disease destroyed her blood, and in the dawn light she looked as though she had been sucked by some monstrous vampire. He knew she was dying, and he took her hand, and she did not stir.

A soft rustle at the door made Mungo turn his head. Robert, his son, stood in the door. His nightshirt was threadbare and patched, too tight under the armpits and the skirts were up above his knees. His thick tangled curls flopped onto the broad pale forehead, and he stared at Mungo unblinkingly, owl-eyed from sleep.

Mungo sat very still, for he sensed that any movement would put the child to flight like a frightened wild animal. He waited a hundred beats of his own heart, and at last the child shifted his gaze to his mother's face, and for the first time there was expression in his eyes.

Slowly, a pace at a time, he crossed to the bed, and hesitantly reached out to touch his mother's cheek. Robyn opened her eyes.

Already they were glazed and sightless, looking beyond the dark frontiers which she had reached. "mummy, , said Robert. "Please don't die, MUMMY." Robyn's eyes flickered from side to side, and then miraculously they focused on Robert's face. She tried to lift her hand, but it merely twitched and then relaxed again.

"Listen to me. If you die," Mungo said harshly, and her eyes swivelled to him, "if you die," he repeated deliberately, "the child will be mine." For the first time she recognized him. He could see it, and his words had reached her. He saw the anger come alive in her eyes, saw the enormous effort that she made to speak, but she could make no sound, only her lips formed a single word.

"Never!" "Then live," he challenged her. "Live, damn you!" And he saw her begin to fight again.

Robyn's life-forces rose and sank to the dreadful tides of the disease, baking fever followed icy chills, and after a long exhausted Coma followed the bursting sweats. At times she raved in delirium, assailed by fantasies and demons from the past. Sometimes she looked at Mungo St. John and saw him as he had been so long ago, on the quarter-deck of his beautiful Baltimore clipper Huron, when Robyn had been in her early twenties.

"So handsome," she whispered. "So devilishly, impossibly handsome." Then she was lucid for brief periods, and the fever added strength to her anger.

"You killed him you killed him, and he was a saint," she whispered, her voice light but shaking with fury, and Mungo could not quieten her. "He was my husband, and you sent him across the river to where you knew the Matabele assegais waited. You killed my husband as surely as if you had driven the blade through his heart with your own hand." Then her mood changed again. "Please, will you never let me be at peace?" she pleaded, her voice so weak that he had to lean over her to catch her words. "You know I cannot resist you, yet everything you stand for is an offence against me and my God, against me and the lost and leaderless people that have been given into my care." "Drink," he ordered. "You must drink." And she struggled weakly as he held the jug to her lips.

Then the disease would tighten its grip upon her and sweep her away into the burning fever mists, where there was no sense and no reality. The days and nights swung past in a blur. Sometimes Mungo would start awake to find it was past midnight, and one of the twins was sleeping in the chair on the other side of the bed. He would rise, numbed with fatigue, to force Robyn to drink again.

"Drink," he whispered to her. "Drink, or die." Then he sank back into his own chair, and when he awoke again it was dawn, and his son stood beside the chair, staring into his face. As he opened his eyes, the boy darted away again, and when he called after him, Robyn whispered fiercely from the cot. "You will never have him never!"

Sometimes in the noonday, when Robyn was lying pale and silent, resting between the periodic onslaughts of the fever, Mungo could sleep for a few hours on the pallet set at the far end of the veranda, until Juba or one of the twins called him. "It has begun again." And he hurried to the cot and goaded and coaxed her from her lethargy and forced her to go on fighting.

Sometimes, sitting beside the cot, his own bony features now gaunt and haggard, he wondered at himself. He had possessed a hundred women more beautiful than this in his lifetime. He was well aware of the strange attraction he could still wield over any woman, and yet he had chosen this one, this one whom he could never possess. The one who hated him as fiercely as she loved him, who had conceived his son in a soul-consuming passion, and yet kept him from the child with all her determination. She was the one who had demanded that Mungo marry her, yet vehemently denied him the duty of a wife, who would not allow him in her presence except now when she was too weak to resist, or on those rare occasions when her lust for him overcame her conscience and her revulsion.

He remembered one of those occasions only a month or so previously, when he had wakened in the backroom of his mud-brick hut on the outskirts of Bulawayo. There was a candle burning, and Robyn stood beside the camp-bed that was the only item of furniture in his room. She must have ridden through the darkness and the wilderness to reach him.

"God forgive me!" she had whispered, and fallen upon him in a frenzy of desire.

In the first light she had left him exhausted and stunned, and when he had followed her out to Kharni Mission the next day, she had met him on the veranda armed with a shotgun and he had known instinctively that if he tried to mount the steps to touch her, she would have killed him. He had never seen such loathing as there was in her eyes, for herself as much as for him.

Endlessly she had written to the newspapers, at home and in the Cape, denouncing almost every proclamation he made as Chief Native Commissioner of Matabeleland. She had attacked his conscripted labour policy which provided the ranchers and the miners with the black men they desperately needed to ensure the continuance and the prosperity of this new land. She had condemned the levy of his native police force he used to keep order over the tribe. Once she had even stormed into an indaba he was holding with the tribal indunas and harangued them in fluent Sindebele in his presence, calling the indunas "old women" and "cowards" for submitting to the authority of Mungo and the British South Africa Company. Then not an hour later, she had waited beside the path, in thick bush near the ford of the river, and had waylaid him as he rode back from the indaba. Naked as wild animals, they had made love upon her saddle blanket in the veld, and the fury of it came so close to mutual destruction that it left him shaken and appalled.

"I hate you, oh God, how I hate you," she had whispered, her eyes full of tears, as she mounted her horse again and galloped away, heedless of the thorns that ripped at her skirts.

Her exhortations to the indunas were blatant incitement to rebellion and bloody revolution, while in her book Trooper Hackett of Matabeleland, in which she mentioned Mungo by name, the words she put into his mouth and the actions she ascribed to him were a most virulent slander. Mr. Rhodes and other directors of the BSA Company had urged Mungo to take legal action against her.

"Against my own wife, sir?" He had slanted his single eye and smiled ruefully. "What a fool I would appear." She was the most implacable and remorseless adversary he had ever known, and yet the thought of her dead desolated him, so that each time she sank back towards the abyss, so he sank with her, and when she rallied, so his spirits soared to match her.

Yet the play of emotion and the way in which he drained his own reserves to sustain her wearied him to the very core of his soul, and it went on and on, without respite, day after day until finally Elizabeth broke in on the few hours of deathlike sleep which he allowed himself. He heard the emotion that shook her voice and saw the tears in her eyes.

"It's over, General St. John," she said, and he flinched as though she had struck him across the face, and staggered groggily to his feet.

He felt his own tears sting the rims of his eyes.

"I cannot believe it." Then he realized that Elizabeth was smiling through her tears, and she was proffering the enamelled pot she held in both hands.

It stank of ammonia and the peculiar rotting odour of the disease, but the colour of the fluid had changed, from the deadly black of Guinness stout to the light golden of Pilsner beer.

"It's over," Elizabeth repeated. "Her water has cleared. She's safe. Thank God, she's safe." By that afternoon Robyn was well enough once more to order Mungo St. John to leave Khami Mission, and the following morning she tried to rise from the cot to enforce that order.

"I cannot allow my son to come under your evil influences for another day." "Madam,he started, but she swept his protest aside.

"So far I have resolved not to tell the child about you. He does not know that his father once commanded the most notorious slaving fleet that ever made the middle passage. He does not know of the thousands of damned souls, innocent children of Africa, whom you carried away to a far continent. He does not yet understand that it was you, and your ilk, that waged bloody and unprovoked war upon Lobengula and the Matabele nation, nor that you are the instrument of cruel oppression over them but unless you leave, I shall change that resolve." Her voice crackled with some of its old force, and Juba had to hold her by the shoulders. "I order you to leave Kharni immediately." The effort left Robyn white and panting, and under jubas gentle chubby hands she sank back against the bolster, and Elizabeth whispered to Mungo. "She might have a relapse. Perhaps it would be best." The corner of Mungo's mouth twisted up in that mocking grin that Robyn remembered so, well, but in the golden depths of his single eye there was a shadow, a regret or a terrible loneliness, Robyn could not be sure.

"Your servant, ma'am." He gave her an exaggerated bow, and strode from the sick room. Robyn listened to his footsteps crossing the veranda and going down the steps. Only then did she push Juba's hands away and roll on her side to face the blank whitewashed wall.

At the crest, where the path ran through a saddle between the thickly forested hills, Mungo St. John reined in his mare, and looked back. The veranda of the homestead was deserted and he sighed and picked up the reins again and faced ahead down the road into the north, but he did not shake up the mare. Instead he frowned, and lifted his chin to look into the heavens.

The northern sky was dark. It was as though a heavy curtain fell from the high heaven to the earth. It was not a cloud, for it had a peculiar density and body to it, like the poisonous plankton of the mysterious red tide which he had seen sweeping across the surface of the southern Atlantic, spreading death and desolation wherever it touched.

Yet Mungo had never seen anything like this. The magnitude of it challenged the imagination. It reached in a great arc around half the horizon, and even as he watched, it swept towards the sun which stood near its noon zenith.

Far north Mungo had seen the khamsin winds raise the mighty sandstorms over the Sahara, yet he realized there was not a sand desert within a thousand miles which could generate such a phenomenon. This was beyond his experience, and his puzzlement turned to alarm as he realized the speed at which this thing was bearing down upon him.

The fringes of the dark veil touched the rim of the sun and the white noon light altered. The mare fidgeted uncomfortably under Mungo, and a troop of guinea fowl, that had been chittering in the grass beside the track, fell silent. Swiftly the murky tide flooded the heavens, and the sun turned a sullen orange, like a disc of heated metal from the smithy's forge, and a vast shadow fell upon the land.

A silence had fallen upon the world. The murmurous insect chorus from the forest was stilled, the tin king and cheeping of small birds in the scrub had died away, sounds that were the background song of Africa, unnoticed until they were gone.

Now the stillness was oppressive. The mare nodded her head and the tinkle of her curb chain sounded jarringly loud. The spreading curtain thickened and smothered the sky, the shadow deepened.

Now there was a sound. A faint and distant sibilance like the wind shifting the sugary white sands of the desert dunes. The sun glowed dully as the ashes of a dying camp-fire.

The faint hissing sound gathered strength, like the hollow echo in a seashell held to the ear, and the filtered sunlight was a weird purplish glow. Mungo shivered with a kind of religious awe, though the heat of noon seemed even more oppressive in the gloom.

The strange rustling sound mounted swiftly, became a deep humming flutter, and then the rush of high winds, and the sun was gone, blotted out completely. Out of the hal flight he saw it coming low across the forest, sweeping towards him in twisting columns like some monstrous fog bank

With a low roar of millions upon millions of wings, it was upon him. It struck like a volley of grapeshot from a cannon, driving into his face, the impact of each horny winged body striking with a numbing shock that broke his skin and drew blood.

He flung up his hands to protect his face, and the startled mare reared, and it was a miracle of horsemanship that he kept his seat. He was half-blinded and dazed by the rushing torrent of wings about his head, and he snatched at the air, and they were so thick that he caught one of the flying insects. it was almost twice as long as his forefinger, wings a glaring orange slashed with intricate designs of black. The thorax was covered in horny armour, and from the helmeted head stared the bulging multiple eyes, yellow as polished topaz, and the long back legs were fanged with red-tipped thorns. It kicked convulsively in his hand, piercing the skin and leaving a fine line of blood droplets upon it.

He crushed it and it crackled and exploded in a burst of yellow juice. "Locusts!" He looked up again, marvelling at their multitudes.

"The third plague of Egypt,"he spoke aloud, then swung the mare away from the onrushing wall of flying bodies, and put his heels into her, driving her at a gallop back down the hill towards the Mission. The locust cloud flew faster than the mare could go at a full gallop, so he rode in semi-darkness, surrounded by the great drumming roar of wings.

A dozen times he almost lost the track, so dense was the swarm in the air around him. They settled on his back and crawled over him, the sharp feet needling his exposed skin. As soon as he struck them away, others took their place, and he had a sense of horror, of being overwhelmed and drowned in a seething cauldron of living organisms.

Ahead of him the buildings of Khami Mission loomed out of the darkened noon day. The twins and servants were gathered on the veranda, paralysed with astonishment, and he flung himself off the mare and ran towards them.

"Get every person who can walk down into the fields. Take pots, drums anything they can bang to make a noise, blankets to wave,

The twins recovered swiftly. Elizabeth pulled a shawl over her head to protect it and ran out into the swirling storm of locusts towards the church and the wards, while Vicky disappeared into the kitchen and came out carrying a nest of iron pots.

"Good girl," Mungo gave her a quick hug. "When this is over I want a word about you and Harry." He snatched the largest pot from her.

"Come on." With a "suddenness that brought them up short from a dead run, the air cleared and the sunlight was so white and blinding that they had to shield their eyes against it.

It was no release, for the entire heaven-high cloud of locusts had sunk to the earth, and though the sky was blue and high, the fields and the forest were transformed. The tallest trees looked like grotesquely coloured haystacks, seething heaps of orange and black. The branches swayed and sagged to the unbearable weight of tiny bodies, and every few seconds there was a sharp crack as a branch snapped and came crashing down. Before their eyes the standing corn flattened under the onslaught, and the very earth crawled with the myriad clicking, rustling bodies.

They ran into the fields, a hundred frantic human figures, banging the metal pots and flapping the coarse grey hospital blankets, and in front of each of them the insects rose in a brief puff of wings and resettled as they passed.

Now the air was raucous with a new sound. The excited shrieks of thousands of birds gorging upon the swarm. There were squadrons of jet-black drongos with long forked tails, starlings of iridescent malachite green, rollers and bee-eaters in jewelled colours of turquoise and sunlight yellow, carmine and purple, jinking and whirling in full flight, ecstatic with greed. The storks strode knee-deep through the living carpet, marabous with horrific scaly heads, woolly-necked storks with scarves of fluffy white, saddle-bills with yellow medallions decorating" their long red and black beaks, all of them pecking hungrily at the living banquet.

It did not last long, less than an hour. Then, as abruptly as it had settled, the great swarm roared spontaneously into the air as though it were a single creature. Once again an unnatural dusk fell across the earth as the sun was obliterated, and a false dawn followed as the clouds thinned and winged away southwards. In the empty fields, the human figures seemed tiny and insignificant as they stared about them in horror. They did not recognize their home.

The maize fields were reduced to bare brown earth, even the coarse pithy stalks of the corn had been devoured. The rose bushes around the homestead were merely brown sticks. The peach and apple blossom in the orchards was gone and bare twisted branches seemed to be an echo of winter, even the indigenous forests on the hills and the thick riverine bush along the banks of the Khami river had been devastated.

There was no trace of green, no leaf nor blade of grass untouched in the wide brown swathe of destruction that the swarm had blazed through the heart of Matabeleland.

Juba travelled with two female attendants. It was a symptom of the decline that had come upon the Matabele nation. There was a time, before the occupation of the Company, when a senior wife of one of the great indunas of the House of Kumalo would have had an entourage of forty women in waiting, and fifty plumed and armed and una to see her safely to her husband's kraal. Now Juba carried her own sleeping-mat balanced upon her head, and despite her great and abundant flesh, she moved with an extraordinary lightness and grace, her back straight and her head on high.

She had shed the woollen vest, now that she was away from the Mission, although she still wore the crucifix around her neck. Her huge naked breasts swung and bounced with youthful elasticity. They had been anointed with fat and shone in the sunlight, and her legs flashed under the short cowhide apron as she moved at a gait between a trot and a glide, that covered the dusty track at surprising speed.

The two attendants, both young newly married women from Juba's kraal, followed her closely, but they were silent, not singing nor laughing. Instead they turned their heads from side to side under their burdens to stare in awe at the bleak' and denuded land around them. The locust swarms had passed this way also. The bare crippled trees were devoid of insect or bird life. The sun had already scorched the exposed earth and it was crumbling into dust and blowing away on the little eddies of wind.

They came up over a low rise, and involuntarily stopped and drew closer together, not even laying down their bundles, so complete was their horrified fascination at what lay ahead of them. Once it had been the great regimental kraal of the Inyati impi which Gandang commanded. Then, by the decree of the Native Commissioner at Bulawayo, the impi had been disbanded and scattered. The kraal had been destroyed by fire. However, when the women had last seen it, new growth of grass had begun to cover the scars, but now it had been stripped away by the locust swarms and the circular black banks of ash lay exposed once again. They invoked memories of a past grandeur, and the new kraal built to house Gandang and his close family was tiny and insignificant in comparison.

It lay a mile down the bank of the Inyati river, and the pasture in between was destroyed. The spring rains had not yet filled the river and the sandbanks were silvery white, the polished water-worn boulders glittered like reptile scales in the sunlight. The new kraal itself seemed deserted, and the cattle-pens were empty.

"They have taken the cattle again," said Ruth, the handsome young woman who stood beside Juba. She was not yet twenty years of age, and although she had already worn the headdress of the married woman for two seasons, she had not yet conceived. It was the secret terror that she was barren that had driven her to convert to Christianity. three gods as omnipotent as the ones which Juba had described to her would certainly not allow one of their own to remain childless. She had been baptized by Nomusa almost a full moon previously, and her name had been changed by her new gods and Nomusa from Kampu to Ruth. Now she was most anxious to rejoin her husband, one of Gandang's nephews, and to put to the test the efficacy of her new religion.

No, "Juba told her shortly. "Gandang will have sent the herds eastwards to find new pasture." "The amadoda where are the men?"

"Perhaps they have gone with the cattle." "That is work for boys, not men." Juba snorted. "Since One-Bright-Eye has taken their shields, our men are merely mujiba." The mujiba were the herd boys not yet initiated into their fighting regiments, and Juba's companions were shamed by the truth of her words. It was true that their men had been disarmed, and that the cattle and slave raids which had been the main activity and diversion of the and una had been forbidden. At least their own husbands were blooded warriors, they had washed their spears in the blood of Wilson's troopers on the banks of the Shangani river in the one beautiful killing, the one small Matabele victory of that war, but what would become of the younger men, now that a whole way of life had been denied them? Would they ever be able to win on the battlefield the right to go in to the women, and take a wife? Or would the customs and laws under which they had lived all their lives fall into disregard and disuse? And if they did, then what would become of the nation?

"The women are still here," Juba pointed out the rows of workers in the brown denuded cornfields. They swayed in rhythm to the swing of the hoes.

"They are replanting the fields, "Ruth said.

"It is too late, "Juba muttered, "there will be no harvest to celebrate at the dance of the first fruits this season." Then she roused herself. "Let us go down." At one of the shallow pools between the sandbanks, they laid aside their head loads and shed their aprons. in the cool green water they washed away the sweat and dust of the road. Ruth found a buffalo creeper that had escaped the locusts and she picked yellow flowers to twine into headpieces for all of them.

The women in the fields saw them as they came up the bank and ran shrieking with delight to greet them, jostling each other in their eagerness to make obeisance to Juba.

"Mamewethu', they called her, as they bowed and clapped their hands in deep respect. They took her load from her and two of her grandchildren came forward shyly to hold each of her hands. Then, singing the songs of welcome, the little procession filed up to the kraal.

Not all the men had left. Gandang sat under the hate branches of the wild fig tree on his carved stool of chief ship and Juba hurried to kneel before him.

He smiled down at her fondly, nodding comfortably at her protestations of duty and devotion. Then as an extraordinary mark of his feeling for her, he lifted her with his own hand and seated her on the mat which one of his junior wives spread before him. He waited while she refreshed herself from the big clay beer pot that another wife knelt to hand her.

Then he waved the women and children away, and alone at last the two of them leaned their heads together and talked like the beloved companions that they were. "Nomusa is well?" Gandang asked. He did not share Juba's deep love for the woman doctor at Khami Mission, in fact he viewed with deep suspicion this alien religion that his senior wife had adopted. It was Gandang's impi that had caught Wilson's little patrol on the banks of the Shangani river during the war and slain them to a man. Amongst the corpses, stripped naked by his warriors so that the shocking mulberry-coloured assegai wounds in their white flesh were exposed, had lain the body of the woman missionary's first husband. There could never be love where there had been blood. However, Gandang respected the white woman. He had known her as long as he had known Juba, and he had watched her unflagging efforts to champion and protect the Matabele people. She had been friend and adviser to the old King Lobengula, and she had brought comfort to thousands of sick and dying Matabele, so now his concern was genuine. "Has she thrown aside the evil spirits that she brought upon herself by drinking the girl's blood?" It was inevitable that the accounts of Robyn's experiment with the transference of malaria would become garbled and take on the aura of witchcraft.

"She did not drink the girl's blood." Juba tried to explain that the taking of blood had been for the good of the Matabele nation, but because she did not understand it completely herself, her explanation was unconvincing. She saw the doubt in Gandang's eyes, and she abandoned the effort.

"Bazo, the Axe?" she asked instead. "Where is he?" Her first-born son was also her favourite.

"In the hills with all the other young men," Gandang answered.

The Matopos Hills were always the refuge of the Matabele in time of danger and trouble, and Juba leaned forward anxiously to ask, "There has been trouble?" Gandang shrugged in reply. "In these times there is always trouble." "From whence does it come?" "One-Bright-Eye sent word with his kanka with his jackals that we must provide two hundred young men to work on the new gold mine in the south that belongs to Henshaw, the Hawk." "You did not send the men?" "I told his kanka." The derogatory name for the Company native police likened them to the little scavengers that followed the lion for the scraps, and expressed the hatred that the Matabele felt for these traitors. "I told them that the white men had deprived me of my shield and assegai and my honour as an and una therefore I had lost the right to command my young men to dig the white men's holes for them or to build their roads." "And now One-Bright-Eye comes?" Juba spoke with resignation. She knew all the moves that must be made. the command, the defiance, the confrontation.

She had watched it all before, and now she was sick of men's pride and men's wars and the death and maiming and suffering.

"Yes," Gandang agreed. "Not all the kanka are traitors and one has sent word that One-Bright Eye is on the road, with fifty men and so the young men have gone into the hills." "But you stay here to meet him?" Juba asked. "Unarmed and alone, you wait for One-Bright-Eye and fifty armed men?" "I have never run from any man," Gandang said simply, never in my life." And Juba felt her pride and her love choke her as she looked into the stern handsome face, and noticed as if for the first time the hoar-frost sparkling on the dark cap of his hair above the head ring

"Gandang, my lord, the old times have passed. Things change. The sons of Lobengula work as house-boys in the kraal of Lodzi far away in the south beside the great water. The imp is are scattered, and there is a new and gentle god in the land, the god Jesus. Everything has changed, and we must change with it." Gandang was silent a long time, staring out across the river as though he had not heard her speak.

Then he sighed and took a little red snuff from the buckhom that hung on a thong around his neck. He sneezed and wiped his eyes, and looked at her.

"Your body is part of my body," he said. "Your first-born son is my son. If I do not trust you, then I cannot trust myself. So I tell you, that the old times will come again." "What is this, Lord?" Juba asked. "What strange words are these?" "The words of the Umlimo. She has called forth an oracle. The nation will be free and great again.-" "The Umlimo sent the imp is onto the guns at Shangani and Bembesi,".

Juba whispered bitterly. "The Umlimo preaches war and death and pestilence. There is a new god now. The god Jesus of peace." "Peace?"

Gandang asked bitterly. "If that is the word of this god, then the white men do not listen very well to their own. Ask the Zulu of the peace they found at Ulundi, ask the shade of Lobengula of the peace they brought with them to Matabeleland." Juba could not reply, for again she had not fully understood when Nomusa explained, and she bowed her head in resignation. After a while, when Gandang was certain that she had accepted what he had said, he went on. "The oracle of the Umlimo is in three parts and already the first has come to pass. The darkness at noon, the wings of the locust, and the trees bare of leaves in the springtime. It is happening and we must look to our steel."

"The white men have broken the assegais." "In the hills there has been a new birthing of steel." Involuntarily Gandang lowered his voice to a whisper. "The forges of the Rozwi smiths burn day and night and the molten iron runs copiously as the waters of the Zambezi." Juba stared at him. "Who has done this?" "Bazo, your own son." "The wounds of the guns are still fresh and bright upon his body." "But he is an and una of Kumalo," Gandang whispered proudly, "and he is a man." "One man," Juba replied. "One man only, where are the imp is "Preparing in secret, in the wild places, re-learning the skills and arts which they have not yet forgotten." "Gandang, my lord, I feel my heart beginning to break again, I feel my tears gathering like the rainstorms of summer. Must there always be war?" "You are a daughter of Matabele, of pure Zanzi blood from the south. Your father's father followed Mzilikazi, your father spilled his blood for him, as your own son did for Lobengula do you have to ask that question?" She was silent, knowing how futile it was to argue with him when there was that glitter in his eyes. When the fighting madness was in him, there was no room for reason.

"Juba, my little Dove, there will be work for you when the prophecy of the Umlimo comes to full term." "Lord?" she asked.

"The women must carry the blades. They will be bound up in rolls of sleeping-mats and in bundles of thatching grass and carried on the heads of the women to where the imp is are waiting." "Lord." Her voice was neutral, and she dropped her eyes from his hard glittering gaze.

"The white men and their kanka will not suspect the women, they will let them pass freely upon the road," Gandang went on. "You are the mother of the nation now that the king's wives are dead and scattered. It will be your duty to assemble the young women, to train them in their duty, and to see them place the steel in the hands of the warriors at the time that the Umlimo has foreseen, the time when the hornless cattle are eaten up by the cross." Juba was reluctant to reply, afraid to conjure up his wrath. He had to demand her answer.

"You have heard MY word, woman, and you know your duty to your husband and your people." Then only Juba lifted her head and looked deeply into his dark fierce eyes.

"Forgive me, Lord. This time I cannot obey you. I cannot help to bring fresh sorrow upon the land. I cannot bear to hear again the wails of the widows and orphans. You must find another to carry the bloody steel." She had expected his anger. She could have weathered that, as she had a hundred times before, but she saw in his eyes something that had never been there before. It was contempt, and she did not know how she could bear it. When Gandang stood up without another word and stalked away towards the river, she wanted to run after him and throw herself at his feet, but then she remembered the words of Nomusa.

"He is a gentle God, but the way He sets for us is hard beyond the telling of it." And Juba found that she could not move. She was trapped between two worlds and two duties, and she felt as though it was tearing her soul down the middle. uba sat alone under the bare wild fig tree the rest of the day.

She sat with her arms folded across her great glossy breasts, and she rocked herself silently, as though the movement might comfort her as it would a fretful child, but there was no surcease in either movement or thought, so it was with relief that at last she looked up and saw her two attendants kneeling before her. She did not know how long they had been there. She had not even heard them come up, so rapt had she been in her sorrow and confusion.

"I see you, Ruth," she said, nodding at the Christian girl and her companion, "and you too, Imbali, my little Flower. What is it that makes you look so sad?" "The men have gone into the hills," whispered Ruth.

"And your hearts have gone with them," Juba smiled at the two young women. It was a fond yet sad smile, as though she remembered her own youthful bodily passions and regretted that the flames had burned so low.

"I have dreamed of nothing but my beautiful man, every lonely night we have been away," murmured Ruth.

"And of the fine son he will make with you," Juba chuckled. She knew the girl's desperate need, and teased her lovingly. "Lelesa, the lightning stroke, your man is well named." Ruth hung her head. "Do not mock me, Manwwedtu," she murmured pitifully, and Ruth turned to Imbali.

"And you, little Flower, is there no bee to tickle your petals either?" The girl giggled and covered her mouth and squirmed with embarrassment.

"If you need us, Marnewethu," Ruth said earnestly, "then we will stay with you." Juba kept them in an agony of suspense for a few seconds longer.

How firm and nubile was their young flesh, how sweetly shaped their young bodies, how eager were their great dark eyes, how vast their hunger for all that life had to offer. Juba smiled again and clapped her hands.

"Be gone," she said, "both of you. There are those that need you more than I do. Away with you both, follow your men into the hills."

The girls squealed with delight, and throwing aside all ceremony, they embraced Juba joyously.

"You are the sunshine and the moon," they told her, and then they fled to their huts to prepare for the journey, and for a little while Juba's own sorrow was lightened. But at the fall of night when no young wife came to summon her to Gandang's hut, it returned in full strength, and she wept alone on her sleeping-mat until at last sleep came over her, but then there were dreams dreams full of the glow of flames and the smell of rotting flesh, and she cried out in her sleep, but there was no one to hear and awaken her.

General Mungo St. John reined in and looked around him at the devastated forests. There was no cover, the locusts had seen to that, and it would make his task more difficult.

He lifted the slouch hat from his head and mopped his forehead.

This was the suicide month. The great cumulus cloud banks heaved up heaven high along the horizon and the heat shivered and wavered in mirage above the bare baked earth. Mungo carefully readjusted the black patch over his empty eye-socket, and turned in the saddle to look back at the file of men that followed him.

There were fifty of them, all Matabele, but wearing a bizarre motley of traditional and European dress. Some wore patched moleskin breeches, and others tasselled fur aprons. Some were barefoot, others wore rawhide sandals and a few even sported hobnailed boots without socks or puttees. Most of them were bare-chested, though a few wore cast-off tunics or tattered shirts. There was, however, one single item of uniform that was common to them all. It was worn on a chain around the left arm above the elbow, a polished brass disc engraved with the words. "BSA Co. Police." They were each of them armed with a new repeating Winchester rifle, and a bandolier of brass cartridges.

Their legs were dusty to the knees, for they had made a hard fast march southwards, keeping up easily with Mungo St. John's trotting mount.

Mungo looked them over with grim satisfaction. Despite the lack of cover, he believed that the speed of their advance must take the kraals by surprise.

It was like one of his slaving expeditions on the west coast, so long ago, before that damned Lincoln and the Royal bloody Navy had cut off the multi-million-dollar trade. By God, those had been the days.

The swift approach march, the encirclement of the village and the dawn rush with the slavers" clubs cracking against woolly black skulls.

Mungo roused himself. Was it a sign of age to hark back so often to the long-ago? he wondered.

"Ezra, he called his sergeant to come up to him. He was the only other mounted man in the column. He rode a swaybacked grey with a rough coat.

Ezra was a hulking Matabele with a scarred cheek, memento of a mining accident in the great diamond pit at Kimberley, six hundred miles to the south. It was there that he had adopted his new name and learned his English.

"How far ahead is Gandang's kraal?" Mungo asked him in that language.

"That far," Ezra swept his arm through an arc of the sky, indicating two hours or so of the sun's passage.

"All right," Mungo nodded. "Send the scouts out. But I want no mistakes. Explain to them again that they must cross the Inyati river upstream of the kraal and circle out to wait in the foothills." "Nkosi!" Ezra nodded.

"Tell them they must seize anybody who runs from the kraal, and bring them in." The business of translating every command irked Mungo, and for the hundredth time since he had crossed the Limpopo, he resolved to study the Sindebele language.

Ezra saluted Mungo with an exaggerated flourish, an imitation of the British soldiers he had watched from the barred window of his cell while he was serving his sentence for diamond theft, and turned in the saddle to shout the orders to the men who followed the two horsemen.

"Warn them that they must be in position before dawn. That is when we will ride in." Mungo unstrapped the felt-covered water-bottle from the pommel of his saddle and unscrewed the stopper.

"They are ready, Nkosi," the sergeant reported.

"Very well, Sergeant, send them away," said Mungo, and raised the water-bottle to his lips.

For many seconds after waking, Juba believed that the screams of the women and the whimpering of the children were all part of her nightmares, and she pulled the fur kaross over her head.

Then there was a crash as the door to the hut was broken open, a rush of bodies into the dark interior, and Juba came fully awake and threw off the kaross. Rough hands seized her and though she screamed and struggled, she was dragged naked into the open. The sky was paling with the dawn and the constables had piled fresh logs on the fire, so that Juba recognized the white man immediately, and she shrank back into the safety of the crowd of sobbing, wailing women before he could notice her.

Mungo St. John was in a fury, bellowing at his sergeant, striding backwards and forwards beyond the fire, slapping his riding-whip against his glossy boot. His face was flushed a dark crimson like the wattles of the waddling black sing isi the grotesque turkey buzzard of the veld, and his single eye blazed in the firelight.

"Where are the men? I want to know where the men have gone!"

Sergeant Ezra came hurrying down the rank of cringing women, peering into their faces. He stopped in front of Juba, recognizing her instantly, one of the grandes dames of the tribe, as she drew herself to her full height, even in her total and massive nudity she was dignified and queenly. She expected some mark of respect, some gesture of courtesy from him, but instead the sergeant seized her wrist and twisted her arm up so viciously that she was forced to her knees.

"Where are the amadoda?" he hissed at her. "Where have the men gone?" Juba choked down the sob of agony in her throat, and croaked, "It is true there are no men here, for certainly the ones who wear the little brass bangles of Lodzi on their arms are not men.-" "Cow,"hissed the sergeant, "fat black cow. "And he jerked her arm upwards, forcing her face into the dirt.

"Enough, kanka!" A voice cut through the hubbub, and the tone and power of it commanded instant silence. "Let the woman be."

Involuntarily the sergeant released Juba and stepped back, and even Mungo St. John halted his furious pacing. Gandang stalked into the firelight, and though he wore only his head ring and a short loincloth, he was as menacing as a prowling lion, and the sergeant fell back in front of him. "Juba struggled to her feet, rubbing her wrist, but Gandang did not even glance at her. He strode to Mungo St. John and asked. "What is it that you seek, white man, coming into my kraal like a thief in the night?" Mungo looked to the sergeant for a translation.

"He says you are a thief," the sergeant told him, and Mungo jerked up his chin and glared at Gandang.

"Tell him he knows what I come for, tell him I want two hundred strong young men." And Gandang retreated immediately into the studied defensive obtuseness of Africa, which few Europeans know how to counter, and which infuriated a man like St. John who could not even understand the language, and who had to submit to the laborious process of translation. The sun was well up when Gandang repeated the question he had first asked almost an hour before.

"Why does he want my young men to come to him? They are content here." And Mungo's clenched fists shook with the effort of restraint.

"All men must work," the sergeant translated, "it is the law of the white men." "Tell him," Gandang retorted, "that it is not the way of Matabele. The amadoda see no dignity nor great virtue in digging in the dirt. That is for women and amahoU." "The and una-says that his men will not work," the sergeant translated maliciously, and Mungo St. John could endure no more of it. He took a swift pace forward and slashed the riding whip into the and una face.

Gandang blinked, but he neither flinched nor raised his hand to touch the shining tumescent welt that rose swiftly across his cheek.

He made no effort to staunch the thin trickle of blood from his crushed lip that snaked down his chin, but he let it drip onto his naked chest.

"My hands are empty now, white man," he said, in a whisper that was more penetrating than a bellow, "but they will not always be so. "And he turned towards his hut.

"Gandang," Mungo St. John shouted after him. "Your men will work if I have to hunt them down and chain them like animals." The two girls followed the path at a smooth swinging trot that did not disturb the balance of the large bundles they carried upon their heads. In the bundles there were special gifts for their men, salt and stamped corn, snuff and beads and lengths of trade calico for loincloths that they had wheedled out of Nomusa's store at Khami Mission. They were both in high spirits, for they had passed out of the swathe of destruction left by the locust swarms, and the acacia forests were a golden yellow haze of spring bloom murmurous with bees.

Ahead of them rose the first pearly granite domes, and amongst them they would find the men, so they called gaily to each other, silly girlish banter, and their laughter was sweet as the tinkle of bells.

It carried far ahead of them. They skirted the base of a tall cliff, and without pausing to rest started up the natural steps of grey stone.

It led them upwards into a steep ravine which would eventually take them to the summit.

Imbali was leading, her round hard haunches swaying under the short skirt as she skipped over the uneven footing, and Ruth who was every bit as eager followed her closely into the angle where the path turned sharply between two huge round boulders that had rolled down from above.

Imbali stopped so abruptly that Ruth almost ran into her, and then she hissed with alarm.

A man stood in the centre of the path. Although he was unmistakably a Matabele, the girls had never seen him before. The stranger wore a blue shirt, and on his upper arm sparkled a round brass disc. In his hand he carried a rifle. Quickly Ruth glanced behind her and hissed again. Another armed man had stepped out from the shaded angle of the boulder and cut off their retreat. He was smiling, but there was nothing in that smile to reassure the girls. They lowered the bundles from their heads and shrank closer to each other.

"Where are you going, pretty little kittens?" asked the smiling kanka. "Are you going to search for a tomcat?" Neither of the girls answered. They stared at him with big frightened eyes. , "We will go with you." The smiling kanka was so broad across the chest, his legs so muscular, that he appeared to be deformed. His teeth were very white and big as those of a horse, but the smile never reached his eyes. His eyes were small and cold and dead-looking.

"Lift your bundles, kittens, and lead us to the cats." Ruth shook her head. "We go only to search for medicine roots, we do not understand what you want of us." The kanka came closer. His thick legs were bowed, and they gave him a peculiar rolling gait. Suddenly he kicked over Ruth's bundle, and it burst open.

"Ah!" he smiled coldly. "Why do you carry such gifts, if you go to search for mud?" Ruth dropped to her knees, and scrabbled amongst the rocks to retrieve the spilled corn and scattered beads. The kanka dropped -his hand onto her back and stroked her lustrous black skin.

"Purr, little kitten," he grinned, and Ruth froze, crouched at his feet with her hands filled with spilled grain.

The kanka ran his fingers lightly up and placed his hand upon the nape of her neck. His hand was huge, the knuckles enlarged, the fingers thick and powerful. Ruth began to tremble as the fingers encircled her neck.

The kanka looked up at his companion, who still guarded the pathway, and the two of them exchanged a glance. Imbali saw and understood.

"She is a bride," she whispered. "Her husband is the nephew of Gandang. Take care, kanka." The man ignored her. He lifted Ruth to her feet by the neck, and twisted her face towards him.

"Take us to where the men are hiding." Ruth stared at him silently for a second, and then suddenly and explosively she spat into his face.

The frothy spittle spattered his cheeks and dripped from his chin.

Kanka!" she hissed. "Traitor jackal!" The man never stopped smiling. "That is what I wanted you to do," he told her, and hooked his finger into the string of her skirt and snapped it. The skirt fell around her ankles.

He held her by the scruff and she struggled and covered her groin with both hands. The kanka looked at her naked body and his breathing changed.

"Watch the other," he told his companion and tossed his Winchester rifle to him. The second constable caught it by the stock and prodded Imbali with the barrel until she backed up against the high granite bolder.

"Our time will come very soon," he assured her, and turned his head to watch the other couple, at the same time holding Imbali pinned against the rock.

The kanka dragged Ruth off the path, but for only a few paces, and the scrub that screened them was thin and leafless.

"My man will kill you," cried Ruth. They could hear everything on the path, even the sound of the kanka's ragged breathing.

"Then give me good value, if I must pay with my life," he chuckled, and then gasped with pain. "So kitten, you have sharp claws." And there was the clap of a blow on soft flesh, the sound of struggling, the bushes heaved and loose pebbles rolled away down the slope.

The constable guarding Imbali strained for a glimpse of what was happening. His lips were open and he licked them. He could make out blurred movement through the leafless branches, and then there was the sound of a body falling heavily to earth and the breath being driven violently from Ruth's lungs by a crushing weight.

"Hold still, kitten," the kanka panted. "You make me angry. Lie still," and abruptly Ruth screamed. It was the shrill ringing cry of an animal in mortal agony, repeated again and again, and the kanka grunted. "Yes. There, yes, and then snuffed like a boar at the trough, and there was a soft rhythmic slapping sound, and Ruth kept screaming.

The man guarding Imbali propped the spare rifle against the boulder and stepped off the path, and with the barrel of his own Winchester parted the branches and stared. His face seemed to swell and darken with passion, his whole attention concentrated on what he was watching.

With the second constable's attention so distracted, Imbali sidled along the granite, and then paused for an instant to gather herself before darting away. She had reached the angle of the pathway before the man turned and saw her.

"Come back!" he shouted.

"What is it?" the -kanka demanded from behind the bushes in a thick tortured voice.

"The other one, she is running." "Stop her," the kanka bellowed, and his companion ran to the corner, Imbali was fifty paces down the hillside, flying like a gazelle over the rough ground, driven by her terror. The man thumbed back the hammer of his Winchester, flung the butt to his shoulder and fired wildly, without aiming. It was a fluke shot. It caught the girl in the small of the back and the big soft lead slug tore out through her belly. She collapsed and rolled down the steep pathway, her limbs tumbling about loosely.

The constable lowered the rifle. His expression was shocked and unbelieving. Slowly, hesitantly, he went down to where the girl lay.

She was on her back. Her eyes were open, and the exit wound in her flat young stomach gaped hideously, her torn entrails bulged from it.

The girl's eyes switched to his face, the terror in them flared up for an instant, and then slowly faded into utter blankness.

"She is dead." The kanka had left Ruth, and come down the path.

He had left his apron in the bushes. His blue shirt, tails flapped around his bare legs.

Both of them stared down at the dead girl.

"I did not mean it," said the kanka with the hot rifle in his hands.

"We cannot let the other one go back to tell what has happened," his companion replied, and turned back up the pathway. As he passed, he picked up his own rifle from where it leaned against the rock. He stepped off the path, behind the thin screen of bushes.

The other man was still staring into Imbali's blank eyes when the second shot rang out. He flinched to the crack of it, and lifted his head. As the echoes lapped away amongst the granite cliffs, the kanka stepped back onto the path. He ejected the spent cartridge case from the breech and it pinged against the rock.

"Now we must find a story for One-Bright-Eye, and for the indunas," he said quietly, and strapped the fur apron back around his thick waist.

They brought the two girls back to Gandang's kraal on the back of the police sergeant's grey horse. Their legs dangled down one side and their arms down the other. They had wrapped a grey blanket around their naked bodies, as though ashamed of the wounds upon them, but the blood had soaked through and dried black upon it, and the big metallic green flies swarmed joyously upon the stains.

In the centre of the kraal, the sergeant gestured to the kanka who led the grey, and he turned back and cut the line that secured the girl's ankles. The corpses were immediately unbalanced and slid head-first to the swept bare earth. They fell without dignity in an untidy tumble of bare limbs, like game brought in from the hunting veld for skinning and dressing out.

The women had been silent until then, but now they began the haunting ululation of mourning, and one of them scooped a handful of dust and poured it over her own head. The others followed her example, and their cries brought out the gooseflesh down the arms of the sergeant, though his expression remained neutral and his voice level as he spoke to Gandang.

"You have brought this sadness on your people, old man. If you had obeyed the wishes of Lodzi and sent in your young men, as is your duty, these women would have lived to bear sons." "What crime did they commit?" Gandang asked, and watched his senior wife come forward to kneel beside the bloody dust-smeared bodies.

"They tried to kill two of my police." "Haul" Gandang expressed his scornful disbelief, and the sergeant's voice rasped with anger for the first time. " "My men caught them and forced them to lead them to where the amadoda are hiding. At last night's camp, when my men were asleep, they would have thrust sharpened sticks into their ear holes to the brain, but my men sleep lightly, and when they awoke, the women ran into the night and my men had to stop them." For a long moment Gandang stared at the sergeant, and his eyes were so terrible that Ezra turned away to watch the senior wife as she knelt beside one of the girls. Juba closed the slack jaws, and then gently wiped the congealed blood from Ruth's lips and nostrils.

"Yes" Gandang advised Ezra. "Look well, white man's jackal, remember this thing for all the days that are left to you. "Dare you threaten me, old man?" the sergeant blustered. "All men must die," Gandang shrugged, "but some die sooner and more painfully than others."

And Gandang turned and walked back to his hut.

Gandang sat alone by the small smoky fire in his hut. Neither the broiled beef nor white maize cakes in Gthe platter at his side had been touched. He stared into the flames, and listened to the wailing of the women and the beat of the drums.

He knew that Juba would come to tell him when the girls" bodies had been bathed and wrapped in the green skin of the freshly slaughtered ox. As soon as it was light, it would be his duty to supervise the digging of the grave in the centre of the cattle kraal, so he was not surprised when there was a soft scratching at the doorway and he called softly to Juba to enter.

She came to kneel at his side. "All is ready for the morning, my husband." He nodded, and they were silent for a while, and then Juba said, "I wish to sing the Christian song that Nomusa has taught me when the girls are put into the earth." He inclined his head in acquiescence, and she went on.

"I wish also that you would dig their graves in the forest so that I may place crosses over them." "If that is the way of your new god," he agreed again, and now he rose and crossed to his sleeping-mat in the far corner.

"Nkosi," Juba remained kneeling. "Lord, there is something else." "what is it?" He looked back at her. His beloved features remote and cold.

"I, and my women, will carry the steel as you bid me," she whispered. "I made an oath with my finger in the wound in Ruth's flesh. I will carry the assegais to the amadoda." He did not smile, but the coldness went out of his eyes, and he held out one hand to her.

Juba rose and went to him, and he took her hand and led her to the sleeping-mat.

Bazo came down out of the hills three days after the girls had been placed in the earth, under the bare Bspreading branches of a giant mimosa at a place which overlooked the river. There were two young men with him, and the three of them went directly to the graves with Juba guiding them. After a while, Bazo left the two young bridegrooms to mourn their women and he went back to where his father waited for him under the fig tree.

After he had made his dutiful greetings, they drank from the same beer pot passing it back and forth between them in silence, and when it was empty Gandang sighed.

"It is a terrible thing." Bazo looked up at him sharply.

"Rejoice, my father. Thank the spirits of your ancestors," he said.

"For they have given us a greater bargain than we could ever have wished for." "I do not understand this." Gandang stared at his son.

"For two lives lives of no importance, lives that would have been spent in vain and empty-headed frivolity for this insignificant price, we have kindled a fire in the belly of the nation. We have steeled even the weakest and most cowardly of our amadoda. Now when the time comes, we know that there will be no hesitating. Rejoice, MY father, at the gift we have been given." "You have become a ruthless man," Gandang whispered at last.

"I am proud that you should find me so," Bazo replied. "And if I am not ruthless enough for the work, then my son or his son, in their time, will be." "You do not trust the oracle of the Umlimo?" Gandang demanded. "She has promised us success." "No, my father." Bazo shook his head. "Think carefully on her words. She has told us only to make the attempt. She promised us nothing. It is with us alone to succeed or fail. That is why we must be hard and relentless, trusting nobody, looking for any advantage, and using it to the full." Gandang thought about that for a while, then sighed again.

"It was not like this before." Nor will it ever be again. It has changed, Babo, and we must change with it." "Tell me what else there is to be done," Gandang invited. "What way can I help to bring success?"

"You must order the young men to come down out of the hills and to go in to work as the white men are bidding." Gandang considered the question without speaking. "From now until the hour, we must become fleas. We must live under the white men's cloak, so close to the skin that he does not see us, so close that he forgets we are there waiting to sting." Gandang nodded at the sense of it, but there was a fathomless regret in his eyes. "I liked it better when we formed the bull, with the horns outflung to surround the enemy and the veterans massed in the centre to crush them. I loved the closing in when we went in singing the praise song of the regiment, when we made our killing in the sunlight with our plumes flying." "Never again, Babo," Bazo told him. "Never again will it be like that. In the future we will wait in the grass like the coiled puff-adder. We may have to wait a year or ten, a lifetime or more perhaps we may never see it, my father. Perhaps it will be our children's children who strike from the shadows with other weapons than the silver steel that you and I love so well, but it. is you and I that will open the road for them to follow, the road back to greatness." Gandang nodded, and there was a new light in his eyes, like the first glow of the dawn. "You see very clearly, Bazo. You know them so well, and you are right. The white man is strong in every way except patience. He wants it all to happen today.

While we know how to wait." They were silent again, sitting with their shoulders just touching, and the fire had burned low before Bazo stirred.

"I will be gone by daylight, "he said. "Where?"Gandang asked.

"East to the Mashona." "For what reason?" "They also must prepare for the day." "You seek aid from Mashona dogs, from the very eaters of dirt? "I seek aid wherever it can be found," said Bazo simply.

"Tanase says that we will find allies beyond our borders, beyond the great river. She speaks even of allies from a land so cold that the waters there turn hard and white as salt." "Is there such a land?"

"I do not know. I know only that we must welcome any ally, from wherever they may come. For Lodzi's men are hard, fierce fighters. You and I both have learned that well." "the windows of the mule coach were open and the shutters were lowered so that Mr. Rhodes could converse freely with the men who rode in close A attendance upon each side.

They were the aristocracy of this new land, only a dozen or so of them, but between them they owned vast tracts of fertile, virgin country, sprawling herds of native cattle, and blocks of mineral claims beneath which lay dreams of uncountable wealth.

The man in the luxurious carriage, drawn by a team of five matched white mules, was their head. In his capacity as a private citizen, he enjoyed such wealth and power as was usually only commanded by kings.

His Company owned a land which was bigger than the United Kingdom and Ireland put together, which he administered by decree as a private estate. He controlled the world's production of diamonds through a cartel that he had made as powerful as an elected government. He owned outright the mines that produced ninety-five per cent of the world's diamonds. On the fabulous Witwatersrand gold fields, his influence was not as great as it might have been, for he had passed up many opportunities to acquire claims along the strike, where the gold-rich ban ket reef had once stood proud, above the surrounding grassland, sharp and black as a shark's dorsal fin, before the miners had whittled it away.

"I do not sense the power in this reef," he had said once, as he stood on the outcrop, staring at it moodily with those pale Messianic blue eyes. "I can sit on the lip of the great hole at Kimberley and I know just how many carats- are coming up with each load, but this-2 He had shaken his head and gone back to his horse, turning his back on 100 million pounds in pure gold.

When, finally, he had been forced to accept the true potential of the "Ridge of White Waters" and was on the very point of hurrying back to pick up what few properties were still available, a tragic accident had distracted him. His dearest friend, a fine and beautiful young man named Neville Pickering, his companion and "partner of many years, had been thrown from his horse and dragged.

Rhodes had stayed at Kimberley to nurse him, and then when Neville died, to mourn him. The great opportunities had slipped away from Rhodes in those weeks. Yet still he had at last founded his Consolidated Goldfields Company upon the reef, and though it was nothing like his De Beers Consolidated Mines Company, nor the gold empire that his old rival J. B. Robinson had built, yet at the end of the last financial year it had paid a dividend of 125 per cent.

His fortune was such that when, on a whim, he decided to pioneer the farming of deciduous fruit in southern Africa, he had instructed one of his managers to purchase the entire Franschhoek valley.

"Mr. Rhodes, it will cost a million pounds," the manager had demurred.

"I did not ask for your estimate," Rhodes replied testily. "I simply gave you an order buy id" That was his private life, but his public life was no less spectacular.

He was a privy councillor to the queen, and thus could speak directly to the men who steered the greatest empire the world had ever known. In truth, some of them were less than sympathetic to him.

Gladstone had once remarked, "I know only one thing about Mr. Rhodes.

He has made a great deal of money in a very short time. This does not fill me with any overwhelming confidence." The rest of the British nobility were less critical, and whenever he visited London, he was the darling of society, lords and dukes and earls flocked to him, for there were lucrative directorships on the Board of the BSA Company to be filled, and a single word from Mr. Rhodes could lead to a killing on the stock exchange.

Added to all this, Mr. Rhodes was the elected prime minister of Cape Colony, sure of the vote of every English-speaking citizen and through the good offices of his old friend Hofineyr and his Afrikander Bond, sure of most of the Dutch-speaking votes as well.

Thus, as he lolled on the green leather seat of his coach, dressed untidily in a rumpled high-buttoned suit, the knot of his Oriel College necktie slipping a little, he was at the very zenith of his wealth and power and influence.

Seated opposite him, Jordan Ballantyne was pretending to study the shorthand notes that Mr. Rhodes had just dictated, but over the pad he was watching his master with a shadow of concern in his sensitive long4ashed eyes. Although the flat brim of his hat kept Mr. Rhodes" eyes in shadow and prevented Jordan from reading any trace of pain in them, yet his colour was high and unhealthy, and though he spoke with all his old force, he was sweating more heavily than the early morning cool warranted.

Now he raised his voice, calling in that high, almost petulant tone, "Ballantyne!" And Zouga Ballantyne spurred his horse up beside the window and leaned attentively from the saddle.

"Tell me, my dear fellow," Rhodes demanded. "What is this new building to be?" He pointed at the freshly opened foundation trenches and the stacks of red burned brick piled on the corner plot at the intersection of two of Bulawayo's wide and dusty streets.

"That's the new synagogue," Zouga told him.

"So my Jews have come to stay!" Mr. Rhodes said with a smile, and Zouga suspected that Mr. Rhodes had known precisely what those foundations were for, but had asked the question to pave the way for his own witticism. "Then my new country will be all right, Ballantyne.

They are the birds of good omen, who would never roost in a tree marked for felling." Zouga chuckled dutifully, and they went on talking while Ralph Ballantyne, riding in the bunch, watched them with such interest that he neglected the lady riding beside him, until she tapped him on the forearm with her crop.

"I said, it will be interesting to see what happens when we reach Khami" Louise repeated, and Ralph's attention jerked back to his stepmother. She rode astride, the only woman he knew that did so, and though she wore ankle, length divided skirts, her seat was elegant and sure. Ralph had seen her out-ride his own father, beating him in a gruelling point-to-point race over rough terrain. That had been in Kimberley, before the trek to the north and this land, but the years had treated Louise kindly indeed. Ralph smiled to himself as he recalled the youthful crush he had been smitten with when he first saw her driving her phaeton and pair of golden palominos down Kimberley's crowded main street. That was so many years ago, and though she had married his father since then, he still felt a special affection for her that was definitely neither filial nor dutiful. She was only a few years older than he was, and the Blackfoot Indian blood in her veins gave her beauty a certain timeless element.

"I cannot imagine "that even Robyn, my honoured aunt and mother-in-law, would use the occasion of her youngest daughter's marriage for political advantage," Ralph said.

"Are you confident enough to wager on that, a guinea, say?" Louise asked with a flash of even white teeth, but Ralph threw back his head and laughed.

"I have learned my lesson I'll never bet against you again."

Then he dropped his voice. "Besides, I don't really have that much faith in my mother-in-law's restraint." "Then why on earth does Mr. Rhodes insist on going to the wedding? He must know what to expect."

"Well, firstly, he owns the land the Mission is built upon, and, secondly, he probably feels that the ladies of Khami Mission are depriving him of a valued possession." Ralph lifted his chin to indicate the bridegroom who rode a little ahead of the group. Harry Mellow had a flower in his button-hole, a gloss on his boots and a grin upon his lips.

"He hasn't lost him," Louise pointed out.

"He fired him as soon as he realized he couldn't talk Harry out of it." "But he is such a talented geologist, they say he can smell gold a mile away." "Mr. Rhodes does not approve of his young men marrying, no matter how talented." "Poor Harry, poor Vicky, what will they do?" "Oh, it's all arranged," Ralph beamed.

"You?" she hazarded. Who else?" "I should have known. In fact it would not surprise me to learn that you engineered the whole business," Louise accused, and Ralph looked pained.

"You do me a grave injustice, Mama." He knew she did not like that title and used it deliberately, to tease her. Then Ralph looked ahead and his expression changed like a bird-dog scenting the pheasant.

The wedding party had ridden out past the last new buildings and shanties of the town, onto the broad rutted wagon road. Coming towards them, up from the south, was a convoy of transport wagons. There were ten of them, so strung out that the furthest of them were marked only by columns of fine white dust rising above the flat-topped acacia trees. On the nearest wagon-tent Louise could already read the company name, RHO LANDS the shortened form of "Rhodesian Lands and Mining Co." which Ralph had chosen as the umbrella for his multitudinous business activities.

"Damn me," he exclaimed happily. "Old Isazi has brought them in five days ahead of schedule. That little black devil is a miracle." He tipped his hat in apology to Louise. "Business calls. Excuse me, please, Mama." And he galloped ahead, swinging off his horse as he came level with the lead wagon, and embracing the diminutive figure in cast-off military-style jacket who skipped at the flank of the bullock team brandishing a thirty-foot-long trek whip.

What kept you so long, Isazi?" Ralph demanded. "Did you meet a pretty Matabele girl on the road?" The little Zulu driver tried not to grin, but the network of wrinkles that covered his face contracted and there was a puckish sparkle in his eyes.

"I can still deal with a Matabele girl and her mother and all her sisters in, the time it would take you to in span a single ox." It was not only a declaration of virility, but also an oblique reference to Ralph's skill as a teams man Isazi had taught him all he knew of the open road, but still treated Ralph with the indulgent condescension usually reserved for a small boy.

"No, little Hawk, I did not want to rob you of too much bonus, money by bringing them in more than five days ahead." This was a gentle reminder of what Isazi expected in his next pay packet.

Now the little Zulu, with the head ring granted him by King Cetewayo before the battle of Ulundi still upon his snowy head, stood back and looked at Ralph with the speculative eye he usually reserved for a bullock.

"Hau, Henshaw, what finery is this?" He glanced at Ralph's suit and English boots, and at the sprig of mimosa blossom in Ralph's button-hole. "Even flowers like a simpering maiden at her first dance.

And what is that under your coat, surely the Nkosikazi is the one who carries the babies in your family?" Ralph glanced down at his own midriff. Isazi was being unfair, there was barely a trace of superfluous flesh there, nothing that a week of hard hunting would not remove, but Ralph sustained the banter that they both enjoyed.

"It is the privilege of great men to wear fine apparel and eat good food, "he said.

"Then fall to, little Hawk with fine feathers." Isazi shook his head disapprovingly. "Eat your fill. While wiser men do the real work, you play like a boy." His tone belied the warmth of his smile, and Ralph clasped his shoulder.

"There was never a driver like you, Isazi, and there probably never will be again." "Hau, Henshaw, so I have taught you something, even if only to recognize true greatness when you see it," Isazi chuckled at last, and put the long lash up into the air with a report like a shot of cannon, and called to his oxen. (COme, Fransman, you black devil! Come, Sathan, MY darling.

Pakamisa, pick it up!" Ralph mounted and backed his horse off the road and watched his laden wagons trundle by. There was 10,000 pounds of profit in that single convoy for him, and he had 200 wagons, plying back and forth across the vast sub-continent. Ralph shook his head in awe as he remembered the single elderly eighteen-footer that he and Isazi had driven out of Kimberley that first time. He had purchased it on borrowed money, and laden it with trade goods that he did not own.

"A long road and a hard one," he said aloud, as he wheeled his horse and kicked it into a gallop in pursuit of the mule coach and the wedding party.

He fell in again beside Louise, and she started from a reverie as though she had not even noticed his absence. "Dreaming," he accused her, and she spread the fingers of one graceful hand in admission of guilt, and then lifted it to point.

"Do look, Ralph. How beautiful it is!" A bird flitted across the track ahead of the coach. It was a shrike with a shiny black back, and a breast of a stunning crimson that burned in the white sunlight like a precious ruby.

"How beautiful it all is," she exulted as the bird disappeared into the scrub, and Louise turned in the saddle to take in the whole horizon with a sweep of her arm that made the tassels of her white buckskin jacket flutter. "Do you know, Ralph, that King's Lynn is the very first real home I have ever- known." And only then Ralph realized that they were still on his father's land. Zouga'Ballantyne had used up the entire fortune he had won from the blue ground of Kimberley's pit to buy the land grants of the drifters and never-contents amongst Doctor Jameson's troopers who had ridden into Matabeleland in the expeditionary force that had defeated Lobengula. Each of them had been entitled to four thousand acres of his choice, and some of them had sold that right to Zouga Ballantyne for as little as the price of a bottle of whisky.

It would take a rider on a good horse three days to ride around the boundary of King's Lynn. The home that Zouga had built for Louise stood on one of those distant hills, overlooking the wide plain of acacia trees and sweet grass, its thick golden thatch and burned brick blending with the shading grove of tall trees, as though it had always been there.

"This beautiful land will be so good to us, she whispered, her voice husky and her eyes brimming with an almost religious joy. "Vicky will be married today, and her children will grow strong here.

Perhaps--" She broke off and a little cloud passed behind her eyes.

She had not yet given up all hope of bearing Zouga's child. Every night, after his gentle loving, she would lie with her hands clasped over her stomach, and her thighs clenched as if to hold his seed within her and she would pray, while he slept quietly beside her. "Perhapsbut it would be ill-ome ned to even mention it and she changed it, "perhaps one day Jonathan or one of your sons yet unborn will be the master of King's Lynn." She reached across and laid her hand on his forearm. "Ralph, I have his strange premonition that our descendants will live here for ever." Ralph smiled fondly at her and covered her hand with his. "Well, now, my dear Louise, even Mr. Rhodes himself only gives it four thousand years. Will you not settle for that?" "Oh you!" She struck him playfully on the shoulder. "Will you never be serious!"

And then she exclaimed, and turned her horse out of the procession.

Under one of the flat-topped acacias beside the track, stood a pair of Matabele boys, neither of them older than ten years. They wore only the little mutsha loincloths, and hung their heads shyly as Louise greeted them in fluent rippling Sindebele. King's Lynn employed dozens of these mujiba to tend the vast herds of native cattle and the fine breeding bulls that Zouga had brought up from the south. These were but two of them, yet Louise knew them by name, and their faces shone with genuine affection as they returned her greeting.

"I see you also, Balela." The praise name the Matabele servants of King's Lynn had given her meant "the One who brings Clear and Sunny Skies" and the two children waited expectantly, answering her questions dutifully, until Louise at last reached into the pocket of her skirt and dropped a morsel of candy into each of their cupped pink palms.

They scampered back to their herds, cheeks bulging like those of squirrels, and their eyes huge with delight.

"You spoil them, "Ralph chided her, as she rejoined him. "They are our people," she said simply, and then almost regretful. "here is the boundary. I hate to leave our own land." And the wedding procession passed the simple roadside peg, and rode onto the land of Khami Mission Station. However, it was almost an hour later that the mules hauled the coach up the steep track, through thick bush, and paused to blow on the level neck of ground high above the whitewashed church and its attendant buildings.

It seemed as though an army was encamped in the valley.

Jordan jumped down from the coach, shrugging off the cotton dust-coat that had protected his beautiful dove-grey suit, and smoothing his dense golden curls as he crossed to his brother.

"What on earth is going on, Ralph?" he demanded. "I never expected anything like this." "Robyn has invited half the Matabele nation to the wedding and the other half invited themselves." Ralph smiled down at his brother. "Some of them have trekked a hundred miles to be here, every patient she has ever treated, every convert she ever turned, every man, woman and child who ever came to beg a favour or advice, everyone who ever called her "Nomusa" they are all here, and they have all brought their families and friends. It's going to be the greatest jollification since Lobengula held the last Chawala ceremony back in "93." "But who is going to feed them all? "Jordan went immediately to the logistics.

"Oh, Robyn can afford to blow a few of her royalties, and I sent her a gift of fifty head of slaughter-bullocks. Then they do say that Gandang's wife, old fat Juba, has brewed a thousand gallons of her famous twa la They will be bloated as pythons and overflowing with good cheer." Ralph punched his brother's arm affectionately. "Which reminds me that I have worked up a fair old thirst myself, let's get on with it." The road was lined on both sides with hundreds of singing maidens, all of them decked with beads and flowers, their skin was anointed with fat and clay so that it shone like cast bronze in the sunlight. Their short aprons swirled about their thighs as they stamped and swayed, and their naked bosoms bounced and joggled. "By God, Jordan, have you ever seen such a fine display?" Ralph teased his brother, well aware of his prudish and reserved attitude to all women.

"That pair over there would keep your ears warm in a blizzard, I war rand Jordan blushed and quickly made his way back to join his master, as the girls crowded about the carriage and the mules were reduced to a walk.

One of the girls recognized Mr. Rhodes.

"Lodzi!" she called, and her cry was taken up by the others.

"Lodzi! Lodzi!" Then they saw Louise. "Balela, we see you. Welcome, Balela," they sang, clapping and swaying. "Welcome, the One who brings Clear and Sunny Skies." Then they recognized Zouga, and they cried, "Come in peace, the Fist." And then to Ralph, "We see you, little Hawk, and our eyes are white with joy." Zouga lifted his hat and waved it over his head. "By God," he murmured to Louise, "I wish Labouche and the damned Aborigine Protection Society could be here to see this."

"They are happy and secure as they never were under Lobengula's bloody rule," Louise agreed, "this land will be kind to us, I feel it deep in my heart." From the back of his horse, Ralph could look over the heads of the girls. There were very few men in the crowd, and they hung back at the fringe of the press of black bodies. However, a face caught Ralph's attention, a single solemn face amongst all the smiles.

"Bazo!" Ralph called and waved, and the young and una looked at him steadily, still without smiling.

"We will talk later," Ralph shouted, and then he was past, swept along by the throng down the avenue of tall dark green spathodea trees with their flaming orange blossoms.

When they reached the lawns, the dancing black girls fell back, for, by unspoken accord, these were reserved for the white guests.

There were a hundred or so gathered below the wide thatched veranda.

Cathy was there, for she had ridden out three days before to help with the preparations. She was slender and cool in a dress of yellow muslin and the straw hat upon her dark head was wide as a wagon-wheel and loaded with artificial flowers of bright-coloured silk that Ralph had ordered from London.

Jonathan let out a'shriek when he saw Ralph, but Cathy held his hand firmly to prevent him being trampled in the crowd that surged forward to engulf the bridegroom in a storm of greetings and good cheer. Ralph left his horse, and came through the crowd, and Cathy almost lost her hat in the violence of his embrace. She had to snatch desperately at it, and then she froze and the colour drained from her face.

The door of the mule coach had opened, Jordan jumped down and set the step.

"Ralph," Cathy blurted, clinging to his arm. "It's him! What's he doing here?" Mr. Rhodes" bulk had appeared in the doorway of the carriage, and a shocked hush fell upon them all.

"Oh Ralph, what will Mama say? Couldn't you have stopped him?"

"Nobody stops him," Ralph murmured, without releasing her. "Besides this is going to be better than a cock-fight, any day." As he said it, Robyn St. John, drawn by the commotion, came out onto the step of the homestead. Her face, still flushed from the heat of the stove, was radiant with a smile of welcome for her latest guests, but the smile shrivelled when she recognized the man in the doorway of the carriage.

She stiffened, and the flush receded from her face, leaving it icy pale.

"Mr. Rhodes," she said clearly in the silence. "I am delighted that you have come to Khami Mission." Mr. Rhodes" eyes flickered as though she had slapped him across the face. He had expected anything but that, and he inclined his head with cautious gallantry, but Robyn went on. "Because it gives me a heaven-sent opportunity to order you not to set a foot over my threshold." Mr. Rhodes bowed with relief, he did not like unresolved positions over which he had no control.

"Let us grant that your jurisdiction reaches that far," he agreed.

"But this side of that threshold, the ground on which I stand belongs to the BSA Company of which I am Chairman.-" "No, sir," Robyn denied hotly, "the Company has granted me the usufruct.-" "A fine legal point."

Mr. Rhodes shook his head gravely. "I will ask my -Administrator to give us a ruling on that." The Administrator was Doctor Leander Starr Jameson. "But in the meantime, I should like to raise a glass to the happiness of the young couple." "I assure you, Mr. Rhodes, that you will not be served refreshment at Khami." Mr. Rhodes nodded at Jordan, and he hurried back to the mule coach. In "a flurry of activity he supervised the uniformed servants who unpacked the camp chairs and tables and placed them in the shade of the tender growth that the spathodea trees had put out since the locust plague.

As Mr. Rhodes and his party settled themselves, Jordan fired the cork from the first bottle of champagne and spilled a frothy deluge into a crystal glass, and Robyn St. John disappeared abruptly from the veranda.

Ralph placed Jonathan in Cathy's arms. "She's up to something," he said, and sprinted across the lawns. He vaulted over the low veranda wall and burst into the livingroom just as Robyn lifted the shotgun down from its rack above the fireplace.

"Aunt Robyn, what are you doing?" "Changing the cartridges, taking out the birdshot and putting in big loopers!" "My darling mother-in-law, you cannot do that," Ralph protested, and edged towards her.

"Not use big loopers?" Robyn circled him warily, keeping out of reach, holding the shotgun with its ornate curly hammers at the level of her chest.

"You cannot shoot him." "Why not?" "Think of the scandal."

"Scandal and I have been travelling companions as long as I can remember." "Then think of the mess, "Ralph urged her.

"I'll do it on the lawn," Robyn said, and Ralph knew that she meant it. He sought desperately for inspiration, and found it.

"Number SixV he cried, and Robyn froze and stared at him.

"Number Six, "Thou shalt not kill"." "God was not speaking of Cecil Rhodes," Robyn said, but her eyes wavered.

"If the Almighty was allowing open season on specified targets, I'm sure He would have put in a footnote." Ralph pursued his advantage, and Robyn sighed and turned back to the leather cartridge bag on its hook.

"Now what are you doing? "Ralph demanded suspiciously. "Changing back to birdshot," Robyn muttered. "God didn't say anything about flesh wounds." But Ralph seized the stock of the shotgun and with only a token of resistance Robyn relinquished it.

"O Ralph she whispered. "The effrontery of that man. I wish I was allowed to swear." "God will understand," Ralph encouraged her.

"Damn him to bloody hell!" she said.

"Better?" "Not much." "Here," he said, and slipped the silver flask from his back pocket.

She took a swallow, and blinked at the tears of anger that stung her eyes.

"Better?" "A little," she admitted. "What must I do, Ralph?"

"Conduct yourself with frosty dignity." "Right." She lifted her chin determinedly and marched back onto the veranda.

Under the spathodea trees, Jordan had donned a crisp white apron and tall chef's cap, and was serving champagne and huge golden Cornish pasties to whoever wanted them. The veranda, which had been crowded with guests before the arrival of the mule coach, was now deserted, and there was a jovial throng around Mr. Rhodes.

"We will start cooking the sausage," Robyn told Juba. "Get your girls busy." "They aren't even married yet, Nomusa," Juba protested.

"The wedding is not until five o'clock-" "Feed them," Robyn ordered.

"I'll back my sausage against Jordan Ballantyne's pasties to bring "em back." "And I'll put my money on Mr. Rhodes" champagne to keep "em there," Ralph told her. "Can you match it?" "I haven't a drop, Ralph," Robyn admitted. "I have beer and brandy, but not champagne." With a single glance, Ralph caught the eye of one of the younger guests on the lawn. He was the manager of Ralph's General Dealer's shop in Bulawayo.

He read Ralph's expression, and hurried up the steps to his side, listened intently to his instructions for a few seconds, and then ran to his horse.

"Where did you send him?" Robyn demanded.

"A convoy of my wagons arrived today. They will not have unloaded yet. We'll have a wagon full of bubbly out here within a few hours."

"I'll never be able to repay you for this, Ralph." For a moment Robyn considered him, and then for the first time ever she stood on tiptoe and gave him a light dry kiss on the lips, before hurrying back to her kitchen.

Ralph's wagon hove over the hill at a dramatic moment. Jordan was down to his last bottle of champagne, the empty green bottles formed an untidy hillock behind his stall, and the crowd had already begun to drift across to the barbecue pits on which Robyn's celebrated spiced beef sausage was sizzling in clouds of aromatic steam.

Isazi brought the wagon to a halt below the veranda, and, like a conjuror, drew back the canvas hood to reveal the contents. The crowd flocked away to leave Mr. Rhodes sitting alone beside his fancy coach.

Within minutes Jordan sidled up beside his brother. "Ralph, Mr. Rhodes would like to purchase a few cases of your best champagne." "I'm not selling in job lots. Tell him it's a full wagon or nothing. "Ralph smiled genially. "At twenty pounds a bottle." "That's piracy, "Jordan gasped.

"It's also the only available champagne in Matabeleland." "Mr. Rhodes will not be pleased." "I'll be pleased enough for both of us," Ralph assured him. "Tell him it's cash, in advance." While Jordan went with the bad news to his master, Ralph sauntered across to the bridegroom and put one arm around his shoulder.

"Be grateful to me, Harry my boy. Your wedding is going to be a hundred-year legend, but have you told the lovely Victoria about her honeymoon yet?" "Not yet," Harry Mellow admitted.

"Wise decision, laddie. Wankie's country does not have the appeal of the bridal suite at the Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town." "She will understand," Harry said with more force than belief.

"Of course she will," Ralph agreed, and turned to meet Jordan who returned brandishing the cheque which Mr. Rhodes had scribbled on a tattered champagne label.

"How charjningly appropriate," Ralph murmured, and tucked it into his top pocket. "I'll send Isazi back to fetch the next wagon." The rumour of wagon loads of free champagne for all at Khami Mission turned Bulawayo into a ghost town. Unable to compete with these prices, the barman of the Grand Hotel closed down his deserted premises and joined the exodus southwards. As soon as the news reached them, the umpires called "stumps" on the cricket match being played on the police parade ground, and the twenty-two players still in their flannels formed a guard of honour for Isazi's wagon, while behind them followed what remained of the town's population on horse, cycle or foot.

The little Mission church could hold only a fraction of the invited and uninvited, the rest of them overflowed into the grounds, though the heaviest concentrations were always to be found around the two widely separated champ pagne wagons. Copious draughts of warm champagne had made the men sentimentally boisterous and many of the women loudly weepy, so a thunderous acclaim greeted the bride when she at last made her appearance on the Mission veranda.

On her brother-in-law's arm, and attended by her sisters, Victoria made her way down the alley that opened for her across the lawn.

She was pretty enough to begin with, with her green eyes shining and the vivid coppery mass of her hair upon the white satin of her dress, but when she returned the same way, this time on the arm of her new husband, she was truly beautiful.

"All right," Ralph announced. "It's all legal now the party can truly begin." He signalled to the band, a hastily assembled quartet led by, Matabeleland's only undertaker on the fiddle, and they launched into a spirited Gilbert and Sullivan. This was the only sheet music available north of the Limpopo. Each member of the quartet provided his own interpretation of The Mikado, so that the dancers could waltz or polka to it as the inclination and the champagne dictated.

By dawn of the following day, the party had started to warm up, and the first fist-fight broke out behind the church. However, Ralph settled it by announcing to the shirt sleeved contestants, "This will never do, gentlemen, it is an occasion of joy and goodwill towards all mankind." And then before they realized his intention, he dropped them on their backs in quick succession with a left and right swing that neither of them saw coming. Then he helped them solicitously back onto their feet and led them weaving groggily to the nearest drink wagon.

By dawn on the second day, the party was in full swing. The bride and bridegroom, reluctant to miss a moment of the fun, had not yet left on their honeymoon and were leading the dancing under the spathodea trees. Mr. Rhodes, who had rested during the night in the mule coach, now emerged and ate a hearty breakfast of bacon and eggs cooked by Jordan over the open fire, washed it down with a tumbler of champagne, and was moved to oratory. He stood on the driver's seat of the coach and spoke with all his usual eloquence and charisma honed to an edge by a sense of occasion and his own burning belief in his subject.

"My Rhodesians," he addressed his audience, and they took it as an endearment rather than a claim to ownership, and loved him for it.

"Together you and I have made a great leap forward towards the day when the map of Africa will be painted pink from Cape Town to Cairo, when this fair continent will be set beside India, a great diamond beside a lustrous ruby, in the crown of our beloved Queen.-" They cheered him, the Americans and Greeks and Italians and Irish as loudly as the subjects of the "beloved Queen" herself.

Robyn St. John endured half an hour of these sentiments before she lost control of the frosty dignity that Ralph had counselled, and from the veranda of the homestead she began a counter reading of her own, as yet unpublished, poetry. "Mild melancholy and sedate he stands Tending another's herds upon the field.

His father's once, where now the white man builds His home and issues forth his proud commands. His dark eyes flash not, his listless hand Leans on the shepherd staff, no more he wields The gleaming steel, but to the oppressor yields.-" Her high, clear voice rang over Mr. Rhodes', heads turned back and forth between the two of them like the spectators at a tennis match.

"This is only a beginning," Mr. Rhodes raised his volume, (a great beginning, yes but a beginning nonetheless. There are ignorant and arrogant men, not all of them black," and even the dullest listener recognized that the allusion was to old Kruger, the Boer president of the South African Republic in the Transvaal, "who must be allowed the opportunity to come beneath the shield of the pox britannica of their own free will, rather than be driven to it by force of arms." His audience was once again entranced, until Robyn selected another of her works in matching warlike mood, and let fly with. "He scorns the hurt, nor regards the scar Of recent wound, but burnishes for war His assegai and targe of buffalo-hide.

Is he a rebel? Yes, it is a strife Between the black-skinned raptor and the white. A savage? Yes, though loath to aim at life Evil for evil fierce he doth requite.

A heathen? Teach him then thy better creed, Christian! If thou deserv'st that name indeed!" The audience's critical faculty was dulled by two days and two nights of revelry and they applauded Robyn's impassioned delivery with matching fervour, though the sense of it was thankfully lost upon them.

"The Lord save us," Ralph groaned, "from emetic jingoism and aperient scansion!" And he wandered away down the valley to get out of earshot of the competing orators, carrying a bottle of Mr. Rhodes" champagne in one hand, and with his son perched upon his shoulder.

Jonathan wore a sailor suit with Jack Tar collar, and a straw boater on his head, the ribbon hung down his back, and he clucked and urged his father on with his heels as though he was astride a pony. There were fifty head of slaughter-oxen and a thousand gallon pots of Juba's beer to account for, and the black wedding guests were giving the task their dedicated attention. Down here the dancing was even more energetic than that under the spathodea trees, the young men were leaping and twisting and stamping until the dust swirled waist-high about them and the sweat cut tunnels down their naked backs and chests.

The girls swayed and shuffled and sang, and the drummers hammered out their frenetic rhythms until they dropped exhausted, and others snatched up the wooden clubs to beat the booming hollowed-out tree-trunks. While Jonathan, on Ralph's back, squealed with delight, one of the slaughter-oxen, a heavy hump-backed red beast, was dragged out of the kraal. A spears man ran forward and stabbed it through the carotid and jugular. With a mournful bellow the animal collapsed, kicking spasmodically. The butchers swarmed over the carcass, flaying off the hide in a single sheet, delving for the tit bits the kidneys and liver and tripes, throwing them wet and shiny onto the live coals, hacking through the rack of ribs, slicing off thick steaks and heaping them on the racks over the cooking-fire.

Half raw, running with fat and juice, the meat was stuffed into eager mouths and the beer pots tilted to the hot blue summer sky. One of the cooks tossed Ralph a ribbon of tripe, scorched from the fierce flames, and with the contents still adhering to the stomach lining.

Without a visible qualm, Ralph stripped away the lining and bit off a chunk of the sweet white flesh beneath.

"Mushle!" he told the cook. "Good! Very good." And passed up a sliver to the child on his back. "Eat it, Jon-Jon, what doesn't kill you, makes you fat," and his son obeyed with noisy relish, and agreed with his father's verdict.

"Mushle, it's really mush, Papa." Then the dancers surrounded them, prancing and whirling, challenging Ralph. Ralph sat Jonathan on the fence of the cattle kraal, where he had a grandstand view. Then he strode into the centre and set himself in the heroic posture of the Nguni dancer. Bazo had taught him well when they were striplings, and now he raised his right knee as high as his shoulder and brought his booted foot down on the hard earth with a crash, and the other dancers hummed in encouragement and approbation.

"Jee! Jee!" Ralph leaped and stamped and postured, and the other dancers were pressed to match him, the women clapped and sang and on the kraal fence Jonathan howled with excitement and pride.

"Look at my daddy!" His shirt soaked with sweat, his chest heaving, chuckling breathlessly, Ralph dropped out at last and lifted Jonathan back onto his shoulder. The two of them went on, greeting by name those they recognized in the throng, accepting a proffered morsel of beef or a swallow of tart gruel-thick beer, until at last on the rise beyond the kraal, seated on a log, aloof from the dancers and revellers, Ralph found the man he was seeking.

"I see you, Bazo the Axe," he said, and sat down on the log beside him, set the champagne bottle between them and passed Bazo one of the cheroots for which he had developed a taste so long ago on the diamond fields. They smoked in silence, watching the dancers and the feasting until Jonathan grew restless and edged away to seek more exciting occupation, and found it immediately.

He was confronted by a child a year or so younger than he was.

Tungata, son Of Bazo, son of Gandang, son of great Mzilikazi, was stark naked except for the string of bright ceramic beads around his hips.

His navel popped out in the centre of his fat little belly, his limbs were sturdy, dimpled knees and bracelets of healthy fat at his wrists.

His face was round and smooth and glossy, his eyes huge and solemn as he examined Jonathan with total fascination.

Jonathan returned his scrutiny with equal candour, and made no attempt to pull away as Tungata reached and touched the collar of his sailor suit.

"What is your son's name?" Bazo asked, watching the children with an inscrutable expression on his dark features. "Jonathan." "What is the meaning of that name?" "The gift of God, "Ralph told him.

Jonathan suddenly took the straw hat from his own head and placed it upon that of the Matabele princeling. It made such an incongruous picture, the beribboned boater on the head of the naked black boy with his pot belly and little uncircumcised penis sticking out under it at a jaunty angle, that both men smiled involuntarily. Tungata gurgled with glee, seized Jonathan's hand and dragged him away unprotestingly into the throng of dancers.

The lingering warmth of that magical moment between the children thawed the stiffness between' the two men. Fleetingly, they recaptured the rapport of their young manhood. They passed the champagne bottle back and forth, and when it was empty, Bazo clapped his hands and Tanase came to kneel dutifully before him and offered a clay pot of bubbling brew. She never looked up at Ralph's face, and she withdrew as silently as she had come.

At noon she returned to where the two men were still deep in conversation. Tanase led Jonathan by one hand and Tungata still with the straw hat on his head, by the other. Ralph, who had forgotten all about him, started violently when he saw his son. The child's beatific grin was almost masked by layers of grime and beef fat. His sailor suit was the victim of the marvelous games which he and his newly found companion had invented. The collar hung by a thread, the knees were worn through, and Ralph recognized some of the stains as ash and ox blood and mud and fresh cow dung. He was less certain of the others.

"Oh my God," Ralph groaned, "your mother will strangle us both."

He picked up his son gingerly. "When will I see you again, old friend? "he asked Bazo.

"Sooner than you think," Bazo replied softly. "I told you I would work for you again when I was ready." Yes, "Ralph nodded.

"I am ready now," said Bazo simply.

Victoria was amazingly gracious in her acceptance of the change of honeymoon venue, when Harry Mellow explained shamefacedly, "Ralph has this idea. He wants to follow up one of the African legends, at a place called Wankie's country, near the great falls that Doctor Livingstone discovered on the Zambezi river. Vicky, I know how you looked forward to Cape Town and to seeing the sea for the first time, but, "I've lived without the sea for twenty years, a little longer won't hurt much." And she took Harry's hand. "Wherever thou go est MY love, Wankie's country, Cape Town, or the North Pole, just as long as we are together." The expedition was conducted in Ralph Ballantyne's usual style, six wagons and forty servants to convey the two families northwards through the magnificent forests of northern Matabeleland towards the great Zambezi river. The weather was mild and the pace leisurely. The country teemed with wild game, and the newly-weds billed and cooed and made such languorous eyes at each other that it was infectious.

"Just whose honeymoon is this?" Cathy mumbled in Ralph's ear one lazy loving morning.

"Action first, questions later," Ralph replied, and Cathy chuckled in a throaty self-satisfied way and cuddled back down in the feather mattress of, the wagon bed.

At evening and mealtimes, Jonathan had to be forcibly removed from the back of the pony that Ralph had given him for his fifth birthday, and Cathy anointed the saddle sores on his buttocks with Zambuk.

They reached Wankie's village on the twenty-second day and for the first time since leaving Bulawayo, the idyllic mood of the caravan bumped back to earth.

Under the reign of King Lobengula, Wankie had been a renegade and outlaw. Lobengula had sent four separate punitive imp is to bring his severed head back to GuBulawayo, but Wankie had been as cunning as he was insolent, as slippery as he was mendacious, and the imp is had all returned empty-handed to face the king's wrath.

After Lobengula's defeat and death, Wankie had brazenly set himself up as chieftain of the land between the Zambezi and the Gwaai rivers, and he demanded tribute of those who came to trade or hunt the elephant herds that had been driven into the bad lands along the escarpment of the Zambezi valley, where the tsetse fly turned back the horsemen and only the hardiest would go in on foot to chase the great animals.

Wankie was a handsome man in his middle age, open faced and tall, with the air of the chief he claimed to be, and he accepted the gift of blankets and beads that Ralph presented to him with no effusive gratitude, enquired politely after Ralph's health and that of his father, and brothers and sons, and then waited like a crocodile at the drinking place for Ralph to come to the real purpose of his visit.

"The stones that burn?" he repeated vaguely, his eyes hooded as he pondered, seeming to search his memory for such an extraordinary subject, and then quite artlessly he remarked that he had always wanted a wagon. Lobengula had owned a wagon, and therefore Wankie believed that every great chief should have one, and he turned on his stool and glanced pointedly at Ralph's six magnificent Cape-built eighteen-footers out spanned in the glade below the kraal.

"That damned rogue has the cheek of a white man," Ralph protested bitterly to Harry Mellow across the campfire. "A wagon, no less.

Three hundred pounds of any man's money." "But, darling, if Wankie can guide you, won't it be a bargain price?" Cathy asked mildly.

"No. I'm damned if I'll give in to him. A couple of blankets, a case of brandy, but not a three hundred pound wagon!"

"Damned right, Ralph," Harry chuckled. "I mean we got Long Island for that price " He was interrupted by a discreet cough behind him.

Bazo had come across silently from the other fire where the drivers and servants were bivouacked.

"Henshaw," he started, when Ralph acknowledged him. "You told me that we had come here to hunt buffalo to make trek ri ems from their hides." he accused. "Did you not trust me?" "Bazo, you are my brother." "You lie to your brothers?" "If I had spoken of the stones that burn in Bulawayo, we would have had a hundred wagons following us when we left town." "Did I not tell you that I had led my impi over these hills, chasing the same hairless baboon upon whom you now shower gifts?" "You did not tell me," Ralph replied, and Bazo moved on hastily from that subject. He was not proud of his campaign against Wankie, the only one during all the years that he had been and una of the "Moles" which had not ended in complete success. He still recalled the old king's recriminations, would that he could ever forget them.

"Henshaw, if you had spoken to me, we would not have had to waste our time and demean ourselves by parleying with this son of thirty fathers, this unsavoury jackal-casting, this-" Ralph cut short Bazo's opinion of their host, by standing up and seizing Bazo's shoulders.

"Bazo, can you lead us there? Is that what you mean? Can you take us to the stones that burn?" Bazo inclined his head, in assent. "And it will not cost you a wagon, either, "he replied.

They rode into a red and smoky dawn through the open glades in the forest. Ahead of them the buffalo herds opened to give them passage and closed behind them as they passed. The huge black beasts held their wet muzzles high, the massive slaty bosses of horn giving them a ponderous dignity, and they stared in stolid astonishment as the horsemen passed within a few hundred paces, and then returned unalarmed to graze. The riders barely glanced at them, their attention was fastened instead on Bazo's broad bullet-scarred back as he led them at an easy trot towards the low line of flat-topped hills that rose out of the forest ahead.

On the first slope they tethered the horses, and climbed, while above them the furry little brown klipspringer, swift as chamois, flew sure-footed up the cliffs and from the summit an old dog baboon barked his challenge down at them. Though they ran at the slope, they could not keep up with Bazo, and he was waiting for them halfway up on a ledge above which the cliff rose sheer to the summit. He made no dramatic announcement, but merely pointed with his chin. Ralph and Harry stared, unable to speak, their chests heaving and their shirts plastered to their backs with sweat from the climb.

There was a horizontal seam, twenty foot thick, sandwiched in the cliff face. It ran along the cliff as far as they could see in each direction, black as the darkest night and yet glittering with a strange greenish iridescence in the slanted rays of the early sun.

"This was the only thing we lacked in this land," Ralph said quietly. "The stones that burn, black gold now we have it all." Harry Mellow went forward and laid his hand upon it reverently, as though he were a worshipper touching the relic of a saint in some holy place.

"I have never seen coal of this quality in a seam so deep, not even in the Kentucky hills." Suddenly he snatched his hat off his head and with a wild Indian whoop threw it far out down the slope.

"We are rich! "he shouted. "Rich! Rich! Rich!" "Better than working for Mr. Rhodes?" Ralph asked, and Harry grabbed his shoulders and the two of them spun together in a yelling, stomping dance of jubilation on the narrow ledge, while Bazo leaned against the seam of black coal and watched them unsmilingly.

It took them two weeks to survey and peg their claims, covering all the ground beneath which the seams of coal might be buried. Harry shot the lines with his theodolite, and Bazo and Ralph worked behind him with a gang of axe men driving in the pegs and marking the corners with cairns of loose stones.

While they worked, they discovered a dozen other places in the hills where the deep rich seams of glittering coal were exposed at the surface.

"Coal for a thousand years," Harry predicted. "Coal for the railways and the blast furnaces, coal to power a new nation." On the fifteenth day the two of them traipsed back to camp at the head of their bone-weary gang of Matabele.

Victoria, deprived of her new husband for two weeks, was as palely forlorn as a young widow in mourning, but by breakfast the following day she had regained her fine high colour and the sparkle in her eyes as she hovered over Harry, replenishing his coffee cup and heaping his plate with slices of smoked wart hog and piles of rich yellow scrambled ostrich egg. Sitting at the head of the breakfast table set under the giant ms asa trees, Ralph called to Cathy. "Break out a bottle of champagne, Katie my sweeting, we have something to celebrate," and he saluted them with a brimming mug. "Ladies and gentlemen, I give you a toast to the gold of the Harkness Mine and the coal of the Wankie field, and to the riches of both!" They laughed and clinked their mugs and drank the toast.

"Let's stay here for ever," said Vicky. "I'm so happy. I don't want it to end." "We'll stay a little longer," Ralph agreed, with his arm about Cathy's waist. "I told Doctor Jim we were coming up here to hunt buffalo. If we don't bring a few wagon-loads of hides back with us, the little doctor is going to start wondering." The evening wind came softly out of the east. Ralph knew that at this season it would hold steadily during the night, and increase with the warmth of the sun.

He sent out two teams of his Matabele, each team armed with a package of Swan Vestas and leading a span of trek oxen. They moved out eastwards and by dawn they had reached the bank of the Gwaai river.

Here they felled two big dried-out Thorn-trees and hooked the trek chains onto the trunks.

When they, put fire into the branches, the dried wood burned like a torch and the oxen panicked. The drivers ran beside each span, keeping them galloping in opposite directions, heading across the wind, dragging the blazing trees behind them and spreading a trail of sparks and flaring twigs through the tall dry grass. Within an hour, there was a forest fire burning across a front of many miles, with the wind behind it roaring down towards the long open vlei where Ralph's wagons were out spanned The smoke billowed heaven-high, a vast dun pall.

Ralph had roused the camp before first light, and he supervised the back-burn while the dew on the vlei subdued the flames and made them manageable. The Matabele put fire into the grass on the windward side of the open vlei and let it burn to the forest line on the far side.

Here they beat it out before it could take hold of the trees.

Isazi rolled his wagons out onto the blackened still-hot earth, and formed them into a square with his precious oxen penned in the centre. Then, for the first time, they had a chance to pause and look eastward. The dark smoke cloud of the forest fire blotted out the dawn, and their island of safety seemed suddenly very small in the path of that terrible conflagration. Even the mood of the usually cheerful Matabele was subdued, and they kept glancing uneasily at the boiling smoke line as they honed their skinning knives.

"We will be covered with soot," Cathy complained. "Everything will be filthy." "Amd a little singed, like as not," Ralph laughed, as he and Bazo checked the spare horses and slipped the rifles into their scabbards.

Then he came to Cathy and with an arm about her shoulders, told her, "You and Vicky are to stay in the wagons. Don't leave them, whatever happens. If you get a little warm, splash water on yourselves, but don't leave the wagons."

Then he sniffed the wind, and caught the first whiff of smoke. He winked at Harry, who had Vicky in his arms in a lingering farewell.

"I'll bet my share of the Wankie field against yours." "None of your crazy bets, Ralph Ballantyne," Vicky cut in quickly. "Harry has a wife to support now!" "A guinea, then!" Ralph moderated the wager.

"Done!" agreed Harry.

They shook hands on it and swung up into the saddles. Bazo led up Ralph's spare horse, with a rifle in the scabbard and a bandolier of bright brass cartridges looped to the pommel.

"Keep close, Bazo," Ralph told him, and looked across at Harry.

He had his own Matabele outrider and spare horse close behind him.

"Ready?" Ralph asked, and Harry nodded, and they trotted out of the laager.

The acrid stink of smoke was strong on the wind now, and the horses flared their nostrils nervously and stepped like cats over the hot ash of the back-burn.

"Just look at them!" Harry's voice was awed.

The herds of buffalo had begun moving down-wind ahead of the bushfire. Gradually one herd had merged with another, a hundred becoming five hundred, then a thousand. Then the thousand began multiplying, the westward movement becoming faster, black bodies packing closer, the earth beginning to tremble faintly under the iron-black hooves. Now every few minutes one of the herd bulls, an animal so black and solid that he seemed to be hewn from rock, would stop and turn back, stemming the moving tide of breeding cows. He would lift his mighty horned head with its crenellated bosses and snuffle the east wind into his wet nostrils, blink at the sting of the smoke, turn again and break into a heavy swinging trot, and his cows would be infected by his agitation, while the red calves bawled in bewilderment and pressed to the flanks of their dams.

Now the herds were being compressed against each other.

The huge beasts, the largest of them a ton and a half of flesh and bone, were moving shoulder to shoulder and muzzle to tail across a front almost a mile wide. The leaders came cascading out of the forest onto the edge of the vlei, while the serried ranks reached back into the looming dust and were hidden by the twisted silver trunks of the ms asa trees.

Ralph knotted the scarf up over his nose and mouth, and pulled his hat low over his eyes.

"Harry, my lad, every one that falls this side of the wagons," he made a wide gesture, "is mine. Everything that side is yours." "And a guinea on the bag," Harry agreed. He levered a cartridge into the breech of his Lee Enfield rifle and with one of his wild Indian whoops clapped his heels into his horse's flanks and drove straight at the nearest beasts.

Ralph let him go, and held his own horse down to a trot. Gently he angled in towards the rolling herds, careful not to spook them prematurely, letting them concentrate on the flames behind rather than the hunter ahead. This way he got in really close, and picked out a good bull in the front rank. He leaned into the rifle' and aimed into the barrel of the thick neck, just where the bald scabby hide creased at the front of the shoulder.

The shot was almost drowned by the din of pounding hooves and bawling calves, but the bull dropped his nose to the earth, and somersaulted over it, sliding on his back, kicking convulsively in his death agony, and bellowing as mournfully as a foghorn in a winter gale.

The herds plunged into full gallop.

Steering his mount with his heels and toes, leaving both hands free to load and aim and fire, Ralph pressed in against the wall of dark bodies in gargantuan flight. Sometimes he was so close that the rifle muzzle was merely inches from a monstrous neck or shoulder, and the muzzle flash was quick and bright as a lance as it buried itself in the thick black hide. At each crash of the rifle, another beast went down, for at that range an experienced huntsman could make a butchery of it. He fired until the hammer fell on an empty chamber, and then crammed fresh rounds into the magazine, and fired again as fast as he could pump the loading handle, not lifting the butt from his shoulder nor his eye from the sights.

The barrel was smoking hot, each shot now recoiling viciously into his shoulder, so that his teeth cracked together in his jaws and the forefinger of his right hand was bleeding, a flap of loose skin torn from the second joint by the trigger guard, so he was seconds slow -on the reload, and then he was firing again. Deafened by gunfire, each shot was a muted popping in his abused eardrums, and the uproar of the galloping, bawling, bellowing herd was dreamlike and far away. His vision was dulled by the head high bank of dust, and, as they tore once more into the forest, by the sombre shadows of the tree-tops that met overhead. He was bleeding from chin and lip and forehead where stones as big as acorns had been thrown into his face by the flying hooves ahead of him. Still he loaded and fired and reloaded. He had long ago lost all count of the bag and the endless herd still pressed close on both flanks of his floundering horse.

Suddenly one bandolier was empty, a hundred rounds fired, he realized with surprise, and Ralph pulled a fresh one from his saddlebag, instinctively ducking under a long branch and straightening up to find an enormous bull galloping half a length ahead of him.

It seemed to Ralph's distorted vision to be the monarch of all buffalo, with a spread of horns wider than a man could reach, heavy as one of the granite boulders of the Matopos, so old that the points were worn blunt and rounded. His rump and back were grey and bald with age, the bush ticks hanging in blue grape like bunches in the deep folds of skin on each side of his huge swinging testicles.

Ralph's horse, almost blown now, could not hold him and the bull was pulling away strongly, his huge quarters bunching and. contracting, cloven hooves driving almost hock-deep into the soft sandy earth under the immense weight of his body. Ralph stood in the stirrups and aimed for the spine at the base of the bull's long tufted tail as it lashed his own sides in the fury of his run.

At the instant that Ralph fired, a branch snatched at his shoulder and the shot flew wide, socking meatily into the round black haunch.

The bull tripped and checked, catching himself before he went down, swinging abruptly aside with blood spurting down his hind legs. Ralph gathered his exhausted horse to follow him, but another thick grey treetrunk sprang out of the dust clouds ahead and forced him to turn hard the other way to avoid it. Rough bark grazed his knee and the bull was lost in the ranks of racing animals and the billowing dust.

"Let him go," Ralph shouted aloud. There was no chance that he could find a single animal again in this multitude. He cranked another cartridge into the scorching breech of his rifle, and shot a sleek red queen through the back of the skull, and an instant later knocked her half grown calf down with a bullet through the shoulder.

The rifle was empty and he began to reload, concentrating all his attention on the task, until suddenly some instinct warned him and he glanced up.

The wounded bull had turned back to hunt him.

It came out of the gloom like a black avalanche, goring the laggards out of its way, to cut a path for itself through the racing black river of animals. Its nose was high, the muzzle glistening wetly, and long silver strings of mucus dangled from the flaring nostrils. It came quartering in and the dusty earth exploded in pate puffs under the savagely driving hooves.

"Come boy!" Ralph yelled desperately at his tired gelding, gathering him with knees and reins, turning him away from the bull's charge and at the same time cramming a cartridge into the loading slot of the Winchester.

The bull closed in a crabbing rush, and Ralph swivelled the rifle and fired point-blank into the gigantic head, knowing there would be no time for another shot. The bull's head flinched and a splinter of slaty grey horn tore from the huge round bosses, and then the bull steadied himself, moving with the grace of a gazelle on his huge front legs. His head dropped. Ralph could have reached out and touched the crest of shaggy hide between his shoulders, instead he jerked his near leg from the stirrup and lifted his knee as high as his chin, just as the bull hooked the massive horns at the gelding's flank. At the place where Ralph's knee had been a moment before, the blunt tip of a black horn crashed into the horse's chest.

Ralph heard the ribs crackle and snap like dry sticks, and the air from the gelding's lungs was driven out of his throat in a whistling scream. Horse and rider were lifted high. The gelding was still screaming at the agony of his collapsed chest as Ralph was thrown clear. The rifle spun from his hand and he landed on his hip and shoulder and rolled to his knees. His right leg was numbed by the shock, it pinned him for precious seconds.

The buffalo was braced over the fallen gelding, front legs splayed, armoured head low, blood dribbling and trickling down its massive muscled quarters, and now it hooked at the horse, catching him in the soft of his belly and splitting him open like a cod on a fishwife's block. Soft, wet entrails, slippery as cooked spaghetti, were wrapped around the- blunt point, and as the bull tossed his head, he stripped them out of the gaping belly cavity. The horse kicked once more, and then was still.

Dragging his right leg, Ralph crawled towards the base of a wild teak.

"Bazo!" he screamed. "Bring the rifle! Bring the horse! Bazo!" He could hear the shrill of panic and terror in his own voice, and the bull heard it also. It left the horse, and Ralph heard the splayed hooves thudding into the sandy earth, heard the snort of its breath and smelled the rank bovine reek of the animal. He howled again and dragged himself to his feet, hopping on his good leg. He knew he was not going to reach the mopani and he whirled to face the enraged bull.

It was so close that he could see the wet trail of tears from the corners of its pink-shot piggy little eyes running down the shaggy black cheeks, and the spongy tongue, splotched pink and grey, lolling from its jaws as it bellowed at him. The head went down to hook him and split him, as it had the horse, but at that instant another voice bellowed in Sindebele. "Haul Thou uglier than death!" The bull checked, and pivoted on his stubby forelegs. "Come, thou witches' curse Bazo was taking the bull off him, he galloped in out of the rolling dust, dragging the spare horse on its lead rein, and he angled in now across the bull's front, taunting it with his voice and flapping his monkey4in cloak in its face. The bull accepted the lure of the Cloak, put his nose down, and went after it. The horse that Bazo rode was still fresh, and it skittered out of the arc of the great swinging head, and the bull's polished horn glinted at the top of its lunge.

"Henshaw," Bazo yelled, "take the spare horse." And he dropped the lead rein, sending the free horse down on Ralph, still at full gallop.

Ralph crouched in its path, and the grey mare saw him and swerved at the last moment, but Ralph leaped for the saddle, and got a hold on the pommel. For a dozen strides he hopped beside the mare, his feet skimming the ground as she carried him away. Then he gathered himself and swung his weight up across her back. His buttocks thumped onto the saddle, and he did not waste time groping for the stirrups. He yanked the spare rifle from the scabbard under his knee, and kicked the mare around after the great black bull.

The beast was intent on Bazo still, chasing him in a grotesque lumbering charge which covered the ground with uncanny speed. At that moment a low branch caught the half-naked Matabele and una a ringing crack across the shoulder and side of the head.

He was thrown sideways, the monkey-skin cloak flew away, flapping like an overfed black crow, and Bazo slid further until he was hanging upside down, his head almost brushing the ground between his mount's slashing hooves.

Coming up on the bull's blood-splattered quarters, Ralph fired into its back, probing for the spine in the mountain of black hide and bulging muscle. He fired with a mechanical action, cranking the loading handle, and the recoil dinned in upon his ears, so he could barely hear the heavy lead bullets slapping into the bull's body with a sound like a housewife beating a carpet. One of his bullets found the pumping lungs, for there was a sudden torrent of frothy blood blown from both the bull's nostrils, and the wild charge broke down into a short hampered trot.

Ralph came up alongside it, and it turned the great head and looked at him through eyes that swam with the tears of its death agony.

Ralph reached across and almost touched the broad forehead under the beetling horns with the muzzle of the rifle. The bull flung his head back from the brain shot, and it dropped silently onto its knees. It never moved again. Ralph galloped on and caught the bridle of Bazo's running horse.

He yanked it down to a halt.

"Only a Matabele rides with his head in the stirrups and his feet in the saddle," he gasped, and pulled Bazo upright. The dark skin was smeared from Bazo's forehead by the rough bark of the branch, the raw flesh was pale pink and droplets of clear lymph welled up out of it like seed pearls.

"Henshaw, my little Hawk," he replied thickly. "You screamed so loudly I thought you were losing your virginity with a horn, from behind." Ralph spluttered with shaky laughter, almost hysterical with the relief from terror and mortal danger. Bazo shook his head to clear it, his eyes came back into focus, and his grin was wicked.

"Go back to the women, Henshaw, for you cry like a maiden. Give me your gun and I will win your guinea for you. "See if you can keep up, "Ralph told him, and booted his horse into a run. The reaction from terror came upon him in a kind of atavistic madness, the wild soaring passion of the hunter, and he fell upon the galloping herds in a murderous frenzy.

The bushfire overtook them and put an end to the slaughter at last. Ralph and Bazo were almost caught between the enveloping arms of flame, but they broke through with the manes of their horses frizzled and stinking from the heat and Ralph's shirt scorched in brown patches.

Then from the sanctuary of the back-burn, they watched in awe as the fire swept by on either side. It was a gale of heat that whirled burning branches aloft, and crashed from tree to tree, leaping a gap a hundred feet wide with a deep whooshing roar and bursting the next tree asunder as though it had been hit by a lyddite shell from a howitzer.

The flames sucked the air away so that they gasped for breath, and the heat went deep into their lungs, so they coughed like hemp-smokers.

It seared the exposed skin of their faces, seemed to dry the moisture from their eyeballs and dazzle their vision as though they were staring into the fierce orb of the sun itself.

Then the fire was gone, burning away into the west, and they were silent and shaken, awed by the grandeur of its passing and by their own insignificance in the face of such elemental power.

It was the following morning before the earth had cooled sufficiently for the skinners to go out to work. The carcasses of the buffalo were half-roasted, the hair burned away on the upper side, yet untouched on the side where they had lain against the earth. The skinners worked in a landscape like a hellish vision of Hieronymus Bosch, a desolate and blackened earth, grotesquely twisted bare trees, with the hideous shapes of the vultures crouched in the upper branches.

One team of skinners rolled the huge carcasses and made the shallow incisions around the neck, down the limbs and swollen bellies, then the next team hooked on the bullock teams and stripped off the skin in a single slab, while the third team scooped the coarse white rock salt over the wet hides and spread them in the sun.

By the second day, the air was thick with the reek of hundreds of rotting carcasses, and the chorus of cries and howls and croakings of the scavengers was a fitting accompaniment to the scene. Although the dun palls of smoke' had cleared, the sky was dark once again with wings, the glossy sable pinions of the crows, the quick sharp stabbing wings of the little kites and the great majestic spread of the vultures.

Around each naked carcass, stripped of its hide and with the obscene pink bellies massively swollen with gases, the hyena whooped and chuckled and the little dog-like jackal darted in nervously to snatch up a titbit of offal. The vultures hopped and flapped and squabbled, pecking at each other with steely hooked beaks, forcing their way through the enlarged anus of the cadaver into the belly cavern.

The tall black and white marabou storks, solemn as undertakers, stalked in with their bright greedy eyes set in the naked face-mask.

Their crops were naked of feathers also, pink and scalded-looking, they dangled down in front of the throat like the swollen genitalia of some repulsive albino. With their long and powerful bills, they would rip off a strip of flesh on which the greenish iridescent sheen of putrefaction was already blooming. Then they pointed the bill at the sky, gaping and straining with the effort of gobbling the morsel down on top of their already gorged crop.

The stink of rotting, scorched flesh and the smell of the scavengers wafted down on the little circle Of wagons, and kept the women from sleep.

"Ralph, can we leave here tomorrow?" Cathy whispered. "Why?" he asked sleepily. "You like it here, you said so." "Not any more," she answered, and then after a while, "Ralph, if we go on burning and killing like this, how long will it last?" He was so startled that he heaved himself on one elbow and peered at her in the candlelight.

"What on earth are you talking about, girl?" "When the animals are all gone, this will no longer be the land I know and love." "Gone?" He shook his head in sympathy, as though for an idiot child. "Gone? By God, Katie, you saw the herds out there. They are countless, limitless.. They are as thick as that all the way north to Khartoum.

We could hunt like that every day, and not scratch the surface. No, Katie, they will never go." "How many did you kill?" she asked quietly.

"Two hundred and fourteen, thirty-two more than your esteemed brother-in-law." Ralph lay back comfortably, and pulled her head down onto his chest. "And that cost the cocky bastard a guinea of his ill-gotten loot." "Between you, almost four hundred in a single day's hunting, Ralph." Her voice was so low that he barely heard it, but his own became rough with impatience.

"Damn it, Katie, I need the skins. They are mine to take if I want them. That's all there is to it. Now, go to sleep, silly girl." f anything, Ralph Ballantyne's estimate of the buffalo herds was conservative. Probably never had any large imam mal been so prolifically massed upon the earth's face in all of its history. From the great Sud where the infant Nile weaves its way through fathomless swamps of floating papyrus, southwards over the wide savannahs of eastern and central Africa, down to the Zambezi and beyond to the golden glades and forests of Matabeleland, the vast black herds roamed.

They were very seldom hunted by the primitive tribes. They were too swift and fierce and powerful for their bows and spears. The digging of a pitfall large and deep enough to trap such an enormous beast was a labour that few of the tribesmen thought about seriously enough to interrupt their dancing and beer-drinking and cattle-raidings. The Arab travellers into the interior were not interested in such coarse game, rather they were intent on capturing and chaining the tender young black maidens and youths for the markets at Malindi and Zanzibar, or in, hunting the wrinkled grey elephant for their curved ivory tusks. Very few European travellers, bearing their sophisticated weapons, had yet ventured into these remote lands, and even the huge prides of lion which followed the herds could not check their natural multiplication.

The grasslands were blackened by the huge bovine beasts. Some herds, twenty or thirty thousand strong, were so dense that the animals in the rear literally starved, for the pasturage was destroyed by the forerunners before they could reach it. Weakened by their own vast multitudes, they were ripe for the pestilence that came out of the north.

It came out of Egypt. It was the same plague that Moses" God Jehovah had inflicted on the Pharoah of Egypt. It was the Peste bovine, the rinderpest, a virus disease which attacks all the ruminants, but of those the most susceptible are the bovines. buffalo and domestic cattle. The stricken animals are blinded and choked by the discharge from the mucous membranes. Mucus pours in thick ropes from their nostrils and jaws. The discharge is highly infectious and contagious, and it persists on the pasturage over which the animal has passed long after its host has perished.

The course of the disease is rapid and irreversible. The mucous discharges are swiftly followed by profuse diarrhoea and dysentery, with the beasts straining to evacuate even after their bowels are purged of all but bloody slime. Then when at last the animal goes down and no longer has the strength to rise, the convulsions twist the horned head back and around, until the nose touches the flank. That is the position in which they die.

The rinderpest passed with the speed of a gale wind across the continent, so that in places where the concentrations of buffalo were heaviest, a herd of ten thousand great horned animals was wiped out between the dawn and the sunset of a single day. The carcasses lay so thickly on the denuded savannah that they were touching each other like shoals of poisoned sardine washed up on a beach. Over this carnage hung the characteristic fetid odour of the disease with which soon mingled the stench Of putrefaction, for even the teeming flocks of vultures and packs of gluttonous hyena could not devour one thousandth part of this awful windfall.

This gale of disease and death blew southwards, swallowing up the blundering, bellowing herds southwards until at last it reached the Zambezi. Even that wide stretch of swirling green water could not check the pestilence. It was carried to the far bank in the bulging crops of the vultures and carrion storks, and was scattered upon the pasture in the faeces that they voided in flight.

The dreadful gale began again, southwards it moved, ever southwards.

Isazi, the little Zulu driver, was always the first awake in the laager. It gave him satisfaction to be alert and aware when others half his age still slept.

He left his mat and he went to the watch-fire. It was nothing but a pile of fluffy white ash, but Isazi moved the blackened tips of the logs together, crushed a few dry leaves of the il ala palm between them and leaned close to blow upon it. The ash flew away, and a coal glowed sullenly before the palm leaf popped into a cheery little flame. The logs took and Isazi warmed his palms for a moment, and then left the circle of wagons and wandered down to where the oxen were penned.

Isazi loved his bullocks as some men love their children or their dogs. He knew each by name. He knew their separate natures, their strengths and their weaknesses. He knew which of them would try to turn out of the span when the going got tough or the footing soft, and he knew those with great hearts and special intelligence. Of course, he had his favourites, like the huge red wheeler he had christened Dark Moon for his huge soft eyes, an ox who had held a loaded eighteen-footer against the flood of the Shashi when the mud bank was crumbling under his hooves, or Dutchman, the black and white dappled lead ox that he had trained to come like a dog to his whistle and lead the others to their place in the span.

Isazi chuckled lovingly, as he opened the Thorn bush gate of the temporary kraal and whistled for Dutchman. In the pre-dawn gloom, a beast coughed, and the sound had a peculiarly harrowing quality that struck a chill into Isazi's guts. A healthy bullock did not cough that way.

He stood in the opening of the kraal, hesitating to go in, then he smelled something that he had never smelled before. Faint though the whiff of it was, it made his gorge rise. It smelled like a beggar's breath or a leper's sores. He had to force himself to go forward against the smell and his own dread.

"Dutchman,"he called. "Where are you, my beauty?" There was the explosive spluttering sound of a beast racked by dysentery, and Isazi ran towards it. Even in the bad light he recognized the bulky dappled shape. The bullock was lying down.

Isazi ran to it. "Up!" "he called. Vusa, thandwa! Get up, my darling. "For a beast only lies down when it has given up hope. The bullock heaved convulsively, but did not come to its feet. Isazi dropped to his knees, and placed his arm around its neck. The neck was twisted back at an awkward unnatural angle. The velvety muzzle pressed into the beast's flank. The muscles under the sleek skin were convulsed as rigidly as cast iron.

Isazi ran his hands down the beast's neck, feeling the fierce heat of fever. He touched the cheek, and it was slick and wet. Isazi lifted his hand to his own nose. It was coated with a thick slime and the little Zulu gagged at the smell of it. He scrambled to his feet, and backed away fearfully until he reached the gate. Then he whirled and ran to the wagons.

"Henshaw,"he yelled wildly. "Come quickly, little Hawk." "Flame lilies," Ralph Ballantyne growled. His face was congested with black angry blood, as he strode "Fthrough the kraal. The lily was a lovely flower of crimson edged with gold that grew on a bright green bush that tempted any grazing animal that did not know them.

"Where are the herd boys Bring those bloody mupba here." He stopped beside the twisted carcass of Dark Moon, a trained wheeler like this was worth 50 pounds. It was not the only dead ox, eight others were down and as many more were sickening.

Isazi and the other drivers dragged in the herders. They were terrified children, the eldest on the verge of puberty, the youngest ten years old, their immature groins covered only by a scrap of mutsha cloth, their little round buttocks naked.

"Don't you know what a flame lily is?" Ralph shouted at them.

"It's your job to watch for poison plants and keep the oxen off them.

I'm going to thrash the skin off your black backsides to teach you."

"We saw no lilies," the eldest boy declared stoutly, and Ralph rounded on him.

"You cocky little bastard." In Ralph's hand was a sjambok of hippo hide. It was almost five foot long, thicker than a man's thumb at the butt and tapering to whip cord at the tip. It had been cured to the lovely amber colour of a meerschaum pipe.

"I'll teach you to look to the oxen, instead of sleeping under the nearest tree." Ralph swung the lash around the back of the child's legs. It hissed like a puff-adder, and the boy screamed at the cut of it. Ralph seized his wrist, and held him up for a dozen more strokes across the legs and buttocks. Then he let him go and grabbed the next mujiba. The child danced to the tune of the sjambok, howling at each cut.

"All right." Ralph was satisfied at last. "Get the healthy animals into the span." There were only sufficient oxen left to make up three teams. Ralph was forced to abandon half of the wagons, with their loads of salted buffalo hides, and they trekked on southwards as the sun came up over the horizon.

Within an hour another ox had fallen in the traces, with its nose twisted back against its side. They cut it loose and left it lying beside the track. Half a mile further two more bullocks went down.

Then they began dropping so regularly that by noon Ralph was forced to abandon two more wagons, and the last one rolled on with a depleted span dragging it. Long ago Ralph's rage had given way to bewilderment.

It was clear that this was no ordinary case of veld poisoning. None of his drivers had seen anything to equal it, and there was not even a precedent in the whole vast body of African folklore.

"It is a tagathi," Isazi gave his opinion. He had seemed to shrink with grief for his beloved bullocks, so now he was a mournful little black gnome of a man. "This is a terrible witchcraft." "By God, Harry," Ralph led his new brother-in-law out of earshot of the women.

"We'll be lucky to get even the one wagon home. There are a few bad river drifts to cross yet. We had better ride ahead and try to pick an easier crossing on the Lupane river." The river was only a few miles ahead, they could already make out the dark green of the forest along its course. Ralph and Harry rode side by side, both of them worried and anxious.

"Five wagons lying out here," Ralph muttered moodily. "At three hundred pounds each, to say nothing of the cattle I've lost-" He broke off and sat up very straight in the saddle.

They had come out onto another open glade beside the river, and Ralph was staring across it at the three huge dappled giraffe. With the stilt legs of herons and the long graceful necks of swans, they were the strangest looking of all Africa's mammals. Their huge eyes were soft and sorrowful, their heads, strangely ugly-beautiful, were topped not by true horns but by outgrowths of bone covered with skin and hair. Their gait had the same deliberate slow motion of a chameleon, and yet a big bull would weigh a ton and stand eighteen feet tall. They were mute, no extremity of pain or passion could induce a whisper of sound from their swanlike throats. Their heart was large as a drum to pump as high as that head, and the arteries of the neck were fitted with valves to prevent the brain exploding under the pressure when the giraffe stooped, splay-legged, to drink.

These three animals were moving in single file across the vlei.

The old stink-bull leading them was almost black with age, the cow that followed was splotched with reddish fawn, and the half-grown calf was a lovely soft beige.

The calf was dancing. Ralph had never seen anything like it. It was swaying, and turning in slow and elegant pirouettes, the neck twisting and untwisting, swinging first to one side then to the other.

Every few paces the mother turned back anxiously to watch its offspring, and then torn between duty and maternal love, swung again to follow the old bull. At last, quite slowly, with a kind of weary grace, the calf slumped to the grassy earth, and lay in a tangle of long limbs. The mother hovered for a minute or two, and then in the way of the wilderness, deserted the weak and went on after her mate.

Ralph and Harry rode up, slowly, almost reluctantly, to where the calf lay. Only when they reached it were they aware of the fatal mucous discharge from jaws and nostrils, and the diarrhoea painting the dappled hind-quarters. They stared at the corpse in disbelief, until suddenly Harry wrinkled his nose and sniffed.

"That smell, the same as the oxen-" he started, and suddenly realization dawned upon him. "A murrain," he whispered. "By the sweet name of the Virgin, Harry, it's some kind of plague. It is wiping out everything, game and oxen." Under his deep tan, Ralph had turned a muddy colour. "Two hundred wagons, Harry," he whispered, "almost four thousand bullocks. If this thing goes on spreading, I'm going to lose them all." He reeled in the saddle so that he had to clutch at the pommel for his balance. "I'll be finished. Wiped out all of it."

His voice trembled with self-pity, and then a moment later he shook himself like a wet span iO sloughing off despair, and colour rushed back into his darkly handsome face.

"No, I'm not," he said fiercely. "I'm not finished yet, not without a fight anyway." And he whirled to face Harry. "You'll have to bring the women back to Bulawayo alone," he ordered. "I'm taking the four best horses." "Where are you going?" Harry asked. "Kimberley."

"What for?" But Ralph had pivoted his horse like a polo pony, and was lying along its neck as he raced back towards the single wagon that had just come out of the forest behind them. Even as he reached it, one of the lead oxen collapsed and lay convulsed in the traces.

Isazi did not go to the kraal the following dawn. He was afraid of what he would find. Bazo went in his place.

They were all dead. Every single bullock. They were already stiff and cold as statues, locked in that dreadful final convulsion.

Bazo shivered, and pulled his monkeys king cloak more closely around his shoulders. It was not the dawn chill, but the icy finger of superstitious awe that had touched him.

"When the cattle lie with their heads twisted to touch their flank, and cannot rise-" he repeated aloud the exact, words of the Umlimo, and his dread was carried away by the jubilant rush of his warlike spirits. "It is happening, just as it was prophesied." Never before had the Chosen One's words been so unequivocal. He should have seen it immediately, but the whirlwind of events had confused him so that it was only now that the true significance of this fatal plague had come upon him. Now he wanted to leave the laager, and run southwards, day and night, without stopping, until he reached that secret cavern in the sacred hills.

He wanted to stand "before the assembled indunas and tell them.

"You who doubted, believe now the words of the Umlimo. You with milk and beer in your bellies, put a stone in their place." He wanted to go from mine to farm to the new villages the white men were building where his comrades now laboured with pick and shovel instead of the silver blade, wearing the ragged cast-offs of their masters rather than the plumes and kilts of the regiment.

He wanted to ask them, "Do you remember the war song of the 1zimvukuzane Ezembintaba, the Moles-that-burrow under-a-mountain? Come, you diggers of the other men's dirt, come rehearse the war song of the Moles with me." But it was not yet full term, there was the third and final act of the Umlimo's prophecy to unfold, and until then Bazo, like his old comrades, must play the white man's servant. With an effort, he masked his savage joy, withdrawing behind the inscrutable face of Africa. Bazo left the kraal of dead bullocks and went to the remaining wagon. The white women and the child were asleep within the body of the vehicle, and Harry Mellow was lying wrapped in his blanket under the chassis where the dew could not wet him.

Henshaw had deserted them late the previous afternoon, before they had even reached the bank of the Lupani river. He had -chosen four horses, the swiftest and strongest. He had charged Bazo most strictly with the task of leading the little party back to Bulawayo on foot, then he had kissed his wife and son, shaken hands briefly with Harry Mellow, and galloped away southwards towards the drift on the Lupani, leading the three spare horses on a long rein and riding like a man chased by wild dogs.

Now Bazo stooped beside the wagon and spoke slowly and clearly to the blanket-wrapped figure beneath it. Though Harry Mellow's grasp of Sindebele improved each day, it was still equivalent to that of a five-year-old. and Bazo had to be sure he understood.

"The last of the oxen is dead. One horse was killed by the buffalo, and Henshaw has taken four." Harry Mellow sat up quickly and made the decision. "That leaves one mount each for the women, and Jon-Jon can ride up behind one of them. The rest of us will walk. How long back to Bulawayo, Bazo?" Bazo shrugged eloquently. "If we were an impi, fast and fit, five days. But at the pace of a white man in boots.--" They looked like refugees, each servant carrying bundles of only the most essential stores upon his head, and strung out in a long straggling line behind the two horses. The women were hampered by their long skirts whenever they walked to rest the horses, and Bazo could not contain himself to this pace. He ranged far ahead of the others and once he was out of sight and well beyond earshot, he pranced and stamped, stabbing with an imaginary assegai at a non-existent adversary, and accompanying the giya, the challenge dance, with the fighting chant of his old impi.

"Like a mole in the earth's gut Bazo found the secret way-" The first verse of the song commemorated the impi's assault on the mountain stronghold of Pemba, the wizard, when so long ago Bazo, had climbed the subterranean passage to the top of the cliff. It was as a reward for this feat that Lobengula had promoted Bazo to and una had given him the head ring and allowed him to "go in to the women and choose Tanase as his wife.

Dancing alone in the forest, Bazo sang the other verses. Each of them had been composed after a famous victory, all except the last.

That verse was the only one that had never been sung by the full regiment in battle array. It was the verse for the last charge of the Moles, when with Bazo at their head, they had run onto the laager on the banks of the Shangani river. Bazo had composed it himself, as he lay in the cave of the Matopos, near unto death with the mortification of the bullet wounds in his body.

"Why do you weep, widows of Shangani, When the three-legged guns laugh so loudly?

Why do you weep, little sons of the Moles, When your fathers did the king's bidding?" Now suddenly there was another verse. It came into Bazo's head complete and perfect, as though it had been sung ten thousand times before.

"The Moles are beneath the earth, "Are they dead?" asked the daughters of Mashobane. Listen, pretty maids, do you not hear Something stirring, in the darkness?" And Bazo, the Axe, shouted it to the ms asa trees in their soft mantles of red leaves, and the trees bowed slightly to the east wind, as though they, too, were listening.

Ralph Ballantyne stopped at King's Lynn. He threw the reins to Jan Cheroot, the old Hottentot hunter.

R'Water them, old man, and fill the grain bags for me. I will be away again in an hour." Then he ran up onto the veranda of the sprawling thatched homestead, and his stepmother came out to meet him, her consternation turning to delight, when she recognized him.

"Oh Ralph, you startled me "Where is my father?" Ralph demanded, as he kissed her cheek, and Louise's expression changed to match the gravity of his.

"In the north section, they are branding the calves but what is it, Ralph? I haven't seen you like this." He ignored the question.

"The north section, that's six hours" ride. I cannot spare the time to go to him." "It's serious," she decided. "Don't torture me, Ralph."

"I'm sorry." He laid his hand on her arm. "There is some dreadful murrain sweeping down out of the north. It hit my cattle on the Gwaai river, and we lost them all, over one hundred head in twelve hours."

Louise stared at him. "Perhaps-" she whispered, but he cut across her brusquely.

"It's killing everything, giraffe and buffalo and oxen, only the horses have not been touched yet. But, by God, Louise, I saw buffalo lying dead and stinking on each side of the track as I rode southwards yesterday. Animals that had been strong and healthy the day before."

"What must we do, Ralph?" "Sell," he answered. "Sell all the cattle at any price, before it reaches us." He turned and shouted to Jan Cheroot.

"Bring the notebook from my saddlebag." While he scribbled a note for his father, Louise asked, "When did you last eat?" "I cannot remember."

He ate the slabs of cold venison and raw onion and strong cheese on slices of stone-ground bread, and washed it down with a jug of beer, while he gave Jan Cheroot his instructions. "Speak to nobody else but my father. Tell nobody else of this thing. Go swiftly, Jan Cheroot."

But Ralph was up in the saddle and away before the little Hottentot was ready to ride.

Ralph circled wide of the town of Bulawayo, to avoid meeting an acquaintance and to reach the telegraph line at a lonely place, well away from the main road. Ralph's own construction gangs had laid the telegraph line, so he knew every mile of it, every vulnerable point and how most effectively to cut off Bulawayo and Matabeleland from Kimberley and the rest of the world.

He tethered his horses at the foot of one of the telegraph poles and shinned up it to the cluster of porcelain insulators and the gleaming copper wires. He used a magnus hitch on a leather thong to hold the ends of the wire from falling to earth, and then cut between the knots. The wire parted with a singing twang, but the thong held, and when he climbed down to the horses and looked up, he knew it would need a skilled linesman to detect the break.

He flung himself back into the saddle, and booted the horse into a gallop. At noon he intersected the road and turned southwards along it. He changed horses every hour, and rode until it was too dark to see the tracks. Then he knee-haltered the horses, and slept like a dead man on the hard ground. Before dawn, he ate a hunk of cheese and a slice of the rough bread Louise had put into his saddlebag, and was away again with the first softening of the eastern sky.

At midmorning, he turned out of the track, and found the telegraph line where it ran behind a flat-topped kopje. He knew the Company linesmen hunting for the first break in the line would be getting close to it by now, and there may be somebody in the telegraph office in Bulawayo anxious to send a report to Mr. Rhodes about the terrible plague that was ravaging the herds.

Ralph cut the line in two places and went on. In the late afternoon, one of his horses broke down. It had been ridden too hard, and he turned it loose beside the road. If a lion did not get it, then perhaps one of his drivers would recognize the brand.

The next day, fifty miles from the Shashi river, he met one of his own convoys coming up from the south. There were twenty-six wagons in the charge of a white overseer. Ralph stopped only long enough to commandeer the man's horses, leave his own exhausted animals with him, and then he rode on. He cut the telegraph lines twice more, once on each side of the Shashi river, before he reached the railhead.

He came upon his surveyer first, a red-haired Scot. With a gang of blacks, they were working five miles ahead of the main crews, and cutting the lines for the rails. Ralph did not even dismount.

"Did you get the telegraph I sent you from Bulawayo, Mac?" he demanded without wasting time on greetings.

"No, Mr. Ballantyne." The Scot shook his dusty curls. "Not a word from the north in five days they say the lines are down, longest break I've heard of." "Damn it to hell," Ralph swore furiously, to cover his relief. "I wanted you to hold a truck for me." "If you hurry, Mr. Ballantyne, sir, there is an empty string of trucks going back today." Five miles further on Ralph reached the railhead. It was crossing a wide flat plain dotted with thorn scrub. The boil of activity seemed incongruous in this bleak, desolate land on the edge of the Kalahari Desert. A green locomotive buffed columns of silver steam high into the empty sky, shunting the string of flat-topped bogies to the end of the glistening silver rails. Teams of singing black men, dressed only in loincloths, but armed with crowbars, levered the steel rails over the side of the trucks and as they fell in a cloud of pale dust, another team ran forward to lift and set the tracks onto the teak sleepers.

The foremen levelled them with cast4 on wedges and the hammer boy followed them, driving in the steel spikes with ringing blows. Half a mile back was the construction headquarters. A square sweat box of wood and corrugated iron that could be moved up each day. The chief engineer was in his shirtsleeves, sweating over a desk made of condensed-milk cases nailed together.

"What is your mileage?" Ralph demanded from the door of the shack.

"Mr. Ballantyne, sir," the engineer jumped up. He was an inch taller than Ralph, bull-necked and with thick hairy forearms, but he was afraid of Ralph. You could see it in his eyes. It gave Ralph a flicker of satisfaction, he was not trying to be the most popular man in Africa. There was no prize for that. "We didn't expect you, not until the end of the month." "I know. What's your mileage?" "We have had a few snags, sir." "By God, man, do I have to kick it out of you?"

"Since the first of the month," the engineer hesitated. He had proved to himself that there was no profit in lying to Ralph Ballantyne.

"Sixteen miles." Ralph crossed to the survey map, and checked the figures. He had noted the beacon numbers of the railhead as he passed.

"Fifteen miles and six hundred yards, isn't sixteen," he said.

"No, sir. Almost sixteen." "Are you satisfied with that?" "No, sir." "Nor am I." That was enough, Ralph told himself, any more would decrease the man's usefulness, and there wasn't a better man to replace him, not between here and the Orange river.

"Did you get my telegraph from Bulawayo?" "No, Mr. Ballantyne. The lines have been down for days." "The line to Kimberley?" "That is open." "Good. Get your operator to send this." Ralph stooped over the message pad and scribbled quickly.

"For Aaron Fagan, attorney at law, De Beers Street, Kimberley.

Arriving early tomorrow 6th. Arrange urgent noon meeting with Rough Rider from Rholand." Rough Rider was the private code for Roelof Zeederberg, Ralph's chief rival in the transport business.

Zeederberg's express coaches plied from Delagoa to Algoa Bay, from the gold fields of Pilgrims Rest to Witwatersrand, to the railhead at Kimberley.

While his telegraph operator tapped it out on the brass and teak instrument, Ralph turned back to his engineer.

"All right, what were the snags that held you up, and how can we beat them?" "The worst is the bottle-neck at Kimberley shunting, yards."

For an hour they worked, and at the end of it the locomotive whistled outside the shack. They went out, still arguing and planning.

Ralph tossed his saddlebag and blanket-roll onto the first flat car, and held the train for ten minutes longer while he arranged the final details with his engineer.

"From now on you will get your hardware faster than you can nail it down," he promised grimly, as he vaulted up onto the bogie and waved at the driver.

The whistle sent a jet of steam spurting into the dry desert air, and the locomotive wheels spun and then gripped with a jolt, and the long string of empty cars began to trundle southwards, building up speed rapidly. Ralph found a corner of the truck out of the wind, and rolled into his blanket. Eight days" ride from the Lupani river to the railhead. It had to be some sort of record.

"But there is no prize for that either," he grinned wearily, pulled his hat over his eyes and settled down to listen to the song of the wheels over the ties. "We have got to hurry. We have got to hurry." And then just before he fell asleep, the song changed. "The cattle are dying. The cattle are dead," sang the wheels over and over again, but even that could not keep him awake one second longer.

They pulled into the shunting-yards at Kimberley, sixteen hours later. It was just past four in the morning.

Ralph jumped down off the bogie as the locomotive slowed for the points, and with his saddlebags slung over his shoulder, trudged up De Beers Street. There was a light on in the telegraph office and Ralph beat on the wooden hatch until the night operator peered out at him like a barn owl from its nest.

"I want to send an urgent telegraph to Bulawayo." "Sorry, mate, the line is down." "When will it be open again?" "God knows, it's been out for six days already." Ralph was still grinning as he swaggered into the lobby of Diamond Lil's Hotel.

The night clerk was new. He did not recognize Ralph. He saw a tall lean sunburned man, whose stained and dusty clothing hung loosely on him. That wild ride had burned off all Ralph's excess flesh. He had not shaved since leaving the Lupani, and his boots were scuffed almost through the uppers by the brushing of the thorn scrub as he had ridden through it. Locomotive soot had darkened his face and reddened his eyes, and the clerk recognized a drifter when he saw one.

"I'm sorry, sir," he said. "The hotel is full." "Who is in the Blue Diamond suite? "Ralph asked affably. "Sir Randolph Charles," the clerk's voice was filled with reverence.

"Get him out, "said Ralph.

"I beg your pardon?" the clerk reared back, and his expression was frosty. Ralph reached across the desk, and took him by his watered silk cravat, and drew him closer.

"Get him out of my suite," Ralph repeated, his lips an inch from the man's ear. "Quickly!" It was at that moment that the day clerk came into the reception office.

"Mr. Ballantyne," he cried with a mixture of alarm and feigned pleasure as he rushed to the rescue of his colleague. "Your permanent suite will be ready in a minute." Then he hissed in the night clerk's other ear. "Clear that suite immediately, or he'll do it for you." The Blue Diamond had one of the very few bathrooms in Kimberley with laid-on hot water. Two black servants stoked the boiler outside the window to keep steam whistling from the valve while Ralph lay chin-deep and adjusted a trickle of scalding water with his big toe on the tap.

At the same time he shaved his jaws with a straight razor, working by touch and scorning the mirror. The day clerk had supervised the removal of Ralph's steamer trunk from the box-room, and hovered over the valets as they pressed the suits and tried to improve upon the perfect shine of the boots that they unpacked from the trunk.

At five minutes before noon, Ralph, smelling of brilliantine and eau de Cologne, marched into Aaron Fagan's office. Aaron was a thin stooped man, with threadbare hair brushed straight back from a deep intellectual forehead. His nose was beaked, his mouth full and sensitive and his sloe-eyes aware and bright.

He played a cruel game of kalabriasz, giving no quarter, and yet there was a compassionate streak in his nature which Ralph valued as highly as any of his other qualities. If he had known what Ralph intended at this moment, he would have tried to dissuade him, but after having put the case against it, he would then have gone ahead and drawn up a contract as mercilessly as he would have elevated his jasz and men el for a winning coup at kalabriasz.

Ralph didn't have time to argue ethics with him now, so as they embraced and patted each other's shoulder blades affectionately, he forestalled the question by asking. "Are they here?" and then pushing open the door to the inner office.

Roelof and Doel Zeederberg did not rise as he entered and neither they nor Ralph made any attempt to shake hands. They had clashed viciously, but indecisively, on too many occasions.

"So, Ballantyne, you want to waste our time again?" Roelof's accent was still thick with his Swedish ancestry, but under his pale ginger brows, his eyes were quick with interest.

"My dear Roelof," Ralph protested, "I would never do that. All I want is that we should resolve this tariff on the new Matabeleland route before we put each other out of business." "JaP Doel agreed sarcastically. "That's a good thought, like my mother-in-law should love me." "We are willing to listen, for a few minutes anyway." Roelofs tone was casual, but his interest was quicker still. "One of us should buy the other out, and set his own tarifts," said Ralph blandly, and the brothers glanced at each other involuntarily. Roelof made a fuss of relighting his dead cigar to hide his astonishment.