The Angels Weep

Ralph backed away, and then flung himself out of the tent.

"Jonathan," he screamed. "Jon-Jon! Where are you?" He ran through the camp like a madman. "Jonathan! Please, Jonathan!" When he found no living thing, he stumbled into the forest up onto the slope of the kopie.

"Jonathan! It's Daddy. Where are you, my darling?" Dimly in his anguish he realized that his cries might bring the amadoda, as the bleat of the goat brings the leopard, and suddenly he wanted that to happen with all his soul.

"Come!" he yelled into the silent forest. "Come on. Come and find me also!" And he stopped to fire the Winchester into the air, and listen to the echoes go bounding away down the valley.

At last he could run and scream no more, and he came up panting against the hole of one of the forest trees. "Jonathan," he croaked.

"Where are you, my baby?" Slowly he turned down and went down the hill.

He moved like a very old man.

At the edge of the camp, he stopped and peered shortsightedly at something that lay in the grass, then he stopped and picked it up. He turned it over and over in his hands, and then balled it into his fist.

His knuckles turned white with the strength of his grip. What he held was a headband of softly tanned mole-skin.

Still holding the scrap of fur in his hand, he went into the camp to prepare his dead for burial.

Robyn St. John woke to the soft scratching on the shutter of her bedroom, and she raised herself on one elbow.

"Who is it? "she called. "It is me, Nomusa." "Juba, my little Dove, I did not expect you!" Robyn slipped out of bed and crossed to the window. When she opened the shutter, the night was opalescent with moonlight, and Juba was huddled below the sill.

"You are so cold." Robyn took her arm. "You'll catch your death.

Come inside immediately. I'll fetch a blanket." "Nomusa, wait. "Juba caught her wrist. "I must go." "But you have only just arrived."

"Nobody must know that I was here, please tell nobody, Nomusa." "What is it? You are shaking-" "Listen, Nomusa. I could not leave you you are my mother and sister and friend, I could not leave you." "Juba-" "Do not speak. Listen for a minute, "Juba pleaded. "I have so little time." It was only then that Robyn realized that it was not the chill of night that shook Juba's vast frame. She was racked with sobs of fear and of dread.

"You must go, Nomusa. You and Elizabeth and the baby. Take nothing with you, leave this very minute. Go into Bulawayo, perhaps -you will be safe there. It is your best chance." "I don't understand you, Juba. What nonsense is this?" "They are coming Nomusa. They are coming. Please hurry.

Then she was gone. She moved swiftly and silently for such a big woman, and she seemed to melt into the moon shadows under the spathodea trees. By the time Robyn had found her shawl and run down the veranda, there was no sign of her.

Robyn hurried down towards the hospital bungalows, stumbling once on the verge of the path, calling with increasing exasperation.

"Juba, come back here! Do you hear me? I won't stand any more of this nonsense!" She stopped at the church, uncertain which path to take.

"Juba! Where are you?" The silence was broken only by the yipping of a jackal up on the hillside above the Mission. It" was answered by another on the peak of the pass where the road to Bulawayo crossed the hills.

"Juba!" The watch-fire by the hospital bungalow had burned out.

She crossed to it, and threw on to it a log from the woodpile. The silence was unnatural. The log caught and flared. In its light she climbed the steps of the nearest bungalow.

The sleeping-mats of the patients were in two rows, facing each other down each wall, but they were deserted. Even the most desperately ill had gone. They must have been carried away, for some of them had been past walking.

Robyn hugged the shawl around her shoulders. "Poor ignorant heathen," she said aloud. "Another witchcraft scare, they will run from their own shadows.". She turned sorrowfully away, and walked through the darkness back towards the house. There was a light burning in Elizabeth's room, and as Robyn climbed the steps of the veranda, the door opened.

"Mama! Is that you?" "What are you doing, Elizabeth?" "I thought I heard voices." Robyn hesitated, she did not want to alarm Elizabeth, but then she was a sensible child, and unlikely to go into hysteria over a bit of Matabele superstition.

"Juba was here. There must be another witchcraft scare. She ran off again." "What did she say?" "Oh, just that we should go in to Bulawayo to escape some sort of danger." Elizabeth came out onto the veranda in her nightdress, carrying the candle.

"Juba is a Christian, she doesn't dabble in witchcraft."

Elizabeth's tone was concerned. "What else did she say?" "Just that," Robyn yawned. "I'm going back to bed." She started along the veranda, and then stopped. "Oh, the others have all run off. The hospital is empty. It's most annoying." "Mama, I think we should do as Juba says."

"What do you mean by that?" "I think we should go in to Bulawayo immediately." "Elizabeth, I thought better of you." "I have an awful feeling. I think we should go. Perhaps there is real danger." "This is my home. Your father and I built it with our own hands. There is no power on earth that will force me to leave it," Robyn said firmly.

"Now go back to bed. With no help, we are going to have a busy day tomorrow." They squatted in long silent ranks in the long grass below the crest of the hills. Gandang moved quietly down the ranks, stopping occasionally to exchange a word with an old comrade in arms. To revive a memory of another waiting before a battle of long ago.

It was strange to sit upon the bare earth during the waiting time.

In the old days they would have sat on their shields, the long dappled shields of iron-hard oxhide, squatting upon them not for comfort but to hide their distinctive shape from a watchful enemy until the moment came to strike terror into his belly and steel into his heart, squatting upon them also to prevent some young buck in the throes of the divine madness from prematurely drumming upon the rawhide with his assegai and giving warning of the waiting impi.

It was strange also not to be decked out in the full regimentals of the Inyati impi, the plumes and furs and tassels of cow-tails, the war rattles at ankle and wrist, the tall headdress that turned a man into a giant. They were dressed like neophytes, like un blooded boys, with only their kilts about their waists, but the scars upon their dark bodies and the fire in their eyes gave the lie to that impression.

Gandang felt himself choking with a pride that he once thought he would never experience again. He loved them, he loved their fierceness and their valour, and though his face was quiet and expressionless, the love shone through in his eyes.

They picked it up and gave it back to him a hundred times.

"Babo!" they called him in their soft deep voices. "Father, we thought we would never fight at your shoulder again," they said. "Father, those of your sons who die today will be forever young." Across the neck of the hills a jackal wailed mournfully and was answered from close at hand. The impi was in position, lying across the Khami hills like a coiled mamba, waiting and watchful and ready.

There was a glow in the sky now. The false dawn, that would be followed by the deeper darkness before the true dawn. The deep darkness that the amadoda loved and used so well.

They stirred quietly, and grounded the shaft of assegai between their heels, ready for the order. "Up my children. It is the time of the spears." This time the order did not come, and the true dawn flushed the sky with blood. In its light the amadoda looked at each other.

One of the senior warriors, who had won Gandang's respect on fifty battlefields, spoke for all of them. He went to where Gandang sat alone to one side of the impi.

"Babo, your children are confused. Tell us why we wait." "Old friend, are your spears so thirsty for the blood of women and babes, that they cannot wait for richer fare?" "We can wait as long as you command it, Babo. But it is hard." "Old friend, I am baiting for a leopard with a tender goat," Gandang told him, and let his chin sink back on the great muscles of his chest.

The sun pushed up and gilded the tree-tops along the hills, and still Gandang did not move, and the silent ranks waited behind him in the grass.

A young warrior whispered to another. "Already the storm has begun. Everywhere else our brethren are busy. They will mock us when they hear how we sat on the hilltop--" One of the older men hissed a rebuke at him, and the young warrior fell silent, but further down the ranks another youngster shifted on his haunches and his assegai tapped against that of his neighbour. Gandang did not raise his head.

Then from the hilltop a wild francolin called. Qwaali! Qwaah!"

The sharp penetrating cry was a characteristic sound of the veld, only a sharp ear would have detected anything strange about this one.

Gandang rose to his feet. The leopard comes," he said quietly, and stalked up to the vantage point from which he could look down the full length of road that led to the town of Bulawayo. The sentry who had sounded the call of the wild pheasant pointed wordlessly with the hilt of his assegai.

There was an open coach and a troop of horsemen upon the road.

Gandang counted them, eleven riding hard, coming directly out towards the Khami hills. The figure that led them was unmistakable, even at this distance. The height in the saddle, the alert set of head, the long stirrups.

"Haul One Bright-Eye!" Gandang greeted him softly. "I have waited many long moons for you." eneral Mungo St. John had been awakened in the middle of the night. In his nightshirt he had Glistened to the hysterical outpourings of a coloured servant who had escaped from the trading-store on the Ten Mile Drift. It was a wild tale of slaughter and burning, and the man's breath smelled of good Cape brandy. "He's drunk," said Mungo St. John flatly. "Take him away, and give him a good thrashing." The first white man got into town three hours before dawn. He had been stabbed through the thigh and his left arm was broken in two places by blows from a knobkerrie. He was clinging to his horse's neck with his good arm.

"The Matabele are outV he screamed. "They are burning the farms-" and he slid out of the saddle in a dead faint.

By first light there were fifty wagons formed into a laager in the market square, without oxen to draw them, they had been manhandled into position. All the town's women and children had been brought into the laager and put to work making bandages, reloading ammunition, and baking hard bread against a siege. The few able-bodied men that Doctor Jameson had not taken with him into captivity in the Transvaal were swiftly formed into troops, and horses and rifles were found for those who lacked them.

In the midst of the bustle and confusion, Mungo St. John had commandeered a fast open coach with a coloured driver, picked out the most likely and best mounted troop of horsemen, and using his authority as acting Administrator given them the order.

"Follow me! Now he reined in on the crest of the hills above Khami Mission, at the point where the track was narrowest and the tall yellow grass and the forest hemmed it in like a wall on each side, and he shaded his single eye.

"Thank GodP he whispered. The thatched roofs of the Mission that he expected to see billowing with smoke and flame stood serenely in the quiet green valley beyond.

The horses were sweating and blowing from the pull up the hills, and the coach had lagged two hundred paces behind Mungo. As soon as it came up, without giving a moment's rest to the mules, Mungo shouted, "Troop, forwardV and spurred away down the track, with his troopers clattering behind him.

Robyn St. John came out of the thatched rondavel that was her laboratory, and as soon as she recognized the man that led the column, she placed her hands upon her boyish hips and lifted her chin angrily.

"What is the meaning of this intrusion, sir?" she demanded.

"Madam, the Matabele tribe is in full rebellion. They are murdering women and children, burning the homesteads." Robyn took a step backwards protectively, for Robert had come pale-faced from the clinic to hang onto her skirts.

"I have come to take you and your children to safety." "The Matabele are my friends," said Robyn. "I have nothing to fear from them. This is my home. I do not intend leaving it." "I do not have time to indulge your predilection for obstructive disputation, madam," he said grimly, and stood in the stirrups.

"Elizabeth!" he bellowed, and she came onto the veranda of the homestead. "The Matabele are in revolt. We are all in mortal danger.

You have two minutes to gather what personal items your family may need-" "Take no heed Of him, Elizabeth," Robyn shouted angrily. "We are staying here." Before she realized his intention, Mungo had pricked his horse with a spur, backing it up towards the laboratory doorway, then he stooped from the saddle and caught Robyn about the waist. He swung her up over the pommel of the saddle, with her backside in the air and her skirts around her hips. She kicked and yelled with outrage, but he walked his horse alongside the open coach and with a heave of his shoulder dumped her in another flurry of petticoats onto the back seat.

"If you do not stay there, madam, I will not hesitate to have you bound. It will be most undignified." "I will never forgive you for this!" she panted through white lips, but she could see he meant the threat seriously. "Robert," Mungo St. John -ordered his son, "go to your mother. Immediately!" The child scampered to the coach and climbed into it. "Elizabeth!" Mungo St. John bellowed again. "Hurry, girl. All our lives depend on haste now." Elizabeth ran out onto the veranda with a bundle over her shoulder.

"Good girl!" Mungo St. John smiled at her. So pretty and brave and level-headed, she had always been one of his favourites. He jumped down to boost her into the coach, and then vaulted back into the saddle.

"Troop, Walk. March! Trod" he ordered, and they wheeled out of the yard.

The coach was in the rear of the column. The ten troopers in double ranks ahead of it, and five lengths out in front of them again rode Mungo St. John. Despite herself, Elizabeth was thrilled and deliciously fearful. It was all so different from the quiet monotonous round of life at Khami Mission, the armed men, the urgency and tension in each of them, the dark threat of the unknown surrounding them, the romance of the faithful husband riding through the valley of the shadow of death to save his beloved woman. How noble and dashing he looked at the head of the column, how easily he sat his horse, and when he turned to look back at the coach, how reckless was his smile there was only one other man in all the world to match him. If only it had been Ralph Ballantyne come to save her alone! The thought was sinful, and she put it away quickly, and to distract herself looked back down the hill.

"Oh, Mama!" she cried, jumping up in the swaying coach, pointing wildly. "Look!" The Mission was burning. The thatch of the church stood in a tall beacon of leaping flame. Smoke was curling out of the homestead, and as they stared in horror, they saw tiny dark human figures running down the pathway under the spathodea trees, carrying torches of dry, grass. One of them stopped to hurl his torch onto the roof of the clinic.

"My books," whispered Robyn. "All my papers. My life's work."

"Don't look, Mama." Elizabeth sank down beside her on the seat, and they clung to each other like lost children.

The little column reached the crest of the pass, without a pause the weary horses plunged down the far side and the Matabele came simultaneously from both sides of the track. They rose out of the grass in two black waves, and the humming roar of their war chant swelled like the sound of an avalanche gathering momentum down a steep mountainside.

The troopers had been riding with their carbines cocked, the butts resting on their right thighs, but so swift was the rush of Matabele that only a single volley rippled down the column. It made no impression upon the black wave of humanity, and then as the horses reared and whinnied with terror, the troopers were dragged from their saddles, and stabbed through and through, ten and twenty times. The warriors were mad with blood lust. They swarmed over the bodies, snarling and howling, like the hounds tearing the carcass of the fox.

A huge sweat-shining warrior seized the coloured driver by the leg, and plucked him off the driver's seat of the coach, and while he was still in the air another warrior transfixed him on the broad silver blade of an assegai.

Only Mungo St. John, five lengths ahead of the column, broke clear.

He had taken a single assegai-thrust through the side, and the blood streamed down one leg of his breeches, down his riding-boot and dripped from the heel.

He still sat high in the saddle, and he looked back over his shoulder. He looked over the heads of the Matabele straight into Robyn's eyes. It was only for an instant, and then he had wheeled his horse, and he drove back into the mass of black warriors, riding for the coach. He fired his service pistol into the face of a warrior who leaped to catch his horse's head, but from the other side another Matabele stabbed upwards over handed deeply into his armpit. Mungo St. John grunted and spurred onwards.

"I'm here!" he shouted to Robyn. "Don't worry, my darling.-" and a warrior stabbed him through the belly. He doubled over. His horse went down, sharp steel driven through its heart, and it seemed that it was all over, but miraculously Mungo St. John rose to his feet and stood foursquare with the pistol in his hand. His eye-patch had been torn from his head, and the empty eye-socket glared so demoniac ally that for a moment the warriors fell back and he stood in their midst with the terrible spear wounds in his chest and belly running red.

Gandang stepped out of the press, and a silence fell upon them all. The two men stood face to face for a long second, Mungo tried to lift the pistol, but his strength failed him, and then Gandang drove the silver blade through the centre of Mungo St. John's chest and it shot a hand's span out of his back.

Gandang stood over the body and placed one foot upon Mungo St. John's chest and pulled the blade free. It made a sucking sound like a boot in thick mud. It was the only sound, and after it was silence.

The silence was even more terrible than the war chant and the screams of dying men.

The dense press of black bodies hemmed in the coach, and hid the corpses of the dead troopers. The amadoda formed a ring around where Mungo St. John lay upon his back, his features still twisted into a grimace of rage and agony. His one eye glaring at the enemy he could no longer see.

One at a time the warriors lifted their heads and stared at the huddle of women and a child in the open body of the coach. The very air was charged with menace, their eyes were glazed with the killing madness, and blood still splattered their arms and chests and speckled their faces like a macabre war paint. The ranks swayed like prairie grass touched by a little breeze. In the rear a single voice began to hum, but before it could spread, Robyn St. John rose to her feet and from the height of the coach looked down upon them. The hum died out into silence.

Robyn reached forward and picked up the reins. The Matabele watched her and still not one of them moved. Robyn flicked the reins, and the mules started forward- at a walk.

Gandang, son of Mzilikazi, senior and una of the Matabele, stepped off the track, and behind him the ranks of his amadoda opened. The mules passed slowly down the lane between them, stepping daintily over the mutilated corpses of the troopers. Robyn stared straight ahead, holding the reins stiffly. just once as she drew level with where Mungo St. John lay, she glanced down at him, and then looked ahead again.

Slowly, the coach rolled on down the hill, and when Elizabeth looked back again, the road was deserted.

"They have gone, Mama," she whispered, and only then did she realize that Robyn was shaking with silent sobs. Elizabeth put her arm around her shoulders, and for a moment Robyn leaned against her.

"He was a terrible man, but, oh God forgive me, I loved him so, she whispered, and then she straightened up and urged the mules into a trot towards Bulawayo.

Ralph Ballantyne rode through the night, taking the difficult and direct path through, the hills rather than the broad wagon road. The spare horses were loaded with food and blankets that he had salvaged from the railhead camp. He led them at a walk over the rocky terrain, husbanding them for whatever efforts lay ahead of them.

He rode with his rifle across his lap, loaded and cocked. Every half hour or so, he halted his horse and fired three spaced rifle shots into the starry sky. Three shots, the universal recall signal. when the echoes had muttered and rumbled away down the hills, he listened carefully, twisting slowly in the saddle to cover every direction, and then he called, yelling his despair into the silences of the wilderness. "Jonathan! Jonathan!" Again he rode on slowly through the darkness, and when the dawn came he watered the horses at a stream and let them graze for a few hours, sitting on an ant-heap to guard them, munching biscuit and bully, and listening.

It was strange how many of the sounds of the bush could seem like the cries of a human child to someone who listened wishfully. The mournful "quay" of a grey laurie brought Ralph to his feet with his heart hammering, the screech of a meercat, even the wail of the wind in the treetops disturbed him.

In mid-morning he up-saddled and rode again. He knew that in daylight there was greater danger of running into a Matabele patrol, but the prospect had no terrors. He found himself welcoming it. Deep inside him was a cold dark area, a place that he had never visited before, and now as he rode on, he explored it and found there such hatred and anger as he had never believed was possible. Riding slowly through the lovely forests in the clean white sunshine, he discovered that he was a stranger to himself, until this day he had never known what he was, but now he was beginning to find out.

He reined in his horse on the crest of a high bare ridge, where watching Matabele eyes could have seen him from afar silhouetted against the blue, and deliberately he fired another three single shots.

When no file of running warriors came to the summons, his hatred and anger were stronger still.

An hour after noon, he climbed the ridge of the ancients where Zouga had killed the great elephant and looked down onto the Harkness Mine.

The buildings had been burned. On the far ridge the walls that Harry Mellow had built for Vicky were still standing, but the empty windows were like the eyes of a skull. The roof beams were stark and blackened, some of them collapsed beneath the weight of charred thatch.

The gardens were trampled, and the lawns were strewn with the debris of two young lives the brass bedstead with stuffing bursting out of the torn mattress, the chests of Vicky's dowry broken open and the contents scorched and scattered.

Further down the valley the mine store and office had been burned also. The stacks of blackened goods still smouldered, and there was the stink of burning rubber and leather on the air. There was another smell mingled with it, a smell like greasy pork cooking, the first time Ralph had smelled human flesh roasting, but instinctively he knew what it was, and he felt his stomach heave.

In the trees about the burned-out buildings roosted the hunch-backed vultures. There were hundreds of these disgusting birds, from the big black vultures with their bald red heads to the dirty brown birds with obscene woollen caps covering their long necks.

Amongst the vultures were the carrion storks, the raucous crows and the little wheeling black kites. It must be a rich banquet to attract such a gathering.

Ralph rode down off the crest and almost immediately found the first bodies. Matabele warriors, he saw with grim satisfaction, they had crawled away to die of their wounds. Harry Mellow had held out better than the construction gang at the railhead.

"That he should have taken a thousand of the black butchers with him," Ralph hoped aloud, and rode on cautiously with his rifle at the ready.

He dismounted -behind the ruins of the mine store and tethered the horses with a slippery hitch, ready for a quick run. Here there were more dead Matabele, lying amid their own broken and discarded weapons.

The ash was still hot, and three or four corpses lay within the shell of the store. They had been burned to unrecognizable black mounds, and the smell of pork was overpowering.

Holding his rifle at high port, Ralph stepped carefully through the ash and debris towards the corner of the building. The squawk and flap of the vultures and the scavengers covered any small sounds he might make, and he was ready to meet the sudden charge of warriors that might be lying in ambush for him. He steeled himself also to the discovery of the corpses of Harry and pretty blonde little Vicky.

Burying his own mutilated loved ones had not hardened him to the horror of what he knew he would find here.

He reached the corner of the building, removed his hat and carefully peeked around the wall. , There were two hundred yards of open ground between the burned-out store and the open mouth of the No. 1 adit shaft that Harry had driven into the side of the hill. The open ground was heaped with dead warriors. There were piles and skeins of them, drifts and windrows of them. Some were twisted into agonized sculptures of black limbs and some of them lay singly, as though resting, curled into the foetal position. Most of them had been ripped and gnawed by the birds and the jackals, but others were untouched.

This killing ground gave Ralph a bitter feeling of pleasure.

"Good for you, Harry my boy, "he whispered.

Ralph was about to step into the open, when his eardrums cracked with the brutal disruption of passing shot, so close that he felt his own hair flap against his forehead. He reeled back behind the shelter of the wall, shaking his head to clear the insect humming in his ears.

That bullet must have missed by an inch or less, good shooting for a Matabele sniper. They were notoriously poor marksmen.

He had been careless. The piles of dead warriors had distracted him, he had presumed that the impi had finished its bloody business and gone on, a stupid presumption.

He crouched low and ran back down the length of the burned building, sweeping his open flank with an eye sharpened by the hot rush of adrenalin through his veins. The Matabele loved the encircling movement. if they were out front, then they would soon be in his rear, up there amongst the trees.

He reached the horses, slipped the tether and led them over the hot ash into the shelter of the walls. From the saddlebag he took a fresh bandolier of ammunition and slung it over his other shoulder, crisscrossing his chest like a Mexican bandit, and muttering to himself.

"All right, you black bastards, let's burn some powder." One corner of the stone wall had collapsed where the unbaked Kimberley brick had not been able to withstand the heat. The opening was jagged, it would break the silhouette of his head and the rear wall would prevent back lighting. Carefully he peered out over the bloody ground.

They were well concealed, probably in the bush above the mine shaft.

Then with a start of surprise he realized that the mouth of the adit shaft had been barricaded, it was blocked with baulks of timber and what looked like sacks of maize.

They were in the mine shaft but that didn't make sense, he puzzled. Yet it was confirmed immediately. There was a vague shadowy movement beyond the barricade in the throat of the shaft, and another bullet sang off the lip of the wall under Ralph's nose, blinding him with brick dust.

He ducked down, and wiped his swimming eyes. Then he filled his lungs and bellowed.

"Harry! Harry Mellow!" There was silence, even the vultures and the jackals quieted by the shocking burst of gunfire.

"Harry it's me, Ralph." There was a faint answering shout, and Ralph jumped up, vaulted over the broken wall and ran towards the shaft. Harry Mellow was racing towards him, jumping over the piles of dead Matabele, a wide grin on his face. They met halfway, and embraced with the violence of relief, wordlessly pounding each other's backs, and then before he could speak, Ralph looked over the big American's shoulder.

Other figures had emerged from behind the rude barricade. Vicky dressed in men's breeches and shirt, with a rifle in her hand and coppery hair tangled around her shoulders. At her side Isazi, the diminutive Zulu driver, and another even smaller figure ran ahead of them both. The child ran with both arms pumping, and face screwed up.

Ralph caught him up and hugged him to his chest, pressing his haggard unshaven cheek against the boy's velvet skin.

"Jonathan," he croaked, and then his voice failed. The feel of the child's warm little body, and the milky puppy smell of his sweat was almost too painful to be borne.

"Daddy." jon jon pulled back his head, and his face was pale and stricken.

"I couldn't look after Mummy. She wouldn't let me." "That's all right, Jon-Jon," Ralph whispered. "You did your best. And then he was crying. The terrible dry hacking sobs of a man driven to the far frontiers of his love. he hated to let the child out of his arms for a moment, Ralph sent Jonathan to help Isazi feed the horses at the entrance to the shaft. Then he drew Vicky and Harry Mellow aside and in the gloom of the tunnel where they could not see his face, he told them simply.

"Cathy is dead." "How?" Harry broke the stunned silence. "How did she die?".

"Badly," Ralph told them. "Very badly. I don't want to say any more." Harry held Vicky while she wept and when her first sharp grief was over, Ralph went on, "We can't stay here. We have a choice, the railhead or Bulawayo." "Bulawayo may be burned and sacked by now," Harry pointed out.

"And there may be an impi between here and the railhead," said Ralph. "But if Vicky wants to try and reach the railhead, we can send her and Jon-Jon south on the first train that gets through." "Then?"

Harry asked. "What then?" "Then I am riding to Bulawayo. If they are still alive, then they'll want fighting men to stay that way."

"Vicky?"

Harry hugged his wife.

"My mother and my family are at Bulawayo. This is the land of my birth I'm not running away." She wiped the wetness off her cheeks with her thumbs. "I'm coming with you to Bulawayo." Ralph nodded. He would have been surprised if she had agreed to go south.

"We will ride as soon as we have eaten." They took the wagon road northwards and it was a dismal route. The derelict wagons abandoned during the rinderpest were as regular as milestones. The wagon canvas was already rotted to tatters, the cargoes looted, and scattered on the grass, shattered cases and broken boxes and rusting tins. In the traces of some of the wagons the mummified remains of the oxen lay where they had fallen, heads twisted back in the convulsions that had killed them.

Then at intervals they came upon death and destruction that was fresher and more poignant. One of the Zeederbergs" express coaches in the middle of the track, with the mules speared to death and, festooned from the branches of a thorn-tree, the disembowelled bodies of the driver and his passengers.

At the drift of the Inyati river the blackened walls of the trading-post was all that were left standing. Here there was a macabre twist to the usual mutilation of the dead. The naked bodies of the Greek shopkeeper's wife and her three daughters had been laid in a neat row in the front yard with the shafts of the knobkerries thrust up into their private parts. The shopkeeper himself had been beheaded, and his trunk thrown onto the fire. His head, fixed on an assegai, leered at them in the centre of the road. Ralph covered Jon Jon face with his coat, and held him close as they rode past.

Ralph sent Isazi ahead to scout the drift and he found it defended. Ralph closed up the little party and they took it at a gallop, catching the dozen or so Matebele amadoda by surprise, shooting four of them down as they ran to their weapons, and thundering up the far bank together in the dust and gunsmoke. They were not followed, though Ralph, hoping they might be, turned back and lay in ambush beside the road.

Ralph held Jonathan in his lap during the night, starting awake every few minutes from nightmares in which Cathy screamed and pleaded for mercy. In the dawn he found that without realizing it, he had taken the mole-skin headband from his jacket and held it balled in his fist. He put it back in his pocket and buttoned the flap, as though it was something rare and precious.

They rode on northwards all that day, past the little one-man gold mines and the homesteads where men and their families had begun to carve a life out of the wilderness. Some of them had been taken completely by surprise. They were still clad in the remnants of their night-clothes. One little boy even clutched his teddy bear while his dead mother reached out to him with fingers that did not quite touch his sodden curls.

Others had sold their lives dearly, and the dead Matabele were flung like wood chips from a sawmill in a wide circle around the burned-out homesteads. Once they found dead amadoda but no white bodies. There were tracks of horses and a vehicle heading out northwards.

"The Andersons. They got away," Ralph said. "Please God, they are in Bulawayo by now." Vicky wanted to take the old wagon road, past Khami Mission, but Ralph would not do so.

"If they are there, it's too late. You've seen enough. If they got away, we'll find them in Bulawayo." So they rode into the town of Bulawayo in the early morning of the third day. The barricades opened to let them pass into the huge central laager in the town square, and the townspeople thronged around the horses, shouting questions.

"Are the soldiers coming?" "When are the soldiers coming?" "Did you see my brother? He was at the Antelope Mine-" "Have you any news?"

When she saw Robyn waving to her from the top of one of the wagons in the market square, Vicky wept again for the first time since leaving the Harkness Mine. Elizabeth jumped down from the wagon and pushed her way through the crowd to Ralph's horse.

"Cathy?" she asked.

Ralph shook his head and saw his own sorrow reflected in her clear dark honey-coloured eyes. Elizabeth reached up and lifted Jon Jon down from the front of the saddle.

"I'll look after him, Ralph," she said softly.

The family was installed in a corner of the central laager. Under Robyn's and Louise's direction, the single wagon had been turned into a crowded but adequate home.

On the first day of the rising, Louise and Jan Cheroot, the little Hottentot, had brought the wagon in from King's Lynn. One of the survivors from the Matabele attack at Victoria Mine had galloped past the homestead, shouting a barely coherent warning as he went by.

Louise and Jan Cheroot, already alerted by the desertion of the Matabele labourers and servants, had taken time to pack the wagon with a load of essentials, tinned food and blankets and ammunition, and they had driven into Bulawayo, Jan Cheroot handling the traces, and Louise sitting on top of the load with a rifle in her hands. Twice they had seen small war parties of Matabele at a distance, but a few warning shots had kept them there, and they reached the town amongst the very first refugees.

Thus the family did not have to rely on the charity of the townsfolk, like so many others who had arrived in Bulawayo with only a lathered horse and an empty rifle.

Robyn had set up a clinic under a canvas awning beside the wagon and had been asked by the Siege Committee to supervise the health and sanitation of the laager. While Louise had quite naturally taken charge of the other women in the laager, setting up a system by which all food stocks and other essential supplies were pooled and rationed, delegating the care of the halfdozen orphans to foster mothers, and organizing the other activities, from an entertainment committee, to lessons in loading ammunition and handling firearms for those gentlewomen who did not already have those skills.

Ralph left Vicky to break the news of Cathy's death to her mother, gave Jon-Jon into Elizabeth's care and set off across the laager to find a member of the Siege Committee.

It was after dark when Ralph got back to the wagon. Surprisingly, there was a brittle air of festivity upon the town. Despite the terrible bereavements that most families had suffered, despite the threat of dark imp is gathering just beyond the walls of the laager, yet the cries of the children playing hide-and go-seek amongst the wagons, the merry notes of a concertina, the laughter of women and the cheerful blaze of the watch-fires might have been those of a picnic in happier times.

Elizabeth had bathed both Jonathan and Robert, so they glowed pinkly and smelled of carbolic soap, and now as they ate their dinner at the camp table, she was telling them a story that made their eyes big as marbles in the lamplight.

Ralph smiled his thanks at her, and summoned Harry Mellow with an inclination of his head.

The two men sauntered off on a seemingly casual circuit of the darkening laager. They walked with their heads close together, while Ralph told Harry quietly, "The Siege Committee seem to be doing a good job. They have held a census of the laager already, and they reckon there are six hundred and thirty two women and children and nine hundred and fifteen men. The defence of the town seems to be on good footing, but nobody has yet thought of anything but defence. They were delighted to hear that their plight is known in Kimberley and Cape Town. I gave them the first news that they have had from outside the territory since the rising began "Ralph drew on his cheroot "and they seemed to think it was as good as a couple of regiments of cavalry on their way already. We both know that isn't so." "It will take months to get troops up here." "Jameson and his officers are on their way to England for trial, and Rhodes has been summoned to a court of inquiry." Ralph shook his head. "And there is worse news. The Mashona tribes have risen in concert with the Matabele." "Good God." Harry stopped dead and seized Ralph's arm. "The whole territory all at the same time? This thing has been carefully planned." "There has been heavy fighting in the Mazoe valley and in the Charter and Lornagundi districts around Fort Salisbury." "Ralph, how many have these savages murdered?" "Nobody knows. There are hundreds of scattered farms and mines out there. We have to reckon on at least five hundred men, women and children dead." They walked on in silence for a while. Once a sentry challenged them, but recognized Ralph.

"Heard you got through, Mr. Ballantyne are the soldiers coming?"

"Are the soldiers coming?" Ralph muttered, when they were past.

"That's what they all ask from the Siege Committee downwards." They reached the far end of the laager and Ralph spoke quietly to the guard there.

"All right, Mr. Ballantyne, but keep your eyes open. Those murdering heathen are all over." Ralph and Harry passed through the gateway into the town. It was utterly deserted. Everyone had been moved into the central laager. The thatch and daub shanties were dark and silent, and the two men walked down the centre of the broad dusty main street until the buildings petered out on either hand, they stopped and stood staring out into the scrubland. , "Listen!" said Ralph. A jackal yipped down near the Umguza stream, and was answered from the shadows of the acacia forest out in the south.

"Jackal,"said Harry, but Ralph shook his head. "Matabele!" "Will they attack the town?" Ralph did not reply immediately. He was staring out into the veld, and he had something in his hands that he was teasing like a string of Greek worry beads. "There are probably twenty thousand fighting bucks out there. They have got us bottled up here, and sooner or later, when they have massed their imp is and plucked up their courage, they will come. They will come long before the soldiers -can get here." "What are our chances?" Ralph wrapped the thing he held in his hand around one finger, and Harry saw it was a strip of drab fur. "We have got four Maxim guns, but there are six hundred women and children, and out of the nine hundred men, half are not fit to hold a rifle. The best way to defend Bulawayo is not to sit in the laager and wait for them-" Ralph turned away and they went back along the silent street. "They wanted me to join the Siege Committee, and I told them I did not like sieges." "What are you going to do, Ralph?" "I am going to get together a small group of men. Those who know the tribe and the land, those who can shoot straight and talk Sindebele well enough to pass as natives and we are going to go out there in the Matopos Hills, or wherever else they are hiding, and we are going to start killing Matabele." Isazi brought in fourteen men. They were all Zulus from the South, drivers and wagon-boys from the Zeederberg Company who had once worked for Rholands Transport, but had been stranded in Bulawayo by the rinderpest.

"I know you can drive an eighteen ox span," Ralph nodded at the circle of their faces as they squatted around the fire passing the red tin of "Wrights No. ! Best Snuff that Ralph had provided, from hand to hand. "I also know that any one of you can eat his own weight in sadza maize porridge in one sitting, and wash it down with enough beer to stun a rhinoceros, but can you fight?" And Isazi answered for them all, using the patient tone usually reserved for an obtuse child.

"We are Zulu." It was the only reply necessary. an Cheroot brought in six more, all of them Cape boys, with mixed Bushman and Hottentot blood, like Jan Cheroot himself.

"This one is named Grootboom, the big tree." Ralph thought he looked more like a Kalahari Desert thorn bush dark, dry and thorny.

"He was a corporal in the Fifty-second Foot at Cape Town Fort. He is my nephew." "Why did he leave Cape Town?" Jan Cheroot looked pained.

"There was a dispute over a lady. A man had his gizzard slit. They accused my dear nephew of the bastardly deed." "Did he do it?" "Of course he did. He is the best man with a knife that I know after me, "Jan Cheroot declared modestly.

"Why do you want to kill Matabele?" Ralph asked him in Sindebele, and the Hottentot answered him fluently in the same language. "It is work I understand and enjoy." Ralph nodded and turned to the next man.

"It is possible that this one is even more closely related to me," Jan Cheroot introduced him. "His name is Taos, and his mother was a great beauty. She owned a famous shebeen at the foot of Signal Hill above Cape Town docks. At one time she and I were dear and intimate friends, but then the lady had many friends." The prospective recruit had the flat nose and high cheekbones, the oriental eyes and the same waxen smooth skin as Jan Cheroot if he was one of Jan Cheroot's bastards and had spent his boyhood in Cape Town's notorious dock land then he should be a good man in a fight. Ralph nodded.

"Five shillings a day," he said. "And a free box to bury you in if the Matabele catch you." Jameson had taken many hundreds of horses south with him, and the Matabele had swept the horses off the farms.

Maurice Gifford had already taken 160 mounted men down towards Gwanda to bring in any survivors who might be cut off on the outlying farms and mines, and still be holding out. While Captain George Grey had formed a troop of mounted infantry, "Grey's Scouts', with most of the mounts that remained. The four mounts that Ralph had brought in with him were fine beasts, and he had managed to buy six more at exorbitant prices, 100 pounds for an animal that would have fetched 15 pounds on a good day at Kimberley market, but there were no others. He lay awake long after midnight under the wagon worrying about it while above him Robyn and Louise slept with the two girls and the children on the wagon truck under the canvas tent.

Ralph's eyes were closed, and a few feet away Harry Mellow was breathing deeply and regularly drowning out any small sounds. Yet even in his preoccupation, Ralph became aware of another presence near him in the darkness. He smelled it first, the taint of woodsmoke and cured animal furs and the odour of the fat with which a Matabele warrior anoints his body.

Ralph slipped his right hand up under the saddle he was using for a pillow, and his fingers touched the cheque red walnut butt of his Webley pistol.

"Henshaw," whispered a voice he did not recognize, and Ralph whipped his left arm around a thick corded neck and at the same moment thrust the muzzle of the pistol into the man's body.

"Quickly," he grated.. "Who are you, before I kill you?" "They told me you were quick and strong." The man was speaking Sindebele.

"Now I believe it." "Who are you?" "I have brought you good men and the promise of horses." Neither of them had spoken above a whisper.

"Why do you come like a thief?" "Because I am Matabele, the white men will kill me if they find me here. I have come to take you to these men." Ralph released him carefully, and reached for his boots.

They left the laager and slipped through the silent deserted town.

Ralph had spoken only once more.

"You know that I will kill you if this is treachery." "I know it, "replied the Matabele..

He was tall, as tall as Ralph but even heavier built, and once when he glanced back at Ralph the moonlight showed the silky sheen of scar tissue slashed across his cheek beneath his right eye.

In the yard of one of the last houses of the town, close to the open veld, yet screened from it by the wall that some house proud citizen had erected to protect his garden, there were twelve more Matabele amadoda waiting. Some of them wore fur kilts while others were dressed in ragged Western cast-offs.

"Who are these men?" Ralph demanded. "Who are you?" "My name is Ezra, Sergeant Ezra. I was Sergeant to One-bright-Eye who the imp is killed at Khami Hills. These men are all Company police." The Company police have been disbanded and disarmed," Ralph said.

"Yes, they have taken away our guns. They say they do not trust us. That we may go over to the rebels." "Why do you not?" Ralph said.

"Some of your brothers have. They say a hundred of the Company police have gone over, and taken their rifles with them." "We cannot even if we had wished to." Ezra shook his head. "Have you heard of the killing of two Matabele women near the Inyati river? A woman called Ruth and another called Little Flower, Imbali?" Ralph frowned. "Yes, I remember." "It was these men, and I was their sergeant. The and una named Gandang has asked that we be taken to him alive. He wishes personally to supervise the manner of our deaths." "I want men who can kill the women of the Matabele as easily as they killed ours," said Ralph. "Now what of these horses?" "The horses captured by the Matabele at Essexvale and Belingwe are being held in the hills at a place I know of." Long before the curfew bell, they had all slipped out of the central laager singly and in pairs, Jan Cheroot and his Cape boys taking the horses with them, and by the time Ralph and Harry Mellow strolled down the main street as though they were taking the evening air before returning to the laager for dinner, the others were all gathered in the walled garden at the end of the street.

Sergeant Ezra had brought the kilts and spears and knob-kierries, and Jan Cheroot had the big black three-legged pot of beef fat and lampblack boiled to a paste. Ralph and Harry and the Hottentots stripped naked and "smeared each other with the rancid mixture, taking care to work it in around the back of the ears, the knees and elbows, and below the eyes where pale skin might show.

By the time the curfew bell in the Anglican church began to toll, they were all dressed in the kilts of Matabele amadoda. Ralph and Harry covered their hair, which would have betrayed them, with headdresses of black widow-bird feathers. Isazi and Jan Cheroot strapped the rawhide bootees over the hooves of the horses, while Ralph gave his final orders, speaking in Sindebele, the only language they would use during the entire raid.

They left the town in the sudden darkness between sunset and moonrise, the hoofbeats of the horses deadened by the rawhides, and Ezra's Matabele running at the stirrups on silent bare feet. After the first hour, Ralph muttered a curt order to the Matabele and they took a stirrup-leather and hung from it, a man on each side of the horses. The pace of the march never slackened below a canter. They swept south and eastwards, until the crenellated crests of the Matopos Hills were outlined against the moon-pale sky.

A little after midnight Ezra grunted. "This is the place!" Ralph rose in the stirrups and raised his right arm. The column bunched up and dismounted. Jan Cheroot's reputed bastard, Taos, came to take the horses, while Jan Cheroot himself checked his men's weapons.

"I will put them against the firelight for you," Ralph whispered to him. "Watch for my signal." Then Ralph smiled at Isazi, his teeth glinting in the shiny black mask of his daubed face. "There will be no prisoners. Lie close, but beware of Jan Cheroot's bullets." "Henshaw, I want to go in with you." Harry Mellow spoke in Sindebele, and Ralph answered him in the same language.

"You shoot better than you talk. Go. with Jan Cheroot." At another order from Ralph, every one of them reached into the leather pouch on his hip and brought out a white cow-tail tassel necklace.

They were the recognition insignia, that might prevent them killing each other in the press of the fighting. Only Ralph added another ornament to his dress. From his hip pouch he brought the strip of mole-skin and bound it around his upper arm, then he hefted the heavy assegai and lead wood knobkerrie and nodded at Ezra. "Lead!" The line of Matabele, with Ralph running in second place, trotted at a traverse across the slope of the hill. As they turned the southern buttress, they saw the red glow of a watch-fire in the valley below.

Ralph sprinted past Ezra to the front of the line. He filled his lungs and began to sing.

"Lift the rock under which sleeps the serpent. Lift the rock and let the Mamba loose.

The Mamba of Mashobane has silver fangs of steel." It was one of the fighting songs of the Insukamini impi, and behind him the line of Matabele picked, up the refrain in their deep melodious voices. It resounded from the hills and woke the camp in the valley. Naked figures, risen from the sleeping-mats, threw wood on the fires, and the red glow lit the underside of the acacia trees so they formed a canopy like a circus tent overhead.

Ezra had estimated there were forty amadoda guarding the horses, but there were more than that already gathered around the fires and every second more flocked into the bivouac, the outposts coming in to see what was causing the commotion. Ralph had planned for that. He wanted no stragglers. They must be concentrated, so that his riflemen could fire into the bunch, making one bullet do the work of three or four. Ralph trotted into the Matabele encampment.

"Who commands here?" Ralph broke off the battle-song, and demanded in a bellow. "Let the commander stand forth to hear the word I bring from Gandang." He knew from the account that Robyn had given him of the massacre on the Khami Hills that the old and una was one of the leaders of the uprising. His choice of name had the effect he had hoped for.

"I am Mazui." A warrior stepped forward respectfully. "I wait for the word of Gandang, son of Mzilikazi." "The horses are no longer safe in this place. The white men have learned where they are. At the rise of the sun we will take them deeper into the hills," Ralph told him.

"To a place that I shall show you." "It shall be done." "Where are the horses?" "They are in the kraal, guarded by my aniadoda, safe from the lions." "Bring in all your pickets Ralph ordered, and the commander shouted an order and then turned back to Ralph eagerly.

"What news is there of the fighting?" "There has been a great battle," Ralph launched into a fanciful account, miming the fighting in the traditional way, leaping and shouting and stabbing in the air with his assegai.

"Thus we came upon the rear of the horsemen, and thus and thus we stabbed them-" His own Matabele gave him a chorus of long drawn-out "Jee" and leaped and postured with him.

The audience was enraptured, beginning to stamp and sway in sympathy with Ralph and his Matabele. The sentries and pickets had come in from the periphery of the camp. No more hurrying black figures emerged from the shadows. They were all here a hundred, perhaps a hundred and twenty, not more, Ralph estimated, against his forty men.

Not unfair odds, Jan Cheroot's Cape boys were all first-rate marksmen, and Harty Mellow with a rifle was worth five ordinary men.

From close at hand, on the first slope of the hill, a nightjar called. It was a musical quavering-cry, that sounded like "Good Lord, deliver us', this pious sentiment gave the bird its popular name, the Litany bird. It was the signal which Ralph had been listening for. He felt a bleak satisfaction that Jan Cheroot had followed his orders so strictly. From the position on the slope, Jan Cheroot would have the crowd of amadoda silhouetted against the firelight.

Making it all part of the dance, Ralph whirled away, still prancing and stamping, opening a distance of twenty paces between himself and the nearest Matabele. Here Ralph ended his dance abruptly with his arms spread like a crucifix. He stood deathly still staring at his audience with wild eyes, and a silence fell upon them all.

Slowly Ralph raised his arms above his head. He stood like that for a moment, a heroic figure glistening with fat, every muscle in his arms and chest standing proud, the kilt of civet-tails hanging to his knees, the collar of white cow tails around his neck, his charm against the death that lurked in the darkness beyond the firelight. His blackened features were twisted into a ferocious grimace that held the watchers spellbound. The dancing and singing had served its purpose well. It had distracted the anutdoda, and masked any noise that the Zulus and Hottentots might have made while moving into position around the bivouac.

Now suddenly Ralph let out a demoniacal howl that made the amadoda shudder, and he dropped his arms the signal for which Harry and Jan Cheroot were waiting.

The curtains of darkness were torn aside by the blast of massed rifle fire. The range was point-blank, the muzzles almost touching the press of dark naked bodies. It smashed into them, a single bullet churning through belly and chest and spine, bringing down four men, stopping only when the slug broke up against one of the heavy bones of pelvis or femur.

So unexpected was the assault, that the mass of warriors milled aimlessly, receiving three volleys from the repeating Winchesters, before they broke and ran. More than half of them were down already, and many of those still on their feet were wounded. They ran on top of Isazi's Zulus, and piled up against them like water on a dam wall.

Ralph heard the great shouts of Wgidla! I have eaten!" as the Zulus put in the steel, and heard the screams of the dying men.

Now at last the Matabele were rallying, closing up shoulder to shoulder to meet the thin line of Zulus and overrun it. It was the moment Ralph had waited for. He led his own Matabele racing across their rear and flung them at the naked undefended backs of the struggling warriors.

Long ago, as boys on the Kimberley diamond-workings, Bazo had taught Ralph the art of spearsmanship. Ralph had been as skilful with the broad blade as any of the Matabele youths who were his companions.

However, it was one thing to practise the long under-handed killing stroke, and another actually to send the point into living flesh.

Ralph was unprepared for the sensation of the steel in his hand running in and slowing against the sucking resistance, feeling the steel touch and grate on bone, and the haft kick in his hand as his victims bucked and convulsed at the agony. It felt like the butt of the rod when a salmon makes its first run.

Instinctively Ralph twisted the blade in the man's body, the way Bazo had taught him, maximizing the tissue damage and breaking the vacuum that held the steel then he jerked it clear, and for the first time felt the fine hot spray of blood from the wound fly into his face and splatter his right arm and chest.

He stepped over the dying man who thrashed on the earth, and sank the steel again and then again. The smell of blood and the screams maddened him, but it was a cold fierce madness that magnified his vision and slowed down the micro-seconds of mortal combat, so that he saw the counter-thrust and turned his adversary's blade aside with contemptuous ease, using the momentum of his shoulders to drive his own point through the Matabele guard and into the notch formed by the joint of his collar-bones at the base of his throat. The man's breath whistled over his severed vocal cords, and he dropped his assegai and seized Ralph's blade with his bare hands. Ralph pulled it back, and the razor edges cut to the bone of the man's fingers, and his hands fell open nervelessly as the Matabele dropped to his knees.

Ralph leaped over him and poised to thrust again. "Henshaw!" a voice screamed in his face. "It is me!" and through his madness Ralph saw the white cow-tail tassels about the neck and held the stroke, the two lines of attackers had met.

"It is over," Isazi panted, and Ralph looked about him in bewilderment. It had happened so swiftly. He shook his head to free the cold vice of fighting madness that gripped it.

They were all down, though a few of them still twisted and twitched and groaned.

"Isazi, finish them!" Ralph ordered, and watched the Zulus begin the grim work, passing quickly from body to body, feeling for the pulse below the ear and if they found it, stilling it with a quick thrust.

"Ralph," Harry came scrambling down the slope at the head of the Cape boys. "By God, that was one. "No English," Ralph warned him, then raising his voice. "We will take the horses now. Bring the spare bridles and lead-reins." There were fifty-three fine horses in the thorn bush kraal. Most of them carried the BSA Company brand. Each of the unmounted Zulus and Marabele selected a mount, and the remaining animals were put onto lead-reins.

In the meantime the Cape boys were going over the field with the speed and precision of born footpads, selecting the rifles that could be used and throwing the ancient Martini Henrys and muzzle-loaders and knobkeffies onto the fire, snapping the assegai blades in the fork of a tree. The loot they discovered, cutlery and crockery and clothing of European manufacture, proved that this impi had taken part in the depredations of the first few days of the rising. That, too, was thrown upon the flames. Within an hour of the first rifle-shot, they were moving out again. This time every man was well mounted, and the spare horses followed at a canter on the lead-reins.

They rode down the main street of Bulawayo in the uncertain grey light of predawn. In the front rank Ralph and Harry had scrubbed most of the blackening from their faces, but to make certain they did not draw the fire of a jittery sentry, they carried a flag made from Harry Mellow's white flannel undershirt.

The inhabitants of the laager tumbled out of their beds to gape and question, and then as they began to realize that this little cavalcade heralded the first retaliation against the slaughter and arson committed by the tribes, the cheering began and rose into joyous hysteria.

While Vicky and Elizabeth proudly served them a double ration breakfast under the wagon awning, Ralph and Harry received an endless string of well-wishers, of tearful widows whose husbands had perished under the Matabele assegais, bringing thanks and a half-dozen eggs or a freshly baked cake, of wistful boys come merely to stare at the heroes, and of keen young men demanding eagerly, "Is this where we sign up to join Ballantyne's Scouts?" There were shrieks of delight as Judy set about her long-suffering husband with her baton. The children in the front row clapped their hands as the blows cracked upon Punch's wooden head and his grotesquely humped back, and the bells on his cap jingled.

Swimming valiantly against the mainstream of sentiment, Jon-Jon's face was red as Punch's hooked nose and screwed up with outrage. "Hit her back!" he howled, bouncing up and down. "She's only a girl!" "Spoken like a true Ballantyne," Ralph laughed, at the same time forcibly restraining his son from leaping into the fray on the side of down-trodden mankind.

Elizabeth sat beyond Jon-Jon, with Robert on her lap. The child's sickly face was solemn and he sucked dedicatedly upon his thumb like an elderly gnome upon his pipe. In contrast, Elizabeth was radiant with a childlike joy, her cheeks flushed and her eyes shining, as she egged Judy on to further excesses.

A shining lock of her hair had come loose from the tortoiseshell comb and lay against the tender velvety skin of her temple, half curled around the lobe of her ear. Her ear was a faint Pink, and so thin and delicately shaped that the sunlight showed through it as though it were made from some rare bone-china. The same sunlight made the burgundy sparks flare like electricity in her thick dark tresses.

It drew Ralph's attention from the marionettes, and he watched her covertly over Jonathan's curly head. Her laughter was a throaty purr, natural and unashamed, and Ralph laughed again in sympathy. She turned her head and for a moment Ralph looked deeply into her eyes. It was like looking into a bowl of hot honey. He seemed to be able to see into limitless depths that were flecked with gold. Then Elizabeth dropped the veil of dark curved lashes over them, and looked back at the tiny stage, but she was no longer laughing. Instead her lower lip trembled and a dark flush of blood washed up her throat.

Feeling strangely guilty and shaken, Ralph quickly fastened his own eyes, if not his attention, on the squawking, battling marionettes.

The sketch ended, to Jonathan's vast satisfaction, with Judy being led away to some nameless but richly deserved fate by a policeman in Mr. Peel's blue helmet, and the mild bespectacled little bookkeeper of Meikles Store came out from behind his candy-striped screen with the glove puppets still upon his hands, to take his bows.

"He looks just like Mr. Kipling," Elizabeth whispered, "and he has the same bloodthirsty and violent imagination." Ralph felt a rush of gratitude towards her that she should gloss over that unexpected moment of awkwardness so gracefully. He picked up the boys, sat one upon each shoulder, and they followed the dispersing audience across the laager.

Upon his father's shoulder, Jonathan chattered like a flock of starlings, explaining to Bobby the finer points of the play which were clearly too subtle for any lesser intelligence than his own to follow.

However, both Ralph and Elizabeth walked in silence.

When they reached the wagon, Ralph slid both children to the ground and they scampered away. Halfheartedly, Elizabeth made to follow them, but stopped and turned back to him when Ralph spoke.

"I don't know what I would have done without you you've been wonderfully kind-" He hesitated. "Without Cathy-" He saw the pain in her eyes and broke off. "I just wanted to thank you." "You don't have to do that, Ralph," she answered quietly. "Anything you need I'll always be here to help." Then her reserve cracked, she started to speak again, but her lips trembled and she turned away sharply and followed the two boys into the wagon.

Ralph had paid siege prices for the bottle of whisky by scrawling a cheque on the label from a bully beef tin for 20 pounds. He took it hidden under his coat to where Isazi and Jan Cheroot and Sergeant Ezra sat together beside a fire away from their men.

They swilled. the coffee grounds out of their enamel mugs and proffered them for a good dram of the whisky and sipped in silence for a while, all of them staring into the camp-fire flames, letting the warmth of the spirit spread out through their bodies.

At last Ralph nodded at Sergeant Ezra, and the big Matabele began to speak quietly.

"Gandang and his Inyati impi are still waiting in the Khami Hills he has twelve hundred men. They are all blooded warriors, Babiaan is bivouacked below the Hills of the Indunas with six hundred. He could be here in an hour-" Quickly Ezra recounted the positions of the imp is the names of their indunas, and the mood and mettle of their warriors.

"What of Bazo and his Moles?" At last Ralph asked the question that concerned him most, and Ezra shrugged.

"We do not have word of them. I have my best men in the hills, searching for them. Nobody knows where the Moles have gone." "Where will we strike next?" Ralph asked the question rhetorically, musing as he stared in the fire. "Will it be at Babiaan in the Hills of the Indunas, or Zama with his thousand lying across the Mangiwe Road?"

Isazi coughed in polite disagreement, and when Ralph glanced up at him, he said, "Last night I sat at one of Babiaan's camp-fires, eating his meat, and listening to his men talk. They spoke of our attack upon the camp of the horses, and how the indunas had warned them in future to be on their guard against all strangers, even though they wore the furs and feathers of the fighting imp is We will not work the same trick twice." Jan Cheroot and Ezra grunted in agreement, and the little Hottentot inverted his mug to prove it empty, and glanced significantly at the bottle between Ralph's feet. Ralph poured again, and as he cupped the mug in his hands and inhaled the pungent perfume of the spirit, his mind went back to that afternoon to the laughter of the children and a lovely young girl whose hair burned with soft fires in the sunlight.

His voice was rough and ugly. "Their women and children, he said.

"They will be hidden in the caves and the secret valleys of the Matopos. Find them!" There were five small boys under the bank of the stream. They were all stark naked, and their legs were coated to above the knees with slick yellow clay. They laughed and squabbled good-naturedly as they dug the clay out of the bank with sharpened sticks and packed it into crudely woven reed baskets.

Tungata Zebiwe, "The Seeker after what has been Stolen', was the first to climb out of the stream, lugging the heavy basket to a shady place where he squatted and set to work. The others straggled up the bank after him and seated themselves in a circle.

Tungata took a handful of clay from his basket and rolled it into a thick soft sausage between his pink palms. Then he moulded it with practised skill, forming the humped back and sturdy legs. When it was complete, he set the body carefully between his knees on a slab of dried bark, then turned his attention to sculpting the head separately with curved red devil thorns for the horns and chips of water worn rock-crystal for the eyes. He attached the head to the thick neck, sticking out his tongue with concentration as he adjusted it to a proud angle, and then he sat back and studied it with a critical eye.

"Inkunzi Nkulu!"he hailed his creation. "Great Bull!" Grinning with delight, he carried the clay beast to the ant heap and set it on its bark base to dry in the sun. Then he hurried back to begin making the cows and calves for his herd. As he worked, he mocked the creations of the other boys, comparing them to his own great herd bull, and grinning cheekily at their retorts.

Tanase watched him from the shadows. She had come silently down the path through the thick riverine bush, led on by the tinkling of child-laughter, and the happy banter. Now she was reluctant to interrupt this magical moment.

In the sadness and striving, in the menace and smoke of war, it seemed that all joy and laughter had been forgotten. It needed the resilience and vision of a child to remind her of what had once been and what might be again. She felt a suffocating weight of love overwhelm her, followed almost immediately by a formless dread. She wanted to rush to the child and take him in her arms, to hold him tightly to her bosom and protect him from she was not sure what.

Then Tungata. looked up and saw her, and came to her carrying the clay bull with shy pride.

"See what I have made." "It is beautiful." "It is for you, Umame, I made it for you." Tanase took the offering. "He is a fine bull, and he will breed many calves, she said, and her love was so strong that the tears scalded her eyelids. She did not want the child to see it.

"Wash the clay off your legs and arms," she told him. "We must go up to the cave." He skipped beside her on the path, his body still wet from the river, his skin glistening with a velvety black sheen, laughing delightedly when Tanase set the clay bull upon her head, walking straight-backed and hips swinging, to balance the load.

They came up the path to the base of the cliff. It was not truly a cave, but a long low overhang of the cliff face. They were not the first to use it as a home. The rocky roof was blackened with the soot of innumerable cooking-fires, and the back wall was decorated with the ancient paintings and engravings of the little yellow Bushmen who had hunted here long before Mzilikazi led his imp is into these hills. They were wonderful pictures of rhinoceros and giraffe and gazelle, and of the little stick figures, armed with bows and outsized genitalia, who hunted them.

There were almost five hundred persons living in this place, one of the secret safe places of the tribe, where the women and the children were sent when war or some other catastrophe threatened the Matabele. Though the valley was steep and narrow, there were five escape routes, hidden paths scaling the cliffs or narrow clefts through the granite, which made it impossible for an enemy to trap them in the gut of the valley.

The stream provided fresh clear water for drinking, thirty milk cows that had survived the rinderpest provided mass, the soured milk which was one of the tribe's staples. And when they marched in, every woman had borne upon her head a leather grain-bag. The locusts had depleted the harvest, but with careful planning they could exist here for many months.

The women were spread out down the length of the rock shelter, busy with their separate tasks. Some of them were stamping the corn in mortars carved from a dried tree-trunk, using a heavy wooden pestle that they swung up with both hands above their head and then let drop of its own weight into the cup of the mortar, clapping their hands and then seizing the club to lift it for the next stroke. Others were plaiting bark cloth for sleeping-mats, or tanning wild animals" skins, or stringing ceramic beads. Over it all hung the faint blue mist of the cooking-fires, and the sweet hum of women's voices, interspersed with the gurgling and chirping of black babes who crawled naked on the rocky floor, or hung like fat limpets from their mothers" breasts.

Juba was at the far end of the shelter, imparting to two of her daughters and the new wife of one of her middle sons the delicate secrets of beer-brewing. The sorghum grain had been soaked and had germinated, now came the drying and grinding of the yeast. It was an absorbing task, and Juba did not become aware of the presence of her senior daughterin-law and her eldest grandson until they stood over her. Then she looked up, and her smile split the great round of her face. "my mother" Tanase knelt before her respectfully. "I must speak with you." Juba struggled to rise, but was pinned by her own vast weight. Her daughters took an elbow each and heaved her upright. Once she was on her feet, she moved with surprising agility, swept Tungata onto her hip and carried him easily along the pathway. Tanase fell in beside her.

"Bazo has sent for me," Tanase told her. "There is dissension amongst the indunas, Bazo needs the words of the Umlimo made clear.

Without that the struggle will fall into vacillation and talk. We will lose all that we have won so dearly." "Then you must go, my child." "I must go swiftly, I cannot take Tungata with me." "He is safe here, I will look after him. When do you leave?" "Immediately." Juba sighed and nodded. "So be it." Tanase touched the child's cheek.

"Obey your grandmother," she said softly, and like a shadow was gone around the bend of the narrow pathway.

Tanase passed through the granite portals that guarded the valley of the Umlimo. She had only her memories of this place for travelling companions, and they were not good company. Yet when she went down the path, she walked straight, with a kind of antelope grace, her long limbs swinging freely and her head held high on the long heron's neck.

As soon as she entered the little cluster of huts in the bottom of the valley, her trained senses were immediately aware of the tensions and angers that hung over the place like a sickly miasma over a fever swamp. She could feel the anger and frustration in Bazo when she knelt before him, and made her dutiful obeisance. She knew so well what those knots of tense muscle at the points of his clenched jaw and the reddish glaze in his eyes meant.

Before she rose, she had noted how the indunas had drawn into two separate groups. On one side the elders, and facing them the young and headstrong were ranged about Bazo. She crossed the space between them and knelt before Gandang and his white-headed brothers, Somabula and Babiaan.

"I see you, my child." Gravely Gandang acknowledged her greeting, and then the abruptness with which he broached the real reason for her summons warned Tanase of its dire import.

"We wish you to speak to us on the meaning of the Umlimo's latest prophecy." "My lord and father, I am no longer an intimate of the mysteries.-" Impatiently Gandang brushed aside her disclaimer. "You understand more than anyone outside that dreadful cave. Listen to the words of the Umlimo, and discourse faithfully upon them." She bowed her head in acquiescence, but at the same time turned slightly so that she had Bazo at the very edge of her vision.

"The Umlimo spake thus. "Only a foolish hunter blocks the opening of the cave from which the wounded leopard seeks to escape."" Gandang repeated the prophecy, and his brothers nodded at the accuracy of his rendition. "Veiling her eyes behind thick black lashes, Tanase turned her head the breadth of a finger. Now she could see Bazo's right hand as it rested on his bare thigh. She had taught him the rudiments of. the secret sign language of the initiates. His forefinger curled and touched the first joint of his thumb. It was a command.

"Remain silent!"" said that gesture. "Speak not!" She made the signal of comprehension and acknowledgement, with the hand that hung at her side. Then she raised her head.

"Was that all, Lord?"she asked of Gandang. ""There is more," he answered. "The Umlimo spake a second time.

"The hot wind from the north will scorch the weeds in the fields, before the new corn can be planted. Wait for the north wind."" All the indunas leaned forward eagerly, and Gandang told her, "Speak to us of the meaning." "The meaning of the Umlimo's words is never clear at once. I must ponder on it." "When will you tell us?" "When I have an answer." "Tomorrow morning?"Gandang insisted. "Perhaps." Then you will spend the night alone, that your meditation be not disturbed," Gandang ordered.

"My husband,"Tanase demurred.

"Alone," Gandang repeated sharply. "With a guard on the door of your hut." The guard that was set upon her hut was a young warrior, not yet married, and because of it he was that much more susceptible to the wiles of a beautiful woman. When he brought the bowl of food to Tanase, she smiled in such a way that he lingered at the door of the hut. When she offered him a choice morsel, he glanced outside guiltily and then came to take it from her hand.

The food had a strange bitter taste, but he did not want to give offence, so he swallowed it manfully. The woman's smile promised things that the young warrior could barely believe possible, but when he tried to answer her provocative sallies, his voice slurred strangely in his own ears, and he was overcome with a lassitude such that he had to close his eyes for a moment.

Tanase replaced the stopper on the buck horn bottle she had concealed in her palm, and stepped quietly over the guard's sleeping form. When she whistled, Bazo came swiftly and silently to where she waited by the stream.

"Tell me, Lord," she whispered, "that which you require of me."

When she returned to the hut, the guard still slept deeply. She propped him in the doorway with his weapon across his lap. In the morning his head would ache, but he would not be eager to tell the indunas how he had spent the night.

"I have thought deeply on the words of the Umlimo," Tanase knelt before the indunas, "and I read meaning into the parable of the foolish hunter who hesitates in the entrance of the cave." Gandang frowned as he guessed the slant of her reply, but she went on calmly.

"Would not the brave and skilled hunter go boldly into the cave where the animal lurks, and slay it?" One of the elder indunas hissed with disagreement, and sprang to his feet.

"I say that the Umlimo has warned us to leave the road to the south open, so that the white men with all their women and chattels may leave this land for ever," he shouted, and immediately Bazo was on his feet facing him.

"The white men will never leave. The only way to rid ourselves of them is to bury them." There was a roar of approval from the younger indunas grouped around Bazo, but he lifted his hand to silence them.

"If you leave the south road open, it will certainly be used by the soldiers who march up it with their little three legged guns." There were angry cries of denial and encouragement.

"I say to you that we are the hot wind from the north, that the Umlimo prophesied, we are the ones who will scorch the weeds-" The shouts that drowned him out showed just how deeply the nation's leaders were divided, and Tanase felt the blackness of despair come down upon her. Gandang rose to his feet, and such was the weight of tradition and custom that even the wildest and fiercest of the young indunas fell silent.

"We must give the white men a chance to leave with their women.

We will leave the road open for them to go, and we will wait in patience for the hot wind, the miraculous wind from the north that the Umlimo promises to blow our enemies away.-" Bazo alone had not squatted respectfully to the senior and una and now he did something that was without precedent. He interrupted his father, and his voice was full of scorn.

"You have given them chance enough," said Bazo. "You have let the woman from Khami and all her brats go free. I ask you one question, my father, is what you propose kindness or is it cowardice?" They gasped, for when a son could speak thus to his father, then the world that once they all had known and understood was now changed. Gandang looked at Bazo across the small space that separated them, which was a gulf neither of them would ever be able once again to bridge. Though he was still tall and erect, there was such sorrow in Gandang's eyes that made him seem as old as the granite hills that surrounded them.

"You are no longer my son," he said simply.

"And you are no longer my father," Bazo said, and turning on his heel, strode from the hut. First Tanase, and then, one after another, the young indunas stood up and followed Bazo out into the sunlight. n outrider came in at full gallop and brought his horse up so sharply that it reared and sawed its head Against the bit.

"Sir, there is large party of rebels coming up the road ahead," he shouted urgently.

"Very well, trooper." The Honourable Maurice Gifford, officer commanding troops B and D of the Bulawayo field force, touched the brim of his slouch hat with a gloved hand in acknowledgement. "Go forward and keep them under observation." Then he turned in the saddle.

"Captain Dawson, we will put the wagons into laager under those trees, there will be a good field of fire for the Maxim from there I will take out fifty mounted men to engage the enemy." It really was a piece of astonishing good luck to run into a group of rebels so close to Bulawayo. After weeks of scouring the countryside, Gifford and his 160 troopers had managed to gather in thirty or so survivors from the isolated villages and trading-posts, but so far they had not had even a chance of a scrap with the Matabele. Leaving Dawson to prepare the laager, Gifford spurred down the Bulawayo road at the head of fifty of his best men.

Gifford was the youngest son of an earl, a handsome young aristocrat and junior officer in a famous guards regiment. He had been spending his leave on a spot of shooting in Africa, and had been fortunate enough to have his holiday enlivened by a native uprising.

The general opinion of the Honourable M. Gifford was that he was frightfully keen, and a damned fine young fellow, bound to go a long way.

He reined in his horse at the crest of the rise, and held up his gloved right hand to halt the troop.

"There they are, sir," cried the outrider. "Bold as brass." The Honourable Maurice Gifford polished the lenses of his binoculars on the tail of his yellow silk scarf, and then held the glasses to his eyes.

"They are all mounted," he said, "and jolly well mounted at that," he murmured. "But, I say, what a murderous-looking bunch of ruffians."

The approaching horsemen were half a mile away, a straggling mob, dressed in war kilts and headdresses, armed with a weird assortment of modern and primitive weapons.

"Troop, into extended order, left and right wheel," Gifford ordered. "Sergeant, we will use the slope to charge them, and then disengage and attempt to draw them within range of the Maxim."

"Begging your pardon, sir," the sergeant mumbled, "but isn't that a white man leading them?" Gifford lifted the binoculars and peered through them again. "The devil it is!" he muttered. "But the fellow is dressed in furs and things." The fellow gave him a cheery wave, as he rode up at the head of his motley gang.

"Morning, you aren't Maurice Gifford by any chance?" "I am sir," Gifford replied frostily. "And who are you, if I may be so bold as to ask?" "The name's Ballantyne, Ralph Ballantyne." The fellow gave him an engaging grin. "And these gentlemen," with his thumb he indicated those who followed him, "are Ballantyne's Scouts." Maurice Gifford looked them over with distaste. It was impossible to tell their racial origins, for they were all painted with fat and clay to look like Matabele, and they wore cast-offs and tribal dress. Only this fellow Ballantyne had left his face its natural colour, probably to identify himself to the Bulawayo field force, but it was equally probable that he would blacken it as soon as he had what he wanted from them. He was not shy about making his wants known, either.

"A requisition, Mr. Gifford," he said, and handed over a folded and sealed note from his belt pouch.

Gifford bit on the finger of his glove, and drew it off his right hand, before he accepted the note and broke the seal.

"I cannot let you have my Maxim, sit," he exclaimed as he read.

"I have a duty to protect the civilians in my care.

"You are only four miles from the laager at Bulawayo and the road is clear of Matabele. We have just swept it for you. There is no longer any danger to your people." "But,-" said Gifford.

"The requisition is signed by Colonel William Napier, officer commanding the Bulawayo field force. I suggest you take the matter up with him, when you reach Bulawayo." Ralph was still smiling. "In the meantime, we are rather pressed for time. We will just relieve you of the Maxim, and trouble you no further." Gifford crumpled the note, and glared impotently at Ralph, then shifted his ground.

"You and your men appear to be wearing enemy uniform," he accused.

"That is in contravention of the articles of war, sir. "Read the articles to the indunas, Mr. Gifford, particularly those dealing with the murder and torture of noncombatants." "There is no call for an Englishman to descend to the level of the savages he is fighting," said Gifford loftily. "I have had the honour to meet your father, Major Zouga Ballantyne. He is a gentleman. I wonder what he would say about your conduct." "My father and his fellow conspirators, all of them English gentlemen, are presently standing trial on charges of having waged war against a friendly government. However, I will certainly solicit his opinion of my conduct at the first available opportunity.

Now if you will send your sergeant, back with us to hand over the Maxim, I will bid you good day, Mr. Gifford." They unloaded the Maxim from its cart, removed the tripod and ammunition boxes, and loaded them onto three pack-horses.

"How did you get Napier to sign away one of his precious Maxims?"

Harry Mellow demanded, as he clinched the straps on the pack-saddles.

"Sleight of hand," Ralph winked at him. "The pen is mightier-" "You forged the requisition," Harry stared at him. "They'll shoot you." "They'll have to catch me first." Ralph turned and bellowed to his Scouts, "Troop, mount! Walk march, forward!" There was no doubt that he was a wizard. A wizened little fellow, not much taller than Tungata or any "of his companions, but he was painted in the most marvelous colours, zigzags of crimson and white and black across his face and chest.

When he first appeared out of the bush beside the stream in the secret valley, the children were frozen with terror. But before they could recover their wits sufficiently to run, the little painted wizard uttered such a string of cries and grunts, imitating horse and eagle and chacma baboon, at the same time prancing and flapping and scratching, that their terror turned to fascination.

Then from the sack over his shoulder, the wizard dug out a huge lump of rock sugar candy. He sucked it noisily, and the children who had not tasted sugar in weeks drew closer and watched him with glistening dark eyes. He proffered the lump of sugar to Tungata who edged forward, snatched it and scampered back. The little wizard laughed in such an infectious manner, that the other children laughed with him and swarmed forward to grab at the fresh lumps of candy he offered. Surrounded by laughing, clapping children, the little wizard climbed the path up the side of the valley to the rock shelter.

The women, lulled and reassured by the sounds of happy children, came to crowd about the little wizard, to stare and giggle, and the boldest to ask him. "Who are you?" "Where do you come from?" "What is in the sack?" In reply to the last question, the wizard drew out a handful of coloured ribbons, and the younger women shrieked with feminine vanity and tied them at their wrists and throats.

"I bring gifts and happy tidings," the wizard cackled. "Look what I bring you." There were steel combs, and small round mirrors, a little box that played sweet tinkling music they crowded about him, utterly enchanted. "Gifts and happy tidings," sang the wizard.

"Tell us! Tell us!" they chanted.

"The spirits of our forefathers have come to aid us. They have sent a divine wind to eat up the white men, as the rinderpest ate up the cattle. All the white men are de adV "The amakiwa are de adV "They have left behind them all these wonderful gifts. The town of Bulawayo is empty of white men, but these things are there for all to take. As much as you will but hurry, all the men and women of the Matabele are going there. There will be nothing left for those who come after.

Look, look at these beautiful pieces of cloth, there are thousands of them. Who wants these pretty buttons, these sharp knives? Those who want them must follow me!" sang the wizard. "For the fighting is over!

The white men are dead! The Matabele have triumphed, who wants to follow me?" "Lead us, little Father," they begged him. "We will follow you.

Still digging out gewgaws and trifles from the sack, the painted wizard started down towards the end of the narrow valley, and the women snatched up their little ones, strapped them to their backs with strips of cloth, called to the older children and hurried after the wizard.

"Follow me, people of MashobaneV he chirped. "Your time of greatness has come. The prophecy of the Umlimo is fulfilled. The divine wind from the north has blown the amakiwa away." Tungata, almost hysterical with excitement and dread that he would be left behind, hurried down the length of the rock shelter, until he saw the huge beloved figure squatting against the back wall of rock.

"Grandmother," he squeaked. "The wizard has pretty things for us all. We must hurry!" OVer the millennia the stream had cut a narrow twisted exit from the bowel of the valley, with high cliffs on each side. The granite was painted with rich orange and yellow lichens.

Compressed into this chasm the stream fell in smoking cascades of white water, before debouching into a shallower wider valley in the lower foothills.

The valley was filled with fine grass, the colour of a ripening wheat field. The pathway clung to the edge of the chasm, with a perilous drop to foaming white water on one hand and with the cliff rising sheer on the other. Then the gradient became more gentle and the path emerged into the quiet valley below. Rainwater had scarred the side of the lower valley with deep don gas natural entrenchments, and one of these afforded an ideal emplacement for the Maxim.

Ralph had two of his troopers set it up with the thick water jacketed barrel just clearing the lip of the don ga There were 2,000 rounds of ammunition in the oblong boxes, stacked beside the weapon. While Harry Mellow cut branches of thorn brush to screen the Maxim, Ralph paced off the ranges in front of the don ga and set up a cairn of loose stones beside the footpath.

He came scrambling back up the slope, and told Harry, "Set the sights for three hundred yards." Then he went down the length of the don ga giving his orders to each man, and making him repeat them to ensure there was no misunderstanding.

"When Jan Cheroot reaches the cairn, the Maxim will fire. Wait for the Maxim, then open up on the back of the column, and move your fire forward." Sergeant Ezra nodded, and levered a cartridge into the breech of the Winchester. He screwed up his eyes, judging the wind-deflection by the swaying of the gras stops and the feel of it against his face. Then he settled his elbow on the earthen parapet -of the gulley, and laid his scarred cheek against the butt.

Ralph retuffied along the don ga to where Harry Mellow was preparing the Maxim. He watched while Harry twisted the elevation screw to raise the barrel slightly to the 300 yard setting, and then swung the gun left and right in its tripod to make certain that the traverse was free and clear.

"Load one," Ralph ordered, and Taos, who was loading, fed the brass tag of the cartridge-belt into the open breech. Harry let the loading handle fly back and the mechanism clattered harshly.

"Load two!" He pumped the handle a second time, pulling the belt through, and the first round was extracted from the belt and fed smoothly into the breech.

"Ready!" Harry looked up at Ralph. "Now all we have to do is wait." Ralph nodded, and opened the pouch on his hip. From it he took the strip of brown mole-skin and bound it carefully about his right arm above the elbow. Then they settled down to wait.

They waited in the sunlight, and it beat down upon their greasy naked backs, until their sweat oozed from clogged pores and the flies came swarming gleefully to it. They waited while the sun made its noon, and then began to slip down the farther side of the sky.

Abruptly, Ralph raised his head, and at the movement a little stirring rippled down the row of marksmen lining the lip of the don ga

There was a sound of many voices at a distance, and they woke echoes from the lichen-stained cliffs that guarded the entrance to the gorge.

Then there was singing, sweet children's voices, the sound of it rose and filled with each fluke of the wind and each turn in the rocky passage.

From the entrance to the gorge a diminutive figure came dancing.

The weird pattern of red and black and white paints disguised Jan Cheroot's flat pug-like features, and the buttery yellow of his skin, but there was no mistaking his sprightly step, and the way he carried his head at a birdlike angle. The sack of pretties that he had used as bait was long ago empty and had been discarded.

He scampered down the path towards the stone cairn which Ralph had built, and behind him came the Matabele. So eager were they that they crowded three or four abreast, and jostled each other to keep pace with the Pied Piper that led them.

"More then I had hoped," Ralph whispered, but Harry Mellow did not look at him. The coating of black fat covered the pallor of his face, but his eyes were stricken as he stared fixedly over the sights of the Maxim.

The long column of Matabele was still emerging from the gorge, but Jan Cheroot was almost level with the cairn. "Ready," Ralph grated.

Jan Cheroot reached the cairn, and then with a miraculous twinkling movement, he disappeared as though a pitfall had sucked him in.

"Now!"said Ralph.

Not a man in the long line of riflemen moved. They were all staring down into the valley.

"Now!" Ralph repeated.

The head of the column had stopped in bewilderment at Jan Cheroot's abrupt disappearance, and those behind pushed forward.

"Open fire!" Ralph ordered.

"I can't do it," whispered Harry, sitting behind the gun with both hands on the grips.

"Damn you!" Ralph's voice shook. "They slit Cathy's belly open, and tore my daughter out of her womb. Kill them, damn you!" "I can't," Harry choked, and Ralph seized his shoulder and dragged him backwards.

He dropped down behind the gun in his place, and grabbed the double pistol grips. With his forefingers he hooked the safety-locks open, and then pressed his thumbs down on the cheque red firing-button.

The Maxim gun began its hellish fluttering roar, and the empty brass cartridge-cases spewed in a bright stream from the breech.

Peering through the drifts of blue gunsmoke, Ralph slowly traversed the gun from left to right, sweeping the pathway from the mouth of the gorge to the stone cairn, and from the don ga on each side of him the repeating Winchesters added their thunder to the din. The gunfire almost, but not quite, drowned out the sounds from the valley below.

Juba could not keep pace with the younger women, nor with the racing children. She lagged further and further behind, with Tungata urging her on anxiously.

"We will be too late, Grandmother. We must hurry." Before they reached the gorge at the end of the valley, Juba was wheezing and staggering, all her rolls of shining fat wobbling at each heavy pace, and she was seeing patches of darkness before her eyes.

"I must rest," she panted, and sank down beside the path. The stragglers streamed past her, laughing and joshing her as they entered the gorge.

"Ah, little Mother, do you want to climb up on my back?" Tungata waited beside her, hopping from one foot to the other, wringing his hands with impatience.

"Oh Grandmother, just a little farther-" When at last the patches of darkness cleared from her vision, she nodded at him, and he seized her hands and threw all the weight of his tiny body into levering her upright.

Now, as Juba hobbled along the path, they were the very last in the file, but they could hear the laughter and chanting far ahead, magnified by the funnel of the gorge. Tungata ran forward, and then drawn by his duty, skipped back to Juba's hand again.

"Please, Grandmother oh please!" Twice more Juba was forced to stop. They were all alone now, and the sunlight did not penetrate the depths of the narrow gorge. It was shadowy and the cold coming up from the dashing white waters chilled even Tungata's high spirits.

The two of them came around the bend, and looked out between the high granite portals into the open sunlit grassy bowl beyond.

"There they are!" Tungata cried with relief.

The pathway through the yellow grassland was thick with people, but, like a column of safari ants on the march that had come against an impossible obstacle, the head of the line was bunching and milling.

"Hurry, Grandmother, we can catch up!" Juba heaved her bulk upright and hobbled towards the welcoming warm sunlight.

At that moment the air around er head began to flutter as though a bird had been trapped within her skull. For a moment she thought that it was a symptom of her exhaustion, but then she saw the masses of human figures ahead of her begin to swirl and tumble and boil like dust-motes in a whirlwind.

Although she had never heard it before, she had listened when the warriors who had fought at Shangani and the Bembesi crossing described the little three-legged guns that chattered like old women. Armed suddenly by reserves of strength that she never believed she possessed, Juba seized Tungata. and blundered back up the gorge like a great cow elephant in flight.

Ralph -Ballantyne sat on the edge of his camp cot. There was a lighted candle set in its own wax on the upturned tea-chest that served as a table, and a half-filled whisky bottle and enamel mug beside it.

Ralph frowned at the open page of his journal, trying to focus in the flickering yellow candlelight. He was drunk. The bottle had been full half an hour before. He picked up the mug and drained it, set it down and poured from the bottle again. A few drops spilled onto the empty page of his journal. He wiped them away with his thumb and studied the wet mark it left with a drunkard's ponderous concentration.

He shook his head, to try and clear it, then he picked up his pen, dipped it and carefully wiped off the excess ink from the nib.

He wrote laboriously and where the ink touched the wetness left by the spilled whisky, it spread in a soft blue fan shape on the paper.

That annoyed him inordinately, and he flung the pen down and deliberately filled the enamel mug to the brim. He drank it, pausing twice for breath, and when the mug was empty, he held it between his knees, with his head bowed over it.

After a long time, and with an obvious effort, he lifted his head again, and re-read what he had written, his lips forming the words, like a schoolboy with his first reader.

"War makes monsters of us all." He reached for the bottle again, but knocked it on its side and the golden brown spirit glugged into a puddle on the lid of the tea-chest. He fell back on the cot and closed his eyes, his legs dangling to the floor and one arm thrown over his face protectively.

Elizabeth had put the boys to bed in the wagon, and crawled into the cot below theirs, careful not to disturb her own mother. Ralph had not eaten dinner with the family, and he had sent Jonathan back with a rough word when he had gone across to the tent to fetch his father to the meal.

Elizabeth lay on her side under the woollen blanket, and her eye was level with the laced-up opening in the canvas hood, so she could see out. The candle was still burning in Ralph's tent, but, in the corner of the laager, the tent that Harry and Vicky shared had been in darkness for an hour. She closed her eyes and tried to force herself to sleep, but she was so restless that beside her Robyn St. John sighed petulantly and rolled over. Elizabeth opened her eyes again and peered surreptitiously through the canvas slit. The candle was still burning in Ralph's tent.

Gently she eased herself out from under the blanket, watching her mother the while. She picked up her shawl from the lid of the chest, and clambered silently down to the ground.

With the shawl about her shoulders, she sat on the disselboom of the wagon. There was still only a sheet of canvas between her and where her mother lay. She could clearly hear the rhythm of Robyn's breathing. She judged when she sank deeply below the level of consciousness, for her breathing made a soft glottal rattle in the back of her throat.

The night was warm, and the laager almost silent, a puppy yapped unhappily from the far end, and closer at hand a baby's hungry wail was swiftly gagged by a mother's teat. Two of the sentries met at the nearest corner of the laager, and their voices murmured for awhile.

Then they parted and she saw the silhouette of a slouch hat against the night sky as one of them passed close to where she sat.

The candle still burned in the tent, and it must be past midnight by now. The flame drew her as though she were a moth. She rose and crossed to the tent. Silently, almost furtively. She lifted the flap and slipped in, letting it drop closed behind her.

Ralph lay on his back on the steel cot, his booted feet dangled to the ground, and one arm covered his face. He was making an unhappy little whimpering sound in his sleep. The candle was guttering, burned down into a puddle of its own molten wax, and the smell of spilled whisky was sharp and pungent. Elizabeth crossed to the tea-chest, and set the fallen bottle upright. Then the open page of the journal caught her attention, and she read the big uneven scrawl. "War makes monsters of us all!" It gave her a pang of pity so sharp that she closed the leather bound journal quickly, and looked at the man who had written that agonized heart-cry. She wanted to reach across and touch his unshaven cheek, but instead she hitched her nightdress in a businesslike fashion and squatted beside the cot. She undid the straps of his riding-boots, and then, taking them one at a time between her knees, she pulled them off his feet. Ralph muttered and flung the arm off his face, rolling away from the candlelight. Gently Elizabeth lifted his legs and swung them up onto the cot. He groaned and curled into a foetal position.

"Big baby," she whispered, and smiled to herself. Then she could resist no longer and she stroked the thick dark lock of hair off his -forehead. His skin was fever-hot, moist with sweat, and she laid her palm against his cheek. His dark new beard was stiff and harsh, the feel of it sent electric prickles shooting up her arm. She pulled her hand away, and, once more businesslike, unfolded the blanket from the foot of the cot and drew it up over his body.

She leaned over him to settle it under his chin, but he rolled over again and before she could jump back, one hard muscular arm wrapped over her shoulder. She lost her balance and fell against his chest, and the arm pinned her helplessly.

She lay very still, her heart pounding wildly. After a minute the grip of his arm relaxed, and gently she tried to free herself. At her first movement, the arm locked about her, with such savage strength that her breath was driven from her lungs with a gasp.

Ralph mumbled, and brought his other hand over, and she convulsed with shock as it settled high up on the back of her thigh. She dared not move. She knew she could not break the grip of his restraining arm. She had never expected him to be so powerful, she felt as helpless as an unweaned infant, totally in his power. She felt the hand behind her begin to fumble and grope upwards and then she sensed the moment when he became conscious.

The hand slid up to the nape of her neck, and her head was pulled forward with a gentle but irresistible force until she felt the heat and the wetness of his mouth spread over hers. He tasted of whisky and something else, a yeasty musky man taste, and without her volition, her own lips melted and spread to meet his.

Her senses spun like wheels of flame behind her closed eyelids, the sensations were so tumultuous, that for long moments she did not realize that he had swept her nightdress up to the level of her shoulder-blades, and now his fingers, hard as bone, and hot as fire, ran in a long slow caress down the cleft of her naked buttocks and then settled into the soft curve where they joined her thighs. It galvanized her.

Her breath sobbed in her throat, and she struggled to be free, to escape from the torture of her own wild wanting, of her cruel need for him, and from his skilful insistent fingers. He held her easily, his mouth against the soft of her throat, and his voice was hoarse and tough.

"Cathy!"he said. "My Katie! I missed you so!" Elizabeth stopped struggling. She lay against him like a dead woman. No longer fighting, no longer even breathing. "Katie!" His hands were desperate to find her, but she was dead-dead.

He was fully awake now. His hands left Elizabeth's body and came up to her face. He cupped her head in his hands, and lifted it. He looked at her uncomprehendingly for a long moment, and then she saw the green change in his eyes.

"Not Cathy!"he whispered.

She opened his fingers gently and stood up beside the cot.

"Not Cathy" she said softly. "Cathy has gone, Ralph." She stooped over the guttering candle, cupped one hand behind it, and blew it out. Then she stood upright again in the sudden total darkness.

She unfastened the bodice of her nightdress, shrugged it over her shoulders and let it fall around her ankles. She stepped out of it and lay down on the cot beside Ralph. She took his unresisting hand and replaced it where it had been before.

"Not Cathy," she whispered. "Tonight it's Elizabeth. Tonight and for ever more." And she placed her mouth over his.

When at last she felt him fill all the sad and lonely places within her, her joy was so intense that it seemed to crush and bruise her soul and she said. "I love you. I have always loved you I will always love you." Jordan Ballantyne stood beside his father on the platform of the Cape Town railway station. They were both stiff and awkward in the moment of parting.

"Please don't forget to give my, "Jordan hesitated over the choice of words, "my very warmest regards to Louise." "I am sure she will be pleased," said Zouga "I have not seen her for so long--" Zouga broke off.

The separation from his wife had drawn out over the long months of his trial in the Queen's Bench Division of the High Court before the Lord Chief Justice, Baron Pollock, Mr. Justice Hawkins, and a special jury. The Lord Chief Justice had shepherded a reluctant jury towards the inevitable verdict.

"I direct you that, in accordance with the evidence and your answers to the specific questions I have put to you, you ought to find a verdict of guilty against all the defendants." And he had his way.

"The sentence of the Court, therefore, is that as to you Leander Starr Jameson, and as to you John Willoughby, that you be confined for a period of fifteen months" imprisonment without hard labour. That you, Major Zouga Ballantyne, have three months" imprisonment without hard labour." Zouga had served four weeks of his sentence in Holloway, and with the balance remitted, had been released to the dreadful news that in Rhodesia the Matabele had risen and that Bulawayo was under siege.

The voyage southwards down the Atlantic had been agonizing, he had had no word of Louise, nor of King's Lynn, and his imagination conjured up horrors that were nourished by tales of slaughter and mutilation.

Only when the Union Castle mail boat had docked that morning in Cape Town Harbour were his terrible anxieties relieved.

"She is safe in Bulawayo," Jordan had answered his first question.

Overcome with emotion, Zouga had embraced his youngest son, repeating, "Thank God, oh thank God!" over and over again.

They had lunched together in the dining-room of the Mount Nelson Hotel and Jordan had given his father the latest intelligence from the north.

"Napier and the Siege Committee seem to have stabilized the situation. They have got the survivors into Bulawayo, and Grey and Selous and Ralph with their irregulars have given the rebels a few bloody knocks to keep them at a wary distance.

"Of course the Matabele have an absolutely free run of the territory outside the laagers at Bulawayo and Gwelo and Belingwe. They do as they please, though strangely enough they do not seem to have closed the road to the southern drifts. If you can reach Kimberley in time to join the relief column that Spreckley is taking through, you should be in Bulawayo by the end of the month and Mr. Rhodes and I will not be long in joining you.

"Spreckley will be taking through only essential supplies, and a few hundred men to stiffen the defence of Bulawayo until the imperial troops can get there. As you probably know, Major-General Sir Frederick Carrington has been chosen to command, and Mr. Rhodes and I will be going up with his staff. I have no doubt we will bring the rebels to book very swiftly." Jordan kept up a monologue during the entire meal, to cover the embarrassment caused by the stares and the whispers of the other diners, who were deliciously scandalized by the presence of one of Jameson's freebooters in their midst. Zouga ignored the stir he was creating, and addressed himself to the meal and the conversation with Jordan until a young journalist from the Cape Times, clutching his shorthand pad, approached the table.

"I wonder if you would care to comment on the leniency of the sentences passed by the Lord Chief Justice." Only then did Zouga raise his head, and his expression was bleak.

"In the years ahead they will give medals and knighthoods to men who achieve exactly the same task that we attempted," he said quietly.

"Now will you be kind enough to let us finish our lunch in peace."

At the railway station Jordan fussed over making certain that Zouga's trunk was in the goods van and that he had a forward-facing seat in the last carriage. Then they faced each other awkwardly, as the guard blew his warning whistle.

"Mr. Rhodes asked me to enquire whether you would still be good enough to act as his agent at Bulawayo." "Tell Mr. Rhodes that I am honoured by his continued confidence." They shook hands and Zouga climbed into the coach. "If you see Ralph,-" "Yes?" Zouga asked.

"Never mind." Jordan shook his head. "I hope you have a safe journey, Papa." Leaning from the carriage-window as the train pulled out from the platform, Zouga studied the receding figure of his youngest son. He was a fine-looking young fellow, Zouga decided, tall and athletic, his grey three-piece suit in fashion, yet also in perfect understated taste and yet there was something incongruous about him, an air of the lost waif, an aura of uncertainty and deep-rooted unhappiness.

"Damned nonsense," Zouga told himself, and drew his head in and pulled up the window by its leather strap.

The locomotive built up speed across the Cape flats for its assault on the rampart of mountains that guarded the African continental shield.

Jordan Ballantyne cantered up the driveway towards the great white house, that crouched amongst its oaks and stone-pines on the lower slopes of the flat-topped mountain. He was pursued by a feeling of guilt. It was many years since he had neglected his duties for an entire day. Even a year ago it would have been unthinkable for him to do so. Every day, Sunday and public holidays notwithstanding, Mr. Rhodes needed him close at hand.

The subtle change in their relationship was something that increased his feelings of guilt and introduced a darker more corrosive emotion. It had not been entirely necessary for him to spend the whole day with his father, from when the mailship worked her way into Table Bay, with the furious red dawn and the south-easter raging about her, until the northern express pulled out from under the glassed dome of Cape Town station. He could have slipped away and been back at his desk within a few hours, but he had tried to force a refusal out of Mr. Rhodes, an acknowledgement of his own indispensability.

"Take a few days if you like, Jordan Arnold will be able to handle anything that might come up." Mr. Rhodes had barely glanced up from the London papers.

"There is that new draft of Clause 27 of your will-" Jordan had tried to provoke him, and instead received the reply he most dreaded.

"Oh, give that to Arnold. It's time he understood about the scholarships. Anyway, it will give him a chance to use that newfangled Remington machine of his." Mr. Rhodes" childlike pleasure in having his correspondence printed out swiftly and neatly on the caligraph was another source of disquiet to Jordan. Jordan had not yet mastered the caligraph's noisy keyboard, chiefly because Arnold's jealousy monopolized the machine. Jordan had ordered his own model shipped out to him, but it had to come from New York and it would be months yet before he could expect it to arrive.

Now Jordan reined in the big glossy bay at the steps to Groote Schuur's back stoep, and as he dismounted, he tossed the reins to the groom, and hurried into the house. He took the backstairs to the second floor, and went directly to his OWn room, unbuttoning his shirt and pulling the tails from his breeches as he kicked the door closed behind him.

He poured water from the Delft jug into the basin and splashed it onto his face. Then he dried on a fluffy white towel, tossed it aside and picked up the silver-handled brushes and ran them over his crisp golden curls. He was about to turn away from the mirror and find -a fresh shirt when he stopped, and stared thoughtfully at his own image.

Slowly he leaned closer to the glass and touched his face with his fingertips. There were crows" feet at the outer corners of his eyes, he stretched the skin between his fingers but the lines persisted. He turned his head slightly, the light from the tall window showed up the pouches beneath his eyes.

"You only see them at that angle," he thought, and then flattened his hair back from the peak of his forehead with the palm of his hand.

There was the pearly gleam of his scalp through the thinning strands, and quickly he fluffed his hair up again.

He wanted to turn away, but the mirror had a dreadful fascination.

He smiled. it was a grimace that lifted his upper lip. His left canine tooth was darker, definitely a darker grey than it had been a month before when the dentist had drilled out the nerve, and suddenly Jordan was overwhelmed by a cold penetrating despair.

"In less than two weeks" time I will be thirty years old oh God, I'm getting old, so old and ugly. How can anyone still like me?" He bore down hard on the sob that threatened to choke him, and turned away from the cruel glass.

In his office there was a note in the centre of the tooled morocco leather top of his desk, weighted down with the silver ink well.

"See me as soon as possible. C. J. R." It was in that familiar spiky scrawl, and Jordan felt a leap of his spirits. He picked up his shorthand Pad, and knocked on the communicating door.

"Come!" the high-pitched voice commanded, and Jordan went through.

"Good evening, Mr. Rhodes, you wanted to see me?" Mr. Rhodes did not reply at once, but went on making corrections to the typed sheet in front of him, crossing out a word and scrawling a substitute above it, changing a comma to a semi-colon, and while he worked, Jordan studied his face. The deterioration was shocking. He was almost to grey now, and the pouches below his eyes were a deep purple colour.

His jowl had thickened and hung in a dewlap under his jawbone. His eyes were red rimmed and their Messianic blue was blurred and diluted.

All this in the six months or so since Jameson's disastrous raid, and Jordan's thoughts jumped back to that day that the news had come.

Jordan had brought it to him in this same library.

There had been three telegrams. One from Jameson himself was addressed to Mr. Rhodes" Cape Town office, not to the mansion at Groote Schuur, and so it had lain all weekend in the letterbox of the deserted building. It began, "As I do not hear from you to the contrary-" The second telegram was from the magistrate at Mafeking, Mr. Bayes. It read in part, "Colonel Grey has ridden with police detachments to reinforce Dr. Jameson-" The last telegram was from the commissioner of police at Kimberley. "I deem it my duty to inform you that Dr. Jameson, at the head of a body of armed men, has crossed the Transvaal border-" Mr. Rhodes had read the telegrams, meticulously arranging them on the top of his desk before him as he finished each.

"I thought I had stopped him," he had kept muttering as he read.

"I thought he understood that he must wait." By the time he had finished reading, he had been pale as candle wax and the flesh seemed to have sagged from the bones' of his face like un risen dough.

"Poor old Jameson," he had whispered at last. "Twenty years we have been friends and now he goes and destroys me." Mr. Rhodes had leaned his elbows on the desk and placed his face in his hands. He had sat like that for many minutes and then said clearly. "Well, Jordan, now I will see who my true friends are." Mr. Rhodes had not slept for five nights. after that. Jordan had lain awake in his own room down the passage and listened to the heavy tread back and forth across the yellowwood floor, and then, long before the first light of dawn, Mr. Rhodes would ring for him, and they would ride together for hours upon the slopes of Table Mountain before returning to the great white mansion to face the latest renunciations and rejections, to watch with a kind of helpless fascination his life and his work crumbling inexorably into dust about them.

Then Arnold had arrived to take his place as Jordan's assistant.

His official title was second secretary, and Jordan had welcomed his assistance with the more mundane details of running the complex household. He had accompanied them on their visit to London in the aftermath of Jameson's misadventure, and remained firmly by Rhodes" side on the long return journey via the Suez Canel, Beira and Salisbury.

Now Arnold stood attentively beside Mr. Rhodes" desk, handing him a sheet typed upon the caligraph, waiting while he read and corrected it, and then replacing it with a fresh sheet. With the rancid taste of envy, Jordan recognized, not for the first time, that Arnold possessed the clean blond good looks that Mr. Rhodes so much admired. His demeanour was modest and frank, yet when he laughed, his entire being seemed to glow with some inner illumination. He had been up at Oriel, Mr. Rhodes" old Oxford college, and it was more and more obvious that Mr. Rhodes took pleasure and comfort in having him near by, as he had once taken from Jordan's presence.

Jordan waited quietly by the door, feeling strangely out of place in what he had come to think of as his own home, until Mr. Rhodes handed the last corrected sheet to Arnold and looked up.

"Ah, Jordan," he said. "I wanted to warn you that I am advancing the date of my departure for Bulawayo. I think my Rhodesians need me.

I must go to them." "I will see to it immediately," Jordan nodded.

"Have you decided on a date, Mr. Rhodes?" "Next Monday." "We will take the express to Kimberley, of course?" "You will not be accompanying me," said Mr. Rhodes flatly.

"I do not understand, Mr. Rhodes. "Jordan made a helpless little gesture of incomprehension.

"I require utter loyalty and honesty in my employees." "Yes, Mr. Rhodes, I know that." Jordan nodded, and then slowly his expression became uncertain and disbelieving. "You are not suggesting that I have ever been disloyal or dishonest-" "Get that file, please, Arnold," Mr. Rhodes ordered, and when he fetched it from the library table, he added, "Give it to him. Arnold silently came across the thick silk and wool carpet, and offered the box-file to Jordan. As he reached for it, Jordan was aware, for the first time ever, of something other than openness and friendly concern in Arnold's eyes, it was a flash of vindictive triumph so vicious as to sting like the lash of a riding-whip across the face. It lasted for only a blink Of time, and was gone so swiftly that it might never have been, but it left Jordan feeling utterly vulnerable and in dreadful danger.

He placed the folder on the table beside him, and opened the cover. There were at least fifty sheets in the folder. Most of them had been typed on the caligraph, and each was headed "Copy of original." There were "stockbrokers" buy and sell orders, for shares in De Beers and Consolidated Goldfields. The quantities of shares in the transactions were enormous, involving millions of sterling. The braking firm was Silver & Co of whom Jordan had never heard, though they purported to conduct business in Johannesburg, Kimberley and London.

Then there were copies of statements from half a dozen banks, in the different centres where Silver & Co. had offices. A dozen or -so entries on the statements had been underlined in red ink. "Transfer to Rholands -"C86,321 - 7s 9d. Transfer to Rholands - f,146,821 - 9s I Id." The name shocked him, Ralph's company, and though he did not understand why, it increased his sense of peril.

"I don't understand what this has to do with me-" He looked up at Mr. Rhodes.

"Your brother entered into a series of large bear transactions in those companies most drastically affected by the failure of Jameson's enterprise." "It would appear-" Jordan began uncertainly, and was interrupted by Mr. Rhodes.

"It would appear that he has made profits in excess of a million pounds, and that he and his agents have gone to extreme lengths to disguise and conceal these machinations." "Mr. Rhodes, why do you tell me this, why do you adopt that tone? He is my brother, but I cannot be held responsible-" Mr. Rhodes held up one hand to silence him. "Nobody has accused you of anything yet your eagerness to justify yourself is unbecoming." Then he opened the leather bound copy of Plutarch's Lives which lay on one "corner of his desk. There were three sheets of writing-paper lying between the pages. Mr. Rhodes took out the sheets, and proffered the top one to Jordan.

"Do you recognize this?" Jordan felt himself blushing agonizingly.

At that moment he hated himself for ever having written this letter.

He had done so in the terrible _" tual travail following the night spirit of Ralph's -discoveries and brutal accusation in the private pullman coach from Kimberley.

"It is the copy of a private letter that I wrote to my brother. Jordan could not lift his eyes to meet those of Mr. Rhodes. "I do not know what possessed me to keep a copy of it." A paragraph caught his eye, and he could not prevent himself re-reading his own words.

"There is nothing I would not do to convince you of my continued affection, for only now, when I seem to have forfeited it, am I truly conscious of how much your regard mean to me.." He held the sheet possessively. "This is a private and intimate communication," he said in a low voice, which shook with shame and outrage. "Apart from my brother, to whom it is addressed, nobody has the right to read it."

"You do not deny that you are the author, then?" "it would be vain of me to do so." "Indeed, it would," Mr. Rhodes agreed, and passed him the second sheet.

Jordan read on down the page in mounting bewilderment. The handwriting was his, but the words were not. So skilfully and naturally did they continue from the sentiments of the first page, however, that he found himself almost doubting his own recall. What he was reading was his own acquiescence to pass on to Ralph confidential and privileged information related to the planning and timing of Jameson's intervention in the Transvaal. "I do agree that the contemplated venture is totally outside civilized law, and this has convinced me to give you my assistance and the moral debt that I feel that I owe to you." Only then he noticed the slant and form of a letter that was not in his hand. The entire page was a skilful forgery. He shook his head wordlessly. He felt as though the fabric of his existence had been ripped through and through.

"That your conspiracy was successful, we know from the rich fruits your brother harvested," said Mr. Rhodes wearily, in the voice of a man so often betrayed that this no longer had the power to wound him. "I congratulate you, Jordan." "Where did this come from?" The page shook in Jordan's hand. "Where-" He broke off and looked up at Arnold, standing behind his master's shoulder. There was no trace of that vindictive triumph remaining, Arnold was grave and concerned and unbearably handsome.

"I see, "Jordan nodded. "It is a forgery, of course." Mr. Rhodes made an impatient gesture. "Really Jordan. Who would go to the trouble of forging bank statements that can readily be verified?" "Not the bank statements, the letter." "You agreed it was yours." "Not this page, not this-" Mr. Rhodes" expression was remote, his eyes cold and unfeeling.

"I will have the bookkeeper come up from the town office to go over the household accounts with you, and to make an inventory. You will, of course, hand over your keys to Arnold. As soon as all that has been done, I will instruct the bookkeeper to issue you a cheque for three months" salary in lieu of notice, though I am certain you will understand my reluctance to provide you with a letter of recommendation. I would be obliged if you could remove yourself and your belongings from these premises before my return from Rhodesia."

"Mr. Rhodes.--" "There is nothing further that we have to discuss." Mr. Rhodes and his entourage, Arnold amongst them, had left on the northern express for KimMberley and the Matabeleland railhead three weeks before. it had taken that long for Jordan to wind up the inventories and complete the household accounts.

Mr. Rhodes had not spoken to Jordan again after that final confrontation. Arnold had relayed two brief instructions, and Jordan had retained his dignity and resisted the temptation to hurl bootless recriminations at his triumphant rival. He had only seen Mr. Rhodes three times since that fateful evening, twice from his office window as he returned from those long aimless rides through the pine forests on the lower slopes of the mountain, and the third and final time as he climbed into the coach for the railway station.

Now, as he had been for three long weeks, Jordan was alone in the great deserted mansion. He had ordered the servants to leave early, and had personally checked the kitchens and rear areas, before locking up the doors. He moved slowly through the carpeted passageways carrying the oil-lamp in both hands. He wore the Chinese silk brocade dressing-gown that had been Mr. Rhodes" personal gift to him on his twenty-fifth birthday. He felt burned out, blackened like a forest tree after the fire has passed, leaving the hollowed-out trunk continuing to smoulder within.

He was on a pilgrimage of farewell about the great house, and the memories that it contained. He had been present from the very first days of the planning to renovate and redecorate the old building. He had spent so many hours listening to Herbert Baker and Mr. Rhodes, taking notes of their conversations and occasionally, at Mr. Rhodes" invitation, making a suggestion.

It was Jordan who had suggested the motif for the mansion, a stylized representation of the stone bird from the ancient ruins of Rhodesia, the falcon of Zimbabwe. The great raptor, the pedestal on which it perched decorated with a shark's tooth pattern, adorned the banisters of the main staircase. It was worked into the polished granite of the huge bath in Mr. Rhodes" suite, it formed a fresco around the walls of the dining-room and four replicas of the strange bird supported the corners of Mr. Rhodes" desk.

The bird had been a part of Jordan's life from as far back as his earliest memories reached. The original statue had been taken by Zouga Ballantyne from the ancient temple, one of seven identical statues that he had discovered there. He had only been able to carry one of them.

He had left the other birds lying in the ancient temple enclosure, and taken the best-preserved example.

Almost thirty years later Ralph Ballantyne had returned to Great Zimbabwe, guided by his father's journal and the map he had drawn.

Ralph had found the six remaining statues lying in the temple enclosure of the ruins just as his father had left them, but Ralph had come prepared. He had loaded the statues onto the draught oxen he had brought with him and, despite the attempts of the Matabele guardians to prevent him, had escaped southwards across the Shashi river with his treasure. In Cape Town a syndicate of businessmen headed by the multi-millionaire, Barney Barnato, had purchased the relics from Ralph for a substantial sum, and had presented them to the South African Museum in Cape Town. The six statues were still on display to the public there. Jordan had visited the premises, and spent an hour standing transfixed before them.

However, his own personal magic was embodied in the original statue that his father had discovered, and which throughout his childhood had ridden as ballast over the rear wheel-truck of the family wagon, during their wanderings and travels across the vast African veld. Jordan had slept a thousand nights above the bird, and somehow its spirit had pervaded his own and taken possession of him.

When Zouga at last led the family to the Kimberley diamond-diggings, the bird statue had been unloaded from the wagon and placed under the camelthom tree which marked their last camp. When Jordan's mother, Aletta Ballantyne, had fallen sick with the deadly camp fever, and finally succumbed to the disease the statue had come to play an even larger place in Jordan's life.

He had christened the bird Panes, after the goddess of the North American Indian tribes, and later he had avidly studied the lore of the great goddess Panes that Frazer had detailed in his Goklen Bough, a study in magic and religion. He learned how Panes was a beautiful woman who had been taken up into the mountains. To the adolescent Jordan, Panes and the bird statue became confused with the image of his dead mother. Secretly he had developed a form of invocation to the goddess, and in the dead of night when all the other members of his family slept, he would creep out to make a small sacrifice of hoarded food to Panes and worship her with his own rituals.

When Zouga, financially reduced, had been forced to sell the bird to Mr. Rhodes, the boy had been desolated until the opportunity to enter Mr. Rhodes" service and follow the goddess replaced the emptiness of his existence with not one but two deities. the goddess Panes and Mr. Rhodes. Even after he was grown to manhood in Mr. Rhodes'service, the statue continued to bulk large in Jordan's consciousness, though it was only very occasionally, in times of deep turmoil of the spirit, that he actually resorted to the childish rituals of worship.

Now he had lost the lodestone of his life, and irresistibly he was drawn towards the statue for the last time. Slowly he descended the curve of the main staircase. As he passed, he caressed the carved balustrades which were worked into faithful copies of the ancient bird.

The lofty entrance hallway below was floored with black and white marble slabs arranged in a chequer-board pattern. The main doors were in massive red teak, and the fittings were of burnished brass. The light of the lantern that Jordan carried sent grotesquely misshapen shadows flowing across the marble or fluttering like gigantic bats against the high carved ceiling. In the centre of the marble floor stood a heavy table, upon which were the silver trays for visiting-cards and mail. Between them was a tall decoration of dried pro tea blooms which Jordan had arranged with his own hands.

Jordan set the lamp of Svres porcelain upon the table like a ritual lantern upon a pagan altar. He stepped back from it and slowly raised his head. The original stone falcon of Zimbabwe stood in its high niche, guarding the entrance to Groote Schuur. Seeing it thus it was not possible to doubt the aura of magical power that invested the graven image. It seemed that the prayers and incantations of the long-dead priests of Zimbabwe still shimmered in the air about it, that the blood of the sacrifices steamed from the wavering shadows upon the marble floor, and that the prophecies of the Umlimo, the Chosen One of the ancient spirits, invested it with separate life.

Zouga Ballantyne had heard the prophecies from the Umlimo's lips and had faithfully recorded them in his journal. Jordan had re-read them a hundred times and could repeat them by rote, he had made them part of his own personal ritual and invocation to the goddess.

"There shall be no peace in the kingdom of the Mambos or the Monomatapa until they return. For the white eagle unU war unth the black bull until the stone falcons return to roost." Jordan looked up at the bird's proud, cruel head, at the sightless eyes which stared blankly towards the north, towards the land of the Mambos and the Monomatapa which men now called Rhodesia, and where the white eagle and the black bull were again locked in mortal conflict, and Jordan felt a sense of helplessness and emptiness, as though he were caught up in the coils of destiny and was unable to break free.

"Have pity on me, great Panes," and he dropped to his knees. "I cannot go. I cannot leave you or him. I have no place to go." In the lamplight his face was tinged with a faint greenish sheen, as though it had been carved from glacial ice. He lifted the porcelain lamp from the table, and held it high above his head with both hands.

"Forgive me, great Panes," he whispered, and hurled the lamp against the panelled woodwork of the wall.

The lobby was plunged into darkness for a moment, as the flame of the shattered lamp fluttered to the very edge of extinction. Then it sent a ghostly blue light skittering across the surface of the spreading pool of oil. Suddenly the flames burned up strongly and touched the trailing edges of the long velvet drapes that covered the windows.

Still kneeling before the stone statue, Jordan coughed as the first wisps of smoke enveloped him. He was mildly surprised that, after the first burning sting of it in his lungs, there was so very little pain. The image of the falcon high above him slowly receded, dimmed by the tears that filled Jordan's eyes and by the dense swirling curtains of smoke.

The flames made a low drumming roar as they caught on the wooden panelling and shot to the ceiling. One of the heavy drapes burned through, and as it fell it spread open like the wings of an immense vulture. The fiery wings of thick velvet covered Jordan's kneeling figure and their weight bore him face down to the marble floor.

Already asphyxiated by the dense blue smoke, he did not even struggle and within seconds the mound of crumpled velvet was transformed into a funeral pyre, and the flames reached up Joyously to lick against the base of the stone falcon in its high niche.

Bazo has come down from the place of the Umlimo at last," Isazi said quietly, and Ralph could not contain "Bhimself.

"Are you sure of this?" he demanded eagerly, and Isazi nodded.

"I have sat at the camp-fires of his impi, and with my own eyes have seen him, with the bullet scars shining like medals of silver upon his chest, with my own ears I have heard him harangue his amadoda, steeling them for the fighting which lies ahead." "Where is he, Isazi?

Tell me where I can find him." "He is not alone." Isazi was not about to spoil the dramatic impact of his report by prematurely divulging the bare bones of fact. "Bazo has with him the witch, who is his woman. if Bazo is warlike, then this woman, Tanase, the favourite of the dark -spirits, is bold and ruthless, driven by such bloody cruelty that the amadoda when they look upon her beauty shudder as though it is an unspeakable ugliness." "Where are they?" Ralph repeated.

"Bazo has with him the wildest and most reckless of the young indunas, Zama and Kamuza, and they have brought their amadoda, three thousand of the fiercest and finest. With Bazo and Tanase at their head, these imp is are as dangerous as the gut-stabbed lion, as deadly as the old bull buffalo circling in thick cover to lay for the unwary hunter-" "God damn you, Isazi, we have waited long enough." Ralph snarled at him. "Tell me where he is." Isazi looked pained and deliberately took a little snuff. His eyes watered, then he sneezed delectably and wiped his nostrils on the palm of his hand.

"Gandang and Babiaan and Somabula are not with him Isazi took up his recital precisely at the point where Ralph had so boorishly interrupted him. "I listened while the amadoda spoke of an indaba held many weeks back at the valley of the Umlimo. They say that the old indunas decided to wait for the divine intervention of the spirits, to leave the road southwards open for the white men to leave Matabeleland and to sit upon their shields until these things come to pass." Ralph made a gesture of disgusted resignation. "Do not hurry in your telling of it, wise one," he encouraged Isazi with weighted sarcasm. "Do not spare us the smallest detail." Isazi nodded seriously, but his dark eyes sparkled and he tugged at his little goatee beard to prevent himself grinning. "The bellies of the old indunas are cooling, they recall the Shangani and Bembesi battlefields. Their spies report that the laager here at Bulawayo is guarded by the three legged guns. I tell you, Henshaw, that Bazo is the serpent's head. Cut it off and the body dies." Isazi nodded sagely.

"Now will you tell me where Bazo is, my brave and wise old friend?" Isazi nodded again in appreciation of Ralph's change of tone.

"He is very close," Isazi said. "Not two hours" march from where we sit." Isazi made a wide gesture that took in the darkened laager About them. "He lies with his three thousand amadoda in the Valley of the Goats." Ralph looked up at the segment of old moon that hung low down in the sky.

"Four days to new moon," he murmured. "If Bazo plans to attack the laager here, then it will be in the dark of the moon." "Three thousand men," Harry Mellow murmured. "There are fifty of us." "Three thousand. The Moles and the Insukamini and the Svmmers-" Sergeant Ezra shook his head. "As Isazi has said, the fiercest and the finest." "We will take them," said Ralph Ballantyne calmly. "We will take them in the Valley of the Goats, two nights from now, and here is the way we will do it.-" Bazo, son of Gandang, who had denied his father and defied the greater indunas of Kumalo, passed from one watch-fire to the next and beside him moved the slim and exquisitely graceful figure of his woman,"Tanase. Bazo reached the fire and stood tall above it. The flames lit his features from below, so that the cavities of his eyes were black caverns in the depths of which his eyes glinted like the coils of a deadly reptile. The light of the camp-fire picked out in harsh detail every line and crease that suffering had riven into his face. Around his forehead was bound the simple strip of mole-skin, he did not need the feathers of heron and paradise widow birds to place the seal upon his majesty. The firelight glinted upon the great muscles of his chest and arms and his scars were the only regalia of honour that he wore.

Tanase's beauty was even more poignant when seen beside his ravaged features. Her naked breasts were strangely incongruous in these warlike councils, but beneath their satiny swelling they were hard as battle-forged muscle, and the sudden thrust of her nipples puckered and darkened, large as the first joint of a man's little finger, were like the bosses in the centre of a war-shield.

As she stood at Bazo's shoulder in the firelight, her gaze was as fierce as any warrior there, and she looked up at her husband with a ferocious pride as he began to speak.

"I offer you a choice" Bazo said. "You can remain as you are, the dogs of the white men. You can stay as amah oh the lowliest of slaves, or you can become once again Amadoda. His voice was strained, it seemed to rumble up out of his throat, but it rang clearly to the highest part of the natural rocky amphitheatre, and the dark masses of warriors that filled the bowl stirred and sighed at the words.

"The choice is yours, but it "must be made swiftly. This morning I have received runners from the south." Bazo paused, and his listeners craned forward. There were three thousand of them squatting in massed ranks, but there was no sound from them as they waited for Bazo's next words.

"You have heard the fainthearted tell you that if we do not dispute the southern road, then the white men that are in Bulawayo will pack their wagons, take their women and go meekly down that road to the sea." Still not a sound from the listening warriors.

"They were wrong and now they are proven so. Lodzi has come," said Bazo, and there was a sigh like the wind in the grass.

"Lodzi has come," Bazo repeated. "And with him the soldiers and the guns. They gather now at the head of the iron road that Henshaw built. Soon, very soon, they will begin the march up the road which we have left open for them. Before the new moon is half grown to its full, they will be in Bulawayo, and then you will truly be aniahoh.

You and your sons and their sons will toil in the white men's mines and herd the white men's herds." There was a growl, like a leopard when first it is roused, and it shook the dark ranks until Bazo lifted high the hand that held his silver assegai.

"That is not to be. The Umlimo has promised us that this land will once again belong to us, but it is our task to make this prophecy into reality. The gods do not favour those who wait for fruit to fall from the tree into their open mouths. My children, we will shake the tree." "Jee!" said a single voice from the massed ranks, and immediately the humming war chant was taken up by them all.

"Jee!" sang Bazo, stamping his right foot and stabbing the broad blade towards the moonless, sky, and his men sang with him.

Tanase stood still as an ebony carving beside him, but her lips were parted softly, and her huge slanted eyes glowed like moons in the firelight.

At last Bazo spread his arm again, and waited for their silence.

"Thus it will be," he said, and again the waiting warriors strained for every word. "First we will eat up the laager at Bulawayo.

It has always been the way of the Matabele to fall upon their enemy at that hour before the dawn, just before the first light of day. - " the warriors hummed softly in assent. -"and the white men know this is our way," Bazo went on. "Every morning, in the last deep darkness they stand to their guns, waiting for the leopard to walk into their trap.

The Matabele always come before dawn, they tell each other.

Always! they say, but I tell you that this time it will be different, my children." Bazo paused and looked carefully into the faces of the men who squatted in the front rank.

"This time it will be in the hour before midnight, at the rise of the white star from the east." Standing before them in the old way, Bazo gave them their order of battle, and squatting in the black mass of half, naked bodies, his bare shoulders touching those of the and una on each side of him, his hair covered by the feather headdress and his face and body plastered with the mixture of fat and soot, Ralph Ballantyne listened to the detailed instructions.

"At this season, the wind will rise with the rise of the white star. It will come from the east, so from the east we will come also.

Each one of you will carry upon his head a bundle of thatch grass and the green leaves of the ms asa trees," Bazo told them, and anticipating what was to come, Ralph felt the nerve ends in his fingertips tingle with the shock.

"A smoke-screen," he thought. "That's a naval tactic!" "As soon as the wind rises, we will build a great fire." Bazo confirmed it immediately. Each of you will throw his bundle upon it as he passes, and we will go forward in the darkness and the smoke. It will avail them not at all to shoot their rockets into the sky, for our smoke will blind the gunners." Ralph imagined how it might be, the warriors emerging from the impenetrable rolling bank Of smoke, not visible until they were within stabbing range, swarming over the wall of wagons or creeping between the wheels. Three thousand of them coming in silently and relentlessly even if the laager were warned and alerted, it would be almost impossible to stop them. The Maxims would be almost useless in the smoke, and the broad-bladed assegais the more effective weapon at such close range.

A vivid image of the slaughter burned into his brain, and he remembered Cathy's corpse, and imagined beside it the mutilated remains of Jonathan and of Elizabeth, her white smooth flesh as cruelly desecrated. His rage came strongly to arm him, and he stared down into the amphitheatre at the tall heroic figure with the ravaged face, laying out the terrible details of the massacre.

"We must leave not a single one of them. We must destroy the last reason why Lodzi should bring his soldiers. We will offer him only dead bodies, burned buildings and silver steel, if he makes the attempt." Then in his rage Ralph shouted with the other amadoda, and hummed the wild war chant, his features as contorted as theirs, and his eyes as wild.

"The indaba is ended," Bazo told them at last. "Go now to your sleeping-mats to refresh yourself for the morrow. When you rise with the sun, let your first task be to cut, each of you, a bundle of dry grass and green leaves as heavy as you can carry." Ralph Ballantyne lay beneath his fur kaross on a sleeping-mat of woven reeds, and listened to the camp settling into sleep about him. They had withdrawn into the narrower reaches of the valley. He saw the watch-fires dwindle, and the circles of their orange light shrink in upon them. He listened to the murmur of voices subside, and the breathing of the warriors near him changing, becoming deeper and more regular.

Here the Valley of the Goats was broken rocky defile, choked with thick thorn scrub, so that the imp is could not concentrate in one place. They were spread out in pockets, down the length of the valley, fifty men or so in each small clearing, the narrow twisted paths through the thorn scrub overshadowed by the taller trees, which formed a canopy overhead.

The darkness became more menacing as the last fires died into powdery grey ash, and Ralph, lying beneath the fur blanket, gripped the shaft of his assegai and judged his moment.

It came at last, and Ralph drew back the kaross stealthily. On all fours he crept to where the nearest warrior lay, groping gently for him. His fingers touched the bare skin of an arm. The warrior started awake at the touch, and sat bolt upright.

"Who is it?" he asked in a thick guttural voice, rough with sleep, and Ralph stabbed him in the stomach.

The man screamed. It was a cry of ringing mortal agony that bounded from the rocky sides of the valley, cutting through the silences of the night watch, and Ralph bellowed with him.

"Devils! Devils are killing me!"He rolled over and stabbed another warrior, wounding him so he yelled in surprise and pain.

"There are devils here!" At fifty other watch-fires down the valley, the men of Ballantyne's Scouts were stabbing and screaming with Ralph.

"Defend yourselves, there are ghosts at work!" "Topti!

Witchcraft! Beware the witches!" "Kill the witches!" "Witchcraft!

Defend yourselves!" "Run! Run! The devils are amongst us." Three thousand warriors, every one of them steeped from childhood in superstition and witch lore awakened to the screams and wild cries of dying men, and the panic-stricken warnings yelled by men come face to face with the devil's legions. They awakened in blinding suffocating darkness, and seized their weapons and struck out in terror, yelling with fright and the comrades they wounded shrieked and struck back at them.

"I am wounded. Defend yourselves from the devils. Hah! Hah!

The devils are killing me!" The night was filled with running figures that collided and stabbed and cried.

The valley is haunted!" "The devils will kill us all!" "Run!

Run!" Then from the head of the valley rose such a monstrous iron-lunged braying, such a cacophony that it could only be the voice of the great demon himself. Tokoloshe, the eater of men. It was a sound that drove terrified men over the last frontier of reason, into the realms of witless insensate pandemonium.

On his hands and knees, Ralph crawled down the narrow pathway, keeping below the level of the slashing spears, silhouetting the frantic figures of running men against the faint light of the stars, and when he stabbed up at them, he aimed for the groin and belly rather than the killing stroke, so that the men that he maimed added their cries to the uproar.

From the head of the valley, Harry Mellow blew another blaring blast on the brass foghorn, and it was echoed by the screams of men blundering up the sides of the valley and escaping into the open grassland beyond.

Ralph crept forward, listening for a single voice in the thousands. In the first few minutes hundreds of fleeing warriors, most of them unarmed, had escaped from the valley. In every direction they were disappearing into the night, and each second they were followed by others, men who would have unflinchingly charged. into the smoking muzzles of the Maxim machine-guns, but who were reduced by fear of the supernatural to mindless panic-stricken children. Their cries faded with distance, and now at last Ralph heard the voice for which he had waited.

"Stand fast, the Moles," it roared. "Stand with Bazo. These are not demons." And Ralph crept towards the sound.

In the clearing ahead of him, a camp-fire fed with fresh logs flared up sullenly, and Ralph recognized the tall figure with wide gaunt shoulders, and the slim woman at his side.

"This is white men's trickery," she cried, beside her lord.

"Wait, my children." Ralph sprang up and ran through the dense scrub to them. "Nkosi," he cried. He did not have to disguise his voice, it was rough and hoarse with dust and tension and battle-lust. "Lord Bazo, I am with you! Let us stand together against this treachery."

"Brave comrade!" Bazo greeted him with relief as Ralph loomed out of the dark. "Stand back to back, form a ring in which each of us will guard the other, and call out to other brave men to join us." Bazo turned his back to Ralph, and drew the woman Tanase to his side. It was she who glanced back and recognized Ralph as he stooped.

"It is Henshaw," she screamed, but her warning came too late.

Before Bazo could turn back to face him, Ralph had changed his grip on the assegai, using it like a butcher's cleaver, and with a single stroke he hacked across the back of Bazo's legs, just above the ankles, and the Achilles" tendons parted with a soft rubbery popping sound.

Bazo collapsed onto his knees, both legs crippled, pinned like a beetle to a board.

Ralph seized Tanase's wrist, jerked her out of the circle of firelight, and hurled her headlong to earth. Holding her easily, he tore off her short leather skirt and placed the point of the assegai in her groin.

"Bazo," he whispered. "Throw your spear upon the fire, or I will open your woman's secret parts as you opened those of mine." The Scouts used the first glimmerings of the new day to move slowly down the valley in an extended line, finishing the wounded Matabele. While they worked, Ralph sent Jan Cheroot back to where they had left the horses to fetch the ropes. He was back within minutes with the heavy coils of new yellow manila over the saddles of the horses that he led.

"The Matabele have scattered back into the hills," he reported grimly. "It will take a week for them to find each other and regroup."

"We won't wait that long." Ralph took the ropes and began making the knots. The Scouts came in as he worked. They were scrubbing their assegai blades with handfuls of dried grass, and Sergeant Ezra told Ralph, "We lost four men, but we found Kamuza, the and una of the Swimmers, and we counted over two hundred bodies." "Get ready to pull out," Ralph ordered. "What remains to be done will not take long."

Bazo sat beside the remains of the fire. His arms were bound behind him with thongs of rawhide, and his legs were thrust straight out in front of him. He had no control over his feet, they flopped nervelessly like dying fish stranded on a receding tide, and the slow watery blood oozed from the deep gashes above his heels.

Tanase sat beside him. She was stark naked, and bound like him with her arms behind her back.

Sergeant Ezra stared at her body, and he murmured, "We have worked hard all night. We have earned a little sport. Let me and my kanka take this woman into the bushes for a short while." Ralph did not bother to reply, but turned to Jan Cheroot instead. "Bring the horses, "he ordered.

Tanase spoke to Bazo without moving her lips, in the way of the initiates.

"What is the business of the ropes, Lord? Why do they not shoot us, and have done?" "It is the white man's way, the way that conveys the deepest disrespect. They shoot honoured enemies, and use the ropes on criminals." "Lord, on the day I first met this one you call Henshaw, I dreamed that you were high upon a tree and he looked up at you and smiled she whispered. "It is strange that in that dream I did not see myself beside you upon that tree." They are ready now," said Bazo, and turned his head to her. "With my heart I embrace you. You have been the fountainhead of my life." "I embrace you, my husband. I embrace you, Bazo, who will be the father of kings." She went on staring into his ravaged, ugly-beautiful face and she did not turn her head when Henshaw stood tall over them and said in a harsh tortured voice, "I give you a better death than you gave to the ones I loved."

The ropes were of different lengths, so that Tanase hung slightly lower than her lord. The soles of her bare feet, suspended at the height of a man's head, were very white and her toes pointed straight at the earth like those of a little girl standing on tiptoe. Her long heron neck was twisted sharply to one side, so that she still seemed to listen for Bazo's voice.

Bazo's swollen face was lifted towards the yellow dawn sky, for the knot had ridden around under his chin. Ralph Ballantyne's face was lifted also as he stood at the base of the tall acacia tree in the bottom of the Valley of the Goats looking up at them.

In one other respect, Tanase's vision was unfulfilled Ralph Ballantyne did not smile.

Lodzi came and with him came Major-General Carrington and Major Robert Stephenson Smyth S BadenPowell who would one day coin the motto "Be Prepared, and behind them came the guns and the soldiers. The women and children danced out from the laager at Bulawayo with bouquets of wild flowers for them, and they sang "For they are jolly good fellows" and wept with joy.

The senior ihdunas of Kumalo, betrayed by the Umlimo's promises of divine intervention, uncertain and with the fire in their bellies swiftly cooling, squabbling amongst themselves and awed by the massive show of military force that they had provoked, withdrew slowly with their imp is from the vicinity of Bulawayo.

The imperial troops sortied in great lumbering columns and swept the valleys and the open land. They burned the deserted villages and the standing crops and they drove away the few cattle that the rinderpest had spared. They shelled the hills where they suspected the Matabele might be hiding, and they rode- their horses to exhaustion, chasing the elusive black shadows that flittered through the forest ahead of them. The Maxims fired until the water in the cooling-jackets boiled, but the range was nine hundred yards or more and the targets were as fleet as rabbits.

So the weeks dragged on and became months, and the soldiers tried to starve the Matabele and force them into a set-piece battle, but the indunas sulked in the broken ground and took refuge in the Matopos Hills where the guns and the-soldiers dared not follow them.

Occasionally the Matabele caught an isolated patrol or a man on his own, once even the legendary Frederick Selous, elephant-hunter and adventurer extraordinary. Selous had dismounted to "pot" one of the rebels that were disappearing over the ridge ahead, when a stray bullet grazed his pony, and his usually impeccably behaved animal bolted and left him stranded. Only then he realized that he had out ridden the main body of his Scouts, and that the Matabele were instantly aware of his predicament. They turned back and coursed him like dogs on a hare.

It was a race the likes of which Selous had not run since his elephant-hunting days. The bare-footed and lightly equipped amadoda gained swiftly, so close at last that they freed their blades from the thongs and began that terrible humming war chant. Only then Lieutenant Windley, Selous" second-in-command, spurred in and pulling his foot from the left stirrup, gave Selous the leather and galloped with him into the ranks of the oncoming Scouts.

At other times the swing of fortune was towards the soldiers, and they would surprise a foraging patrol of Matabele at a drift or in thick bush, and hang them from the nearest trees that would bear the weight.

It was an inconclusive cruel little war, that drew on and on. The military officers who were conducting the campaign were not businessmen, they did not think in terms of Costa efficiency, and the bill for the first three months was a million pounds of sterling, a cost of 5,000 pounds per head of Matabele killed. The bill was for the account of Mr. Cecil John Rhodes and his British South Africa Company.

In the Matopos Hills, the indunas were forced towards starvation, and in Bulawayo Mr. Rhodes was forced just as inexorably towards bankruptcy.

The three riders moved in a cautious, mutually protective spread.

They kept to the centre of the track, their rifles were loaded and cocked and carried at high port.

Jan Cheroot rode point, fifty yards ahead. His little woolly head turned tirelessly from side to side as he searched the bush on each side. Behind him came Louise Ballantyne, delighting in her escape from the confinements of the Bulawayo laager after these weary months. She rode astride, with all the elan of a natural horsewoman, and there was a feather in her little green cap, and when she turned to look back every few minutes, her lips parted in a loving smile. She was not yet accustomed to having Zouga with her once again, and she had constantly to reassure herself.

Zouga was fifty yards behind her, and he answered her smile in a way that wrenched something deep inside her.

He sat easy and straight in the saddle, the wide-brimmed slouch hat slanted over one eye. The sun had gilded away the pallor of Holloway gaol, and the silver and gold of his beard gave him the air of a Viking chieftain.

In that extended order they rode up from the grassy plains, under the high arched branches of the ms asa trees, up the first slope of the hills and, as he reached the false crest, Jan Cheroot stood in his stirrups and shouted with relief and delight. Unable to contain themselves Louise and Zouga cantered forward and reined in beside him.

"Oh, thank you, Lord," Louise whispered huskily, and reached across for Zouga's hand.

"It's a miracle" he said softly, and squeezed her fingers. Ahead of them the mellow thatch of King's Lynn basked comfortably in the sunlight. It seemed to be the most beautiful sight either of them had ever looked upon.

"Untouched." Louise shook her head in wonder.

"Must be the only homestead in Matabeleland that wasn't burned."

"Oh come on, my darling," she cried, with sudden ecstasy. "Let's go back to our home." Zouga restrained her at the steps of the wide front porch, and Imade her stay in the saddle, her rifle at the ready, holding the reins of their horses while he and Jan Cheroot searched the homestead for any sign of Matabele treachery.

When Zouga came out onto the stoep again, he carried his rifle at the trail and smiled at her.

"It's safe!" He helped her down from the saddle, and while Jan Cheroot led the horses away to stall feed them in the stables from the grain bags he had brought, Zouga and Louise went up the front steps hand in hand.

The thick ivory curves of the old bull elephant's tusks still framed the doorway to the dining-room, and Zouga stroked one of them as he passed.

"Your good luck charms," Louise chuckled indulgently. "The household gods,". he corrected her, and they passed between them into the house.

The house had been looted. They could not have expected less, but the books were still there, thrown from the shelves, some with their spines broken or with the leather boards damaged or gnawed by rats, but they were all there.

Zouga retrieved his journals. and dusted them superficially with his silk scarf. There were dozens of them, the record of his life, meticulously handwritten and illustrated with ink drawings and coloured maps.

"It would have truly broken my heart to have lost these," he murmured, piling them carefully on the library table and stroking one of the red morocco covers. The silver was lying on the dining-room floor, some of it battered, but most of it intact. It has no value to a Matabele.

They wandered through the rambling homestead, through the rooms that Zouga had added haphazardly to the original structure, and they found small treasures amongst the litter. a silver comb he had given her on their first "Christmas together, the diamond and enamel dress studs which had been her birthday present to him. She handed them back to him and went up on tiptoe to offer her face to his kiss.

There was still crockery and glassware on the kitchen shelves, though all the pots and knives had been stolen and the doors to the pantry and storeroom had been broken off their hinges.

"It won't take much to fix,"Zouga told her. "I can't believe how lucky we've been." Louise went out into the kitchen and found four of her red Rhode Island hens scratching in the dust. She called Jan cheroot from the stable and begged a few hand fills of grain from the horses" feed-bags. When she clucked at the hens, they came in a flutter of wings to be fed.

The glass In the windows of the main bedroom was smashed, and wild birds had come through to roost in the rafters. The bedspread was stained with their excrement, but when Louise stripped it off, the linen and mattress beneath it were clean and dry.

Zouga put an arm around her waist, squeezed it and looked down at her, in the way she knew so well.

"You are a wicked man, Major Ballantyne," she breathed huskily.

"But there are no curtains on the windows." "Fortunately there are still shutters." He went to close them, while Louise folded back the sheet and then unfastened the top button of her blouse. Zouga returned in time to assist her with the others. , An hour later when they came out again onto the front stoep, they found Jan Cheroot had dusted off the chairs and table, and unpacked the picnic basket they had brought from Bulawayo. They, drank fine Constantia wine and ate cold Cornish pasties, while Jan Cheroot waited upon them and regaled them with anecdotes and reminiscences of the exploits of Ballantyne's Scouts.

"There were none like us,"he declared modestly. "Ballantyne's Scouts! The Matabele learned to know us well." "Oh, don't let's talk about war, "Louise pleaded.

But Zouga asked with good-natured sarcasm, "What happened to all your heroes? The war still goes on, and we need men like you." "Master Ralph changed," said Jan Cheroot, darkly. "He changed just like that."

He snapped his fingers. "From the day we caught Bazo at the Valley of the Goats, he wasn't interested any more. He never rode with the Scouts again, and within a week he had gone back to the railhead to finish building his railway. They say he will drive the first train into Bulawayo before Christmas, that's what they say." "Enough!" Louise declared. "It's our first day at King's Lynn in almost a year. I will not have another word of war. Pour some wine, Jan Cheroot, and take a little sip for yourself." Then she turned to Zouga "Darling, can't we leave Bulawayo and come back here?" Zouga shook his head regretfully.

"I'm sorry, my love. I could not risk your precious life. The Matabele are still in rebellion, and this is so isolated-" From the back of the house came the sudden shriek and cackle of alarmed poultry.

Zouga broke off and jumped to his feet. As he reached for his rifle propped against the wall, he said softly but urgently, "Jan Cheroot, go around the back of the stables. I'll come from the other side. "Then to Louise, "Wait here, but be ready to run for the horses if you hear a shot." And the two men slipped silently away down the veranda.

Zouga reached the corner of the wall below the main bedroom, just as there was another storm of squawks and cackles, and the beating of wings. He ducked around the corner, and sprinted down the thick whitewashed walls that protected the kitchen yard, and flattened himself beside the gate. Above the cacophony of terrified chickens and the flapping of wings, he heard a voice say, "Hold that one! Do not let it go!". The voice was Matabele, and almost immediately a halfnaked figure ducked through the doorway beside Zouga, carrying a chicken in each hand.

One thing only prevented Zouga firing. The pendulous bare breasts that flapped against the Matabele's ribs as she ran. Zouga smashed the butt of his rifle between the woman's shoulders, knocking her to the earth, and he leaped over her body into the kitchen yard.

Beside the kitchen door stood Jan Cheroot. He held his rifle in one hand and in the other the skinny, naked, struggling body of a small black boy.

"Shall I knock his head in? "Jan Cheroot asked.

"You are no longer a member of Ballantyne's Scouts," Zouga told him. "Just keep a hold on him, but don't hurt him. "And he turned back to examine his own prisoner.

She was an elderly Matabele woman, almost on the point of starvation. She must once have been a big heavily fleshed woman, for her skin hung loosely upon her in folds and wrinkles. Once those breasts must have been the size of water melons, and almost bursting with fat, but now they were empty pouches that dangled almost to her navel. Zouga caught her wrist and hauled her to her feet. He marched her back into the kitchen yard, and he could clearly feel the bones of her arm through the wasted flesh.

Jan Cheroot was still holding the boy, and now Zouga studied him briefly. He also was skeletally thin, each rib and each knob of his spine poked through the skin, and his head seemed too big for his body, and his eyes too big for his head.

"Little bugger is starving," said Zouga

"That's one way of getting rid of them," Jan Cheroot agreed, and at that moment Louise stepped into the kitchen doorway with the rifle still in her hand, and her expression changed the instant she saw the black woman.

"Juba," she said. "Is that you, Juba?" "Oh Balela," the Matabele woman whimpered. "I had thought never to see the sunshine of your face again." "What now!" said Zouga grimly. "We have caught ourselves a pretty prize, Jan Cheroot. The senior wife of the great and noble and una Gandang, and this puppy must be his grandson! I didn't recognize either of them, they are on their last legs." Tungata Zebiwe sat in his grandmother's bony lap and ate with a quiet frenzy, the total dedication of a starving animal. He ate the extra Cornish pasties from the picnic basket, then he ate the crusts that Zouga had left. Louise searched the saddlebags and found a battered tin of bully, and the child ate that also, stuffing the rich fatty meat into his mouth with both hands.

"That's right," said Jan Cheroot sourly. "Fatten him up now, so we have to shoot him later." And he went off sulkily to saddle the horses for the return to Bulawayo.

"Juba, little Dove," Louise asked, "are all the children like this?" "The food is finished, "Juba nodded. "All the children are like this, though some of the little ones are dead already." "Juba is it not time that we women put an end to the foolishness of our men, before all the children are dead?" "It is time, Balela,"Juba agreed. "Time and past time." "Who is this woman? "Mr Rhodes asked, in that exasperated high-pitched voice that betrayed his agitation, and he peered at Zouga His eyes seemed to have taken a new prominence as though they were being squeezed out of his skull.

"She is the senior wife of Gandang." "Gandang he commanded the impi that massacred Wilson's patrol on the Shangani?" "He was a half-brother to Loberigula. With Babiaan and Somabula he is the senior of all the indunas." "I don't suppose there is anything to lose by talking to them," Mr. Rhodes shrugged. "This business will destroy us all if it goes on much longer. Tell this woman to take a message back that the indunas must lay down their arms and come in to Bulawayo."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Rhodes," Zouga told him. "They won't do that. They have had an indaba in the hills, all the indunas have spoken, and there is only one way." "What is that, Ballantyne?" "They want you to go to them." "personally?" Mr. Rhodes asked softly.

"We will speak only to Lodzi, and he must come to us unarmed. He must come into the Matopos without the soldiers. He may bring three other men with him, but none of them must carry a weapon. If they do, we kill them immediately." Zouga repeated the message that Juba had brought out of the hills for him, and Mr. Rhodes closed his eyes and covered them with the palm of his hand. His voice wheezed painfully in his chest, so that Zouga had to lean forward to catch his words.

"In their power," he said. "Alone and unarmed, completely in their power." Mr. Rhodes dropped his hand and stood up. He moved heavily to the opening of the tent. He clasped his hands behind his back, and rocked back on his heels. Outside in the hot dusty noon, a bugle sang the advance, and there was the distant sound of a cavalry troop leaving the laager, hooves and the rattle of lance butts in their hard leather boots.

Mr. Rhodes turned back to Zouga "Can we afford to trust them?" he asked.

"Can we afford not to, Mr. Rhodes?" They left the horses at the place that had been agreed, in one of the myriad valleys in the granite hills that reared into broken crests and dropped into deep troughs like the frozen surf whipped up by a wild Atlantic gale. Zouga Ballantyne led from there, taking the twisted narrow footpath through dense brush, moving slowly and looking back every few paces at the shambling, bearlike figure that followed him.

When the path began to climb, Zouga stopped and waited for him to regain his breath. Mr. Rhodes" face had taken on a bluish mottled appearance, and he was sweating heavily. However, after only a few minutes, he waved Zouga onwards impatiently.

Close behind Mr. Rhodes followed the two others that the indunas had stipulated. One was a journalist Mr. Rhodes was too much of a showman to miss an opportunity such as this and the other was a doctor, for he realized that the assegais, of the Matabele were not the only threat he faced, on this gruelling journey.

The shimmering heat of the Matopos Hills made the air above the granite surfaces dance and waver as though they were the plates of a wood-fired iron stove. The silence had a cloying suffocating texture that seemed almost tangible, and the sudden sharp bird calls that cut through it every few minutes served only to emphasize its intensity.

The scrub pressed in closely on each side of the track, and once Zouga saw a branch tremble and stir when there was no breeze. He strode on upwards with a measured pace, as though he were leading the guard of honour at a military funeral. The path turned sharply into a vertical crack in the highest point of the granite wall, and here Zouga waited again.

Mr. Rhodes reached him and leaned against the heated granite with his shoulder while he wiped his face and neck with a white handkerchief. He could not speak for many minutes and then he gasped, "Do you think they. will come, Ballantyne?" Farther down the valley, from the thickest bush, a robin called and Zouga inclined his head to listen. It was almost convincing mimicry.

"They are here before us, Mr. Rhodes. The hills are alive with Matabele," and he looked for fear in the pale blue eyes. When he found none, he murmured quietly, almost shyly, "You are a brave man, sir." "A pragmatic one, Ballantyne." And a smile twisted the swollen disease-ravaged face. "It's always better to talk than to fight." "I hope the Matabele agree." Zouga returned his smile and they went on into the vertical crack in the granite, passing swiftly through shadow into the sunlight once more, and below them was a basin in the granite. It was ringed by high ramparts of broken granite, and bare of any cover.

Zouga looked down into the little circular valley and all his soldier's instincts were offended.

"It's a trap," he said. "A natural killing-ground from which there is no escape." "Let us go down," said Mr. Rhodes.

In the middle of the basin was a low anthill, a raised platform of hard yellow clay, and instinctively the little group of white men made their way towards it.

"We might as well make ourselves comfortable," Mr. Rhodes panted, and sank down upon it. The other members of the party sat on each side of him only Zouga remained upon his feet.

Though he kept his face impassive, his skin itched as the insects of dread crawled over it. This was the heart of the Matopos Hills, the sacred hills of the Matabele, their stronghold in which they would be at their bravest and most reckless. It was folly to come unarmed into this place, to throw themselves upon the mercy of the most savage and bloodthirsty tribe of a cruel wild continent. Zouga stood with his empty hands clasped behind his back, and turned slowly upon his heel, surveying the wall of rock that hemmed them in. He had not completed his circle before he said quietly. "Well, gentlemen. Here they are!" Without a sound, with no spoken command, the imp is rose from their concealment, and formed a living barricade along the skyline. They stood in rank upon rank and shoulder to shoulder, completely encompassing the rocky valley. It was impossible to count their multitude, impossible even to guess at their thousands, but still the silence persisted as though their eardrums were filled with wax.

Do not move, gentlemen" Zouga cautioned them, and they waited in the sunlight. They waited while the silent impassive imp is stood guard about them. Now no bird called and not the lightest breeze stirred the forest of feather headdresses and the kilts of fur.

At last the ranks opened and a group of men came through. The ranks closed behind them, and the little group came on down the path.

These were the great princes of Kumalo, the Zanzi of royal blood but how they were reduced.

They were all of them old men, with the hoar frost of the years sparkling in their woolly caps of hair and in their beards. They were starved to the thinness of pariah dogs, with their warrior's muscles stringy and wasted, and their old bones showing through. Some of them had dirty bloodsoaked bandages bound over their wounds, while the limbs and faces of others were scabbed with the sores that starvation and deprivation breed.

Gandang led them, and a pace behind him on either hand came his half-brothers Babiaan and Somabula, and behind them again the other sons of Mashobane, wearing the head rings of honour and carrying every one of them the broad silver killing blades and the tall rawhide shields that gave them their name' Matabele "the People of the Long Shields."

Ten paces in front of Zouga, Gandang stopped and grounded his shield, and the two men stared deeply into each other's eyes, and both of them were thinking of the day they had first met thirty years and more before.

"I see you, Gandang, son of Mzilikazi,"Zouga said at last. "I see you, Bakela, the one who strikes with the fist." And behind Zouga Mr. Rhodes ordered calmly, "Ask him if it is to be war or peace." Zouga did not take his eyes from those of the tall emaciated and una

"Are the eyes still red for war?" he asked.

Gandang's reply was a deep rumble, but it carried clearly to every and una who followed him, and it rose up to the the ranks of warriors upon the heights.

"Tell Lo'dzi that the eyes are white," he said, and he stooped and laid his shield and his assegai upon the ground at his feet.

Two Matabele, dressed only in loincloths, pushed the steel coco pan along the narrow-gauge railway tracks. When they reached the tip, one of them knocked out the retaining pin and the steel pan swivelled and spilled its five-ton load of sugary blue quartz in the funnel-shaped chute. The rock tumbled and rolled into the sizing box, and piled on the steel grating where another dozen Matabele fell upon it with ten-pound sledgehammers, and broke it up so that it could fall through the grating into the stamp boxes below.

The stamps were of massive cast iron, hissing steam drove them in a monotonous see-saw rhythm, pounding the ore to the consistency of talcum powder. The roar of the stamps was ear-numbing.- A continuous stream of water, piped up from the stream in the valley below, sluiced the powdered ore out of the stamp boxes and carried it down the wooden gutters to the James tables.

In the low open-sided hut, Harry Mellow stood over the No. 1 table, and watched the flow of thick mud-laden water washing across the heavy copper sheet that was the tabletop. The top was inclined to allow the worthless mud to run to waste, and eccentric cams agitated the table gently to spread the flow and ensure that every particle of ore touched the coated surface of the table. Harry closed the screw valve, and diverted the flow of mud to the No. 2 table. Then he threw the lever and the agitation of the table ceased.

Harry glanced up at Ralph Ballantyne and Vicky who were watching him avidly, and he cocked a thumb to reassure them the thunderous roar of the stamps drowned all conversation here and then Harry stooped over the table once more. The tabletop was coated with a thick layer of quicksilver, and, using a wide spatula, Harry began scraping it off the copper and squeezing it into a heavy dark ball. One of the unique properties of mercury is its ability to mop up particles of gold the way that blotting paper sucks up ink.

When Harry had finished, he had a ball of amalgamated mercury twice the size of a baseball, that weighed almost forty pounds. He needed both hands to lift it. He carried it across to the thatched rondavel that served as laboratory and refinery for the Harkness Mine, and Ralph and Vicky hurried after him, and crowded into the tiny room behind him.

The three of them watched with utter fascination as the ball of amalgam began to dissolve and bubble in the retort over the intense blue flame of the primus stove.

"We cook off the mercury," Harry explained, "and condense it again, but what we have left behind is this." The boiling silver liquid reduced in quantity, and began to change in colour. They caught the first reddish-yellow promise, the gleam that has enchanted men for more than Six thousand years.

"Just look at it!" Vicky clapped her hands with excitement, shaking out her thick coppery tresses, and her eyes shone as though with a reflection of the lustre of the precious liquid that she was watching. The last of the mercury boiled away, and left behind a deep glowing puddle of pure gold. , Gold," said Ralph Ballantyne. "The first gold of the Harkness Mine." And then he threw back his head and laughed. The sound startled them. They had not heard Ralph laugh since he had left Bulawayo, and while they stared at him, he seized both of them, Vicky in one arm and Harry in the other, and danced them out into the sunlight.

They danced in a circle, and the two men whooped and leaped, Ralph like a highlander, and Harry like a Plains Indian, while the Matabele hammer-boys broke off their labours and watched them, first with astonishment, and then chuckling in sympathy.

Vicky broke out of the circle first, panting and holding the first bulge of her pregnant tummy in both hands.

"You are mad!" she laughed breathlessly. "Mad! Both of you! And I love you for it." The mix was fifty-fifty, half river-clay dug from the banks of the Khami and half yellow anthill clay, the adhesive qualities of which had been enhanced by the saliva of the termites which had carried it up through their subterranean tunnels to the surface. The clays were puddled in a pit beside the bottom well, the same well that Clinton Codrington, Robyn's first husband, and Jordan Ballantyne had dug together so long ago, even before the Charter Company's pioneers had first ridden into Matabeleland.

Two of the Mission converts cranked up each bucketful from the well, and spilled it into the mixing pit, another two shovelled in the clay and a dozen naked black children, led by Robert St. John, made a game out of trampling the clay to the correct consistency. Robyn St. John was helping pack the clay into the oblong wooden moulds, each eighteen inches by nine. A line of Mission boys and girls carried the filled moulds away to the drying ground, where they carefully turned out the wet bricks onto the beds of dry grass, and then hurried back with the empty moulds to have them refilled.

There were thousands of yellow bricks lying in long lines in the sun, but Robyn had calculated that they needed at least twenty thousand for the new church alone. Then of course they would have to cut all the timber and cure it, and in a month's time the thatch grass in the vleis would be tall enough to begin cutting.

Robyn straightened and placed her muddied yellow hand in the small of her back to ease the cramping muscles. A lock of grey-flecked hair had escaped from under the scarf she had knotted over her head, and there was a smear of mud down her cheek and neck, but the little tunnels of her own sweat were eroding this away and staining the high collar of her blouse with it.

She looked up at the burned-out ruins of the Mission, the charred roof beams had fallen in and the heavy rains of the last wet season had dissolved the unbaked brick walls into a shapeless hillock. They would have to re-lay every brick, and lift every rafter into place again, and the prospect of all that grinding, unremitting labour gave Robyn St. John a deep and exciting sense of anticipation. She felt as strong and alive as the young medical missionary who had first stepped onto this unforgiving African soil almost forty years before.

"Thy will be done, dear Lord," she said aloud, and the Matabele girl beside her cried happily, "Amen, Nomusa!" Robyn smiled at her, and was about to bend once more to the brick moulds, when she started, shaded her eyes, and then picked up her skirts and rushed down the track towards the river, running like a young girl.

"Juba," she cried. "Where have you been? I have waited so long for you to come home." Juba set down the heavy load she carried balanced on her head, and came lumbering to meet her.

"Nomusa!" She was weeping as she hugged Robyn to her. Great fat oily tears slid down her cheeks and mingled with the sweat and mud on Robyn's face.

"Stop crying, you silly girl," Robyn scolded her lovingly. "You will make me start. just look at you! How skinny you are, we will have to feed you up! And who is this?" The black' boy dressed only in a soiled loincloth came forward shyly.

"This is my grandson, Tungata Zebiwe." "I did not recognize him, he has grown so big." "Nomusa, I have brought him to you so that you can teach him to read and to write." "Well, the first thing we will have to do is give him a civilized name. We shall call him Gideon and forget that horrible vengeful name." "Gideon," Juba repeated. "Gideon Kumalo. And you will teach him to write?" "We have a lot of work to do first," Robyn said firmly. "Gideon can go into the mud puddle with the other children and you can help me pack the moulds. We have to start all over, Juba, and build it all up from the beginning again." "I admire the grandeur and loneliness of the Matopos, and therefore I desire to be buried in the Matopos on the hill which I used to visit and which I called the "View of the World" in a square to be cut in the rock on the top of the hill and covered with a plain brass plate with these words thereon. "Here lie the remains of CECIL JOHN RHODES"." So when at last the pumping of his diseased heart ceased, he came to Bulawayo once more along the railroad that Ralph Ballantyne had laid. The special saloon coach in which his coffin rode was draped with purple and black, and at each town and siding along the way, those whom he had called "my Rhodesians" brought wreaths to pile upon the casket. From Bulawayo the coffin was taken on a gun carriage into the Matopos Hills and the pure black bullocks that drew it plodded slowly up the rounded egg-shaped dome of granite that he had chosen.

Above the open sepulchre stood a tripod gantry, with block and chain at the peak, and around it a dense throng of humanity. elegant gentlemen, uniformed officers, and ladies with black ribbons on their hats. Then, farther out, there stretched a vast black sea of half-naked Matabele, twenty thousand come to see him go down into the earth. At their head were the indunas who had met him near this same hill to treat for peace. There were Gandang and Babiaan and Somabula, all of them very old men now.

Gathered at the head of the grave were the men who had replaced them in real power, the administrators of the Charter Company, Milton and Lawley, and the members of the first Rhodesian Council. Ralph Ballantyne was amongst them with his young wife beside him.

Ralph's expression remained grave and tragic as the coffin was lowered on its chains into the gaping tomb, and the bishop read aloud the obituary that Mr. Rudyard Kipling had composed. "It is his will that he look forth Across the world he won, The granite of the ancient north, Great spaces washed with sun. There shall he patient take his seat (As when the death he dared) And there await a people's feet In the paths that he prepared." As the heavy brass plaque was lowered into position, Gandang stepped out of the ranks of, the Matabele, and lifted one hand.

"The father is dead," he cried, and then in a single blast of sound, like the thunder of a tropical storm, the Matabele nation gave the salute they had never given to a white man before.

"Bayete!" they shouted as one man. "Bayete!" The salute to a king.

The funeral crowds dispersed, slowly, seemingly reluctantly. The Matabele drifted away like smoke amongst the valleys of their sacred hills, and the white folk followed the path down the face of the granite dome. Ralph helped Elizabeth over the uneven footing, and he smiled down at her.

"The man was a rogue, and you weep for him," he teased her gently.

"It was all so moving," Elizabeth dabbed at her eyes. "When Gandang did that-2

"Yes. He fooled them all, even those he led into captivity. Damn me, but it's a good thing they buried him in solid rock and put a lid on him, or he would have squared the devil and got out of it at the last moment." Ralph turned her out of the stream of people, of mourners who were following the path.

"I told Isazi to bring the carriage round to the back of the hill, we don't want to be caught in the crush." Under their feet the. granite was painted a vivid orange with lichen, and the little blue-headed lizards scuttled for cover in the crevices and then glared at them with their throats throbbing and the cockscomb crests of the monstrous heads fully erect. Ralph paused on the lower slope of the dome, where a twisted and deformed rusasa tree had found precarious purchase in one of the crevices and he looked back up at the peak.

"So he's dead at long last, but his Company still governs US. I have work to do yet, work that may take the rest of my life Then abruptly and uncharacteristically, Ralph shivered, although the sun was blazing hot.

"What is it, my dear?" Elizabeth turned to him with quick concern.

"Nothing," he said. "Perhaps I just walked over my own grave."

Then he chuckled. "We'd best go down now before Jon-Jon drives poor Isazi completely out of his mind." He took her arm and led her down to where Isazi had parked the carriage in the shade, and from a hundred paces they picked up the piping of Jonathan's questions and speculations, each punctuated with a demanding. "Uthini, Isazi? What do you say, Isazi?" And the patient reply. "Eh-heh, Bawu. Yes, yes, little Gadfly."

PART TWO.

The Land-Rover turned off the black-topped road, and as soon as it hit the dirt track, the pale dust boiled out from under its back wheels. It was an elderly vehicle, the desert-coloured paintwork was scored and scratched by thorn and branch down to the bare metal. Rock and sharp shale had bitten chunks of rubber out of the heavily lugged tyres.

The doors and the top were off and the cracked windshield lay flat on the bonnet, so that the wind swept over the two men in the front seat. Behind their heads stood the gun-rack. The forks, lined with foam rubber, held a formidable battery of weapons. two semi-automatic FN rifles, sprayed with dun and green camouflage paint, a short 9mm Uzi submachine-gun with the extra long magazine clipped on ready for instant use, and, still in its canvas slip-cover, a heavy Colt Sauer "Grand African" whose.458 magnum cartridge could knock a bull elephant off its feet. From the uprights of the gun-rack dangled haversacks containing spare clips and magazines, and a damp canvas water bottle

They swung harmoniously with each jolt and lurch of the Land-Rover.

Craig Mellow drove with his foot jamming the accelerator to the floorboards. Though the vehicle's body clattered and banged loosely, he had always serviced and tuned the engine himself, and the speedometer needle pressed against the stop pin at the end of the dial.