The Sunbird

The Sunbird

Born In Zambia and educated at Michaelhouse and Rhodes University, Wilbur Smith has lived all his life in Africa and his commitment to that continent is deep.

A full-time writer since 1964, he also finds time to travel out of Africa and enjoy his other interests - such as numismatics, wildlife photography and big game fishing. He and his wife make an annual safari into the dwindling wildernesses of Central Africa, and at other seasons he fishes by boat in the Indian Ocean for tuna and other game fish.

Wilbur Smith lives with his wife in Cape Town on the slopes of Table Mountain.

Also by

Wilbur Smith in Pan Books

When the Lion Feeds

The Dark of the Sun (The Mercenaries)

The Sound of Thunder

Shout at the Devil

Gold Mine (Gold)

The Diamond Hunters

Eagle in the Sky

Cry Wolf

A Sparrow Falls

Hungry as the Sea

First published 1972 by William Heinemann Ltd

This edition published 1974 by Pan Books Ltd,

Cavaye Place, London SW10 9PG, in association with

William Heinemann Ltd

13th printing

© Wilbur A. Smith

Printed in Great Britain by

Richard Clay (The Chaucer Press) Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Wilbur Smith

The Sunbird

Pan Books in association with William Heinemann

For my wife, Danielle

Part I

It cut across the darkened projection room and exploded silently against the screen - and I did not recognize it. I had waited fifteen years for it, and when it came I did not recognize it. The image was swirled and vague, and it made no sense to me for I had expected a photograph of some small object; a skull perhaps, or pottery, or an artefact, a piece of gold work, beads - certainly not this surrealistic pattern of grey and white and black.

Louren’s voice, tight with excitement, gave me the clue I needed. ‘Taken at thirty-six thou at six forty-seven on the fourth of Sept,’ that was eight days ago, ‘exposed in a 35 mm Leica.’

An aerial photograph then. My eyes and brain adjusted, and almost instantly I felt the first tickle of my own excitement begin as Louren went on in the same crisp tone.

‘I’ve got a charter company running an aerial survey over all my concession areas. The idea is to pick the strike and run of geographical formations. This photograph is only one of a couple of hundred thousand of the area - the navigator did not even know what he was photographing. However, the people in analysis spotted it, and passed it on to me.’

His face turned towards me, pale and solemn in the glare of the projector.

‘You can see it, can’t you, Ben? Just off centre. Top right quarter.’

I opened my mouth to reply, but my voice caught in my throat and I had to turn the sound I made into a cough. With surprise I found I was trembling, and my guts seethed with an amalgam of hope and dread.

‘It’s classic! Acropolis, double enclosure and the “phallic towers”.’ He was exaggerating, they were faint outlines, indistinct and in places disappearing, but the general shape and configuration was right.

‘North, I blurted. ’Where is north?‘

‘Top of picture - she’s right. Ben. Facing north. Could the towers be sun-orientated?’

I did not speak again. The reaction was coming swiftly now. Nothing in my life had been this easy, therefore this was suspect and I searched for the flaws.

‘Stratification,’ I said. ‘Probably limestone in contact with the country granite. Throwing surface patterns.’

‘Oh bull!’ Louren cut in, the excitement still bubbling in his voice. He jumped up and strode to the screen, picked up an ebony pointer from the lectern and used it to spot the cell-like stippling around the outline of what he was pleased to presume was the main enclosure. ‘You tell me where you’ve ever seen geological patterns like that.’

I didn’t want to accept it. I didn’t want to make myself vulnerable again with hope.

‘Perhaps,’ I said.

‘Damn you.’ He laughed now, and the sound was good for he did not often laugh these days. ‘I should have known you’d fight it. You are without doubt the most miserable bloody pessimist in Africa.’

‘It could be anything, Lo,’ I protested. ‘A trick of light, of shape and shade. Even conceding that it is man-made - it could be recent gardens or agriculture—’

‘A hundred miles from the nearest surface water? Forget it, Ben! You know as well as I do that this is the—’

‘Don’t say it,’ I almost shouted, and was out of the padded leather chair, across the projection room and had hold of his arm before I realized I had moved.

‘Don’t say it,’ I repeated. ‘It’s - it’s bad luck.’ I always stutter when I am excited, but it is the least of my physical disabilities and I have long ago ceased worrying about it.

Louren laughed again, but with the trace of uneasiness he shows whenever I move quickly or unleash the strength of my arms. He stooped over me now, and eased my fingers that were sunk into the flesh of his forearm.

‘Sorry - did I hurt you?’ I released the grip.

‘No. But he massaged his arm as he moved to the control panel and doused the projector, then turned the wall switch and we stood blinking at each other in the light.

‘My little Yiddish leprechaun,’ he smiled. ‘You cannot fool me. You are wetting yourself.’

I looked up at him, ashamed of my outburst now, but still excited.

‘Where is it, Lo? Where did you find it?’

‘I want you to admit it first. I want you to go out on a limb for once in your life. I want you to say it - before I’ll tell you another thing,’ he teased.

‘All right.’ I looked away and picked my words. ‘It looks, at first glance, quite interesting.’

And he threw back that great golden head and bellowed with bull laughter.

‘You’re going to have to do a lot better than that. Let’s try again.’

His laughter I cannot resist, and my own followed immediately. I was aware of its birdlike quality against his.

‘It looks to me,’ I wheezed, ‘as though you may have found it.’

‘You beauty!’ he shouted. ‘You little beauty.’

It was years since I had seen him like this. The solemn banker’s mask stripped away, the cares of the Sturvesant financial empire forgotten in this moment of promise and achievement.

‘Now tell me,’ I pleaded. ‘Where did you find it?’

‘Come,’ he said, serious again, and we went to the long table against the wall. There was a chart spread and pinned on the green baize. It was a high table, and I scrambled quickly on to a chair and leaned across it. Now I was almost on equal terms with Louren who stood beside me. We pored over the chart.

‘Aeronautical Series A. Southern Africa. Chart 5. Botswana and Western Rhodesia.’

I searched it quickly, looking for some indication - a cross, or pencil mark perhaps.

‘Where?’ I said. ‘Where?’

‘You know that I’ve got twenty-five thousand square miles of mineral concession down here south of Maun—’

‘Come on, Lo. Don’t try and sell me shares in Sturvesant Minerals. Where the hell is it?’

‘We’ve put a landing-strip in here that will take the Lear jet. Just finished it.’

‘It can’t be that far south of the gold series.’

‘It isn’t,’ Louren reassured me. ‘Throttle back, you’ll rupture something.’ He was enjoying himself tormenting me.

His finger moved across the chart, and stopped suddenly - my heart seemed to stop with it. It was looking better and better. The latitude was perfect, all the clues I had so painstakingly gathered over the years pointed to this general area.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Two hundred and twelve miles south-east of Maun, fifty-six miles from the south-western beacon of the Wankie game reserve, tucked below a curve of low hills, lost in a wilderness of rock and dry land scrub.’

‘When can we leave?’ I asked.

‘Wow!’ Louren shook his head. ‘You do believe it. You really do!’

‘Someone else could stumble on it.’

‘It’s been lying there for a thousand years - another week won’t—’

‘Another week!’ I cried in anguish.

‘Ben, I can’t get away before then. I’ve got the Annual General Meeting of Anglo-Sturvesant on Friday, and on Saturday I have business in Zürich - but I’ll cut it short, especially for you.’

‘Cut it altogether,’ I begged. ‘Send one of your bright young men.’

‘When somebody lends you twenty-five million, it’s only polite to go fetch the cheque yourself, not send the office boy.’

‘Christ, Lo. It’s only money - this is really important.’

For a moment Louren stared at me, the pale blue eyes bemused and reflective.

‘Twenty-five million is only money?’ He shook his head slowly and then wonderingly as though he had heard a new truth spoken. ‘I suppose you are right.’ He smiled, gently now, the smile of affection for a well-loved friend. ‘Sorry, Ben. Tuesday. We’ll fly at dawn, I promise you. We’ll recce from the air. Then land at Maun. Peter Larkin - you know him?’

‘Yes. very well.’ Peter ran a big safari business out of Maun. Twice I’d used him on my Kalahari expeditions.

‘Good. I’ve been on to him already. He will service the expedition. We will go in light and fast - one Land-Rover and a pair of three-ton Unimogs. I can only spare five days - and that’s a squeeze - but I’ll get a charter helicopter to fetch me out, and I’ll leave you to scratch around—’ As he talked Louren led me out of the projection room into the long gallery.

Sunlight spilled in through the high windows, giving good light to the paintings and sculptures that decorated the gallery. Here works of the leading South African artists mingled easily with those of the great internationals living and dead. Louren Sturvesant, and his ancestors before him, had spent money wisely. Even now in the urgency of the moment, my eyes were tugged aside by the soft fleshy glow of a Renoir nude.

Louren paced easily over the sound-deadening pile of Oriental carpets, and I matched him stride for stride. My legs are as long as his and as powerful.

‘If you turn up what we are both hoping for, then you can go in full-scale. A permanent camp, airstrip, assistants of your choice, a full crew, and any equipment you call for.’

‘Please God, let it happen,’ I said softly and at the head of the staircase we paused. Louren and I grinned at each other like conspirators.

‘You know what it could cost?’ I asked. ‘We might be digging for five or six years.’

‘I hope so,’ he agreed.

‘It could run into a couple of hundred thousand.’

‘It’s only money, like the man said.’ And again that great bull laugh started me off. We went down the staircase roaring and tittering, each in his own way. Elated and hyper-tense, we faced each other in the hall.

‘I’ll be back at seven-thirty Monday evening. Can you meet me at the airport, Alitalia flight 310 from Zürich? In the meantime you get your end arranged.’

‘I’ll need a copy of that photograph.’

‘I’ve already had an enlargement delivered by hand to the Institute. You have got a week to gloat over it,’ He glanced at the gold Piaget on his wrist. ‘Damn. I’m late.’

He turned to the doorway at the moment that Hilary Sturvesant came through it from the patio. She wore a short white tennis dress, and her legs were long and achingly beautiful. A tall girl with gold-brown hair hanging shiny and soft to her shoulders.

‘Darling, you aren’t going?’

‘I’m sorry, Hil. I meant to tell you I wouldn’t be staying for lunch, but Ben will need somebody to hold him down.’

‘You’ve shown him?’ She turned and came to me, stooped to kiss me on the lips easily and naturally, with not the least sign of revulsion, and then she stepped back and smiled full into my eyes. Every time she does that she makes me her slave for another hundred years.

‘What do you think of it, Ben? Is it possible?’ But before I could answer Louren had slipped his arm about her waist and they both smiled down at me.

‘He’s doing his nut. He’s frothing at the mouth and doing back flips. He wants to rush into the desert now, this minute.’ Then he pulled Hilary to him and kissed her. For a long minute they were oblivious of my presence as they embraced. They are, for me, the epitome of beautiful woman and manhood, both of them tall and strong and well-favoured. Hilary is younger than he is by twelve years, his fourth wife and the mother of only the youngest of his seven children. In her middle twenties she has the maturity and poise of a much older woman.

‘Give Ben some lunch, my darling. I’ll be home late.’ Louren pulled away from the embrace.

‘I’ll miss you,’ Hilary said.

‘And I you. I’ll see you Monday, Ben. Cable Larkin if you thing of anything special we will need. So long, partner.’ And he was gone.

Hilary took my hand and led me out on to the wide flagged patio. Five acres of lawn and dazzling flowerbeds sloped gently down to the stream and artificial lake. Both tennis courts were occupied and a shrieking mob of small near-naked bodies thrashed the water of the swimming-pool to sun-sparkled white. Two uniformed servants were laying out a cold buffet on the long patio trestle-table, and with a small squirming twinge of dread I saw a half-dozen young matrons is tennis dress sprawled in the lounging chairs beside the outside bar. They were flushed with exertion, perspiration dampened the crisp white dresses and they sipped at long dewy, fruit-laden glasses of Pimms No 1.

‘Come,’ said Hilary, and led me towards them. I steeled myself, trying to draw myself up to an extra inch of height as we moved towards the group.

‘Girls - we’ve got a man to keep us company. I want you to meet Dr Benjamin Kazin. Dr Kazin is the Director of the Institute of African Anthropology and Prehistory. Ben, this is Marjory Phelps.’

I turned to each of them as she spoke their names, and I acknowledged the slightly over-effusive greetings; giving each my eyes and voice, they are my good things. It was as difficult for them as it was for me. You do not expect your hostess to spring a hunchback on you with the pre-lunch drinks.

The children rescued me. Bobby spotted me and came at a run, shrieking, ‘Uncle Ben! Uncle Ben!’ She flung her cold wet arms around my neck and pressed her sopping bathing-costume to my new suit, before dragging me away to become overwhelmed by the rest of the Sturvesant brood and their hordes of young friends. I find it easier with children, they either do not seem to notice or they come straight out with it. ‘Why do you walk all bent over like that?’

For once I was not very good value. I was too preoccupied to give them my full attention - and soon they drifted away, all but Bobby - for she is ever loyal. Then Hilary took over from her stepdaughter and I was returned to the league of young mothers where I made a better impression. I cannot resist pretty women, once the first awkwardness wears off. It was three o’clock before I left for the Institute.

Bobby Sturvesant pours Glen Grant malt whisky with the same heavy thirteen-year-old hand she uses to pour Coca-Cola. Consequently I floated into the Institute feeling very good indeed.

The envelope was on my desk marked ‘Private and Confidential’ with a note pinned to one corner, ‘This came for you at lunchtime. Looks exciting! Sal.’

With a quick stab of jealousy I inspected the seal of the envelope. It was unbroken. Sally hadn’t been into it but I knew it must have taken all her self-control for she has an almost neurotic curiosity. She calls it a fine inquiring scientific mind.

I guessed she would arrive within the next five minutes so I found the packet of Three X peppermints in my top drawer and slipped one into my mouth to smother the whisky fumes before I opened the envelope and drew out the glossy twelve-by-twelve enlargement, switched on the desk light and adjusted it and the magnifying table lens over the print. Then I looked around at the hosts of the past that crowd my office. All four walls are lined with shelves, and from floor to shoulder height - my shoulder height - these are filled with books: the tools of my trade, all bound in brown and green calf-skin, and titled in gold leaf. It is a big room, and there are many thousands of volumes. The shelves above the books carry the plaster busts of all the creatures that preceded man. Head and shoulders only. Australopithecus, Proconsul, Robusta, Rhodesian Man, Peking - all of them up to Neanderthal and finally Cro-Magnon himself - homo sapiens sapiens in all his glory and infamy. The shelves to the right of my desk are laden with busts of all the typical ethnic types found in Africa, Hamites, Arabs, pygmies, the negroids, Boskops, bushmen, Griqua, Hottentot and all the others. They watched me attentively, with their bulging glass eyes as I addressed them.

‘Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘I think we are on to something good.’ I only speak aloud to them when I am excited or drunk, and now I was more than a little of each.

‘Who are you talking to?’ asked Sally from the doorway, making me leap in my seat. It was a rhetorical question, she knew damn well who I was talking to. She lounged against the jamb, her hands thrust deeply into the pockets of her grubby white dust-coat. Dark hair drawn back with a ribbon from the deep bulging forehead, large green eyes well spaced beside the pert nose. High cheekbones, wide sensual smiling mouth. A big girl with long well-muscled legs in the tight-fitting blue jeans. Why do I always like them big?

‘Good lunch?’ she asked, starting the slow sidling approach across the carpet towards my desk that would put her in position to check what was going on. She can read documents upside-down, as I have proved to my cost.

‘Great,’ I answered, deliberately covering the photograph with the envelope. ‘Cold turkey, lobster salad, smoked trout, and a very good duck and truffles in aspic.’

‘You bastard,’ she whispered softly. She loves good food, and she had noticed my play with the envelope. I don’t allow her to talk to me like that, but then I can’t stop her either.

Five feet from me she sniffed, ‘And peppermint-flavoured malt whisky! Yummy!’

I blushed, I can’t help it. It’s like my stutter - and she burst out laughing and came to perch on the edge of my desk.

‘Come on, Ben.’ She eyed the envelope frankly. ‘I’ve been bursting since it arrived. I would have steamed it open - but the electric kettle is broken.’

Dr Sally Senator has been my assistant for two years, which is coincidently the exact period of time that I have been in love with her.

I moved aside making room for her behind the desk and uncovered the photograph. ‘All right,’ I agreed, ‘let’s see what you make of it.’

She squeezed in beside me, her upper arm touching my shoulder - a contact that shivered electrically through my whole body. In two years she had become like the children, she didn’t seem to notice the hump. She was easy and natural, and I had a timetable worked out - in another two years our relationship would have ripened. I had to go slowly, very slowly, so as not to alarm her, but in that time I would have accustomed her to the thought of me as a lover and husband. If the last two years had been long - I hated to think about the next two.

She leaned over the desk peering into the magnifying lens, and she was still and silent for a long time. Reflected light was thrown up into her face, and when she at last looked up her expression was rapt, the green eyes sparkled.

‘Ben,’ she said. ‘Oh Ben - I’m so glad for you!’ Somehow her easy acceptance and presumption annoyed me.

‘You are jumping the gun,’ I snapped. ‘There could be a dozen natural explanations.’

‘No.’ She shook her head, smiling still. ‘Don’t try and knock it. It’s true, Ben, at last. You’ve worked so long and believed so long, don’t be afraid now. Accept it.’

She slipped out from behind the desk and crossed quickly to the shelf of books under the label ‘K’. There are twelve volumes there that bear the author’s name ‘Benjamin Kazin’. She selected one, and opened it at the fly-leaf.

‘Ophir,’ she read, ‘by Dr Benjamin Kazin. A personal investigation of the prehistoric gold-working civilization of Central Africa, with special reference to the city of Zimbabwe and to the legend of the ancients and the lost city of the Kalahari.’

She came to me smiling. ‘Have you read it?’ she asked. ‘It’s quite entertaining.’

‘There’s a chance, Sal. I agree. Just a chance, but—’

‘Where does it lie?’ she cut in. ‘In the mineralized series, as you predicted?’

I nodded. ‘Yes, it’s in the gold belt. But it could, it just could, produce so much more than Langebeh and Ruwane.’

She grinned triumphantly, and bent over the lens again. With her finger she touched the indian ink arrow in the corner of the photo that gave the northerly bearing.

‘The whole city—’

‘If it is a city,’ I cut in.

‘The whole city,’ she repeated with emphasis, ‘faces north. Into the sun. With the acropolis behind it - sun and moon, the two gods. The phallic towers - there are four, five - six. Perhaps seven of them.’

‘Sal, those aren’t towers, they are just dark patches on a photograph taken from 36,000 feet.’

‘Thirty-six thousand!’ Sal’s head jerked up. ‘Then it’s huge! You could fit Zimbabwe into the main enclosure half a dozen times.’

‘Easy, girl. For God’s sake.’

‘And the lower city outside the walls. It stretches for miles. It’s enormous, Ben - but I wonder why it’s crescent-shaped like that?’ She straightened up, and for the first time - the very first wonderful time - she spontaneously threw her arms around my neck and hugged me. ‘Oh, I’m so excited, I could die. When do we leave?’

I didn’t answer, I hardly heard the question, I just stood there and revelled in the feel of her big warm breasts pressing against me.

‘When?’ she asked again, pulling back to look into my face.

‘What?’ I asked. ‘What did you say?’ I was both blushing and stuttering - and she laughed.

‘When do we leave, Ben? When are we going to find your lost city?’

‘Well,’ I considered how to phrase it delicately, ‘Louren Sturvesant and I will go in first. We leave on Tuesday. Louren didn’t mention an assistant - so I don’t think you will be coming along on the recce.’

Sally stepped back and placed her clenched fists on her hips, she looked at me unkindly and asked with deceptive gentleness: ‘Do you want to bet on that?’

I like reasonable odds when I do bet, so I told Sally to pack. A week was too long for the job, for she is a professional and travels light. Her personal effects filled a single small valise and a shoulder-strapped carry-all. Her sketchbooks, and paints, were more bulky, but we pooled our books to avoid duplication. My photographic equipment was another big item, and then the sample bags and boxes together with my one canvas case made a formidable pile in the corner of my office. We were ready in twenty-four hours, and for the next six days we killed time by arguing, agonizing, squabbling and poring over the photograph which was starting to lose a little of its gloss. When our tensions built up to explosion point, then Sally would lock herself in her own office and try to work on the translation of the rock-engraving from Drie Koppen or the painted symbols from the Witte Berg. Rock-paintings, engravings and the translation of the ancient writings are her speciality.

I would wander fretfully around the public rooms, trying to find dust on the exhibits, dreaming up some novel way of displaying the treasures that filled our warehouse and upstairs storerooms, counting the names in the visitors’ book, playing guide to parties of schoolchildren - doing anything but work. Finally I would go upstairs to tap on Sally’s door. Sometimes it was, ‘Come in, Ben.’ And then again it might be, ‘I’m busy. What do you want?’ Then I would drift through to spend an hour in the African languages section with my dour giant, Timothy Mageba.

Timothy started at the Institute as a sweeper and cleaner, that was twelve years ago. It took me six months to discover that apart from his own southern Sotho he spoke sixteen other dialects. I taught him to speak English fluently in eighteen months, to write it in two years. He matriculated two years later, graduated Bachelor of Arts in another three, Master’s degree in the required further two years - and he is working on his doctorate in African languages.

He now speaks nineteen languages including English, which is one more than I do, and he is the only man I know, apart from myself - spent nine months in the desert, living with the little yellow men - who speaks the dialects of both the northern and Kalahari bushmen.

For a linguist, he is a peculiarly silent man. When he does speak it is in basso profundo which matches well his enormous frame. He stands six foot five inches tall and he is muscled like a professional wrestler and yet he moves with the grace of a dancer.

He fascinates me, and frightens me a little. His head is completely hairless, the rounded pate shaven and oiled to gleam like a midnight-black cannon ball. The nose broad and flat with flaring nostrils, the lips a thick purple black and behind them gleam big strong white teeth. From behind this impassive mask a chained animal ferocity glowers through the eye slits, and once in a while flashes like distant summer lightning. There is a satanical presence about him, despite the white shirt and dark business suit he wears, and though for twelve years I have spent much of my time in his presence I have never fathomed the dark depths beneath those dark eyes and darker skin.

Under my loose surveillance he runs the African languages department of the Institute. Five younger Africans, four men and a girl, work under him and, so far, they have published authoritative dictionaries of the seven main African languages spoken in southern Africa. They have also accumulated, written, and taped material to keep them busy for the next seven years.

On his own initiative, with just a little of my help and encouragement, he has published two volumes of African history which have raised a storm of hysterical abuse from white historians, archaeologists and reviewers. As a child Timothy was apprenticed to his grandfather, the witchdoctor and historical custodian of the tribe. As part of his initiation into the mysteries his grandfather placed Timothy under hypnosis and taped the entire tribal history on his brain. Even now, thirty years later, Timothy is able to throw himself into a trance and establish total recall of this mass of legend, folklore, unwritten history and magical doctrine. Timothy’s grandfather was tried by an unsympathetic white judge and hanged for his part in a series of ritual murders the year before Timothy had completed his training and been entered into the priesthood. However, his legacy to Timothy is a formidable mountain of material - much of it palpably spurious, a great deal of it unpublishable as being either too obscene or top explosive, and the remainder fascinating, puzzling or downright scary.

I have drawn on much of Timothy’s unpublished material for my own book Ophir - particularly those unscientific and ‘popular’ sections which deal with the legend of the ancients, a race of fair-skinned golden-haired warriors from across the sea, who mined the gold, enslaved the indigenous tribes, built walled cities and flourished for hundreds of years before vanishing almost without trace.

I am aware that Timothy edits the information he passes on to me - some of it is too secret, the taboos which surround it too powerful to disclose to other than an initiate of the mysteries. I am sure that much of this withheld information relates to the legend of the ancients. I, however, never abandon my attempts to milk him.

On the Monday morning of Louren’s return from Switzerland, Sally was so overwrought by the possibility that Louren would veto her inclusion in the preliminary expedition that her company was unbearable. To escape her and to kill the last long waiting hours, I went down to Timothy.

He works in a tiny room - we are a little pressed for space at the Institute - which is congested with neatly stacked pamphlets, books, folders, and piles of loose paper that reach almost to the ceiling, and yet there is room for my chair. This is a long-legged affair like a bar-room stool. For although my legs and arms are regulation size, or better, my trunk is squashed and humped so that from the seat of an ordinary chair I have trouble seeing over the top of a desk.

‘Machane! Blessed one!’ Timothy rose with his usual greeting as I entered. According to Bantu lore those of us with club feet, albino pigmentation, squint eyes, and humped backs are blessed by the spirits and endowed with physic powers. I derive a sneaky sort of pleasure from this belief, and Timothy’s greeting always gives me a lift.

I hopped up on my chair, and began a desultory conversation which flicked from subject to subject and changed from language to language. Timothy and I are proud of our talents - and I suppose we do show off a little. There is no other man living, of this I am convinced, who could follow one of our conversations from beginning to end.

‘It will be strange,’ I said at last in I forget what language, ‘not to have you along on a journey. It will be the first time in ten years, Timothy.’

He was immediately silent and wary. He knew I was going to start again on the lost city. I had shown him the photograph five days before, and had been pumping him steadily ever since for some significant comment. I changed into English.

‘Anyway, you are probably not missing anything. Another groping for shadows. God knows there have been many of those. If only I knew what to look for.’

I broke off and froze with expectancy. Timothy’s eyes had glazed. It is a physical thing, an opaque blueish film seems to cover the eyeballs. His head sinks down on the thick corded column of the neck, his lips twitch - and the goose flesh runs up my arms and the hair on the back of my neck fans erect.

I waited. As often as I had seen it I could never shake off the supernatural thrill of watching Timothy going into trance. Sometimes it is involuntary - a word, a thought will trigger it, and the reflex is almost instantaneous. Then again it can be a deliberate act of auto-hypnosis, but this involves preparation and ritual.

This time it was spontaneous, and I waited eagerly knowing that if the material was taboo it would be but a few seconds only before Timothy broke the spell with a deliberate effort of will.

‘Evil—’ he spoke in the quavering, high-pitched voice of an old man. The voice of his grandfather. A little spittle wet the thick purple lips,‘—an evil to be cleaned from the earth and from the minds of men, for ever.’

His head jerked, the conscious mind intervening, his lips worked loosely. The brief internal struggle - and suddenly bis eyes cleared. He looked at me and saw me.

‘I’m sorry,’ he murmured in English, turning his eyes away now. Embarrassed by the involuntary display, and the need to exclude me. ‘Would you like some coffee, Doctor? They have repaired the kettle at last.’

I sighed. Timothy had switched off, there would be no more communication that day. He was closed up and defensive. To use his own expression, he had ‘turned nigger’ on me.

‘No thanks, Timothy.’ I looked at my watch and slipped off the stool. ‘Still some last-minute things to do.’

‘Go in peace, Machane, and the spirits guide your feet.’ We shook hands.

‘Stay in peace, Timothy, and if the spirits are kind I will send for you.’

Standing on the rail of the coffee bar in the main hall of Jan Smuts Airport I had a good view of the entrance to the international terminal.

‘Damn it,’ I swore.

‘What is it?’ Sal asked anxiously.

‘BYM - a whole platoon of them.’

‘What are BYM?’

‘Bright young men. Sturvesant executives. There, you see the four of them beside the bank counter.’

‘How do you know they are Sturvesant men?’ she asked.

‘Haircuts, short back and sides. Uniforms, dark cashmere suits and plain ties. Expressions, tense and ulcer-ridden but poised to blossom as the big man appears.’ And then I added in an unaccustomed fit of honesty, ‘Besides, I recognize two of them. Accountants. Friends of mine - have to prise money out of them every time I want a roll of toilet paper for the Institute.’

‘Is that him?’ asked Sally, and pointed.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s him.’

Louren Sturvesant came out of the doors of the international terminal, the first of the Zürich flight through customs and immigration, the airport public relations officer trotting to keep pace with him. Two other BYM a pace behind him on either side. Probably a third taking care of his luggage. The four waiting men broke into smiles that seemed to light the hall and hurried forward in order of seniority for a brief handclasp and then fell into formation around Louren. Two of them running interference ahead of him, the others closing in at either hand. The public relations officer fell back bewildered to the tail of the field, and Anglo-Sturvesant drove across the crowded floor like an advancing Panzer division.

In their midst Louren stood out by a golden curly head, his sun-bronzed features grim in contrast to the artificial smiles around him.

‘Come on!’ I caught Sally’s hand and dived into the crowd. I am good at this. I go in at the level of their legs - and the pressure from this unexpected level cleaves them open like the waters of the Red Sea. Sally ran through behind me like the Israelites.

We intercepted Anglo-Sturvesant at the glass exit doors, and I dropped Sally’s hand to crack the inner circle. I broke through at the first attempt and Louren nearly tripped over me.

‘Ben.’ I saw immediately how tired he was. Pale beneath the gold skin, purply smudges under the eyes - but a warm smile cleared the fatigue for a moment. ‘I’m sorry. I should have warned you not to come. Something has come up. I am on my way to a meeting now.’

He saw the expression on my face, and clasped my shoulder quickly.

‘No. Don’t jump to conclusions. It’s still on. Be at the airfield at five o’clock tomorrow morning. I’ll meet you there. I must go now. I’m sorry.’

We shook hands quickly.

‘All the way, partner?’ he asked.

‘All the way,’ I agreed, grinning at the schoolboy inanity and then they swept on by and disappeared through the glass doors.

We were halfway back to Johannesburg before Sally spoke.

‘Did you ask him about me? Is it fixed?’

‘There wasn’t time, Sal. You saw that. He was so rushed.’

Neither of us spoke again until I turned into the grounds of the Institute and parked the Mercedes beside her little red Alfa in the empty car park.

‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ I asked.

‘It’s late.’

‘It isn’t. You won’t sleep anyway - not tonight. We could have a game of chess.’

‘All right.’

I let us in at the front door and we went through the public rooms, crowded with glass cases and wax figures, to the private staircase that led to my office and flat.

Sal lit the fire and set out the chessmen while I made coffee. When I came back from the kitchen she was sitting cross-legged on a tooled leather pouffe, brooding over the ivory and ebony chessboard. I caught my breath at the fresh dimension of her loveliness that the light and setting presented to me, She wore a patchwork poncho, as brilliantly coloured as the Oriental carpets strewn on the floor about her - and the gentle sidelighting glowed on the soft sun-touched olive of her skin. Watching her, I thought my heart might burst.

She looked up with those big soft eyes. ‘Come,’ she said, ‘let’s play.’

If I can weather the storm of her first lightning, volatile attacks then I can smother and wear her down with pawn play and superior development. She calls it the creeping death.

At last she toppled her queen with a little groan of exasperation and stood up to pace restlessly about the room, hugging her own shoulders under the vivid poncho. I sipped coffee and watched her with covert pleasure until suddenly she swirled and faced me with long legs astride and clenched fists on her hips, her elbows tenting the poncho around her.

‘I hate the bastard,’ she said in a tight, strangled voice. ‘A big arrogant god-man. I knew the type as soon as I saw him. Why, in the name of all that’s holy, does he have to come with us? If we make any significant discovery, you can guess who will hog all the glory.’

I knew immediately she was talking of Louren - and I was startled by the acid and gall in her tone. Later I would remember it, and know the reason. But now I was stunned and then angry.

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ I demanded.

‘The face, the walk, the flock of idolaters, the condescending air with which he dispenses favours, the immense overpowering conceit of the man—’

‘Sally!’

‘The casual, unthinking cruelty of his presumption—’

‘Stop it, Sally.’ I was on my feet now.

‘Did you see those poor little men of his - shaking with fright?’

‘Sally, you’ll not talk of him like that - not in front of me.’

‘Did you see yourself? One of the gentlest, kindest, most decent men I have ever known. One of the finest brains I have ever been privileged to work with. Did you see yourself, scampering and tail-wagging - God, you were rolling on your back at his feet - offering your belly to be tickled—’ She was almost hysterical now, crying, tears of anger running down her face, shaking, white-faced. I hated you - and him! I hated you both. He was demeaning you, making you cheap and, and—‘

I could not answer her. I stood stricken and numb - and her temper changed. She lifted her hand and pressed it to her mouth. We stared at each other.

‘I must be mad,’ she whispered. ‘Why did I say those things? Ben, oh Ben. I’m sorry. So very sorry.’

And she came and knelt before me, her arms went around my body and she hugged me to her. I stood like a statue. I was cold with fear, dread of what was to come. For although this was what I had long prayed for, yet it had come so suddenly, without a moment’s warning, and now I had been thrust far beyond the point of no return, into unknown territory. Sally lifted her head, still clinging to me, and looked up into my face.

‘Forgive me, please.’

I kissed her, and her mouth was warm and salty with tears. Her lips opened under mine, and my fear was gone.

‘Make love to me, Ben - please.’ She knew instinctively that I must be led. She took me to the couch.

‘The lights,’ I whispered harshly, ‘please switch off the lights.’

‘If that’s what you want.’

‘Please, Sally.’

‘I will,’ she said. ‘I know, my darling.’ And she switched off the lights.

Twice in the darkness she cried out: ‘Oh, please Ben -you’re so strong. You are killing me. Your arms are - your arms.’

Then not long after, she screamed, an incoherent cry without form or meaning, and my own hoarse cry blended with it. Then there was only the ragged sound of our breathing in the darkness.

I felt as though my mind had broken free from my body and floated in warmth and darkness. For the first time in my life I was completely at rest, contented and secure. There seemed to be so many first times with this woman. When at last Sally spoke, her voice came as a small shock.

‘Will you sing for me, Ben?’ And she switched on the lights on the table beside the couch. We blinked at each other, owl-eyed in the muted glow. Her face was flushed rosily, and her hair a dark unruly tumble.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I want to sing.’ I went through into my dressing-room and took the guitar from the cupboard, and as I closed the door there was my reflection in the full-length mirror.

I looked with full attention, for a stranger stood before me. The coarse black hair framed a square face, with dark eyes and girlishly long lashes, a heavy simian jaw and a long pale forehead. The stranger was smiling at me, half shy - half proud.

I glanced down the strange, telescoped body over which I had agonized since childhood. The legs and arms were overdeveloped, thick and knotted with slabs of muscle, the limbs of a giant. Instinctively I glanced at the body-builder’s weights in the corner of the room - and then back to the mirror. I was perfect around the edges - but in the centre was this squat, humped, toad-like torso, covered in a shaggy pelt of curly black hair. I looked at that remarkable body, and again for the first time in my life, I did not hate it.

I went back to where Sally still lay on the soft monkey-skin kaross that covered the couch. I hopped up, and squatted cross-legged beside her with the guitar in my lap.

‘Sing sad - please, Ben,’ she whispered.

‘But I’m happy, Sal.’

‘Sing a sad song - one of your own sad ones,’ she insisted, and as I picked out the first notes she closed her eyes. I was grateful, for I had never had a woman’s body to gloat over. I leaned forward and as I touched the singing strings, I caressed the long smooth length of her with my eyes, the pale planes and rounds and secret shadows. Flesh that had cradled mine - how I loved it! I sang:

‘In the lonely desert of my soul,

The nights are long.

And no other traveller journeys there

O’er the lonely oceans of my mind

The winds blow strong—‘

And in a short while a tear squeezed out between her closed lids for there is a magic in my voice which can call up tears or laughter, I sang until my throat was rough and my picking finger tender. Then I lay the guitar aside and went on looking at her. Without opening her eyes she turned her head slightly towards me.

‘Tell me about you and Louren Sturvesant,’ she said. ‘I would like to understand about that.’

The question took me by surprise, and I was silent for a moment. She opened her eyes.

‘I’m sorry, Ben. You don’t have to—’

‘No,’ I answered quickly. ‘I’d like to talk about it. You see, I think you were wrong about him. I don’t think you can apply ordinary standards to them - the Sturvesants. Louren and his father, when he was alive, that is. My own father worked for them. He died of a broken heart a year after my mother. Mr Sturvesant had heard of my academic record, and of course my father had been a loyal employee. There are a few of us, the Sturvesant orphans. We have nothing but the best. I went to Michaelhouse, the same school as Louren. A Jew at a church school, and a cripple at that - you can imagine how it was. Small boys are such utterly merciless little monsters, Louren dragged me out of the urinal where four of them were trying to drown me. He beat the daylights out of them, and after, that I was his charge. I have been ever since. He finances this Institute, every penny of it. At first it was something just for me, but little by little he has become more and more involved It’s his hobby and my life - you will be surprised how knowledgeable he is. He loves this land, just as you and I do. He is caught up in its history and future more than you or I will ever be-’ I broke off, for she was staring at me in a way that seemed to pierce my soul.

‘You love him, Ben, don’t you?’

I blushed then, and dropped my eyes, ‘How do you mean that—’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Ben,’ she interrupted impatiently. ‘I don’t mean queer. You just proved the opposite. But I mean love, in the biblical sense.’

‘He has been father, protector, benefactor and friend to me. The only friend I’ve ever had. Yes, you could say I love him.’

She reached up and touched my cheek.

‘I’ll try to like him. For your sake.’

It was still dark when we drove in through the gates of Grand Central Airport. Sal was huddled into her coat, silent and withdrawn. I was light-headed and brittle-feeling from a night of love and talk without sleep. There were floodlights picking out the private Sturvesant hangar at the east end of the runway, and as we approached I saw Louren’s Ferrari parked in his reserved bay, and beside it another half-dozen late model saloons gleaming in the floods.

‘Oh God.’ I groaned. ‘He’s got the whole team with him.’

I parked beside the Ferrari, and Sal and I began unloading our equipment from the boot. She picked up her easel and slung it over her shoulder, then with a huge folder of parchment in one hand and a box of paints in the other she ducked through the wicket gate into the hangar. I should have gone with her, of course, but I was so absorbed in checking my luggage that it was three or four minutes before I followed her. By then it was too late.

As I stepped through the low aperture into the brightly lit hangar, my stomach churned with alarm. The gleaming sharklike silhouette of the Lear jet formed a backdrop for a tension-charged tableau. Seven of Louren’s bright young men clad in the regulation casual garb - smartly cut safari suits and fleece-lined car coats - stood in a discreet circle about the two protagonists.

Louren Sturvesant very rarely loses his temper, and when he does it is only after severe and prolonged provocation. However, in less than two minutes Sally Senator had managed to achieve what many experts before her had never accomplished. Louren was in a towering, shaking, tight-lipped rage, which had his seven BYM awed and slack-mouthed.

Sally had dropped her load of equipment on the concrete floor and was standing with clenched fists on her hips and bright explosions of colour burning in her cheeks, trading Louren glare for glare.

‘Dr Kazin told me I could come.’

‘I don’t care if the goddam King of Woody England told you that you could come. I’m telling you that the plane is full -and that I have no intention of dragging a female with me on the first break I’ve had in six months.’

‘I didn’t realize it was a pleasure jaunt—’

‘Will somebody throw this bitch out of here?’ shouted Louren, and the BYM roused themselves and made a tentative advance. Sally picked up the heavy wooden easel, and held it in both hands. The advance petered out. I scuttled into the void and grabbed Louren’s arm.

‘Please, Lo. Can we talk?’ I almost dragged him into the flight office - although I thought I detected a twinge of relief from Louren as I rescued him.

‘Look. I’m terribly sorry about this, Lo. I didn’t have a chance to explain—’

Five minutes later Louren strode out of the office, and without a glance at either Sal or the frozen group of BYM, climbed into the jet and a moment later his head appeared beside that of the pilot in the window of the cockpit as he adjusted his earphones.

I went to the junior BYM and gave him the word of the law.

‘Mr Sturvesant asked me to tell you to arrange a charter to Gaberones for yourself.’ Then I turned to the others, ‘I wonder if you could give us a hand with the luggage.’

While a gang of the most highly paid stevedores in Africa carried in Sally’s luggage, she preened with shameless triumph. I managed to whisper a harsh warning.

‘Back seat,’ I snapped. ‘And try to make yourself invisible. You will never know how close that was. Not only did you nearly miss the trip, but you almost talked yourself out of a job.’

We had been airborne for ten minutes before the pilot came back along the aisle. He stopped beside us and looked at Sal with open admiration.

‘Jesus, lady.’ He shook his head. ‘I would have given a month’s salary not to miss that! You were great.’

Sally, who had been suitably subdued since my warning, immediately perked up.

‘With boys that size I don’t even spit out the bones,’ she declared, and a couple of BYM who heard it swivelled in their seats with startled expressions.

The pilot laughed delightedly and turned to me. ‘The man wants to speak to you, Doctor. I’ll change places with you.’

Louren was chit-chatting with flight control over the radio, but he waved me into the co-pilot’s seat and I squeezed behind the wheel and waited. Louren ended his transmission and turned to me.

‘Breakfast?’

‘I’ve eaten.’

He ignored it and passed me a leg of cold turkey, and a huge slice of chicken and egg pie from the hamper beside him.

‘Coffee in the thermos. Help yourself.’

‘Did you get your £25 million loan?’ I asked with a full mouth.

‘Yes - despite a last-minute panic.’

‘I didn’t think you needed to borrow, Lo. Have you fallen on hard times?’

‘Oil prospecting.’ He laughed at my suggestion. ‘Risk money. I prefer to gamble with other people’s money, and play the certainties with my own.’ He changed the subject smoothly. ‘Sorry about the detour. I am dropping the boys off at Gaberones. They’ve got a series of meetings with the Botswana government. Routine stuff, just settling the details of the concession. Anyway, it’s not too far off our course. Then we can press on alone.’ He filled his mouth with turkey and spoke around it. ‘Met report is lousy, Ben. Thick cloud down on the deck over the whole northern area. Happens about once in three years that you get low overcast in the desert - but today’s the day. Anyway we’ll have a stab at picking up the hills and the ruins, no harm done if we can’t though. We’ll not learn anything more from the air.’ He was relaxed and easy, not a trace of his early rage, he could switch it on or off as he wished, and we talked and laughed together. I knew his mood, it was holiday and release. He was truly looking forward to it. Lost city or no lost city, it was an excuse to get out into the wild country that he loved.

‘This is like the old days. God, Ben, how long is it since we got away together? Must be all of ten years. Remember the canoe trip down the Orange River - when was that? 1956 or 7? And the expedition to find the wild bushmen.’

‘We must do it more often, Lo.’

‘Yes,’ he said, really meaning it; as though he had a choice.

‘We must, but there is so little time. It’s running out so quickly - I’ll be forty years old next year.’ And his voice was wistful. ‘God, if only we could buy time with money!’

‘We’ve got five days,’ I said, heading the conversation away from the quicksands, and he picked it up eagerly. It was another half an hour before he mentioned Sally.

‘That assistant of yours, the prize fighter. What’s her name?’ And I told him.

‘Are you having it away with her?’ he asked. It was said so naturally, so casually, that for an instant I did not realize what had been said. Then I felt my vision blur with red rage, felt the blood pound in my temples and heat my throat and face. I think I could have killed him then, but instead I lied in a thick, shaken voice.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Just as well,’ he grunted. ‘She’s a wild one. Well, as long as she doesn’t mess up the trip.’ If only I had told him then, but it was too private a thing - too precious and fragile to despoil with words, especially the words he had chosen. Then the moment was passed, and I was sitting trembling and shaky as he talked on lightly about the five days ahead.

As we flew the cloud solidified beneath us, congealing into a dirty greyish blanket that stretched away in all directions to the horizon. We crossed the border between South Africa and the independent African state of Botswana. At Gaberones the ceiling was down to a thousand feet when we landed. Despite Louren’s assurance that we would be speedily airborne once more, there was a deputation of senior government officials, and an invitation to drinks and food in a private dining-room of the airport. Hot, sticky weather with intent white faces talking softly and greedily to shiny intent black faces - all of them sweating in the heat and whisky fumes, and the thick swirls of cigar and cigarette smoke.

Three hours more before the Lear jet with just four of us aboard slashed up into the cloud cover, then burst through into the high bright sunshine.

‘Wow!’ said Louren. ‘An expensive little party. That black bastard Ngelane has just raised the price of his honour by another 20,000. I’ll have to square him, of course. He could squash the whole deal. It has to go through his ministry.’

Louren flew northwards with the map on his lap and a stopwatch in his hand. His eyes darted from compass to airspeed indicator and back to the watch.

‘Okay, Ben. You’d better let Roger take over the controls. We’ll go down into the porridge and take a look-see.’

With Louren and the pilot, Roger van Deventer, at the controls and Sal and I braced in the doorway of the cockpit behind them, the jet slanted down towards the floor of dirty cloud. A few wisps of the stuff flickered past and then suddenly the sun was gone and we were enfolded in the dark grey mist.

Roger was flying, his attention completely on the instruments panel, and as the needle of the altimeter slowly unwound I saw his hands tightening on the wheel. We dropped steadily lower through the grey filth. Now Roger pulled on the flaps and airbrakes and throttled back. The three of us staring forward and down for the first glimpse of the earth. Down we sank, and still down. The pilot’s tension turned to active fear. I could smell it, the rank greasy tang of it. It was infectious. If he, the hardened fly-bird, was afraid, then I was prepared to be terrified. I knew suddenly that rather than risk Louren’s wrath he would fly us straight into the ground. I decided to intervene, and opened my mouth. It was unnecessary.

‘Overflown,’ grunted Louren. checking the stopwatch. ‘Ease up, Rog.’

‘Sorry, Mr Sturvesant, there is no bottom to this stuff.’ Roger said it like a sigh, and lifted the Lear’s nose. He opened the throttle and let off the airbrakes.

‘No go!’ I murmured with relief. ‘Forget it, Lo. Let’s go on to Maun.’

Louren turned to look back at me, and instead looked into Sally’s face. She stood behind his shoulder. I could not see her expression, but I could guess what it was by the tone in which she asked softly, ‘Chicken?’

Louren stared at her a moment longer, then he grinned. I could have turned Sally over my knee and beat that luscious backside to a pulp. The warm active fear I had felt the minute before, turned now to cold numbing terror for I had seen Louren grin like that before.

‘Okay, Roger,’ he said, slipping the map and stopwatch into the pocket beside his seat. ‘I’ve got her.’ And the Lear stood on one wing as he pulled her around in a maximum-rate turn. It was so finely executed that Sally and I merely sagged a little at the knees as gravity caught us.

He levelled out and flew for three minutes on even keel, retracing our course. I stole a glance at Sally’s face. It was bright-eyed, and flushed with excitement - she was staring ahead into the impenetrable murk.

Again Louren banked the aircraft steeply and came out of the turn flying the reciprocal of our previous course and eased the nose downwards. This was no cautious groping with flaps and half throttle. Louren flew us in boldly and fast. Sally’s hand groped for mine and squeezed. I was afraid and angry with both of them, I was too old for these children’s games, but I returned her grip. As much for my own comfort as hers.

‘Christ, Lo,’ I blurted. ‘Take it easy, will you!’ And no one took the least notice of me. Roger was frozen in his seat, hands gripping the armrests, staring ahead. Louren was deceptively relaxed behind the controls, as he hurtled us into mortal danger - and Sally, damn her, was grinning all over her face and hanging on to my icy hand like a child on a roller coaster.

Suddenly we were into rain, pearly strings and snakes of it writhing back over the rounded Perspex windscreen. I tried to protest again, but my voice stuck somewhere in my parched throat. There was wind outside now. It buffeted the sleek gleaming body of the Lear, and the wings rocked. I felt like crying. I didn’t want to die now. Yesterday would have been fine, but not after last night.

Before my own reflexes had even registered, Louren had seen the ground and caught the headlong plunge of the jet. With a soft shudder that threw Sally and me gently together he pulled us up level with the earth.

This was even more terrifying than the blind fall through space. The dark hazy outlines of the low scrubby tree-tops flicked by our wingtips close enough to touch, while ahead of us through the rain-mist an occasional big baobab tree loomed and Louren eased the jet over its greedily clutching branches. Seconds that seemed like a lifetime passed, then abruptly the filthy curtains of rain and cloud were stripped aside and we burst into a freak hole in the weather.

There before us, full in our path and washed by watery sunlight, stood a rampart of red stone cliffs. It was only the merest fleeting glimpse of red rock rushing down on us, then Louren had dragged the jet up on its tail and the rock seemed almost to scrape our belly as we slid over the crest and arrowed upwards into the clouds with the force of gravity squashing me down on buckling knees.

No one spoke until we had plunged out into the sunlight high above. Sally softly disengaged her hand from mine as Louren turned in his seat to look at us. I noticed with grim satisfaction that both he and Sally were looking slightly greenish with reaction. They stared at each other for a moment. Then Louren snorted with laughter.

‘Look at Ben’s face!’ he roared and Sally thought that was very funny. When they finished laughing, Sally asked eagerly.

‘Did anyone see the ruins? I just got a glimpse of the hills, but did anyone see the ruins?’

‘The only thing I saw,’ muttered Roger, ‘was my own hairy little ring.’ And I knew how he felt.

The cloud was breaking up by the time we reached Maun. Roger took us in through a gap and put us down sedately, and Peter Larkin was waiting for us.

Peter is one of the very few left. An anachronism, complete with fat cartridges looped to the breast of his bush jacket and his trousers tucked into the tops of mosquito boots. He has a big red beefy face and huge hands, the right index finger scarred by the recoil of heavy rifles. His single level of communication is a gravelly, whisky-raddled shout. He has no feelings and very little intelligence, so consequently never experiences fear. He has lived in Africa all his life and never bothered to learn a native language. He uses the lingua franca of South Africa, the bastard Fanagalo, and emphasizes his points with boot or fist. His knowledge of the animals on which he preys is limited to how to find them and where to aim to bring them down. Yet there is something appealing about him in an elephantine oafish way.

While his gang of hunting boys loaded our gear into the trucks he shouted amiable inanities at Louren and me.

‘Wish I was coming with you. Got this bunch of yanks arriving tomorrow - with a big sack of green dollars. Short notice, you gave me, Mr Sturvesant. But I’m giving you my best boys. Good rains in the south, be plenty of game in the area. Should run into gemsbok this time of year. And jumbo, of course, shouldn’t be surprised if you get a simba or two—’

The coy use of pet names for game animals sickens me, especially when the intention is to blast them with a high-velocity rifle. I went to where Sally was supervising the packing of our gear.

‘It’s after one o’clock already,’ she protested. ‘When do we get cracking?’

‘We’ll probably push through to the top end of the Makarikari Pan tonight. It’s about 200 miles on a fair road. Tomorrow we’ll bash off into the deep bush.’

‘Is Ernest Hemingway coming with us?’ she asked, eyeing Peter Larkin with distaste.

‘No such luck,’ I assured her. I was trying to form some idea of those who were accompanying us. Two drivers, their superior status evident in the white shirts, long grey slacks and shod feet, with paisley-patterned scarves knotted at the throat. One for each of the three-ton trucks. Then there was the cook, carrying a lot of weight from his sampling, skin glossy from good food. Two gnarled and grey-headed gunboys who had jealously taken out Louren’s sporting rifles from the other luggage, had unpacked them from their travelling cases, and were now fondling and caressing them lovingly. These were the elite and took no part in the frenzied scurryings of the camp boys as they packed away our gear. Bamangwatos most of them, I listened briefly to their chattering. The gunboys were Matabele, as was to be expected and the drivers were Shangaans. Good, I would understand every word on this expedition.

‘By the way. Sal,’ I told her quietly, ‘don’t let on that I speak the language.’

‘Why?’ She looked startled.

‘I like to monitor the goings-on and if they know I understand they’ll freeze.’

‘Svengali!’ She pulled a face at me. I don’t think I’d have laughed if anyone else had called me that. It was a bit too close to the bone. We went to shake hands and say goodbye to Roger, the pilot.

‘Don’t frighten the lions,’ Roger told Sally. Clearly she had made another conquest. He climbed into the jet and we stood in a group and watched him taxi out to the end of the runway and then take off and wing away southwards.

‘What are we waiting for?’ asked Louren.

‘What indeed,’ I agreed.

Louren took the wheel of the Land-Rover and I climbed in beside him. Sally was in the back seat with the gunbearers on the bench seats.

‘With you two I feel a damned sight safer on the ground,’ I said.

The road ran through open scrubland and baobab country. Dry and sun-scorched. The Land-Rover lifted a pale bank of drifting dust, and the two trucks followed us at a distance to let it settle.

There were occasional steep, rock-strewn dry river-beds to cross, and at intervals we passed villages of mud and thatched huts where the naked pot-bellied piccaninnies lined the side of the road to wave and sing as though we were royalty. Sally soon ran out of pennies, throwing them to watch the resulting scramble, and clapping her hands with delight. When she started tossing our lunch out of the window I pulled my guitar from its case to distract her.

‘Sing happy, Ben,’ Sally instructed.

‘And bawdy,’ added Louren. I think it was to needle her, or perhaps test her.

‘Yes,’ Sally agreed readily. ‘Make it meaty and happy.’

And I started with the saga of the Wild, Wild Duck, with Sal and Louren shouting the chorus at the end of each verse.

We were children going on a picnic that first day out, and we made a good run of it to the pan. The sun was a big fat ball of fire amongst the tattered streamers of cloud on the horizon when we came out on the edge of the pan. Louren parked the Land-Rover and we climbed out to wait for the trucks and stared out with silent awe across that sombre, glistening plain that stretched away to the range of the eye.

When the trucks arrived they spilled their load of black servants before they had properly stopped, and I timed it at seventeen and a half minutes to when the tents were pitched, the camp-beds made up and the three of us sitting around the fire, drinking Glen Grant malt on the rocks of glistening ice that dewed the glasses. From the cooking fire drifted the tantalizing smell of the hunter’s pot as our cook reheated it and tossed in a dash more garlic and oregano. They were a good, cheerful gang that Larkin had given us and after we had eaten they gathered around their own fire fifty yards away and sweetened the night with the old hunting songs.

I sat and listened half to them, and half to the involved and heated argument between Sal and Louren. I could have warned her that he was playing the devil’s advocate, needling her again, but I enjoyed the interplay of two good minds. Whenever the discussion threatened to degenerate into personal abuse and actual physical violence, I intervened reluctantly and herded them back to safety.

Sally was staunchly defending the premise of my book Ophir that postulated an invasion of southern central Africa by Phoenician or Carthaginian colonizers in about 200 BC and which flourished until about AD 450, before disappearing abruptly.

‘They were not equipped for a major voyage of discovery as early as that,’ Louren challenged. ‘Let alone a colonizing…’

‘You will find, Mr Sturvesant, that Herodotus records a circumnavigation of Africa in the reign of King Necho. It was led by six Phoenician navigators as early as 600 BC or thereabouts. They started at the apex of the Red Sea and in three years returned through the Pillars of Hercules.’

‘A single voyage,’ Louren pointed out.

‘Not a single voyage, Mr Sturvesant. Hanno sailed from Gibraltar to a point south in the west coast of Africa in about 460 BC, a voyage from which he returned with bartered ivory and gold sufficient to whet the appetites of all the merchant adventurers.’

Still Louren attacked her dates. ‘How do you get a date of 200 BC, when the very earliest carbon-datings from the foundations of Zimbabwe are mid-fifth century AD and most of them are later?’

‘We are not concerned with Zimbabwe, but with the culture that preceded it,’ Sally came back at him. ‘Zimbabwe could have been built towards the end of the ancients reign, probably only occupied for a short time before they disappeared; that would fit neatly with your carbon-dating of around AD 450. Besides the carbon-dating from the ancient mines at Shala and Inswezwe show results at 250 and 300 BC.’ Then she ended it with fine feminine logic. ‘Anyway, carbon-dating isn’t that accurate. It could be out by hundreds of years.’

‘The mines were worked by the Bantu,’ declared Louren. ‘And Caton-Thomas - and of course, more recently, Summers - said—’

Fiercely she attacked Louren. ‘Did the Bantu, who only probably arrived in the area about AD 300 suddenly conceive of a brilliant prospecting talent which enabled them to locate the metal lodes where not a scrap of it showed in the ore as visible gold or copper? Did they at the same time develop engineering know-how that enabled them to remove 250,000,000 tons of ore from rock at depth - remember they had never demonstrated these talents before - and did they abruptly forget or cease to use them for another thousand years?’

‘Well, the Arab traders - they may have—’ Louren began but Sally rode over him without a check.

‘Why did they mine it at such risk and expenditure of energy? Gold has no value to the Bantu - cattle are their standard of wealth. Where did they learn how to dress and use rock for building? The Bantu had never done it before. Suddenly the art was fully fledged and highly skilled and then instead of becoming more refined, the art deteriorated rapidly and then died out.’

With assumed reluctance Louren retreated steadily before her onslaughts, but he made his final stand when my own theory of incursion from the west instead of the east came under discussion. Louren had read the views and arguments of all my many detractors and critics and he repeated them now.

The accepted theory was that the point of entry was from the Sofala coast, or the mouth of the Zambezi. I had put forward the theory, based on the evidence of early texts and extensive excavations of my own, that a Mediterranean people left that sea through the Pillars of Hercules, and voyaged steadily down the western coast of Africa, probably establishing trading stations on the Gold, Ivory and Nigerian coasts, until their southward explorations led them into an unpeopled vacuum. I guessed at a river mouth long since dried and silted or altered in its course and depth in the present day. A river that drained what then would have been the huge lakes of Makarikari, Ngami, and others long since disappeared, shrivelled by the progressive desiccation of southern Africa. They entered the river, possibly the Cunene or the Orange, journeyed up it to the source, and from there sent their metallurgists overland to discover the ancient mines of Manica - and who knows but they discovered the diamonds in the gravel of the lakes and rivers, and certainly they would have hunted the vast herds of elephant that roamed the land. Sufficient wealth to justify the establishment of a city, a great walled fortress and trading station. Where would they site this city? Clearly at the limit of water-borne travel. On the shores of the farthest lake. Makarikari, perhaps? Or the lake that overflowed the present boundaries of the great salt pan.

Sally and Louren argued with increasing acrimony and bitterness. Sally called him ‘an impossible man’, and he countered with ‘madam know-it-all’. Then suddenly Louren capitulated and the next minute all three of us were joyously anticipating the discovery of the lost city of Makarikari.

‘The lake would have spread at least fifty miles beyond the boundaries of the present pan,’ Louren pointed out. ‘Only a hundred years ago Burchell describes Lake Ngami as an inland sea, and nowadays it’s a puddle you can jump across without straining yourself. It’s altogether probable that the ancient lake extended to the foot of the hills on which our ruins are placed. We have plenty of evidence of the gradual desiccation and drying up of southern Africa, read Cornwallis Harris’ description of the forests and rivers which no longer exist.’

‘Ben.’ Sally grabbed my arm with excitement. ‘The crescent-shape of the city, do you remember me puzzling on it? It could be the shape of the ancient harbour with the two following the shoreline!’

‘God,’ Louren whispered. ‘I can hardly wait for tomorrow.’

It was after midnight, and the whisky bottles had taken a terrible beating before Louren and Sally went off to their tents. I knew I could not sleep so I left the camp, passing the fire around which lay the blanket-cocooned bodies of our servants, and I walked out onto the surface of the pan. The stars lit the salt a ghastly grey, and it crunched crisply with each pace I took. I walked for a long time, stopping once to listen to the distant roaring of a lion, from the edge of the bush. When I returned to the camp a lantern still burned in Sally’s tent, and her silhouette was magnified against the pale canvas, a huge, dark portrait of my love. She was reading, sitting cross-legged upon her camp-bed, but as I watched she reached across and extinguished the lantern.

I waited awhile, gathering my courage, then I went to her tent, and my heart threatened to hammer its way out of its malformed rib-cage.

‘Sal?’

‘Ben?’ she answered my whisper softly.

‘May I come in?’ She hesitated before she replied.

‘All right-just for a minute.’

I went into the tent, and in the gloom her nightdress was a pale blur. I groped for her face, and touched her cheek.

‘I came to tell you that I love you,’ I said softly, and I heard her little catch of breath in the dark. When she answered her voice was gentle.

‘Ben,’ she whispered. ‘Dear, sweet Ben.’

‘I would like to be with you tonight.’

And it seemed to me there was regret in her voice as she replied, ‘No, Ben. Everyone would know about it. I don’t want that.’

The morning started off as the previous day had ended. Everybody was in high spirits, laughing at the breakfast table. The servants sky-larked as they broke camp and repacked the truck sand by seven o’clock we had left the road and were following the edge of the pan.

The Land-Rover leading and the trucks following our tracks through scrub and rank grass, and across the dry ravines which meandered down to the pan.

We had been going for an hour when I saw a flash of pale movement among the trees ahead of us, and three stately gemsbok broke out onto the open pan and trotted in single file away from us. They moved heavily, like fat ponies, the pale mulberry of their coats and the elaborate black and white face masks standing out clearly against the grey of the pan surface.

Louren slammed the brake on the Land-Rover, and with the smoothly executed timing of the professional the old Matabele gunbearer put the big .375 Magnum Holland Holland into Louren’s hand and he was gone, running doubled-up behind the fringe of grass that lined the edge of the pan.

‘Is he going to kill them?’ asked Sally in her little-girl voice. I nodded and she went on, ‘Why-but why?’

‘It’s one of the things he likes doing.’

‘But they are so beautiful,’ she protested.

‘Yes,’ I agreed. Out on the pan, about six hundred yards from the Land-Rover, the gemsbok had stopped. They were standing broadside to us. Staring at us intently with heads held high, and long slender horns erect.

‘What’s he doing?’ Sal pointed at Louren who was still running along the edge of the pan.

‘He’s playing the rules,’ I explained. ‘It’s an offence to fire within 500 yards of a vehicle.’

‘Jolly sporting,’ she muttered, biting her lip and glancing from Louren to the distant gemsbok. Then suddenly she had jumped from the Land-Rover and clambered up onto the engine bonnet. She cupped her hands around her mouth and yelled.

‘Run, you fools. Run, damn you!’

She snatched her hat and waved it over her head, jumping up and down on the bonnet and howling like a banshee. Out on the pan the gemsbok erupted into startled flight, galloping diagonally away from us in a bunch. I glanced at Louren’s small figure, and saw him drop into a sitting position with elbows braced on his knees, head cocked over the telescopic sight. The rifle jerked, and smoke spurted from the muzzle -but it was a second or two before the flat report of the shot reached us. Out on the pan the leading gemsbok slid over his nose and rolled in a drift of white dust. Louren fired again, and the second animal tumbled with legs kicking to the sky. The last gemsbok ran on alone.

Behind me the old gunbearer spoke to the other in Sindebele. ‘Hou! This is much man.’

Sally climbed down off the bonnet, and sat silently while I drove to where Louren waited. He handed the rifle to the gunbearer, and as I relinquished the wheel to him the bitter tang of burnt cordite filled the cab of the Land-Rover. He glanced at Sally. ‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘I prefer a running shot.’

‘Why didn’t you kill all three of them?’ Her tone was neutral, without rancour.

‘You are only allowed two on a licence.’

‘Christ,’ said Sally in a voice that now reeked of anger and outrage, ‘how bloody touching. It’s not often you meet a true gentleman.’

And Louren drove us out to where the dead animals lay. While the servants skinned and butchered the carcasses. Sally remained in the back seat with her face averted, her hat pulled down low over her forehead, and her eyes glued to a book.

I stood beside Louren in the bright sunlight, that was intensified by the glare of the white salt surface, and watched the gunboys cut the incisions in the skin and flay the gemsbok with the skill of a pair of Harley Street surgeons.

‘You might have warned me we had one of them on this trip,’ Louren told me bitterly. ‘Am I ever regretting having given in to you and letting her come along!’

I didn’t reply and he went on. ‘I’ve a bloody good mind to send her back to Maun on one of the trucks.’ The suggestion was so unworkable that it didn’t give me even a twinge, and Louren went on immediately. ‘She’s your assistant - try and keep her under control, will you!’

I moved away, giving him time to recover his temper, and took the map-case from the seat beside Sally. She didn’t look up from her book. I walked around the vehicle and spread the aeronautical large-scale map on the bonnet of the Land-Rover, and within two minutes Louren was with me. Navigation is one of his big things, and he fancies himself no end.

‘We’ll leave the pan here,’ he pointed to where a dry riverbed joined the eastern extremity of the pan, ‘and strike in on a compass-bearing.’

‘What kind of going will we meet, I wonder.’

‘Sand veld, like as not. I’ve never been in there before.’

‘Let’s ask the drivers,’ I suggested.

‘Good idea.’ Louren called the two of them across and the gunboys, who had by now finished the skilled work and were leaving the rest to the camp boys, joined us as was their right.

‘This is where we want to go.’ Louren pointed it out on the map. ‘These hills here. They haven’t got a name marked, but they run in line with the edge of the pan, like this.’

It took a moment or two for the drivers to figure out their bearings on the chart, and then a remarkable change came over both of them. Their features dissolved into blank masks of incomprehension.

‘What kind of country is it between the pan and the hills?’ Louren asked. He had not sensed the change in them. The drivers exchanged furtive glances.

‘Well?’ asked Louren.

‘I do not know that country. I have never heard of these hills,’ Joseph, the elder driver, muttered, and then went on to give himself the lie. ‘Besides there is much sand, and there are river-beds which one cannot cross.’

‘There is no water, agreed David, the second driver. ’I have never been there. I have never heard of these hills either.‘

‘What do the white men seek?’ asked the old gimboy in Sindebele. It was obvious that maps meant nothing to him.

‘They want to go to Katuba Ngazi,’ the driver explained quickly. They were all convinced by now that neither Louren nor I had mastery of the language, and that they could speak freely in front of us. This then was the first time I heard the name spoken. Katuba Ngazi - the Hills of Blood.

‘What have you told them?’ demanded the gunbearer.

‘That we do not know the place.’

‘Good,’ the gunbearer agreed. ‘Tell them that there are no elephant there, that the wild animals are south of the pan.’ The driver dutifully relayed this intelligence, and was disappointed in our obvious lack of dismay.

‘Well,’ Louren told them pleasantly, ‘you will learn something today. For the first time you will see these hills.’ He rolled up the map. ‘Now get the meat loaded and let us go on.’

In five minutes the whole tone of the expedition had changed. Sally and the entire staff were all in the deepest depression. The smiles and horseplay were gone, there were sulky faces and meetings in muttering groups. The tempo of work dropped to almost zero, and it took almost half an hour to load the butchered gemsbok. While this was happening I led Louren away from the cluster of vehicles out of earshot and quickly told him of the exchange between the African servants.

‘Hills of Blood! Wonderful!’ Louren enthused. ‘It means that almost certainly they know about the ruins - there is probably a taboo on them.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘But now we are going to have to watch for attempts to sabotage the trip. Look at them.’ We turned to watch the slow-motion, almost somnambulistic movements of our staff. ‘My guess is that it’s going to take longer to reach the Hills of Blood than we allowed for.’

We got off the pan once more, for the going is suspect with soft places beneath the crust that will bog a vehicle, and we followed the firm but sandy ground along the edge. We crossed another of the steep ravines, after having scouted for a place where the banks were flattened, and drove on for twenty minutes before we realized that neither of the trucks were following us. After waiting ten minutes, with both Louren and I fuming impatiently, we turned back and retraced our course to the dry river-bed.

One truck was hanging half over the edge of the ravine, one front wheel and one rear wheel not touching earth, but its belly heavily grounded. The other truck was parked nearby, and fourteen grown men were sitting or standing around in various attitudes of relaxation without making the least attempt to free the stranded truck.

‘Joseph,’ Louren called the driver. ‘How did this happen?’

Joseph shrugged his shoulders disinterestedly, but he was having difficulty hiding his satisfaction.

‘All right, gentlemen, let’s get it out,’ Louren suggested with heavy irony. Half an hour later, despite the ladylike efforts of all fourteen of them, and despite Joseph’s hearty clashing of gears and desperate engine racing and stalling, the truck still hung over the edge of the ravine. Finally they all climbed out of the ravine and looked at Louren and me with interest.

‘Okay, Ben?’ Louren turned to me as he began to strip his bush jacket.

‘All right, Lo,’ I agreed. I was delighted to see how well Louren had taken care of himself. His body looked rock-hard, and denuded of fatty tissue. At six foot two he carried a mass of muscle whose outlines beneath the skin were unblurred.

I kept my shirt on. My body, although it has the same utility as Louren’s, is not so good to look at.

‘Front end first,’ Louren suggested.

The truck had been unloaded, petrol tank about half filled, I estimated the front end weight at a little over two thousand pounds. I windmilled my arms as I looked at the problem, loosening up cold muscles. The servants looked puzzled, and one of them giggled. Even Sally put aside her book and climbed out of the Land-Rover to watch.

Louren and I went to the front of the truck and stooped to it, placing our hands carefully, bending at the knee, spreading our legs a little.

‘All the way, partner?’

‘All the way, Lo,’ I grinned back at him, and we began the lift. I started slow, just taking up the slack in my muscles, bringing on the strain evenly and letting it build up in shoulders, thighs and belly. It was a dead unmoving mass and I started to burn the reserves, feeling the tension turn to pain and my breathing start to scald my throat.

‘Now,’ grunted Louren beside me, and I let it all come, rearing back against it with my vision starting to star and pin-wheel. It came away smoothly in our hands, and I heard the gasps and startled exclamations from the watchers.

We lifted the front of the truck clear of the ravine, went around to the back and did the same there. Then we started to laugh, a little shakily at first, but building up to a full gale. Louren put his arm around my shoulder and led me back to face our retinue of retainers who were looking discomforted and uneasy.

‘You are—’ Louren told them, still laughing, ‘—a bunch of frail old women and giggling virgins. Translate that for them, Joseph.’

I noticed that Joseph gave them a correct rendition of this pleasantry.

‘And as for you, Joseph, you are a fool.’ Louren stepped away from me towards Joseph, one quick dancing step, and hit him with an open hand across the side of the head. The sound of it was shockingly loud, and the force of it spun Joseph fully around in a tight circle before throwing him to the ground. He sat up groggily, with a thin trickle of blood running out of the corner of his mouth where teeth had cut into the thick under lip.

‘You see that I am still laughing,’ Louren pointed out to his startled audience. ‘I am not even angry yet. Think a while on what may happen to anyone who makes me really angry.’

The truck was reloaded with alacrity and we went on.

‘Well,’ said Sally, ‘we can be sure of full cooperation for the rest of this trip. Why didn’t the big white bwana use a sjambok, rather than soiling his hands?’

‘Tell her, Ben.’ Louren did not look around at either of us, while I told Sally quickly about the campaign of deliberate obstruction that we had run into.

‘I’m sure Louren didn’t enjoy hitting the man. Sal. But he ditched the truck deliberately. We’ve got three and a half days left to get to these Hills of Blood, and we can’t afford any more tricks.’

Sally immediately forgot her concern for Joseph. ‘Hills of Blood,’ she gloated. ‘My God, it conjures up visions of human sacrifice and—’

‘More likely it’s merely the red colour of the cliffs,’ I suggested.

‘And this taboo thing.’ She ignored me. ‘It must be because of the ruins! Oh God, I can feel it in my blood - temples stuffed with treasures, relics and written records of a whole civilization, tombs, weapons—’

‘You will notice my assistant’s unbiased, unromantic and thoroughly scientific approach,’ I pointed out to Louren, and he grinned.

‘It irks me like hell, but for once I feel the way she does,’ Louren admitted.

‘For once that makes you smart, dearie,’ Sally told him tartly.

It was two in the afternoon before we reached the point on the eastern extremity of the pan where we were to cut off on compass for the hills, and almost immediately it became apparent that we would not reach them that day. The going was heavy, sand-veld clutched at the wheels of the vehicles and reduced our rate of progress to a low-gear slog. Half a dozen times the trucks bogged in the thick sand, and had to be dragged out by the four-wheel transmission of the Land-Rover. Each time this happened there was a profuse offering of apologies from the driver and crew concerned.

The sand had absorbed all traces of the recent rains, but they showed in the new growth of green that decked the thorn and acacia trees - and more dramatically in the display of wild flowers that were spread everywhere in carpets and thick banks.

Their seeds and bulbs had lain dormant for three long years of drought, waiting for this time of plenty - and now the bright crimson of King Chaka’s fire burned brilliantly among the fields of Namaqua daisies. Star lilies, Ericas, golden Gazanias and twenty other varieties made a royal show, and helped to lessen the frustrations of our snail’s progress.

At every enforced halt, I left the cursing and hustling to Louren, and wandered away from the vehicles with my camera.

Sunset found us still fifteen miles from the hills, and when I climbed into the top branches of the flat-topped acacia under which we camped, I could see their low outlines on the eastern horizon. The cliffs caught the last slanted rays of the sun, and glowed orange-red. I sat in the fork of the main trunk and watched them until the sun was gone and the hills melted into the dark sky.

A strange mood gripped me as I watched the far hills. A mystic sense of pre-destiny filled me with a languid melancholy - a sense of unease and disquiet.

When I climbed down into the camp, Louren sat alone by the fire, staring into the flames and drinking whisky.

‘Where’s Sally?’ I asked.

‘Gone to bed. In a sulk. We got into a discussion about blood sports and beating up blacks.’ Louren glanced at her tent which glowed with internal lantern light. There was no singing from the servants’ fire as Louren and I ate grilled gemsbok liver and bacon, washed down with warm red Cape wine. We sat in silence for a while after we had eaten, and finished the wine.

‘I’m bushed,’ Louren said at last, and stood up. ‘I’ll just call Larkin. I promised to check in every second night. See you in the morning, Ben.’

I watched him cross to the Land-Rover and switch on the two-way radio set. I heard Larkin’s boozy voice through the buzz and crackle of static. I listened for a few minutes, while Louren made his report. Then I stood up also and moved away from the camp-fire.

Restless, and still under the spell of my mood of disquiet, I wandered into the dark again. The gemsbok carcasses had attracted a pack of hyena to the camp, and they giggled and screeched out among the thorn trees. So I kept close to camp, passing Sally’s tent and pausing for a while to draw comfort from her nearness, then walked on towards the servants’ fire. My feet made no sound in the soft sand, and one of the old gunbearers was speaking as I approached. He had the attention of all the others who squatted in a circle about the low fire. His words came to me clearly, and stirred my memory. I felt the tingle of them run along my spine, and the ghost fingers stroked my arms and neck bringing the hair erect.

‘This evil to be cleaned from the earth and from the minds of men, for ever.’

The words were exactly those that Timothy Mageba had spoken - the same words, but in a different language. I stared fascinated at the lined and time-quarried features of the old Matabele. It was as though he sensed my scrutiny for he looked up and saw me standing in the shadows.

He spoke again, warning them. ‘Be careful, the spider is here,’ he said. They had named me for my small body and long limbs. His words released them from the spell that held them, they shuffled their feet and coughed, glancing at me. I turned and moved away, but the old Matabele’s words stayed with me. They troubled me, increasing my restless mood.

Sally’s tent was dark now, and Louren’s also. I went to my own bed and lay awake far into the night, listening to the hyenas and pondering what tomorrow would bring. One thing was certain, by noon we would know if the patterns on the photograph were natural or man-made, and with that thought I at last fell asleep.

We could see the hills from the front of the Land-Rover by ten the following morning. They showed orange-red beyond the tops of the taller acacias, stretching across our front, higher at the centre of our horizon then dwindling in size as they strung out on either hand.

I took over the driving from Louren while he pored over map and photograph, directing me in towards the highest point of the cliffs. There was a distinctive clump of giant candelabra euphorbia trees on the skyline of the cliff - and these showed up clearly in the photograph. Louren was using them to orientate our approach.

The cliffs were between two and three hundred feet high, their exposed fronts furrowed and weather-worn, rising almost sheer to the crests. Later I was to find that they were a form of hardened sandstone heavily pigmented with mineral oxides. Below the cliffs grew a small grove of big trees, and it was clear that there was underground water trapped there to nourish these giants. Their exposed roots twisted and writhed up the face of the cliff like frenzied pythons, and their dense, dark green foliage was a welcome relief from the drab greenish grey of the thorn and acacia. In a strip about half a mile wide, the ground before the cliffs was open and sparsely covered with a low growth of scrub and pale grass.

I threaded the Land-Rover through the scrub towards the cliffs in a silence which momentarily grew more strained. Closer we crawled towards the towering red cliffs, until we had to crane our necks to look up at them.

Sally broke the silence at last, voicing our disappointment and chagrin. ‘Well, we should be within the great walls of the main enclosure now - if there was one.’

We parked at the foot of the cliff and climbed out stiffly to look around us, subdued and reluctant to meet each other’s eyes. There was no trace of a city, not a single dressed block of stone, not a raised mound of earth nor the faintest outline of wall or keep. This was virgin African bush and kopje, untouched and unmarked by man.

‘You’re sure this is the right place?’ Sally asked miserably, and we did not answer her. The trucks came up and parked. The servants climbed down in small groups, peering up at the cliffs and talking in hushed tones.

‘All right,’ said Louren. ‘While they set up the camp we will scout the area. I will go along the cliff that way. You two go the other way - and, Ben, take my shotgun with you.’

We picked our way along the base of the cliff, through the grove of silent trees. Once we startled a small troop of vervet monkeys in the high branches and they fled through the tree-tops in shrieking consternation. Their antics couldn’t raise a smile from either Sally or me. We paused to examine the cliff at intervals, but there was little enthusiasm or hope in our efforts. Three or four miles from camp we stopped to rest, sitting on a block of sandstone that had fallen out from the cliff face.

‘I could cry,’ said Sal. ‘I really could.’

‘I know. I feel the same way.’

‘But the photograph. Damn it, there was definitely something showing. You don’t think it’s his idea of a joke, do you?’

‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘Lo wouldn’t do that. He was just as keen as we were.’

‘Then what about the photograph?’

‘I don’t know. It was clearly some sort of optical illusion. The shadow from the cliff, and cloud perhaps.’

‘But those patterns!’ she protested. ‘They are geometrical and symmetrical.’

‘Light can play funny tricks, Sal,’ I said. ‘Remember that photograph was taken at six o’clock in the evening - almost sunset. Low sun throwing shadows, you could get almost any effect.’

‘I think that this is the most disappointing thing that has ever happened to me.’ She really did look as though she might burst into tears, and I went to her shyly and put one long arm around her.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, and she pulled a face and offered her lips to be kissed.

‘Wow!’ she said at last. ‘Dr Kazin, you do carry on!’

‘You ain’t seen nothing yet.’

‘I’ve seen too much.’ She broke away gently. ‘Come on, Ben. Let’s circle back to camp, away from the cliff. There may be something out there.’

We tramped slowly through the heat. The flowers were out here also, and I noticed the bees crawling busily into the blossoms, their back legs thick with yellow pollen. We found where the recent rains had scoured a shallow ravine, although there was no remaining trace of moisture. I climbed down into the ravine and examined the exposed layers of stone and earth. Three feet from the surface the pebbles were rounded and water-worn.

‘Good guess. Sal,’ I told her as I picked out a few pebbles and found the shell of a bivalve encrusted in the half-formed sandstone. ‘That proves at least a little of our theory. At one time this was the bed of a lake – look.’

Eagerly Sal clambered down beside me. ‘What is it?’

‘A type of unionidae, fresh-water African mussel.’

‘I wish,’ said Sally, ‘that it were something a little more exciting.’ She dropped the ancient shell in the sand.

‘Yes.’ I agreed, and climbed out of the ravine.

My only excuse is that my reasoning was clouded by intense disappointment and my recent physical excitement with Sally. 1 do not usually behave in such a cavalier fashion with scientific clues. Nor do I usually miss as many as four hints in the space of an hour. We walked away without a backward glance.

The camp was fully set up and functioning smoothly when Sal and I trailed in, sweaty and dusty, and sat down to lunch off tinned ham and Windhoek beer.

‘Anything?’ asked Louren, and we shook our heads in unison and lifted our beer glasses.

‘Warm!’ Sally spoke with disgust at her first taste of the beer.

‘Cook has got the refrigerator going. It’ll be cold by tonight.’

We ate in silence until Louren spoke. ‘I raised Larkin on the radio while you were away. He will send in a helicopter tomorrow. We’ll have a last search from the air. That will settle it once and for all. If there’s nothing doing, I will fly out. Some things are brewing back in Johannesburg, and there is only one passenger seat, I’m afraid. You two will have to bus out the hard way.’

It was at that moment that a deputation arrived, headed by Joseph, to tell us that some unknown and foolish person had left the taps open on four of the water tanks. We had thirty-five gallons of water between seventeen people to last the rest of the trip.

‘Therefore,’ added Joseph, with evident relish, ‘we will have to leave this place tomorrow, and return to the nearest water on the Maun road.’

There were a few expressions of disgust at this latest, clearly deliberate setback, but none of us could work up any real anger.

‘All right, Joseph,’ Louren agreed with resignation. ‘Break camp tomorrow morning. We will leave before lunch.’ There was, an immediate improvement in employer-employee relations. I even noticed a few smiles, and heard a little laughter from the cooking fire.

‘I don’t know what you two intend doing this afternoon,’ Louren lit a cigar as he spoke, ‘but I noticed elephant spoor when I did my little recce this morning. I’m taking the Land-Rover and the gunbearers. Don’t worry if I don’t arrive back tonight, we may get hung up on the spoor.’

Sally looked up quickly; for a moment I thought she was going to start her anti-blood sport campaign again, but instead she merely frowned and went back to her ham. I watched the Land-Rover drive off along the base of the cliff before I suggested to Sally:

‘I’m going to try and find a path up to the top - do you want to come along?’

‘Deal me out, Ben,’ she answered. ‘I think I’ll do some sketching this afternoon.’

Hiding my disappointment as best I could, I set off along the base of the cliff, and within half a mile I had found a game trail leading into one of the bush-choked gullies that furrowed the face of red rock.

It was a steep climb and I toiled up with the sun burning onto my back and bouncing off the rock into my face. From cracks and crannies in the cliff-face an army of furry little rock rabbits watched my endeavours with avid interest. It was forty minutes before I came out on the top, my arms scratched by the thorny undergrowth of the gully and sweat soaking my shirt.

I found a good vantage point on the front edge of the cliff under the spreading shade of a giant euphorbia, and my first concern was to sweep with binoculars for any trace of ruins. The thorn bush at the base of the cliff below me was fairly open and scantily grassed, and immediately it was obvious that there was no trace of any human habitation or cultivation. I shouldn’t really have hoped for more, but disappointment gave a sickening little lurch in my guts. Then I dismissed it, and turned the glasses towards the camp far below. A Bantu was cutting firewood, and for a while I amused myself by watching the axe-stroke, then listening for the sound of the blow seconds later. I searched farther from the camp and picked up Sally’s rose-coloured blouse at the end of the grove. She had obviously given up all hope of a major discovery and, sensible girl, was deriving what other enjoyment she could from the expedition. I watched her for a long time, trying to decide how exactly to proceed with my campaign to make her my own. I had spent one night with her, but I was not so naive as to believe that this proved a breathless and undying passion on behalf of a sophisticated, highly intelligent and extravagantly educated modern Miss. Angel that she was, yet I was pretty damned certain that my Sally had played the game with other men before Dr Ben stumbled starry-eyed into her bed. The odds were extremely high she had been motivated by respect for my mind rather than my body, pity, and possibly a little perverse curiosity. However, I was almost certain she had not found the experience too repulsive, and I had only to keep working on her to change respect and pity into something a little deeper and more permanent.

A good quiet sense of peace came over me as I sat there in the high kranz; slowly I realized that this whole journey had been worthwhile and I found myself wishing that I could stay longer at these haunting Hills of Blood, with their mystery and silent beauty. Sally and I together here in the wilderness where I could teach her to love me.

A flicker of movement in the corner of my eye made me turn my head slowly, and within six feet of where I sat a marico sunbird was sucking the nectar from the blossoms of a wild aloe, its metallic green head shimmering as it dipped the long curved bill into the fiery red blossoms. I watched it with an intense pleasure, and when it was gone on quick darting wings I felt as though I had missed something. The feeling became stronger, making me restless, there was a message somewhere that was trying to come through to me but it was being blocked. I let my brain relax, and had the feeling that it was just there at the very fringe of my conscious mind. Another second and I would have it.

Dull on the hot breathless hush of afternoon the double boom-boom of distant heavy gunfire jerked my attention away, I sat up and listened for another thirty seconds - then it came again, boom, and again. Louren had found his elephant.

I picked Sally up in the field of the binoculars. She had heard it also, and was standing away from her easel staring out into the bush. I stood up also, my sudden restlessness still persisting, and started down the cliff path again. I could not shake off the mood, and it grew stronger. There is something here, I thought, something strange and inexplicable.

‘You and I are lucky, my friend,’ Timothy Mageba had told me once. ‘We are marked by the spirits and we have the eye within that can see beyond, and the ear that can catch the sounds of silence.’

It was cool now in the heavily shaded gully and my shirt was still damp with sweat. I felt the goose pimples rising on my skin but not entirely from the chill. I began to hurry, I wanted to get back to the camp and Sally.

For dinner that night we ate grilled elephant heart sliced thin and covered with a biting pepper sauce, served with potatoes roasted in their jackets. The beer was icy cold as Louren had promised, and he was in an expansive mood. It had been a good day’s hunt, fully compensating him for the other disappointments. Lying in the lantern light beyond the fire were four long, curved yellow tusks of ivory.

When Louren sets out to be charming, he is irresistible. Although Sally tried to maintain a disapproving attitude at first, she soon succumbed to his charisma and she laughed with us, when Louren gave us the toast, ‘To the city that never was, and the treasure we didn’t find.’

I went to bed a little drunk, and I dreamed strange dreams - but I woke in the morning clear-headed and with an unformed sense of excitement buoying me, as though today something good was going to happen.

The helicopter came out of the south an hour before noon, drawn to us by the smudge fires of oil-soaked rag; it sank noisily down towards the camp on its glistening silver rotor, and raised a whirlwind of dust and debris.

There was a brief conference with the dark-haired young pilot, then Louren climbed into the seat beside him and the ungainly craft lifted into the air once more and began a series of sweeps along the cliffs, rising higher with each pass until it was a dark distant speck in the aching blue of that hot high sky. Its manoeuvres were so clearly indicative of failure, that Sally and I soon lost interest and went to sit in the shade of the dining tent.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘that is that, I guess.’

I didn’t answer her, but went to the refrigerator and brought us each a can of Windhoek. For the first time in days the fabled Kazin brain began running on all cylinders. Thirty gallons of water shared between two persons meant a gallon a day for two weeks. Water? There was something else about water in the back of my mind. Sally and water.

The helicopter landed once more on the outskirts of the camp, and Louren and the pilot came to the tent. Louren shook his head.

‘No go. Nothing. We’ll have a bite of lunch and be on our way. Leave you to make the best of it home.’

I nodded agreement, not telling him my plans to forestall any argument.

‘Well, Ben, I’m sorry about this. I just can’t understand it.’ Louren began building himself a sandwich of bread and cold slices of roast gemsbok fillet, smearing it with mustard. ‘Anyway, it won’t be the last disappointment we will ever have in our lives.’

Twenty minutes later Louren’s essential luggage was packed in the helicopter and while the pilot started the motor we said our farewells.

‘See you back in jolly Jo’burg. Look after those tusks for me.’

‘Good trip, Lo.’

‘All the way, partner?’

‘All the way, Lo.’

Then he was ducking under the spinning rotor and climbing into the passenger’s seat of the helicopter. It rose in the air like a fat bumblebee and clattered away over the tree-tops Bumblebee? Bee? Bee! My God, that was what had been niggling me.

Bees, birds and monkeys!

I grabbed Sally’s arm, my excitement startling her.

‘Sally, we’re staying.’

‘What?’ she gaped at me.

‘There are things here we’ve overlooked.’

‘Like what?’

‘The birds and the bees,’ I told her.

‘Why. you randy old thing,’ she said.

We split the water fifteen to twenty gallons. That would give the servants a little over half a gallon a day each for two days, sufficient to get them out safely. Sally and I would have a full gallon a day for ten days. I kept the Land-Rover, making sure the petrol tanks were full, and there were twenty-five gallons in the emergency cans. I also kept the radio, one tent, bedding; a selection of tools including spade, axe and pick, rope, gas lanterns and spare cylinders, torches and spare batteries, tinned food, Louren’s shotgun and half a dozen packets of shells, together with all of Sally’s and my personal gear. All the rest of the equipment was loaded onto the two trucks and when the servants were all on board I took the old Matabele gunbearer aside.

‘My old and respected father,’ I spoke in Smdebele, ‘I have heard you speak of a great mystery that lives in this place. I ask you now as a son, and a friend, to speak to me of these things.’

It took him a few seconds to get over his astonishment. Then I went on to speak a sentence that Timothy Mageba had given me. It is a secret code, a recognition signal used at a high level among the initiates to the mysteries. The old man gasped. He could not question me now, nor ignore my appeal.

‘My son,’ he spoke softly. ‘If you know those words then you should know of the legend. At a time when the rocks were soft and the air was misty,’ an expression of the uttermost antiquity, ‘there was an abomination and an evil in this place which was put down by our ancestors. They placed a death curse upon these hills and commanded that this evil be cleaned from the earth and from the minds of men, for ever.’

Again those fateful words, repeated exactly.

‘That is the whole legend?’ I asked. ‘There is nothing else?’

‘There is nothing else,’ the old man told me, and I knew it was the truth. We went back to the waiting lorries and I spoke to Joseph first in Shangaan.

‘Go in peace, my friend. Drive carefully and care well for those who ride with you - for they are precious to me.’ Joseph gaped at me, his wits scattered. I turned to the camp boys and changed to Sechuana.

‘The Spider gives you greetings and wishes you peace.’ There was consternation amongst them as I used my nickname, but when they drove away they had recovered from the shock and were laughing delightedly at the joke. The trucks disappeared amongst the thorn trees, and the sound of their motors dwindled into the eternal silence of the deep bush.

‘You know,’ Sally murmured reflectively, ‘I think I’ve been took! Here I am stranded 200 miles from anywhere with a man whose morals are definitely suspect.’ Then she giggled. ‘And isn’t it lovely?’ she asked.

I had found the spot on the top of the cliff where I could lean out over the drop, supported by a hefty young baboon apple tree, and obtain a good view of the rock screen on either side, as well as over the open plain below. Sally was down beyond the silent grove, and I could see her clearly.

The sun seemed at the right angle for her, although it was shining directly into my eyes. It was only ten or fifteen degrees above the horizon now and the golden rays brought out new soft colours from rock and foliage.

‘Yoo hoo!’ Sally’s shout carried faintly up to me, and she held both hands straight up towards the sky. It was the signal we had evolved to mean, ‘Come back towards me.’

‘Good,’ I grunted. She must have picked them up. I had explained to her carefully how to shade her eyes against the slant of the sun’s rays and to watch for the arrow-straight flight of the tiny golden motes of light. It was an old trick used by bee hunters to find the hive, a bushman had taught it to me.

I pulled back from the cliff, and began working my way through the thorns and thick bush that clogged the crest. I had guessed where to begin the search, for the chances were enormously in favour of the hive being located in this tall wall of red rock with its many gullies and crevices, and now with Sally calling the range for me from below, it was only a matter of fifteen minutes before she windmilled her arms, and I heard her call.

‘That’s it! Right under you.’ Again I leaned out over the edge, and now I picked up the swift sunlight flight of the returning bees as they homed in on the cliff below me.

Leaning far out I could make out the entrance to the hive; a long diagonal crack the edges of which were discoloured by old wax. It must have been an enormous hive, judging by the number of workers coming in, and by the extent of the waxing around the entrance. In such an inaccessible position it had probably remained undisturbed by man or beast for hundreds of years. A rarity in this land where honey is so highly prized.

I tied my white handkerchief to an overhanging branch to mark the spot and in the swiftly falling dark I went down to Sally on the plain. She was very excited by our small success, and we discussed the implications of it over our dinner.

‘You are really quite clever, Doc Ben.’

‘On the contrary, I was as slow as doomsday. I had to beat my head against all the signs for two whole days before I rumbled to it,’ I told her smugly. ‘The place is thick with birds, animals and bees, all of which must have a good permanent supply of surface water. There is supposed to be no permanent water for two hundred miles - well, that’s wrong for sure.’

‘Where will we find it, I wonder?’ She was all big-eyed and enthusiastic again.

‘I can’t even guess, but when we do I promise you something interesting.’

That night when I came into the tent in my pyjamas, having modestly changed outside, she was already in her bed with the sheets up under her chin. I hesitated in the space between the two camp-beds, until with a mischievous grin she took pity on me and lifted the blankets beside her in invitation.

‘Come to Mama,’ she said.

In the chilly darkness before dawn I huddled in my leather jacket on the cliff above the hive, and waited for the sun. I was a very happy man again, some of my doubt dispelled during the night.

Down on the dark plain there was a flash of light. Sally at her place beyond the grove again, probably lonely and a little scared in the African darkness with its night rustlings and animal cries. I flashed my torch down at her to reassure her, and the dawn started coming on quickly.

Dawn was a thing of soft pinks and roses, misty mauves and mulberry - then the sun burst up above the horizon and the bees began to fly. For twenty minutes I watched them to decide the pattern and purpose of their flight, There was a fan of workers winging wide out over the plain. These were the pollen-gatherers. I established this by leaning out and watching their return, through the binoculars, checking the bunches of yellow pollen on their hind legs as they alighted on the protruding bulge of the crack.

In doing so I discovered another pattern of flight that I might have missed. A steady stream of workers was dropping almost vertically down towards the dark foliage of the silent grove below me - and on their return there was no pollen on their legs. Water-carriers then! I signalled Sally in towards the base of the cliff, this morning our roles were reversed by the slant and angle of the sun’s rays. After a while she waved to let me know she had spotted them, and I began the laborious climb down to the plain.

She had to point out to me the indistinct flight of bees down the cliff towards the grove, but even then the shadow cast by the cliff caused them to vanish before we could establish their exact destination within the grove. We watched them for thirty minutes, then gave it up and went into the trees to search at random.

By noon I could swear that there was no sign of surface water within the environs of the grove. Sally and I flopped down side by side with our backs to the sturdy trunk of one of the mhoba-hoba trees, the wild loquat tree that legend states the ancients brought with them from their homeland, and we looked at each other in despair.

‘Another blank!’ She was perspiring in a light dew across her forehead and temples and a dark curl was plastered to the skin. With one finger I pushed it gently back and tucked it behind her ear.

‘It’s here, somewhere. We’ll find it,’ I told her with the confidence I did not feel. ‘It’s got to be here. It just has to be.’

She was about to answer me, when I pressed my fingers to her lips to silence her. I had seen movement beyond the last trees of the grove. We watched the troop of vervet monkeys crossing the open plain at a gallop with their tails in the air. As they reached the grove they shot up the trunk of the nearest tree with comical relief. Their little black faces peered down anxiously from the massed green foliage, but they did not notice us sitting quietly at the base of the mhoba-hoba.

Confidently now they moved across the tree-tops towards the cliff, the big males leading while the mothers, with infants slung beneath their bodies, and the rabble of half-grown youngsters followed them.

They reached the top branches of a gargantuan wild fig tree, one of those whose roots and trunk were embedded in the vertical cliff wall of red rock, and whose branches spread wide and green fifty feet above the earth - and they began to disappear.

It was an astonishing phenomenon, sixty monkeys went into the tree and dwindled swiftly until the branches were deserted. Not a single monkey was left.

‘What happened to them?’ whispered Sally. ‘Did they go up the cliff?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’ I turned to her grinning happily. I think we’ve found it, Sal. I think this is it, but let’s just wait for the monkeys to come back.‘

Twenty minutes later the monkeys suddenly began reappearing in the branches of the wild fig again. The troop moved off in a leisurely fashion along the cliff, and we waited until they were all out of sight before we went forward.

The convoluted and massed roots of the wild fig formed a flight of irregular steps up towards the point where the trunk emerged from the cliff. We climbed up and began examining the trunk, working our way around it. peering up into the branches high overhead. The trunk was gigantic, fully thirty feet around, deformed and flattened by its contact with the uneven wall of red rock. Even then we might have missed it, had there not been a smoothly polished footpath leading into the living rock - a path worn by the passage of feet and paws and hooves over the course of thousands of years. The path squeezed between the gross yellow trunk of the wild fig, and the wall of rock. In the same manner there is often a cave behind a waterfall hidden by the falling water, so our wild fig screened the entrance.

Sally and I peered into the darkened recess behind the trunk, and then we looked at each other. Her eyes were sparkling bright and her cheeks flushed a dull rose.

‘Yes!’ she whispered, and I nodded, unable to speak.

‘Come on!’ She took my hand and we went in.

The opening was a long vertical crack in the cliff and good light came in from high above. Looking up I saw how the rock was polished by the paws of the monkeys who came in that way.

We moved on down the passage, the wall rising twenty feet on each side of us to a narrow vee of a roof. Immediately it was clear that we were not the first human beings that had entered here. The smooth red walls were covered with a profusion of magnificent bushman rock paintings. The most beautiful and well preserved that I had ever seen.

‘Ben! Oh Ben! Just look at them!’ One of Sally’s specialities is bushman art. ‘It’s a treasure house. Oh, you wonderful clever man!’ Her eyes shone in the gloom like lamps.

‘Come on!’ I tugged at her hand ‘There will be plenty of time for that later.’

We moved slowly along the narrow passage as it slanted steadily downwards for another hundred feet. The roof above us climbed progressively higher, until it was lost in the gloom above. We heard the squeak of bats from the dark recesses of the passage.

‘There is light ahead,’ I said, and we went on into an open chamber, rounded, perhaps 300 feet across with sheer walls which rose 200 feet upwards. Like the interior walls of a cone, they narrowed into a small aperture high above which gave a view of cloudless blue sky beyond.

I saw immediately that this was an intrusion of limestone into the red sandstone, and that it was a typical sink-hole formation, very similar to the Sleeping Pool at Sinoia in Rhodesia.

Here also the floor of the cavern was a basin which led down to a pool of water. The water was crystal clear, obviously very deep as the pale greenish colour showed, perhaps 150 feet across, the surface mirror-smooth and still.

Sally and I stood and stared at it. The beauty of this great cavern had paralysed us. Through the tiny aperture 200 feet above us the sun’s rays poured in like the beam of a searchlight, striking the walls of shimmering limestone and lighting the entire cavern with an eerie reflected glow. From the arched roof and walls hung great butterfly wings and stalactites of sparkling white.

The walls of the main chamber were also decorated to a height of fifteen feet or more with the lovely bushman art. In places water seeping from the rock had destroyed the graceful figures and designs, but mostly it was well preserved. I guessed there was two years’ work for Sally and me in this wondrous place.

Slowly she disengaged her hand from mine and walked down to the edge of the emerald pool. I stayed where I was in the mouth of the tunnel, watching her with rapt attention as she stood at the edge of the pool and leaned forward to peer down into the still water.

Then she straightened and slowly, with deliberate movements, began to strip off her clothing. She stood naked at the edge of the pool and her skin was as pale and translucent as the limestone cliffs. Her body, for all its size and strength, had a delicacy of line and texture to it that reminded me of the Chinese carvings in old ivory.

Like a priestess of some old pagan religion, she stood beside the pool and lifted her arms. With a strange atavistic thrill this gesture brought to my mind an ancient forgotten ritual. There was something deep in me that I wanted to cry out, a blessing perhaps, or an invocation.

Then she dived, a long graceful curve of white body and flowing dark hair. She struck the water and went on down, deep. The sweet clean shape of her showed clearly through the crystal water, then she came up slowly from the depths and broke the surface. Her long dark hair was slicked down over her neck and shoulders, she lifted one slender arm and waved at me.

I felt like crying out aloud with relief. I realized then that I had not expected her to come up again from those mysterious green depths. I went down to the edge of the pool to help her out of the water.

Presently we moved slowly around the walls of the cavern and passage, awed by the profusion of paintings and engravings, Sally with her damp hair hanging to her shoulders and her face shining with wonder.

‘There is work here spread over 2,000 years, Ben. This must have been a very holy place to the little yellow men.’ The light failed before we had completed half the tour of the cavern, and it was chilly and scary in the passage as we groped our way out. It was only then that I realized we had not eaten that day.

While Sally warmed up a hash of bully beef and onions, I raised Peter Larkin on the radio and was relieved to hear that the two trucks had returned safely to Maun. I ended the transmission by asking Larkin to get a message through to Louren. ‘Tell him we have found some very interesting rock paintings and will be staying on here indefinitely.’

‘How are you for water?’ bellowed Larkin, his voice distorted by static and Scotch whisky.

‘Fine. We managed to find an adequate supply here.’

‘You found water?’ roared Larkin, ‘There isn’t any water there!’

‘A small catchment in a rock basin from the last rain.’

‘Oh, I see. Okay then. Keep in touch. Over and out.’

‘Thanks, Peter. Over and out.’

‘You are a fibber.’ Sally grinned at me as I switched off the set.

‘All in a good cause,’ I agreed, and we began to prepare lanterns, and cameras, and sketching equipment for the following day.

The old bull elephant was mortally wounded. Blood, slick and shiny, poured from the wounds in throat and shoulder and the shafts of fifty arrows pin-cushioned his massive frame. He stood at bay with his back humped in agony, while around him swarmed the brave little yellow hunters with drawn bows, and pelting arrows. A dozen of their number were strewn back along the path of the hunt, their frail bodies crushed and broken beneath the great round pads and cruel ivory shafts - but the others were closing in for the kill.

The ancient artist had filled his canvas of red rock with such movement and drama that I felt myself witness to the actual hunt. However, the light was tricky and the best reading I could get was F-11 at l/10th of a second.

Reluctantly I decided to use flash. I try to avoid it where possible for it tends to distort colour and throw in false highlights. I began setting up tripod and camera when Sally called.

‘Ben! Come here, please!’

The echo effect and distortion caused by the lofty cavern could not disguise the urgency and excitement in her voice, and I went quickly.

She was in the main cavern beyond the emerald pool, where the rear wall cut back steeply to form a low recess. It was gloomy in there and Sally’s torch beam jumped quickly over the smooth rock surface.

‘What is it, Sal?’ I asked as I came up beside her.

‘Look.’ She moved the torch beam down and I stared at the representation of a massive human figure before me.

‘Good God!’ I gasped. ‘The White Lady of the Brandberg! It’s the same!’

Sally played the beam of the torch down across the figure until it spotlighted the vaunting erection that thrust from its thighs.*

*The White Lady of the Brandberg is one of the most celebrated and controversial rock paintings yet discovered in Africa. Its date is agreed at about AD 0-200, but its interpretation is the subject of much dispute. One source clams it is a Xhosa circumcision candidate daubed with white clay (one thousand miles from the territory of the Xhosa). The famous Abbe Breuil named it a lady, and Credo Mutwa in his recent book Idaba My Children gives an intriguing interpretation in which he concludes ‘It is not a Lady, but a strikingly handsome young white man, one of the great emperors who ruled the African Empire of the Ma-iti (Phoenicians) for nearly two centuries.’

‘That lady is beautifully hung,’ she murmured, ‘if you get the point.’

The figure was six feet tall, dressed in yellow breastplate and ornate helmet with a high arched crest. On his left shoulder he carried a rounded shield on which yellow ornamental rosettes were set in a circle about the central boss. In his other hand he carried a bow and sheaf of arrows, and from his waist hung sword and battle-axe. His shins were protected by greaves of the same yellow metal and on his feet were light open sandals.

The figure’s skin was depicted as deathly white, but a fiery bush of red beard hung onto his chest. The display of his sexual parts was clearly a stylized indication of his dominant and lofty status. The effect was in no way obscene, but gave to the figure a masculine pride and arrogance.

‘A white man,’ I whispered. ‘Armour and rounded shield, bow and battle-axe. Could it be—’

‘A Phoenician king,’ Sally finished for me.

‘But the Phoenician type is more likely to have been darkhaired, hook-nosed. This man would have been an unusual figure amongst the ancients, to say the least. A throw-back, perhaps, to some north Mediterranean ancestor. How old is it, Sal?’

‘I can’t be sure yet, but I’d say 2,000 years. This wall of paintings is the most ancient in the whole cavern.’

‘Look, Sal.’ I pointed eagerly.

Beyond the central figure was an army of stick figures that followed the king. They were not executed in such detail, but the swords and helmets were unmistakable.

‘And look there.’ Sally directed the beam of the torch onto a row of white-robed figures that stood at the king’s feet. Tiny figures, perhaps nine inches tall.

‘Priests, perhaps - and, oh Ben! Look! Look!’

She played the beam across the stone canvas, and for a moment I did not recognize it - then my heart jumped. Like a huge frieze, that was obliterated in places by moisture, moss and lichens, or that was obscured by the myriad figures of men and animals drawn over it, and that yet managed to maintain its imposing majesty and power, swept the drawing of a stone fortress wall. It was built in blocks with the joints clearly shown, and along its summit was the decorative pattern of chevrons, identical to the one that graces the main temple wall at the ruins of Zimbabwe. Beyond the wall rose outlines of the phallic towers we had expected to find.

‘It’s our city, Ben. Our lost city.’

‘And our lost king, Sally, and his priests, and warriors and - oh, my God! Sally, look at that!’

‘Elephants!’ she squealed. ‘War elephants with archers on their backs, just like Hannibal used against the Romans. Carthaginian - Phoenician!’

There was so much of it, a curved wall 100 feet long and ten to fifteen feet high and every square inch of it thick with bushman paintings. The figures and forms were interwoven, some of the earlier pictures overlaid and smothered; others, like our white king, standing proudly untouched and unspoiled. It would be a major undertaking to unravel those portraits which related to our lost civilization, from the great mass of traditional cave art. This was Sally’s special skill, my camera could only capture the whole confused scene, while she would patiently and painstakingly pick out a figure or group of particular interest that was almost entirely obliterated and recreate and restore it on her rolls of wax paper.

However, there was no suggestion of such work beginning now. Sally and I spent what was left of the day climbing and crawling along the back wall peering and probing and exclaiming with wonder and delight.

When we got into camp that night we were physically and emotionally exhausted. Peter Larkin had a message for us from Louren:

‘He says to wish you good luck, and that one of the oil helicopters will be in your area within the next few days. Is there anything you need, and if so give me a list. They will drop it to you.’

The next ten days were the happiest of my entire life. The helicopter came as Louren had promised with the name ‘Sturvesant Oil’ blazoned across its fuselage. It carried a full load of necessities and luxuries for us, another tent, folding chairs, a surveyor’s theodolite, gas for the lamps, food, extra clothing for both of us, more paper and paints for Sally, film for me, and even a few bottles of Glen Grant malt whisky, that sovereign specific for all the ills of man. A note from Louren enjoined me to carry on with what I was doing as long as it looked promising. He would give me his full support, but I was not to keep him in the dark too long as he was ‘dying of curiosity’.

I sent him my thanks, a roll of film showing the paintings which had no ancients in them, and a batch of polythene bags containing samples of pigments from the cavern for carbon-14 dating. Then the helicopter flew away and left us to our idyll.

We worked from early each morning until dark each evening, mapping the cavern in plan and elevation, and photographing an overlapping run of the walls and relating this to our map. Sally alternated between assisting me and continuing with her own task of isolating our ancient figures. We worked in complete harmony and understanding, breaking off now and then to eat our lunch beside the emerald pool, or to swim naked together in its cool limpid water, or at times just to lie idly on the rocks and talk.

At first our occupation of the cavern seriously affected the ecology of the local fauna, but as we hoped would happen, they soon adapted. Within days the birds were dropping down through the hole in the cavern roof to drink and bathe at the edge of the pool. Soon they ignored us as they went about their noisy and vigorous ablutions, shrieking and chattering and spraying water, while we paused in our labours to watch them.

Even the monkeys, driven by thirst, at last crept in through the rock passage to snatch a mouthful of water before darting away again. Rapidly these timid forays became bolder, until at last they were a positive nuisance, stealing our lunch, or any loose equipment that was left unguarded. We forgave them, for their antics were always appealing and entertaining.

They were wonderful days of satisfying work, good loving companionship, and the deep peace of that beautiful place. There was only one day on which anything happened to ruffle the surface of my happiness. As Sally and I were sitting below the portrait of our wonderful white king, I said: ‘They won’t be able to deny this, Sal. The bastards are going to have to change their narrow little minds now!’

She knew I was talking about the debunkers, the special pleaders, the politico-archaeologists, who could twist any evidence to fill the needs of their own beliefs, the ones who had castigated me and my books.

‘Don’t be so certain of that, Ben,’ Sally warned. ‘They will not accept this. I can hear their carping little voices now. It’s secondhand observation by bushmen, open to different interpretations - don’t you remember, Ben, how they accused the Abbe Breuil of retouching the paintings in the Brandberg?’

‘Yes. That’s the great pity of it - it is secondhand. When we show them the paintings of the fortified walls, they will say, “Yes, but where are the walls themselves?”’

‘And our king, our beautiful virile warrior king,’ she looked up at him, ‘they’ll emasculate him. He will become another “White Lady”. His war shield will become a bouquet of flowers, his milky white skin will change to ceremonial day, his fiery-red beard will suddenly turn into a scarf or a necklace, and when they reproduce his portrait it will be subtly altered in all those ways. The Encyclopedia Britannica will still read,’ she changed her voice mimicking a pedantic and pompous lecturer. ‘“Modern scientific opinion is that the ruins are the work of some Bantu group, possibly the Shona or Maka-lang.”’

‘I wish - oh, how I wish we had found some definite proof,’ I said miserably. I was facing for the first time the prospect of delivering our discovery to my learned brothers in science, and the idea was as appealing as climbing into a pit full of black mambas. I stood up. ‘Let’s have a swim, Sal.’

We swam side by side, an easy breaststroke, back and forth across the pool. When we climbed out to sit in the spot of bright sunlight that fell from the roof above, I tried to alleviate my unhappiness by changing the subject. I touched Sally’s arm, and with all the finesse of a wounded rhinoceros, I blurted out, ‘Will you marry me, Sally?’

She turned a startled face to me, her cheeks and eyelashes still bejewelled with water droplets, and she stared at me for fully ten seconds before she began to laugh.

‘Oh, Ben, you funny old-fashioned thing! This is the twentieth century. Just because you done me wrong - doesn’t mean you have to marry me!’ And before I could protest or explain she had stood up and dived once again into the emerald pool.

For the rest of the day she was completely occupied with her paints and brushes, and she had no time to even look in my direction, let alone talk to me. The message was received my end loud and clear - there were some areas of discussion that Sally had put the death curse on. Matrimony was one of them.

It was a very bad day, but I learned the lesson well, and decided to clutch at what happiness I now had without pressing for more.

That evening Larkin had another message from Louren:

‘Your samples 1-16 give C14 average result of 1620 years ±100. Congratulations. Looks good. When do I get in on the secret? Louren.’

I perked up at this news. Assuming our old bushman artist had been an eye-witness of the subjects he had drawn, then somewhere between AD 200 and AD 400 an armed Phoenician warrior had led his armies and war elephants across this beloved land of mine. I felt guilty about excluding Louren from the secrets of the cavern, but it was still too soon. I wanted to have it to myself a little longer - to gloat upon it, to have its peace and beauty to myself, unsullied by other eyes. More than that, it had become the temple of my love for Sally. Like the old bushmen, it had become a very holy place to me.

On the following day, it was as though Sally was determined to make up for the unhappiness she had caused me. She was teasing, and loving, and mischievous all at once. At noon with the beam of sunlight burning down on us. we made love on the rocks beside the pool, Sally skilfully and gently taking the initiative once again. It was a shattering and mystic experience that scoured the sadness from the cup of my soul and filled it to the brim with happiness and peace.

We lay together softly entwined, murmuring sleepily, when suddenly I was aware of another presence in the cavern. Alarm flared through me, and I struggled up on one elbow and looked to the entrance tunnel.

A golden-brown human figure stood in the gloomy mouth of the tunnel. He was dressed in a short leather loin-cloth, a quiver and short bow stood up behind his shoulder, and around his neck hung a necklace of ostrich egg-shell beads and black monkey beans. The figure was tiny, the size of a ten-year-old child, but the face was that of a mature man. Slanted eyes, and high flat cheekbones gave it an Asiatic appearance, but the nose was flattened and the lips were full and voluptuously chiselled. The small domed skull was covered by a pelt of tight black curls.

For an instant we looked into each other’s eyes and then, like the flash of a bird’s wing, the little manikin was gone, vanished into the dark passage in the rock.

‘What is it?’ Sally stirred against me.

‘Bushman,’ I said. ‘Here in the cavern. Watching us.’

She sat up quickly, and peered fearfully about her.

‘Where?’

‘He’s gone now. Get dressed - quickly!’

‘Is he dangerous, Ben?’ Her voice was husky.

‘Yes. Very!’ I was pulling on my clothes quickly, trying to decide on our best course of action, running over in my mind the words I would speak. Although it was a little rusty I found the language was still on my tongue, thanks to sessions of practice with Timothy Mageba. They would be northern bushmen here, not Kalahari, the languages were similar but distinctly different.

‘They wouldn’t attack us, would they, Ben?’ Sally was dressed.

‘If we do the wrong thing now, they will. We don’t know how holy this place is to them. We mustn’t frighten them, they have been persecuted and hunted for 2,000 years.’

‘Oh, Ben.’ She moved closer to me, and even in my own alarm I enjoyed her reliance upon me.

‘They wouldn’t - kill us, would they?’

‘They are wild bushmen. Sally. If you threaten or molest a wild thing it will attack you. I’ve got to get an opportunity to talk to them.’ I looked around for something to use as a shield, something strong enough to turn a reed arrow with a poisoned tip. Poison that would inflict a lingering but certain death of the most unspeakable agony.

I selected the leather theodolite case, and tore it open along the seams with my hands, flattening it out to give it maximum area.

‘Follow me down the passage, Sal. Keep close.’

Her hand was on my shoulder as I led her slowly along the rock passage, using the four-cell torch to search every dark corner and recess before moving on. The light alarmed the bats and they fluttered and squeaked about our heads. The grip of Sally’s hand on my shoulder became painfully tight, but we reached the tree-trunk that guarded the entrance to the cavern.

We crouched by the narrow slit between rock and tree-trunk, and the bright sunlight beyond was painful to my eyes. Minutely I examined each tree-trunk in the grove, each tuft of grass, each hollow or irregularity of earth - and there was nothing. But they were there, I knew, hidden, waiting with the patience and concentration of the earth’s most skilful hunters.

We were prey, there was no escaping this fact. The accepted laws of behaviour did not apply out here on the fringe of the Kalahari, I remembered the fate of the crew of a South African Air Force Dakota that force-landed in the desert ten years before. They hunted down the family of bushmen that did it and I flew to Gaberones to interpret at the trial. In the dock they wore the parachute silk as clothing, and their faces were childlike, trusting, without guilt or guile as they answered my questions.

‘Yes. We killed them,’ they said. Locked in a modern gaol, like caged wild birds, they were dead within twelve months -all of them. The memory was chilling now and I thrust it aside.

‘Now listen to me carefully, Sally. You must stay here. No matter what happens. I will go out to them. Talk to them. If ,’ I choked on the words, and cleared my throat, ‘if they hit me with an arrow I’ll have half an hour or so before—’ I rephrased the sentence, ‘—I’ll have plenty of time to get the Land-Rover and come back for you. You can drive. You’ll have no trouble following the tracks we made back to the Makarikari Pan.’

‘Ben - don’t go. Oh God, Ben - please.’

‘They’ll wait, Sal - until dark. I have to go now, in the daylight.’

‘Ben—’

‘Wait here. Whatever happens, wait here.’ I shrugged off her hands and stepped to the opening.

‘Peace,’ I called to them in their own tongue. ‘There is no fight between us.’

I took a step out into the sunlight.

‘I am a friend.’

Another slow step, down over the twisted roots of the wild fig, holding the flattened leather case low against my hip.

‘Friend!’ I called again. ‘I am of your people. I am of your clan.’

I went slowly down into the silent hostile grove. There was no response to my words, no sound nor movement. Ahead of me lay a fallen tree. I began sliding towards it, my guts a hard ball of tension and fear.

‘I carry no weapon,’ I called, and the grove was quiet and sinister in the hush of the afternoon.

I had almost reached the fallen tree, when I heard the twang of the bow and I dived for the shelter of the dead trunk. Close beside my head the arrow fluted, humming in the silence, and I went down. My face was pressed into the dry earth, my heart frozen with fear at the close passage of such hideous death.

I heard footsteps, running, from behind me and I rolled over on my side to defend myself.

Sally was running down the wild fig roots towards me, ignoring my instructions, her face a pale mask of deathly terror, her mouth open in a silent scream. She had seen me fall and lie still, and the thought of me dead had triggered her panic. Now as I moved she realized her mistake, and she faltered in her run, suddenly aware of her own vulnerability.

‘Get back, Sal,’ I yelled. ‘Get back!’ Her uncertainty turned to dismay and she stopped, stranded halfway between the cavern entrance and my dead tree-trunk, undecided on which way to move.

In the edge of my vision I saw the little yellow bushman rise from a patch of pale grass. There was an arrow notched to his bow and the feathered flights were drawn back to his cheek as he aimed. He was fifty paces from where Sally hovered, and he held his aim for a second.

I dived across the space that separated Sally from me at the instant the bushman released the arrow. The arrow and I flew on an interception course, two sides of a triangle with Sally at the apex.

I saw the humming blur of the arrow flash in belly-high at Sally and I knew I could not reach her before it struck. I threw the flattened leather case with a despairing underhand flick of my wrist as I dived towards her. It cart-wheeled lazily, spinning in the air - and the arrow slapped into it. The deadly iron tip, with the poison-smeared barbs, bit into the tough leather of the case. Arrow and case fell harmlessly at Sally’s feet, and I picked her up in my arms and spinning on my heels, doubled up under her weight. I raced back towards the cover of the dead tree-trunk.

The bushman was still on his knees in the grass ahead of me He reached over his shoulder and pulled another arrow from his quiver, in one smoothly practised movement he had notched and drawn.

This time there was no hope of dodging, and I ran on grimly. The bow-string sang, the arrow flew, and instantly I felt a violent jerk at my neck. I knew I was hit, and with Sally still in my arms we fell behind the dead tree-trunk.

‘I think I’m hit, Sal.’ I could feel the arrow dangling against my chest as I rolled away from her. ‘Break off the shaft - don’t try and pull it out against the barbs.’

We lay facing each other, our eyes only a few inches apart Strangely, now that I was a dead man I felt no fear,,The thing was done, even if I was hit a dozen more times, my fate would be unaltered. It remained only to get Sally safely away before the poison did its work.

She reached out with shaking hands and took the frail reed arrow, lifting it gingerly - and then her face cleared.

‘Your collar, Ben, it’s lodged in the collar of your jacket. It hasn’t touched you.’

Relief washed through me as I ran my hands up the shaft of the arrow, and found that I was not dead. Carefully lying on my side while Sally held the tip of the arrow away from my flesh, I shrugged off my light khaki jacket. For a moment I stared in revulsion at the hand-forged iron arrow-head with the sticky toffee-coloured material clogging the wicked barbs, then I threw jacket and arrow aside.

‘God, that was close,’ I whispered. ‘Listen, Sal, I think there is only one of them here. He’s a young man, panicky, probably as afraid as we are. I will try to talk to him again.’

I wriggled forward against the reassuring solidity of the dead tree, and raised my voice in the most persuasive tones that would pass my parched throat.

‘I am your friend. Though you fly your arrows at me, I will not war with you. I have lived with your people, I am one with you. How else do I speak your language?’

A deathly, impenetrable silence.

‘How else do I speak the tongue of the people?’ I asked again, and strained my ears for a sound.

Then the bushman spoke, his voice a high-pitched fluting, broken up with soft ducking and clicking sounds.

‘The devils of the forest speak in many tongues. I close my ears to your deceits.’

‘I am no devil. I have lived as one of yours. Did you never hear of the one named the Sunbird,’ I used my bushman name, ‘who stayed with the people of Xhai and became their brother?’

Another long silence followed, but now I sensed that the little bushman was undecided, puzzled, no longer afraid and deadly.

‘Do you know of the old man named Xhai?’

‘I know of him,’ admitted the bushman, and I breathed a little easier.

‘Did you hear of the one they called the Sunbird?’

Another long pause, then reluctantly, ‘I have heard men speak of it.’

‘I am that one.’

Now the silence went on for ten minutes or more. I knew the bushman was considering my claim from every possible angle. At last he spoke again.

‘Xhai and I hunt together this season. Even now he comes, before darkness he will be here. We will wait for him.’

‘We will wait for him,’ I agreed.

‘But if you move I will kill you,’ warned the bushman, and I took him at his word.

Xhai the old bushman came to my shoulder, and heaven knows I am no giant. He had the characteristically flattened features, with high cheekbones and oriental eyes, but his skin was dry and wrinkled, like an old yellow raisin. The wrinkling extended over his entire body as though he were covered with brittle parchment. The little peppercorns of hair on his scalp were smoky-grey with age, but his teeth were startling white and perfect, and his eyes were black and sparkling. I had often thought that they were pixie eyes, alive with mischief and intelligent curiosity.

When I told him how his friend had tried to kill us, he thought it an excellent joke and went off into little grunting explosions of laughter, at the same time shyly covering his mouth with one hand. The younger bushman’s name was Ghal, and he was married to one of Xhai’s daughters, so Xhai felt free to josh him mercilessly.

‘Sunbird is a white ghost!’ he wheezed. ‘Shoot him, Ghal, quickly! Before he flies away.’ Overwhelmed by his own humour, Xhai staggered in mirth-racked circles giving an imitation of how he thought a ghost would look as it flew away. Ghal was very embarrassed and looked down at his feet as he shuffled them in the dust. I chuckled weakly, the sound of flighted arrows very fresh in my memory.

Xhai stopped laughing abruptly, and demanded anxiously, ‘Sunbird. have you got tobacco?’

‘Oh. my God!’ 1 said in English.

‘What is it?’ Sally was alarmed by my tone, expecting that something else horrifying had happened.

‘Tobacco,’ I said. ‘We haven’t any,’ Neither Sally nor I used the stuff, but it is very precious to a bushman.

‘Louren left a box of cigars in the Land-Rover.’ Sally reminded me ‘Is that any use?’

Both Ghal and Xhai were intrigued with the aluminium cylinders in which the Romeo and Juliette cigars were packed. After I showed them how to open them and remove the tobacco, they cooed and chattered with delight. Then Xhai sniffed the cigar like the true connoisseur he was, nodded approvingly and took a big bite. He chewed a while and then tucked the wad of sodden cigar up under his top lip. He passed the stub to Ghal who bit into it and followed Xhai’s example. The two of them squatted on their haunches, positively glowing with contentment and my heart went out to them. It took so little to make them happy.

They stayed with us that night, cooking on our fire a meal of bush-rats threaded on a stick like kebabs, and grilled over the open coals without gutting or removal of the skin. The hair frizzled off in the fire and stank like burning rags.

‘I think I’m going to throw up,’ murmured Sally palely as she watched the relish with which our two friends ate, but she didn’t.

‘Why do they call you Sunbird?’ she asked later, and I repeated her question to. Xhai.

He jumped up and did his celebrated imitation of a sun-bird, darting his head and fluttering his hands. It was convincingly done, for bushmen are wonderful observers of nature.

‘They say that’s how I act when I get excited,’ I explained.

‘Yes!’ Sally exclaimed, clapping her hands with delight as she recognized me, and then they were all laughing.

In the morning we went to the cave together, all four of us, and in that setting the little men were completely at home. I photographed them, and Sally sketched them as they sat on the rocks by the pool. She was fascinated by their delicate little hands and feet, and their enlarged buttocks, a recognized anatomical peculiarity named steatopygia, which enabled them to store food like a camel stores water, against the contingencies of the wilderness. Ghal remarked to Xhai on the activity in which Sally and I had been engaged beside the pool when he discovered us the previous day, and this led to much earthy comment and laughter. Sally wanted to know the source of it, and when I told her she blushed like a sunset, which was a pleasant change, for I am usually the blusher.

The bushmen were enthusiastic over Sally’s sketches, and this enabled me to lead them naturally to the rock paintings.

‘They are the paintings of our people,’ Xhai boasted. ‘This has been our place from the beginning.’

I pointed out the portrait of the white king and Xhai explained frankly, without any of the reserve or secrecy I had expected.

‘He is the king of the white ghosts.’

‘Where did he live?’

‘He lives with his army of ghosts on the moon,’ Xhai explained - and my critics accuse me of being a romantic!

We discussed this at some length, and I learned how the ghosts fly between moon and earth, how they are well disposed towards the bushmen, but care should be taken as the common forest devils will sometimes masquerade as white ghosts. Ghal had mistaken me for one of these.

‘Have the white ghosts ever been men?’ I asked.

‘No, certainly not.’ Xhai was a little put out by the question. ‘They were always ghosts, and they have always lived on the moon and these hills.’

‘Have you ever seen them, Xhai?’

‘My grandfather saw the ghost king.’ Xhai avoided the question with dignity.

‘And this, Xhai,’ I pointed out the drawings of the stone wall with its chevrons and towers, ‘what is this?’

‘That is the Moon City,’ Xhai answered readily.

‘Where is it - on the moon?’

‘No. It is here.’

‘Here?’ I demanded, my blood starting to race. ‘You mean on these hills?’

‘Yes.’ Xhai nodded, and took another bite of his five-dollar cigar.

‘Where, Xhai? Where? Can you show it to me?’

‘No.’ Xhai shook his head regretfully.

‘Why not, Xhai? I am your brother. I am of your clan,’ I pleaded. ‘Your secrets are my secrets.’

‘You are my brother,’ Xhai agreed, ‘but I cannot show you the City of the Moon. It is a ghost city. Only when the moon is full and the white ghosts come down, then the city stands upon the plain below the hills - but in the morning it is gone.’

My blood no longer raced, and my excitement cooled.

‘Have you seen the Moon City, Xhai?’

‘My grandfather saw it, once long ago.’

‘Grandpa was a big mover,’ I remarked bitterly in English.

‘What is it?’ Sally wanted to know.

‘I’ll explain later, Sal,’ I said, and turned back to the old bushman. ‘Xhai, in all your life have you ever seen such a city as this? A place of tall stone walls, of round stone towers? I don’t mean here at these hills, but anywhere. In the north, by the great river, in the desert of the west - anywhere?’

‘No,’ said Xhai, ‘I have never seen such a place.’ And I knew that there was no lost city north of the great Pan or south of the Zambezi, for if there were, Xhai would have come across it in seventy years of ceaseless wandering.

‘It was probably some old bushman who wandered 270 miles east of here and saw the temple at Zimbabwe,’ I suggested to Sally that night as we sat around the fire and discussed the old bushman’s story. ‘He was so impressed that on his return he painted it.’

‘Then how do you explain your white king?’

‘I don’t know, Sal,’ I told her honestly. ‘Perhaps it is a white lady with a bouquet of flowers.’

It seems that whenever I receive a serious disappointment -Sally’s rejection of my proposal, and the story of the Moon City were both serious - my brain ceases to function for a period. I missed the clue completely, and the link-up was so obvious. I mean, for God’s sake, I have a tested IQ of 156 - I’m a goddamned genius!

In the morning the two bushmen went back to the families they had left by the Pan. They took with them the treasures we lavished upon them. A hatchet, Sally’s make-up mirror, two knives and half a box of Romeo and Juliette cigars. They trotted away into the vastness of the Kalahari, without a backward glance, and left us the poorer for their going.

The helicopter came the following week, bringing in a full load of supplies and the special equipment I had asked Louren to send us.

Sally and I carried the rubber dinghy up to the cavern and inflated it beside the pool, taking it in turns to blow until we felt dizzy.

Sally launched it and paddled happily around the pool while I assembled the rest of the equipment. There was a short glass-fibre fishing-rod, a heavy one, twenty-five ounces, and in the case which held a 12/0 Penn Senator fishing-reel was a note from Louren: ‘What are you after, for crying out loud? Sand fish, or desert trout? “L”’

I fitted the reel to rod, threaded the line through the runners, and attached the five-pound lead weight to the end of it. Sally paddled us out into the centre of the pool. I dropped the lead weight over the side, disengaged the clutch on the reel, and let the line start running out.

As I had requested, the plaited Dacron line was marked at intervals of fifty feet, and as each marker of coloured cotton disappeared into the luminous green water, we counted aloud.

‘Five, six, seven - my God, Ben. It’s bottomless.’

‘These limestone sink-holes can go down to tremendous depths.’

‘Eleven, twelve, thirteen.’

‘I hope we’ve got enough line.’ Sally eyed what remained on the spool dubiously.

‘We have got 800 yards here,’ I told her. ‘It will be more than enough.’

‘Sixteen, seventeen.’ Even I was impressed, I had guessed at a depth of around 400 feet, the same as the Sleeping Pool at Sinoia, but still the line unwound steadily from the big-game fishing-reel.

At last I felt the weight bump on the bottom, and the line went slack. We looked at each other with awe.

‘A little over 850 feet,’ I said.

‘It makes me feel scary, hanging over a hole in the earth that deep.’

‘Well,’ I said with finality, ‘I had plans to explore the bottom with a Scuba, but that’s out now. Whatever is down there will stay there for ever. Nobody can dive that deep.’

Sally looked down into the green depths, and the dappled, moving, reflected light illuminated her face weirdly. There were shadows in her eyes, and her expression was dazed. Suddenly she shook herself violently, a shudder that went through her whole body, and she tore her eyes away from the green surface.

‘Oh! I felt funny then. A really creepy sensation, as though something walked over my grave.’

I began to wind in the fishing-line, and Sally lay back flat on the floor of the dinghy staring up at the rock roof high above. It was a laborious task to recover all that line, but I worked away steadily.

‘Ben.’ Sally spoke suddenly. ‘Look up there.’ I stopped winding and looked up. We had never looked up at the opening in the roof from this angle. The shape of the opening was different.

‘There, Ben. On the side,’ Sally pointed. ‘That piece of rock sticking out. It’s square, too regular to be natural, surely?’

I studied it for a while.

‘Perhaps.’ I was dubious.

‘You know we have never tried to find where the cavern opens out onto the top of the hills, Ben.’ Sally sat up excitedly. ‘Can’t we do that. Let’s go up and look at that piece of square stone. Can we, Ben?’

‘Of course.’ I agreed readily.

‘Today. Now! Can we go now?’

‘Hell, Sal. It’s after two o’clock already. We will be out after dark.’

‘Oh, come on! We can take torches with us.’

The growth of vegetation at the crest of the hills was dense and spiny. I was glad of the machete I had with me, and I hacked a path for us through it. We had marked the approximate position of the hole from the plain below, but even then we blundered about in the undergrowth for two hours before I nearly walked into it.

Suddenly the earth opened at my feet in that frightening black shaft, and I threw myself backwards, nearly knocking Sally down.

‘That was a near one.’ I was shaken, and I kept a respectful distance from the edge as we worked our way around to where a slab of stone jutted squarely out into the void.

I knelt on the lip to examine the stone. Far below, the surface of the emerald pool glowed in the gloomy depths. I do not like exposed heights, and I felt distinctly queasy as I leaned out to touch the flat surface of the stone.

‘It is certainly regular. Sal.’ I ran my hands over it. ‘But I can’t feel any chisel marks. It’s been badly weathered though, perhaps—’

I looked up and froze with horror. Sally had walked out onto the stone platform as though it were a diving-board. She stood now with her toes over the edge, and as I watched in horror she lifted her hands above her head. She pointed them straight at the sky with all her fingers and both thumbs extended stiffly in that same gesture she had used when first she saw the emerald pool.

‘Sally!’ I screamed, and her head jerked. She swayed slightly. I scrambled to my knees.

‘Don’t. Sally, don’t!’ I screamed again, for I knew she was about to plunge into the hungry stone mouth. Slowly she leaned out over the gap. I ran out onto the stone platform and as she went forward beyond the point of balance my hand closed on her upper arm. For brief unholy seconds we teetered and struggled together on the lip of stone, then I dragged her back, and pulled her to safety.

Suddenly she was shaking and weeping hysterically, and I clung to her, for I also was badly scared. Something had happened that was beyond my understanding, something mystical and deeply disturbing.

When Sally’s sobs had abated, I asked her gently, ‘What happened, Sal? Why did you do it?’

‘I don’t know. I just felt dizzy, and there was a black roaring in my head, and - oh, I don’t know, Ben. I just don’t know.’

It was another twenty minutes before Sally seemed sufficiently recovered to begin the journey back to camp, and by then the sun was setting. Before we reached the path down the cliff face it was completely dark.

‘The moon will be up in a few minutes. Sal. I don’t fancy going down the cliff in the dark. Let’s wait for it.’

We sat on the edge of the cliff huddled together, not for warmth, for the air was still hot and the rocks were sunbaked, but because both of us were still a little shaken from the experience we had just come through. The moon was a big silver glow beneath the horizon, then it pushed up fat and yellow and round above the trees, and washed the land with a soft pale light.

I looked at Sally. Her face was silver-grey in the moonlight with dark bruised eyes, and her expression was remote and infinitely sad.

‘Shall we go, Sal?’ I hugged her lightly.

‘In a minute. It’s so beautiful.’ I turned to stare out over the moon-silver plain. Africa has many moods, many faces, and I love them all. Here, before us. she put on one of her more enchanting displays. We were silent and engrossed for a long time.

Suddenly I felt Sally stir, against me, half rising.

‘Ready?’ I asked her, rising with her.

‘Ben!’ Her hand closed on my wrist with surprising strength, she was shaking my arm.

‘Ben! Ben!’

‘What is it, Sal?’ I was seized with dread that her earlier mood had returned.

‘Look, Ben. Look!’ Her voice was choked with emotion.

‘What is it, Sal? Are you all right?’

With one hand she was shaking my arm, with the other she was pointing down at the plain below us.

‘Look, Ben, there it is!’

‘Sally!’ I put both arms around her to restrain her. ‘Easy, my dear. Just sit down quietly.’

‘Don’t be a fool, Ben. I’m perfectly all right. Just look down there.’

Still holding her securely. I did as she asked. I stared and saw nothing.

‘Do you see it, Ben?’

‘No.’ And then, like the face in the picture-puzzle, it was there. It was there, as it should have been from the beginning.

‘Can you see it?’ Sally was trembling. ‘Tell me you can see it too, Ben. Tell me I’m not imagining it.’

‘Yes,’ I mumbled, still not certain, ‘yes, I think—’

‘It’s the City of the Moon, Ben. The ghost city of the bush-men - it’s our lost city, Ben. It is. It is - it must be!’

It was vague, hazy. I shut my eyes tightly and opened them again. It was still there.

The double enclosure around the silent grove, vast symmetrical tracings on the silver plain, dark shadowy lines. There were the dark circles that marked the spots on which the phallic towers had stood, some of them obscured by the trees of the grove. Beyond the walls were the honeycomb cells of the lower city, crescent-shaped and spread around the shores of the ancient, vanished lake.

‘The moon,’ I whispered. ‘Low angle. Picking up the outline of the foundations. They must be so flattened that we have walked over them, lived on top of them for a month! The light of the full moon is just the right strength to cast shadows where the remains stand slightly proud.’

‘The photograph!’

‘Yes. From 36,000 feet, the light low enough and soft enough to give the same effect,’ I agreed.

‘We probably wouldn’t have seen it from such a low altitude, the helicopter didn’t go high enough,’ Sally suggested.

‘And it was noon,’ I agreed. ‘High-angle sun, no shadows. That is why Louren didn’t see it from the helicopter.’ It was so simple, and I had missed it. Some bloody genius - they must have botched the tests.

‘But there are no walls, Ben, no towers, nothing. Only the foundations. What happened to it? What happened to our city?’

‘We will find out, Sal,’ I promised. ‘But now let’s mark it, before it disappears again.’

I handed her the one torch from the knapsack, ‘One flash means “come towards me”; two flashes, “move away from me”; three, “move left”; four, “move right”; and a windmill means “you’re on it”.’ Quickly we agreed a simple code. ‘I’ll go down onto the plain and you signal me. Put me on top of the large tower first, then guide me around the perimeter of the outer walls. We had better work fast, we don’t know how long the effect will last. Give me a flat cut-out sign when it goes.’

It lasted a little over an hour with me scampering about on the plain in obedience to Sally’s signals, and then the city faded, and slowly vanished as the moon rose towards its zenith. I went up to fetch Sally down from the cliff. I was bare to the waist, having ripped my shirt to shreds and tied strips of it onto clumps of grass and shrubs as markers.

Back in camp we built a huge fire and I got out the Glen Grant to celebrate. We were so elated, and there was so much to discuss and marvel over, that sleep was long delayed.

We went over the lighting phenomenon again in greater detail, agreeing how it worked and ruefully remembering how close we had come to the truth when we discussed the low sun effect on our very first day, the day we discovered the fresh-water mussel shells. We discussed the shells and their new significance.

‘I swear here and now, with all the gods as my witness, that I will never again toss a piece of vital scientific evidence over my shoulder.’ I made oath and testament.

‘Let’s drink to that,’ suggested Sal.

‘What a wonderful idea,’ I agreed, and refilled the glasses. Then we went on to the old bushman’s story.

‘It just goes to show you that every piece of legend, every piece of folklore is based on some fact, however garbled.’ Sally becomes all philosophical after one shot of Glen Grant.

‘And let’s face facts, my blood brother Xhai is a champion garbler of facts from way back - the City of the Moon, forsooth.’

‘It’s a lovely name. Let’s keep it,’ Sally suggested. ‘And what do you think about Xhai’s grandfather actually meeting one of the white ghosts?’

‘He probably saw one of the old hunters or prospectors, remember, we nearly had ghost status awarded us.’

‘Literally and figuratively,’ Sally reminded me.

The talk went on and on while the moon made its splendid transit of the sky above us. Every now and then serious discussion degenerated into effusive outbursts of, ‘Oh, Ben. Isn’t it wonderful. We’ve got a whole Phoenician city to excavate. All to ourselves.’ Or, ‘My God, Sal. All my life I’ve dreamed of something like this happening to me.’

It was long past midnight before we got our feet back on the earth, and Sally brought up the subject of practical procedure.

‘What do we do, Ben? Do we tell Louren Sturvesant now?’

I poured another drink slowly, while I considered this.

‘Don’t you think, Sal, we should sink a pothole, a small one, of course, on the foundations. Just to be certain we’re not making fools of ourselves?’

‘Ben, you know that’s the first rule. Don’t go scratching around haphazardly. You might destroy something valuable. We should wait until we can go in on an orderly, organized basis.’

‘I know, Sal. But I just can’t help myself. Just one tiny little hole?’

‘Okay,’ she grinned. ‘Just one tiny little hole.’

‘I suppose we’d better try and get some sleep now, it’s past two o’clock.’

Just before we finally drifted off, Sally murmured against my chest, ‘I still wonder what happened to our city. If the bushman picture was correct then huge walls and towers of masonry have vanished into thin air.’

‘Yes. It’s going to be exciting to find out.’

With that strength of character which I am able occasionally to conjure up, I firmly thrust aside the temptation to open a trench within the temple enclosure, and instead I chose a spot upon the foundations of the outer wall where I hoped I would do minimum damage.

With Sally watching avidly, and volunteering more than her share of advice, I marked out with tapes torn from my sheets the outline of the intended excavation. A narrow trench three foot wide and twenty foot long, set at a right-angle to the run of the foundations so as to open a cross-section of the horizon.

We numbered the tapes at intervals of one foot, and Sally cross-referenced her notebook to the markings on the tapes. I fetched the cameras, tools and tarpaulin from the Land-Rover. Our trench was only thirty yards from the tents. We had camped almost on top of the ancient wall.

I spread the tarpaulin ready to receive the earth removed from the trench, and then I pulled off my shirt and threw it aside. I was no longer ashamed to expose my body in front of Sally. I spat on the palms of my hands, straddled the tapes, hefted the pick, and glanced at Sally, sitting attentively on the tarpaulin with a big floppy-brimmed hat on her head.

‘Okay?’ I grinned at her.

‘All the way, partner?’ she said, and I was startled. The words jarred, they were Louren’s and mine. We didn’t say them to other people. Then suddenly I thought, what the hell! I love her also.

‘All the way, girl!’ I agreed and swung the pick. It was good to fed the pick feather-light in my hands, and the head clunking deep into the sandy earth. I worked steadily, swinging pick and shovel easily, but soon the sweat was running in rivulets down my body and soaking my breeches. As I shovelled the earth from the trench and piled it on the tarpaulin, Sally began sifting it carefully. She chattered away happily as she worked, but my only reply was the grunt at each swing of pick.

By noon I had opened the trench along its full length to a depth of three feet. The sandy soil gave way at a depth of eighteen inches to a dark reddish loam which still held the damp of the recent rains. We rested and I ate a mess of canned food and drank a bottle of Windhoek to replace some of my lost moisture.

‘You know,’ Sally looked me over thoughtfully, ‘once you get used to it, your body has a strange sort of beauty,’ she said, and I blushed until my eyes watered.

I worked for another hour, and then suddenly the bite of the pick turned up black. I swung again - still black. I dropped the pick, and knelt in the trench.

‘What is it?’ Sally was there immediately.

‘Ash!’ I said. ‘Charcoal!’

‘An ancient hearth,’ she guessed.

‘Perhaps.’ I didn’t commit myself, luckily, so that later I could chide her for her presumption. ‘Let’s take some samples for dating.’

I worked more carefully now, trying to expose the layer of ash without disturbing it. We sampled it and found that it varied between a quarter of an inch and two inches deep across the full horizon of the trench. Sally noted the depth from surface, and the position of each of the carbon samples we took, while I photographed the trench and tapes.

Then we straightened up and looked at each other.

‘Too big for a hearth,’ she said, and I nodded. ‘We shouldn’t go deeper, Ben. Not like this, crashing in with pick and shovel.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘We will stop on half the trench, leave the layer of ash undisturbed - I’ll make that concession to the rules - but I am sure as hell going down on the rest of it, to bedrock, if I can!’

‘I’m glad you said that,’ Sally applauded my decision. ‘It’s exactly what I feel as well.’

‘You begin at the far end. I’ll start here and we will work towards each other,’ I instructed, and we began lifting the layer of ash from half the trench. I found that immediately below it was a floor of hard clay and, though I didn’t say so, I guessed it was a building filler. A transported layer, not occurring naturally.

‘Go carefully,’ I cautioned Sally.

‘Quoth the pick-and-shovel man,’ she muttered sarcastically without looking up, and almost immediately she made the first discovery from the ruins of the City of the Moon.

As I write I have her notebook in front of me, with her grubby, earthy fingerprints upon the pages and her big schoolgirlish handwriting filling it.

Trench 1. Reference AC. 6. II.4. Depth 4’2½“.

Item. One glass bead. Oval. Blue. Circum 2½ mm,

Pierced. Slightly heat-distorted.

Remarks: Found in layer of ash at Level I

Index No CM. 1

This laconic notation can give no idea of our jubilation, the way we hugged each other and laughed in the sun. It was a typical blue Phoenician trade bead, and I cupped the tiny pellet of glass in my one hand.

‘I’m going to take it and stick it up their backsides.’ I threatened, referring of course to my critics.

‘If that end is as narrow as their minds, Ben dear, then it will be a pretty tight fit.’

I started using a small pick and fifteen minutes later I made the next discovery. A charred fragment of bone.

‘Human?’ Sally asked.

‘Possibly.’ I said. ‘Head of a human femur - the shaft has been burned away’

‘Cannibalism? Cremation?’ Sally hazarded.

‘You do run on,’ I said.

‘What do you think then?’ she challenged. I was silent for a long time, then I made up my mind, and came out with it.

‘I think at this level the City of the Moon was sacked and burned, its inhabitants were slaughtered, the walls thrown down and its buildings obliterated.’

Sally whistled softly, staring at me in mock amazement. ‘On the evidence of one bead, and a piece of bone - that just has to be the greatest flyer of all time!’

That evening, in reply to Larkin’s bellowed queries, I replied, ‘Thanks, Peter. We are fine. No, we don’t need anything. Yes. Good. Please tell Mr Sturvesant there is no change here, nothing to report.’

I switched off the set, and avoided Sally’s eyes.

‘Yes,’ she told me sternly. ‘After a stinking one like that, you should look guilty!’

‘Well, you said yourself it’s only one bead and a piece of bone.’

But by the evening two days later, I had no such excuse, for I had sunk my trench seven feet five inches and there I uncovered the first of four courses of dry packed masonry. The stones were skilfully dressed, and squared. The joints between each block were so tight that a knife-blade would not go between them. The stones were bigger than those of Zimbabwe, clearly intended to support the weight of a substantial edifice; the average size was approximately four feet, by two, by two. They were cut from red sandstone similar to that of the cliffs and as I examined the workmanship I knew beyond any doubt that they were the work of artisans from a powerful and wealthy civilization.

That night I spoke to Larkin again.

‘How soon can you get a message through to Mr Sturvesant, Peter?’

‘He should have got back from New York today. I can put a phone call through this evening.’

‘Please ask him to come right away.’

‘You mean you want him to drop everything and come running - that’s a laugh.’

‘Just do it, please.’

The helicopter arrived at three o’clock the following afternoon, and I ran to meet it, pulling on my shirt.

‘What have you got for me, Ben?’ Louren demanded as he climbed, big and blond, out of the cabin.

‘I think you are going to like it,’ I told him, as we shook hands.

Five hours later we sat around the fire and Louren smiled over the rim of his glass at me.

‘You were right, lad. I do like it!’ This was the first opinion he had expressed since his arrival. He had followed Sal and me from excavation to cavern to cliff-top, listening attentively to our explanations, shaking his head with a rueful grin when I explained our theory of low-angle light on the ruins, firing a question occasionally in the same tone I had heard him use in a directors’ meeting. Each time the question was relevant, incisive and searching, as though he were evaluating a business deal. When Sally spoke he stood close to her, looking frankly into her face, those marvellous classical features of his rapt and still. Once she touched his arm to enforce a point and they smiled at each other. I was happy to see them so friendly at last, for they were the two people in the world I loved.

He knelt with me in the bottom of the trench and caressed the worked stone with his hands, he held the charred bone and melted glass bead in his palm and frowned at them as though trying to draw their secrets from them by sheer force of concentration.

Just before sunset, at Louren’s insistence, we returned to the cavern and went to the rear wall. I lit one of the gas lanterns and placed it so that its light fell full on the painting of the white king. Then the three of us sat around it in a semicircle and studied it in every detail. The king’s head was in profile and Sally pointed out the features, the long straight nose and high forehead.

‘A face like that never came out of Africa,’ she said, and as a contrast she picked out the painting of another figure farther down the wall. ‘Look at that. It’s a Bantu and no mistaking it. The artist was skilled enough to differentiate between the features of each type.’

However, Louren’s attention never wavered from his scrutiny of the king. Again he seemed to be trying to wrest its secrets from it, but the king was regally aloof and at last Louren sighed and stood up. He was about to turn away when his glance dropped to the white-robed priest figures below the king.

‘What are those?’ he asked.

‘We have named them the priests,’ I told him, ‘but Sally feels they could be Arab traders or—’

‘The figure in the centre—’ he pointed out the central priest figure, and his voice was sharp, almost alarmed, ‘what is he doing?’

‘Bowing to the king,’ Sally suggested.

‘Even though he is bowing, he stands taller than the others?’ Louren protested.

‘Size was the bushman artist’s way of showing importance. See the relative size of the king - although they are pygmies they always show themselves as giants - the size of the central priest would signify that he was the High Priest, or the leader of the Arabs, if Sally is right.’

‘If he is bowing, it’s with the top third of his body only and he is the only one doing it. The others are erect.’ Louren was still not convinced. ‘It’s almost as though—’ his voice trailed away, and he shook his head. Then suddenly he shivered briefly, and I saw the gooseflesh appear on the smooth tanned skin of his upper arms.

‘It’s become cold in here,’ he said, folding his arms across his chest, I had not noticed any drop in temperature, but I stood up also.

‘Let’s get back to camp,’ Louren said, and it was only after I had built up the fire to a cheerfully crackling, spark-flying blaze that he spoke again.

‘You are right, lad. I do like it!’ And he took a swallow of the malt whisky. ‘Now let’s start talking prices,’ he suggested.

‘Set it out for us. Lo,’ I agreed.

‘I will negotiate with the Botswana Government. I can put a little leverage on them. We’ll have to have a formal agreement drawn up, probably split any finds fifty-fifty, they’ll have to guarantee us access and exclusive rights. That sort of thing.’

‘Good. That’s certainly your bag of tricks, Lo.’

‘Knowing you, Benjamin, you have a list of your requirements, the men you want, equipment - am I right?’

I laughed and unbuttoned my top pocket. ‘As a matter of fact—’ I admitted as I handed him three foolscap sheets. He glanced over them quickly.

‘Very Spartan, Ben,’ he congratulated me. ‘But I think we can go in a bit bigger than this. I’ll want at least a rough landing-strip here to start with, something to handle a Dakota. The hot weather is coming. You’ll die living out under canvas. We’ll need solid accommodation, also office and storage space with air-conditioning. That means a generator for lighting and to pump water down from the pool.’

‘No one can ever accuse you of being half-arsed, Lo,’ I told him, and we all laughed. Sally refilled my glass. I was jubilant and mightily pleased with myself that evening. I had much to be proud of, ferreting out a secret so well hidden for millennia, and Louren was going to back me all the way, partner. The whisky went down my throat like water.

I used to drink a lot of whisky. It was a way of forgetting certain things and making others easier to accept. Then about six years ago I found I hadn’t worked on a book for a year, that my memory and intellect were blurry and unreliable, and my hands shook in the morning. I still drink a tot or two of an evening, and occasionally I take on a full blast of the stuff. But now I drink because I am happy, not because I am sad.

‘Come on, Ben. Tonight we’ve got something to celebrate,’ Sally laughed and poured me another heavy portion.

‘Wow! Gently, Doctor,’ I protested weakly, but that night I got drunk, pleasantly, contentedly, floating drunk. With dignity I refused Louren’s offer of assistance and made my own way to the tent wherein Sally had discreetly segregated me since Louren’s arrival. I fell on top of my bed fully clothed and went to sleep. I half woke when Louren came in and climbed into his bed across the tent. I remember opening one eye and seeing the glow of the waning moon through the fly of the tent - or was it the first glow of dawn? It didn’t seem important then.

The personnel for the project was the most important consideration, and here I was lucky. Peter Willcox was due for his sabbatical leave from Cape Town University. I flew down to see him, and in six hours convinced him that he wouldn’t enjoy the fleshpots of Europe at all. Heather, his wife, was a little harder to sway, until I showed her the photographs of the white king. Like Sally, rock art is one of her big things.

They were good people to have on a dig. We had been together on the excavation of the Slangkop caves. They were both in their thirties: he a little paunchy and balding with steel-rimmed spectacles and trousers always on the point of falling down. He had to keep tugging at the waistband. She was thin and angular, with a wide laughing mouth and a snub, heavily freckled nose They were childless, cheerful, knowledgeable and hard-working. Peter plays a very jazzy accordion and Heather has a voice that harmonizes well with mine.

Peter introduced me to two of his postgraduate students whom he recommended without reservation. I was startled at my first meeting with them. Ral Davidson was a young man of twenty-one - although the fact that he was a man was not immediately obvious. However, Peter assured me that beneath all the untidy hair lurked a promising young archaeologist. His fiancee was an intense bespectacled young woman, who had graduated at the head of her year. Although she was depressingly plain and I prefer my women beautiful, Leslie Johns endeared herself to me immediately by whispering breathlessly, ‘Dr Kazin, I think your book, Ancient Africa, is the most exciting thing I’ve ever read.’

This display of good taste secured the job for them.

Peter Larkin found me forty-six African labourers from the southern territories of Botswana, who had never heard of the Hills of Blood nor of any curse upon them.

My only disappointment was with Timothy Mageba. I spent five days at the Institute in Johannesburg on my way back from Cape Town, mostly trying to convince Timothy that I needed him at the Hills of Blood.

‘Machane,’ he said, ‘there is work here that no one else can do.’ I was to remember those words later. ‘Where you are going there is work that many men are capable of. You have these men and women already, specialists all of them. You do not need me.’

‘Please, Timothy. It would be for six months or so. Your work here can wait.’

He shook his head vehemently, but I hurried on.

‘I really want you, and need you. There are things that you alone can explain. Timothy, there are over fifteen thousand square feet of paintings on the rocks. Much of it is symbol, stylized emblems which only you—’

‘Dr Kazin, you could send me copies of them. I can still give you my interpretation.’ Timothy switched to English, which with him was always a discouraging sign. ‘I hope you don’t insist that I leave the Institute now. My assistants cannot work without my direction.’

We stared at each other for a few seconds. It was a deadlock. I could order him to come, but an unwilling helper is worse than none at all. There was a rebellious, independent spirit smouldering in Timothy’s dark eyes and I knew that there was some deeper reason why he refused to accompany me.

‘Is it—’ I hesitated. I was about to ask him if the ancient curse was the reason for his refusal. It was always disquieting to find superstition influencing an intelligent and well-educated man. I was reluctant to come straight out with it, for even with an African like Timothy the direct question is considered gauche and discourteous.

‘There are always reasons within reasons, Doctor. Please believe me when I tell you it would be better if I did not accompany you this time.’

‘All right, Timothy,’ I agreed with resignation, and stood up. Again we locked glances, and it seemed to me that he was different. The flickering fires burned brighter, and again I felt the stirring of unease, of fear even, deep within me.

‘I promise you, Doctor, that my work here is at a critical stage.’

‘I will be very interested to see it when you are ready, Timothy.’

My four new assistants arrived on the commercial flight from Cape Town the following morning and we drove directly to the Sturvesant hangar where the Dakota transport was waiting for us.

The flight in was noisy and gay. Peter had his accordion along, and I never travel without my old guitar. We hit a couple of easy ones like ‘Abdul Abulbul Emir’, and ‘Green grow the rushes, oh!’, and I discovered with delight that Ral Davidson whistled with a clarity and purity that was truly beautiful, and that Leslie had a sweet little soprano.

‘When we’ve finished this dig, I’m going to take you lot on tour,’ I told them, and began teaching them some of my own compositions.

It was three weeks since I had left the Hills of Blood, and as we circled it I could see that changes had taken place in my absence. The landing-strip, complete with wind-sock, had been gouged out of the dusty plain. Near it stood a cluster of prefabricated buildings. One long central bungalow with the residential quarters grouped around it. A skeletal metal tower supported a 2,000-gallon galvanized iron water-tank, and beyond that was the encampment which housed the African labour force.

Sally was waiting for us at the landing-strip, and we piled our luggage into the Land-Rover and went to look at our new home. I expected Louren to be there but Sally told me he had gone the previous day after a stay of a few days.

Proudly Sally showed us over the camp. The central air-conditioned bungalow was divided into a small common room and lounge at the one end, in the centre was a large office and beyond that a storage warehouse. There were four residential huts, air-conditioned, but sparsely furnished. Sally had allotted one to the Willcoxes, one for Leslie and herself, one for Ral and me, and the fourth for Louren or other visitors, pilots, and overnight guests.

‘I could think of a few improvements in the sleeping arrangements,’ I muttered bitterly.

‘Poor Ben.’ Sally smiled cruelly. ‘Civilization has caught up with you. By the way, I hope you remembered to bring your bathing costume, no skinny dips in the pool any more.’

And perversely I regretted all that Louren had done for me.

The Hills of Blood were no longer a lonely, mysterious place in the wilderness, but a bustling little community, with aircraft landing regularly, Land-Rovers kicking up the dust and even the clatter of an electric water-pump shattering the dreaming silence of the cavern and disturbing the still green waters of the emerald pool.

Quickly my group settled into their allotted tasks. Sally worked on at the cavern, with a single young African assistant. Each of the other four was placed in charge of a team of ten labourers and assigned an area in which to work.

Peter and Heather shrewdly elected to work outside the main walls, in the ruins of the lower city. It was here that the ancients would have disposed of their rubbish, broken pottery, old weapons, discarded beads and the fascinating debris of a vanished civilization.

Ral and Leslie with dreams of gold and treasure jumped at the chance of excavating within the enclosure, an area which the ancients would have kept swept and scrupulously clean, and therefore much less likely to yield finds of interest. That is the difference between experience and inexperience, between the impetuosity of youth and the cool calculations of an older head.

I kept myself free, on a supervisory and advisory capacity, spending my time at those places where it could do the most good. Anxiously I watched Ral and Leslie to assure myself that their approach and technique was satisfactory, then I relaxed as Peter Willcox’s recommendation proved correct. They were clever, enthusiastic youngsters and, more important, they knew their way around an archaeological dig.

The four teams shook themselves out as the dullards amongst the African labourers were sorted from the bright ones. In a shorter time than I had hoped for, the firm of Kazin and Company was breaking ground and doing good business.

It was slow, painstaking and thoroughly satisfying work. Each evening, before the nightly singsong in the common room, the day’s work was discussed and any discoveries evaluated and related to their place in the general picture of the site.

The first conclusive discovery we made was that the ash layer at Level I persisted throughout the site, even in the lower city. It was by no means evenly distributed, but showed up in patches of varying thickness. Carbon-dating, however, gave a fairly constant result, and we settled at a date of AD 450. This date seemed to be concurrent or to slightly pre-date the oldest bushman painting in the cavern.

We were agreed that bushman occupation of the cavern would have followed immediately after the departure or disappearance of the ancients from the city. Scrupulously we referred to the first occupations as ‘ancients’, considering the term ‘Phoenician’ as yet unproven. A condition which it was my most dearly-held hope would soon be altered.

Associated with the ash layer were haunting scraps of human remains. Ral uncovered an incisor in the ash against the base of the main tower, Peter a complete humerus together with many other unidentifiable bone fragments. These unburied human remains went a long way to ensuring a general acceptance of my theory of a violent end to the City of the Moon.

This was reinforced by the baffling disappearance of walls and towers, which we could reasonably accept once stood on these bases of clay, with their vestigial stone foundations which occurred spasmodically along the outline of the temple enclosure.

Ral hesitantly suggested an enemy so crazed with hatred, that he had set out to obliterate all trace of the ancients from the earth. We could all accept this.

‘Fair enough. But what happened to thousands of tons of massive masonry?’ Sally spoke for all of us.

‘They scattered it out across the plain,’ Ral hazarded.

‘A Herculean task, besides the plain was a lake in those days. To get rid of it they would have scattered it along the area between cliff and lake. There is no sign of it.’

Apologetically Peter Willcox reminded us of the account in Credo Mutwa’s book Indaba My Children of how an ancient city was carried by its people, block by block, out of the west, and how the city was rebuilt at Zimbabwe.

‘This is red sandstone,’ Sally cut in brusquely. ‘Zimbabwe is granite, quarried from the rock on which it stands. Zimbabwe is 275 miles east of here. The labour involved is unthinkable. I will accept that the building skills and techniques were transported, but not the material itself.’

There were no more ideas forthcoming and we could turn from theories to facts. At the end of six weeks Louren Sturvesant visited us for the first time. All digging and other work was suspended as for two days we held a seminar, with myself as chairman, in which we presented Louren with all our accomplishments and conclusions to date.

These were very impressive. To begin with, the list of artefacts, pottery sherds, and other relics filled 127 typewritten foolscap pages. Peter and Heather were responsible for most of these and they opened the seminar.

‘So far all excavation without the enclosure has been confined to the area north of it, and lying within 1,000 feet of the outer perimeter. In the main it seems to have been a complex of small rooms and buildings built from adobe clay and roofed with poles and thatch—’