The Sunbird

Peter described the area in detail, giving the average size of the rooms and the exact position of each object discovered. Louren started thrashing around in his chair, and fiddling with his cigar. Peter is meticulous, almost old-maidish, in his approach to his work. Finally he reached his conclusions. ‘It seems, therefore, that this area was an extensive bazaar and market.’ And he led us through into the warehouse to examine the finds from this area. There were fragments of badly rusted iron, a bronze comb, the handle of a knife fashioned in the shape of a woman’s body, fourteen rosettes of bronze that we guessed had embossed a leather shield, twenty-five pounds’ weight of bronze discs, and stars and sun objects which were clearly ornaments, sixteen shaped and beaten bronze plates that we hoped might comprise part of a suit of body armour, a magnificent bronze dish twenty-four inches in diameter chased with a sun image and set around with an intricate border pattern, and another forty pounds’ weight of bronze scraps and fragments so badly battered and damaged as to be unidentifiable.

‘These are all the bronze objects so far recovered,’ Peter told Louren. ‘The workmanship is crude, but not recognizably Bantu in conception and execution. It would relate more closely to what we know of Phoenician craftsmanship. Unlike the Romans and Greeks, they placed little value on the arts. Their artefacts, like their buildings, were massive and roughly executed. One other fact that emerges is the veneration of the sun. It was clearly a generally polytheistic community but one in which sun-worship predominated. In this settlement, it appears that Baal, the Phoenician male deity, was personified by the sun.’

I thought Peter was verging on the mistake of special pleading but I let him continue without interruption. After discussing each item separately, Peter led us to the next row of tables that carried all the glass and pottery.

‘One hundred and twenty-five pounds’ weight of glass beads - the colours are predominantly blue and red. Phoenician colours, with greens and whites and yellows recovered only in Levels I and II. In other words, later than AD 50 which coincides approximately with the final phase of absorption of Phoenician civilization by the Romans in the Mediterranean area, and its gradual disappearance.’

I interrupted. ‘The Romans were so thorough in their absorption of Phoenicia and all her works, that we know very little of them…’

My attention wandered to Sally. She was in a sparkling mood, a complete change from the previous six weeks when she had been moody and withdrawn. She had washed her hair and it was shiny and springing with soft lights. Her skin also shone with golden hues where the sun had touched it, and she had coloured her lips and dramatized her eyes. Her beauty squeezed my heart. I forced my mind back to the row of tables.

‘… A case in point is this recovery of pottery,’ Peter was saying. He indicated the huge display of fragments, portions, and a very few complete pieces. ‘On all of this, with one exception, there is not a single inscription. This is the exception.’ He picked up a sherd which was set out in a place of honour, and passed it to Louren. Although we had all gloated over it before, we crowded around Louren as he examined it. There was a symbol cut into the baked clay.

‘A chip from the lip of a cup, or vase. The symbol could conceivably be a Punic T.’

Louren burst in impulsively, turning to me and laying a hand on my shoulder, ‘Conclusive, Ben. They must accept that, surely?’

‘By no means, Lo.’ I shook my head regretfully. ‘They will cry, “Imported”. The old trick of discrediting anything you can’t explain, or which doesn’t support your theories, by saying that it was brought in during the course of trade.’

‘Looks as though you can’t win, Ben,’ Louren sympathized, and I grinned.

‘At least we haven’t uncovered any fourteenth-century Nanking pottery - or a chamber pot with Queen Victoria’s portrait on it!’

Laughing we moved on to the next display of copper and copperware. There were bangles and brooches, green-encrusted and eaten away. Bales of copper wire and, significantly, ingots cast into the shape of a St Andrew’s Cross each weighing twelve pounds.

‘Those aren’t something new,’ Louren remarked.

‘No,’ I agreed. ‘They turn up all over central and southern Africa, And yet the shape is exactly that of the ingots taken from the tin mines of Cornwall by the Phoenicians - or the copper ingots from the ancient mines on Cyprus.’

‘Still not conclusive?’ Louren looked at me and I shook my head, leading him on to see the iron work we had recovered. All of it was so badly rusted and damaged that the original shape was a matter of conjecture and guesswork. There were hundreds of arrow-heads, mostly associated with Levels I and II, spear-heads and sword-blades, axe-heads and knives.

‘Judging by the quantities of weapons, or what we take to be weapons, the ancients were a warlike people. Alternatively they were a people fearful of attack and well armed against it,’ I suggested, and there was a general murmur of agreement. From the iron section we went on to a display of my photographs, showing each stage of the excavations, views of the lower city, the temple, the acropolis and the cavern.

‘Pretty good, Ben,’ Louren admitted. ‘Is that all you have for me?’

‘The best comes last.’ I couldn’t help a little showmanship in my presentation, and I had screened off the end of the warehouse. I led him beyond the first screen with all my team hovering anxiously to judge his reaction. It was gratifying.

‘Good God!’ Louren stopped short and stared at the phallic columns with their ornamental tops. ‘Zimbabwe birds!’

There were three of them. Although incomplete, they stood about five foot high, and were thirty inches in circumference. Only one of them was relatively undamaged, the other two had been mutilated so as to be hardly recognizable. The carving on top of each pillar had obviously originally depicted a vulturine bird shape with heavy beak, hunched shoulders, and predatory claws. They were similar in design and execution to those recovered from Zimbabwe by Hall, Maclver, and others.

‘Not Zimbabwe birds,’ I corrected Louren.

‘No,’ Sally affirmed. ‘These are the ones from which the Zimbabwe birds were copied.’

‘Where did you find them?’ Louren asked as he moved in for a closer scrutiny of the green soapstone figures.

‘In the temple,’ I smiled at Ral and Leslie, who looked suitably modest, ‘within the inner enclosure. They are probably religious objects - you see the sun symbols around the collar of the column - clearly they are associated with the worship of Baal as the sun god.’

‘We have named them the sunbirds,’ Sally explained, ‘as Ben felt a name like the birds of Ophir was a bit too pretentious.’

‘Why have they been damaged like this?’ Louren indicated where deliberate blows had shattered the brittle green stone.

‘That’s anybody’s guess.’ I shrugged away the question. ‘But we know that they had been toppled and were lying without design or direction in the layer of ash at Level I.’

‘That’s very interesting, Ben.’ Louren’s eyes were drawn to the final screen at the end of the warehouse. ‘Now come on, you secretive old bastard, what have you got behind there?’

‘What the whole city and colonization was based on—’ I opened the screen,‘—gold!’

There is something about that beautiful buttery metal that holds the imagination captive. A hush came over the party as we stared at it. The objects had been carefully cleaned, and the surfaces shone with the special soft radiance which is unmistakably gold.

To coldly itemize the collection detracts in some way from its excitement and mystery. The gross weight of the pieces was 683 fine ounces. There were fifteen rods of native gold as thick and as long as a man’s finger. There were forty-eight pieces of crudely wrought jewellery, pins, brooches and combs. There was a statuette of a female figure four and a half inches tall—

‘Astarte - Tanith,’ Sally whispered as she stroked it, ‘Goddess of the moon and the earth.’

In addition there were a handful of gold beads with the string long ago disintegrated, dozens of sun discs and many chips, tacks and flakes and buttons of no definite shape or discernible purpose.

‘And then,’ I said, ‘there is this,’ picking up the heavy chalice of solid gold. It had been crushed and flattened, but the base was undamaged. ‘Look,’ I said, pointing to the design worked into it with uncommon delicacy of line.

‘Ankh? The Egyptian sign of eternal life?’ Louren looked to me for confirmation, and I nodded.

‘For the Christians and heathens amongst you. We know that the Pharaohs on occasions used the Phoenicians to supply treasure for their empire. Was this,’ and I turned the chalice in my hands, ‘a gift from a Pharaoh to the King of Ophir?’

‘And do you remember the cup in the right hand of the White Lady of the Brandberg?’ Sally asked.

It was enough to keep us arguing and locked in discussion into the early hours, and the next day Sally, helped by Heather Willcox, presented her drawings and paintings from the cavern. When she showed the tracing of the white king, that frown of concentration again creased Louren’s brow, and he stood up and went to examine it more closely. We waited for a long time in silence, before he looked up at Sally.

‘I would like you to make a copy of this, for my own personal collection. Would you mind?’

‘With the greatest of pleasure.’ Sally smiled happily at him.

The mood of sparkle and smile was still strong upon her and she was enjoying the sensation that the display of her work was causing. Sally, like most beautiful women, is not completely averse to standing in the limelight. She knew her work was damned good, and she liked the plaudits.

‘Now I haven’t been able to decide what these are.’ Sally smiled as she hung a new sheet on the common-room board. ‘There are seventeen symbols similar to this which I have so far isolated. Heather calls them the walking cucumbers, or the double walking cucumbers. Have you any ideas?’

‘Tadpoles?’ Ral tried.

‘Centipedes?’ Leslie was a bit more feasible.

That was the end of our imagination, and we were silent.

‘No more offers?’ Sally asked. ‘I thought that with the formidable collection of academic qualification and worldly wisdom we have assembled here we could do better—’

‘A bireme!’ Louren said softly. ‘And a trireme.’

‘By Jove.’ I saw it immediately. ‘You’re right!’

‘ “Quinquereme of Nineveh, from distant Ophir,”’ Peter quoted joyously.

‘The shape of a ship’s hull, and the banks of oars,’ I enlarged upon it. ‘Of course - if we are right then vessels like that must have plied regularly across the lakes.’

We could accept it, but others certainly would not.

After lunch we went for a tour of the excavations, and Louren again distinguished himself with an inspired guess. A series of large regular cell-like rooms had been uncovered by Peter’s team in the angle formed by the cliff and the enclosure wall. They were joined by a long corridor, and there was evidence of paved floors and a system of drainage. Each room was approximately twenty-five feet square, and it seemed that these were the only buildings outside the enclosure which had been made of stone blocks and not adobe clay.

The closest we could come to a purpose for these cells was to call them ‘the prison’.

‘Do I have to do all the work around here?’ Louren sighed. ‘When you’ve just shown me pictures of the war elephants?’

‘Elephant stables?’ I asked.

‘Very quick, lad!’ Louren clapped me on the shoulder and I blushed. ‘But I believe they are called elephant lines in India.’

After dinner I worked for an hour in my dark room, developing three rolls of film, and when I was finished I went to look for Louren. He was leaving again early the following morning and there was much for us to discuss.

He wasn’t in the guest room, nor in the lounge, and when I asked for him, Ral told me, ‘I think he has gone up to the cavern, Doctor. He borrowed a torch from me.’

Leslie looked at him in a way which was clearly meant to be highly significant, a frown and a quick little shake of the head, but it meant as much to him as it did to me. I went to fetch my own torch, and set off through the silent grove, picking my way carefully around the open excavations. No light showed from the entrance of the tunnel beyond the great wild fig tree.

‘Louren!’ I called. ‘Are you there?’ And my voice bounced hollowly from cliff and rock. There was silence once the echoes died, and I went forward into the tunnel. Flashing my torch into the darkness ahead, ducking my head under the zooming flight of the bats, and hearing my own footsteps magnified in the silence.

I could see no light, and I stopped and called again.

‘Louren!’ My voice boomed around the cavern. There was no reply, and I went on down the passage.

As I stepped out from the mouth of the tunnel, suddenly the beam of a powerful torch flashed from across the cavern shining full in my eyes.

‘Louren?’ I asked. ‘It that you?’

‘What do you want, Ben?’ he demanded from the darkness behind the torch. He sounded irritable, angry even.

‘I want to talk to you about the plans for the next step.’ I shielded my eyes from the beam.

‘It can wait until tomorrow.’

‘You are leaving early - let’s talk now.’

I started to cross the cavern towards him, averting my eyes from the dazzling beam.

‘Point that light somewhere else, won’t you,’ I protested mildly.

‘Are you deaf!’ Louren’s voice rasped, the voice of a man used to being obeyed. ‘I said tomorrow, damn you.’

I stopped dead, stunned, confused. He had never spoken to me like that in my life before.

‘Lo, are you all right?’ I asked anxiously. There was something wrong here in the cavern. I could sense it.

‘Ben,’ his voice crackled, ‘just turn around and walk out of here, will you. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.’

I hesitated a moment longer. Then I turned and walked back down the passage. I hadn’t even had a glimpse of Louren in the darkness beyond the torch.

In the morning Louren was as charming as only he can be. He apologized handsomely for the previous evening. ‘I just wanted to be alone, Ben. I’m sorry. I get like that sometimes.’

‘I know, Lo. I am the same.’

In ten minutes we had agreed that although the circumstantial evidence of a Phoenician occupation of the city was most encouraging, it was not conclusive. We would not make any public announcement yet, but in the meantime Louren gave me complete carte blanche to proceed with a full-scale excavation and investigation.

He flew out with the dawn, and I knew he would be in London for breakfast the following morning.

The weeks that followed Louren’s departure were dissatisfying for me. Although the work on the ruins went forward steadily, and my assistants never faltered in their enthusiasm and industry - yet the results were uniformly disappointing.

There were other finds, many of them, but they were repetitive. Pottery, beads, even the occasional gold fragment or ornament no longer thrilled me as it had before. There was nothing that added a scrap of knowledge to the store we had accumulated already. I roved the site restlessly, anxiously hovering over a new trench or exposed level, praying that the next spadeful of earth turned would expose an inscribed pallet or the headstone to a burial vault. Somewhere here was the key to the ancient mystery, but it was well hidden.

Apart from the lack of progress on the excavation, my relationship with Sally had deteriorated in some subtle fashion which I was at a loss to explain. Naturally there had been no opportunity for any physical intimacy since the arrival of the others at the City of the Moon. Sally was adamant in her determination not to allow our affair to become common knowledge. My amateurish manoeuvrings to get her alone were deftly countered. The nearest I came to success was when I visited her at the cavern during the day. Even here she had her assistant with her, and often Heather Willcox as well.

She seemed withdrawn, taciturn, even surly. She worked over her easel with a fierce concentration during the day, and she usually slipped away to her hut immediately after dinner. Once I followed her, knocking softly on the door of her hut, then hesitantly pushing the door open when there was no reply. She was not there. I waited in the shadows, feeling like a peeping Tom, and it was after midnight before she returned, slipping out of the silent grove like a ghost and going directly to her room where Leslie had long ago switched out the light.

It was distressing for me to see my laughing Sally so withdrawn, and finally I visited her at the cavern.

‘I want to talk to you, Sal.’

‘What about?’ She looked at me with mild surprise, as though it were the first time in days that she had noticed me. I sent the young African assistant away and prevailed on Sally to join me on the rocks beside the emerald pool, hoping that its beauty and associations would soften her mood.

‘Is something wrong, Sal?’

‘Good Lord, should there be?’ It was an awkward unsatisfying conversation. Sally seemed to feel I was prying into affairs that did not concern me. I felt my anger rising, and I wanted to shout at her, ‘I am your lover, damn you, and everything you do concerns me!’

But good sense prevailed, for I am sure presumption of that magnitude from me would have severed the last tenuous threads of our relationship. Instead I took her hand and, hating myself for the blush that burned my cheeks, I told her softly, ‘I love you, Sally. Just remember that - if there is ever anything I can do—’

I think it was probably the best thing I could have said, for immediately her hand tightened on mine and her face softened, her eyes went slightly misty.

‘Ben, you are a sweet dear person. Don’t take any notice of me for a while. I’ve just got the blues, there is nothing anybody can do about it. They will go on their own, if you don’t fuss.’

For a moment she was my old girl again, a smile quivering precariously on the corners of her mouth, and in those great green eyes.

‘Let me know when it’s over, won’t you?’ I stood up.

‘That I will, Doctor. You’ll be the first to know.’

The following week I flew back to Johannesburg. There was the Annual General Meeting of the trustees of the Institute which I could not avoid, and I was committed to a series of lectures for the Faculty of Archaeology at the University of Witwatersrand.

I was scheduled to be away from the site for eleven days. I left it all in Peter Willcox’s safe hands, after extracting from him a promise that he would cable me immediately if any new development broke.

The three girls fussed around me, packing my case, making a picnic lunch for me to eat on the plane, and lining up to kiss me goodbye at the airstrip. I must admit that I rather enjoyed all the attention.

I have often found that living too close to any problem narrows one’s view of the whole. Three hours after leaving the City of the Moon, I made a minor breakthrough. If there had been walls and towers standing on the ruined foundations, then the rock must have been brought from nearby. The obvious place was from the cliffs themselves. Somewhere in those cliffs, close to the city, there was a quarry.

I would find it, and from its extent I would calculate the actual size of the city.

For the first time in weeks I felt good, and the days that followed were gratifying and solidly enjoyable. The meeting of the trustees was the type of festive affair which can be expected when funds are unlimited and prospects are favourable. From the Chair Louren was most complimentary when he renewed my contract as Director of the Institute for a further twelve months. To celebrate the thirty per cent rise in my remuneration, he invited me to a dinner at his home where forty people sat down at the yellow wood table in the huge dining-room, and I was the guest of honour.

Hilary Sturvesant, in a gown of yellow brocade silk and wearing the fabled Sturvesant diamonds, gave me her almost undivided attention during the meal. I have a weakness for beautiful things, particularly if they are women. There were twenty of them there that night, and in the drawing-room afterwards I held court like royalty. The wine had loosened my tongue, and washed away my confounded shyness. No matter that Hilary and Louren had probably primed the other guests to make a fuss of me, for when at two o’clock in the morning I went down to the Mercedes with Hilary and Louren escorting me I swaggered along seven feet tall.

This new-found confidence carried me through the series of four lectures at the University of Witwatersrand, the first of which was attended by twenty-five students and faculty members, the latter outnumbering the former two to one. The word got out, however, and my final venue was changed to one of the main lecture theatres to handle the audience of 600 that turned up. I was an unqualified success. I was prevailed upon to return at an early date - and there was an unsubtle hint from the Vice-Chancellor of the University that the Archaeology Chair would fall vacant the following year.

For the last three days of my visit I spent every minute at the Institute. With relief I found that not much had suffered in my absence, and my multitudinous staff had kept things running smoothly.

The bushman exhibition in the Kalahari Room was completed, and open to the public. It was magnificently executed, and the central figure of the main group reminded me sharply of my little friend Xhai. The model was depicted in the act of painting on the stone wall of a cave abode. With his stoppered buck-horn paint pots, and reed pipes and brushes, I imagined that this was how the artist who had painted my white king had worked. It gave me an odd sensation, as though two millennia had rolled away, as though I could send my mind back along the years. I spoke of it to Timothy Mageba.

‘Yes, Machane. I have told you before that you and I are marked. We have the sign of the spirits on us, and we have the sight.’

I smiled and shook my head. ‘I don’t know about you, Timothy, but I’ve never been able to pick a winner—’

‘I am serious, Doctor,’ Timothy rebuked me. You have the gift. It is merely that you have not been taught to develop it.‘

I will accept hypnotism, but talk of clairvoyance, necromancy, mantology and the like leaves me feeling embarrassed. To divert the conversation from me and my gifts, I asked, ‘You have told me before that you are also marked by the spirits…’

Timothy looked at me steadily from out of those disturbing black eyes. At first I thought I had insulted him by my thinly disguised question, but suddenly he nodded that cannon-ball head. He stood up, closed and locked the door of his office before returning to his seat. Quickly he stripped shoe and sock from his right foot, and showed it to me.

The deformity was shocking, although I had seen photographs of it before. It was of fairly common occurrence among the Batonga tribe of the Zambezi Valley. There had been a paper on it published in the British Medical Journal during 1969. The condition was known as ‘ostrich-foot’, and consisted of a massive division between the metatarsus of the big toe and the second toe. The effect was to make the foot resemble the claw of an ostrich or predatory bird. Timothy was obviously very sensitive about this deformity, and almost immediately replaced his sock and shoe. I realized later that he had shown it to me in a deliberate attempt to enlist my sympathy, to create a bond between us.

‘Both feet?’ I asked, and he nodded. ‘There are many people in the Zambezi Valley with feet like that,’ I told him.

‘My mother was a Batonga woman,’ he answered. ‘It was this mark that qualified me for training in the mysteries.’

‘Does it hinder you at all?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he answered brusquely, and then went on almost defiantly in Batonga, ‘We men of the cloven feet outrun the fleetest antelope.’

It was a beneficial mutation then, and I would have enjoyed discussing it further but I was warned by Timothy’s expression. I realized the effort it had taken him to show me.

‘Will you have some tea. Doctor?’ He reverted to English, closing the subject. When one of his young African assistants had poured cups of strong black tea for us, Timothy asked, ‘Please tell me how the work at the City of the Moon is progressing, Doctor.’

We chatted for another half hour, then I left him.

‘You must excuse me now, Timothy. I am flying back tomorrow morning early and there is still much to do.’

I was awakened by a soft but insistent knocking on the door of my suite in the Institute. I switched on the bedside light and saw that the time was three o’clock in the morning.

‘Who is there?’ I called and the knocking stopped. I slipped out of bed, shrugged into a dressing-gown and slippers, and started for the front door, when I realized the risk I was taking. I went back to my bedroom and took the big ugly automatic .45 from the drawer. Feeling a little melodramatic, I pumped a round into the chamber and went back to the front door.

‘Who is it?’ I repeated.

‘It’s me. Doctor. Timothy!’

I hesitated a moment longer - anybody could call themselves Timothy.

‘Are you alone?’ I asked in Kalahari bushman.

‘I am alone, Sunbird,’ he answered in the same language, and I slipped the pistol into my pocket and opened the door.

Timothy was dressed in dark blue slacks and a white shirt with a windcheater thrown over his shoulders and I noticed immediately that there were spots of fresh blood on the shirt and that there was a rather grubby cloth wrapped around his left forearm. He was clearly much agitated, his eyes wide and staring in the light, and his movements jerky and nervous.

‘Good God, Timothy, are you all right?’

‘I’ve had a terrible night, Doctor. I had to see you right away.’

‘What have you done to your arm?’

‘I cut it on the window pane of my front door, I fell in the dark,’ he explained.

‘You’d better let me have a look at it.’ I went towards him.

‘No, Doctor. It’s only a scratch What I have come to tell you is more important.’

‘Sit down at least,’ I told him. ‘Can I get you a drink?’

‘A drink, thank you, Machane, as you can see I am upset and nervous. That is how I came to injure my arm.’

I poured both of us whisky, and he took his glass in his right hand and continued moving nervously around my sitting-room while I sat in one of the big leather armchairs.

‘What is it, Timothy?’ I prompted him.

‘It is difficult to begin, Machane, for you are not a believer. But I must convince you.’

He broke off and drank whisky, before turning to face me.

‘Yesterday evening we spoke at length about the City of the Moon. Doctor, you told me how there are mysteries there that still baffle you.’

‘Yes.’ I nodded encouragement.

‘The burial grounds of the ancients,’ Timothy went on ‘You cannot find them.’

‘That is true, Timothy.’

‘Since then I have thought heavily on this matter.’ He changed into Venda, a language better suited for the discussion of the occult. ‘I went back in my memory over all the legends of our people.’ I imagined vividly how he must have thrown himself into hypnotic trance to search. ‘And there was something there, like a shadow beyond the firelight, a dark memory that eluded me.’ He shook his head and turned away, pacing restlessly, sipping at his drink, muttering softly to himself as though he still searched in the dark archives of his mind.

‘It was no use, Doctor. I knew it was there, but I could not grasp it. I despaired of it, and at last I slept. But it was a sleep greatly troubled by the dream demons - until at last…’ he hesitated, ‘… my grandfather came to me.’

I stirred uneasily in my chair. Timothy’s grandfather had lain twenty-five years in a murderer’s grave.

‘All right. Doctor.’ Timothy saw my small movement of disbelief, and changed smoothly to English. ‘I know you do not believe such things can happen. Let me explain it in terms you can accept. My imagination, heated by my search for a long-forgotten fragment of knowledge, threw up a dream image of my grandfather. The one from whom the knowledge was learned in the first place.’

I smiled to cover my spooky feelings; at this time of night with this half-demented black man talking of dark things, I felt myself falling under his spell.

‘Go on, Timothy.’ I tried to say it lightly, but my voice croaked a little.

‘My grandfather came to me, and he touched my shoulder and he said. “Go with the blessed one, to the Hills of Blood and there I will make the mysteries known to you and open up the secret places.”’

I felt my skin prickle. Timothy had said ‘The Hills of Blood’, and nobody had told him that name.

‘The Hills of Blood,’ I repeated.

That is the name he used,‘ Timothy agreed. ’I can only believe he meant your City of the Moon.‘

I was silent; reasonable man at war with primitive superstitious man within me.

‘You want to come with me tomorrow, Timothy?’ I asked.

‘I will go with you,’ Timothy agreed. ‘And perhaps I will be able to show you something for which you search - then again I may not be able to.’

There was certainly nothing to lose. Timothy was obviously sincere, he was still tense and nervously aware.

‘I have already invited you to join me, Timothy, and I was very disappointed when you refused. Of course you may come with me - we can certainly see if the sight of the ruins stirs something in your memory.’

‘Thank you, Doctor. What time will you leave?’

I glanced at my watch.

‘Good Lord, it’s four o’clock already. We will leave at six.’

‘Then I must hurry home and pack.’ Timothy replaced his glass on my cabinet, then he turned to me. ‘There is a small snag, Doctor. My travel papers have expired and we will have to cross an international border into Botswana.’

‘Oh, damn it,’ I muttered, deeply disappointed. ‘You will have to get them renewed and come up with me on the next trip.’

‘As you wish, Doctor,’ he agreed readily. ‘Of course, it will take two or three weeks - and by then the whole thing might have faded from my memory.’

‘Yes.’ I nodded, but I felt a prick of temptation. I am usually a law-abiding person, but now as I thought about it I saw that no harm could come from what I intended. The chance that Timothy might lead me to the burial grounds of the ancients was worth any risk.

‘Would you like to take a chance, Timothy?’ I asked. Formalities concerned with the coming and going of Sturvesant aircraft had been reduced to a minimum. There were daily arrivals and departures, and a phone call to the airport authorities was all that was necessary before departure. The Sturvesant name carried such weight, that there was never a head count on arrival or departure. At the City of the Moon Louren had arranged special status with the Botswana Government, and we were virtually free from bothersome red tape.

I could have Timothy in and out within three days with nobody the wiser and no damage done. Roger van Deventer would accept my word that Louren had sanctioned the flight. I could see no problems.

‘Very well, Doctor, if you think it’s safe.’ Timothy agreed to my proposal.

‘Be at the Sturvesant hangar before six.’ I sat down to scribble a note. ‘If you are questioned at the airport gate, which I doubt, show them this. It’s a note authorizing you to deliver goods to the Sturvesant hangar. Park your car behind the flight office, and wait for me in the office.’

Quickly we made our arrangements, and when I stood at the window of my bedroom and watched Timothy’s old blue Chevy pull out of the Institute car park I felt a mixture of elation and apprehension. Idly I wondered what the penalty was for aiding illegal exit and entry, then dismissed the thought and went to make myself some coffee.

Timothy’s Chevy was in one of the parking bays when Roger van Deventer and I drove up in the Mercedes. We went through into the hangar. The big sliding doors were open and the ground crew was readying the Dakota for the flight, and through the glass doors of the flight office I saw Timothy sitting hunched at the desk. He looked up and smiled at me.

‘I’ll get the clearance, Roger,’ I suggested smoothly. ‘You go and start the engines.’

‘Okay, Doctor.’ He handed me the flight dossier. We had done this before, and I had banked on the same procedure. Roger climbed up through the door of the fuselage, while I went quickly into the office.

‘Hello, Timothy.’ I looked at him and felt a twinge of concern. He was huddled into his blue windcheater, and there were lines of pain cut into his forehead and the corners of his nostrils. His skin was grey and his lips pale purplish blue. ‘Are you all right?’

‘My arm is a little painful, Doctor.’ He opened the front of his jacket. The arm was in a sling, freshly bandaged. ‘But it will be all right. I’ve had it attended to.’

‘Do you feel up to this trip?’

‘I’ll be all right, Doctor.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, I’m sure.’

‘All right, then.’ I sat down at the desk and picked up the phone. It was answered at the first ring.

‘Airport police!’

‘This is Dr Kazin - from Sturvesant, Africa.’

‘Oh, good morning, Doctor. How are you this morning?’

‘Fine, thank you. I want to clear a flight to Botswana on ZA-CEE.’

‘Hold on, Doctor. Let me get the particulars. Who are the passengers?’

‘One passenger, myself - and the pilot is Roger van Deventer as usual.’

I dictated while the constable on the other end took it down in laborious shorthand. Until finally he said: ‘That’s okay, Doctor. Have a good flight. I’ll give your clearance to control.’

I hung up and smiled at Timothy.

‘All clear.’ I stood up. ‘Let’s go.’ And I led the way out of the office. The engines of the Dakota were ticking over. The three black ground crew inexplicably left their positions beside the landing gear and began walking rapidly towards me.

‘Doctor!’ Timothy’s voice behind me, and I turned back towards him. It took me four or five seconds to realize that he had a short-barrelled Chinese model machine-pistol in his uninjured hand and the muzzle was pointing into my belly, I gaped at him.

‘I am sorry, Doctor,’ he said softly, ‘but it is necessary.’

The ground crew closed in on each side of me, they gripped my arms.

‘Please believe me, Doctor, when I tell you that I will not hesitate to kill you if you do not cooperate,’ He raised his voice without taking his eyes off me. ‘Come.’ he called in Venda.

Five others came through the outer door of the hangar. I immediately recognized two of the young Bantu assistants from the Institute, and one of the girls. All of them carried those stubby, lethal-looking machine-pistols and between them they supported a badly wounded stranger. His feet, dangled loosely, and blood-soaked bandages covered his chest and neck.

‘Get him into the plane,’ Timothy ordered crisply.

All this time I had stood dumbly, paralysed with shock, but now the party carrying the wounded man squeezed past between my captors and the side wall. They were blanketing each others’ line of fire, the whole group was off balance and at that moment I regained my wits. I braced my legs, leaned forward slightly and heaved. The men on my arms shot forward like thrown darts, crashing headlong into Timothy and knocking him down in a floundering heap.

‘Roger!’ I shouted, ‘Radio! Get help!’ Hoping my voice would carry over the sound of the aircraft engines. The third ground crew leaped on my back, one arm locking around my throat. I reached up, took him at wrist and elbow and wrenched against the joint. His elbow went with a rubbery popping sound and he screamed like a girl, his arm loose and flabby in my grip.

‘Don’t shoot,’ shouted Timothy. ‘No noise.’

‘Help!’ I screamed, the engines drowning my cry. They dropped the wounded man and came at me. I ducked and went in low. I kicked for the groin of the leader, and felt my boot sock into him, fleshy and soft. He doubled over and I swung my other knee up into his face. It crunched as the gristle of his nose collapsed.

Timothy and the ground crew were scrambling to their feet.

‘No shooting.’ Timothy’s voice was desperate. ‘No noise.’ I went for him. Leopard-mad with rage, hating him for this betrayal, with the full strength of my being, wanting to see his blood splash and feel his bones break in my hands.

One of the girls hit me with the steel butt of the machine-pistol, as I brushed past her. I felt the sharp edge of it cut into the flesh of my scalp, it threw me off balance. One of the ground crew grappled with me, and I took him to my chest and hugged him. He screamed, and I felt his ribs buckling in my grip.

They hit me again, steel biting into the bone of my skull. Blood poured warmly down my face, blinding me. My arms went soft, I dropped the man I was crushing and turned to charge into the others. Blinded with my own blood, my maniacal roars deafening me, they hit me again, crowding around me as I flailed and groped for them. The blows rained on my head and my shoulders. My knees collapsed, and I went down. I was still conscious, hot waves of anger buoying me. The boots started then, crashing into my chest and belly. I doubled up, blind, rolled into a ball on the cold oily concrete, trying to ride that storm of booted feet.

‘Enough, leave him.’ Timothy’s voice, ‘Get him to the aircraft.’

‘My arm. I’ll kill him.’ The voice pig-squealing with agony.

‘Stop that,’ Timothy again, and the sound of a palm slapping against a face. ‘We need hostages. Get him into the plane.’

They dragged me across the floor, many hands. I was lifted and thrown heavily onto the metal floor of the fuselage. The door slammed closed, muting the engine noise.

‘Tell the pilot to take off,’ Timothy ordered, ‘Get the Doctor into the radio compartment.’

I was hustled down the length of the aisle. Blinking the blood out of my eyes, I saw the white ground engineer and his black ground crew lying bound and gagged against the wall of the fuselage. They were stripped of their overalls, which the gang had used to impersonate them.

Rough hands forced me into the steel chair in the radio compartment, and they tied me so tightly that the ropes bit painfully into my flesh. My face felt swollen and numb, and the taste of my own blood was thick and metallic in my mouth.

I turned my head, looking into the cockpit. Roger van Deventer was at the controls. There was a livid red swelling under his eye, and his grey hair was rumpled, his face pale and terrified. One of them stood over him with the muzzle of a machine-pistol pressed firmly against the back of his head.

‘Take off,’ instructed Timothy, ‘Observe all routine procedures. Do you understand?’

Roger nodded jerkily. I felt sorry for him, I had guessed he was not cast in the heroic mould.

‘Sorry, Doctor,’ he tried to explain. ‘They jumped me the moment I stepped aboard.’ His full attention was on the job of taxiing the big aircraft out onto the still dark airfield. He did not look at me. ‘I didn’t have a chance.’

‘That’s all right, Roger. I didn’t do so good either,’ I replied thickly. ‘I only got in two good licks.’

‘That is enough talking for now, please, Doctor. Mr van Deventer must attend to the business of take-off,’ Timothy admonished me, and I turned to give him the most expressive glare of hatred that I could force from my numbed features.

Roger asked for and received control clearance, and the take-off was routine and uneventful. The tense, anxious black faces relaxed and there were a few nervous laughs.

‘You will fly on course for Botswana,’ Timothy instructed Roger. ‘Once you are over the border I will give you a new course.’

Roger nodded stiffly, the machine-pistol still held at his head. I was assessing the strength of the gang, I had already formed a working idea of their motives. Apart from Timothy and the eight who had overwhelmed me, there were five others. These were the ones who had captured and guarded Roger and the ground crew. The wounded man and the two I had damaged were laid out on the floor of the cargo hold. The two girls were working over them, both girls from the Institute, they were fitting a splint and changing bloody bandages.

As I watched, the gang members began changing from civilian clothing into camouflage paratrooper battledress. I saw the red star shoulder flashes, and my last doubts were dispelled. I turned my head and found Timothy was watching me.

‘Yes, Doctor.’ He nodded. ‘Soldiers of freedom.’

‘Or the bringers of darkness, depending how you look at it.’

Timothy frowned at my retort. ‘I had always believed you to be a man of humanity, Doctor. You, I would have expected, could understand and sympathize with our aspirations.’

‘I find it hard to sympathize with gangsters carrying guns in their hands.’

We stared at each other for a few moments. Then abruptly he stood up and came to the radio equipment beside my chair. He switched on the set, glanced at his watch, and began sweeping the bands. The station came on loudly, and immediately all movement in the aircraft arrested, all attention fixed on the announcer’s voice:

‘This is the South African Broadcasting Corporation. The time is seven o’clock and here is the news. A spokesman for the South African Police states that at 2.15 AM this morning a detachment of the Security Police, acting on information received, raided a farm house on the outskirts of Randberg, a suburb of Johannesburg. A pitched battle between police and a large gang of unidentified persons armed with automatic weapons ensued. Elements of the gang escaped in four motor-cars, and after a chase by the police, two vehicles managed to evade pursuit. Initial reports are that eight of the gang were shot dead, and four were captured wounded or unhurt. It is anticipated that many of those escaping were also wounded. A full-scale police hunt is now in progress, and all roads out of the Witwatersrand area are under surveillance, together with all airports. It is with deep regret that we announce the death of three members of the South African Police Force, and the critical wounding of two—’

A ragged cheer rang out through the aircraft, and one or two of the gang clenched their fists over their heads in the Communist salute.

‘Congratulations,’ I murmured sarcastically to Timothy and he looked down at me.

‘Death is ugly, slavery is worse,’ he said evenly. ‘Doctor, there is a bond between us.’

‘My head is sore, my face is too painful to listen to your Communistic cant,’ I told him. ‘Don’t give me fancy words, you bastard. You want to burn my land and soak it in blood. You want to tear down everything I hold dear and sacred. It is my country and with all its faults I love it. You are my enemy. There is no bond between us - except that of the knife.’

Again we held each other’s eyes for a long moment, then he nodded. ‘To the knife then,’ he agreed and turned away. The Dakota bore on steadily into the north, and my injuries began to ache. I closed my eyes, and rode the long dizzy swells of pain that rose up out of my guts and exploded in my head.

The Mirage jet came up out of the east and flashed silvery sleek across our nose, and as it passed with incredible speed I saw the Air Force roundels and the goggled face of the pilot staring at us. Then it was gone, but immediately the Tannoy crackled into life.

‘ZA-CEE. This is Air Force Red Striker Two. Do you read me?’ I stared out of the window beside my head, and saw the Mirage turn sparkling in the sunlight high above us. Timothy came running forward to the set beside me and stared at it for a moment. The atmosphere was hushed and tense. Timothy could not reply, his Bantu accent was too thick for deception.

Again the jet howled across our front. The gunman crouched low behind Roger’s seat hidden from view.

‘ZA-CEE.’ Again the call was repeated. Timothy was sweating lightly, his face blue-grey with strain and the pain of the arm wound. He turned from the set and motioned to two of his men.

‘Bring him,’ he pointed to the white ground engineer. They dragged him into the radio compartment and held him in front of me. His face was pale and shiny with sweat, his terrified eyes held mine in pitiful appeal, the gag cut into his mouth. One of them stood behind him and pulled his head back, exposing his throat and stretching the pale skin so that the arteries showed blue and pulsing. He reached around in front of the man, and laid the glistening blade of a trench knife against his throat.

‘I am serious, Doctor.’ Timothy assured me as he freed the rope from my arms and put the microphone of the radio transmitter into my hand. ‘Reassure them. Tell them there are only two aboard, and that you are bound for the City of the Moon on a routine flight.’ He placed his finger on the transmit switch of the set ready to cut it off.

The terrified engineer moaned into his gag, the knife pressed to the softly throbbing skin of his throat. They pushed him towards me, closer so that I could see his face clearly.

‘Air Force Striker Two this is ZA-CEE standing by.’ I croaked into the mike, staring fascinated into the engineer’s terrified face.

‘Report your complement and destination.’

‘This is Dr Kazin of Sturvesant, Africa on a routine flight from—’ As I spoke I saw them relax, the tension eased and Timothy’s hand moved from the transmit switch of the set. The engineer’s eyes held mine and I wanted to tell him that I was sorry, that I wished I could save him. I wanted to explain that I was trading his life for those of fourteen of my country’s most dangerous enemies, that the sacrifice was worthwhile, and that I would willingly add my own life to the price. Instead I shouted into the handset:

‘Hi-jacked by terrorists! Fire into us! Disregard our safety.’ Timothy’s hand darted to the transmit switch, and at the same moment he turned towards the hostage. I think he was going to intervene, to try and stop it. He was too late.

The knife slashed across the tensed throat, slitting it deeply beneath the line of the jaw. The blood burst forth like a ruptured garden hose, it sprayed out in a red fountain that drenched both Timothy and me. It pumped in great liquid jets that splashed against the foot of the cabin, then dribbled in thick cords and strings to the floor. The engineer was keening a high wailing sound like steam from a kettle, and the air from his lungs burst from the severed windpipe in a pink froth, that spattered the radio set.

The Tannoy was squawking, ‘Reverse your course! Conform to me! Conform to me immediately, or I will fire into you.’

Timothy was cursing as he wrestled the microphone out of my hands: I was screaming and fighting against the ropes.

‘You animals! You filthy murdering bloody animals.’

One of the gang lifted his machine-pistol to hit me in the face, but Timothy knocked his arm away.

‘Get him out of here!’ He jerked his head towards the still twitching, kicking corpse of the engineer - and they dragged him out into the cargo hold.

‘Mirage is attacking!’ shouted Roger, from the cockpit, and we saw it coming from ahead of us, a silvery flash as it bore in on a head-on interception course.

Timothy snatched the microphone to his mouth. I saw that his face was speckled with the engineer’s blood.

‘Hold your fire!’ he shouted. ‘We have hostages aboard.’

‘Attack!’ I screamed, tearing and jerking at my bonds. ‘They’ll murder us anyway! Open fire!’

The Mirage jet pulled up steeply ahead of us, without opening fire, and howled a few feet over our heads. The Dakota rocked violently in the slipstream. I was still screaming and struggling to tear myself loose. I wanted to get at them. The steel chair was rocking from side to side. I got my feet against the side of the fuselage and heaved with all my strength. The seat buckled a little, and again the guard lifted his machine-pistol.

‘No,’ shouted Timothy. ‘We need him alive. Tell Mary to bring the morphine.’

The Mirage sheered off, then circled to take up station a hundred feet off our starboard wingtip, I could see the pilot staring helplessly across the gap at us.

‘You have spoken to Dr Kazin,’ Timothy warned the pilot of the jet. ‘And we have four other hostages. We have already executed one white hostage and we will not hesitate to execute another if you take any further hostile action.’

‘They’re going to kill us anyway,’ I shouted, but Timothy broke the contact.

It took five of them to hold me still for the hypodermic, but at last they got it into my arm, and though I tried to resist the drug, I felt myself going muzzy and misty. I tried to maintain my struggle, but my movements became lethargic and uncoordinated and slowly I drifted off into unconsciousness. My last waking memory was hearing Timothy giving Roger a new course to fly.

Pain and thirst woke me. My mouth was thick and scummy and my head was a mass of solid blinding agony. I tried to sit up and cried out aloud.

‘Are you all right, Doctor? Take it easy.’ Roger van Deventer’s voice, and I focused my eyes on him.

‘Water?’ I asked.

‘Sorry, Doc.’ He shook his head, and I looked around the bare whitewashed room. Four wooden bunks and a lavatory bucket were all the furnishings, and the door was barred and grilled. The three Bantu ground crew sat on one of the bunks across the room, looking lost and unhappy.

‘Where are we?’ I whispered.

‘Zambia. Some sort of military camp. We landed an hour ago-’

‘What happened to the Air Force jet?’

‘It turned back when we crossed the Zambezi. Nothing they could do.’

And there was nothing we could do, either. For five days we sat in the airless, oven-like room with its stinking bucket, until on the fifth day our guards came to fetch me. With much shouting and many unnecessary shoves and blows I was marched down a corridor and into a sparsely furnished office whose main furnishing was a portrait of Chairman Mao. Timothy Mageba rose from behind the desk and motioned my guards to leave.

‘Sit down, Doctor, please.’ He wore paratrooper camouflage, and the bars and stars of a Colonel in the Chinese People’s Army.

I sat on the wooden bench, and my eyes fastened on the half-dozen bottles of Tusker beer that stood on a tray. The bottles were bedewed with cold, and I felt my throat contracting.

‘I know how fond you are of a bottle of cold beer, Doctor.’ Timothy opened one of the bottles, and offered it to me, I shook my head.

‘No, thank you. I don’t drink with murderers.’

‘I see.’ He nodded, and I saw the little shadows of regret in those dark brooding eyes. He lifted the bottle to his own lips and drank a mouthful. I watched him thirstily.

‘The engineer,’ he said, ‘the execution, it was not intended. I did not mean it to happen. Please understand that, Doctor.’

‘Yes. I understand. And when the smoke of our burning land blackens the skies, and the stink of our dead sickens even your dark spirits, will you cry out, I did not mean it to happen?’

Timothy turned away and went to stand at the window, looking out over a parade ground where squads of uniformed Bantu drilled under a dazzling sun.

‘I have been able to arrange for your release, Doctor. You will be allowed to return in the Dakota.’ He came back to stand before me, and then he changed from English into Venda. ‘My heart cries out to see you go, Machane, for you are a man of gentleness, and strength, and great courage. Once I hoped that you might join us.’

In Venda I answered, ‘My heart weeps also, for a man who was a friend, one I trusted, one who I believed was a man of goodwill, but he is gone now into the half-world of the criminals and the destroyers He is dead to me, and my heart weeps.’

It was true, I realized. It was not just an attempt to shame him. Beneath my hatred and anger, there was a sense of sorrow, of loss. I had believed in him. I had seen in a man such as he was, a hope for the future of this poor tormented continent of ours. We looked at each other wistfully, regretfully across a space of four feet that was as wide as the span of the heavens and as deep as the chasms of Hell.

‘Goodbye, Doctor,’ he said softly. ‘Go in peace, Machane.’

They took us in the covered back of a three-ton truck to the airstrip, bare-footed and stripped to our underclothes.

They formed a double line from the truck to the Dakota, There were perhaps 200 of them in paratrooper uniform, and we were forced to walk down the narrow aisle with jeering black faces on each side of us. There were Chinese instructors with them, their lank black hair flopping out from under the cloth uniform caps, grinning hugely as we passed. I was bitterly aware of the mocking eyes and jibes aimed at my crooked exposed back, and I hurried towards the refuge of the Dakota, Suddenly one of them stepped out of the ranks in front of me. Deliberately he spat at me, and a storm of laughter went up from them. With a thick gob of yellow phlegm plastered in my hair, I scrambled up into the cabin of the aircraft.

The Air Force Mirages picked us up an hour after we crossed the Zambezi river and they escorted us to the military airfield at Voortrekker Hoogte. However, my almost hysterical relief at our safe home-coming was shortlived. Once a doctor had cleaned and dressed the clotted and suppurating gashes in my head, I was hustled away in a closed car to a meeting with four unsmiling, grimly polite, officers of the police and military intelligence.

‘Dr Kazin, is this your signature?’

It was my recommendation for the issue of Timothy Mageba’s passport.

‘Dr Kazin, do you remember this man?’

A Chinaman I had met when I visited Timothy at London University.

‘Are you aware that he is an agent of the Communist Chinese government. Doctor?’

There was a photograph of the three of us drinking beer on the tow-path beside the Thames.

‘Can you tell us what you spoke about, please, Doctor?’

Timothy had told me that the Chinaman was an anthropology major, and we had discussed Leakey’s discoveries at Olduvai Gorge.

‘Did you recommend Mageba for the Sturvesant travel scholarship, Doctor?’

‘Did you know that he went to China and received training as a guerrilla leader?’

‘Did you sign these order forms for twenty-seven drums of fuller’s earth from Hong Kong, Doctor - and these customs declarations?’

They were standard Institute forms, I could recognize my signature on the customs form across the desk. I did not remember the shipment.

‘Were you aware that this shipment contained 150 lb of plastic explosives, Doctor?’

‘Do you recognize these, Doctor?’

Pamphlets in a dozen African languages. I read the first line of one of them. Terrorist propaganda. Exhortations to kill, burn and destroy.

‘Were you aware that these were printed on your press at the Institute, Doctor?’

The questions went on endlessly, I was tired, confused, and began contradicting myself. I pointed out the wounds on my head, the rope burns at my wrists and ankles, and the questions went on. My head throbbed, my brain felt like a battered jelly.

‘Do you recognize these, Doctor?’

Machine-pistols, ammunition.

‘Yes!’ I shouted at them. I had pistols like that against my head, in my belly!‘

‘Did you know that these were imported in cases of books addressed to your Institute?’

‘When you obtained police clearance for the Dakota flight, Doctor, you stated—^’

‘They jumped me after the phone call, I’ve explained that a dozen times, damn you!’

‘You’ve known Mageba for twelve years. He was a protege of yours, Doctor.’

‘Do you mean to tell us that you were never approached by Mageba? Never discussed politics with him?’

‘I’m not one of them! I swear it—’ I remembered the blood spraying against the cabin roof, the crunch of steel biting into the bone of my skull, the spittle clinging in my hair. ‘You’ve got to believe me, please! Oh God, please!’ And I think I must have fainted, it went all dark and warm in my head and I slumped sideways off the chair onto the floor.

I woke in a hospital room, between clean crisp sheets - and Louren Sturvesant sat beside the bed.

‘Lo, oh thank God.’ I felt all choked up with relief. Louren was here, and it would be all right now.

He leaned forward, unsmiling, that marvellous face cold and hard as though it had been cast in bronze. ‘They think you were one of the gang. That you set it up, that you were using the Institute as the headquarters for a terrorist organization.’

I stared at him, and he went on remorselessly, ‘If you have betrayed me and your country, if you have gone over to our enemies, then you can expect no mercy from me.’

‘Not you also, Lo. I don’t think I can stand that.’

‘Is it true?’ he demanded.

‘No!’ I shook my head. ‘No! No!’ And suddenly there were tears streaming down my face and I was shaking and blubbering like a baby. Louren leaned forward and gripped my shoulder hard.

‘Okay, Ben.’ He spoke with infinite gentleness and pity. ‘It’s okay, partner. I’ll fix it. It’s all over now, Ben.’

Louren would not let me go back to my bachelor quarters at the Institute, and I was installed in a guest suite at Kleine Schuur, the Sturvesant residence.

The first night Louren woke me from a screaming nightmare of blood and mocking black faces. He was in a dressing-gown, with his golden curls disordered from sleep. He sat on the side of my bed, and we talked of the good, sane things we had done together and the things we would do together in the future, until at last I slipped off into untroubled sleep.

For ten lazy, idyllic days I stayed at Kleine Schuur, spoiled by Hilary and fussed by the children, protected from the news-hungry Press, and sheltered from the realities and alarums of the outside world. The bruises faded, the scabs dried and fell away, and I found it more and more difficult to respond to the children’s cry of ‘Story’ with something new. They shouted the punch-lines in chorus, and corrected me on the details. It was time to go back into the stream.

In one unpleasant day-long session I told the story of the hijacking at the public inquiry, and afterwards faced the Press of the world. Then Louren flew me north in the Lear jet, back to the City of the Moon.

On the way I told him how I intended to find the stone quarries - and then the tombs of the ancients.

When he grinned and told me, ‘That’s the tiger - get in there, boy, and tear the bottom out of it!’ I realized that I had been enthusing and emoting a little. I remembered old Xhai’s imitation of the Sunbird, and put my fluttering hands firmly back in my lap.

A hero’s welcome was waiting for me at the City of the Moon, they had followed my adventures on the radio. But now they opened a case of Windhoek beer and sat round me in a circle while I told the whole story again.

‘That Timothy, he always gave me a funny feeling.’ Solemnly Sally demonstrated her amazing gift of hindsight. ‘I could have told you there was something fishy about him.’ Then she stood up and came to kiss me on the forehead in front of them all, while I blushed crimson. ‘Anyway, we are glad you’re safe, Ben. We were so worried about you.’

The next morning, after I had driven Louren to the airstrip and watched him take off, I went looking for Ral Davidson. I found him in the bottom of a trench measuring a slab of sandstone. He was covered by a skimpy pair of shorts and a mass of hair that almost completely obscured his features, but he was burned a deep mahogany brown by the sun and was lean and fit. I had become very fond of him. We sat on the edge of the trench dangling our feet over the side, and I explained to him about the quarry.

‘Gee, Doc! Why didn’t we think of that before?’ he enthused. That evening we drew up an elaborate search pattern, with a schedule to enlarge the area of search in expanding spirals each day. Ral’s gang was temporarily withdrawn from the excavations within the temple, and armed with machetes for the assault on the thick, spiny vegetation on top of the cliffs.

The whole search was planned like a military operation. I had been dying to find an opportunity to use the walkie-talkie radio sets with which Louren had, unbidden, supplied us. This was it. Ral and I checked the radios, shouting things like ‘Over to you’ and ‘Roger!’ and ‘Read you five five!’ at each other.

Peter Willcox muttered something about ‘boy scouts’, but I think he was a little jealous that he hadn’t been invited to join the search. Leslie and Sally, however, were infected by our enthusiasm and they victualled the expedition with sufficient food and drink to keep an army bloated and drunk for a week. They turned out in a pink dawn, still in their pyjamas and dressing-gowns, Leslie with her hair in curlers, to wave us off and wish us luck. At the head of my gang of stalwarts, laden with food and equipment, feeling a little like Scott or bold Cortez, I led them towards the gap in the cliffs which had become our regular route to the top - and ten hours later, sweaty, bedraggled, scratched by thorns, stung by hippo fly and other insects, broiled by the sun and in a filthy temper, I led them down again.

We repeated this routine daily for the next ten days, and on the tenth evening when we paused halfway down the gap in the cliff to rest, Ral suddenly looked at the steep sides of the gap and said in a voice of wonder:

‘Gee, Doc! This is it!’

For ten days we had been using the steps cut by the ancients into their quarry. Thick growth had covered the neat terraces from which they had sawn the red stone. We found some of the half-formed blocks of masonry still in situ, only a little undercut and almost unweathered in this protected gully. The marks of the saws were fresh upon them as though the workmen had laid down their tools the day before, instead of 2000 years ago. Then there were blocks, cut in the rough, and abandoned halfway through the process of dressing. Others were completed, ready for transporting - yet others were in transit, discarded haphazard along the floor of the gully.

We cleared the undergrowth from around them and were then able to follow each fascinating step of the process of manufacture. The whole team came up to assist. They were jubilant with this new success, for we had all been a little put down with the recent total lack of progress. We sketched and mapped, measured and photographed, argued and theorized, and there was an evident renaissance of enthusiasm in all of us. The feeling that we had reached a dead end in the investigation was dispelled. I have a photograph, taken by one of the Bantu foremen who thought us all mad. We are clowning it up, posing on one of the bigger blocks of masonry. Peter strikes a Napoleonic attitude, hand in the breast of his jacket. Ral’s hairy visage is adorned with a ferocious squint, and he poises a pick-axe murderously above Peter’s head. Leslie is coyly showing a little cheesecake, and that is almost as bad as Ral’s squint, with those legs she could kick elephants to death. I am sitting on Heather’s lap, sucking my thumb. Sally has Peter’s glasses on her nose and my hat pulled down over her ears, she is trying to look hideous, but failing resoundingly. This photograph illustrates the mood of those days.

After their assistance was no longer needed, the others went back to their separate tasks with renewed energy. Ral and I stayed on in the quarry. I brought up my theodolite and we set about calculating its extent and the amount of masonry removed from it. It was impossible to measure accurately the irregular excavation, but we decided that approximately a million and a half cubic yards of rock had been removed.

Then by a study of the method of quarrying and using the volume of abandoned blocks as a very rough guide, we guessed that the ratio of dressed finished blocks to waste material would be about 40 :60. Finally we arrived at a figure of 600,000 cubic yards.

Up to this point we had been working with fairly factual figures, but now we pushed off into an ocean of conjecture.

‘At least it’s not as bad as drawing a dinosaur from its footprints,’ Ral defended us, as we used the map of the foundations of the temple together with our calculation of rock volumes to reconstruct a complete elevation of the vanished City of the Moon.

‘Here, let me do that!’ Irritably Sally took the paint brush out of my hand on the first evening, after she had watched my efforts for ten minutes.

‘I think the batter of the main walls is a little excessive,’ Peter murmured critically, watching her, ‘if you compare the walls of the elliptical building at Zimbabwe—’

‘Yes, but take the temple of Tarxien at Malta,’ Heather interceded. ‘Or the main walls of Knossos.’ And before Ral and I could do a thing to prevent it, the project had become a group effort that replaced the nightly song-fest in the common room.

With everybody contributing from their own particular area of the dig, and from their own specialized talents and interests, we built up a series of pictures of our city.

Massive red walls, ornamented with the chevron patterns of the waves that made Phoenicia great. Red walls that caught the rays of the setting sun, the evening blessing of the great sun god Baal. The tall towers, symbols of fertility and prosperity, rising from the dark green foliage of the silent grove. Beyond it, the vertical gash in the cliffs that led through a secret passage into the mysterious cavern. Again a symbol of the organs of reproduction. Surely this must have been sacred to Astarte - more commonly worshipped by the Carthaginians as Tanith - goddess of earth and moon, and so ranks of white-clad priests wound in procession through the grove, past the towers and into the secret cavern.

We knew that the Phoenicians made human sacrifices to their gods and goddesses. The Old Testament describes the infants delivered to the flaming belly of Baal, and we wondered what dreadful ritual our peaceful emerald pool had seen, depicting the victim dressed in gold and finery and poised on the edge of the pool with the high priest lifting the sacrificial knife.

‘If only it weren’t so deep!’ Sally exclaimed. ‘Ben wanted to get divers to go down, but he says they wouldn’t work so deep.’

In the area between the inner and outer walls of the temple, where the layer of ash lay thick and where the majority of golden beads and richer ornaments had been discovered, we drew in the quarters of the priests and priestesses. This would be a maze of mud walls with thatched roofs. We reconstructed the streets and courts of the priests and nobles.

‘What about the king and his court?’ Peter demanded. ‘Wouldn’t they live within the main walls also?’

So we divided the area between the quarters of the priests and the court of the king, drawing on what little we knew of Knossos, Carthage and Tyre and Sidon to give our paintings life. Ral had found the gate through the outer wall, it was the only opening and it looked towards the west.

‘From it a road would have led directly down to the harbour.’ Sally drew it in.

‘Yes, but there would have been a market, a place of trade beside the harbour,’ Ral suggested, and pointed to the map. ‘This would be it. The area Peter has been puzzling over.’

‘Can you imagine the piles of ivory and copper and gold.’ Leslie sighed.

‘And the slaves standing on the blocks to be sold,’ Heather agreed.

‘Hold it! Hold it! This is supposed to be a scientific investigation.’ I tried to restrain them.

‘And the ships lying on the beach.’ Sally started to paint them in. ‘Huge biremes with their prows shaped like rams’ heads, covered with gilt and enamel.’

The walls and towers rose again, the lake refilled with bright waters, and the harbours and taverns were peopled with hosts dead for two thousand years. Warriors strutted, and slaves whined, noble ladies rode in their litters, caravans poured in from the land to the east laden with gold and treasure, and a white king strode out through the great stone gates with a resetted shield on his shoulder and his armour asparkle in the sun.

The project was fun, and it served also to prod our imagination. By the time Sally had put the last touches to our painting, four weeks had passed, and as a direct result of it Peter had discovered the shipyards suggested by Sally’s biremes beached below the city.

There was the keel of a ship laid on the slip, with the main frames in place. The unfinished vessel had been burned, and its charred parts scattered. Only imagination and faith could recognise it as a ship. I knew my scientific opponents would challenge it, but carbon 14 on the charred wood gave us an approximate date of AD 300, the date which we had defined as that of the ‘great fire’.

The project gave me an excuse to spend more of my time with Sally. I began taking my lunch and bathing costume up to the cavern. At first there was an awkwardness between us, but I worked hard at setting Sally at ease and soon we were back in that friendly bantering relationship that made us such a good working team. Only once I referred back to our more intimate association.

‘Have you still got the blues, Sal?’ I asked, and she gave me a long frank gaze before replying.

‘Please give me time, Ben. There is something I have to work out with myself.’

‘Okay.’ I smiled as cheerfully as I could, and resigned myself to a long, long wait.

Sometimes the others joined our lunchtime sessions at the pool, for even when the heat was a hissing 115° outside, it was cool in the cavern. We splashed and shouted, and the echoes boomed back at us. One of my indelible memories is that of Leslie clad in a frilly little pink bikini romping skittishly around the pool like a lady hippopotamus in the mating season, pursued by the indefatigable Ral.

Five weeks after my return I went up to the cavern with good news.

‘I just received a radio message from Larkin, Sal, Louren is arriving tomorrow.’

I was disappointed in her negative reaction, because I was sure she had overcome her initial dislike of Louren for my sake - and that she had begun to like him.

I went to meet Louren at the airstrip, and I was shocked. He had lost 20 lb in weight, and his skin which usually glowed with golden health was now chalky grey. Beneath his eyes were smears of dark plum that looked like bruises.

‘Ben! ’ He put an affectionate arm around my shoulder and squeezed. ‘It’s good to see you, you old bastard.’ But his voice was weary and I noticed the threads of silver at bis temples which were newly acquired.

‘My God, Lo, you look terrible.’

‘Thanks.’ He grinned wryly, and slung his bags into the back of the Land-Rover.

‘Seriously, Lo. Are you sick or something?’ I was distressed to see him looking so ill and haggard.

‘I’ve been on a rough one, Ben,’ he confided as he climbed into the Land-Rover beside me. ‘Four weeks at the bargaining table, I had to do it all myself - could not trust anyone else to handle it. The other side sent in teams, changing them when they were worn out.’

‘You’re going to kill yourself,’ I scolded him, sounding a little like a nagging wife. And he leaned across, punched my arm lightly, and laughed.

‘You’re a shot in the arm, partner.’

‘Was it worth it? What was it about?’

‘It’s big, Ben! E – bloody – normous! Copper and iron. South West Africa, near the Cunene River, massive ore bodies lying in association, low-grade copper and high-grade iron – together they are a treasure chest.’ The weary tone was gone from his voice. ‘I put those little Jap bastards over the table and I roasted their arses. They will put in the finance for a deep-water harbour and a railway line to get the stuff out. That will cost them 150 million.’ He was exultant, colour coming back into the pale cheeks. ‘One of my companies will do the construction work, of course.’ He touched a finger to his lips in a conspiratory gesture and I giggled delightedly. I enjoyed him in this mood. ‘I’ll put up for the pelletization plant and… ’ He went on to outline the scheme, laughing and punching my arm when he recounted each bargaining point on which he had scored.

‘What will it make for you?’ I asked at last, and he looked at me, slightly put down.

‘You mean in terms of money?’ he asked.

‘Sure! What else?’

‘Hell, Ben. I’ve explained it before. That’s not the important thing. It’s not money, it’s exports and employment, and opening up new resources, and building for the future, realizing the potential of our country and - and—’

‘And getting one hell of a kick out of it,’ I suggested.

He laughed again. ‘You are too shrewd, Ben. I suppose that’s a lot of it. The game, not the score.’

‘Have you seen last week’s Time magazine?’ I asked. I knew it would needle him.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Ben,’ he protested.

‘Your name is on the list of the world’s thirty richest men.’

‘Those bastards,’ he muttered darkly. ‘Now everybody doubles their prices. Why don’t they mind their own business and let me get on with mine.’

‘And in the process you are killing yourself.’

‘You’re right, Ben. I do feel a little spent, so I’m taking a week. A whole week’s holiday.’

‘Big deal,’ I sneered, ‘a holiday with your BYM arriving every half-hour for conferences, and the rest of the time with you hanging over the radio set.’

‘Forget it,’ he smiled. I’m getting away, and you’re coming with me.‘

‘What do you mean, Lo? I asked.

‘Tell you later.’ He avoided the question for we were approaching the branch in the dirt track, and I automatically slowed to turn down to the huts.

‘Straight on, Ben,’ Louren instructed. ‘I want to go up to the cavern. I’ve been thinking of that place for weeks.’ His voice went soft and reflective. ‘When things got really tough there at the table, I’d think about the peace and tranquillity of that place. It seemed to…’ He stopped, and coughed with embarrassment. Louren doesn’t often talk that way.

Sally was working at the rear wall of the cavern. She wore a green silk blouse and tailored khaki slacks, with her hair loose and shiny. As she looked up to greet Louren, I saw with mild surprise that she wore lipstick for the first time in weeks.

She noticed his haggard features immediately, and I saw the concern in her eyes although she said nothing about it. Her greeting was subdued, almost offhand, and she turned back to her easel. Louren went immediately to the portrait of the white king. I drifted across to join him and we sat in a friendly relaxed silence examining the strange, figure, Louren spoke first.

‘Do you get the feeling he’s trying to tell you something, Ben?’

It was a fanciful question for Louren, but I treated it with respect for he was clearly in deadly earnest.

‘No, Lo, I can’t say that I do.’

‘There is something here, Ben,’ he said with certainty ‘Something you - we have overlooked. The key to this place, the whole secret of it is in this cavern.’

‘Well, Lo. we could…’ I began but he wasn’t listening. Sally left her easel and came to join us, she sat beside Louren and watched his face with complete attention.

‘This feeling has never let me down, Ben. Do you remember the Desolation Valley mine? My geologists gave it a thumbs down, but I had this feeling. Do you remember?’

I nodded. Desolation Valley was now yielding twenty thousand carats of gem diamonds a month.

‘There is something here. I am sure of it, but where?’ He turned to stare at me, as though I had hidden whatever he was searching for, ‘Where is it, Ben? The floor, the walls, the roof?’

‘And the pool,’ I said,

‘All right, let’s start with the pool,’ he agreed.

‘It’s too deep, Lo. No diver—’

‘What do you know about diving?’ he demanded.

‘Well, I’ve dived a couple of times.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Ben!’ he interrupted brusquely. ‘When I need a heart operation I go to Chris Barnard, not the local vet. Who is the best diver in the world?’

‘Cousteau, I suppose.’

‘Fine. I’ll get my people on to him. That takes care of the pool. Now the floor—’

Dealing with Louren is like being caught in a hurricane. At the end of an hour, he had outlined a scheme for a thorough investigation of the cavern, and at last he suggested casually, ‘Okay, Ben. Why don’t you go on back to camp. I’d like an hour or so alone here.’ I was reluctant to miss a minute of his company but I stood up immediately.

‘Are you coming, Sal?’ I asked. Louren wanted to be alone.

‘Oh, Ben. I’m in the middle of—’

‘That’s okay, Ben,’ Louren told me, ‘she won’t disturb me.’ And I left them in the cavern.

The guest hut was long ago prepared, but I went with one of the servants to supervise the unpacking of Louren’s bags. I noticed that someone had cut a spray of the wild cave-lilies that grew under the cliffs, and placed them in a beer tankard beside the bed. I meant to compliment the Matabele who acted as our cook, butler and housekeeper for this thoughtful little touch. It relieved the bleakness of the hut.

After checking Louren’s accommodation I went down to the big bungalow and made sure there was ice in the refrigerator and plenty of cold water. Then I cracked the seal on a fresh bottle of Glen Grant - Louren and I have a common fondness for this nectar. While I was busy with the whisky bottle, Ral and Leslie came in off the dig and I heard them clump into the office next door. I did not intend eavesdropping, but the partition walls were paper-thin.

Ral growled like an enraged beast, and Leslie squealed.

‘Oh, you are naughtyl’ she cried breathlessly, and it was clear that she had been physically molested. ‘Someone will catch you doing that.’

‘As long as they don’t catch me doing what I’m going to do tonight,’ Ral declared.

‘Shh!’ Leslie enjoined silence, but to no avail.

‘Five weeks. I thought he’d never come. I was going mad.’

‘Oh, Rally Dally darling,’ wheezed Leslie in high passion.

‘Toodles, my little Toodles,’ Ral replied, and I blushed for them. Silently I set down the bottle and stole from the room. I was slightly puzzled as to how Louren’s arrival, for that was obviously what Ral was referring to, could make such a dramatic improvement in their physical relationship, and I envied them for I had no such expectation.

We were all of us sick to the stomach with a diet of canned and preserved food. Louren had brought with him a full load of fresh fruit, vegetables and meat. That night we had a sucking pig, golden brown in its suit of crackling, with roast potatoes, green peas and a gigantic bowl of fresh salad. There was very little conversation at the dinner-table.

Once the dishes were cleared, Louren lit a cigar, I refilled the glasses and we all settled down in a circle about Louren. First I reported to Louren the discovery of the quarry, and the deductions we had made from it. This led on to an exhibition of Sally’s reconstruction of the city.

I had not expected Louren to react the way he did. I had thought he might be mildly amused, as we were, not that he would accept our fantasy as proven fact. He worked himself into a fever of excitement, jumping up from his chair to examine each illustration, firing his abrupt searching questions at us, or simply sitting hunched forward in his seat staring at the painting with glitter-eyed concentration. His face was still pale and ravaged, which gave an almost demented intensity to his expression.

Sally, with a touch of canny showmanship, had kept the painting of the white king for the last. As she lifted it onto the board I saw Louren stiffen in his seat. The white king was in full battle armour, helmet and breastplate in glistening bronze, shield slung, and a short sword girt around his waist. His red-gold beard was curled and clubbed, and his bearing regal. His attendants followed him through the gates of the high outer wall, one carried his battle-axe, another his bow and a quiver of arrows, a third bore the golden chalice of eternal life.

Sally had lavished patient skill upon this particular illustration, and it was the most impressive of the whole series. We all stared at it in silence until suddenly I uncrossed my legs and leaned forward quickly, spilling a little of my whisky in my surprise. I had not noticed it before, the golden beard had masked it, but now I realized suddenly whom Sally had used as her model for the white king. I turned to stare at Louren, and there was the same deep forehead, the noble brow above wide-set piercing pale blue eyes, the same straight nose with delicately chiselled nostrils, and the proud curve of mouth with the slightly sensual pout of the lower lip.

‘Ben!’ His voice was husky, he did not take his eyes off the portrait. ‘This is remarkable -I hadn’t realized until this evening what this meant. Up to now it was just intriguing blocks of stone, and a few beads and scraps of gold. I never really thought about the people. That’s the important thing, Ben! These men that voyaged to the ends of their world; that built something magnificent in the wilderness—’ He broke off, and shook his head slowly, considering the magnitude, the grandeur of it. Then he turned to me.

‘Ben. We have got to find out what happened to them, and their city. I don’t care how long it takes, how much it costs. I have got to know.’

Now he stubbed out his cigar and jumped up from his chair, began pacing with a barely controlled violence.

‘It’s about time we announced this, Ben. I will set up a Press conference. I’ll want you all there to explain it. The world must know about these men.’

My stomach dropped steeply with alarm, and I stuttered a protest.

‘But, Lo, we can’t do that. Not now, not yet - please!’

‘Why not?’ He wheeled on me belligerently.

‘We haven’t got enough proof yet.’ I went chill with horror, as I thought how my critics would hang, draw and quarter me if I went out on the stage with such a sorry script. ‘They’ll scalp us, Lo. They’ll tear us to pieces.’

‘We’ll show them these.’ He pointed at the paintings.

‘God!’ I shuddered at the thought. ‘Those are just conjecture, fantasy, in that picture the only single detail we could substantiate would be the chalice.’

Louren stared at me, but I saw the madness fading in his eyes. Suddenly he laughed guiltily, and struck his forehead with the heel of his hand.

‘Wow!’ he laughed. ‘I must be tired! For a moment there those paintings were real, from life!’ He went to stand before the painting again and examined it wistfully. ‘I’ve got to know, Ben,’ he said again, ‘I’ve just got to know.’

The following day, while we ate lunch beside the emerald pool, Louren told me how he and I were to get away together. He used Sally’s charcoal stick to draw on the flat surface of a rock.

‘Here we are, and here sixty-five miles to the north-east are the ruins at Doinboshaba. If your theories are correct then there was an ancient caravan route between the two cities You and I are going to take the Land-Rover. and go crosscountry, trying to pick up the old trail.’

‘It’s pretty rough country,’ I pointed out, without enthusiasm. ‘Completely unexplored, no roads, no water.’

‘And no BYM,’ Louren smiled.

‘That makes it irresistible.’ I returned his smile, remembering that this was therapeutic not scientific. ‘When do we leave?’

‘Tomorrow morning at first light.’

It was still dark when I awoke, and my bedside clock showed four-thirty. It was too late to go back to sleep and too early to get up. I was pondering the problem when the door of the hut opened stealthily and, as I prepared to repel burglars, Ral’s hairy head silhouetted by the moonlight appeared around the jamb.

He had given me a fright so I shouted at him, ‘What are you doing?’

If I had been frightened, it was as nothing to Ral’s reaction to my question. Letting out a howl of terror he leapt about three feet in the air with his arms flapping, rather like a crested crane doing its mating dance. It took him a minute or two to recover himself sufficiently to shamble across to his bed and reply in a shaky voice, ‘I’ve been to the toilet.’ Which was just as well, I thought, otherwise my challenge could have had disastrous consequences. I got up, dressed and went out to check the Land-Rover. I suppose I guessed that Ral had been with Leslie, but I did not realize the implications of this.

It took Louren and me most of the first day to find a way over the Hills of Blood that the Land-Rover could negotiate. We followed the line of cliffs northward until they dwindled away and broke up into low kopjes and we could climb one of the gullies between them. It was a rugged ascent that taxed even that sturdy vehicle, but once on the top the going was through open savannah and scattered acacia forest and we made good progress, swinging away southward again to pick up the caravan route that Louren had hopefully drawn in on his large scale map.

That night we camped astride it, or at least where we hoped it might have been. With the amount of gasoline and water aboard, there was scant room for the luxuries of camp life. Besides it was meant to be a rough trip to dispel the smogs and grimes of civilization, a nostalgic return to the expeditions we had made together in our youth.

We grilled a brace of sand-grouse over the coals, and drank Glen Grant and sun-warmed water from enamel mugs. Then with hollows scraped from the hard earth for hip and shoulder we rolled into our sleeping bags beside the Land-Rover and chatted drowsily and contentedly for an hour before falling asleep.

In the dawn Louren massaged his back and gingerly worked the stiffness out of his muscles.

‘I’ve just remembered I’m not twenty any longer,’ he groaned, but by the third day he was looking it. The sun coloured him again, the bruises under his eyes were gone and he laughed freely.

Our progress was slow. Often it was necessary to retrace our spoor out of broken ground whose kopjes and ridges denied us passage. Then we would leave the Land-Rover and go in on foot to try and pioneer a way through. There was no hurry, however, so we could fully enjoy each mile as we groped our way north and east through country that changed its character and mood with the bewitching rapidity that is Africa’s alone.

Each hour of eastward travel rewarded us with more evidence of bird and animal life. The dry-land birds gave way to guinea fowl, francolin, and the gigantic korrie bustard. While amongst the mopani and masasa trees there was the occasional silver-grey flash of a running kudu, with his long corkscrew horns laid flat along his back.

‘Water not far away,’ Louren commented as we stopped the Land-Rover at the edge of one of those open glades of yellow grass and watched a herd of stable antelope move away into the trees on the far side. The most stately antelope in Africa, proud heads holding the curved scimitar horns high and the dazzling contrast of snowy breast against black body.

‘Another endangered species,’ I remarked sadly. ‘Making way for the greed and excesses of man.’

‘Yes,’ Louren agreed. ‘And you know something, there’s not one single specimen of homo sapiens that’s half as beautiful, and that,’ he said, ‘includes Raquel Welch.’

That night we camped in a grove of masasa trees, clad in their outlandish spring foliage which has the colours of no other tree on earth - pinks, soft shiny beige, and flaming reds. Louren had shot a young impala ram during the day and he wrapped the fillets in bacon and roasted them in a heavy iron pot while I made a sauce of onions and tomato and plenty of garlic. We ate it with thick slices of brown bread and yellow tinned butter and it tasted like no other food I had ever known.

‘If you ever need a job, Lo, you can come cook for me,’ I told him around a mouthful. He grinned and went to the Land-Rover to switch on the radio.

‘What was the deal?’ I asked.

‘Just the news.’ He had the grace to look guilty. ‘Can’t lose touch entirely.’

We listened to the strivings and strugglings of a world gone mad. Somehow, in this remote and tranquil place the affairs of man seemed unimportant, petty and transient.

‘Switch it off, Lo,’ I said. ‘Who needs it?’

He reached for the control knob of the set, but checked his hand as the voice of the announcer spoke a familiar name.

‘Lusaka Radio reports that the leader of the terrorist gang which yesterday ambushed a detachment of police in the Wankie district of Rhodesia, killing four and wounding two others, is the self-styled “Colonel” Timothy Mageba who two months ago made world headlines in his dramatic hijacking bid. A spokesman for the Rhodesian police said that Mageba is probably one of the most dangerous terrorists in Africa. A reward of 10,000 Rhodesian dollars has been offered for information leading to his death or capture.’

With a savage gesture Louren switched off the set and came back to the fire. He sipped his whisky before speaking.

‘He’s operating only 100 miles or so north of here, I’d give anything to get a chance at that one.’

News of Timothy disturbed me deeply, and that night I lay long awake with my hands behind my head staring up at the starry splendour of the night sky. Venus had dropped below the horizon before I fell into a sleep troubled with ugly dreams.

The morning sun lit the crests of the kopjes a fresh gold and inflamed the sky with virulent reds and purples, driving away dark thoughts and we talked and laughed together as we picked our way slowly towards the east.

In the middle of the morning we saw the vultures circling off towards the north, a vast wheel of specks turning slowly beneath the hard blue sky. Following the flight of these grotesque scavengers is one of the most intriguing invitations that Africa has to offer. For every time they will lead you to the scene of some desperate incident in the never-ending drama of the wilderness.

‘A couple of miles off,’ Louren commented, peering eagerly ahead through the windscreen. I shared his curiosity. The hell with ruined cities and lost civilizations, this was the stark, raw rule of tooth and claw we were going to witness.

A quarter of a mile ahead of us we saw the hunch-backed bird shapes squatting obscenely in the tree-tops, thick as some devil’s fruit in the orchards of hell.

‘They are off the kill.’ Louren was jubilant ‘Something’s keeping them up in the trees and sky.’

He stopped the Land-Rover, and switched off the ignition. We climbed out, and Louren checked the load of his big .375 magnum, changing the solid bullets for soft-nosed ones that would deliver a heavier knock-down blow.

‘We’ll walk up,’ he said. ‘I’d love a chance at a big black-maned lion.’ He snapped the bolt of the rifle closed, ‘Take the shotgun, Ben, load with buckshot.’

This is my sort of thinking. If a lion is far enough away to warrant the use of a rifle then he and I have got no quarrel; closer than that I like a weapon that I can’t miss with.

Louren set off through the waist-high grass, I followed him, keeping out on his flank to open my line of fire, the shotgun loaded for lion and my pockets bulging with spare shells. We moved in slowly, trying to find the focal point of this gathering of vultures for they were scattered in the trees over an area of half a square mile.

Every step heightened our tension with the expectation of walking on top of a pride of lions lying in the grass. Louren signalled each change of direction to me, as we quartered carefully back and forth over the ground. From the trees around us the birds launched into flight, changing miraculously from ungainly repose into something graceful and beautiful as they entered their true element.

My throat was dry with excitement, and a pleasurable fear. I could see Louren was sweating through the back of his shirt, not entirely from the heat. His every movement was charged with restrained energy, ready to explode at the first sign of the quarry. I loved this part of the hunt, for there is the atavistic urge of hunter still hidden in most of us, it was only the killing that repulsed me.

Louren froze, rifle at high port. He was staring ahead, and I braced myself for the heavy detonation of the shot that I knew must follow; but the seconds passed slowly as dripping oil and still Louren stood with only the slightest movement of his head as he searched.

Quietly I moved up beside him. Ahead of us was an area of flattened and trampled grass. In the centre of it lay the body of a dead buffalo, his belly bloated with gas, and big shiny green flies swarming over his dead eyes and into his open mouth. I could see no marks of claws in the thick hide, with its coarse black hair blotched with patches of shiny baldness and rough scab.

I looked down at the ground, not wishing to tread on a twig as I moved again, and I saw the small childlike human footprint in a patch of ant-turned earth.

I felt the hair at the back of my neck prickle, we had walked into something a damned sight more dangerous than a pride of lions. Quickly I looked back to the dead buffalo, and for the first time noticed two inches of a frail reed stalk protruding from the folded skin of the neck. The flesh around it was swollen tight and hard.

‘Lo!’ I croaked huskily. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here - this is a bushman kill.’

Louren’s head jerked around and he stared at me. I saw the rim of his nostrils fade to china white.

‘How do you know?’ he demanded hoarsely

‘Footprints at your feet.’ He glanced down, ‘Arrow in the buffalo’s neck.’

He was convinced. ‘This is your shauri, Sen. What do we do?’ Now he was sweating as heavily as I was.

I said ‘Slowly, slowly! Don’t turn your back and don’t move suddenly. They are watching us, Lo, Probably right here.’

We began backing off, clutching our weapons with sweat-greasy hands, eyes darting restlessly from side to side.

‘Talk to them, for God’s sake, Ben!’ Louren whispered. I found time to examine the discovery that the threat of poison could turn even a man like Louren into a coward.

‘Can’t take the chance. Anything could trigger them.’

‘They may be behind us.’ His voice shook, and I felt my skin between the shoulder blades cringe as I listened for the flute of the arrow. With each pace backwards I felt my fear shrinking, and fifty yards from the kill I risked hailing them.

‘Peace,’ I called. ‘We mean you no harm.’

The reply came immediately, birdlike and disembodied, seeming to emanate from the heated air itself.

‘Tell the big white-head to lay down his weapon, for we do not know him.’

‘Xhai.’ I cried out my relief and delight. ‘My brother!’

‘His eye was bright as the yellow moon,

His hoof struck fire from the iron hills.‘

We sang the buffalo song together, the men squatting around the leaping fire, clapping out the complicated rhythm with our hands. The women danced in an outer circle around us, swaying and shuffling, miming the buffalo and his gallant hunter. The firelight shone on their golden-yellow skins, their tiny childlike bodies with the startling bulge of buttocks and the fat little yellow breasts joggling to the dance rhythm.

‘The arrow-bird flew from my hand

Swift as a bee, or a stooping hawk.‘

The branches of the trees around us were heavy with festoons of raw meat, hung out to dry, and beyond the firelight the jackal and hyena howled their frustrations to the star-bright heavens, as they snuffed the tantalizing odours.

The blood when it flowed was bright as a flower

And sweet as wild honey was the flesh of his body,‘

The dance ended at last, and the women giggled and trilled as they flocked to the fire to cram more meat into their little round bellies. Bushmen and women are awed by physical size, and to them Louren was a huge golden giant. They discussed him in a frank and intimate manner, starting at his golden head and working downwards until I laughed out aloud.

‘What’s so funny?’ Louren demanded, and I told him.

‘My God, they didn’t say that!’ Louren was shocked, staring at the women in horror, and they covered their mouths with their hands as they giggled.

I sat between Xhai and Louren, one of them smoking and the other eating a Romeo and Juliette cigar, and I translated for them. They spoke of the animals and the birds for they had a common love of the chase.

‘My grandfather told me that when he was a young man the buffalo in this land below the great river were as locusts, black upon the earth - but then the red sickness came.’

‘Rinderpest,’ I explained to Louren.

‘And they died so that they fell one upon the other, so thick that the vultures could not fly with the load of their bellies, and their bones lay in the sun like the fields of white Namaqua daisies in the spring time’

They talked on after the women and children had curled up and fallen asleep like little yellow puppies in the dust. They spoke of noble animals and great hunts, and they became friends beside the fire so that at last Xhai told me shyly, ‘I should like to share the hunt with such a one. I could show him an elephant, like those that my grandfather knew, with teeth as thick as my waist and as long as the shaft of a throwing spear.’

And there goes any further pretence of looking for ruins and caravan routes, I thought, as I watched Louren’s face light up at the suggestion.

‘But,’ I added, ‘he says you must leave the Land-Rover here. They heard us coming for half an hour before we arrived today and he says this elephant is old and cunning. Which means we will have to get some sleep now. We’ve got a hell of a day ahead of us tomorrow.’

By the time the sun came up we had been on the march for three hours, dew had soaked our trousers to the knees but we had walked the night’s chill out of our joints and were extending ourselves, stepping out with full stride to keep the two tiny brown figures in view. Xhai and Ghal were into that loose-limbed trot that would eat away the miles all day without flagging, their little brown forms danced ahead of us through the thickening thorns and Jessie bush.

‘How you doing, Ben?’

I grunted and changed the shotgun to my other shoulder.

‘The little bastards can certainly foot it.’

‘Brother, you have only just started,’ I warned him. They led us into bad, broken country where harsh black ridges of ironstone thrust from the earth and the thorn was grey and spiny and matted, where deep ravines rent the walls of steep tableland outcrops and the heat was a fierce dazzling thing that sucked the moisture from our bodies and dried it in rings of white salt on our shirts. It was the type of country that a canny old elephant bull, pursued by men all his life, might choose as a retreat.

We rested for half an hour at noon, seeking shade in the lee of a boulder whose black surface was scalding to the touch and drinking a few mouthfuls of lukewarm water, then we went on and almost immediately cut the spoor.

‘There and there.’ With the point of a poison arrow, Xhai traced the outline of a padmark on the iron-hard earth. ‘Do you not see it?’ he asked with exasperation, and though we circled the area, tilting our heads learnedly, neither of us could make it out.

‘If that’s an elephant spoor,’ muttered Louren, ‘I’m a Chinese tinker.’ But Xhai set off confidently on a new bearing through the thorns, and we climbed one of the rocky tablelands, following a trail that Louren and I could not even see. Near the crest of the hill, lay a pile of elephant dung, still moist despite the furnace-dry heat, and a cloud of yellow and orange butterflies hovered over it attracted by the wetness. The dung looked like the contents of a coir mattress.

‘Velly solly,’ I whispered to Louren, ‘please fixee pottee -chop chop.’

‘The man’s a bloody magician.’ Louren shook his head in amazement, as he unslung the heavy rifle from his shoulder and tucked it under his arm.

We went on again, but slowly now, pausing frequently while Xhai and Ghal searched the impenetrable thickets of thorn ahead of us. It was a gut-aching business in this close bush, each step planned and made only at a signal from Xhai’s dainty pink-palmed hand, moving forward when the hand beckoned and freezing when it froze.

‘Come,’ said the hand and we went on again, then abruptly—

‘Stop!’ A quick cut-out sign, with the hand like a blade, then balling into a fist and pointing ahead, bad luck to point with a finger at the quarry.

We stood still as death, sweat-shiny faces staring ahead into the wall of thorn - and then suddenly the elephant loomed ghostly grey amongst the grey thorn, moving from us in a leisurely sway-backed shamble, grey skin wrinkled and old, hanging in bags and pouches at the belly and in the crotch of his back legs, the tail bare of tuft hair, the knuckles of the spine showing clearly through the ridged skin on his back. Old elephant. Big elephant.

‘Stay here!’ Xhai’s hand pointed at Ghal and me, and I nodded in acknowledgement.

‘Come with me!’ Xhai’s forefinger crooked at Louren, and they went on together, circling out on the elephant’s flank through the thorn. The bushman doll-like beside Louren’s bulk, leading him around for a clean shot at the head or shoulder.

The elephant paused, and began feeding from one of the thickets, delicately plucking the pale green shoots with the tip of his trunk, stuffing them into his mouth, completely unaware of danger - while out on his flank Louren reached a firing stance and braced himself, legs spread, leaning forward to meet the recoil of the heavy rifle.

The shot was stunningly loud, shocking in the heat-drugged silence. I heard the bullet slap into flesh, and the elephant spun away from the impact, turning to face Louren, with its long yellow ivories lifted high, the huge grey ears cocked back, and it squealed as it saw the man. It squealed in anger, and a long smouldering hatred now burst into flame.

It crabbed sideways as it began the charge, blanketing Louren’s line of fire with a thicket of thorns. I saw Louren turn and run out to the side, trying to open his front for a clear shot. His foot hit an ant-bear hole and he fell in full run, going down heavily, the rifle flying from his hand, lying stunned full in the path of the charge.

‘Louren!’ I screamed, and then I was running also, armed with only a shotgun, racing to head the charge of a wounded bull elephant.

‘Here!’ I screamed at it as I ran. ‘Here!’ Trying to lead it off him, in the corner of my vision I saw Louren on hands and knees crawling painfully towards his rifle.

‘Yah! Yay!’ I screamed with all the strength of my lungs, and the bull checked his charge, his head swinging towards me, piggy eyes seeking me, trunk questing for my scent.

I threw up the shotgun, and at thirty yards’ range I aimed for his little eyes, hoping to blind him.

Blam! Blam! I fired left and right into his face, and he came at me. I felt a vast sense of relief as his charge exploded towards me. I had taken him off Louren - that was all that counted. With clumsy fingers I groped for fresh cartridges, knowing that before I could reload he would be upon me.

‘Run, Ben, run!’ Louren’s voice, high above the ground-thudding charge of the bull. But I found my legs would not function, and I stood in the path of the charge, groping stupidly for cartridges which were useless as thrown peppercorns against this grey mountain of flesh.

The blast of Louren’s rifle beat against my numbed brain, once - twice, it crashed out and like an avalanche the grey mountain fell towards me, dead already, the brain shattered like an overripe fruit at the passage of the heavy bullet.

My feet were rooted to the earth, I could not move, could not dodge, and the outflung trunk hit me with savage force. I felt myself thrown through air, and then the cruel impact of earth and my brain burst into bright colours and stabbing lights as I went out.

‘You silly bastard! Oh, you silly brave little bastard.’ I heard Louren’s voice speaking to me down a long dark tunnel, and the sound of it echoed strangely in my head. Cool wetness splashed over my face, blessed wetness on my lips and I opened my eyes. Louren was sitting on the ground, my head was cradled in his lap and he was splashing water from the bottle into my face.

‘Who are you calling a bastard?’ I croaked up at him, and the expression of relief that flooded over his worried features was one of the most satisfying things I have ever seen.

I was stiff and sore, bruised of shoulder and across the small of my back, and there was a lump above my temple that was too painful to touch.

‘Can you walk?’ Louren fussed over me.

‘I can try.’ It wasn’t too painful, and I even found the inclination to photograph the huge dead beast as it knelt in a prayerful attitude with the head supported on the curved yellow tusks. Louren and the bushman sat on its head.

‘We will camp tonight at the Water-In-The-Rocks,’ Xhai told me, ‘and tomorrow we will return and take the teeth.’

‘How far is it?’ I asked dubiously.

‘Close!’ Xhai assured me. ‘Very close.’ And I scowled at him uncertainly. I had heard him use the same words to describe a march of fifty miles.

‘It had bloody well better be,’ I said in English, and to my surprise it was much closer than I had expected - and a lot of other things I had not expected either.

We crossed one ridge with me hobbling along on Louren’s arm and then came out on a wide granite sheet, a great curved dome of rock almost four acres in extent. I took one look at it, at the lines of shallow rounded holes that dimpled the entire surface, and I let out a whoop of joy. Suddenly I no longer needed Louren’s support, and both of us ran down onto the stone floor, chortling with glee, as we examined the regular lines of worn depressions.

‘It must have been a big one, Ben,’ Louren exulted, he made a guess at the number of holes. ‘A thousand?’

‘More!’ I said. ‘More like two thousand.’

I paused then, imagining the long regular lines of naked slaves kneeling on the rock floor, each beside one of the smooth depressions, each of them linked to his neighbours by the iron slave chains, each of them with a heavy iron pestle in his hands, pounding away at the gold-bearing ore in the stone mortar between his knees.

I saw in my imagination the slave masters walking along the lines, the leather whips in their hands as they checked that the rock was crushed to a fine powder. I saw the endless columns of slaves with ore baskets balanced on their heads coming up from the workings. All this had happened here nearly 2,000 years before.

‘I wonder where the mine is.’ Louren was paralleling my thoughts.

‘And the water?’ I added. ‘They’d need water to wash the gold out.’

‘The hell with the water,’ Louren shouted. ‘It’s the mine I want, those old boys only worked values of three ounces and over and they stopped at water level - there’s a bloody treasure house around here somewhere.’

This was how all the ancient mines had been destroyed. It was a credit to the skill of the ancient metallurgists that the site of nearly every modern mine in central Africa had been discovered by them 2,000 years before. The modern miners ripped out all trace of the ancient workings in their haste to expose the abandoned reef. I made a vow that at the least I would be first into this one, before the vandals with their drills and dynamite.

The water was at the bottom of a fifty-foot well, cut cleanly through the living rock, its walls lined with masonry. It was the finest example of an ancient well I had ever seen; clearly it had been kept in good repair by the bushmen, and I gloated over it while Xhai fetched a raw-hide rope and leather bucket from a hiding place among the rocks. He brought the bucket up brimming with clear water in which floated a few dead frogs and a drowned bush rat. I made a resolution to boil every drop before it passed my lips.

Louren spent a full thirty seconds in admiring the well, before he set off into the narrow valley between the two ridges of granite. I watched him disappear amongst the trees searching diligently, and twenty minutes later his faint shouts drifted up to me.

‘Ben! Come here! Quickly!’ I dragged myself off the coping of the well and limped down into the valley.

‘Here it is, Ben.’ Louren was wild with excitement and I was struck again by the power that gold has to quicken the most sluggish pulse, and to put the glitter of avarice in even the most world-weary eye. I am not a materialistic person, but the lure and magic of it quickened my own breathing as I stood beside Louren and we looked upon the mine of the ancients.

It was not an impressive sight in itself, a shallow depression, a trench sunk about three or four feet below the level of the surrounding earth, its banks gently rounded, it meandered away amongst the trees like a footpath that had been worn into the earth.

‘Open stope,’ Louren told me. ‘They followed the strike of the reef.’

‘And back-filled.’ I commented on the peculiar habit that the ancients had of filling in all their workings before abandoning them. This shallow trench was caused by the subsidence of the loose soil with which they had filled it.

‘Come on,’ said Louren. ‘Let’s follow it.’

For a mile and a half we followed the old stope through the forest before it petered out.

‘If only we could find one of their dumps,’ Louren muttered as we searched the rank vegetation for a pile of loose rock. ‘Or at least a piece of the ore that they overlooked.’

My back was hurting so I sat on a fallen log to rest, and left Louren to continue the search. He moved away through the trees leaving me alone, and I could enjoy the sense of history which enveloped me when I was alone in a place such as this.

The water level in the well was fifty feet, so I guessed that this was the depth to which the ancients had worked their stope. They did not have the pumps or equipment to evacuate the workings, and as soon as water started pouring in they refilled it and left to find another reef.

This mine had been an open trench, one and a half miles long and fifty feet deep by six feet wide, hacked from the earth with adzes of iron and iron wedges pounded into the grain of the rock with stone hammers. When the rock was hard enough to resist this method, then they built fires upon it and poured water mixed with sour wine on the heated surface to shatter it. This was the same method that Hannibal used to break up the boulders that blocked the passage of his elephants across the Alps - a Carthaginian trick, you might call it. From the sheet of reet they prised lumps of gold quartz and packed it into baskets to be hauled to the surface on raw-hide ropes.

Using these methods they removed an estimated 700 tons of fine gold from workings spread over 300,000 square miles of central and southern Africa, together with vast quantities of iron and copper and tin.

‘That’s 22 million ounces of gold at $40 an ounce, 880 million dollars.’ I worked it out aloud, then added, ‘And that’s a big loaf of bread.’

‘Ben, where are you?’ Louren was coming back through the trees. ‘I found a piece of the reef.’ He had a lump of rock in his hand and he handed it to me.

‘What do you make of that?’

‘Blue sugar quartz,’ I said. And I licked at it to wet the surface, then held it to catch the sunlight. ‘Wow!’ I exclaimed as the native gold sparkled wetly back at me, filling the cracks and tiny fissures in the quartz like butter in a sandwich.

‘Wow, indeed!’ Louren agreed. ‘This is good stuff. I’ll send a couple of my boys in to peg the whole area.’

‘Lo, don’t forget about me,’ I said, and he frowned quickly.

‘You’ll be cut in on it, Ben. Have I ever tried—’

‘Don’t be a clot, Lo. I didn’t mean that. I just don’t want your rock hounds tearing up the countryside before I’ve had a chance to go over it.’

‘Okay, Ben. I promise,’ he laughed. ‘You can be here when we reopen the workings.’ He juggled the lump of quartz in his hand. ‘Let’s get back, I want to pan this and get some idea of its value.’

Using one of the stone mortars in the granite cap and a lump of ironstone as a pestle, Louren pounded a piece of the quartz to a fine white powder. This he collected in our cooking pot, and with well-water washed off the powdered stone. Swirling the contents of the pot with an easy circular motion, letting a little spill over the rim of the pot with each turn. It took him fifteen minutes to separate the ‘tail’ of gold. It lay curled around the bottom of the pot, greasy shiny yellow.

‘Pretty,’ I said.

‘They don’t come prettier!’ Louren grinned. ‘This stuff will go five ounces to the ton.’

‘You are an avaricious bastard, aren’t you,’ I teased him.

‘Put it this way, Ben,’ he was still grinning, ‘the profits from this will probably keep your Institute running for another twenty years. Don’t kick it, partner, money isn’t the root of all evil if you use it right.’

‘I won’t kick it,’ I promised him.

We camped that night beside the well, feasting on boiled elephant tongue and potatoes and keeping a bonfire going to compensate for our lack of blankets. We spent the following morning cutting out the tusks. These we buried beneath a huge pile of rocks to keep off the hyenas, and it was after noon before we started back for the Land-Rover.

Night caught us out again, but we reached the Land-Rover in the middle of the following morning. I had blisters on my heels the size of grapes and my lumps and bruises ached abominably. I collapsed thankfully into the passenger seat of the Land-Rover.

‘Up to this moment I have never truly appreciated the invention of the internal combustion engine,’ I announced gravely. ‘You can take me home now, James.’

We left Xhai and his small tribe to their eternal wanderings in the wilderness and we arrived back at the City of the Moon eight days after we left it. We were blackened by the sun and an accumulation of dirt, we had sprouted beards, and our hair was stiff with dust and grime. Louren’s beard came out a burnished red-gold that glistened in the sunlight.

He had been AWOL for three days, and the pack was clamorous. A tall pile of messages waited for him in the radio shack, and before he could shave or bath he had to spend an hour on the radio taking care of the most urgent matters that had arisen in his absence.

‘I should get on back to the salt mines right away,’ he told me as he came out of the shack. ‘It’s four-thirty. I could make it.’ He hesitated a moment, then his resolve hardened. ‘No, damn it! I’m going to steal one more night. Get out the Glen Grant while I take a bath.’

‘Now you are talking sense.’ I laughed.

‘All the way, partner.’ He punched my shoulder.

‘All the way, Lo,’ I assured him.

We talked a lot, and sang a little, and drank whisky until after midnight.

‘Bed!’ said Louren then, and rose to go, but suddenly he paused. ‘Ben you promised to let me have some photographs of the “white king” painting to take back with me.’

‘Sure, Lo.’ I stood up a little unsteadily and went through into the office. I took a sheaf of nine-by-six-inch glossy prints from my files and went back with them to Louren. Standing under the light he shuffled through them.

‘What’s wrong with this one, Ben?’ he asked suddenly, and handed it to me.

‘What? I can’t see anything.’

‘The face, Ben. There is a mark.’

I saw it then; a faint shadowy cross which marred the death-white face of the king. I studied it a moment. It puzzled me. I hadn’t noticed it before - like a dark grey hot cross bun.

‘It’s probably a flaw in the printing, Lo,’ I guessed. ‘Is it on the others?’ He glanced through the other prints quickly.

‘No. Just that one.’

I handed it back to him. ‘Just a faulty print,’ I said.

‘Okay.’ Louren accepted my explanation. ‘Goodnight.’

I poured myself a nightcap while Sally and the others trooped off after Louren, and I drank it slowly, sitting alone, running over in my mind the plans that Louren and I had formulated for the thorough investigation of the cavern.

I will admit that I never gave the mark on the white king’s face another thought. My excuse is that I was more than a little drunk.

The next two months passed swiftly. Ral and I devoted ourselves to a thorough excavation of the floor of the cavern.

The results were surprising only in their paucity. The cavern had never been used for human habitation, there was no midden or hearth level. We found an accumulation of animal detritus that extended down to bed-rock. On the bedrock itself we found a single square block of dressed stone, and that was the total bag.

Our excavations had given the cavern a forlorn and gutted appearance, and the bed-rock was uneven limestone, so I had the dig refilled and neatly levelled. Then we used the ancient blocks to lay a pavement around the emerald pool. I saw this as a concession to the convenience of the thousands of future visitors who would come to view this wonderful gallery of bushman art once its existence was known to the world.

As he had promised, Louren radioed me when his company was ready to begin re-opening the ancient mine we had discovered on the hunt for the elephant. A helicopter fetched me and I spent three weeks with the engineers who were doing the work.

The reef was there below the water-table as we had hoped, and although its values varied widely from place to place along its length, yet the average was exceptionally high. Secretly I was glad of my ten per cent interest in the mine, despite my non-materialist values. We recovered many hundreds of artefacts, mostly mining tools. There were badly rusted adzes and wedges, stone hammers, scraps of chain, a few well-preserved fibre baskets and the usual beads and pottery.

Of these I was most pleased with the fibre baskets which enabled us to obtain a carbon-14 date from the laboratories. This was slightly prior to, if not concurrent with, the date of the great fire, and served to link the elephant mine with the City of the Moon.

However, the most interesting find at the elephant mine was that of fifteen human skeletons lying like a string of beads along the stope at its deepest point. The arrangement of the bodies was so regular as to preclude the idea that they may have been killed in a rockfall. Although the skeletons had been flattened by the weight of earth from above, I was able to determine that five of them were female and ten were male. All of them were elderly, and one of them showed traces of arthritis, another had lost an arm between elbow and wrist but the bone had encysted, proving that it had not been a recent injury. Most of them had lost teeth. On all of them I found traces of iron chains, and the picture I had was that of fifteen elderly and infirm slaves laid deliberately along the bottom of the stope before it was filled.

After supervising the cataloguing, packing and dispatch to the Institute of all these finds, I returned to the City of the Moon, and I went immediately to the cavern. As I had hoped, Sally was hard at work there. I do not think her pleasure was affected as she came to meet me and kissed me.

‘Oh, Ben. I’ve missed you.’ Then she launched immediately into a technical discussion, and while I made the right answers my thoughts were far from bushman paintings.

I watched the way she crinkled her nose as she spoke, and the way she kept pushing her hair back from her cheek with the back of her hand, and my whole being throbbed with love of her. Down in my stomach I felt a squirming of dread. Our work at the City of the Moon was almost finished, soon we would be returning to Johannesburg and the hushed halls of the Institute. I wondered how this would affect Sally and me.

‘We’ll be leaving soon, Sal.’ I gave expression to my thoughts.

‘Yes,’ she agreed, immediately sobered. ‘The thought saddens me. I’ve been so happy here, I’m going to miss it.’

We sat in silence for a while, then Sally stood up and went to stand before the portrait of the white king. She stared at it moodily, her arms folded tightly across her breast. - ‘We’ve learned so much here,’ she paused for a moment, and then went on, ‘and yet there was so much that was denied us. It was like chasing clouds, often I felt we were so close to having it in our hands.’ She shook her head, angrily. ‘There are so many secrets still locked away from us, Ben. Things we will never know.’

She turned and came back to where I sat; she knelt in front of me with her hands on her knees, staring into my face.

‘Do you know that we haven’t got proof, Ben! Do you realize there is nothing we have found here that can’t be discredited by the old arguments.’ She leaned closer towards me. ‘We have a symbol on a scrap of pottery. Imported in the course of trade, they will say. We have the golden chalice, the work of native goldsmiths using the Ankh motif by chance, they will say. We have the paintings - heresay is not evidence, they will say.’

She sat back on her haunches and stared at me.

‘Do you know what we’ve got, Ben, after it’s all been sifted and sorted? We’ve got a big fat nothing.’

‘I know,’ I said miserably.

‘We haven’t even a single fact to knock them off their smug little perch. Our City of the Moon - our beautiful city -will be simply another culture of obscure Bantu origin, and there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it. We will never know what happened to the great walls and towers, and we will never know where our white king lies buried.’

I planned to shut down the dig on the 1st of August, and we spent the last weeks of July tidying it all, leaving the foundations exposed for others who might follow us, packing our treasures with loving care, making the last entries in the piles of notebooks, typing the long lists of catalogues and attending to the hundreds of other finicky details.

The field investigation was over, but ahead of me lay months of work, filing and correlating everything we had discovered, fitting each fact into its niche and comparing it with evidence gathered by others at other sites and finally there would be the summation and the book. Months before, I had hoped I might be able to entitle my book The Phoenicians in Southern Africa. Now I would have to find another title.

The Dakota arrived to take away the first load of crates, and with it went Peter and Heather Willcox. They would still have two or three months of their European holiday, but we were sorry to see them go, for we had been a happy group.

That evening Louren spoke to me over the radio.

‘We have got hold of Cousteau at last, Ben. He’s been cruising in the Pacific but my office in San Francisco spoke with him. He thinks he may be able to help, but there is no chance that he will be able to come before next year. He has a full schedule for the next eight months.’

That was my last excuse for staying on at the City of the Moon, and I began packing my own private papers. Sally offered to help me. We worked late, sorting through the thousands of photographs. Now and then we would pause to examine a print of particular interest, or laugh over one that had been taken in fun, remembering the good times we had spent together over the months.

Finally we came to the file of prints of the white king.

‘My beautiful mysterious king,’ Sally sighed. ‘Isn’t there anything more you can tell us? Where did you come from? Who did you love? Into what battles did you carry your war shield, and who wept over your wounds when they carried you home from the field?’

We went slowly through the thick pile of prints. They were taken from every angle, with every type of variation in lighting, exposure and printing technique.

A detail of one of the prints caught my eye. I suppose that subconsciously I was alerted to pick it up. I stared at it, with eyes that began to see for the first time. I felt something fluttering inside of me like a trapped bird, felt the electric tickle run up my arms.

‘Sal,’ I said and then stopped.

‘What is it. Ben?’ She picked up the quaver of suppressed excitement in my voice.

‘The light!’ I said. ‘Do you remember how we found the city in the moonlight? The angle and the intensity of the light?’

‘Yes,’ she nodded eagerly.

‘Do you see it, Sal?’ I touched the white king’s face. ‘Do you remember the print I gave to Lo? Do you remember the mark on it?’

She stared at the photograph. It was fainter than on Louren’s print, but it was there, the same shadowy cross shape superimposed upon the death-white face.

‘What is it?’ Sally puzzled, turning the photograph in her hands to catch the light.

‘I don’t know.’ I said as I hurried across the room to the equipment cupboard, and began scratching around in it, ‘but I’m damned well going to find out.’

I came out of the cupboard and handed her one of the four-cell torches. ‘Take this and follow me, Watson.’

‘We always seem to do our best work at night,’ Sally began, and then realized what she had said. ‘I didn’t mean it that way!’ She forestalled any ribald comment.

The cavern was as still as an ancient tomb, and our footsteps echoed loudly off the paving as we skirted the pool and went to the portrait of the white king. The beams of our torches danced upon him and he stared down at us, regal and aloof.

‘There’s no mark on his face,’ Sally said, and I could hear the disappointment in her voice.

‘Wait.’ I took my handkerchief from my pocket. Folding it in half, and in half again, I masked the glass of my torch. The bright beam was reduced to a steady glow through the cloth. I climbed up onto the timber framework that had been left in position.

‘Switch yours off,’ I ordered Sally, and in the semi-darkness I stepped up to the portrait and began examining the face with the dimmer light.

The cheek was white, flawless. Slowly I moved the light, lifting higher, lowering it, moving it in a wide circle around the king’s head.

‘There!’ we cried together, as suddenly the hazy mark of the cross appeared over the pale features. I steadied the light in its correct position and examined the mark.

‘It’s a shadow, Sal,’ I said. ‘I think there must be an irregularity beneath the paint. A sort of groove, or rather two grooves intersecting each other at right angles to form a cross.’

‘Cracks in the rock?’ Sally asked.

‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘But they seem to be too straight, the angles too precise to be natural.’

I unmasked my torch, and turned to her.

‘Sal, have you an article of silk with you?’

‘Silk?’ She looked stunned, but recovered quickly, ‘My scarf.’ Her ringers went to her throat.

‘Lend it to me, please.’

‘What are you going to do with it?’ she demanded, holding her hand protectively over the scrap of pretty cloth that showed in the neck of her blouse. ‘It’s genuine Cardin. Cost me a ruddy king’s ransom.’

‘I won’t spoil it,’ I promised.

‘You’ll buy me a new one if you do,’ she warned me, as she unknotted the scarf and passed it up to me.

‘Give a light,’ I requested and she directed her torch onto the king. I spread the scarf over the king’s head, holding it in position with the fingers of my left hand.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ she demanded.

‘If you are ever buying a second-hand car, and you want to be sure it has never been in a smash, then this is the way you feel for blemishes that the eye can’t see.’

With the fingertips of my right hand I began feeling the surface of the painting through the silk. The cloth allowed my fingertips to slip easily over the rock, and seemed to magnify the feel of the texture. I found a faint groove, followed it to a crossroads, moved down the south axis to another crossroads, moved east, north, and back to my starting point. My finger-tips had traced a regular oblong shape, measuring about nine by six inches.

‘Do you feel anything?’ Sally could not contain her impatience. I did not answer her for my heart was in my mouth, and my fingers were busy, running all over the rock beneath the silk, moving well away from the portrait, down almost to floor level, and up as high as I could reach.

‘Oh, Ben. Do tell me! What is it?’

‘Wait!’ My heart was drumming like the flight of a startled pheasant, and the track of my fingertips trembled with excitement.

‘I will not wait, damn you,’ she shouted. ‘Tell me!’

I jumped down off the framework and grabbed her hand. ‘Come on.’

‘Where are we going?’ she demanded as I dragged her across the cavern.

‘To get the camera.’

‘What on earth for?’

‘We are going to take some photographs.’

I had two rolls of Kodak Ektachrome Aero-film type 8443 in the small refrigerated cabinet which housed my stock of films. I had ordered this infra-red film to experiment with photographing the unexcavated foundations of the city from the top of the cliffs, but the results had not been encouraging. There were too many rock strata and too much vegetation confusing the prints.

I filled my Rolleiflex with a roll of the infra-red film, and I fitted a Kodak No 12 Wratten filter over the lens. Sally pestered me while I worked, but I replied to all her queries with, ‘Wait and see!’

I took up two arc-lights, and we arrived back at the cavern a little alter midnight.

I used a direct frontal lighting, plugging the arc-lights into the switchboard of the electric water-pump beside the pool. I set the Rolleiflex on a tripod and made twenty exposures at varying speeds and aperture-settings. By this time Sally was on the point of expiring with curiosity, and I took mercy on her.

‘This is the technique they use for photographing canvases and picking out the signatures and details overlaid by layers of other paints, for aerial photography through cloud, for photographing the currents of the sea, things which are invisible to the human eye.’

‘It sounds like magic.’

‘It is,’ I said, clicking away busily. The filter takes out everything but the infra-red rays, and the film is sensitive to it. It will reflect any temperature or texture differences in the subject and show them in differing colours.‘

There was an hour’s work in the dark room before I could project the images onto our viewing screen. All colours were altered, becoming weird and hellish. The king’s face was a virulent green and his beard purple. There were strange dapplings, speckles, and spots which we had never noticed before. These were irregularities in the surface, extraneous materials in the paint pigments, colonies of lichens and other imperfections. They glowed like outlandish jewels.

I hardly noticed these. What held all my attention, and set my pulses pounding, was the grid of regular oblong shapes that underlaid the entire image. An irregular chequer-board effect; they showed in lines of pale blue.

‘We’ve got to get Louren here immediately,’ I blurted.

‘What is it? I still don’t understand. What does it mean?’ Sally pleaded, and I turned to her with surprise. It was so clear to me that I had expected her to understand readily.

‘It means, Sal, that beyond our white king is an opening in the rock wall which has been closed off by a master mason with perfectly laid blocks of sandstone The white king has been painted over it.’

Louren Sturvesant stood before the rock wall in the cavern and stared angrily at the white king. His hands were clasped behind his back. He was balanced on the balls of his feet, with his jaw thrust out aggressively. We stood around him in a semicircle, Ral, Sally, Leslie and I, and we watched his face anxiously.

Suddenly Louren tore the cigar out of his own mouth and hurled it onto the paved floor. Savagely he ground the stub to powder, then he swung away and went to the edge of the emerald pool and stared down into its shadowy depths. We waited in silence.

He came back, drawn to the painting like a moth to the candle.

‘That thing,’ he said, ‘is one of the world’s great works of art. It’s two thousand years old. It’s irreplaceable. Invaluable.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘It doesn’t belong to us. It’s part of our heritage. It belongs to our children, to generations not yet born.’

‘I know,’ I said, but I knew more than that. I had watched Louren over the months as his feelings towards the portrait grew. It had developed some deep significance for him, which I could only guess at.

‘Now you want me to destroy it,’ he said.

We were all silent. Louren swung away and began pacing, back and forth, in front of the portrait. All our heads swung to watch him, like spectators at a tennis match. He stopped abruptly, in front of me.

‘You and your fancy bloody photographs,’ he said, and began pacing again.

‘Couldn’t we—’ Leslie began timidly, but her voice faded out as Louren spun around and glared at her.

‘Yes?’ he demanded.

‘Well, could you sort of go round behind it, I mean, well—’ Her voice faded and then grew stronger again. ‘Drill a passage in the wall off to one side, and then turn back behind the king?’

For the first time in my life I felt like throwing my arms around her neck and kissing her.

Louren flew up one of his mine captains with a crack team of five Mashona rock-breakers from the Little Sister gold mine near Welcome. They brought with them an air-compressor, pneumatic drills, jumper bars, and all the other paraphernalia of their trade. The mine captain was a big, ginger-haired man, with cheerful cornflower-blue eyes, and a freckled baby face. His name was Tinus van Vuuren, and he threw himself wholeheartedly into the project.

‘Reckon we will be able to cut her fairly easy. Doctor, This sandstone is like cheese, after the serpentine and quartz that I am used to.’

‘I want the smallest opening you can work in,’ Sally told him sternly. ‘I want as little damage as possible done to the paintings.’

‘Man,’ Tinus turned to her earnestly. ‘I’ll cut you one no bigger than a mouse’s—’ he cut the word off, and substituted another, ‘—ear-hole.’

Sally and I taped the outline of the mouth of the shaft on the wall of the cavern. We positioned it carefully to avoid the most beautiful and significant paintings. Though we took Tinus at his word and made the opening a mere two feet wide by four high - yet we would destroy part of a lovely group of giraffe, and a dainty little gazelle with big listening ears.

We kept thirty feet away from the white king, to avoid undue vibrations from the drills which may have loosened flakes of stone or paint pigments. Tinus would go in for thirty feet, then turn his shaft at right angles to the face and cut in behind the king. Tinus was set to begin first thing the following morning, but that night we entertained him in the common room. The atmosphere was similar to that of a fighter squadron mess on the eve of a dangerous sortie. We were all voluble and tense, and all of us were drinking a little too much.

To begin with, Tinus was very reserved, clearly overawed by the company of the legendary Louren Sturvesant, but the brandy loosened him up and he joined in the conversation.

‘What do you want the respirators for, Doc?’ he asked. ‘You expecting gas or a fire?’

‘Respirators?’ Louren broke off a private conversation with Sally. ‘Who ordered respirators?’

‘They specially told me six respirators.’ Tinus looked dismayed at Louren’s direct questioning. ‘They told me that, sir.’

‘That’s right, Lo.’ I rescued the poor man. ‘I asked for them.’

‘Why?’

‘Well, Lo. What we are all hoping to find is a passage, a—’ I was about to say tomb, but I did not want to tempt the gods,‘—cave of some sort.’

He nodded. They were all watching me - and with a receptive audience I can seldom resist a touch of the theatrical.

‘That cave will have been sealed, airtight, for two thousand years or so, which means there could be a danger of—’

‘The Curse of the Pharaohs!’ Sally interjected. ‘Of course, do you remember what happened to the men who first entered Tutankhamen’s tomb?’ She drew a finger across her own throat and rolled her eyes horribly. She was onto her second Glen Grant.

‘Sally, you ought to know better,’ I cut in severely. ‘The Curse of the Pharaohs is of course a myth. But there is a danger of a peculiarly unpleasant lung disease.’

‘Well, I must say, I don’t believe in curses and all that sort of bulldust,’ Tinus laughed, a little too loudly. His inhibitions were way down around his ankles.

‘That makes two of us,’ agreed Ral Davidson.

‘It’s not a supernatural thing,’ Leslie told them primly. ‘It’s a fungus disease.’

I seemed to have lost control of the situation completely, so I raised my voice.

‘If you are all finished, I’ll go on,’ which got their attention back to me. ‘The conditions would have been ideal for the development of cryptococcus newomyces, a fungoid saphrophitic growth whose airborne spores are the cause of a fatal disease.’

‘What does it do?’ Tinus asked.

‘The spores are breathed into the lungs, and in the warm moist conditions they germinate almost immediately and develop into dense granulitic colonies.’

‘Sies!’ said Tinus, which is an expression of the deepest disgust. ‘You mean it starts growing on your lungs like that green stuff on mouldy bread?’

‘What are the consequences?’ Louren asked

I had it word perfect. ‘Primarily they are extensive lesions of the lung tissue, with haemorrhage, high temperature and rapidly painful breathing, but then the fungoid colonies begin generating wastes which are readily absorbed into the blood and carried to the brain and central nervous system.’

‘My God!’ Tinus was blanched and horrified, his blue eyes stared out of the white freckled face. ‘Then what happens?’

‘Well, the wastes act as a virulent neurotoxin and induce hallucination. There is inflammation of the meninges, and severe brain malfunction, similar to the effects of lysergic acid or mescalin.’

‘Groovy!’ said Ral, and Leslie kicked his shin.

‘You mean it drives you crazy?’ Tinus demanded.

‘Clean out of your little skull,’ Sally assured him.

‘Fatal?’ asked Louren.

‘Seventy-five per cent, depending on individual immunity and the rate of antibody formation.’

‘In the event of survival, is there permanent damage?’

‘Scarring of the lungs similar to healed tuberculosis.’

‘Brain damage?’

‘No,’ I shook my head.

‘Hell, man,’ said Tinus carefully, setting his glass down. ‘I don’t know that I am so keen on this deal. Rock falls, methane gas, pressure bursts - those don’t worry me. But this fungus thing,’ he shuddered, ‘it is creepy, man. Just plain bloody creepy.’

‘What precautions are you going to take, Ben?’ Louren asked.

‘The first party in will be protected by respirators.’ I explained. ‘I will take air and dust samples for microscopic examination.’

Louren nodded, and smiled at Tinus.

‘Satisfied?’

‘What will you do if you don’t find it - but it’s sort of lurking there? Like, ready to pounce, you know. Like in those science fiction books,’ Tinus hedged.

‘If it’s there, it will be thick. Every dust sample will be full of it. You can’t miss it under the microscope. A black, three-ball structure like a pawnbroker’s sign.’

‘Are you sure, Doc?’

‘I’m sure, Tinus.’

He took a deep breath, hesitated a moment longer, then nodded, ‘Okay, Doc. I’ll trust you,’ he said.

The buffeting, fluttering roar of the rock drills chased my agonized brain into a corner of my skull and started kicking it to a jelly. The party had ended in the early hours.

‘How are you feeling, Doc?’ Tinus van Vuuren came across to where I stood watching the work and shouted above the din. My nerves vibrated like guitar strings. Tinus looked as fresh and baby-faced as though his night cap had been hot milk and honey and he had slept twelve hours. I knew the type - Louren was one of them.

‘I feel bloody awful, thanks,’ I shouted back.

‘There won’t be anything to see here for a couple of days,’ Tinus told me. ‘Why don’t you go lie down for a bit, Doc.’

‘I’ll stick around,’ I said, which seemed to be the general sentiment. Louren piloted the course of the Sturvesant empire from the radio shack, unable to tear himself away from the City of the Moon. Sally made a few desultory attempts at cataloguing and filing, but these never lasted more than an hour or two and then she was back at the cavern. Ral and Leslie made no pretence, and spent all day in the cavern, except for brief simultaneous absences which Louren and I guessed were exercise periods.

Tinus was a top man in his trade, and his team cut the tunnel swiftly and skilfully. The walls were shaped smoothly and precisely. They were shored with heavy timbers baulks, and electric lights were strung along the roof. Thirty feet in, Tinus constructed a large chamber from which a new drive was made, aimed at the area behind the painting of the white king.

Tinus and I had made careful measurements and calculations, and we had decided exactly where we could expect to strike whatever the wall of masonry concealed.

The Bantu drill-men were warned of the need for respirators, and Tinus and I crouched behind them in the cramped rock tunnel as they began the assault on the last few feet of rock. Their backs were naked glistening bunches of black muscles as they worked the heavy drills. The noise in the confined space was thunderous, and despite the ventilation fans circulating air, the heat was appalling. The sweat poured down inside the face mask of my respirator, and the eye goggles were fogged and blurry.

The tension was becoming almost painful as the long steel bit of the drill hammered itself into the rock, sinking in inch by inch, the muddy lubricating water running back from the drill hole. I glanced sideways at Tinus. He appeared monstrous in the black rubber mask, but the blue eyes twinkled out of the eye glasses and he winked and held up a thumb in a gesture of assurance.

Suddenly the drill-man was thrown off balance, as the drill ran away with him. It slid, unresisted, into its hole, and he staggered wildly as he tried to control the enormous weight of steel. Tinus slapped his shoulder, and he slammed the valve of the drill closed. The silence was almost painful, and our laboured breathing was the only sound.

Through, I thought, we’ve holed through into God knows what.

I saw my own excitement reflected in Tinus’s blue eyes. I nodded at him, and he turned and tapped the drill-men’s shoulders and jerked his thumb in a gesture of dismissal. They shuffled back, bowed in the low tunnel, and disappeared around the bend.

The two of us went forward and crouched at the face. Gingerly we withdrew the drill steel from its hole, and a wisp of fine dust followed it out, smoking in the harsh glare of the electric lights. Tinus and I exchanged glances. Then I jerked my head at Tinus. He nodded, and followed his gang back along the tunnel. I worked on alone at the face.

I used the long plastic rod, with a piece of sterile white cloth attached to the end of it, to probe the drill hole to its limit. It ran fourteen feet into the rock before meeting resistance, and when I withdrew it the cloth was thick with grey floury dust. I dropped it into the sample bottle, and attached another cloth to the rod. In all I collected six separate samples, before I followed Tinus back along the passage. There was a bench and an angle-poise lamp set up ready for me in the rock chamber. The microscope was under the light, with its mirror adjusted and it was the work of only a few minutes to smear my dust samples onto the slides and spread the red dye over them.

It was difficult to get a view into the eyepiece of the micro-scope through my befogged goggles. One quick scrutiny was sufficient, but I doggedly inspected all six samples before I ripped off my respirator and sucked big relieved breaths. Then I scampered down the passage and out into the cavern. They were all waiting for me, crowding around me eagerly. ‘We’ve drilled into a cavity,’ I shouted, ‘and it’s clean!’ Then they were on me, pounding my back and shaking my hand, laughing and chattering excitedly.

Louren would let no one else work with me at the face, though Ral and Sally were clearly breaking their hearts to do so.

The two of us worked carefully, slowly chipping away at the drill hole with chisel and four-pound hammer, enlarging it gradually until we had exposed a slab of dressed masonry. It was a massive slab of red sandstone which blocked off the end of our tunnel from floor to roof, and from wall to wall. It was obviously the lining of the cavity into which the drill had bored.

The drill hole cut through the centre of it like a single black eye-socket. All our efforts to peer through it were rewarded with a vista of impenetrable blackness and we had to content ourselves with the slower painstaking approach.

For three days we worked shoulder to shoulder, stripped to the waist, chipping steadily at the living rock until, despite our gloves, our hands were mushy with blisters and smeared skin. Slowly we exposed the massive slab over its full width and height, to find that it butted on either side against identical slabs and that it appeared to carry across its summit the cross-pieces of an equally massive stone lintel.

We used two fifty-ton hydraulic jacks to take the strain of the lintel off the slab. Then we drilled and attached ring bolts to the slab itself and hooked steel chains to them. We jammed a brace of steel H-sections across the tunnel to anchor the chains and with two heavy ratchet winches we began to haul the slab bodily out of its seating.

We knelt side by side, each of us straining against one of the winches, taking up the pull one pawl at a time. With each click of the ratchet the strain on the chains increased until they were as rigid as solid steel bars. Now the handles of the winches were almost immovable.

‘Okay, Ben. Let’s both get onto one of them,’ Louren panted. His golden curls were dark and heavy with sweat and dirt, plastered against his skull, and the sweat highlighted his great shoulder muscles and the straining, swollen biceps as we heaved together at the winch.

‘Clank! ’ went the rachet and the chain moved a sixteenth of an inch.

‘Clank!’ Again she moved. Our breathing hissed and whistled in the silence.

‘All the way, partner,’ Louren gasped beside me.

‘All the way, Lo.’ And my body arched like a drawn bow, I felt the muscles in my back begin to tear, my eyes strained from their sockets.

Then with a soft grating sound the great slab of sandstone swung slowly out of the face, and then fell with a heavy thump to the floor of the tunnel, and beyond it we saw the square black opening.

We lay together side by side, fighting for breath, sweat trickling down our faces and bodies, our muscles still quivering and twitching from our exertions and we stared into that sinister hole.

There was a smell; a stale, long-dead, dry smell as the air that had been trapped in there for 2,000 years gushed out.

‘Come!’ Louren was the first to move, he scrambled to his feet and snatched up one of the electric bulbs in its little wire cage, the extension cable slithered after him like a snake as he went forward. I followed him quickly, and we crawled through the opening.

It was a jump of four feet down to the floor of the chamber beyond. We stood side by side, Louren holding the light above his head, and we peered around us into the moving mysterious shadows.

We were in a long commodious passage that ran straight and undeviatingly 155 feet from the cavern end to terminate against a blank wall of stone. The passage was eight foot six inches high, and ten foot wide.

The roof was lined with lintels of sandstone laid horizontally from wall to wall, and the walls themselves were tiled with blocks similar to the one we had removed from its seating. The floor was paved with square flags of sandstone.

Let into the walls on each side of the passage were stone-lined cupboards. These were seven feet wide and five feet deep and reached from floor to roof height. Each of these recesses was fitted with shelves of stone slab, rank upon rank of them, three feet apart and upon the shelves stood hundreds upon hundreds of pottery jars.

‘It’s some sort of store room,’ Louren said, holding the light high and moving slowly down the passage.

‘Yes, probably wine or corn in the jars.’ I have never learned not to guess aloud. My heart was hammering with excitement and my head swivelled from side to side, as I tried to take in every detail.

There were twenty of these recesses, ten on each side of the passage, and I guessed again.

‘Must be two or three thousand pots,’ I said.

‘Let’s open one,’ Louren was consumed by a layman’s impatience.

‘No, Lo, we can’t do that until we are ready to work properly.’

There was a thick soft shroud of pale dust over everything, it softened the outlines and edges of all shapes. It rose lazily around our legs like a sea mist as our movements stirred it.

‘We will have to clean up before we can do anything else,’ I said, and sneezed as the dust found its way into my nostrils.

‘Move slowly,’ Louren told me. ‘Don’t stir it up.’ He took a further pace and then stopped.

‘What’s this?’ Scattered along the passage floor were dozens of large shapeless objects, their identity concealed by the blanketing dust. They were lying singly, or in heaps, strange fluid shapes that teased my memory. Compared with the orderly ranks of jars on their shelves, the objects were strewn with a careless abandon.

‘Hold the lamp,’ I told Louren, and crouched over one of them. I touched it gently, running my fingers through the velvety dust, brushing it softly aside until I recognized what it was and I drew back with an involuntary exclamation of surprise.

Through the soft mist of dust and ages a face stared up at me. A long-dead, mummified face over which was stretched dry tobacco-brown skin. The eyes were empty dark holes, and the lips had dried and shrunken to expose the grinning yellow teeth.

‘Dead men,’ Louren said. ‘Dozens of them.’

‘Sacrifices?’ I pondered. ‘No, this is something else.’

‘It looks like a battle As though they have been killed in a fight.’

Now that we knew what they were, it was possible to make out the way the bodies were piled upon each other like the debris of a hurricane, or were thrown loosely about the stone floor. A corpse in a mantle of grey dust sat with his back to the wall, his head sagged forward on his chest, and one out-flung arm had knocked four of the jars from their shelf - they lay on the floor beside him like fat rolls of French bread.

‘It must have been a hell of a fight,’ I said with awe.

‘It was,’ said Louren softly, and I turned to him with surprise. His eyes glowed with some intense inner excitement, and his lips were parted, a reckless half smile on his lips.

‘What do you mean?’ I demanded. ‘How do you know that?’

Louren looked at me For a second or two he did not see me, then his eyes focused.

‘Hey?’ he said, puzzled.

‘Why did you say that, as though you knew?’

‘Did I?’ he asked. ‘I don’t know. I meant - it must have been.’

He moved on slowly down the passage, stepping over the wind-rows of dead men, peering in each recess as he passed, and I followed him slowly. My mind was thrashing around like a corralled bull, charging madly at each fleeting idea that crossed its path, spinning back on its track and charging again. I knew there was no chance of it being capable of calm, logical thought until this first surging excitement waned.

Of one thing, and one thing only, I was certain. This was big. This was something to rank with Leakey’s discoveries at Olduvai Gorge, something to startle and dazzle the world of archaeology. Something that I had prayed for and dreamed about for twenty years.

We had reached the end of the passage. The end wall was another panel of sandstone, but this was decorated. A swirling, stylized engraving of the sun image. Three feet in diameter, it looked like a Catherine wheel with the rays radiating from its circumference. The image evoked in me a strange sense of reverential awe, a hushed feeling of the spirit such as I experience sometimes in a synagogue or the cloisters of a Christian cathedral. Louren and I stood and stared at the image for a long time, then suddenly he turned and looked back to the bricked-in wall 155 feet away.

‘Is that all?’ he asked, and there was an irritable tone to his voice. ‘Just this passage and pots and old bones? There must be something more!’

It came as a shock to me to realize that he was actually disappointed. For me the universe could hold no richer prize, this was the culminating moment of my life - and Louren was disappointed. I felt anger start to hiss and bubble within me.

‘What the hell do you want?’ I demanded, ‘Gold and diamonds and ivory sarcophagi and—’

‘Something like that.’

‘You don’t even know what we’ve got here yet, and already it’s not enough.’

‘Ben, I didn’t say that.’

‘You know what’s wrong with you, Louren Sturvesant? You’re bloody well spoiled. You’ve got everything, so nothing is good enough for you.’

‘Now, listen here!’ I saw my own anger reflected in his eyes, but I rushed on regardlessly.

‘I’ve planned and saved and worked for this all my life. And now I achieve it, and what do you do?’

‘Hey, Ben!’ I saw comprehension in his eyes suddenly, ‘I didn’t mean it that way. I’m not knocking your achievement. I really think it’s the most incredible discovery ever made in Africa, I was just—’

It took him a few minutes of hard talking to mollify me, but at last I grinned reluctantly.

‘Okay.’ I relented, ‘just don’t go saying things like that, Lo. All my life the bastards have been putting down my discoveries and theories, so don’t you start!’

‘One thing they’ll never be able to say about you is that you’re frightened to speak your mind!’ He punched my shoulder lightly. ‘Come on, Ben, let’s see what we’ve got in these pots.’

‘We shouldn’t disturb them, Lo.’ I was ashamed of my outburst now, and eager to make it up to him. ‘Not until we have mapped and charted—’

‘A couple of them are lying on the floor, knocked off the shelves,’ Louren pointed. ‘There are thousands of the bloody things. We will just snaffle one of them. Hell, Ben, it won’t do that much harm!’

He was not asking permission, not Louren Sturvesant, he was merely giving an order in the pleasantest possible fashion. Already he was making his way back to where the jars were lying beside the dusty bowed corpse, and I hurried after him.

‘Okay,’ I agreed unnecessarily, in an attempt to keep nominal control of my find. ‘We will remove one of them only ’ I felt a sneaking sense of relief that the wrong decision had been made for me. I was also in a fever of impatience to find out what was in the jars.

The jar stood in the centre of the workshop bench in our prefabricated warehouse. Night had fallen outside, but the overhead lights were all on. We stood around the bench, Sally, Ral, Leslie and I. Tinus van Vuuren was still up at the cavern, his status having changed from mine captain to night-watchman. Louren had decided to place a twenty-four-hour armed guard over the entrance to the tunnel, and Tinus was it - until we could get others.

Through the thin partition walls of the hut I could hear Louren’s voice as he shouted into the microphone of the radio.

‘A vacuum cleaner. Vacuum cleaner. VACUUM CLEANER! V for Venereal, A for Alcoholic - that’s right. Vacuum cleaner. You know the heavy-duty model for cleaning factories. Two of them. Have you got that? Good! Now I want you to get on to Robeson, Head of Security at Sturvesant Diamond Mines. He is to send me his two best men, with half a dozen Bantu guards. Yes, that’s right. Yes, I want them armed.’

None of us paid attention to Louren’s voice, we were all staring in mesmerized fascination at the earthenware jar.

‘Well, it’s not filled with gold.’ Ral was certain. ‘Not heavy enough.’

‘Nor is it liquid - not wine or oil,’ Leslie agreed. And we relapsed into silence. The pot was about eighteen inches high, and thick around as a pickle jar. It was of unglazed red pottery, without inscription or ornamentation, and the lid was like that of a teapot with a small knob for a handle. It was sealed with a layer of black substance, probably gum or wax.

‘Get that lot on the Dakota first thing tomorrow morning, do you hear?’ Louren was still busy next door.

‘I wish he’d hurry up!’ Sally stirred impatiently. ‘I’m dying to find out what it is.’

Suddenly I was afraid. I didn’t want to know - I didn’t want to find the jar filled with African millet or some other indigenous grain. I could hear my critics howling like wolves out there in the wilderness. Suddenly I was doubting my own premonition of some momentous discovery and I sat on the edge of my stool, miserably rubbing my grimy hands together and staring at the jar. Perhaps Louren was right, perhaps we would echo his cry, ‘Is that all?’

From the radio shack we heard Louren’s voice end the transmission, and he came through into the warehouse. He was still filthy from the work in the tunnel, and his golden hair was stiff with dust and dried sweat. Yet the grime and unruly curls gave him an air of romance, the jaunty look of an old-time pirate. He stood in the doorway with his thumbs hooked into his belt, and all our attention was on him. He grinned at me.

‘Okay, Ben. What have you got for us?’ he asked and sauntered across the room to stand behind my shoulder. Instinctively the others drew closer, crowding into a circle around me and I picked up the surgical scalpel and touched the point of it to the joint of the lid.

The first touch told me that my guess had been correct.

‘Bee’s wax, I think.’

Carefully I scraped it away, then laid the scalpel aside and gently tried the lid. It came away with surprising ease.

All heads craned forward, but the first view of the contents was disappointing. An amorphous mass of substance that was stained dirty yellow-brown by time.

‘What is it?’ Louren demanded of his experts, but none of us could answer him. I was not sure whether to be disappointed or relieved. It certainly wasn’t corn.

‘It smells,’ said Sally. There was a faintly unpleasant, but familiar odour.

‘I know that smell,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ agreed Leslie.

We stared at the pot trying to place it. Then suddenly I remembered.

‘It smells like a tannery works.’

‘That’s it!’ agreed Sally.

‘Leather?’ asked Louren.

‘Let’s see,’ I said, and carefully tipped the jar onto its side with the mouth facing me. Gently I began easing the contents out of the jar. It became immediately clear that it held something cylindrical in shape and of a hard, brittle texture.

It seemed to have stuck to the inside of the jar, but I twisted carefully and with a faint rending sound it was loose. I inched it out of the jar, and as it emerged, there was a running commentary from the watchers.

‘It’s a long round thing.’

‘Looks like a polony sausage.’

‘It’s wrapped in cloth.’

‘Linen, I hope!’

‘It’s woven anyway. That will take some explaining away as Bantu culture!’

‘The cloth is rotten, it’s falling away in patches.’

I laid it on the table, and as I stared at it I knew all my dreams had become reality. I knew what it was. A treasure beyond all the gold and diamonds Louren had hoped for. I looked up quickly at Sally to see if she had guessed, her expression was eager but puzzled. Then her eyes met mine and my jubilation must have been obvious.

‘Ben!’ She guessed then. ‘It isn’t? Oh, Ben, it couldn’t be! Open it, man! For God’s sake, open it!’

I took up a pair of tweezers, but my hands were too unsteady to work. I clenched my fists, and drew a couple of deep breaths to try and calm the racing of my blood and the pounding of it in my ears.

‘Here, let me do it,’ said Ral, and reached to take the tweezers from my grip.

‘No!’ I snatched my hand away. I think I would have struck him if he had persisted. I saw the shock on Ral’s face, he had never before seen the violence that lurks in my depths.

They all waited until I had got control of my hands again. Then carefully I began to peel the wrappings of brittle yellow cloth from the cylinder. I saw it appear from under the wrappings, and there were no more doubts. I heard Sally’s little gasp from across the bench, but I did not look up until it was done.

‘Ben!’ she whispered, ‘I’m so happy for you,’ And I saw that she was crying, big fat tears sliding slowly down her cheeks. This was what triggered me, I am certain that if she hadn’t started it I would have been all right, but suddenly my own eyes were burning and my vision blurred with moisture.

‘Thanks, Sal,’ I said, and my voice was soggy and nasal. When I felt the droplets start to spill on to my cheeks I struck them away with an angry hand, and groped for my handkerchief. I blew my nose like a bugler sounding the charge, and my heart sang as loudly.

It was a tightly rolled cylindrical scroll of leather. The outer edges of the scroll were tattered and eaten by decomposure. The rest of it, however, was miraculously preserved. There were lines of writing running like columns of little black insects along the length of the scroll. I recognized the symbols immediately, identifying the individual letters of the Punic alphabet. It was written in a flowing Punic script, of which the first thirty lines were exposed on the roll of ancient leather. The language was not one I understood, but I looked up at Sally again. This was her speciality, she had worked with Hamilton at Oxford.

‘Sal, can you read it? What is it?’

‘It’s Carthaginian,’ she spoke with complete certainty. ‘Punic!’

‘Are you sure?’ I demanded.

In reply she read aloud in a voice that was still choked up and muffled with tears, ‘Into Opet this day a caravan from the.’ she hesitated, ‘that piece is obscure but it goes on, In fingers of fine gold one hundred and twenty-seven pieces, of which a tenth part unto—’

‘What the hell is going on?’ Louren demanded. ‘What does all this mean?’

I turned to him. ‘It means we have found the archives of our city - completely intact and decipherable. We have the whole written history of our city, of our dead civilization, written by the people themselves in their own language. Their own words.’

Louren was staring at me. It was clear that the significance of our discovery had not yet occurred to him.

‘This, Lo, is what every archaeologist prays for. This is proof in its most absolute form, in its most detailed and elaborate form.’

He still didn’t seem to understand.

‘In one line of writing we have proved conclusively the existence of a people who spoke and wrote the ancient Punic of Carthage, who traded gold, who called their city Opet, who—’

‘And that’s only in one line of writing,’ Sally interrupted. ‘There are thousands of jars, each with its scroll of writings. We will know the names and deeds of their kings, their religion, their ceremonial—’

‘Their battles and strivings, where they came from and when.’ I took the verbal ball from Sally, but just as adroitly she snatched it back.

‘And where they went to and why!’

‘My God!’ Louren understood at last. ‘This is everything we’ve been looking for, Ben. It’s the whole bloody shebang and shooting-match rolled into one!’

‘The works!’ I agreed. ‘The whole ruddy lot!’

Within an hour of my triumph, right at the zenith of my career when nothing but the prospect of fame and brilliant success lay ahead of me, Dr Sally Benator managed to bring it all crashing down around me.

We were sitting in the same tight circle around the scroll, still talking eagerly, one of those talk sessions which could only end in the early morning, for already the Glen Grant bottle was out and all our throats were oiled, the words pouring out smoothly.

Sally had translated all the writing visible on the scroll. It was an accounting of trade into the city, a cataloguing of goods and values that in itself held intriguing references to places and peoples.

‘Twenty large amphora of the red wines of Zeng, taken by Habbakuk Lal of which a tenth part to the Gry-Lion.’

‘What’s a gry-lion?’ Louren’s hunter’s instincts were roused.

‘Gry is a superlative,’ Sally explained. ‘So a gry-lion is a great lion. Probably a title of the king or governor of the city.’

‘From the grass seas of the south one hundred and ninety-two large tusks of ivory in all two-hundred and twenty-one talents in weight of which a tenth part to the Gry-Lion and the balance outwards on the bireme of Al-Muab Adbm.’

‘How much is a talent?’ Louren asked.

‘About 56 pounds avoirdupois.’

‘My God, that’s over 10,000 lb of ivory, in one load,’ Louren whistled. ‘They must have been great little hunters.’

We had discussed in detail every line of exposed writing, and again Louren’s impatience came to the surface.

‘Let’s unroll a little more,’ he suggested.

‘That’s a job for an expert, Lo.’ I shook my head regretfully. ‘That leather has been rolled up for nearly 2,000 years. It’s so dry and brittle it will fall to pieces if it isn’t done correctly.’

‘Yes,’ Sally agreed with me. ‘It will take me weeks to do each one.’

Her presumption left me flabbergasted. Her practical knowledge of palaeography and ancient writings was limited to three years as a third assistant to Hamilton. I doubted if she had actually done much work on preservation and preparation of leather or papyrus scrolls. She could read Punic with about the same aplomb as the average ten-year-old can read Shakespeare, and she was taking it for granted that she would be placed in sole control of one of the greatest hoards of ancient writings ever discovered.

She must have read my expression, for her own alarm showed clearly.

‘I am to do the work, aren’t I, Ben?’

I tried to make it easier for her, I do not like hurting anyone, let alone the girl I love.

‘It’s an enormous and difficult job, Sal. I really think we should try and get someone like Hamilton himself, or Levy from Tel Aviv, even Rogers from Chicago.’ I saw her face starting to fall to pieces, the lips drooping and trembling, the eyes clouding, and I went on hurriedly. ‘But I’m sure we can arrange for you to become first assistant to whoever does the work.’

There was a deadly silence for five seconds, and during that time Sally’s despair changed swiftly to a blind all-consuming rage. I saw it coming like a build-up of storm clouds but I was powerless to divert it.

‘Benjamin Kazin,’ she began with deceptive softness of voice, ‘I think you are the most unmitigated bastard it has ever been my misfortune to meet. For three long difficult years I have given you my complete and unswerving loyalty—’

Then she lost control and it was a splendid spectacle. Even while her words lashed my soul raw and bleeding I could still admire the flashing eyes, the flushing cheeks and the masterly choice of invective.

‘You are a little man, in mind as well as body.’ She used the adjective deliberately, and I gasped. No one should ever call me that, it is a word that eats away the fabric of my soul and she knew it. ‘I hate you. I hate you, you little man.’

I felt the blood rush to my face, and I stuttered, trying to find the words to defend myself, but before I could do so Sally had turned on Louren. Her rage still blazed, her tone was not moderated in the least as she shouted at him.

‘Make him give it to me. Tell him to do it!’

Even in my own distress I felt alarm for poor Sally. This wasn’t a crippled, soft-hearted little doctor of archaeology she was talking to now. This was like prodding a black mamba with a short stick, or throwing stones at a man-eating lion. I could not believe that Sally would be so stupid, would presume so upon the mildly friendly attitude which Louren had shown to her. I could not believe that she would dare that tone with Louren, as though she had some special right to his consideration, as though there was some involvement of emotions or of loyalties which she could call upon in such imperious terms. Even I who had such rights would never misuse them in such a fashion, I knew no one else who would.

Louren’s eyes flashed cold blue light, like the glinting of spear-heads. His lips drew into grim lines, and the rims of his nostrils flared and turned pale as bone china.

‘Woman!’ His voice crackled like breaking ice. ‘Hold your tongue.’

If it were possible then my despair plunged even deeper as Louren responded precisely as I had expected. Now the two persons I loved were on a collision course, and I knew each of them so well, knew their pride and pig-headedness, that neither would deviate. Disaster was certain, inevitable.

I wanted to cry out to Sally, ‘Don’t, please don’t. I’ll do what you ask. Anything to prevent this happening.’

And Sally’s bravado collapsed. All the fight and anger went out of her. She seemed to cringe beneath the lash of Louren’s voice.

‘Go to your room and stay there until you learn how to behave,’ Louren gave the order in the same coldly furious tone.

Sally stood up and with eyes downcast she left the room.

I could not believe it had happened. I gaped at the door through which she had gone - my saucy, rebellious Sally - as meekly as a chastened child. Ral and Leslie were writhing in a sea of agonized embarrassment.

‘Bedtime, I think,’ Ral muttered ‘Please excuse us. Come, Les. Goodnight all.’ And they were gone, leaving Louren and me alone.

Louren broke the long silence. He stood up as he spoke in an easy natural voice. His hand dropped on my shoulder in a casually affectionate gesture.

‘Sorry about that, Ben. Don’t let it worry you. See you in the morning.’ And he strolled out into the night.

I sat alone with my suddenly worthless roll of old leather, and my breaking heart.

‘I hate you, you little man!’ Her voice echoed through the lonely wastes of my soul, and I reached for the Glen Grant bottle.

It took me a long time to get completely drunk, to the stage where the words had lost some of their sting, and when I staggered down the steps into the bright silver moonlight, I knew what I was going to do. I was going to apologize to Sally, and let her do the work. Nothing was important enough to warrant her displeasure.

I went to the hut where Sally now slept alone. Leslie had moved into Peter and Heather’s old room. I scratched softly on the door, and there was no reply from within. I knocked louder, and called her name.

‘Sally! Please, I must talk to you.’

At last I tried the door, and it opened into the darkened room. I almost went on in, but then my courage deserted me. I closed the door softly, and staggered to my own hut. I fell face down across the bed, and still dirty and fully dressed I found oblivion.

‘Ben! Ben! Wake up.’ Sally’s voice and her hand shaking me gently but insistently. I turned my head and opened my burning eyes. It was bright morning. Sally sat on the edge of my bed, leaning over me. She was fully dressed, and although her skin glowed from the bath and her hair was freshly brushed and gay with a scarlet ribbon, yet her eyes were puffy and swollen as though she had slept badly, or had been crying.

‘I’ve come to apologize for last night, Ben. For the stupid, hateful things I said, and my disgusting behaviour—’ As she talked the shattered pieces of my life fell back into place, and the pain in my head and heart abated.

‘Even though you’ve probably changed your mind, and I don’t deserve it anyway, I’d be honoured to act as first assistant to Hamilton or whoever does the work.’

‘You’ve got the job.’ I grinned at her, ‘That’s a promise.’

Our first task at the archives was to clean away the thick accumulation of grey dust that blanketed everything. I was puzzled as to the source of this dust in a sealed and airless space like the passage, but I soon found that the joints of the roof lintels were not as tight as those of the walls, and during the centuries a fine sprinkling of dust had filtered down through these cracks.

When the equipment which Louren had ordered arrived on the Dakota, along with a detachment of Louren’s security police, we could begin the work.

The security police set up a hut at the entrance to the tunnel, where there was a permanent guard posted. Only the five of us were allowed to enter.

The vacuum equipment simplified the removal of dust from the archives. Ral and I worked from the outer end of the passage like a pair of busy housewives, and the suffocating clouds of grey dust made it necessary to wear respirators until the job was finished.

We were then able to assess our discovery more accurately. There were 1,142 sealed jars of pottery in the stone recesses. Of these 148 had been knocked from their niches and 127 were broken or cracked, with their scrolls exposed to the air and obviously much the worse for it- These we sprayed with paraffin wax to prevent them crumbling, before lifting, labelling and packing them.

We then turned our full attention to the evidence of the deadly battle that had raged through the archives, and wrought the damage to the shelves of jars.

There were thirty-eight corpses strewn down the passage between the shelves in all the abandoned attitudes of sudden and violent death, and their state of preservation was quite remarkable. A few of them had crawled away into the recesses to die, groaning out their last breaths, and clutching the terrible wounds that still gaped in their mummified bodies Their dying agonies were clearly stamped into their contorted features. Others had died swiftly, and most of these had received hideous wounds that had severed limbs, or split their skulls down to the shoulders, or, in a few cases, had struck the head clean from the trunk and sent it rolling yards away.

There was evidence here of a diabolical fury, the unleashing of an almost superhuman destructive strength.

All the victims were clearly negroid in type, and wore loincloths or aprons of tanned leather, with beadwork or bone decorations. On their feet were light leather sandals, and on their heads caps or head-dresses of leather, feathers or plaited fibre also decorated with beads, shells or bones.

Around them were strewn their weapons; crudely forged iron spear-heads bound on shafts of polished hardwood. Many of these shafts were broken, or severed by the blows of some razor-sharp weapons. With them lay hundreds of reed arrows, fledged with the feathers of wild duck and tipped with wickedly barbed heads of hand-forged iron. The arrows had nicked and chipped the soft sandstone walls, and it was easy to determine that they had been fired from outside the mouth of the passage before it had been sealed off. Not one of them had found a mark in a human body, and so we reasoned that a barrage of arrows had preceded the attack by these men who lay scattered in death down the length of the passage.

Fifteen feet from the sealed mouth of the passage there was evidence of a large bonfire which had blackened the walls, roof and floor around it. A pile of charred logs still lay where the lack of air had stifled the fire when the mouth of the tunnel was sealed. This fire puzzled us until Louren reconstructed the battle for us. He paced restlessly back and forth along the passage, his footsteps ringing on the stone slabs, his shadow falling grotesque and monstrous on the stone walls.

‘They drove them into this place, the last of our men of Opet, a small party of the strongest and the bravest.’ His voice rang with the truth of it, like a troubadour singing the legends of the old heroes. ‘They sent in their champions to finish the slaughter but the men of Opet cut them down and the others fled. Then they drew up their archers at the mouth of the passage, and fired volleys of arrows into it. Again they went in, but the men of Opet were there waiting for them and again they died in their dozens.’

He turned and came down the passage to stand beside me under the swaying electric bulb, and we were silent for a moment imagining it.

‘My God, Ben. Think of it. What a fight to end with. What glory these men won on that last day.’

Even I, a man of peace, was stirred by it. I felt my heartbeat quicken and I turned to him like a child at story-time. ‘What happened then?’ I asked.

‘They were dying already, weak with a dozen wounds each. There was no strength left in them to continue and they stood shoulder to shoulder, companions in life, and now in death also, leaning wearily on their weapons, but the enemy would not come again. Instead, they built a fire in the mouth of the passage to smoke them out, and when that did not do it, they abandoned the attack and bricked up the entrance turning it into a tomb for the dead and the living alike.’

We were all silent then, thinking about Louren’s story. It made sense, it fitted the evidence in all but one respect. I did not want to say it, did not want to spoil such a stirring tale, but Sally had no such compunction.

‘If that’s true, then what happened to your band of heroes - did they change into moonbeams and flit away?’ Her tone was slightly derisive, but of course she was right. I wished she was not.

Louren laughed, a little embarrassed chuckle. ‘So you think of something better,’ he challenged her.

Of the heroes of this ancient drama there was no trace, except that which lay at the foot of the passage below the graven sun image of Baal. It was blanketed by the thick grey dust and it was the final discovery on the archives floor. It was a battle-axe. A weapon of striking beauty and utility. When first I took it up from the paving where it had lain for almost 2,000 years, my hand closed snugly around the haft, the grooves in the handle fitted my fingers as though they had been moulded from them. A broken wrist-strap of leather dangled from the end of the handle.

The haft was forty-seven inches long, and fashioned from lengths of rhinoceros horn that had been laminated into a solid rod of steely resilience and strength. The handle was of ivory and the whole had been bound with electrum wire to reinforce its already surpassing strength and to protect the shaft from the cuts of enemy blades. The blade was shaped like a double crescent moon, each side exposing seven and a half inches of razor edge. From its extreme end protruded an unbarbed spike twelve inches long, thus the weapon could be used on the cut as well as the thrust.

The head was exquisitely worked and engraved, with the shapes of four vultures with wings spread, one on each side of the double blade. The birds were rendered in such detail that every feather was shown, and beyond the figures a sun rose in a burst of rays like a flower. The engravings were inlaid with electrum, an alloy of gold and silver, and from the silvery sheen of the blades it was clear that they had been tempered. The weapon was caked and dulled with what must have been dried blood, it was obviously the author of those horrible wounds that bloomed upon so many of the corpses scattered along the passage.

Holding that beautiful weapon in my hand I was infected by a sudden madness. I was not truly aware of my own intention until the axe was flying in a wide glittering circle around my head. The balance and weight of the great axe was so pure and sweet that no effort was involved as I swung it high, and then into a long overhand killing stroke. The blade whickered eagerly at the kiss of moving air across its bright edge. The flexing of the handle seemed to bring it alive in my hand, alive again after nearly 2,000 long years of sleep.

From some deep atavistic depths of my soul I felt a cry rising, an exultant yell which seemed the natural accompaniment to the deadly song of the axe. With an effort I checked the flight of the axe and the cry before it reached my lips, and looked around at the faces of the others.

They were staring at me as though I had begun raving and frothing at the mouth. Quickly I lowered the axe. I stood there feeling utterly foolish, appalled at my treatment of such a rare treasure. The horn handle could easily have become brittle, and snapped at such harsh usage.

‘I was just testing it,’ I said lamely. ‘I’m sorry.’

That night we pondered and puzzled the riddle of the archives until well after midnight. We found no answer and afterwards Louren walked with me to my hut.

‘The Lear is coming to pick me up tomorrow morning, Ben. I’ve been here two weeks already, and I just cannot stay another day. God, when I think of how I’ve neglected my responsibilities since we started on this dig!’

We stopped at the door of my hut and Louren lit a cigar.

‘What is it about this place that makes us all act so strangely, Ben? Do you feel it also? This strange sense of,’ he hesitated, ‘of destiny.’

I nodded, and Louren was encouraged.

‘That axe. It did something to you, Ben. You weren’t yourself for a few minutes there today ’

‘I know.’

‘I am desperate to discover the contents of the scrolls, Ben We must start on that as soon as possible.’

‘There is ten years’ work there, Lo. You will have to be patient.’

‘Patience is not one of my virtues, Ben. I was reading of the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb last night. Lord Carnarvon made the discovery possible, and yet he died before he could look on the sarcophagus of the dead Pharaoh.’

‘Don’t be morbid, Lo.’

‘All right,’ Louren agreed. ‘But don’t waste time, Ben.’

‘You get Hamilton for me,’ I said ‘We can’t do a thing without him.’

‘I’ll be in London on Friday,’ Louren told me ‘I’ll see him myself.’

‘He is a difficult old codger,’ I warned him.

Louren grinned. ‘Leave him to me. Now, listen to me, Benjamin my boy, if you find anything else here, you let me know immediately, you understand? I want to be here when it happens.’

‘When what happens?’

‘I don’t know - something. There is something else here, Ben. I know it.’

‘I hope you are right, Lo.’ And he clapped my shoulder and walked away into the night towards his own hut.

While we worked on in the archives, lifting the human remains and the piles of weapons, a construction crew arrived on the site by Dakota to erect a repository for the scrolls. This was another large prefabricated warehouse, fitted with airtight doors and a powerful air-conditioning unit to maintain the scrolls in an atmosphere of optimum temperature and humidity. A high barbed-wire fence was erected around the building for security reasons, and every precaution for the safety of the scrolls was taken.

At the same time the construction crew erected another half-dozen living quarters for the expanded team, and the first inhabitants of these were four high officials of the Botswana Government. It was the Government who had forbidden the removal of the scrolls from the territory and made the erection of the new buildings necessary. The Government deputation stayed for two days, and left satisfied that their interests in the discovery would be adequately protected, but not before I had exacted a solemn promise of secrecy. The announcement of the site would be at my signal only.

We began labelling and removing the pottery jars from their shelves, taking the greatest pains to record, both photographically and by written notes, the exact position of each. It seemed likely that they had been stacked in chronological order, and this would assist the work of interpretation.

On the Monday I received a crippling blow to my plans in the form of a laconic message from Louren.

‘Hamilton unavailable. Please suggest alternative.’

I was disappointed, hurt and angry. Disappointed because Hamilton was the best in the world, and his presence would have immediately given weight and authenticity to my site. I was hurt because Hamilton obviously believed my claims were spurious, my reputation had been damaged by the vicious attacks of my critics and scientific opponents. Hamilton had clearly been influenced by this. He did not want to be party to some mistaken or blatantly fraudulent discovery of mine. Finally, I was angry because Hamilton’s refusal to undertake the work was a direct insult. He had put the mark of the pariah on me and it would discourage others from giving the assistance I desperately needed. I might find myself discredited before I had even started.

‘He didn’t even give me a chance,’ I protested to Sally. ‘He didn’t even want to listen to me. Christ, I didn’t realize I was such a professional leper. Even talking to me can ruin a reputation!’

‘He’s a skinny, bald-headed old goat!’ Sally agreed. ‘He’s a lecherous old feeler of bottoms, and—’

‘And the greatest living authority on ancient writings in the world,’ I told her bitterly. There was no reply to that, and we sat in forlorn silence for a while.

Then Sally perked up. ‘Let’s go and fetch him!’ she suggested.

‘He might refuse to see us,’ I gloomed.

‘He won’t refuse to see me,’ Sally assured me, and behind the words was an untold story that set my jealousy coursing corrosively through my veins. Sally had worked for him three years, and I could only console myself that her standards were high enough to exclude Eldridge Hamilton.

Seventy-two hours later I sat in the front lounge of the Bell at Hurley with a pint of good English bitter in front of me, and watched the car park anxiously. It was only a fifteen-minute drive from Oxford and Sally should have been here long ago.

I felt tired, irritable and depressed from that soul-destroying overnight flight from Johannesburg to Heathrow. Sally had phoned Hamilton from the airport.

‘Professor Hamilton, I do hope you don’t mind me phoning you,’ she had cooed.

‘Sally Senator, do you remember I worked under you in 1966. That’s right, Sally Green-Eyes.’ And she giggled coyly.

‘Well, I am on my way through England. Just here for a day or two. I felt so lonely and nostalgic - those were wonderful times.’ Her tone had a hundred intimate shades of invitation and promise.

‘Lunch? That’s wonderful, Professor. Why don’t I pick you up. I have a hire car.’ She gave me a triumphant thumbs-up sign.

‘The Bell at Hurley? Yes, of course, I remember. How could I forget.’ She made a sick face at me. ‘I so look forward to it.’

The silver Jaguar slid into the car park, and I saw Sally at the wheel. With a scarf in her hair and laughter on her lips, she didn’t look like a girl who had sat fourteen hours in the cramped seat of an intercontinental jet.

She slid out of the car, giving me a flash of those wonderful sun-browned thighs, and then she was coming towards me, hanging on the arm of Eldridge Hamilton, and laughing gaily.

Hamilton was a tall stoop-shouldered man in his fifties; a baggy Harris tweed suit with leather patches on the elbows hung like a sack on his gaunt frame. His nose was beaky, and his bald pate shone in the pale sunlight as though it had been buffed up with a good wax polish. All in all he was not formidable competition, but his little eyes sparkled behind the heavy horn-rimmed glasses and his lips were slack with desire, exposing a mouthful of bad teeth, as he looked at Sally. I found it a hard price to pay for his services.

Sally led him to my table, and he was six feet from me before he recognized me. He stopped dead, and I saw him blink once. He knew instantly that he had been taken, and for a moment the whole project hung in the balance. He could so easily have turned on his heel and walked out.

‘Eldridge!’ I leapt to my feet, crooning seductively. ‘How wonderful to see you.’ And while he still hesitated, I had him by the elbow in a grip like a velvet-lined vice. ‘I’ve ordered you a large Gilbey’s gin and tonic - that’s your poison, isn’t it?’

It was five years since last we had met, and my memory of his personal tastes mollified him slightly. He allowed Sally and I to ease him into a seat and place the gin convenient to his right hand. While Sally and I bombarded him with all our considerable combined charm he maintained a suspicious silence, until the first gin had gone down. I ordered another and he began to thaw, halfway through the third he became skittish and voluble.

‘Did you read Wilfred Snell’s reply to your book Ophir in the Journal?’ he asked. Wilfred Snell was the most vociferous and merciless of all my scientific adversaries, ‘Jolly amusing, what?’ And Eldridge neighed like a randy stallion, and clutched at one of Sally’s beautiful thighs.

I am a man of peace, but at that moment I was having difficulty remembering it. My expression must have been a sickly grin, my fingernails were driven like claws into the flesh of my palms as I fought down the temptation to drag Eldridge around the room by his heels.