The Last Leopard

by Lauren St. John

  “Martine, Ben, let me introduce you to Ngwenya. Black Eagle would have gone out of business long ago if it weren’t for him.”

  Ngwenya shook their hands with calloused, sun-warmed palms. “Gogo is being too kind,” he said. “She would get along very well without me.”

  “Gogo means ‘grandmother’ in Ndebele,” Sadie explained, seeing their puzzled expressions. “It’s a term of respect and affection used to address all elderly women, not just relatives. Not, of course, that I’m elderly.” She turned to Ngwenya. “And no,” she said fiercely, “I couldn’t manage without you. I just couldn’t.”

  Ngwenya chuckled. “Come and meet your new friends,” he said to Ben and Martine. “You are good riders, yes?”

  Ben shook his head. “I’ve never ridden a horse in my life.”

  “And I’ve only ever ridden a giraffe,” Martine said.

  The horse wrangler smirked and waited for her to finish the joke. When she didn’t, he glanced at Sadie as if to say “Is your friend’s granddaughter in the habit of making up such ridiculous fantasies?”

  Sadie laughed. “I’ve never actually witnessed it, but I’m told it’s true. On the game reserve where she lives in South Africa, Martine rides a giraffe called Jemmy.”

  Ngwenya clapped a hand to his forehead. “A giraffe!” he exclaimed. “You ride a giraffe?” He examined Martine with a great deal of interest. “With horses,” he said, “I think you will be a natural.”

  As it turned out, he was an excellent judge of potential. For most of her life Martine had been hopeless at every sport she’d ever tried apart from giraffe riding, but she swung into the saddle as if she’d been doing it since the day she was born. Everything came easily to her. Everything was natural. After months of learning to stay aboard a ten-foot-high wild giraffe—one who had a disconcerting habit of making unexpected detours to snatch at clumps of juicy acacia leaves, sometimes in mid-gallop—riding a schooled, responsive horse was a breeze.

  Mounting and dismounting using stirrups was simplicity itself, and Martine bumped only twice before mastering the rising trot. But the thing that really impressed Sadie and Ngwenya was her affinity with Black Eagle’s six horses. So tranquil did they become when she touched them that after ten minutes of watching her ride Jack, a big-boned black horse, Ngwenya declared that it would be her responsibility to exercise Sirocco and Tempest during her stay at the retreat.

  Sirocco and Tempest were highly strung Arabs, with arched necks, dished faces, and delicate, flaring nostrils, but once Martine had saddled Sirocco under Ngwenya’s expert guidance and trotted her around the paddock, the chestnut mare became positively placid.

  Ben was having a horrible time. It’s not that the horses disliked him; Ben was so gentle and treated animals with such kindness and respect that the opposite was true. It’s just that Cassidy and Mambo, the pot-bellied white ponies Ngwenya had told him it would be his duty to exercise, sensed that he had no idea what he was doing and took advantage mercilessly.

  They had barely rounded Elephant Rock when Cassidy shied at some imaginary object and threw Ben off into a bush. And every few strides she’d pause to snatch mouthfuls of grass, or make a dash for home. Eventually, Ngwenya attached a lead rope to her bridle and she was forced to accompany him and Jack. She did it meekly but reluctantly, with lots of yawning and snorting.

  One part of Martine felt sorry for Ben, but then again he excelled at so many things—he was a straight-A student, Caracal School’s cross-country running champion, a gifted swimmer, and wonderful at wilderness activities like building shelters and fishing—that it was quite nice to find a chink in his armor. Still, she didn’t like to see him struggle, so she helped him as much as she could.

  There was something about negotiating Matopos’s extraordinary terrain on horseback that made it all the more spectacular. They felt connected to it. In daylight, the intense silence was not creepy but simply peaceful, and as Martine adjusted to the short, bouncy strides of Sirocco, so different from Jemmy’s long lope, a calm feeling came over her. Sadie had told her that the Matopos was the spiritual home of the Ndebele tribe and she could understand why. The domes and spires of the boulders were like a living force all around them. When they reached a high point, distant kopjes unfolded in watery blue and violet layers against the horizon.

  Not long after they set off, they came across two girls—one six-year-old and one eight-year-old, neatly dressed in dark green school uniforms. Martine and Ben couldn’t hide their astonishment. There was not a building in sight. The girls were strolling through the thick bush with their exercise books under their arms, as if it were perfectly normal for Zimbabwean children to walk unaccompanied to nonexistent classrooms through lonely areas teeming with wildlife and poisonous snakes.

  Ngwenya spoke to them in Ndebele and they stared up at Martine and burst into fits of giggles, covering their faces shyly with their books. They went on their way with smiles and waves, pausing periodically to look back over their shoulders and giggle some more.

  “I told them that your usual horse is a giraffe,” Ngwenya explained to Martine. He added that not only did the girls walk alone through the bush almost daily, they walked an incredible four miles to and from school each way.

  “Why?” asked Martine, bewildered. Four miles was more or less the distance from Sawubona to Caracal School, and even that journey seemed to take forever in Gwyn Thomas’s car. Martine didn’t really like school, which gobbled up time she’d have much preferred to spend riding Jemmy, and she couldn’t imagine wanting to go to class so badly she’d risk life and limb to walk eight miles on her own.

  “Because their parents are poor and have no car.”

  “No, I mean, why do they go all that way by themselves?”

  Ngwenya shrugged. “They are hungry to learn. They want to grow up to be doctors or scientists. They have seen the life of their parents, who are unemployed or tend goats or cattle, and they want something better for themselves.”

  Martine immediately felt guilty that she didn’t have a better attitude toward school. She made up her mind to be more appreciative in the future and to try harder in lessons.

  The bush they were riding through seemed jungle-thick and untouched, almost as if they and the schoolgirls were the first human beings ever to cross it. But according to Ngwenya, there’d been human beings in the area for over forty thousand years. Many tribes had come and gone. The Banyubi hill people had been followed by a whole mix of Mashona and other tribesmen, most of whom fled or were conquered when Mzilikazi, the first Ndebele king, came to the Bulawayo and Matopos areas in 1839 with his wives and warriors.

  “Mzilikazi called this area ‘Matobo’ because the rocks reminded him of the heads of bald men,” Ngwenya said.

  Martine smiled at him as she considered this. She liked Ngwenya, who had an open, pleasant face. There was nothing particularly striking about him. He was of medium height and build and was the sort of person you would pass without noticing on the street. But he had an infectious laugh, like an especially cheerful bird, and was a man she felt she could trust completely.

  They were winding their way along a narrow path when Ben saw a splash of color ahead. “What’s that?” he called to Ngwenya.

  Ngwenya reacted as if he’d been poked with something sharp. “Get down! Get down!” he hissed, leaping off Jack and pulling the horse into a thicket of trees. Martine and Ben barely had time to do the same with Sirocco and Cassidy before three men came striding along the path in the opposite direction. The one in front was wearing a trilby, the kind of cool hat popular with jazz players and gangsters, and a shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The others were in overalls, open to the waist. Their muscular bodies, shining with sweat, could have been carved from wood. One had a heavy sack of maize meal on his head; the others were loaded down with equipment. They were arguing about something and didn’t notice the horse tracks.

  “Looks like they’re trying to find some kind of metal,” Ben said soft
ly to Martine. “The man in the hat is carrying a metal detector.”

  “Are you sure?” Martine watched as the men followed the path around a dinosaur-shaped boulder and disappeared. “What if they’re poachers?”

  “They are not poachers, I can promise you that,” Ngwenya said. He sounded almost angry. “One is my uncle’s son. He is my cousin.”

  “Why are you avoiding your own cousin?” asked Ben.

  “He is not a good man,” Ngwenya replied. “He and his shamwaris, his friends, are tstotsis—troublemakers. They do not want to find a job; they want to find the treasure of Lobengula.”

  “Does that mean it’s true? The story of the king’s lost treasure?”

  Ngwenya grimaced. “So you have heard about it. Yes, it is true.”

  “Can you tell us something about its history?” Martine pleaded. “How did the treasure go missing? What exactly is it? Is it precious jewels?”

  Ngwenya sat down in the shade and leaned against a tree. He took a packet from his pocket and offered them some dried mango. “Make yourselves comfortable,” he said. “I will tell you what I know.”

  7

  According to Ngwenya, Mzilikazi and his followers had traveled five hundred miles and taken ten long years to reach the hills they called Matobo from their original home in South Africa. It was a journey known as the “Pathway of Blood,” so many battles did they fight along the way. Mzilikazi had been the Zulu king Shaka’s bravest and most brilliant lieutenant. When his popularity grew too much for Shaka, the Zulu king wanted to have him murdered, so Mzilikazi fled, taking his wives and loyal warriors with him. His fighting skills and those of his men were so legendary that their enemies called them the AmaNdebele, “People with Long Shields.” They became known as the Ndebele: “The ones who followed” or even “Children of the Stars.”

  Mzilikazi reigned successfully for nearly two decades in the Matobo Hills, and his reputation as one of the greatest African kings of all time spread throughout the continent. But when he died it was found that the heir to his throne had mysteriously vanished. All efforts to locate him failed. After a debate lasting two years, a council of indunas, chiefs, appointed Lobengula, Mzilikazi’s son by an inferior wife, as his successor in 1870.

  Lobengula’s nickname, Ndlovu, meant “Great Elephant” and he grew to embody it, standing well over six feet tall and filling out until he resembled a bull elephant. He was almost as great a warrior as his father and successfully led a rebellion against the white settlers, but some suspected him of having several of his own brothers murdered, and they distrusted him.

  “But what about the treasure?” Martine said impatiently. She had a low boredom threshold with history. “Where did the treasure come from?”

  Ngwenya laughed. “You want me to ‘cut to the chase,’ as the American tourists say?” He ate another piece of mango before continuing.

  “The treasure came from raids on other tribes and from gifts from the Colonial hunters, miners, and explorers. The elders say he had three tins filled with diamonds, raw gold from the mines of the Mashona, and many bags of British and Kruger sovereigns. He also had much ivory. I have heard it told that some nights he would order his secretary, a white man from Cape Town called John Jacobs, to cover his body in gold sovereigns from head to foot.

  “One day he came rushing from his house and gave orders for his treasure to be taken into the bush to a safe place. Lobengula, Jacobs, and four indunas went with the treasure on the wagons, followed by the fourteen Matebele who would bury it. They hid it well and sealed the entrance with a stone wall. When they returned that night, Lobengula ordered all who had buried the treasure to be killed in case they had thoughts of stealing it. Many were slain, but some escaped . . .”

  A baboon’s eerie cry, “Qua-ha, qua-ha-ha!” suddenly split the silence. Ben and Martine, who were absorbed in the story, jumped at least an inch off the ground. Ngwenya rapped a stick loudly against the trunk of the tree and the rest of the troop loped away, the babies riding high on their mothers’ backs. The male baboon took his time following, pausing to scratch a flea and eat a few imaginary berries for their amusement. “I’ll go when I’m good and ready,” he seemed to be saying.

  “Did any of those who escaped ever say where the treasure is buried?” Ben asked Ngwenya.

  “If they did, they took the secret to the graves. After Lobengula’s death, John Jacobs, who knew the general area where it was buried but not its exact location, led many expeditions into Southern Rhodesia, as Zimbabwe used to be known, to try to recover it, but each time the expedition was cursed as the witch doctors, traditional healers and fortune tellers—they are like your sangomas, I think—had foretold it would be. Men were struck down with illnesses none had ever seen before; charged by elephants or murdered by rivals; one even had his nose licked by a lion just before he was disemboweled. The same fate befell others who tried to find Lobengula’s surviving indunas . Jacobs was sentenced to hard labor for entering the country without the proper permit.

  “Some people believe that the treasure is definitely in the Matobo Hills. Others say it is in the Batoka Gorges or as far away as Zambia. Over the years hundreds of people have come in search of it. We have seen Englishmen with maps drawn by their great-great-great-grandfathers, descendants of Lobengulu’s indunas, Zimbabwean officials; Japanese tourists, Russian geology experts, Australian archaeologists. Nobody has found any trace of it.”

  His gaze shifted to the path taken by his cousin. “Many good men have been driven crazy by this quest.”

  “Then what makes your cousin and his shamwaris so confident they can find it?” asked Martine, surveying the mountainous landscape. Hunting for a needle in a haystack would be nothing compared to searching for the treasure troves of Ndebele royals in this Land of a Thousand Hills.

  Ngwenya’s reply chilled her to the bone. “They believe that the leopard they call Khan will lead them to it.”

  “What do you mean?” Martine said.

  The horse wrangler was clearly uncomfortable talking about it. He kept checking uneasily over his shoulder as if he thought his cousin was about to pop up from behind a rock and smite him to the ground for saying the words out loud. At last he said, “Can you keep a secret?”

  Martine nodded furiously, and Ben gave his word.

  Ngwenya looked around once more before continuing in a low voice, “They have spoken with our local witch doctor, and he has told them that the last resting place of the king of leopards is the hiding place of the king’s treasure.”

  Martine swallowed. “The last resting place. You mean . . . ?”

  Ngwenya’s mouth twisted. “Exactly. I mean that before the treasure can be found, the leopard first has to be dead.”

  8

  For most of the next week, they rode twice a day, going out on Sirocco, Jack, and Cassidy in the morning and Tempest, Mambo, and a Thoroughbred called Red Mist in the evening. Ben’s riding improved and he slowly developed the right muscles, which stopped him from being quite so saddle sore, so he was able to sit down again at meals.

  They always went out with Ngwenya, who, they found, had the dry humor that characterized many Zimbabweans. He would tease them about the local tree that was said to chase naughty children in the night, and was very funny on the subject of past guests at Black Eagle Lodge.

  “If a bird watcher comes, that’s when you know you are in for a bad day,” he said, his Ndebele accent turning bird into bed. “These people, they only want to see small beds, big beds, and medium beds. Even if you see a lion chasing something, they don’t mind. Even if one elephant is killing another, they don’t mind. They only want to see beds. You need a lot of patience because they will look in their book: ‘Oh, it’s the Blue-Mantled Crested Flycatcher!’”

  Ngwenya was as good a guide as Sadie had boasted. One afternoon he showed them grain bins used by the Bushmen, and biting ants so fierce they were known as the Enemy of Lions. “Where you find these, you won’t find any lions. Eve
n snakes, you won’t find them here.”

  The shadows were lengthening by then, so they turned the horses in the direction of the retreat and threaded their way through the balancing rocks and bush-filled gullies. The air was filled with the exotic scents of plants and animals and the wood smoke of unseen villagers in faraway huts preparing their evening meals.

  Twice Martine thought she saw a streak of gold in amongst the foliage on the knobbly hills, and she found herself wondering if the leopard was watching them. She had been incredibly distressed by the story of Ngwenya’s cousin and had found it hard to understand why the witch doctor would tell men who obviously had ulterior motives that it was only when the leopard was dead that they’d find their treasure.

  “Doesn’t the witch doctor have an obligation to protect the leopard if he is a member of your clan?” she asked Ngwenya.

  But the horse wrangler had explained that, although he and the witch doctor were both from the Ndebele tribe, the witch doctor was from a different clan.

  “Even so, it seems wrong that he would tell them something that might tempt them to go out and kill the leopard,” Martine said.

  “I agree,” was Ngwenya’s response. “But not all witch doctors do things for the right reasons.”

  Riding beside Ben now, Martine scanned the hills for any sign of the treasure seekers, the leopard, or even a leopard spirit. She hadn’t been able to think about the Matobo Hills in quite the same way since discovering that they were riddled with shrines created by the early Mashona tribesmen, who had worshipped Mwali, the High God. Each shrine had its own guardian and they were looked after to this day.

  Ngwenya had many stories about ghostly goings-on amid the rocks and hills, which he said were full of spirits. He claimed that Lobengula had regularly visited the Umlimo Cave on Mount Injelele, the Hill of Slippery Sides, to consult a spirit that could “bark like a dog, crow like a cock, or roar like a lion.”

  “The pilgrims who visit the shrines often say they hear the voice of Mwali coming from the rocks,” Ngwenya said. “You might even hear it yourself. But don’t worry; the ‘Voices of the Rocks’ also has a scientific explanation. The boulders expand in the sun and shrink at night when it is cool. When they get smaller, they moan or growl like thunder.”