by Wilbur Smith
‘Tear gas,’ he realized. The Shona were gassing the cavern.
Craig saw Tungata was in the water, crouched waist-deep behind the slab of rock. He had torn a strip from his shirt, wet it and bound it over his mouth and nose, but his eyes were red and running with tears.
‘The whole cavern is swarming with troopers,’ he told Craig, his voice muffled by the wet cloth, and he stopped as a stentorian disembodied voice echoed down the gallery, its English distorted by an electronic megaphone.
‘If you surrender immediately, you will not be harmed.’
As if to punctuate this announcement, there was the ‘pock’ of a grenade-launcher and another tear-gas canister came flying down the gallery, bouncing off the limestone floor like a football, belching out white clouds of the irritant gas.
‘They are down the staircase already, I couldn’t stop them.’ Tungata bobbed up from behind the edge of the slab and fired a short burst up the gallery. His bullets cracked and whined from the rock, and then the AK went silent and he ducked down.
‘The last magazine,’ he grunted and dropped the empty rifle into the water. He groped for the pistol on his belt.
‘Come on, Sam,’ Craig gasped. ‘There is a way through beyond this pool.’
‘I can’t swim.’ Tungata was checking the pistol, slapping the magazine into the butt and jerking back the slide to load.
‘I got Sarah through.’ Craig was trying to breathe through the searing clouds of gas. ‘I’ll get you through.’
Tungata looked up at him.
‘Trust me, Sam.’
‘Sarah is safe?’
‘I promise you, she is.’
Tungata hesitated, fighting his fear of the waters.
‘You can’t let them take you,’ Craig told him. ‘You owe it to Sarah and to your people.’
Perhaps Craig had discovered the only appeal that would move him. Tungata pushed the pistol back into his belt.
‘Tell me what to do,’ he said.
It was impossible to hyperventilate in the gas-laden atmosphere.
‘Get what air you can, and hold it. Hold it, force yourself not to breathe again,’ Craig wheezed. The tear gas was ripping his lungs and he could feel the cold and deadly spread of lethargy like liquid in his veins. It was going to be a long, hard road home.
‘Here!’ Tungata pulled him down. ‘Fresh air!’ There was still a pocket of clean air trapped below the angle of the slab. Craig drank it in greedily.
He took Tungata’s hands and placed them on the canvas belt. ‘Hold on!’ he ordered, and when Tungata nodded, he pulled one last long breath, and they ducked under together. They went down fast.
When they reached the wall there was no bulky oxygen set to encumber them, and Craig pulled Tungata through with what remained of his strength. But he was slowing and weakening drastically, once again losing the urge to breathe, a symptom of anoxia, of oxygen starvation.
They were through the wall, but he could not think what to do next. He was confused and disorientated, his brain playing tricks with him. He found he was giggling weakly, precious air bubbling out between his lips. The glow of the lamp turned a marvellous emerald green, and then split into prisms of rainbow light. It was beautiful, and he examined it drunkenly, starting to roll onto his back. It was so peaceful and beautiful, just like that fall into oblivion after an injection of pentathol. The air trickled out of his mouth and the bubbles were bright as precious stones. He watched them rise upwards.
‘Upwards!’ he thought groggily. ‘Got to go up!’ and he kicked lazily, pushing weakly upwards.
Immediately there was a powerful heave on his waistbelt, and he saw Tungata’s legs driving like the pistons of a steam locomotive in the lamplight. He watched them with the weighty concentration of a drunkard, but slowly they faded out into blackness. His last thought was, ‘If this is dying, then it’s better than its publicity,’ and he let himself go into it with a weary fatalism.
He woke to pain, and he tried to force himself back into that comforting womb darkness of death, but there were hands bullying and pummelling him, and the rough-barked timber rungs of the ladder cutting into his flesh. Then he was aware that his lungs burned and his eyes felt as though they were swimming in concentrated acid. His nerve ends flared up, so that he could feel every aching muscle and the sting of every scratch and abrasion on his skin.
Then he heard the voice. He tried to shut it out.
‘Craig! Craig darling, wake up!’ And the painful slap of a wet hand against his cheek. He rolled his head away from it.
‘He’s coming round!’
They were like drowning rats at the bottom of a well, clinging half-submerged to the rickety ladderwork, all of them shivering with the cold.
The two girls were perched on the lower rung, Craig was strapped to the main upright with a loop of canvas under his armpits, and Tungata, in the water beside him, was holding his head, preventing it from flopping forward.
With an effort Craig peered around at their anxious faces and then he grinned weakly at Tungata. ‘Sam, you said you couldn’t swim – well, you could have fooled me!’
‘We can’t stay here.’ Sally-Anne’s teeth chattered in her head.
‘There is only one way—’ they all looked up the gloomy shaft above them.
Craig’s head still felt wobbly on his neck, but he pushed Tungata’s hand away, and forced himself to begin examining the condition of the timberwork.
It had been built sixty years ago. The bark rope that had been used by the old witch-doctors to bind the joints together had rotted, and now hung in brittle strings like the shavings from the floor of a carpentry shop. The entire structure seemed to have sagged to one side, unless the original builder’s eye had not been straight enough to erect a plumb-line.
‘Do you think it will hold us all?’ Sarah voiced the question.
Craig found it difficult to think, he saw it all through a fine mesh of nausea and bone-weariness.
‘One at a time,’ he mumbled, ‘lightest ones first. You Sally-Anne, then Sarah—’ he reached up and untied his leg from the rung. ‘Take the rope up with you. When you get to the top, pull up the bags and the lamps.’
Obediently Sally-Anne coiled the rope over her shoulder, and began to climb up the ladder.
She went swiftly, lightly, but the ladderwork creaked and swayed under her. As she went upwards, her lamp chased the shadows ahead of her up the shaft. She drew away until only the lamp glow marked her position, then even that disappeared abruptly.
‘Sally-Anne!’
‘All right!’ Her voice came echoing down the shaft. ‘There is a platform here.’
‘How big?’
‘Big enough – I’m sending down the rope.’
It came snaking down to them, and Tungata secured the bags to the end.
‘Haul away!’
The bundle went jerkily up the shaft, swinging on the rope.
‘Okay, send Sarah.’
Sarah climbed out of sight, and they heard the whisper of the girls’ voices high above. Then, ‘Okay – next!’
‘Go, Sam!’
‘You are lighter than I am.’
‘Oh for Chrissake, just do it!’
Tungata climbed powerfully, but the timberwork shook under his weight. One of the rungs broke free, and fell away beneath his feet.
‘Look out below!’
Craig ducked under the surface, and the pole hit the water above him with a heavy splash.
Tungata clambered out of sight, and his voice came back, ‘Carefully, Pupho! The ladder is breaking up!’
Craig pulled himself out of the water, and sitting on the bottom rung strapped on his leg.
‘God, that feels good.’ He patted it affectionately, and gave a few trial kicks.
‘I’m coming up,’ he called.
He had not reached the halfway point when he felt the structure move under him and he flung himself upwards too violently.
One of the poles broke with
a report like a musket shot, and the entire structure lurched sideways. Craig grabbed the side frame, just as three or four cross-rungs broke away under him and fell, hitting the water below with a resounding series of splashes. His legs were dangling in space, and every time he kicked for a foothold, he felt the timberwork sag dangerously.
‘Pupho!’
‘I’m stuck. I can’t move or the whole bloody thing will come down.’
‘Wait!’
A few seconds of silence and then Tungata’s voice again. ‘Here’s the rope. There is a loop in the end.’
It dropped six feet from him.
‘Swing it left a little, Sam.’
The loop swung towards him.
‘A little more! Lower, a little lower!’ It dangled within reach.
‘Hold hard!’
Craig made a lunge at it and got his arm through the loop.
‘I’m coming on!’
He released his hold on the side frame and swung free. He was too weak to climb.
‘Pull me up!’
Slowly he was drawn upwards, and even in that dangerously exposed position, Craig appreciated the strength that it needed to lift a full-grown man this way. Without Tungata, he would never have made it.
He saw the glow of the lamp reflected off the walls of the shaft and getting closer, and then Sally-Anne’s head peering over the edge of the platform at him.
‘Not far now. Hold on!’
He came level with the edge of the rock platform, and there was Tungata braced against the far wall, a loop of the rope over his back and shoulder, hauling double-handed on the rope with the cords standing out in his throat and his mouth open, grunting with the effort. Craig hooked his elbow over the edge and then as Tungata heaved again he kicked wildly and wriggled over the edge on his belly.
It was many minutes before he could sit up and take an interest in his surroundings again. The four of them were huddled, shivering and sodden, on a canted platform of water-worn limestone, just large enough to accommodate them.
Above them, the vertical shaft continued upwards, disappearing into darkness, the walls smooth and unscalable. The ladderwork built by the old witch-doctors reached only as high as this platform. In the silence, Craig could hear the drip of water somewhere up there in the darkness and the squeak of bats disturbed by their voices and movements. Sally-Anne held the lamp high, but they could not make out the top of the shaft.
Craig looked about the ledge. It was about eight feet wide, and then in the far wall he saw the entrance to a subsidiary branch of the tunnel, much lower and narrower than the main shaft, cutting into the rock on the horizontal.
‘That looks like the only way to go,’ Sally-Anne whispered. ‘That’s where the old witch-doctors were headed.’
Nobody replied. They were all exhausted by the climb and chilled to the bone.
‘We should keep going!’ Sally-Anne insisted, and Craig roused himself.
‘Leave the bags and rope here.’ His voice was still hoarse and scratchy from the tear gas and he coughed painfully. ‘We can come back for them when we need them.’
He did not trust himself to stand. He felt weak and unsteady and the black drop of the shaft was close at his side. He crawled on hands and knees to the opening in the far wall.
‘Give me the lamp.’ Sally-Anne handed it to him and he crawled into the low entrance.
There was a passage beyond. After fifty feet the roof lifted so that he could rise into a crouch and, steadying himself against the wall with his free hand, go on a little faster. The others were following him. Another hundred feet, and he stooped through a last low natural doorway of stone and then stood to his full height. He looked about him with swiftly rising wonder. The others coming out of the opening behind him jostled him, but he hardly noticed it. He was so enraptured by his new surroundings.
They stood in a group, close together, as if to draw comfort and courage from each other, and they stared. Their heads revolved slowly, craning upwards and from side to side.
‘My God, it’s beautiful,’ whispered Sally-Anne. She took the lamp from Craig’s hand and lifted it high.
They had entered a cavern of lights, a cavern of crystal. Over countless ages the sugary crystalline calcium had been deposited by water seepage over the tall vaulted ceiling and down the walls. It had dripped onto the floor and solidified.
It had crafted marvellous sculptures in glittering iridescent light. On the walls there were traceries, like ancient Venetian lace, so delicate that the lamplight shone through them as though through precious porcelain. There were cornices and pillars of monolithic splendour joining the high roof to the floor, there were suspended marvels of rainbow colours shaped like the wings of angels in flight. Huge spiked stalactites hung as menacingly as the burnished sword of Damocles, or as the white teeth in the upper jaw of a man-eating shark. Others suggested gigantic chandeliers, or the pipes of a celestial organ, while from the floor the stalagmites rose in serried ranks, platoons and squadrons of fantastic shapes, hooded monks dressed in cassocks of mother-of-pearl, wolves and hunchbacks, heroes in gleaming armour, ballerinas and hobgoblins, graceful and grotesque, but all burning with a million tiny crystalline sparks in the lamplight.
Still in a small group, hesitantly, a step at a time, they moved forward down the length of the cavern, picking their way through the gallery of tall stalagmitic statues and stumbling over the daggerlike points of limestone that had broken off the ceiling and littered the floor like ancient arrowheads.
Craig stopped again, and the others pressed up so closely to him that they were all touching.
The centre of the cavern was open. The floor had been swept of fallen debris, and in the open space human hands had built, from gleaming limestone, a square platform, a stage – or a pagan altar. On the altar, with legs drawn up against his chest, clad in the golden and dappled skin of a leopard, sat the body of a man.
‘Lobengula.’ Tungata sank down on one knee. ‘The one who drives like the wind.’
Lobengula’s hands were clasped over his knees, and they were mummified, black and shrunken. His fingernails had continued growing after death. They were long and curved, like the claws of a predatory beast. Lobengula must once have worn a tall headgear of feathers and fur, but it had fallen from his head and now lay on the altar beside him. The heron feathers were still blue and crisp, as though plucked that very day.
Perhaps by design, but more likely by chance, the sitting corpse had been placed directly beneath one of the seepages from the roof. Even as they stood before the altar, another droplet fell from high above and, with a soft tap, burst upon the old king’s forehead, and then snaked down over his face like slow tears. Millions upon millions of drops must have fallen upon him, and each drop had laid down its deposit of shining calcium on the mummified head.
Lobengula was being transformed into stone, already his scalp was covered with a translucent helmet, like the tallow from a guttering candle. It had run down and filled his eye-cavities with the pearly deposit, it had lined his withered lips and built up the line of his jaw. Lobengula’s perfect white teeth grinned out of his stone mask at them.
The effect was unearthly and terrifying. Sarah whimpered with superstitious dread and clutched at Sally-Anne who returned her grip as fervently. Craig played the lamp beam over that dreadful head and then slowly lowered it.
On the rock altar in front of Lobengula had been placed five dark objects. Four beer-pots, hand-moulded from clay with a stylized diamond pattern inscribed around each wide throat, and the mouth of each pot had been sealed with the membrane from the bladder of a goat. The fifth object was a bag, made from the skin of an unborn zebra foetus, the seams stitched with animal sinew.
‘Sam, you—’ Craig started, and his voice cracked. He cleared his throat, and started again. ‘You are his descendant. You are the only one who should touch anything here.’
Tungata was still down on one knee, and he did not reply. He was staring at the old king
’s transformed head, and his lips moved as he prayed silently. Was he addressing the Christian God, Craig wondered, or the spirits of his ancestors?
Sally-Anne’s teeth chattered spasmodically, the only sound in the cavern, and Craig placed his arms around the two girls. They pressed against him gratefully, both of them shivering with the cold and with awe.
Slowly Tungata rose to his feet and stepped forward to the stone altar. ‘I see you, great Lobengula,’ he spoke aloud. ‘I, Samson Kumalo, of your totem and of your blood, greet you across the years!’ He was using his tribal name again, claiming his lineage as he went on in a low but steady voice. ‘If I am the leopard cub of your prophecy, then I ask your blessing, oh king. But if I am not that cub, then strike my desecrating hand and wither it as it touches the treasures of the house of Mashobane.’
He reached out slowly and placed his right hand on one of the black clay pots.
Craig found that he was holding his breath, waiting for he was not sure what, perhaps for a voice to speak from the king’s long-dead throat, or for one of the great stalactites to crash down from the roof, or for a bolt of lightning to blast them all.
The silence drew out, and then Tungata placed his other hand on the beer-pot, and slowly lifted it in a salute to the corpse of the king.
There was a sharp crack and the brittle baked clay split. The bottom fell out of the pot, and from it gushed a torrent of glittering light that paled and rendered insipid the crystalline coating of the great cavern. Diamonds rattled and bounced on the altar stone, tumbling and slithering over each other, piled in a pyramid, and lay smouldering like live coals in the lamplight.
‘I cannot believe these are diamonds,’ Sally-Anne whispered. ‘They look like pebbles, pretty, shiny pebbles, but pebbles.’
They had poured the contents of all four pots and of the zebra-skin bag into the canvas food-bag, and leaving the empty clay pots at the feet of the old king’s corpse, they retreated from Lobengula’s presence to the end of the crystal cavern nearest the entrance passage.