by Wilbur Smith
The decorative chevron pattern did not seem to extend around the entire circumference, but covered the eastern quadrant. Zouga wondered at the significance of that.
The immediate explanation seemed to be that the decoration would face the rising sun. It seemed likely that the peoples who had built this massive edifice had been sunworshippers.
Jan Cheroot trailed him reluctantly, prophesying the wrath of the devils and hobgoblins who guarded this evil place, while Zouga. hacked and chopped his way around the walls, completely oblivious of his advice. There must be a gateway, he grumbled. "How did they get in and out? " Devils got wings, Jan Cheroot pointed out broodingly. They fly. Me, I wish I had wings also, to fly the hell away from here."
They came again to the point in the wall where they had discovered the beehive, and by then it was almost dark, the sun had disappeared below the treetops. We'll search for the gate in the morning, " Zouga decided. We are not going to sleep here? " Jan Cheroot demanded, horrified.
Zouga ignored the protest. "Honey for supper, he suggested mildly, and for once he did not sleep that deep hunter's sleep, but lay under his single blanket, his imagination filled with golden idols and treasure houses built out of massive worked stone blocks.
Zouga resumed the search again when it was light enough to see the top of the wall silhouetted against the misty pearl sky of dawn. The previous day he had been blinded by his own eagerness and careless in his haste.
He had missed the area, only a few yards from where they were camped, where the creepers covering the wall had once been hacked away and then had regrown, even more thickly than before. Now, however, a lopped branch beckoned him like a finger, the clean cut unmistakably made by an axe.
Jan Cheroot, Zouga called him from the cooking fire. Clean out this rubbish. " Zouga showed him the dense secondary growth, and Jan Cheroot sauntered away to fetch his axe.
While he waited for him to return, Zouga decided that only one person could possibly be responsible for these old overgrown and healed cut marks on the stems of the vine. Once again Fuller Ballantyne had been his guide, yet this time he did not resent it so fiercely; the experience of treading squarely in his father's footsteps was no longer new, and he had his excitement and anticipation to lessen the sting of it.
Hurry, he called to Jan Cheroot. It's been here a thousand years.
It's not going to fall down now, Jan Cheroot answered saucily, and spat on his palms before hefting the axe.
The little Hottentot was a great deal happier this morning. He had survived a night under the wall, without being assailed by even a single hobgoblin, and Zouga had passed the unsleeping hours in describing to him the treasures that might lie beyond that wall. Jan Cheroot's temporarily paralysed avarice had revived sufficiently to imagine himself with his pants filled with gold coin seated in his favourite tavern. on the Cape Town dockside with a dozen butter yellow Hottentot beauties crowding close to him to hear the story, while the bartender prised the wax seal off another bottle of Cape Smoke. Now his enthusiasm almost matched that of Zouga himself.
He worked swiftly and when Zouga stooped and peered into the passage that he had cut through the dense secondary growth that had sprung up behind Fuller Ballantyne's axe, he saw the outline of the curved portals of the gateway, and the chiselled granite steps that led up to the narrow opening.
The steps had been worn into a smooth dish shape by the passage of thousands of feet over the centuries, but the gateway Had been deliberately blocked with stone and rubble, not the neat stonework of the main wall, but a careless and hurried attempt to seal the entrance, probably in the face of an advancing enemy, Zouga thought.
Somebody, probably Fuller Ballantyne, had pulled down this barrier sufficiently to enter. Zouga followed his tracks, the loose stone rolling under foot, he squeezed his way through the gateway, and found that it turned abruptly to the left, into a narrow vegetation-choked passage, between high walls open to the sky.
his disappointment was intense. He had hoped that once he forced the gateway, all the city and its wonders and treasures would lie before him. instead there were many hours of hard sweating labour facing him. It had been years, four years at least, since Fuller Ballantyne had entered through this gate and passageway, and it was as though he had never been.
Where the stonework had collapsed, Zouga clambered over it gingerly, the thought and dread of snakes was very much with him since the cave of the Umlimo. The long narrow passage, obviously constructed as a defensive measure against intruders, followed the curve of the main wall until abruptly it opened into a clear space, again choked with dense green thorny growth, and dominated by a tall cylindrical tower of lichen-covered granite blocks. The tower was immense, seeming in Zouga's excitement to reach to the very clouds.
Zouga started across the intervening courtyard, hacking impatiently at the bush and creepers, and halfway across he saw that there was a second tower, an identical twin to the first that had until that moment obscured it.
Now his heart was pounding fiercely against his ribs, not from the exertion of swinging the axe, but with an intuitive belief that the towers were the centre of this strange ancient city, and that they held the key to the mystery.
He stumbled in his haste, and went down on his knees, tearing another long rent in his breeches and abrading a strip of skin from his shin, so he swore in his impatience and his pain. He had lost the axe but when he groped for it in the tangled roots and interwoven branches, he found it almost immediately, and at the same time, uncovered the stone that had tripped him.
It was not the granite of which the walls and tower had been constructed. That fact caught his attention, and still on his knees he used the axe to clear the bush around the stone. He felt his nerves thrill as he realized that it was a work of sculpture.
Jan Cheroot had come up behind him, and now he knelt also and tore at the plants with his bare hands then the two of them rocked back on their heels, and still squatting examined the statue that they had uncovered. It was not large, probably weighed less than a hundredweight. It was carved in satiny, greenish soapstone, sitting on that familiar ornamental plinth, the simple pattern of triangles, like a row of shark's teeth.
The head was smashed off the statue, seemingly by a blow from a sledge hammer, but more likely from a rock used as a hammer. The body of the statue was still intact, the body of the raptor, with the folded pointed wings of a bird of prey, crouching on the point of flight.
Zouga slipped his hand into the opening of his shirt and drew out the little ivory charm on its leather thong, that he had taken from the body of the Mashona chieftain he had killed at the pass of the elephant road.
He let it nestle in the palm of his hand, comparing it with the statue. Beside him Jan Cheroot murmured, "It is the same bird! "Yes, " Zouga agreed softly. "But what does it mean? "
He dropped the ivory charm back inside his shirt. It is from long ago.
" Jan Cheroot shrugged. "We will never know. " And dismissing it thus, he would have risen to his feet again, but something else caught his beady bright eye and he darted forward, his hand pecking at the loose earth beside the statue like a greedy hen, and held it up between thumb and forefinger to catch the slanted morning light.
It was a perfectly round bead of metal pierced for the string of a necklace, a tiny bead only slightlyitly bigger than the head of a wax Vesta, and it was irregular in shape, as though beaten out under the hammer of a primitive smithy, but the colour was red-yellow, and its surface was undulled by either tarnish or corrosion; there is only one metal that has that peculiar lustre and sheen.
Zouga held out his hand for it almost reverently, and it had the weight and the warmth of a living thing. Gold! " said Zouga, and beside him Jan Cheroot giggled ecstatically, like a young bride at her first kiss. Gold, he agreed.
"Good yellow gold."
Zouga was always aware of the very limited time left to him, and every hour or so as they worked he would lift his head to the sky with the sweat s
treaming down his face and neck, and greasing the flat hard muscles of his naked upper body, and always the clouds were taller and blacker, the heat more punishing, and the wind sullen as a captive tribe on the point of rebellion.
In the night he would start awake, breaking up through the drugged surface of exhausted sleep, to lie and listen to the thunder growling below the horizon like a man-killing monster.
Each dawn he shook his men from their blankets and drove them in a suppressed frenzy of impatience to their labour, and when Matthew, the gunbearer, refused to rise again after the short rest which Zouga allowed them in the hottest hour of the day, Zouga dragged him to his feet and hit him once, a short, perfectly timed chopping blow that sent him spinning backwards full length into his own excavation. Matthew crawled out again with blood dribbling from his chin, and picked up the crude sieve of plaited split bamboos with which he was sifting the earth from the digging, and began again working over the piles of loose earth and rubble.
Zouga drove himself harder than he drove his small band of temple plunderers. He worked shoulder to shoulder with them as they cut out all the undergrowth from the courtyard below the twin stone towers, exposing the broken cobbles, and piles of loose rubble amongst which lay the fallen statues.
He found six more of the bird carvings virtually undamaged, except for minor chips and the attrition of the ages, but there were the fragments of others that had been broken with a savagery which could only have been deliberate, so that he was uncertain of the original number of statues. Zouga spent little time puzzling over them. The loose earth and rubble on which they lay was rich ground for his band to pick over, though they were handicapped by the lack of tools. Zouga would have paid a hundred guineas for a set of good picks and spades and buckets.
However, they had to make do with sharpened wooden stakes, the tips hardened in the fire, to dig out the loose stuff, and Jan Cheroot wove baskets of split bamboo, like the flat baskets used by the African women to winnow the stamped corn meal, and with these they sieved the fine earth after picking over it by hand.
It was tedious, back-breaking work, and the heat was murderous, but the harvest was rich. The gold was in small pieces, mostly in the pierced round heads, from which the string had long ago rotted away, but there were flakes and flecks of thinly beaten foil, which might once have been used to decorate a votive wooden carving, there were coils of fine gold wire, and more rarely small ingots of the metal the size and thickness of a child's finger.
Once the green stone birds must have stood in a circle, facing inwards like the granite columns of Stonehenge, and the gold had probably formed some part of the offerings and sacrifices made to them. Whoever had thrown down the statues had scattered and trampled the sacrifice, and time had corroded all except that lovely yellow incorruptible metal.
Within ten days of first hacking away the undergrowth that choked the inner courtyard, the temple yard, as Zouga called it, they had gleaned over fifty pounds weight of native gold, and the interior of the stone courtyard had been gutted, the earth rutted and harrowed as though a troop of wild bush pig had rooted it out.
Then Zouga turned his full attention to the twin towers. He measured them around the base, over a hundred paces, and inspected each joint in the masonry for a secret opening. There was none, so he built a rickety ladder of raw timber and bark rope and risking neck and limb reached the top of the tallest tower. From this vantage point he could look down into the roofless passageways and courtyards of the city. It was a maze, all of it choked with growth, but there was no other part as promising as the temple courtyard of the bird statues.
He turned his attention back to the tower on which he stood. There was again no sign of a secret opening, although he searched diligently for one. It puzzled him that the ancient architect would have built such a solid structure with no apparent use or motive, and the possibility occurred to him that it might be a sealed treasure house, built around an inner chamber.
The work of trying to penetrate the massive stonework, daunted even Zouga, and Jan Cheroot declared the attempt to be madness. But Zouga had exhausted the digging below the tower, and this seemed to be the only fruitful area left to him.
Complaining bitterly, a small team led by Matthew climbed the rickety ladder, and under Zouga's supervision began prising loose the small blocks from the summit of the tower. However, such was the skill and dedication of the original masons that progress in the demolition was painfully slow, and there was a long pause between each crash of one loose block into the courtyard below and the next. It needed three days" unremitting toil to break a jagged aperture through the first layer of dressed blocks and to discover that the interior of the tower consisted merely of a fill of the same grey granite.
Standing beside him on the summit of the tower, Jan Cheroot voiced Zouga's own disappointment. We are wasting our time.
It's stone and more stone."
He spat over the side of the tower and watched the speck of phlegm float down into the ransacked courtyard. What we should look for is the place the gold came from."
Zouga. had been so obsessed by his search and plunder of the ruined and deserted city that he had paid no thought to the mines which must lie somewhere beyond the walls. Now he nodded his head thoughtfully. No wonder your mother loved you, he said. "Not only are you beautiful, but clever too. JA! Jan Cheroot said smugly. "Everybody tells me that."
At that moment a fat weighty drop of rain struck Zouga's forehead, and ran down into his left eyeball so that his vision blurred. The drop was warm as blood, warm as the blood of a man racked by malarial fever. .
Beyond the high walls there were other ruins, none of such proportions or importance as the inner city, however, and all of them so scattered, so overgrown and thrown down as to make detailed exploration of them out of the question in the time still available to Zouga.
The kopjes around the city had been fortified, but were deserted, the caves empty as the eye-sockets of a long dead skull, smelling of the leopards and rock rabbits who were the latest tenants, but Zouga concentrated his search on the ancient mine workings which he had convinced himself had formed the backbone of this vanished civilization. He imagined deep shafts driven into a hillside, and dumps of loose rock like the ancient Cornish tin mines, and he scoured the densely wooded country for miles in each direction, eagerly checking each irregularity of ground, each eminence that could possibly be an abandoned mine dump.
He left Jan Cheroot to oversee the scratching and sweeping up of the last tiny scraps of gold in the temple yard, and all the men profited by the new relaxed supervision. They shared views with Jan Cheroot on the role of menial work in the life of a warrior and hunter.
The first spattering of rain had been only a warning of the fury to come, and it had barely wet Zouga's shirt through to the skin before passing, but it was a warning that Zouga realized he was ignoring at his own peril. Yet still the hope of the ancient mine workings with their fat golden seams of the precious metal tantalized him, and he spun out the days until even Jan Cheroot began to worry. If the rivers spate, we will be trapped here, " he brooded beside the camp fire. "Besides we have taken all the gold.
Let us now live to spend it. "One more day, Zouga promised him as he settled into his single blanket, and composed himself to sleep. "There is a valley just beyond the southern ridge, it will take me only another day to search it, the day after tomorrowhe promised sleepily.
. . . -A Zouga smelled the snake first, the sweet sickening stench of it filled his nostrils, so he drew each breath with difficulty, yet trying not to gasp or choke lest he called the snake's attention. He could not move, he was pinned under an immense dark weight which threatened to crush his ribs and the smell of snake suffocated him.
He could barely turn his head towards the place from which he knew the snake would come, and it came flowing sinuously, coil upon thick undulating coil. Its head was lifted, its eyes were unblinking and glassily fixed in the cold and deadly reptilian sta
re, the ribbon of its tongue flickered in a soft black blur through the icy smile of its thin curved lips. Its scales scratched softly across the earth, and they glittered with a soft metallic sheen, the colour of the polished gold foil that Zouga had gleaned from the temple courtyard.
Zouga could not move nor cry out, his tongue had swollen with terror to fill his mouth and choke him, but the snake slid past him, close enough to touch if he had had command of his arms to reach out. It slid on into the circle of soft wavering light, and the shadows drew back so the birds emerged from the darkness, each on its elevated perch.
Their eyes were golden and fierce, the cruel yellow curve of their beaks echoed by the proud pout of their russet-flecked breasts and the long pinions folded across their backs like crossed blades.
Though Zouga knew they were hunting falcons with belled tresses on their legs, yet they were the size of golden eagles. They were decked with garlands of flowers, crimson blossoms of King Chaka fire, and the snowy virginal white of arum lilies. They wore necklaces and chains of brightest gold about their arrogant necks, and as the serpent slid into the midst of the circle they stirred upon their perches.
Then as the serpent raised its glittering head with the crest of scales erect upon the back of its neck, the falcons burst into thunderous flight and the darkness was filled with the roar of their wings and the plaintive lament of their wild hunting cries.
Zouga lifted his hands -to shield his face, and great wings beat all about him, as the flock of falcons took flight and the presence of the snake was no longer of significance, what was important was the departure of the birds. Zouga felt a tremendous sense of doom, of personal loss, and he opened his mouth, able to utter again. He shouted at the birds to call them back to roost.
He shouted into the darkness, after the soaring, buffeting thunder of the birds" wings and his own shouts and the cries of his servants woke him from the coils of the nightmare.
He woke to find the night was thunderous with the wind of the storm that swept down upon the camp. The trees tossed and thrashed their branches overhead, showering them with leaves and small twigs. and the rush of air was glacially cold. It stripped the thatch from their crudely built huts and it scattered ash and live coals from the fire. The coals, fanned into new life, were the only source of light, for overhead, the stars were obscured by the thick rolling banks of cloud that pressed close upon the earth.