by Wilbur Smith
He swung down out of the saddle to rest his mount, for it had been a hard pull up the steep slope from the town, and he tossed the reins to the Hottentot groom who accompanied him on the second horse. Zouga was sweating lightly and there was a residual pulse of dullness behind his eyes from the wine he had drunk the night before, the magnificent rich sweet wine of Constantia, one of the most highly prized vintages in the world, but capable of delivering as thick a head as any of the cheap and common grogs they sold in the waterfront bars.
In the five days since they had disembarked, the friendliness of the Cape Colony citizens had almost overwhelmed them. They had slept only the first night at a public inn in Buitengracht Street, then Zouga had called upon one of the Cape Colony’s more prominent merchants, a Mr Cartwright. He had presented his letters of introduction from the directors of the Worshipful Company of London Merchants Trading into Africa, and Cartwright had immediately placed at their disposal the guest bungalow set in the gardens of his large and gracious home on the mountain slope above the old East India Company’s gardens.
Every evening since then had been a gay whirl of dinners and dances. Had Robyn and Zouga not insisted otherwise, the days would have been filled with equivalent frivolity – picnics, sailing and fishing expeditions, riding in the forest, long leisurely lunches on the lawns under spreading oak trees that reminded him so vividly of England.
However, Zouga had avoided these diversions and had managed to accomplish much of the work of the expedition. Firstly there had been the supervising of the unloading of equipment from Huron – in itself a major undertaking as the crates had to be swayed up from the hold and lowered into lighters alongside before making the perilous return through the surf to land on the beach at Rogger Bay.
Then he had to arrange temporary warehousing for the cargo. Here again Mr Cartwright had been of assistance. Still Zouga found himself fiercely resenting his sister’s insistence that had made all this heavy work necessary.
‘Damn me, Sissy, even Papa used to travel in the company of Arab slave-traders when he had to. If this fellow St John is a trader, we would do well to learn all we can from him – his methods and sources of supply. No one could give us better information for our report to the society.’
None of his arguments had prevailed, and only when Robyn had threatened to write home to the Society’s directors in London, and to follow that up with a frank talk to the editor of the Cape Times, had Zouga acceded, with the worst grace possible, to her demands.
Now he looked down longingly at Huron, lying well out from the beach, snubbing around on her anchor cable to point into the rumbustious south-easterly wind. Even under bare poles she seemed on the point of flight.
Zouga guessed that St John would be sailing within days, leaving them to await the next ship that might be bound for the Arab and Portuguese coasts.
Zouga had already presented his letter of introduction from the Foreign Secretary to the Admiral of the Cape Squadron of the Royal Navy, and been promised all consideration. Nevertheless, he spent many hours of each morning visiting the shipping agents and owners in the port in hope of an earlier passage.
‘Damn the silly wench,’ he muttered aloud, thinking bitterly of his sister and her foibles. ‘She could cost us weeks, even months.’
Time was, of course, of the very essence. They had to be clear of the fever-ridden coast before the monsoon struck and risk of malaria became suicidal.
At that moment there was the crack of cannon shot from the slopes of the hill above him, and as he glanced up he saw the feather of gunsmoke drifting away from the lookout station on Signal Hill.
The gunshot was to alert the townsfolk that a ship was entering Table Bay, and Zouga shaded his eyes with his cap as the vessel came into view beyond the point of land. He was not a seaman but he recognized instantly the ugly silhouette and single smoke stack of the Royal Naval gunboat that had pursued Huron so doggedly. Was it really two weeks ago, he wondered, the days had passed so swiftly. Black Joke, the gunboat, had her boilers fired and a thin banner of dark smoke drifted away downwind as she rounded up into the bay, her yards training around as she pointed through the wind and she passed within half a mile of where Huron was already at anchor. The proximity of the two ships raised interesting possibilities of the feud between the two captains being revived, Zouga realized, but his immediate feeling was of intense disappointment. He had hoped that the vessel might have been a trader that could have offered the expedition further passage up the east coast – and he turned away abruptly, took the reins from the groom and swung up easily into the saddle.
‘Which way?’ he asked the servant, and the little yellowskinned lad in Cartwright’s plum-coloured livery indicated the left branch of the road that forked over the neck and dropped down across the dragon’s-back of the Cape peninsula to the ocean shore on the far side.
It was another two hours’ ride, the last twenty minutes along a rutted cart track, before they reached the sprawling thatched building hidden away in one of the ravines of the mountain slope behind a grove of milkwood trees. The slopes behind the building were thick with protea bushes in full flower and the long-tailed sugar-birds haggled noisily over the blazing blooms. To one side a waterfall smoked with spray as it fell from the sheer rock face and then formed a deep green pool on which a flotilla of ducks cruised.
The building had a dilapidated air to it, the walls needed white-washing and the thatch hung in untidy clumps from the eaves. Under the milkwood trees were scattered items of ancient equipment, a wagon with one wheel missing and the woodwork almost entirely eaten away by worm, a rusty hand forge in which a red hen was sitting upon a clutch of eggs, and mouldering saddlery and ropes hung from the branches of the trees.
As Zouga swung down from the saddle, a pack of half a dozen dogs came storming out of the front porch, snarling and barking around Zouga’s legs so that he lashed out at them with his riding whip and with his boots, changing the snarls to startled yelps and howls.
‘Who the hell are you and what do you want?’ A voice carried through the uproar, and Zouga took one more cut at a great shaggy Boerhound with a ridge of coarse hair fully erect between his shoulders, catching him fairly on the snout and forcing him to circle out of range, with fangs still bared and murderous growls rumbling up his throat.
Then he looked up at the man on the stoep of the building. He carried a double-barrelled shotgun in the crook of his arm, and both hammers were at full cock. He was so tall that he had to stoop beneath the angle of the roof, but he was thin as a blue-gum tree, as though the flesh and fat had been burned off his bones by ten thousand tropical suns.
‘Do I have the honour of addressing Mr Thomas Harkness?’ Zouga called over the clamour of the dog pack.
‘I ask the questions here,’ the lean giant bellowed back. His beard was as white as the thunderhead clouds of a summer’s day on the highveld and it hung to his belt buckle. Hair of the same silver covered his head and flowed down to the collar of his leather jerkin.
His face and his arms were burned to the colour of plug tobacco, and were speckled by the raised blemishes like little moles and freckles, where years of the fierce African sun had destroyed the upper layers of his skin. The pupils of his eyes were black and bright as drops of fresh tar, but the whites were smoky yellow, the colour of the malarial fevers and the pestilences of Africa.
‘What is your name, boy?’ His voice was strong and deep. Without the beard he might have been fifty years of age, but Zouga knew with certainty that he was seventy-three. He carried his one shoulder higher than the other and the arm on that side hung at an awkward angle to the joint. Zouga knew that a lion had chewed through the shoulder and through the bone of the upper arm, before Harkness had been able to reach his hunting knife on his belt with the other hand and stab it between the forelegs, up into the heart. That had been forty years before and the injury had become the Harkness hallmark.
‘Ballantyne, sir.’ Zouga shouted to make him
self heard above the dogs. ‘Morris Zouga Ballantyne.’
The old man whistled once, a fluting double note that stilled the dogs and brought them back around his legs. He had not lowered the shotgun and a frown puckered his sharp features.
‘Fuller Ballantyne’s pup, is it?’
‘That’s right, sir.’
‘By God, any son of Fuller Ballantyne’s is good enough for a charge of my buckshot in the rump. Don’t cock your butt when you get back on that horse, boy, for I’m a man who tempts very easily.’
‘I’ve ridden a long way to see you, Mr Harkness.’ Zouga smiled that frank and wining smile of his, standing his ground. ‘I’m one of your greatest admirers. I’ve read everything that has ever been written about you and everything you have written yourself.’
‘I doubt that,’ Harkness growled, ‘they burned most of mine. Too strong for their lily livers.’ But the hostile glint in his eyes turned to a twinkle and he cocked his head as he studied the young man before him.
‘I have no doubt that you’re as ignorant and arrogant as your Daddy, but you’ve got a fairer turn of speech.’ And he stared again at the toes of Zouga’s boots, and let his gaze move up slowly.
‘Priest,’ he asked, ‘like your Daddy?’
‘No, sir, soldier.’
‘Regiment?’
‘13th Madras Foot.’
‘Rank?’
‘Major.’
Harkness’ expression eased with each reply until his gaze once more locked with Zouga’s.
‘Teetotal? Like Your Daddy?’
‘Perish the thought!’ Zouga assured him vehemently and Harkness smiled for the first time as he let the muzzles of the shotgun droop until they pointed at the ground. He tugged at the long spikes of his beard for a moment, then reached a decision.
‘Come.’ He jerked his head and led the way into the house. There was one huge central room, the high ceiling of dried reed stems kept it cool and the narrow windows kept it gloomy. The floor was of peach-pip shells set into a plaster of mud and cow-dung and the walls were three-foot thick.
Zouga paused in the threshold and blinked with surprise at the collection of strange articles that covered the walls, were piled on every table and chair, and packed to the rafters in the dark corners.
There were books, thousands of books, cloth and leatherbound books, pamphlets and journals, atlases and encyclopaedias. There were weapons, assegai of Zulu, shield of Matabele, bow of Bushman with its quiver of poisoned arrows and, of course, guns – dozens of them in racks or merely propped against the walls. There were hunting trophies, the beautiful zigzag-striped hide of zebra, the dark bush of the lion’s mane, the elegant curved horn of harrisbuck, teeth of hippopotamus and warthog, and then the long, yellow arcs of ivory thicker than a woman’s thigh and taller than a man’s head. There were rocks, piles of rocks that glittered and sparkled, crystal rocks of purple and green, metallic nodules, native copper redder than gold, hairy strands of raw asbestos – all of it covered with a fine layer of dust and piled untidily wherever it had fallen.
The room smelled of skins and dogs and damp, of stale brandy and fresh turpentine, and there were stacks of new canvases already stretched in their wooden frames, while other canvases stood on their easels with the subjects sketched in charcoal outline, or partly blocked in with bright oil paint. On the walls were hung some finished pictures.
Zouga crossed to examine one of them while the old man blew into a pair of glass tumblers and polished them on his shirt-tail.
‘What do you think of my lions?’ he asked, as Zouga studied a huge canvas entitled ‘Lion Hunt on the Gariep River. Feb. 1846’.
Zouga made an appreciative sound in the back of his throat. Zouga was himself a dauber and scribbler, but he considered that the meticulous reproduction of the subject was the painter’s duty, while these paintings had a guileless, almost childlike joy in every primitive line. The colours also were gay and made no pretence to imitate nature, while the perspectives were wildly improbable. The mounted figure with the flowing beard in the background dominated the pride of lions in the foreground. Yet Zouga knew that these strange creations had remarkable value. Cartwright had paid ten guineas for a fanciful landscape. Zouga could only believe it was a fad amongst the colony’s fashionable set.
‘They say my lions look like English sheepdogs.’ Harkness glowered at them. ‘What do you think, Ballantyne?’
‘Perhaps,’ Zouga started, then saw the old man’s expression change. ‘But tremendously ferocious sheepdogs!’ he added swiftly, and Harkness laughed out loud for the first time.
‘By God, you’ll do!’ He shook his head as he half-filled the tumblers with the dark brown local brandy, the fearsome ‘Cape Smoke’, and brought one glass to Zouga.
‘I like a man who speaks his mind. Rot all hypocrites.’ He raised his own glass in a toast. ‘Especially hypocritical preachers who don’t give a damn for God, for truth or for their fellow men.’
Zouga fancied that he recognized the description, but raised his glass. ‘Rot them!’ he agreed, and managed to suppress a gasp as the liquor exploded in his throat and sizzled behind his eyes.
‘Good,’ he said hoarsely, and Harkness wiped his silver moustache, left and right, with his thumb before he demanded,
‘Why have you come?’
‘I want to find my father, and I think you may be able to tell me where to search.’
‘Find him?’ fulminated the old man. ‘We should all be extremely grateful he is lost, and pray each day that he remains that way.’
‘I understand how you feel, sir,’ Zouga nodded. ‘I read the book that was published after the Zambezi expedition.’
Harkness had accompanied Fuller Ballantyne on that illfated venture, acting as second-in-command, expedition manager and recording artist. He had been caught up in the squabbling and blame-fixing that had marred the enterprise from the beginning. Fuller Ballantyne had dismissed him, accusing him of theft of the expedition stores, trading on his own account, artistic incompetence, neglecting his duties to hunt for ivory, and total ignorance of the countryside and its trails, of the tribes and their customs and had included these accusations in his account of the expedition, implying that the blame for the expedition’s failure could be laid on Thomas Harkness’ uneven shoulders.
Now even mention of that book brought the colour to the sun-raddled face and made the white whiskers twitch.
‘I crossed the Limpopo for the first time in the year that Fuller Ballantyne was born. I drew the map that he used to reach Lake Ngami.’ Harkness stopped and made a dismissive gesture. ‘I might as well try and reason with the baboons barking from the tops of the kopjes.’ Then he peered more closely at Zouga.
‘What do you know about Fuller? Since he sent you home to the old country, how often have you seen him? How much time have you spent in his company?’
‘He came home once.’
‘How much time did he spend with you and your mother?’
‘Some months – but he was always in Uncle William’s study writing, or he was up at London, Oxford or Birmingham to lecture.’
‘But you, nevertheless, conceived a burning filial love and duty for the sainted and celebrated father?’
Zouga shook his head. ‘I hated him,’ he said quietly. ‘I could hardly bear the days until he went away again.’
Harkness tilted his head on one side, surprised, speechless for a moment, and Zouga drank the last few drops of liquor in the glass.
‘I never told anybody that before.’ He seemed puzzled himself. ‘I hardly even admitted it to myself. I hated him for what he did to us, to me and my sister, but especially to my mother.’
Harkness took the empty tumbler from his fingers, refilled it and handed it back. He spoke quietly.
‘I also will tell you something that I have never told another man. I met your mother at Kuruman, my God, so long ago. She was sixteen or seventeen and I was nearly forty. She was so pretty, so shy and yet so filled
with a special quality of joy. I asked her to marry me. The only woman I ever asked.’ Harkness stopped himself, turned away to his painting, and peered at it. ‘Damned sheepdogs!’ he snapped, and then without turning back to face Zouga, ‘So why do you want to find your father? Why have you come out to Africa?’
‘Two reasons,’ Zouga told him. ‘Both good. To make my own reputation and my own fortune.’
Harkness swivelled to face him. ‘Damn me, but you can be direct.’ There was a tinge of respect in his expression now. ‘How do you plan to achieve those very desirable ends?’
Zouga explained swiftly – the newspaper sponsorship, that of the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade.
‘You’ll find much grist for your mill,’ Harkness interjected. ‘The coast is still rife with the trade, despite what you’ll hear in London town.’
‘I am also an agent for the Worshipful Company of London Merchants Trading into Africa, but I have my own goods to trade, and 5,000 cartridges for my Sharps rifle.’
Harkness wandered across the dim room and stopped before one of the gigantic elephant tusks propped against the far wall. It was so old and heavy that there was very little taper from root to tip, the point worn blunt and rounded. One third of its length was smooth and a clear lovely butter yellow colour, where it had been buried in the jaw of the beast, the rest of it was stained dark with vegetable juices and scarred from the battles and foragings of sixty years.
‘This one weighs one hundred and sixty pounds – its value in London is six shillings a pound.’ He slapped it with his open palm. ‘There are still bulls like that out there, thousands of them. But take a tip from an old dog – forget your fancy Sharps, and use one of the ten-bore elephant guns. They throw a ball that weighs a quarter of a pound, and though they kick like the devil himself, they drive better than any of these new-fangled rifles.’ There was a lightness in the worn old features, a sparkle in the dark eyes. ‘Another tip – get in close. Forty paces at the outside, and go for the heart. Forget what you’ll hear about the brain shot, go for the heart—’ He broke off suddenly and waggled his head, grinning ruefully. ‘By God, but it’s enough to make a man want to be young again!’