by Wilbur Smith
‘How long?’ Lippe’s tortured eyes held Lothar’s, beseeching comfort.
The latex looked freshly distilled, none of its virulence dissipated, but Vuil Lippe was big and strong and healthy, his body would fight the toxin. It would take time, a few dreadful hours that would seem like eternity.
‘Can’t you cut it out?’ Lippe pleaded.
‘It’s gone deep, you’d bleed to death.’
‘Burn it out!’
‘The pain would kill you.’
Lothar helped him down into a sitting position, just as Hendrick rode up with the bunch.
‘Two men stay to look after him,’ Lothar ordered. ‘Hendrick, you and I will go after the little yellow swine.’
They pushed the tired horses, and within twenty minutes they saw the Bushman ahead of them. He seemed to dissolve and dance in the heat mirage, and Lothar felt a dark rage seize him; the kind of hatred a man can only feel towards something he fears in the deep places of his soul.
‘Go right!’ Lothar waved Hendrick over. ‘Head him off if he turns.’ And they spurred forward, riding down swiftly on the fleeing figure.
‘I’ll give you a death to wipe out the other,’ Lothar promised grimly, and he loosened his blanket roll from the pommel in front of him.
The sheepskin that he used as a mattress would shield him from the frail bone-tipped arrows. He wrapped it around his torso, and tucked the end over his mouth and nose. He pulled his wide-brimmed hat low, leaving only a slit for his eyes.
The running Bushman was two hundred yards ahead. He was naked, except for the bow in one hand and the halo of tiny arrows in the leather thong around his head. His body shone with a coating of sweat, and it was the colour of bright amber, almost translucent in the sunlight.
He ran lightly as a gazelle, his small neat feet seemed to skim the earth.
There was the crack of a Mauser and a bullet kicked a fountain of pale dust just beyond the running Bushman like the spout of a sperm whale, and the Bushman jerked and then, unbelievably, increased the speed of his flight, drawing away from the two galloping horsemen. Lothar glanced across at Hendrick; he was riding with a loose rein, using both hands to reload the Mauser.
‘Don’t shoot!’ Lothar yelled angrily. ‘I want him alive!’ and Hendrick lowered the Mauser.
For another mile the Bushman kept up that last wild spring, then gradually he faltered. Once again they began to overhaul him.
Lothar saw his legs begin to wobble under him, his feet flopping from the ankles with exhaustion, but Lothar’s mount was almost blown. It was lathering heavily, and froth splattered his boots as he drove it forward.
Fifty yards ahead the exhausted Bushman spun round to face him, standing at bay, his chest pumping like a bellows, and sweat dripping from his small spade-shaped beard. His eyes were wild and fierce and defiant as he fitted an arrow to the bow.
‘Come on, you little monster!’ Lothar yelled, to draw the Bushman’s aim from the horse to himself, and the ruse succeeded.
The Bushman threw up the bow, and drew and loosed in a single movement, and the arrow flew like a beam of light. It struck Lothar at the level of the throat, but the thick wool of the sheepskin smothered it, and it fell away, tapping against his riding boot and falling to the dry earth.
The Bushman was trying desperately to notch another arrow as Lothar leaned out of the saddle like a polo player reaching for a forehand drive, and swung the Mauser. The rifle barrel crunched into the side of the Bushman’s skull above the ear and he collapsed.
Lothar reined down his horse and sprang from the saddle, but Hendrick was there before him, swinging wildly with his Mauser butt at the Bushman’s head as he lay against the earth. Lothar grabbed his shoulder and pushed him away with such force that he staggered and almost fell.
‘Alive, I told you!’ Lothar snarled, and went down on his knees beside the sprawling body.
There was a sluggish trickle of blood out of the Bushman’s earhole, and Lothar felt a prickle of concern as he felt for the pulse of the carotid artery in the throat, and then grunted with relief. He picked up the tiny bow and snapped it in his hands and threw the pieces aside, then with his hunting knife he cut the leather thong around the Bushman’s forehead and one at a time broke the poisoned arrowheads from their shafts, and handling them with extreme care threw them as far from him as he could.
As he rolled the Bushman on to his belly, he shouted at Hendrick to bring the leather thongs from his saddle-bag. He trussed the captive securely, surprised at his perfect muscular development and at the graceful little feet and hands. He knotted the leather thongs at wrist and elbow, and at knee and ankle, and pulled the knots so tight that they bit deeply into the bright amber skin.
Then he picked up the Bushman in one hand, as though he were a doll, and slung him over the saddle. The movement revived the Bushman and he lifted his head and opened his eyes. They were the colour of new honey, and the whites were smoky yellow. It was like looking into the eyes of a trapped leopard – so ferocious that Lothar stepped back involuntarily.
‘They are animals,’ he said, and Hendrick nodded.
‘Worse than animals, for they have the cunning of a man without being human.’
Lothar took the reins and led his exhausted steed back to where they had left the wounded Vuil Lippe.
The others had rolled him in a grey woollen blanket and laid him on a sheepskin. Clearly they were waiting on Lothar to attend to him, but Lothar was reluctant to involve himself. He knew that Vuil Lippe was beyond any help he could give, and he put off the moment by dragging the bound Bushman out of the saddle and dropping him on the sandy earth. The little body curled up defensively, and Lothar hobbled his horse and went slowly to join the circle around the blanket-wrapped form.
He could see immediately that the poison was acting swiftly. One side of Lippe’s face was grotesquely swollen and laced with furious purple lines. One eye was closed by the swelling, and the lid looked like an over-ripe grape, shining and black. The other eye was wide open but the pupil was shrunken to a pinprick. He made no sign of recognition as Lothar stooped over him and had probably already lost his sight. He was breathing with extreme difficulty, fighting wildly for each breath as the poison paralysed his lungs.
Lothar touched his forehead and the skin was cold and clammy as that of a reptile. Lothar knew that Hendrick and the others were watching him. On many occasions they had seen him dress a bullet wound, set a broken leg, draw a rotten aching tooth, and perform all manner of minor surgery. They were waiting for him to do something for the dying man, and their expectations and his own helplessness infuriated Lothar.
Suddenly Lippe uttered a strangled cry and began to shake like an epileptic, his single open eye rolled back into his skull, showing the yellow blood-shot white, and his body arched under the blanket.
‘Convulsions,’ said Lothar, ‘like a mamba bite. It won’t be long now.’
The dying man bit down, grinding his teeth together, and his swollen protruding tongue was caught between them. He chewed on his tongue, mincing it to ribbons while Lothar tried desperately and futilely to prise his jaws open, and the blood poured down the Hottentot’s own throat into his semi-paralysed lungs and he choked and moaned through his locked jaws.
His body arched in another rigid convulsion, and there was a spluttering explosion beneath the blanket as his racked body voided itself. The sweet faecal stench was nauseating in the heat. It was a long-drawn-out and messy death, and when it was over at last, it left those hardened men shaken and morose.
They scraped a shallow grave and rolled Vuil Lippe’s corpse, still in the soiled grey blanket, into it. Then they hastily covered it, as though to be rid of their own loathing and horror.
One of them built a small fire of brush twigs, and brewed a canteen of coffee. Lothar fetched the half-bottle of Cape brandy from his saddle-bag. As they passed it from hand to hand, they avoided looking at where the Bushman lay curled naked in the sand.
&
nbsp; They drank the coffee in silence, squatting in a circle, and then Vark Jan, the Khoisan Hottentot who spoke the San language, flicked his coffee grounds on to the fire and stood up.
He crossed to where the San lay and picked him up by his bound wrists, forcing his arms high behind him as they bore his full weight. He carried him back to the fire and picked out a burning twig. Still holding the San dangling from one hand, he touched the naked glans of his penis with the glowing tip of the twig. The San gasped and wriggled wildly and a blister formed miraculously on the skin of his genitals. It looked like a soft silver slug.
The men around the fire laughed, and in their laughter was the sound of their loathing and their terror of the death by poison, and their sorrow for their companion, of their craving for vengeance and the sadistic need to inflict pain and humiliation, the worst that they could devise.
Lothar felt himself shaken by the quality of that laughter, felt the insecure foundations of his humanity totter, and the same animal passions arise in him. With a supreme effort he forced them back. He rose to his feet. He knew he could not prevent what was about to happen, just as you cannot drive hungry lions from their fresh kill. They would turn on him if he tried.
He averted his eyes from the Bushman’s face, from those wild haunted eyes. It was clear that he knew that death awaited him, but even he could not guess at the manner of it. Instead Lothar looked at the faces of his own men, and he felt sickened and soiled by what he saw. Their features seemed distorted as though seen through a poorly glazed window, thickened and smeared with lust.
He thought that after the Bushman had been mounted by each of them in turn, ravished as though he were a woman, he would probably welcome what awaited him at the very end.
‘So.’ Lothar tried to keep his expression neutral, but his voice was hoarse with disgust. ‘I am returning to the wagons now. The San is yours, but I must know if he has seen or has heard of the white girl. He must answer that one question. That is all.’
Lothar went to his horse and mounted. He rode away towards the wagons without looking back. Just once, far behind, he heard a cry of such outrage and agony that it made his skin prickle, but then it was muted and lost on the moan of the desert wind.
Much later when his men rode up to the wagons, Lothar was lying under the side awning of his living wagon, reading his faithful old copy of Goethe by the light of a hurricane lantern – stained and battered, it had sustained him a hundred times before when the substance of his being had been drawn thin.
The laughter of his men as they dismounted and unsaddled had a fat, satisfied sound, like that of men who had well feasted and drunk, and were replete. Swart Hendrick came to where he lay, swaggering as though he had taken wine, and the front of his breeches was speckled with black drops of dried blood.
‘The San had not seen a white woman, but there was something strange and unexplained that he had heard whispered at the fire when they met other San in the desert; a tale of a woman and a child from a strange land where the sun never shines, who lived with two old people of the San.’
Lothar came up on his elbow. He remembered the two little Bushmen he had seen with the girl.
‘Where? Did he say where?’ he demanded eagerly.
‘There is a place, deep in the Kalahari, that is sacred to all the San. He gave us the direction—’
‘Where, Hendrick, damn you. Where?’
‘A long journey, fifteen days of their travel.’
‘What is this place? How will we know it?’
‘That,’ Hendrick admitted sadly, ‘he did not say. His will to stay alive was not as great as we thought it might be. He died before he could tell us.’
‘Tomorrow we will turn in that direction,’ Lothar ordered.
‘There are the other San that we lost today. With fresh horses we might catch them before sundown tomorrow. They have women with them—’
‘No!’ Lothar snarled at him. ‘We go on towards this sacred place in the wilderness.’
When the great bald mountain rose abruptly out of the plain, Lothar believed at first that it must be some trick of the desert light.
He knew of no description in the folklore or verbal history of the desert tribes to warn that the existence of such a place was possible. The only white men who had travelled this country – Livingstone and Oswell on their route to the discovery of Lake Ngami, and Anderson and Galton on their hunting forays – had made no mention of such a mountain in their writing.
Thus Lothar doubted what he was seeing in the uncertain evening light, and the sunset was so laden with dust, so garish and theatrical as to heighten the effect of a stage illusion.
However, in the first light of the next day when he looked for it eagerly, the silhouette was still there, dark and clearly incised against a sky that was turned to mother-of-pearl by the coming of the dawn. As he rode towards it, so it rose higher and still higher from the plain, and finally detached itself from the earth and floated in the sky on its own shimmering mirage.
When at last Lothar stood beneath the tall cliffs, he did not doubt that this was the sacred place of which the San had spoken as he died, and his conviction was made complete when he scrambled up the scree slopes and discovered the wondrous paintings upon the sheltered cliff face.
‘This is the place, but it’s so extensive,’ Lothar realized. ‘If the girl is here, we might never find her. So many caves and valleys and hidden places – we could search for ever.’
He divided his men again and sent them on foot to explore and search the nearest slopes of the mountain. Then he left the wagons in a shaded grove in the charge of Swart Hendrick, whom he mistrusted least, and taking only a spare horse set out to circumnavigate the mountain’s bulk.
After two days of travel, during which he kept notes and sketched a rough map with the aid of his pocket compass, he could estimate with some certainty that the mountain was probably about thirty miles long and four or five miles wide, a long extended ridge of gneiss and intruding sandstone strata.
He rounded the eastern extremity of the mountain and deduced from his compass readings that he was heading back along the opposite side from where he had left the wagons. Whenever some feature of the cliffs caught his attention, a fissure or a complex of caves, for instance, he hobbled the horses and climbed up to explore.
Once he discovered a small spring of clear sweet water welling up from the base of the cliff and trickling into a natural rock basin. He filled his water canteens, then he stripped and washed his clothes. At last he bathed, gasping with delight at the cold, and went on refreshed.
At other places he found more of the San paintings covering the rock face, and he marvelled at the accuracy of the artist’s eye and hand that depicted the shape of eland and buffalo so that even his hunter’s eye could find no fault. However, these were all ancient signs and he found nothing of recent human presence.
The forest and plain below the cliffs teemed with game, and he had no difficulty in shooting a plump young gazelle or antelope each day and keeping himself in fresh meat. On the third evening, he killed an impala ewe and made a kebab of the tripes and kidneys and liver, impaling them on a green twig and grilling them over the coals.
However, the scent of fresh meat attracted unwelcome attention to his camp, and he had to spend the rest of the night standing by the horses with his rifle in his hand while a hungry lion grunted and moaned in the darkness just outside the circle of firelight. He examined the beast’s tracks in the morning and found that it was an adult male, past its prime and with a damaged limb that forced it to limp heavily.
‘A dangerous brute,’ he muttered, and hoped that it had moved away. But this was a vain hope, he discovered that evening when the horses began to fidget and whicker as the sun set. The lion must have followed him at a distance during the day, and emboldened by the gathering dusk, it again closed in and began to prowl around his camp fire.
‘Another sleepless night.’ He resigned himself and heaped wood on
the fire. Preparing to stand guard, he pulled on his overcoat, and suffered another minor irritation. One of the brass buttons was missing, which would let in the cold of the desert night.
It was a long, unpleasant night, but a little after midnight the lion seemed at last to tire of its fruitless vigil and it moved away. He heard it utter one last string of moaning grunts at the head of the grassy vlei half a mile away, then there was silence.
Wearily Lothar checked the head halters on the horses and then went to the fire and rolled himself in his blankets, still fully dressed, and keeping his boots on. Within minutes he had fallen into a deep dreamless sleep.
He came awake with bewildering suddenness and found himself sitting up with the rifle in his hands, and the din of an angry lion’s thunderous roars echoing in his ears.
The fire had died down to white ash but the tree-tops were black against the paling morning sky. Lothar threw off his blankets and scrambled to his feet. The horses were stiff with alarm, their ears pricked forward, staring towards the open glade whose silver grasses just showed through the screen of mopani forest.
The lion roared again, and he judged it as a half-mile distant, in the direction in which the horses were staring. So clearly does the roar of a lion carry in the night, that an inexperienced ear would have reckoned it much closer and been unable to pinpoint the direction, for it played ventriloquist tricks upon the ear.
Once more the awful cacophony filled the forest. Lothar had never heard one of these beasts behaving like this, such sustained anger and frustration in those great blasts of sound, and then his head jerked with shock. In the lull between this roar and the next, he heard another unmistakable sound, a human scream of utmost terror.
Lothar reacted without thought. He seized the head halter of his favourite hunting horse and leaped to its bare back. He socked his heels into its ribs, urging it into a gallop, and guided it with his knees, turning it towards the head of the glade. He lay forward on the horse’s neck as the low branches lashed past his head, but as he broke into the open glade, he straightened and looked about him frantically.