by Wilbur Smith
At first our occupation of the cavern seriously affected the ecology of the local fauna, but as we hoped would happen, they soon adapted. Within days the birds were dropping down through the hole in the cavern roof to drink and bathe at the edge of the pool. Soon they ignored us as they went about their noisy and vigorous ablutions, shrieking and chattering and spraying water, while we paused in our labours to watch them.
Even the monkeys, driven by thirst, at last crept in through the rock passage to snatch a mouthful of water before darting away again. Rapidly these timid forays became bolder, until at last they were a positive nuisance, stealing our lunch, or any loose equipment that was left unguarded. We forgave them, for their antics were always appealing and entertaining.
They were wonderful days of satisfying work, good loving companionship, and the deep peace of that beautiful place. There was only one day on which anything happened to ruffle the surface of my happiness. As Sally and I were sitting below the portrait of our wonderful white king, I said: ‘They won’t be able to deny this, Sal. The bastards are going to have to change their narrow little minds now!’
She knew I was talking about the debunkers, the special pleaders, the politico-archaeologists, who could twist any evidence to fill the needs of their own beliefs, the ones who had castigated me and my books.
‘Don’t be so certain of that, Ben,’ Sally warned. ‘They will not accept this. I can hear their carping little voices now. It’s secondhand observation by bushmen, open to different interpretations - don’t you remember, Ben, how they accused the Abbe Breuil of retouching the paintings in the Brandberg?’
‘Yes. That’s the great pity of it - it is secondhand. When we show them the paintings of the fortified walls, they will say, “Yes, but where are the walls themselves?”’
‘And our king, our beautiful virile warrior king,’ she looked up at him, ‘they’ll emasculate him. He will become another “White Lady”. His war shield will become a bouquet of flowers, his milky white skin will change to ceremonial day, his fiery-red beard will suddenly turn into a scarf or a necklace, and when they reproduce his portrait it will be subtly altered in all those ways. The Encyclopedia Britannica will still read,’ she changed her voice mimicking a pedantic and pompous lecturer. ‘“Modern scientific opinion is that the ruins are the work of some Bantu group, possibly the Shona or Maka-lang.”’
‘I wish - oh, how I wish we had found some definite proof,’ I said miserably. I was facing for the first time the prospect of delivering our discovery to my learned brothers in science, and the idea was as appealing as climbing into a pit full of black mambas. I stood up. ‘Let’s have a swim, Sal.’
We swam side by side, an easy breaststroke, back and forth across the pool. When we climbed out to sit in the spot of bright sunlight that fell from the roof above, I tried to alleviate my unhappiness by changing the subject. I touched Sally’s arm, and with all the finesse of a wounded rhinoceros, I blurted out, ‘Will you marry me, Sally?’
She turned a startled face to me, her cheeks and eyelashes still bejewelled with water droplets, and she stared at me for fully ten seconds before she began to laugh.
‘Oh, Ben, you funny old-fashioned thing! This is the twentieth century. Just because you done me wrong - doesn’t mean you have to marry me!’ And before I could protest or explain she had stood up and dived once again into the emerald pool.
For the rest of the day she was completely occupied with her paints and brushes, and she had no time to even look in my direction, let alone talk to me. The message was received my end loud and clear - there were some areas of discussion that Sally had put the death curse on. Matrimony was one of them.
It was a very bad day, but I learned the lesson well, and decided to clutch at what happiness I now had without pressing for more.
That evening Larkin had another message from Louren:
‘Your samples 1-16 give C14 average result of 1620 years ±100. Congratulations. Looks good. When do I get in on the secret? Louren.’
I perked up at this news. Assuming our old bushman artist had been an eye-witness of the subjects he had drawn, then somewhere between AD 200 and AD 400 an armed Phoenician warrior had led his armies and war elephants across this beloved land of mine. I felt guilty about excluding Louren from the secrets of the cavern, but it was still too soon. I wanted to have it to myself a little longer - to gloat upon it, to have its peace and beauty to myself, unsullied by other eyes. More than that, it had become the temple of my love for Sally. Like the old bushmen, it had become a very holy place to me.
On the following day, it was as though Sally was determined to make up for the unhappiness she had caused me. She was teasing, and loving, and mischievous all at once. At noon with the beam of sunlight burning down on us. we made love on the rocks beside the pool, Sally skilfully and gently taking the initiative once again. It was a shattering and mystic experience that scoured the sadness from the cup of my soul and filled it to the brim with happiness and peace.
We lay together softly entwined, murmuring sleepily, when suddenly I was aware of another presence in the cavern. Alarm flared through me, and I struggled up on one elbow and looked to the entrance tunnel.
A golden-brown human figure stood in the gloomy mouth of the tunnel. He was dressed in a short leather loin-cloth, a quiver and short bow stood up behind his shoulder, and around his neck hung a necklace of ostrich egg-shell beads and black monkey beans. The figure was tiny, the size of a ten-year-old child, but the face was that of a mature man. Slanted eyes, and high flat cheekbones gave it an Asiatic appearance, but the nose was flattened and the lips were full and voluptuously chiselled. The small domed skull was covered by a pelt of tight black curls.
For an instant we looked into each other’s eyes and then, like the flash of a bird’s wing, the little manikin was gone, vanished into the dark passage in the rock.
‘What is it?’ Sally stirred against me.
‘Bushman,’ I said. ‘Here in the cavern. Watching us.’
She sat up quickly, and peered fearfully about her.
‘Where?’
‘He’s gone now. Get dressed - quickly!’
‘Is he dangerous, Ben?’ Her voice was husky.
‘Yes. Very!’ I was pulling on my clothes quickly, trying to decide on our best course of action, running over in my mind the words I would speak. Although it was a little rusty I found the language was still on my tongue, thanks to sessions of practice with Timothy Mageba. They would be northern bushmen here, not Kalahari, the languages were similar but distinctly different.
‘They wouldn’t attack us, would they, Ben?’ Sally was dressed.
‘If we do the wrong thing now, they will. We don’t know how holy this place is to them. We mustn’t frighten them, they have been persecuted and hunted for 2,000 years.’
‘Oh, Ben.’ She moved closer to me, and even in my own alarm I enjoyed her reliance upon me.
‘They wouldn’t - kill us, would they?’
‘They are wild bushmen. Sally. If you threaten or molest a wild thing it will attack you. I’ve got to get an opportunity to talk to them.’ I looked around for something to use as a shield, something strong enough to turn a reed arrow with a poisoned tip. Poison that would inflict a lingering but certain death of the most unspeakable agony.
I selected the leather theodolite case, and tore it open along the seams with my hands, flattening it out to give it maximum area.
‘Follow me down the passage, Sal. Keep close.’
Her hand was on my shoulder as I led her slowly along the rock passage, using the four-cell torch to search every dark corner and recess before moving on. The light alarmed the bats and they fluttered and squeaked about our heads. The grip of Sally’s hand on my shoulder became painfully tight, but we reached the tree-trunk that guarded the entrance to the cavern.
We crouched by the narrow slit between rock and tree-trunk, and the bright sunlight beyond was painful to my eyes. Minutely I examined each tr
ee-trunk in the grove, each tuft of grass, each hollow or irregularity of earth - and there was nothing. But they were there, I knew, hidden, waiting with the patience and concentration of the earth’s most skilful hunters.
We were prey, there was no escaping this fact. The accepted laws of behaviour did not apply out here on the fringe of the Kalahari, I remembered the fate of the crew of a South African Air Force Dakota that force-landed in the desert ten years before. They hunted down the family of bushmen that did it and I flew to Gaberones to interpret at the trial. In the dock they wore the parachute silk as clothing, and their faces were childlike, trusting, without guilt or guile as they answered my questions.
‘Yes. We killed them,’ they said. Locked in a modern gaol, like caged wild birds, they were dead within twelve months -all of them. The memory was chilling now and I thrust it aside.
‘Now listen to me carefully, Sally. You must stay here. No matter what happens. I will go out to them. Talk to them. If ,’ I choked on the words, and cleared my throat, ‘if they hit me with an arrow I’ll have half an hour or so before—’ I rephrased the sentence, ‘—I’ll have plenty of time to get the Land-Rover and come back for you. You can drive. You’ll have no trouble following the tracks we made back to the Makarikari Pan.’
‘Ben - don’t go. Oh God, Ben - please.’
‘They’ll wait, Sal - until dark. I have to go now, in the daylight.’
‘Ben—’
‘Wait here. Whatever happens, wait here.’ I shrugged off her hands and stepped to the opening.
‘Peace,’ I called to them in their own tongue. ‘There is no fight between us.’
I took a step out into the sunlight.
‘I am a friend.’
Another slow step, down over the twisted roots of the wild fig, holding the flattened leather case low against my hip.
‘Friend!’ I called again. ‘I am of your people. I am of your clan.’
I went slowly down into the silent hostile grove. There was no response to my words, no sound nor movement. Ahead of me lay a fallen tree. I began sliding towards it, my guts a hard ball of tension and fear.
‘I carry no weapon,’ I called, and the grove was quiet and sinister in the hush of the afternoon.
I had almost reached the fallen tree, when I heard the twang of the bow and I dived for the shelter of the dead trunk. Close beside my head the arrow fluted, humming in the silence, and I went down. My face was pressed into the dry earth, my heart frozen with fear at the close passage of such hideous death.
I heard footsteps, running, from behind me and I rolled over on my side to defend myself.
Sally was running down the wild fig roots towards me, ignoring my instructions, her face a pale mask of deathly terror, her mouth open in a silent scream. She had seen me fall and lie still, and the thought of me dead had triggered her panic. Now as I moved she realized her mistake, and she faltered in her run, suddenly aware of her own vulnerability.
‘Get back, Sal,’ I yelled. ‘Get back!’ Her uncertainty turned to dismay and she stopped, stranded halfway between the cavern entrance and my dead tree-trunk, undecided on which way to move.
In the edge of my vision I saw the little yellow bushman rise from a patch of pale grass. There was an arrow notched to his bow and the feathered flights were drawn back to his cheek as he aimed. He was fifty paces from where Sally hovered, and he held his aim for a second.
I dived across the space that separated Sally from me at the instant the bushman released the arrow. The arrow and I flew on an interception course, two sides of a triangle with Sally at the apex.
I saw the humming blur of the arrow flash in belly-high at Sally and I knew I could not reach her before it struck. I threw the flattened leather case with a despairing underhand flick of my wrist as I dived towards her. It cart-wheeled lazily, spinning in the air - and the arrow slapped into it. The deadly iron tip, with the poison-smeared barbs, bit into the tough leather of the case. Arrow and case fell harmlessly at Sally’s feet, and I picked her up in my arms and spinning on my heels, doubled up under her weight. I raced back towards the cover of the dead tree-trunk.
The bushman was still on his knees in the grass ahead of me He reached over his shoulder and pulled another arrow from his quiver, in one smoothly practised movement he had notched and drawn.
This time there was no hope of dodging, and I ran on grimly. The bow-string sang, the arrow flew, and instantly I felt a violent jerk at my neck. I knew I was hit, and with Sally still in my arms we fell behind the dead tree-trunk.
‘I think I’m hit, Sal.’ I could feel the arrow dangling against my chest as I rolled away from her. ‘Break off the shaft - don’t try and pull it out against the barbs.’
We lay facing each other, our eyes only a few inches apart Strangely, now that I was a dead man I felt no fear,,The thing was done, even if I was hit a dozen more times, my fate would be unaltered. It remained only to get Sally safely away before the poison did its work.
She reached out with shaking hands and took the frail reed arrow, lifting it gingerly - and then her face cleared.
‘Your collar, Ben, it’s lodged in the collar of your jacket. It hasn’t touched you.’
Relief washed through me as I ran my hands up the shaft of the arrow, and found that I was not dead. Carefully lying on my side while Sally held the tip of the arrow away from my flesh, I shrugged off my light khaki jacket. For a moment I stared in revulsion at the hand-forged iron arrow-head with the sticky toffee-coloured material clogging the wicked barbs, then I threw jacket and arrow aside.
‘God, that was close,’ I whispered. ‘Listen, Sal, I think there is only one of them here. He’s a young man, panicky, probably as afraid as we are. I will try to talk to him again.’
I wriggled forward against the reassuring solidity of the dead tree, and raised my voice in the most persuasive tones that would pass my parched throat.
‘I am your friend. Though you fly your arrows at me, I will not war with you. I have lived with your people, I am one with you. How else do I speak your language?’
A deathly, impenetrable silence.
‘How else do I speak the tongue of the people?’ I asked again, and strained my ears for a sound.
Then the bushman spoke, his voice a high-pitched fluting, broken up with soft ducking and clicking sounds.
‘The devils of the forest speak in many tongues. I close my ears to your deceits.’
‘I am no devil. I have lived as one of yours. Did you never hear of the one named the Sunbird,’ I used my bushman name, ‘who stayed with the people of Xhai and became their brother?’
Another long silence followed, but now I sensed that the little bushman was undecided, puzzled, no longer afraid and deadly.
‘Do you know of the old man named Xhai?’
‘I know of him,’ admitted the bushman, and I breathed a little easier.
‘Did you hear of the one they called the Sunbird?’
Another long pause, then reluctantly, ‘I have heard men speak of it.’
‘I am that one.’
Now the silence went on for ten minutes or more. I knew the bushman was considering my claim from every possible angle. At last he spoke again.
‘Xhai and I hunt together this season. Even now he comes, before darkness he will be here. We will wait for him.’
‘We will wait for him,’ I agreed.
‘But if you move I will kill you,’ warned the bushman, and I took him at his word.
Xhai the old bushman came to my shoulder, and heaven knows I am no giant. He had the characteristically flattened features, with high cheekbones and oriental eyes, but his skin was dry and wrinkled, like an old yellow raisin. The wrinkling extended over his entire body as though he were covered with brittle parchment. The little peppercorns of hair on his scalp were smoky-grey with age, but his teeth were startling white and perfect, and his eyes were black and sparkling. I had often thought that they were pixie eyes, alive with mischief and intell
igent curiosity.
When I told him how his friend had tried to kill us, he thought it an excellent joke and went off into little grunting explosions of laughter, at the same time shyly covering his mouth with one hand. The younger bushman’s name was Ghal, and he was married to one of Xhai’s daughters, so Xhai felt free to josh him mercilessly.
‘Sunbird is a white ghost!’ he wheezed. ‘Shoot him, Ghal, quickly! Before he flies away.’ Overwhelmed by his own humour, Xhai staggered in mirth-racked circles giving an imitation of how he thought a ghost would look as it flew away. Ghal was very embarrassed and looked down at his feet as he shuffled them in the dust. I chuckled weakly, the sound of flighted arrows very fresh in my memory.
Xhai stopped laughing abruptly, and demanded anxiously, ‘Sunbird. have you got tobacco?’
‘Oh. my God!’ 1 said in English.
‘What is it?’ Sally was alarmed by my tone, expecting that something else horrifying had happened.
‘Tobacco,’ I said. ‘We haven’t any,’ Neither Sally nor I used the stuff, but it is very precious to a bushman.
‘Louren left a box of cigars in the Land-Rover.’ Sally reminded me ‘Is that any use?’
Both Ghal and Xhai were intrigued with the aluminium cylinders in which the Romeo and Juliette cigars were packed. After I showed them how to open them and remove the tobacco, they cooed and chattered with delight. Then Xhai sniffed the cigar like the true connoisseur he was, nodded approvingly and took a big bite. He chewed a while and then tucked the wad of sodden cigar up under his top lip. He passed the stub to Ghal who bit into it and followed Xhai’s example. The two of them squatted on their haunches, positively glowing with contentment and my heart went out to them. It took so little to make them happy.
They stayed with us that night, cooking on our fire a meal of bush-rats threaded on a stick like kebabs, and grilled over the open coals without gutting or removal of the skin. The hair frizzled off in the fire and stank like burning rags.
‘I think I’m going to throw up,’ murmured Sally palely as she watched the relish with which our two friends ate, but she didn’t.