The Sunbird

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘Louren!’ I screamed, and then I was running also, armed with only a shotgun, racing to head the charge of a wounded bull elephant.

  ‘Here!’ I screamed at it as I ran. ‘Here!’ Trying to lead it off him, in the corner of my vision I saw Louren on hands and knees crawling painfully towards his rifle.

  ‘Yah! Yay!’ I screamed with all the strength of my lungs, and the bull checked his charge, his head swinging towards me, piggy eyes seeking me, trunk questing for my scent.

  I threw up the shotgun, and at thirty yards’ range I aimed for his little eyes, hoping to blind him.

  Blam! Blam! I fired left and right into his face, and he came at me. I felt a vast sense of relief as his charge exploded towards me. I had taken him off Louren - that was all that counted. With clumsy fingers I groped for fresh cartridges, knowing that before I could reload he would be upon me.

  ‘Run, Ben, run!’ Louren’s voice, high above the ground-thudding charge of the bull. But I found my legs would not function, and I stood in the path of the charge, groping stupidly for cartridges which were useless as thrown peppercorns against this grey mountain of flesh.

  The blast of Louren’s rifle beat against my numbed brain, once - twice, it crashed out and like an avalanche the grey mountain fell towards me, dead already, the brain shattered like an overripe fruit at the passage of the heavy bullet.

  My feet were rooted to the earth, I could not move, could not dodge, and the outflung trunk hit me with savage force. I felt myself thrown through air, and then the cruel impact of earth and my brain burst into bright colours and stabbing lights as I went out.

  ‘You silly bastard! Oh, you silly brave little bastard.’ I heard Louren’s voice speaking to me down a long dark tunnel, and the sound of it echoed strangely in my head. Cool wetness splashed over my face, blessed wetness on my lips and I opened my eyes. Louren was sitting on the ground, my head was cradled in his lap and he was splashing water from the bottle into my face.

  ‘Who are you calling a bastard?’ I croaked up at him, and the expression of relief that flooded over his worried features was one of the most satisfying things I have ever seen.

  I was stiff and sore, bruised of shoulder and across the small of my back, and there was a lump above my temple that was too painful to touch.

  ‘Can you walk?’ Louren fussed over me.

  ‘I can try.’ It wasn’t too painful, and I even found the inclination to photograph the huge dead beast as it knelt in a prayerful attitude with the head supported on the curved yellow tusks. Louren and the bushman sat on its head.

  ‘We will camp tonight at the Water-In-The-Rocks,’ Xhai told me, ‘and tomorrow we will return and take the teeth.’

  ‘How far is it?’ I asked dubiously.

  ‘Close!’ Xhai assured me. ‘Very close.’ And I scowled at him uncertainly. I had heard him use the same words to describe a march of fifty miles.

  ‘It had bloody well better be,’ I said in English, and to my surprise it was much closer than I had expected - and a lot of other things I had not expected either.

  We crossed one ridge with me hobbling along on Louren’s arm and then came out on a wide granite sheet, a great curved dome of rock almost four acres in extent. I took one look at it, at the lines of shallow rounded holes that dimpled the entire surface, and I let out a whoop of joy. Suddenly I no longer needed Louren’s support, and both of us ran down onto the stone floor, chortling with glee, as we examined the regular lines of worn depressions.

  ‘It must have been a big one, Ben,’ Louren exulted, he made a guess at the number of holes. ‘A thousand?’

  ‘More!’ I said. ‘More like two thousand.’

  I paused then, imagining the long regular lines of naked slaves kneeling on the rock floor, each beside one of the smooth depressions, each of them linked to his neighbours by the iron slave chains, each of them with a heavy iron pestle in his hands, pounding away at the gold-bearing ore in the stone mortar between his knees.

  I saw in my imagination the slave masters walking along the lines, the leather whips in their hands as they checked that the rock was crushed to a fine powder. I saw the endless columns of slaves with ore baskets balanced on their heads coming up from the workings. All this had happened here nearly 2,000 years before.

  ‘I wonder where the mine is.’ Louren was paralleling my thoughts.

  ‘And the water?’ I added. ‘They’d need water to wash the gold out.’

  ‘The hell with the water,’ Louren shouted. ‘It’s the mine I want, those old boys only worked values of three ounces and over and they stopped at water level - there’s a bloody treasure house around here somewhere.’

  This was how all the ancient mines had been destroyed. It was a credit to the skill of the ancient metallurgists that the site of nearly every modern mine in central Africa had been discovered by them 2,000 years before. The modern miners ripped out all trace of the ancient workings in their haste to expose the abandoned reef. I made a vow that at the least I would be first into this one, before the vandals with their drills and dynamite.

  The water was at the bottom of a fifty-foot well, cut cleanly through the living rock, its walls lined with masonry. It was the finest example of an ancient well I had ever seen; clearly it had been kept in good repair by the bushmen, and I gloated over it while Xhai fetched a raw-hide rope and leather bucket from a hiding place among the rocks. He brought the bucket up brimming with clear water in which floated a few dead frogs and a drowned bush rat. I made a resolution to boil every drop before it passed my lips.

  Louren spent a full thirty seconds in admiring the well, before he set off into the narrow valley between the two ridges of granite. I watched him disappear amongst the trees searching diligently, and twenty minutes later his faint shouts drifted up to me.

  ‘Ben! Come here! Quickly!’ I dragged myself off the coping of the well and limped down into the valley.

  ‘Here it is, Ben.’ Louren was wild with excitement and I was struck again by the power that gold has to quicken the most sluggish pulse, and to put the glitter of avarice in even the most world-weary eye. I am not a materialistic person, but the lure and magic of it quickened my own breathing as I stood beside Louren and we looked upon the mine of the ancients.

  It was not an impressive sight in itself, a shallow depression, a trench sunk about three or four feet below the level of the surrounding earth, its banks gently rounded, it meandered away amongst the trees like a footpath that had been worn into the earth.

  ‘Open stope,’ Louren told me. ‘They followed the strike of the reef.’

  ‘And back-filled.’ I commented on the peculiar habit that the ancients had of filling in all their workings before abandoning them. This shallow trench was caused by the subsidence of the loose soil with which they had filled it.

  ‘Come on,’ said Louren. ‘Let’s follow it.’

  For a mile and a half we followed the old stope through the forest before it petered out.

  ‘If only we could find one of their dumps,’ Louren muttered as we searched the rank vegetation for a pile of loose rock. ‘Or at least a piece of the ore that they overlooked.’

  My back was hurting so I sat on a fallen log to rest, and left Louren to continue the search. He moved away through the trees leaving me alone, and I could enjoy the sense of history which enveloped me when I was alone in a place such as this.

  The water level in the well was fifty feet, so I guessed that this was the depth to which the ancients had worked their stope. They did not have the pumps or equipment to evacuate the workings, and as soon as water started pouring in they refilled it and left to find another reef.

  This mine had been an open trench, one and a half miles long and fifty feet deep by six feet wide, hacked from the earth with adzes of iron and iron wedges pounded into the grain of the rock with stone hammers. When the rock was hard enough to resist this method, then they built fires upon it and poured water mixed with sour wine on the heated surface to s
hatter it. This was the same method that Hannibal used to break up the boulders that blocked the passage of his elephants across the Alps - a Carthaginian trick, you might call it. From the sheet of reet they prised lumps of gold quartz and packed it into baskets to be hauled to the surface on raw-hide ropes.

  Using these methods they removed an estimated 700 tons of fine gold from workings spread over 300,000 square miles of central and southern Africa, together with vast quantities of iron and copper and tin.

  ‘That’s 22 million ounces of gold at $40 an ounce, 880 million dollars.’ I worked it out aloud, then added, ‘And that’s a big loaf of bread.’

  ‘Ben, where are you?’ Louren was coming back through the trees. ‘I found a piece of the reef.’ He had a lump of rock in his hand and he handed it to me.

  ‘What do you make of that?’

  ‘Blue sugar quartz,’ I said. And I licked at it to wet the surface, then held it to catch the sunlight. ‘Wow!’ I exclaimed as the native gold sparkled wetly back at me, filling the cracks and tiny fissures in the quartz like butter in a sandwich.

  ‘Wow, indeed!’ Louren agreed. ‘This is good stuff. I’ll send a couple of my boys in to peg the whole area.’

  ‘Lo, don’t forget about me,’ I said, and he frowned quickly.

  ‘You’ll be cut in on it, Ben. Have I ever tried—’

  ‘Don’t be a clot, Lo. I didn’t mean that. I just don’t want your rock hounds tearing up the countryside before I’ve had a chance to go over it.’

  ‘Okay, Ben. I promise,’ he laughed. ‘You can be here when we reopen the workings.’ He juggled the lump of quartz in his hand. ‘Let’s get back, I want to pan this and get some idea of its value.’

  Using one of the stone mortars in the granite cap and a lump of ironstone as a pestle, Louren pounded a piece of the quartz to a fine white powder. This he collected in our cooking pot, and with well-water washed off the powdered stone. Swirling the contents of the pot with an easy circular motion, letting a little spill over the rim of the pot with each turn. It took him fifteen minutes to separate the ‘tail’ of gold. It lay curled around the bottom of the pot, greasy shiny yellow.

  ‘Pretty,’ I said.

  ‘They don’t come prettier!’ Louren grinned. ‘This stuff will go five ounces to the ton.’

  ‘You are an avaricious bastard, aren’t you,’ I teased him.

  ‘Put it this way, Ben,’ he was still grinning, ‘the profits from this will probably keep your Institute running for another twenty years. Don’t kick it, partner, money isn’t the root of all evil if you use it right.’

  ‘I won’t kick it,’ I promised him.

  We camped that night beside the well, feasting on boiled elephant tongue and potatoes and keeping a bonfire going to compensate for our lack of blankets. We spent the following morning cutting out the tusks. These we buried beneath a huge pile of rocks to keep off the hyenas, and it was after noon before we started back for the Land-Rover.

  Night caught us out again, but we reached the Land-Rover in the middle of the following morning. I had blisters on my heels the size of grapes and my lumps and bruises ached abominably. I collapsed thankfully into the passenger seat of the Land-Rover.

  ‘Up to this moment I have never truly appreciated the invention of the internal combustion engine,’ I announced gravely. ‘You can take me home now, James.’

  We left Xhai and his small tribe to their eternal wanderings in the wilderness and we arrived back at the City of the Moon eight days after we left it. We were blackened by the sun and an accumulation of dirt, we had sprouted beards, and our hair was stiff with dust and grime. Louren’s beard came out a burnished red-gold that glistened in the sunlight.

  He had been AWOL for three days, and the pack was clamorous. A tall pile of messages waited for him in the radio shack, and before he could shave or bath he had to spend an hour on the radio taking care of the most urgent matters that had arisen in his absence.

  ‘I should get on back to the salt mines right away,’ he told me as he came out of the shack. ‘It’s four-thirty. I could make it.’ He hesitated a moment, then his resolve hardened. ‘No, damn it! I’m going to steal one more night. Get out the Glen Grant while I take a bath.’

  ‘Now you are talking sense.’ I laughed.

  ‘All the way, partner.’ He punched my shoulder.

  ‘All the way, Lo,’ I assured him.

  We talked a lot, and sang a little, and drank whisky until after midnight.

  ‘Bed!’ said Louren then, and rose to go, but suddenly he paused. ‘Ben you promised to let me have some photographs of the “white king” painting to take back with me.’

  ‘Sure, Lo.’ I stood up a little unsteadily and went through into the office. I took a sheaf of nine-by-six-inch glossy prints from my files and went back with them to Louren. Standing under the light he shuffled through them.

  ‘What’s wrong with this one, Ben?’ he asked suddenly, and handed it to me.

  ‘What? I can’t see anything.’

  ‘The face, Ben. There is a mark.’

  I saw it then; a faint shadowy cross which marred the death-white face of the king. I studied it a moment. It puzzled me. I hadn’t noticed it before - like a dark grey hot cross bun.

  ‘It’s probably a flaw in the printing, Lo,’ I guessed. ‘Is it on the others?’ He glanced through the other prints quickly.

  ‘No. Just that one.’

  I handed it back to him. ‘Just a faulty print,’ I said.

  ‘Okay.’ Louren accepted my explanation. ‘Goodnight.’

  I poured myself a nightcap while Sally and the others trooped off after Louren, and I drank it slowly, sitting alone, running over in my mind the plans that Louren and I had formulated for the thorough investigation of the cavern.

  I will admit that I never gave the mark on the white king’s face another thought. My excuse is that I was more than a little drunk.

  The next two months passed swiftly. Ral and I devoted ourselves to a thorough excavation of the floor of the cavern.

  The results were surprising only in their paucity. The cavern had never been used for human habitation, there was no midden or hearth level. We found an accumulation of animal detritus that extended down to bed-rock. On the bedrock itself we found a single square block of dressed stone, and that was the total bag.

  Our excavations had given the cavern a forlorn and gutted appearance, and the bed-rock was uneven limestone, so I had the dig refilled and neatly levelled. Then we used the ancient blocks to lay a pavement around the emerald pool. I saw this as a concession to the convenience of the thousands of future visitors who would come to view this wonderful gallery of bushman art once its existence was known to the world.

  As he had promised, Louren radioed me when his company was ready to begin re-opening the ancient mine we had discovered on the hunt for the elephant. A helicopter fetched me and I spent three weeks with the engineers who were doing the work.

  The reef was there below the water-table as we had hoped, and although its values varied widely from place to place along its length, yet the average was exceptionally high. Secretly I was glad of my ten per cent interest in the mine, despite my non-materialist values. We recovered many hundreds of artefacts, mostly mining tools. There were badly rusted adzes and wedges, stone hammers, scraps of chain, a few well-preserved fibre baskets and the usual beads and pottery.

  Of these I was most pleased with the fibre baskets which enabled us to obtain a carbon-14 date from the laboratories. This was slightly prior to, if not concurrent with, the date of the great fire, and served to link the elephant mine with the City of the Moon.

  However, the most interesting find at the elephant mine was that of fifteen human skeletons lying like a string of beads along the stope at its deepest point. The arrangement of the bodies was so regular as to preclude the idea that they may have been killed in a rockfall. Although the skeletons had been flattened by the weight of earth from above, I was able to determin
e that five of them were female and ten were male. All of them were elderly, and one of them showed traces of arthritis, another had lost an arm between elbow and wrist but the bone had encysted, proving that it had not been a recent injury. Most of them had lost teeth. On all of them I found traces of iron chains, and the picture I had was that of fifteen elderly and infirm slaves laid deliberately along the bottom of the stope before it was filled.

  After supervising the cataloguing, packing and dispatch to the Institute of all these finds, I returned to the City of the Moon, and I went immediately to the cavern. As I had hoped, Sally was hard at work there. I do not think her pleasure was affected as she came to meet me and kissed me.

  ‘Oh, Ben. I’ve missed you.’ Then she launched immediately into a technical discussion, and while I made the right answers my thoughts were far from bushman paintings.

  I watched the way she crinkled her nose as she spoke, and the way she kept pushing her hair back from her cheek with the back of her hand, and my whole being throbbed with love of her. Down in my stomach I felt a squirming of dread. Our work at the City of the Moon was almost finished, soon we would be returning to Johannesburg and the hushed halls of the Institute. I wondered how this would affect Sally and me.

  ‘We’ll be leaving soon, Sal.’ I gave expression to my thoughts.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, immediately sobered. ‘The thought saddens me. I’ve been so happy here, I’m going to miss it.’

  We sat in silence for a while, then Sally stood up and went to stand before the portrait of the white king. She stared at it moodily, her arms folded tightly across her breast. - ‘We’ve learned so much here,’ she paused for a moment, and then went on, ‘and yet there was so much that was denied us. It was like chasing clouds, often I felt we were so close to having it in our hands.’ She shook her head, angrily. ‘There are so many secrets still locked away from us, Ben. Things we will never know.’

  She turned and came back to where I sat; she knelt in front of me with her hands on her knees, staring into my face.