The Sunbird

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘Wilfred Snell,’ said Eldridge earnestly, ‘is a monumental jackass. Where did he ever find a thousand Punic scrolls?’

  ‘Waiter,’ I called, ‘please bring us two large Cordon Argent brandies.’

  ‘Make that three,’ said Sally.

  As the brandy diffused a gentle warmth through my body, I listened to Eldridge Hamilton effusing about the scrolls and demanding of Sally information as to exactly where, when and how we had discovered them. I found myself beginning to like the man. It was true that he had teeth like the stumps of a pine forest devastated by fire, but then I am not a perfect physical specimen myself. It was also true that he had a weakness for Gilbey’s gin and pretty girls - but then he differed from me only in his choice of liquor, and who am I to hold that Glen Grant is in any way superior?

  No, I decided, despite my prejudices, I would be able to work with him, just as long as he kept his bony little claws off Sally.

  Eldridge followed us out a week after our return to the City of the Moon, and we met him at the airstrip. I was concerned that he might find the transition from a northern winter to our 110°F summer impaired his abilities. I need not have worried. He was one of those Englishmen who, solar topee cocked, go out in the midday sun without raising a sweat. His luggage consisted of a single small valise which contained his personal effects and a dozen large packing-cases filled with chemicals and equipment.

  I gave him the Grade ‘A’ tour of the site, trying without success to fan his interest in the city and the cavern. Eldridge was a single-minded specialist.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Jolly interesting - now where are the scrolls?’ I think even then he had doubts, but I took him into the archives and he purred like an angular old tomcat as he moved down the burdened stone shelves.

  ‘Ben,’ he said, ‘there’s just one thing still to settle. I write the paper on the actual scrolls, agreed?’ We are a strange breed, we work not for the gold but for the glory. Eldridge was making certain of his share.

  ‘Agreed.’ We shook hands.

  ‘Well then there is nothing to stop me beginning right away,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘there isn’t, is there.’

  The treatment of the scrolls was an art form more than an exact science. For each of them the treatment varied, depending on their state of preservation, the quality of the leather, the composition of the ink and other inter-related factors. Sally admitted to me in a weak moment that she would not have been able to handle the task, it required a fund of acquired experience which she did not have at her command.

  Eldridge worked like a medieval alchemist, steaming and soaking and spraying and painting. His domain stank of chemicals and other weird smells, and his and Sally’s fingers were stained. Sally reported that his absorption with the task had reduced his animal instincts to the level where he made only spasmodic and half-hearted clutches at the protruding parts of her anatomy.

  As each scroll was unrolled, its contents were evaluated and the detailed translation begun. One after the other they proved to be either books of account on the city’s trade, or proclamations made by the Gry-Lion and the council of the nine families. The authors were nameless clerks, and their style was brisk and economical with little time for poetic flights or unnecessary descriptive passages. This starkly utilitarian outlook echoed the life style which we had so far reconstructed from our finds on the site. We discussed it at the nightly talk sessions.

  ‘It’s typically Punic,’ Eldridge agreed. ‘They had little taste in the visual arts, their pottery was coarse and mass-produced. In my opinion their sculpture, what little there was, was downright hideous.’

  It requires wealth and leisure and security to produce art,‘ I suggested.

  ‘That’s true - Rome and Greece are examples of that. Carthage and, earlier, Phoenicia were often threatened, on occasion struggling for survival - they were the bustlers and hustlers. Traders and warriors, more concerned with wealth and the acquisition of power than the niceties of living.’

  ‘You don’t have to go back that far, modern art comes from the great wealthy and secure nations.’

  ‘And we white Africans are like the old Carthaginians,’ Sally said, ‘when there’s gold in them thar hills who gives a hoot about painting pictures.’

  The scrolls reinforced the theory. Gold from Zimbao and Punt, ivory from the southern plains of grass or from the forests along the great river, hides and dried meat, salted fish from the lakes, wine and oil from the terraced gardens of Zeng, copper from the hills of Tuya, and salt from pans along the west shores of the lakes, tin from the juncture of the two rivers, corn from the middle kingdom in baskets of woven cane, sun stones from the southern river of the crocodile, iron bars from the mines of Sala - and slaves, thousands upon thousands of human beings treated as domestic animals.

  The chronicle was dated from some undisclosed point in time, we suspected this as the date of the founding of the city, and each entry was prefaced by such dating as, ‘In year 169 the month of the elephant’. From these we deduced a ten-month year based on a calendar of 365 days.

  Once the nature of the scrolls had been established, I suggested to Eldridge that rather than work systematically through the collection from beginning to end, we sample them and try to establish the overall history of our city.

  He fell in with my wishes, and there evolved a picture of a widespread colonization of central and southern Africa by a warlike and energetic people, based on the city of Opet, and ruled by a hereditary king, the ‘Gry-Lion’, and an oligarchy of nine noble families. The decrees of this Council covered a range as wide as the measures adopted for dredging the channels of the lake and preventing the encroachment of water weed, to the choice of messengers to be sent to the Gods Baal and Astarte. Here Astarte seemed to have taken precedence over the more usual Carthaginian form Tanith. ‘Messengers’, we suspected, were human sacrifices.

  We discovered carefully recorded family trees, based like the Jewish system on a matrilinear system. Each noble man or woman could trace his or her line back to the founding of the city. It was also clear from the chronicle that their religion was part of their scheme of living, and we could reasonably guess that it was a conventional form of polytheism, with leading male and female godheads, Baal and Astarte.

  As we moved forward in time so we found new factors intruding, new contingencies occupying the attention of the ruling king. The rapid shrinking of the waters of the lake of Opet began to threaten the city’s life line, and in the year 296 the Gry-Lion sent 7,000 slaves to assist with the work of keeping the channels open to the sea. He also dispatched a column of 1.000 of his own guards under the war-captain Ramose with orders to ‘venture eastwards towards the rising sun stopping not, nor failing in determination’ until he had reached the eastern sea and had discovered the route to the lands of the north whose existence was postulated by the sea captain and navigator, Habbakuk Lal.

  A year later Ramose returns, with only seventy men, the others having perished in a land of pestilential swamps and putrid fevers. He had, however, reached the eastern sea and there found a city of traders and seafarers ‘dark men, and bearded, dressed in fine linens, and binding their brows with the same material’. They come from a land beyond the eastern sea, and Ramose is rewarded with twenty fingers of gold and twenty slaves. Our men of Opet have made their first contact with the Arabs, known to them as ‘the Dravs’, who are colonizing the Sofala coast.

  We learned how the Gry-Lion’s search for a new source of slave-labour becomes desperate. Orders are dispatched to the mine overseers to take all measures to prolong the working lives of their slaves. Rations of meat and corn are increased, inflating the cost of production but increasing the life expectancy of the slaves. Owners are enjoined to breed all female slaves regularly, and the practice of infibulation is discontinued. The slaving expeditions are sent farther and farther afield, as the Yuye are hunted down. From the description of these yellow-skinned Yuye we guessed they wer
e the ancestors of Hottentot people.

  Then suddenly the Gry-Lion is delighted by the return of a northerly expedition with 500 ‘savage Nubians, both tall and strong’ and the leader of the expedition is rewarded with ten fingers of gold. This delight fades slowly over the following hundred years as a solid mass of black humanity builds up north of the great river. The vast Bantu migrations have begun and now the concern of the Gry-Lion is to dam the flood southwards and his legions march constant patrol upon the northern border.

  Our samplings gave us these fleeting glimpses into the past, but they were recorded as bland impersonal statements of fact. How we longed to find the writings of a Pliny or Livy to give flesh and breath to these meticulous records of acquired wealth.

  Each fact seemed to present us with a hundred unanswered questions. Of these the most pressing was: where did they come from these men of Opet, and when? Where did they go to and why? We hoped the answers to the major questions were here somewhere in this maze of writings, and in the meantime we occupied ourselves with finding the lesser answers.

  It was easy enough to locate the places mentioned in the chronicles, Zimbao and Punt were the southern and northern territories of modern Rhodesia, the great river was the Zambezi, the lakes had disappeared, the gardens of Zeng were clearly the hundreds of thousands of acres of terraced hillsides in the Inyanga area of eastern Rhodesia, the hills of Tuya must be the copper-rich country above Sinoia; step by step we established the presence of our men of Opet at nearly all the ancient sites, and at the same time we had a picture of the building-up of an immense treasure. For although the bulk of this wealth was sent ‘outwards’ yet there re-occurred the words ’a tenth part to the Gry-Lion‘.

  Where had this treasure been stored, and what had become of it? Had it perished with the city, or was it still here in some secret storehouse carved from the red rock cliffs of the Hills of Blood?

  As a mental exercise I made an estimate of the extent of this treasure. Assuming that a ‘finger’ of gold was one of the finger-like rods of the precious metal we had discovered among the foundations of the city. I listed the total inflow of gold recorded in twenty-odd sample years beginning in the year 345 and ending in the year 501. I found that previous estimates had been hopelessly inadequate. Instead of 750 tons of gold, I found that the total recovery from the ancient mines could not have been less than 4,000 tons - of which a tenth part to the Gry-Lion.

  Assuming half of this 400 tons had been spent on the maintenance of his army, the building of the temple and other public works, this still left the staggering figure of 200 tons of gold that might be hidden in or near the city - 200 tons represents a fortune of almost £80,000,000.

  When I showed my calculations to Louren on his next visit to the site, I saw the gold-greed glitter in the pale blue eyes. He took away the sheet of paper with my workings on it, and the following morning as he was about to board the Lear for Johannesburg, he remarked casually, ‘You know, Ben, I really think that you and Ral should spend more time exploring the area along the cliffs, rather than living in those archives.’

  ‘What should we look for, Lo?’ As if I didn’t know.

  ‘Well, those old boys were dab hands at hiding things away. They must have been the most secretive people in history, and we still haven’t found their burial grounds.’

  ‘So you want me to go grave-hunting.’ I grinned at him, and he laughed.

  ‘Of course, Ben, if you happened to stumble on their treasury I wouldn’t hate you for it. After all eighty Big M’s are a nice piece of petty cash.’

  We had transferred 261 jars from the archives to the repository and Eldridge and Sally had sufficient material to keep them busy for the next two or three months, so I decided to follow Louren’s suggestion and suspend work in the archives and undertake another detailed search of the area. My timing was impeccable. Ral was within five feet of where the small jars with the sunbird seals on their lids were standing in the darkest corner of the last recess. They were tucked away behind the front rank of jars twice their size and so effectively hidden by them that we had not included them in our original count. Ral was working his way steadily towards them, another three days would have been enough, but I took him away to search the cliffs.

  This was November which we call the ‘suicide month’ in Africa. The sun was a hammer, and the earth an anvil but we worked the cliffs despite it. We rested only for two hours in the middle of the day, when the heat was murderous and the cool green waters of the emerald pool were irresistible.

  We were now alert to the tricks and subterfuges of the ancient men of Opet. Having learned from bitter experience how skilfully they could conceal their tracks and how cunningly their masons could conceal the joints in their masonry, I went back over ground I had already covered. 1 used my own tricks to try and out-think them. Ral and I re-photographed every inch of the cavern walls, but this time with infra-red film. We found no more concealed passages.

  From there we worked outwards. Each day I marked off a 300-foot section and we combed this minutely. Not content merely to eye-ball the rocks, we searched by sense of touch also. Groping our way over them like blind men.

  Each day brought its small adventures, I was chased by a black mamba, eight feet of irritability and sudden death, with eyes like glass beads and a flicking black tongue, that resented my prodding around in the crack which was its home and castle. Ral was very impressed with my turn of speed over broken ground, and suggested 1 took it up professionally.

  A week later I could return his sallies in kind by remarking on the improvement that twenty wild bee stings made to his appearance. His face looked like a hairy pumpkin, and his eyes were slits in the swollen flesh. For five days poor Ral was of no use to me at all.

  November passed and in mid-December we had a quarter of an inch of rain, which is about par for the course in this part of Africa. It laid the dust for an hour or so, and that was the end of the rainy season. I guessed that the ancient lake of Opet would have ensured a higher and more regular rainfall for the area. Open water encourages rain, both by its evaporation and by cooling the air to aid precipitation.

  Ral and I worked on without results, but also without any diminution of our determination or enthusiasm. Despite our days of wearing labour under the killer sun, we spent most of our evenings poring over the map of the foundations of the city. By a process of guess, deduction and elimination, we tried to work out where the ancients would have sited their tombs. I had by now become extremely fond of Ral Davidson, and I saw in this big gangling indefatigable youth the makings of one of the giants of our profession. There would be a permanent post for him at the Institute once this dig was finished, I would see to that.

  In contrast to our results, Eldridge Hamilton, assisted by Sally, and Leslie, continued to reap the rich and enchanting harvest of the scrolls. Each evening I would spend an hour in the air-conditioned repository with them, reviewing the day’s work. Steadily the sheets of typed translation piled up, the margins thick with notes and references in Eldridge’s spidery and untidy hand.

  Christmas came and we sat out under a moon as big as a silver gong, exchanging gifts and companionship. I gave them White Christmas in the style of Bing Crosby, even though the night temperature was in the high eighties. Then Eldridge and I did Jingle Bells as a duet. Eldridge had forgotten the words, all except the jingling part. He was a great little jingler was our Eldridge, especially after ten large gins. He was still jingling away merrily when Ral and I carried him off to bed.

  Early in the new year we had what amounted to a royal visit. Hilary Sturvesant had at last prevailed on Louren to bring her to see the site. We had a week to prepare for the family. Hilary was bringing the elder children with her and I was beside myself with excitement at the prospect of having all my favourite women at the City of the Moon. I left the search of the cliffs to Ral, while I rushed about re-arranging the accommodation and checking our stores for such essentials as Coca-Cola and chocolates. Com
modities which make life bearable for Bobby Sturvesant.

  They arrived in time for the lunch of cold meats and salads which I had personally prepared, and immediately the visit began souring. Sally Senator was not at the meal, she sent a message that she had a headache and was going to lie down. However, I saw her sneaking off with towel and bathing costume towards the emerald pool.

  Eldridge Hamilton and Louren Sturvesant took one look at each other, and remembered their last meeting. They were as hostile as a pair of rutting stags. I recalled Eldridge’s boast that he had sent Louren packing. They began making elaborately offensive remarks at each other, and I was fully extended in trying to prevent active physical violence breaking out, and when Eldridge spoke about people with ‘more money than either breeding or sense’, I thought I had lost my expert on ancient writings.

  As if this was not sufficient, it was also obvious that Hilary and Louren were engaged in a domestic dispute which made it impossible for them to address each other directly. All communication was conducted through the agency of Bobby Sturvesant and was preceded by remarks of the order, ‘Please ask your stepmother if ’ or ‘If your father wants…’

  Hilary wore dark glasses at the lunch-table, and I could guess her eyes bore the traces of recent weeping. She was silent and reserved, as, were both Ral and Leslie. The two youngsters were overcome with shyness in the presence of the Sturvesants, and when Louren and Eldridge also subsided into a smouldering truce, there were only two of us left articulate, Bobby Sturvesant and me.

  Bobby took full advantage of the temporary breakdown in parental control to become an utterly impossible little bitch. She spent the entire meal either showing off shamelessly or being insolent to her stepmother. I would dearly have loved to turn her over my knee and paddle her stern.

  Immediately after the meal dragged to its tortured conclusion, Eldridge retreated to his repository. Ral and Leslie muttered excuses and fled. Louren asked me for the keys of the Land-Rover and I saw him take his shotgun and drive away towards the north, leaving Hilary and the children to me. I took Hilary through the site museum and she soon forgot her unhappiness in the fascination of our exhibits.