On Leopard Rock: A Life of Adventures

by Wilbur Smith

  Lee and I spent our days on the Reef, and then the evenings carousing in port when we returned. On the final day, I landed a black marlin weighing 1012 pounds and measuring fourteen feet long. They hung it up at the harbor and I was bursting with pride. I’d just won membership of the legendary “International Game Fishing Association Thousand Pounder Club” because of it. Lee returned to shore about an hour later. He had heard about my catch, and he sauntered over to the jetty to have a look.

  “Not bad for a novice,” he drawled. “Now, come and see a real fish . . .” We went to where his boat was tied up and there was an absolute monster specimen of a marlin lying on the deck—weighing 1200 lbs.

  “Never mind, sonny,” said Lee. “Let me buy you a drink and you can cry into your glass.”

  That evening I learned not to try to drink level with Lee Marvin. It was another game that I was a real novice at too.

  Shout at the Devil was far better received by the critics than Gold. Lee Marvin received rave reviews for his performance as the drunkard O’Flynn while Roger was praised for displaying the same debonair tongue-in-cheek wit as he did in the James Bond films. Yet Shout at the Devil was to be the last big film to be made of one of my books. I had been involved in scripting from the start of my career and, even as Shout at the Devil was released, I was being paid to write the screenplay for Eagle in the Sky. But I was growing increasingly uncomfortable in the world of film. On one occasion I was summoned to a script conference, a new experience for me, who had always thought of writing as a solitary, single-minded endeavor. Here I was in a room of a dozen people all casting their opinions, struggling to make their voices heard, each one of them trying to pull the story in a different direction. At the head of the room, the producer had called for silence when he opened the meeting.

  “Gentlemen,” he began, addressing the script editors, “we’ve got our work cut out to make sense of this codswallop . . .”

  I was sat in the corner of the room and I looked up, considering him carefully. In that moment, I had learned a very important lesson. In the world of film, the writer does not stand on the top of Olympus as he does in the world of novels, he’s right at the bottom amongst the invertebrates, the very last in the food chain. It was the beginning of the end of my relationship with Hollywood.

  The time had come to take stock. I was enjoying the riches and the attention that came with making a devil’s pact with Hollywood, but I hadn’t always enjoyed watching movies being made from my books. I liked some of the characters in the movies, but not one of them was who I’d imagined when I was writing. The characters in my novels felt like real people to me. I always lived with them for such long, intense periods of my life. I had developed them and their families, I knew what they looked like, how they spoke, how they would react in every possible circumstance. There is a straightforward, unobstructed relationship between a writer of novels and his readers, an honesty if you like. When a viewer watches a movie, they are seeing the product of many peoples’ work, a collaboration between the actors and the director, countless producers, cinematographers, make-up artists, set-designers, lighting guys and many more. But when a reader sits down with a book, it’s just me telling a story and the reader recreating it in their imaginations. Something important, some sort of trust, will always be lost in the transition from page to screen. It had been fun while it lasted, but this was not the world for me.

  After Shout at the Devil, it was fifteen years before any of my works returned to the screen. In the intervening years, my novels would be optioned and reoptioned, but it wasn’t until 1991 that The Burning Shore, one of my later Courtney novels, came to the screen as the television film Mountain of Diamonds. Later still, Wild Justice, The Seventh Scroll and The Diamond Hunters would all find new life as TV mini-series, but I had long ago stopped having any active involvement in the productions. To this day, I still don’t. I never have a problem selling the rights to my books to other people—I’ve sold some of the rights several times over—but, from a writer’s perspective, the best option is to sell the rights, take the money, and hope and pray no film gets made that might ruin your work.

  •••

  One of the lessons my publisher Charles Pick had taught me was that I should write from the heart, only ever writing what I truly wanted to write. In the past years, it seemed I had stepped away from that ideal. The temptations of Hollywood, of seeing my characters up on the silver screen played by the idols of the age—Roger Moore, Lee Marvin, Michael Caine and others—had been corrupting me. Proud as I was of Gold Mine, Shout at the Devil, and The Diamond Hunters, I was aware they were the product of a young writer too deeply in love with the screen. Unconsciously, I had been chasing the dream of Hollywood adulation, and I felt that I was starting to write film-scripts rather than novels. It was the thin end of the wedge because then I would become a writer for hire, someone who was told by a director and producer what to write. Hollywood is a turbo-powered machine that only occasionally functions. It could be exciting when all the components came together, but often your work got torn apart, your credit taken away, the project stalled in development hell—and you were left with a bucketful of regret and a bruised ego. On top of that, I had been around enough film sets to discover the truth about the so-called “romance” of movie making—they’re usually deadly boring. There’s not much going on and unless you are one of the main movers and shakers, there is nothing to do except a lot of sitting around and talking nonsense.

  It had been a good ride, but I thought I was worth more than that. I was a novelist, not a screenwriter. I’d loved the cinema as a child—there had been a cinema up on the Copperbelt, and a Saturday Night Cinema club when I boarded at Michaelhouse—but they had never eclipsed books in my life. Novels were my craft. I belonged to extended narrative, pace, character, atmosphere, twists, drama, location, description, denouement. These were the components that made me the happiest. I was beginning to feel trapped, constricted in a way I had never been before. Since When the Lion Feeds had been accepted for publication, the work load was relentless. My publishers expected me to write a book a year, as they should have because it was the only way to build a strong reputation, by feeding your audience with regular, quality work. I wanted to approach writing as a professional, forging a relationship of trust between me and my readers. But I had been seduced by the lure of Hollywood, its glittering Faustian pact, and I was perilously close to being trapped in a writing treadmill. I was at the point where writing—which had been a passion of mine for so long, my first and only real love—was in danger of becoming a chore.

  However, I had an idea for a new novel that would change all that, and which would be my passage out of the Hollywood factory. Writing it would mean going back to one of the most haunting memories of my childhood.

  •••

  In the gathering dusk, the car came to a stuttering halt and, in the front seat, my father turned around. “We’re here,” he said. “Wilbur, up and out.” It was 1941, and I was eight years old.

  Outside, the oncoming night was silent and still. I helped my five-year-old sister out of the car and looked up at the succession of stone monoliths standing like giant sentries.

  The overgrown ruins looked monstrous and menacing as the twilight shadows groped toward us, wearing the visages of men. The wind tumbling over the tallest towers seemed to be the whispering of ghosts from centuries past. I wondered what secrets lay hidden in the darkness. My sister crouched behind me, as if she would rather not see.

  We had come to the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, once a city in the southeastern hills of Zimbabwe near Lake Mutirikwe and the town of Masvingo. It was the capital of the Kingdom of Zimbabwe during the country’s late Iron Age, the largest of many hundreds of smaller ruins now known as “zimbabwes” spread across what was then Rhodesia’s Highveld. We had arrived as the sun was setting because my mother was fascinated by the ancient world.

  Today Great Zimbabwe draws tourists from all over the glo
be, but in 1941 the place was just another corner of overlooked Africa, left to be reclaimed by the wild. Europeans discovered this lost world in the late 1800s, but in my youth, there was no official acknowledgment that there had once been a thriving city here. The Rhodesian government, keen to protect Rhodesia as a European enclave at all costs, was putting pressure on academics and archaeologists to deny the great city had been built by African natives. But any schoolboy could see that this had been the heart of a kingdom with warlords and counselors, merchants and soldiers, and possibly slavers and slaves. Dig into the history of Africa, my mother had taught me, and what you will find will be more fantastic than any fiction.

  My father led the way. The ruins stretched for miles, the hills crowned by what had once been small towers—but here, in the heart of the ancient city, there was only one great edifice, a fortress built from stones of magnificent size. We passed along overgrown passages between tumbledown walls, through a great enclosure where the air was curiously still.

  I sensed a communion with the past, with history’s intangible myths. Every rustling in the night became the footsteps of some malevolent spirit, every shadow cast by the light of the scudding moon became the approach of a phantom who meant us harm. Soon, my sister started to cry. I tried to console her but the longer it went on, the more my reserves of strength began to crumble. I was not afraid of any material thing. Perhaps my mind was too full of H. Rider Haggard and his doomed sorceress, She Who Must Not Be Named, but it was the unearthly, the unreal, that petrified me tonight.

  Archaeologists and anthropologists would spend their careers debating what kind of civilization had been centered on these ruins. They would argue whether it was the seat of the Gokomere people, the ancestors of Zimbabwe’s Shona, or whether it belonged to the tribes who would one day call themselves the Lemba or Venda. Some reckoned the city was between five hundred and a thousand years old, and that war, famine, pestilence or natural disaster had befallen its people and laid the city to waste. Nothing was certain.

  •••

  Thirty years later, it was 1971 and I was sitting in my caravan in the Bvumba, the Mountains of Mist (Bvumba is the Shona word for “mist”), which are situated on the border between Rhodesia on the west and Mozambique to the east. It’s a beautiful place, often shrouded in early morning mist that clears during the day to reveal blue-green mountains with spectacular views, the abundant forests resonating with birdsong. Mist wreathed the headlands and thick miombo woodland flourished on the escarpments, half-masking the scent of the small coffee plantations in the valleys below. I had come here for the solitude I needed to write. I had also come to take back my independence, to recover my soul. The past decade had been immensely busy, so full of obligations, demands and my own ambitions that I was close to losing my way. The manuscript in front of me was half-complete, but already much bigger than the thrillers that had consumed each of my last few years. Shout at the Devil, Gold Mine, and The Diamond Hunters had all been blistering reads, highly charged, with adrenaline-driven plots like the best adventure stories, and they had been written with the expenditure of enormous emotional energy. I loved writing them, I was swept away by the drama and tension of their worlds—but I was determined that this new novel, The Sunbird, was to be something different. The challenge was daunting, but there was no room in my life for artistic ennui, indulgences like writer’s block or appealing to the elusive Muse of Inspiration. My muse was my father’s voice in my ear saying, “Get on with it Wilbur, you lazy son of a bitch, there’s work to be done.”

  The Sunbird was going to be my most ambitious, richly imagined—and unfilmable—work to date. The germ of the idea had come from my experience as a boy during that night in Great Zimbabwe, and what the ghosts were telling me as they drifted through the ruin. I was developing my own theories about the history of the place and imagining my own lost city of Ophet, founded by castaway Carthaginians who had traveled south after suffering the depredations of the Romans in North Africa. They would come through Gibraltar, down an ancient river system now dried up, until they reached the mighty Nile, the birthplace of civilization. I imagined they had crossed the Namib, as I would one day, and in Botswana found a fantastic civilization, all of it to be undone by a villainous king, and rediscovered millennia later. The novel would be a two-part story set millennia apart and it would be much more ambitious and richer than anything I had written before.

  •••

  Handing The Sunbird to my publishers, I had felt considerable trepidation. It was unlike anything I’d ever written, an epic in scope and length. I’d forced my imagination into territory I’d never visited before. My previous novels were slender in comparison—The Sunbird was almost longer than the previous two novels combined. However, it exceeded all my expectations. Even before the publication date preorders were four times higher than for any other of my books. I was so grateful and relieved at the respect my publishers had shown for the book. When my editors first read it, they were overjoyed.

  The Sunbird is the story of Dr. Benjamin Kazin, a hunchback academic, and it chronicles Ben and his assistant Sally’s search for proof of a lost civilization in the heart of untamed Botswana. Ridiculed by others in his profession, Ben is convinced that there was once a Phoenician settlement in Botswana and, spurred on by aerial photographs that he believes confirm his theory, he sets out to discover this lost city and eventually stumbles upon the archaeological discovery of a lifetime. Along the way, as he battles with unfriendly natives and murderous terrorists, spectacular cave paintings point toward the existence of a civilization that was destroyed in a violent cataclysm many centuries ago. Only then does the novel reveal its true heart—no sooner is the reader swept up in Ben’s quest, than the story spirals backward in time to an imagined land of two thousand years before.

  Since I was a boy, the phenomenon of civilizations rising and falling had been an obsession of mine: the Egyptians, the Romans, the Greeks, even the triumph and decline of the colonial powers in Africa. The Sunbird was an attempt to capture the sheer drama of these tumultuous events. The brutality and mysticism of the story were straight out of my memories of H. Rider Haggard; the doomed city of Ophet was a recreation of those terrified moments I had spent in the gathering dark of Great Zimbabwe, my sister and I cowering in the midst of the enveloping night. I had taken the name of The Sunbird itself from my love of nature and the wild. I have always adored wild birds. The sunbird is my favorite of them all. There are 132 different species inhabiting the Africas, across Asia and even extending into northern Australasia. Like hummingbirds, they are tiny, brightly-colored creatures. My garden in Cape Town is full of them, with a treasured nest of double-collared sunbirds next to the veranda. Spiritually minded people believe that they are the harbingers of harmony, that they can open hearts, bringing out the best in everybody. They believe the sunbird hates ugliness and discord and will always fly off to areas where there is happiness and beauty. There is a magic in those little birds, and they have been my good luck charms across the years.

  The Sunbird gave me the confidence to create vast new worlds on the page. The irony was that, as with many of my other works, the screen rights were indeed snapped up by Michael Klinger. He would never be able to film it, though.

  In the years to come, I would look back on The Sunbird as a watershed in my career. It even led to a little tradition. From that point on, every hardback first edition of my books would have an embossed sunbird on the front cover, in the lower right hand corner. I called my home in Cape Town, on the foothills of Table Mountain, Sunbird Hill.

  That is the strange thing about a novel—you spend long months willing it into existence, but then it develops a life of its own. What starts as imaginary can sometimes become very real.

  11

  THIS HERO’S LIFE

  I killed my first lions when I was thirteen years old. I did it to protect the family farm I had been charged to look after, and I was alone.

  Every year my pa
rents took time away from the cattle ranch to go on vacation together, down in South Africa or even further afield. Usually my father would leave his foreman, Peter, in charge, but this was the first year the responsibility had been given to me. Every day I saddled my pony and rode circuits around my father’s fields, along the banks of the Kafue River and up into the forested hills at the height of the ranch. Down by the river, where the puku and lechwe grazed, the world could seem vast and unknowable while, in the dense trees of the north, I would see occasional impala, always spooking at my appearance and vanishing into the shadows. Sometimes lions passed through the ranch, on the hunt for wild game, and it was for signs of these predators that I vigilantly made my circuits. Only rarely did I see them; more often I came across the spoor they left behind, or the signs of a kill.

  I entered the fields where my father’s prized Brown Swiss cattle grazed. These were the animals on which the ranch’s livelihood depended, hardy yet docile animals first bred in the Swiss Alps and capable of surviving in harsh environments as different as the snowbound mountains and the withering heat of inland Africa. As I came among them, I already knew that something was wrong. Most of the herd had scattered, disappearing off to other grazing grounds.

  Lying in the grass in front of me was a cow, her chest cavity open and glistening with gore, her neck ruptured where some monster’s teeth had torn it apart. I looked around. In the grasses I could see two or three other carcasses, all of them similarly maimed.

  Whispering to my pony to settle her, as the scent of blood was making her jittery, I dismounted and approached the first dead body. I touched it with my boot. It was a fresh kill; the blood had not yet congealed.