by Wilbur Smith
"Count them," Kamuza instructed. "Let us agree on the number, and let Lobengula, the great Black Elephant, count the same number into his mighty hands when you lay the belt before him at the kraal of Gubulawayo, the place of killing., Bazo touched each diamond with his fingertip, his lips moving silently. "Amashurni amatatu!"
"Thirty," Kamuza repeated. "It is agreed."
And they were all large clean stones, the smallest the size of the first joint of a man's little finger.
Bazo tied the kilt about his waist, the fleecy tails of the bat-eared fox dangling to his knees.
"It looks well upon you" Kamuza nodded, and then went on. "Tell Lobengula, the Great Elephant, that I am his dog and I grovel in the dirt at his feet. Tell him that there will be more of the yellow coins and the bright stones. Tell him that his children labour each day in the pit, and there will be more, many more. Every man who takes the road north will bring him riches." Kamuza stepped forward and laid his right hand on Bazo's shoulder.
"Go in peace, Bazo the Axe."
"Stay in peace, my brother, and may the days disappear like raindrops into the desert sand until we smile upon each other once more.
Isazi put the span to its first real test in the drift of the Vaal river.
The grey waters were barely flowing, but they covered the hubs of the tall iron-shod rear wheels, and the bottom was broken waterwom rock that clanked and rolled under pressure, threatening to jam the wheels and denying purchase to the driving hooves of the span.
Yet they ran the wagon through under load, leaning into the yokes, noses down almost touching the surface of the river, and the wagon tent jolting and rocking behind them.
Until, under the steep cut up the far bank, the rear wheels stuck and the wagon bed tilted alarmingly. Then Isazi showed his expertise. He swung the team wide, giving them a run at it, and when he called to his leaders and burst the air asunder with the thirty-foot lash that tapered to the thickness of twine they went in stifflegged, jerked her clear, and took the load out of the river bed at a canter, while Isazi pranced and sang their praises and even Umfaan smiled.
Ralph ordered an early outspan under the tall trees on the far bank, for there was good grass and unlimited water, and the next leg of the road to his grandfather Moffat's mission station was a hundred and twenty miles, hard and dry going all the way.
"See, Little Hawk," Isazi was still rapturous over the performance of his span. "- See how clever they are. They pick a good patch of grass and eat it up; they do not wander from patch to patch, wasting their time and strength, as lesser beasts might do. Soon they will settle with the cud, and in the morning they will be strong and rested.
Each of them is a prince among cattle!"
"From tomorrow we begin night marches," Ralph ordered, and Isazi's smile faded and he looked severe.
"I had already made that decision," he said sternly, "but where did you ever hear of night marching, Little Hawk?
It is a trick of the wise ones."
"Count me amongst them then, Isazi," Ralph told him solemnly, and walked out of camp to find a place upon the riverbank from which to enjoy the sunset.
Here the banks of the Vaal were churned into mounds and irregular hollows, the old river workings, picked over by the first diggers and now abandoned and overgrown.
It was a mass burial ground of men's dreams, and looking upon it Ralph's high spirits that had buoyed this first day's trek upon the open road began to evaporate.
It was the first day in his life that Ralph had been free and completely his own man. Walking at the wheel of his own wagon, he had woven dreams of fortune. He had imagined his wagons, fifty, a hundred, carrying his cargoes across the continent. He had seen them coming south again, loaded with ivory and bars of yellow gold.
He had seen in his mind's eye the wide lands, the herds of elephant, the masses of native cattle, the riches that lay out there in the north beckoning to him, warbling the siren call in his ears.
He had been carried so high that now as his spirits turned they fell as low. He looked at the deserted diggings on the banks across the river, the vain scratchings where other men had attempted to turn this great brown slumbering giant of a continent to their own account.
Then suddenly he felt very small and lonely, and afraid. His thoughts turned to his father, and his spirits plunged lower still as he recalled the last words he had spoken.
"Go then! Go and be damned to you."
That was not the way he had wanted it. Zouga Ballantyne had been the central figure in his life until that day.
A colossus who overshadowed each of his actions, each of his thoughts.
Much as he had chafed under the shackles that his duty to his father had placed upon him, much as he had resented every one of his decisions being made for him, each of his actions ordered, yet now he felt as though the greater part of himself had been removed by some drastic surgery of the soul.
Until this moment he had not really thought of losing his father, he had not let the memory of their brutal parting cut him too deeply. Now suddenly this dirty slow river was the barrier between him and the life he had known. There was no going back, now or ever. He had lost his father and his brother and Jan Cheroot and he was alone and lonely.
He felt the acid tears scald his eyelids.
His vision wavered, played him tricks, for across the wide river course, on the far bank was the figure of a horseman.
The horseman slouched easily in the saddle, one hand on his hip, the elbow cocked; and the set of the head upon the broad shoulders was unmistakable.
Slowly Ralph came to his feet, staring in disbelief, and then suddenly he was running and sliding down the sheer bank and splashing waist deep through the grey waters of the ford. Zouga swung down from Tom's back and ran forward to meet Ralph as he came up the bank.
Then both of them stopped and stared at each other.
They had not embraced since the night of Aletta's funeral, and they could not bring themselves to do so now, though longing was naked in the eyes of both of them.
"I could not let you go, not like that," said Zouga, but Ralph had no reply, for his throat had closed.
,"It is time for you to go out on your own," Zouga nodded his golden beard. "Past time. You are like an eaglet that has outgrown the nest. I realized that before you did, Ralph, but I did not want it to be. That is why I spoke so cruelly."
Zouga picked up Tom's reins and the pony nudged him affectionately. Zouga stroked his velvety muzzle.
"There are two parting gifts that I have for you." He placed the reins in Ralph's hand. "That is one," he said evenly, but the green shadows in his eyes betrayed how dearly that gesture had cost him. "The other is in Tom's saddle-bag. It's a book of notes. Read them at your leisure. You may find them of interest, even of value."
Still Ralph could not speak. He held the reins awkwardly, and blinked back the stinging under his eyelids.
"There is one other small gift, but it has no real value.
It is only my blessing."
"That is all that I really wanted," whispered Ralph.
It was six hundred miles to the Shashi river, to the border of Matabeleland.
Isazi inspanned at dusk each evening and they trekked through the cool of the night. When the moon went down and it was utterly dark, then Umfaan threw the lead rein over Dutchman's head, and the big black ox put his nose down and stayed on the track, like a hunting dog on the spoor, until the first glimmering of dawn signalled the outspan.
During a good night's trek they made fifteen miles but when the going was heavy with sand they might make only five miles.
During the days, while the cattle grazed or chewed the cud in the shade, Ralph saddled up Tom and, with Bazo running beside his stirrup, they hunted.
They found herds of buffalo along the banks of the Zouga river, the river on whose bank Ralph's father had been born, big herds, two hundred beasts together.
The herd bulls were huge, bovine and bald with a
ge, their backs crusted with the mud from the wallow, the spread of their arnioured heads wider than the stretch of a man's arms, the tips of the polished black horns rising into symmetrical crescents like the points of the sickle moon, while the bosses above their broad foreheads were massively crenellated.
they ran them down, and Tom loved those wild flying chases every bit as much as his rider.
They chased the ghostly grey gemsbuck over the smoking red dunes, and in the thorn country they hunted the stiff-legged giraffe and sent their grotesque but stately bodies plunging and sliding to earth with the crack of rifle fire, the long graceful necks twisting in the agony of death like that of a swan.
They baited with the carcasses of zebra, and the coppery red Kalahari lions came to the taint of blood, and Tom stood down their charge. Though he trembled and snorted and rolled his eyes at the shockingly offensive cat smell, he stood for the shot which Ralph had to take from the saddle, aiming between the fierce yellow eyes or into the gape of rose-pink jaws starred with white fangs.
Thus, fifty days out from Kimberley they came at last to the Shashi river, and when they had made the crossing Bazo was on his native soil. He put on his war plumes and carrying his shield on his shoulder he walked with a new spring and joy in his stride as he led Ralph to a hilltop from which to survey the way ahead.
"See how the hills shine," Bazo whispered with an almost religious fervour. And it was true. In the early sunlight the granite tops gleamed like precious jewels.
Soft, dreaming, ruby, delicate sapphires and glossy pearl shaded like a peacock tail into a fanfare of colour.
The hills rolled away, rising gradually towards the high central plateau ahead of them, and the valleys were clad with virgin forest.
"You never saw such trees on the plains around Kimberley," Bazo challenged him, and Ralph nodded. They stood on soaring trunks, some scaled like the crocodile, others white and smooth as though moulded from potter's clay, their tops sailing in traceries of green high above the open glades of yellow grass.
"See, the buffalo herds, thick as cattle."
There was other game. There were small family groups of grey kudo, pale as ghosts, trumpet-eared, the bulls carrying the burden of their long black cork-screw horns with studied grace.
There were clouds of red impala antelope upon the woven silk carpet of golden grasses. There were the darkly massive statues of the rhinoceros seemingly graven from the solid granite of the hills, and there were the noblest antelope of all, the sable antelope, black and imperial as the name implied, the long horns curved and cruel as Saladin's scimitar, the belly blazing white, the neck of the herd bull arched haughtily as he led his lighter coloured females out of the open glade into the cool green sanctuary of the forest.
"Is it not beautiful, Henshaw?" Bazo asked.
"It is beautiful."
There was the same awe in Ralph's voice, and a strange unformed longing in his throat, a wanting that he knew could never be satisfied, and suddenly he understood his own father's obsession with this fair land: "My north," as Zouga called it.
"My north," Ralph whispered, and then, thinking of his father, the next question came immediately to mind.
"Elephant, Indhlovu? There are no elephant, Bazo.
Where are the herds?"
"Ask Bakela, your own father," Bazo grunted. "He was the first to come for them with the gun, but others followed him, many others. When Gandang, my father, son of Mzilikazi the Destroyer, half brother of the great black bull Lobengula, when he crossed the Shashi as a child on his mother's hip, the elephant herds were black as midnight upon the land and their teeth shone like the stars. Now we will find their bones growing like white lilies in the forest."
In the last hours of daylight, when Bazo and Isazi and Umfaan still slept to fortify themselves for the. long night's trek, Ralph took the leather-bound notebook out of Tom's saddle-bag.
By now the pages were dog-eared and grubby from the constant perusal to which Ralph had subjected it. It was the gift that Zouga Ballantyne had given him on the bank of the Vaal river, and the inside cover was inscribed: To my son Ralph.
May these few notes guide your feet northwards, and may they inspire you to dare what I have not dared Zouga Ballantyne The first twenty pages were filled with hand-drawn sketch maps of those areas of the land between the Zambezi and the Limpopo and the Shashi rivers over which Zouga, and before him the old hunter Tom Harkness, had travelled.
Often the map was headed by the notation: Copied from the original map drawn by Tom Harkness in 1851.
Ralph recognized the unique value of this information, but there was more. Page 21 of the notebook bore a terse explanation in Zouga's precise spiky hand: In the winter of 1860 while on trek from Tete on the Zambezi River, to King Mzilikazi's town at Thabas Indunas I slew 216 elephant. Lacking porters or wagons I had perforce to cache the ivory along my route.
During my later expeditions to Zambezia, I was able to recover the bulk of this treasure.
There remain fifteen separate caches, containing eighty-four good tusks, which I was for various reasons unable to reach.
Here follows a list of these caches with directions and navigational notes to reach them:
And on page 22 the list began:
Cache made 16 September 1860.
Position by sun sight and dead reckoning300 5 5" E. 170 45" S. A granite kopje which I named Mount Hampden. The largest for many miles in any direction. Distinct peak with three turrets. On the northern face between two large ficus natalensis trees there is a rock fissure.
18large tusks total weight 426 pounds placed in fissure and covered with small boulders.
The current price of ivory was twenty-two shillings and sixpence the pound, and Ralph had added the total weights of the ivory still lying out in the veld. It exceeded three thousand pounds: a great fortune waiting merely to be picked up and loaded on his wagon.
Still that was not all. The final entry in the notebook read: In my book A Hunter's Odyssey I described my discovery of the deserted city which the tribes call "zimbabwe a name which can be translated as "The Grave yard of the Kings".
I described how I was able to glean fragments of gold from the inner courtyards of the walled ruins, a little over 50 pounds weight of the metal in all. I also carried away with me one of the ancient bird-like statues. A souvenir which has been with me from that time until very recently.
It is possible that there is precious metal which I overlooked, and certainly there remain within the walled enclosures six more bird carvings which I was unable to bring away.
In Hunter's Odyssey I deliberately refrained from giving the location of the ancient ruin. As far as I know, it has not been rediscovered by any other white Man while a superstitious taboo forbids any African to venture into the area.
Thus there is every reason to believe the statues lie where last I laid eyes upon them.
Bearing in mind that my chronometer had not been checked for many months when these observations were made, I now give you the position of the city as calculated by myself at that time.
The ruins lie on the same longitude as the kopje which I named Mount Hampden on 30" 55" E., but 175 miles farther south at 20" 0" S. There followed a detailed description of the route that Zouga had taken to reach Zimbabwe, and then the notes ended with this statement: mister Rhodes offered the sum of 1000 pounds for the statue which I rescued.
The following noon Ralph took the brass sextant from its travel-battered wooden case. He had bid ten shillings for it at one of the Saturday auctions in the Market Square of Kimberley, and Zouga had checked its accuracy against his own instrument and showed Ralph how to shoot an "apparent local noon" to establish his latitude. Ralph had no chronometer to fix a longitude, but he could guess at it from his proximity to the confluence of the Shashi and Macloutsi rivers.
Half an hour's work with Brown's Nautical Almanac gave him an approximate position to compare with the one that his father had given in the notes for Z
imbabwe.
"Less than one hundred and fifty miles," he muttered to himself, still squatting over his father's map, but staring eastwards.
"Six thousand pounds just lying there," Ralph said quietly, and shook his head in wonder. It was a sum difficult to imagine.
He packed away the sextant, rolled the map and went to join the slumbering trio beneath the wagon for what remained of the drowsy afternoon.
Ralph woke to a stentorian challenge that seemed to echo off the granite cliffs above the camp.
"Who dares take the king's road? Who chances the wrath of Lobengula?"
Ralph scrambled out from under the wagon. The day was almost gone, the sun flamed in the top branches of the forest, and the chill of evening prickled his bare chest. He stared about him wildly, but some instinct warned him not to reach for the loaded rifle propped against the rear wheel of the wagon. Below the trees the shadows were alive, blackness moved on blackness, dusky rank on rank.
"Stand forth, white man," the voice commanded.
"Speak your business, lest the white spears of Lobengula turn to red."
The speaker stepped forward, out of the forest to the edge of the camp. Behind him the ring of dappled black and white war-shields overlapped, edge to edge in an unbroken circle surrounding the entire outspan, the "bull's borns" of the Matabele fighting formations.
There were many hundreds of warriors in that deadly circle, and the broad stabbing spears were held in an underhand grip so that the silver blades pointed forward at belly height between the shields.
Above each shield the frothy white ostrich-feather headdress trembled and swayed in the small evening breeze, the only movement in that silent multitude.
The man who had broken the ranks was one of the most impressive figures that Ralph had ever seen. The high crown of ostrich feathers turned him into a towering giant. The breadth of his chest was enhanced by the flowering bunches of white cowtails that he wore on his upper arms. Each separate tail had been awarded him by his king for an act of valour, and he wore them not only on his arms but around his knees also.
His broad intelligent face was lightly seamed by the passage of the years, as though by the chisel of a skilled carpenter, forming a frame for the dark penetrating sparkle of his eyes; yet his chest was covered with the elastic muscle of a man only just reaching his prime and his lean belly rippled with the same muscle as he moved forward.