by Wilbur Smith
She remembered suddenly a description of the elephant digs from Zouga Ballantyne’s book – and it gave her the final burst of strength to pull herself onto her feet and stagger to the nearest sandcastle. The elephants had kicked aside the sand, and made an excavation in the bottom of the river bed as deep as a man’s waist. She slid down into it and began frantically to dig with her bare hands. Within minutes her nails were broken and her fingertips bleeding, and the sand kept collapsing back into her hole, but she dug on doggedly.
Then the white sand changed colour, became damp and firm, and at last there was a glint in the very bottom. She tore a strip of cloth from the hem of her ragged skirt and pressed it down into the hole, then after a moment lifted it to her mouth, and with bleeding fingers squeezed out a drop of water onto her cracked and blackened tongue.
It was as Zouga had always imagined that it would be.
He crossed the Shashi river an hour before high noon on a hot windless day, with the silver and blue thunder-heads piled on the far horizons and the teeming forests and hunting veld of Matabeleland ahead.
He sat astride a fine salted horse, and at his right hand rode his eldest son, a man full grown, straight and strong, a man to delight his father’s heart.
‘There she is, Papa.’ Ralph swept his hat from his head and gestured with it to include the horizon of smoky-blue hills and green forests. ‘There is your north at last. We are coming to take her now.’
Zouga laughed with him, his golden beard glowing in the sunlight and his teeth as white and even as his son’s.
‘Not quite yet, my boy. This time we have come to woo her – and the next time to take her as a bride.’
Zouga had broken his journey three months at Kimberley, and with the full resources of De Beers Diamond Mines at his disposal had done the planning that Rhodes had ordered.
He had decided on a band of two hundred men to take and hold Mashonaland, to ride the boundaries of the farms and peg the gold reefs. They were to be supported by a detachment of Sir Sidney Shippard’s Bechuanaland Police from Khama’s kraal – and another detachment of Rhodes’ own police which he would raise. Zouga detailed the arms and equipment that they would need – one hundred and sixteen pages of schedules and lists – and Rhodes approved it with that bold sweeping signature and a curt injunction. ‘Do it!’
Four days later Ralph had come into Kimberley with two dozen wagons from the Witwatersrand goldfields, and Zouga sat with him all night in his suite in Lil’s new hotel.
In the morning Ralph had whistled with excitement.
‘It’s so big, so many men, so much equipment—’
‘Can you do it, Ralph?’
‘You want me to tender for a price to recruit the men, buy the equipment and assemble it here at Kimberley, provide the wagons and oxen to carry it all, horses for the men, rifles and ammunition, machine-guns, a steam engine to power a searchlight; then you want me to tender to build a road to get it all to a map reference, a place which you call Mount Hampden, somewhere in the wilderness, and you want it all to be ready to leave in nine months?’
‘You have grasped it fairly,’ Zouga smiled. ‘Can you do it?’
‘Give me a week,’ Ralph said, and five days later he was back.
‘It’s too big for me, I’m afraid, Papa,’ he said, and then grinned mischievously at Zouga’s expression of disappointment. ‘I had to take in a partner – Frank Johnson.’
Johnson was another young man in a hurry, and, like Ralph, had already acquired a reputation for being able to get things done.
‘Have you and young Johnson worked out a price?’
‘We’ll do it for eighty-eight thousand two hundred and eighty-five pounds and ten shillings.’ Ralph handed him the signed tender and Zouga studied it in silence. When at last he looked up he asked:
‘Tell me, Ralph, what is that ten shillings on the end for?’
‘Why, Papa—’ Ralph widened his eyes disarmingly. ‘That is our profit on the deal.’
Zouga had cabled the tender price to Rhodes at Claridge’s Hotel in London, and the following day Rhodes had cabled back his acceptance in principle.
All that was still needed was Lobengula’s ratification of the consolidated concessions – and Zouga was under Rhodes’ orders to go immediately to GuBulawayo and find out from Rudd the reasons for the delay.
Ralph had immediately elected to ride with Zouga.
‘Once Mr Rhodes gives us the word to go – there will be no time for anything else. I have some unfinished business in Matabeleland, at Khami Mission and beyond—’ And an uncharacteristic dreamy look had come into Ralph’s eyes. ‘This is the time to do it. While I still have the chance.’
So now, side by side, Zouga and Ralph spurred their mounts up the bank of the Shashi river and rode into Matabeleland.
‘We will outspan here for a few days, Papa,’ Ralph said; it was still strange for Zouga to have his son make decisions without deferring to him. ‘The grazing is good and sweet, and we will rest the oxen and do a little hunting; there is still plenty of game up near the confluence of the Tati river.’
At the beginning of this long journey together, Zouga had been disconcerted by his son’s competitive spirit that turned even the most mundane task into a contest. He had forgotten this trait of Ralph’s in the time they had been separated but found now that it had grown stronger and fiercer during that period.
His energy daunted Zouga, who found that on this journey – for lack of other opposition – he was a foil for his son’s need to compete.
They shot bird, on foot in heavy cover – guinea-fowl and francolin, Ralph counted the bag and scowled when Zouga outgunned him. They sat late at each outspan over the ivory dice, or the greasy dog-eared pack of cards, and Ralph glowed when he won a shilling, and growled when he lost one.
So now, when he said, ‘We’ll hunt together tomorrow, Papa,’ Zouga knew he was in for an early start, and a long hard day.
They rode out from the wagons an hour before the first glimmer of dawn.
‘Old Tom is getting madala – he’s getting old – but I have a sovereign that says he’ll run rings around that fancy beast of yours,’ Ralph offered.
‘I cannot afford that sort of money,’ Zouga told him. He was hard and fit, his long professional hunting expeditions had kept him that way but the pace that Ralph set once he was aroused would be punishing. There was something else that troubled Zouga. When Ralph hunted competitively, he could be murderous. If he were challenged, there was only one consideration for him, the size of the bag.
Zouga had been a hunter for the greater part of his life. He had hunted for ivory, and for the peculiar fascination of the beautiful and noble animals he pursued. It was almost a form of love, that made a man want to study and understand and finally take the quarry irrevocably for his own.
These last seasons he had hunted, of necessity, with many men, but he had never yet met a man who hunted like his own son when his blood was up. It seemed as if the game were merely counters in another of Ralph’s contests, the score all that counted. ‘I don’t want to be a sportsman, Papa. I leave that to you. I just want to be a winner.’
‘I cannot afford that sort of money,’ Zouga repeated, trying lightly to defuse Ralph’s escalating tension.
‘You can’t afford a sovereign?’ Ralph threw back his darkly handsome head, and his green eyes flashed as he laughed delighted. ‘Papa, you have just sold that fat diamond of yours for thirty thousand pounds.’
‘Ralph, let’s make an easy day of it. If we get one giraffe, or a buffalo, that’s all we need.’
‘Papa, you are getting old. A sovereign. If you can’t pay immediately, why then, your credit is always good!’
In mid-morning they cut the spoor of a troop of giraffe, feeding slowly eastward along the river bank.
‘I make out sixteen of them.’ Ralph leaned from the saddle to examine the huge double bean-shaped spoor in the sandy earth. ‘They’ll not be an hour ahead of us.�
�� And he put his heels into old Tom’s flanks.
The forest alternated with open glades through which meandered little streams, draining the escarpment down to the Shashi river. They were dry at this season of the year, but that did not account for the paucity of game.
When Zouga had first travelled this road, going south from old King Mzilikazi’s kraal, the herds had darkened every one of these open glades. In one day’s ride he had counted over a hundred monstrous grey rhinoceros, but there had been no counting the silvery herds of fat zebra and clowning purple wildebeest.
In those days, after a man had fired a shot, the dust rising from the galloping herds had looked like the smoke from a bush fire – and yet this day they had ridden since dawn without seeing a single wild animal.
Zouga brooded on it as he rode stirrup for stirrup with his son. Of course, this area was on the direct road to Lobengula’s kraal, over which steadily more and more wagons and travellers passed. There were still vast areas beyond where the herds were thick as the grass on which they grazed. But after the road they would cut into Mashonaland – and the railway line that would follow – he wondered what would remain.
Perhaps one day his grandchildren would live in a land of which every corner was as barren as this. He did not envy them the prospect; and even as he thought that, his trained hunter’s eye picked up the tiny speck just above the forest line, far ahead.
For a moment he was reluctant to call Ralph’s attention to it. It was the head of a giraffe, raised inquisitively high above the mimosa tree on which it was feeding.
For the first time in the hunting veld Zouga felt sick to the gut at the slaughter he knew was about to follow – and he thought to distract Ralph’s attention from the herd of huge spotted animals in the mimosa forest ahead. But at that moment Ralph shouted gaily:
‘There they are, I’ll be damned! They are shy as blushing virgins, they are off already.’
There had been a time when Zouga had been able to ride up to within two hundred yards of a herd before they took alarm. These were still a mile away and already galloping from the two horsemen.
‘Come on, Papa. We’ll catch them when they try to cross the Shashi,’ and they tore into the stand of flowering mimosa.
‘Tally-ho!’ yelled Ralph. His hat came off and, hanging on its thong, it slapped against his back; while his long dark hair fluttered in the wind of their gallop. ‘By God, Papa – you’ll have to work to win your sovereign today,’ he warned laughingly.
They crashed out of the forest onto another level open plain. The entire herd of huge vulnerable animals were spread before them: bulls and cows and calves, but that was not what caught Zouga’s attention.
He pulled his horse down out of its gallop and swung his head away to the west.
‘Ralph,’ he shouted, ‘let them go!’
Ralph looked back at him through the flying dust. His face was flushed with the hunter’s fever.
‘Warriors,’ Zouga shouted. ‘War party, Ralph. Close up!’
For a moment it seemed that Ralph would not obey, but then his good sense prevailed. It would be reckless to separate when there was a war party out, and he broke back to Zouga’s side and let the panic-driven giraffe tear away towards the river.
He reined Tom to a halt. ‘What do you make of them?’ he asked, shading his eyes and peering through the heat-distorted air at the squiggly black line, like a shoal of tadpoles in the bottom of a rippling pool, which moved across the far side of the open plain. ‘Khama’s men? Bamangweto raiders? We are only a few miles from the frontier.’
‘We won’t take any chances until we know,’ Zouga told him grimly. ‘Let the horses blow. We may have to make a run—’
But Ralph interrupted him. ‘Long shields! And they are red, those are the Moles, Bazo’s fellows,’ Ralph urged Tom towards the approaching impi. ‘And I’ll be damned if that isn’t Bazo himself out front.’
By the time Zouga came up, Ralph had dismounted and, leaving Tom to stand, had run to embrace his old comrade – and he was already joshing Bazo cruelly.
‘Lo, the Moles-that-burrow-under-a-mountain are returning from a raid without women or cattle. Did Khama’s people give you the steel farewell?’
Bazo’s delighted smile slid off his face at such levity, and he shook his plumes sternly.
‘Not even in jest, Henshaw – do not talk like a giggling girl. If the king had sent us to Khama,’ and he stabbed the air with his assegai, ‘there would have been a beautiful killing.’ He broke off as he recognized Zouga.
‘Baba!’ he said. ‘Bakela – I see you, and my eyes are white with joy.’
‘It has been too long, Bazo – but now you have the headring on your brow and an impi at your back – we shall shoot a beast and feast together this night.’
‘Ah Bakela, it grieves me – but I am on the king’s business. I return to GuBulawayo in haste to report the woman’s death to the king.’
‘Woman?’ Zouga asked without real interest.
‘A white woman. She ran from GuBulawayo without the king’s word, and the king sent me after her—’ Bazo broke off with an exclamation. ‘Hau! But you know this woman, Bakela.’
‘It is not Nomusa, my sister?’ Zouga asked with quick concern. ‘Not one of her daughters?’
‘No, not them.’
‘There are no other white women in Matabeleland.’
‘She is the woman of One Bright Eye. The same woman who raced her horse against yours at Kimberley – and won. But now she is dead.’
‘Dead?’ All the blood had drained from Zouga’s face, leaving his tan muddy and yellow. ‘Dead?’ he whispered, and swayed in the saddle so that, had he not grabbed at the pommel, he would have fallen.
‘Louise – dead.’
Zouga found the sycamore that Bazo described to him, merely by back-tracking the impi.
They had left a good wide spoor, and Zouga reached the tree in the middle of the afternoon.
He did not know why he tortured himself so. There could be no reasonable doubt that she was dead. Bazo had showed him the pathetic relics he had retrieved. The damaged rifle and bandolier, the empty water-bottle, and the tatters of cloth and saddlery ripped and chewed by the omnivorous jaws of the hyena.
The ground under the sycamore was beaten and swept of all traces of Louise by the pads of jackal and hyena, by the fluttering wings and the talons of hundreds of feeding, squabbling vultures. It smelled like a chicken coop, smeared with vulture dung, and loose feathers blew aimlessly hither and thither on the soft dry breeze.
Except for a few splinters of bone and tufts of hair, every trace of animal carcasses and the human body had been devoured. The hyena would have gobbled up even the leather of Louise’s boots and belt, and the few remaining shreds of blanket and cloth were bloodstained.
It was quite easy to reconstruct what had happened. Louise had been set upon by a pride of lion. She had managed a single shot, there was an empty shell in the breech of the damaged rifle, and had killed one of the cats before being pulled off the mule.
Zouga could imagine every moment of her agony, almost hear her screams as the great jaws crunched through her bone and the yellow claws hooked into her flesh. It left him physically nauseated and weakened. He wanted to pray on the spot where she had died, but he did not seem to have the energy for even such small effort. It was as though the very force of life had gone out of him. Until that moment he had not realized what Louise’s memory had meant to him, how the certainty that their lives were intertwined had sustained him while they were apart, how his belief in their eventual reunion had given his life purpose and direction. She had become part of his dream, and now it had been snuffed out on this wild and bloody patch of earth.
Twice he turned back to his horse to mount and leave, but each time he hesitated and then wandered back to sift through the reeking dust with his fingers for some last trace of her.
At last he looked at the sun. He could not reach the wagons before nightfall.
He had told Ralph to leave Jan Cheroot and the spare horses at the drift of the Shashi when he went on with the wagons, so there was no urgency. There was no hurry. Without Louise there was no flavour in his life. Nothing really mattered any more, but he crossed to his horse, clinched the girth and mounted. He took one more lingering look at the trampled earth and then turned his horse’s head back towards the Shashi and the wagons. He had not gone fifty yards when he found himself circling. It was not a conscious decision to begin casting for outgoing spoor. He knew it was futile, but his reluctance to leave the place dictated his actions.
Once he circled the sycamore, leaning out of the saddle and examining the broken and stony earth, then he moved farther out and circled again, then again, each time opening the radius of the circle. Suddenly his heart leaped against his ribs, and new hope flooded his devastated soul, but he had to steel himself to lean from the saddle and examine the thorn twig, in case he was to be disappointed once again.
The white tear had caught his eye, the twig had been broken half-through and now hung from the main branch at the level of a man’s waist. The soft green leaves had wilted, the break was two or three days’ old, but that was not what made Zouga’s fingers shake.
From one of the curved red-tipped thorns hung a fine red thread of spun cotton. Zouga lifted it reverently and then touched it to his lips as though it were a sacred relic.
He was to the west of the sycamore; he could just make out the top branches above the surrounding bush, which meant that Louise had left that thread on the grasping thorn after she had run from the tree. The height above ground showed she had been on foot, and the broken twig and shredded cloth were evidence of her haste.
She had run from the sycamore and kept going in the direction which she had been stubbornly following, westwards, towards the Tati and Khama’s country.