The oldest bull was tall and gaunt, taller by almost a head than his proteges, but the flesh seemed to have wasted off the ancient frame. His skin hung in baggy folds and creases from the ma.s.sive framework of bones.
He was thin in the way that some old men are thin; time had eroded him, seeming to leave only skin and stringy sinew and brittle bone. Matthew had been right in his description, the bull moved the way an old man moves, as though each joint protested with rheumatic pangs, and the weight of ivory he had carried for a hundred years was at last too much for him.
The ivory had once been the symbol of his majesty, and it was still perfect, flaring out from the lip and then turning in again so the points almost met. The gracious curves seemed perfectly matched, and the ivory was a lovely, b.u.t.ter yellow, unblemished despite the dominance battles he had fought with them, despite the forest trees that the bull had toppled with them and stripped of their bark or the desert roots he had dug from stony soil with them.
But now, at last, these great tusks were a burden to him, they wearied him and he carried his head low as they ached in his old jaws. It had been many years now since he had used them as fearsome weapons to keep control of the breeding herds. it had been as many years since he had sought the company of the young cows and their noisy squealing calves.
Now the long yellow ivories were a mortal danger to him, as well as a source of discomfort and pain. They made him attractive to man, his only enemy in nature.
Always it seemed that the hunters were camped upon his spoor, and the man-smell was a.s.sociated with the flash and thudding discharge of muzzle-loading firearms, or the rude stinging intrusion of sharpened steel into his tired old flesh.
There were pieces of beaten iron pot-leg and of round hardened lead ball deep in his body, the shot lying against the bone castle of his skull had become encysted -with gristle and formed lumps as big as ripe apples beneath the skin, while the scars from arrows and stabbing spears, from the fire-hardened wood spikes of the dead-fall-trap had thickened into shiny grey scars and become part of the rough, folded and creased mantle of p his bald grey hide.
Without his two askari he would long ago have fallen to the hunters. It was a strangely intimate relationship that knit the little herd of old bulls, and it had lasted for twenty years or more. Together they had trekked tens of thousands of miles, from the Cashan mountains in the far south, across the burning, waterless wastes of the Kalahari desert, along the dry river beds where they had knelt and with their tusks dug for water in the sand.
They had wallowed together in the shallow lake of Ngami while the wings of the water fowl darkened the sky above them, and they had -stripped the bark from the forests along Linyati and Chobe, and crossed those wide rivers, walking on the bottom with just the tips of their trunks raised above the surface to give them breath.
Over the seasons they had swung in a great circle through the wild land that lay north of the Zambezi, feasting on the fruits of different forests scattered over a thousand miles, timing their arrival as each crop of berries came into full ripening.
They had crossed lakes and rivers, had stayed long in the hot swamps of the Sud where the midday heat, reaching 120, soothed the aches in the old bull"s bones. But then the wanderl.u.s.t had driven them on to complete the circle of their migration, south again over mountain ranges and across the low alluvial plains of the great rivers, following secret trails and ancient pa.s.ses that their ancestors had forged and which they had first trodden as calves at their mother"s flank.
In these last dozen seasons, however, there were men where there had never been men before. There were white-robed Arabs in the north around the lakes, with their long-barrelled jezails. There were big bearded men in the south, dressed in dark rough homespun and hunting from tough s.h.a.ggy little ponies, while everywhere they met the tiny little bushmen with their wicked poisoned arrows, or the Nguni regiments hunting a thousand strong, driving the game into set positions where the plumed spearmen waited.
With each round of the seasons, the elephant ranges were shrinkin& new terrors and new dangers waited in the ancient ancestral feeding grounds and the old bull was tired and his bones ached and the ivory in his jaws weighed him down. Still he moved on up the slope to the head of the pa.s.s with slow determination and dignity, driven on by his instincts, by the need for s.p.a.ce about him, by the memory of the taste of the fruits he knew were already ripening in a distant forest on the sh.o.r.es of a far-away lake. We must hurry. " Jan Cheroot"s voice roused Zouga, for he had been mesmerized by the sight of the regal old animal, filled with a strange feeling of dejd-vu, as though he had lived this moment before, as though this meeting was part of his destiny. The old bull filled him with awe, with a sense of timelessness and grandeur, so he was reluctant to return to the reality of the moment. The day dies fast, Jan Cheroot insisted, and Zouga glanced over his shoulder to where the sun was setting like a mortally wounded warrior bleeding upon the clouds. Yes, he acknowledged, and then frowned as he realized that Jan Cheroot was stripping off his puttees and breeches, folding them and stuffing them together with his blanket and food bag into a crevice in the rock face beside him. I run faster like this, he answered Zouga"s silent enquiry with a twinkling grin.
Zouga followed his example, leaving his own pack and pulling off the webbing belt from which hung knife and compa.s.s, stripping down to good running order, but he stopped short of removing his breeches. Jan Cheroot"s skinny naked yellow b.u.t.tocks were totally devoid of dignity and his dangling p.e.n.i.s played hide-and-seek from under his shirt tails. There were some conventions that an officer of the Queen must observe, Zouga decided firmly, and one was to keep his breeches on in public.
He followed Jan Cheroot along the narrow ledge, until they stepped off it on to the forested slope and immediately their forward vision was limited to a dozen yards by the lichen-covered tree trunks. From higher up the slope, however, they could hear the crackle and the ripping sound as the bull with the broken tusk fed on the uprooted tree.
Jan Cheroot worked out swiftly across the slope to avoid the askari, to circle around him and come at the lead bull. Twice he paused to check the wind. It held steadily down the slope into their faces and the colourful leaves above their heads quivered and sighed at its pa.s.sing.
They had gone a hundred yards when the sounds of the feeding bull ceased abruptly; again Jan Cheroot paused and the little group of hunters froze with him, every man instinctively holding his breath as they listened, but there was only the sound of the wind and the singing whine of a cicada in the branches above. He has moved on to join the others, " Jan Cheroot whispered at last.
Zouga was also certain that the bull could not yet have suspected their presence. The wind was steady, he could not have scented them. Zouga knew that the eyesight of the elephant was as weak as his hearing and sense of smell were acute, but they had made no sound.
Yet this was a clear demonstration of the benefits that the three old bulls derived from their a.s.sociation. It was always difficult for the hunter to place each of them accurately, especially in thick forest such as this, and the two askaris seemed always to take station on the lead bull to cover and protect him. To come at him, the hunter must penetrate the screen they threw around him.
Standing now, listening and waiting, Zouga wondered if a genuine affection existed between the three animals, whether they derived the pleasure of companionship from each other, and whether the askaris would mourn or pine when the old bull fell at last with the musket ball in his brain or his heart. Come! Silently Jan Cheroot made the open-handed signal to advance and they went on up the slope, stooping under the low trailing branches, Zouga keeping four paces out on the Hottentot"s flank to open his field of vision and fire, concentrating his whole being in his eyes and his ears. Far up the slope there was the snap of a breaking twig and it stopped them dead once more, breathing shallowly with the tension, but the sound fastened all their attention ahead so none of them saw the askari.
The elephant waited with the stillness of granite, his sered bide grey and rough as the lichen-covered tree trunks, the shadows thrown by the low sun barred him and broke up the shape of his great body so he blended into the forest, grey and unearthly as mist, and they tiptoed past him at twenty paces without seeing him.
He let the hunters pa.s.s him and get up above the wind and when the acrid stench of carnivorous man was borne thickly down to him through the forest, he took it in his trunk and lifted it to his mouth and sprayed the tainted air over the little olfactory organs under his upper lip, and his smell buds flared open like soft wet pink rose buds and the askari bull squealed.
It was a sound that seemed to bounce against the sky, and ring from the peaks above them, it was an expression of all the hatred and pain, the terrible memories of that acrid min-smell from a hundred other encounters, and the askari bull squealed again and launched his huge body up the slope to destroy the source of that evil odour.
Zouga spun to the piercing din, his shocked eardrums still buzzing with the sound, and the forest shook with the bull"s charge. The dense shiny vegetation burst open, like a storm surf running on to rock, and the bull came through.
Zouga was not conscious of his own movements, he was aware only that he was looking at the bull over the open sights of the Sharps rifle, and the blast of shot seemed muted and far off after the ringing squeal that initiated the charge. He saw dust fly from the bull"s forehead in a brief little pLff, saw the grey skin ripple like that of a stallion stung by a bee, and he reached back and found the stubby wooden stock of one of the big elephant guns in his hand. Again, there was no awareness of conscious movement, but over the crude vee of the sight the elephant appeared much closer. Zouga seemed to be leaning back to look up at the gigantic head and the long shafts of yellow ivory reached out over him, blotting out the sky. Clearly he could see the bright white porcelain break in one point of the left-hand tusk.
He heard Jan Cheroot beside him, and heard his excited shrieks. Skiet horn! Shoot himV Then the heavy weapon leapt against his own shoulder, driving him back a pace, and he saw the tiny fountain of bright blood squirting out of the elephant"s throat like a lovely scarlet flan-dngo feather. He reached back for the next loaded gun, although he knew there would be no time to fire again.
He was surprised that he felt no fear, although he knew he was a dead man. The elephant was on him, his life was forfeit, there could be no question, yet he went on with the motions of living, hefting the new gun, thumbing back the clumsy hammer as he swung the barrel up. The shape of the huge animal above him had altered, it was no longer so close, and he realized with a thrill that the bull was turning, it had been unable to endure the fearful punishment of the heavy-bored guns.
He was turning, pa.s.sing by them with blood streaming down his head and chest. As he pa.s.sed, he exposed his neck and flank, and Zouga shot him a hand"s span behind the joint of his shoulder on the line of the lungs and the ball slogged into his rib cage.
The bull was going, crashing away up the slope, and with the fourth gun Zouga. hit him high in the back, aiming for the bony knuckles of the spine where they showed through the scabby grey hide of the sloping back and the bull whipped his thick tufted tail at the agony of the strike and disappeared into the forest, gone like a wraith in the failing light of the sunset.
Zouga and Ian Cheroot stared at each other speechlessly, each of them holding a smoking weapon at high port across his chest, and they listened to the run of the bull up the slope ahead of them.
Zouga found his voice first, be turned to his gunbearers. Load! " he hissed at them, for they also were paralysed by the close pa.s.sage of violent, thundering death, but his command liberated them and they each s.n.a.t.c.hed a handful of black powder from the bag slung at their sides and poured it into the still-hot muzzles of the guns. The lead bull and the other askari will run, lamented Jan Cheroot, himself frantically busy with the ramrod of his Enfield. We can still catch them before the summit, Zouga told him, grabbing the first loaded gun. An elephant goes on a steep uphill at a very measured pace that a good ninner can gain upon, but downhill he goes like a runaway locomotive, nothing can catch him, not even a good horse. We must catch them before the crest, Zouga. repeated, and launched himself at the slope. Weeks of hard going over bad terrain had toughened him, and the driving l.u.s.t of the hunter was the spur. He flew at the slope.
Awareness of his own lack of experience that had resulted in such poor shootin& made Zouga more fiercely determined to close with the lead bull and vindicate himself. He guessed that as a complete novice he had failed to find the vitals with any of the b.a.l.l.s he had fired, he had missed brain and heart and lungs by inches, inflicting pain and mutilation, instead of the quick kill for which the true huntsman strives. He wanted desperately to have another chance to end it cleanly, and he pelted up the slope.
Before he had gone two hundred yards, he had evidence that his shooting had not been as wide as he had at first believed. He checked at a spot where it looked as though someone had thrown a bucket of blood across the stony earth. The blood was a peculiarly bright scarlet, and it frothed with tiny bubbles, lung blood. There was no question, that last ball fired into the bull"s back as he went away up the slope must have raked the lungs. It was a killing shot, but a slow killer. The old bull was drowning in his own bright arterial blood, desperately trying to rid himself of it by squirting it out through his trunk as it bubbled up into his throat.
He was dying, but it would take time still, and Zouga raced on after him.
He had not expected the bull to stand again. He expected him to run until he dropped, or until the hunters caught up with him. Zouga knew the folly of attributing human motives and loyalties to wild animals, even so it seemed that the stricken bull had determined to sacrifice himself in order to allow the lead bull and the second askari to escape across the pa.s.s at the crest of the mountains.
Up the slope, he was waiting for Zouga, listening for him with those vast grey ears spread wide, his chest with the girth of a Cognac cask of Limousine oak racked and strained to force air into his torn lung.
He charged as soon as he heard the man. His huge ears c.o.c.ked back and rolled at the tips, trunk curled at his chest, shrilling and squealing, blowing a fine red mist of blood from his trunk, pounding through the forest so the earth trembled with each ma.s.sive footfall and the branches crackled and broke like a discharge of musketry.
Panting, Zouga stood to meet the charge, ducking his head and weaving for a clean shot through the thick forest. At the last moment the bull broke off the charge, and swerved up the slope again. Each time the hunters began to move forward, he launched another thunderous mock-attack, forcing them to stand to meet him, and then breaking off again.
Minutes pa.s.sed between each charge, and the hunters were pinned down in the thick forest, fretting with the knowledge that already the lead bull and his surviving protege must have reached the crest and gone away in a rush like an avalanche down the far side.
Zouga was learning two hard lessons: the first, as old Tom Harkness had tried to teach him, was that only a novice or a fool under-guns an elephant. The light ball of the Sharps might be highly effective on American bison, but the African elephant has ten times the body weight and resistance. Standing in the msasa forests, listening to the squealing and crashing of the wounded monster, Zouga. determined never again to use the Ught American rifle on heavy game.
The second lesson he was learning was that if the first ball does not kill, then it seems to numb and anaesthetize heavy game to further punishment. Kill cleanly, or the subsequent shots into heart and lungs seem to be without effect. it was not only anger and provocation which made a wounded animal so dangerous, it was also this shock-induced immortality.
After standing down half a dozen mock charges, Zouga abandoned caution and patience, and he ran forward shouting to meet the next charge. Wh(a there! " he called. "Come on then, old fellow! " This time he got in close, and crashed another ball through the bull"s rib cage as he turned away. He had controlled his first wild excitement, and the ball struck precisely at the point of aim. He knew it was a heart shot, but the bull came again squealing, and Zouga fired a last time before the angry trumpeting and shrilling turned to a long sad bellow, that echoed off the peaks and rang out into the blue void of sky beyond the cliffs.
They heard him go down, the impact of the heavy body against the earth made it shiver under their feet.
Cautiously, the little group of hunters went forward through the forest and they found him kneeling, his forelegs folded neatly under his chest, his long, yellow ivories propping up the dusty wrinkled old head, still facing down the slope as though defiant even in death.
Leave him, shouted Jan Cheroot. "Follow the others.
And they ran on past him.
Night caught them before they reached the crest of the slope, the sudden impenetrably black night of central Africa, so they lost the spoor and missed the pa.s.s. We will have to let them go, " Jan Cheroot lamented in the darkness, his yellow face a pale blob at Zouga"s shoulder. Yes, Zouga agreed. "This time we must let them go."
But somehow he knew there would be another time. The feeling that the old bull was part of his destiny was still strongly with Zouga. Yes, there would be another time, of that he was certain.
That night for the first time Zouga ate the hunter"s greatest delicacy: slices of elephant heart threaded on to a green stick with cubes of white fat cut out from the chest cavity, salted and peppered, and roasted over the slow coals of the camp fire, eaten with cold cakes of stone-ground com and washed down with a mug of tea, steaming hot, bitter, strong and unsweetened. He could not remember a finer meal, and afterwards Zouga lay down on the hard earth, covered by a single blanket and protected from the chill of the wind by the huge carca.s.s of the old bull, and slept as though he also had been struck down, without dreams, without rolling over even once in his sleep.
In the morning, by the time they had chopped out one of the tusks and laid it under the rnsasa trees, they could already hear the singing of the porters as the main body of the caravan filed along the narrow ledge, rounding the shoulder of the mountain and then came up on to the slope.
Robyn was a hundred paces ahead of the standardbearer, and when she reached the carca.s.s of the bull she stopped.
"We heard the gunfire last evening, she said. He"s a fine old bull, Zouga told her, indicating the freshly chopped tusk. it was the unbroken right-hand ivory, taller than Zouga, but a third of its length had been buried in the skull. This portion was smooth, unblemished white, whereas the rest of it was stained by vegetable juices. it will weigh almost a hundred pounds, he went on, touching the tusks with the toe of his boot. "Yes, he"s a fine old bull. "Not any more, he isn"t, Robyn told him quietly, watching Jan Cheroot and the gunbearers hacking away at the enormous mutilated head. Little chips of white bone flew in the early sunlight, as they whittled away the heavy skull to free the second tusk. Robyn watched the butchery for a few seconds only before going on up the slope towards the crest.
Zouga was irritated and angry with her, for she had detracted from his own vaulting pleasure in his first elephant hunt.
So, an hour later when he heard Robyn calling to him from higher up the slope, he ignored her cries.
However, she was persistent, as always, and at last with an exclamation of exasperation, he followed her up through the forest. She came running down to meet him, with the unrestrained infectious joy of a child shining on her face. Oh Zouga. " She seized his hand, and began to drag him impetuously up the slope. "Come and see, you must come and see."
The old elephant road crossed the saddle, through a deep pa.s.s, guarded on each hand by grey b.u.t.tresses of rough grey rock and as they took the last few paces over the highest point a new and beautiful world opened below and ahead of them. Zouga gasped involuntarily, for he had not antic.i.p.ated anything like this.
Low foothills fell away from beneath their feet, regular as the swells of the ocean, covered with stately trees whose trunks were tall and grey as the oaks of Windsor Park, and then beyond the hills the undulating lightly forested gra.s.slands, golden as fields of ripe wheat, spread to a tall blue horizon. There were streams of clear water meandering through the glades of pale gra.s.s, where herds of wild game drank or lazed upon the banks.
There were buffalo everywhere Zouga looked, black bovine shapes, standing shoulder to shoulder in dark ma.s.ses under the umbrella branches of the acacia trees.
Closer at hand a troop of sable antelope, that loveliest of all antelope, jet black above but with snowy bellies, their long symmetrical curve of horn. extended backwards almost to touch the haunches, followed the herd bull in long file to the water, pausing unafraid to stare curiously at the interlopers, forming a frieze of stately, almost Grecian, design.
The endless stretch of land was dotted with hills like ruined natural castles of stone, seeming to have been built in past aeons by giants and ogres from mammoth blocks of stone, and tumbled now in fantastic shapes, some with fairy turrets and spires, others again flat topped, geometrically laid out as though by a meticulous architect with plumb-line and theodolite.
This lovely scene was lit by a peculiar pearly luminosity of the morning light, so that even the furthest hills, probably more than a hundred miles distant, were sharply silhouetted through the sweet clear air. It"s beautiful, Robyn murmured, still. holding Zouga"s hand. The kingdom of Monomatapa, Zouga answered her, his own voice husky with emotion. No, " Robyn answered softly. "There is no sign of man here, this is the new Eden."
Zouga was silent, letting his eyes rove across the scene, searching for, but not finding, any evidence of man. it was a land untouched, unspoiled. A new land, there for the taking! " he said, still holding Robyn"s hand. They were as close, in that moment, as they had ever been or would ever be again, and the land awaited them, wide, limitless, empty and beautiful.
At last, reluctantly, he left Robyn at the head of the pa.s.s and went back through the grey rock portals to bring on the caravan. He found the second tusk removed, and both of them bound up with bark rope on to the carryingpoles of newly cut rnsasa wood, but the porters had laid aside their packs and were indulging in an orgy of fresh meat, and that most sought-after of African spoils, thick white globs of elephant fat.
They had cut a trapdoor into the belly of the elephant carca.s.s, and pulled out the entrails, and these glistened in the early sunlight, huge rubbery tubes of purple and yellow guts, already swelling and ballooning with the trapped gases they contained.
Half a dozen porters, stripped mother-naked, had crawled into the interior of the elephant"s carca.s.s, disappearing completely from view and wading almost waist-deep in the clotting, congealing bath of trapped blood. They crawled out, painted with it from head to foot, eyes and grinning teeth startlingly white in the grisly shining wet red visages, their arms filled with tidbits of liver and fat and spleen.
These delicacies were hacked into pieces with the blade of an a.s.segai and thrown on the glowing coals of one of half a dozen fires, then s.n.a.t.c.hed up again, black on the outside and more than half raw within to be wolfed down with every appearance of ecstatic pleasure.
There would be no moving them until they were satiated, Zouga realized.
So he left instructions to Jan Cheroot, himself already potbellied with the meat he had gorged, to follow as soon as the carca.s.s had been either eaten or packed up for carrying, and taking the Sharps rifle returned back up the slope to where he had left Robyn.
He called for her, fruitlessly, for almost half an hour, and was really becoming concerned for her safety when her reply echoed off the cliffs, and looking upwards he saw her standing on a ledge a hundred feet above him, waving him to come up to her.
Zouga climbed up swiftly to where she stood on the ledge, and checked the rebuke that he had ready for her when he saw her expression. She was pale, a sickly greyish colour, under the gilding of the sun, and her eyes were reddened and still swimming with tears. What is it, Sissy? " he asked with quick concern, but she seemed unable to reply, the words choking in her throat so she had to swallow thickly, and motion him to follow her.
The ledge on which they stood was narrow, but level - and was cut back under the cliff, forming a low long cavern. The cavern had been used before by other men, for the rocky roof was blackened with the sooty smoke of countless cooking-fires, and the back wall was decorated with the lyrically childlike paintings of the little yellow bushmen who over the centuries must have used this as a regular camp during their endless wanderings.
The paintings lacked both perspective and accurate form, but they captured the essential nature of all they recorded, from the graceful sweep of, the giraffe"s neck, to the bulky shoulders of the Cape buffalo with the mournful drooping horns framing the lifted nose.
The bushman artist saw himself and his tribe as frail, sticklike figures, with drawn bows, dancing and prancing about the quarry, and again, out of all proportion to the rest of the paintin& each little man sported a ma.s.sively erect p.e.n.i.s. Even in the heat of the chase, such was the universal conceit of all mate kind, Zouga thought.
Zouga was enchanted by the frozen cavalcade of man and beast which covered the walls of the cave, and he had already determined to camp here so that he could have more time to study and record this treasure house of primitive art, when Robyn was calling him again.
He followed her along the ledge until they reached the point where it ended abruptly, forming a balcony over the dreaming land ahead of them. Zouga"s attention was torn between this fresh vista of forest and glade and the cave art at his shoulder, but Robyn summoned him again impatiently.
There were strata of multi-coloured rock running horizontally through the rock face of the cliff. The different layers of rock varied in hardness, and the erosion of a softer layer had formed the long low cavern beyond the ledge.
This layer of rock was a soapy green colour, where it had not been painted over by the bushmen artists or discoloured with the smoke of their fires, and here at the point overlooking the empire of Monomatapa someone had used a metal tool to sc.r.a.pe a smooth square plaque into the green soapstone. The freshly cut surface stood out rawly as though it had been done that very day, but the words gave the lie to that impression.
There was a simple Christian cross chiselled deeply into the stone, and below it the name and the date, the lettering very carefully cut and designed by an expert penman. FULLER MORRIS BALLANTYNEZouga exclaimed aloud at seeing his father"s name, so clearly rendered by his father"s own hand.
Despite the apparent freshness of the cut, the date was seven years previously, 2, 0th July, i853. After that single exclamation they were both speechless, staring at the inscription, each of them gripped by differing emotion, Robyn by a resurgence of filial love and duty, by a crushing desire to be with her father again after so many years, the vast empty place in her life aching more excruciatingly at the prospect of being soon filled. Her eyes refilled with tears, and they broke from her eyelids and ran down her cheeks. Please, G.o.d, she prayed silently, "lead me to my father. Dear G.o.d, grant me that I am not too late."
Zouga"s emotions were as strong, but different. He felt a corroding resentment that any other man, father or not, should have preceded him through these rocky gates into the kingdom of Monomatapa. This was his land, and he did not want to share it with another. Especially, he did not want to share it with that monster of cruelty and conceit that was his father.
He stared coldly at the inscription that followed the name and date, but inwardly he seethed with anger and resentment. In G.o.d"s Holy name. " The words were carved below his father"s name.
It was typical of Fuller Ballantyne that he should carve his own name here with cross and credentials as the Lord"s amba.s.sador, as he had on trees and rocks at a hundred other places across the continent which he regarded as a personal gift from his G.o.d. You were right, Zouga dear.
You are leading us to him, as you promised. I should never have doubted you."
If he had been alone Zouga. realized that he might have defaced that inscription, sc.r.a.ped the rock bare with his hunting knife, but as he had the thought, he realized how futile it would be, for such an action would not wipe out the ghostly presence of the man himself.
Zouga turned away from the rock wall and its taunting plaque. He stared out over the new land, but somehow his heady pleasure in it had been dimmed by the knowledge that another man had pa.s.sed this way ahead of him.
He sat down with his feet dangling over the sheer drop to wait for Robyn to tire of staring at her father"s name.
However, the caravan of porters came before she did that. Zouga heard the singing from the forested slope behind the pa.s.s long before the head of the line crossed the saddle. The porters had voluntarily doubled their own loads, and they struggled up the slope under the enormous weight of elephant meat and fat and marrow bones, bound up in baskets of green rnsasa leaves and bark rope.
if Zouga had asked them to carry that weight of trade cloth or beads, or even gunpowder, he would have had an immediate mutiny to deal with, he thought grimly, but at least they were carrying the tusks. He could see them near the head of the line. Each tusk slung on a long pole, a man at either end, but even here they had hung extra baskets of meat on the same pole as the tusk.
The total weight must have been well over three hundred pounds, and they struggled up the slope uncomplainingly, even cheerfully.
Slowly, the caravan wound out of the forest and entered the gut of the pa.s.s, beginning to move directly under where Zouga sat, the figures of the porters and of Jan Cheroot"s Hottentot musketeers foreshortened by the angle. Zouga rose to his feet, he wanted to order Jan Cheroot to camp just beyond the point where the pa.s.s debauched on to the foothills. From where Zouga stood, he could see a patch of green gra.s.s against the foot of the cliffs far below him, and a pair of pale grey herons hunting flogs in this verdant marshy area. There was certainly a spring, and with the meat upon which they had gorged, his servants would be burning with thirst by nightfall.
The spring would be a good place to camp, and it would allow him the following morning to copy and record the Bushman paintings in the cavern. He cupped his hands to his mouth to hail Jan Cheroot, when a crash like the broadside from a ship-of-the-line filled the pa.s.s with thunder that echoed and bounced back and forth between the cliffs.
For many seconds Zouga could not understand what was happening for the thunderous bursts of sound were repeated, almost drowning the thin screams of his porters. They were throwing down their burdens and scattering like a flight of doves under the stoop of the falcon.
Then another movement caught his attention, a large round shape went bounding down the scree slope below the cliffs, charging straight at his panic-stricken caravan.
For a moment Zouga believed it was some sort of living predator that was attacking his servants, and, running along the lip of the ledge, he unslung the Sharps rifle, ready to fire down into the pa.s.s as soon as he could get a sight on one of the dark bounding shapes.
Then he realized that at each leap the thing struck sparks and fine grey smoke from the scree slope, and he could smell the faint smell, like burnt salt-petre that the sparks left in the air. He realized abruptly that they were giant rounded boulders rolling down upon his caravan, not one but a dozen or more, each weighing many tons, an onslaught which seemed to spring from the very air itself, and he looked wildly about for its source, goaded by the screams of his men and the sight of the rolling boulders smashing open packs of his precious irreplaceable provisions and scattering them across the rocky ground of the saddle.
Far below him, he heard the thudding report of an Enfield rifle, and glancing back he saw the tiny figure of Jan Cheroot aiming almost directly upwards at the sky, and following the direction of his rifle Zouga saw movement, just a flicker of movement on the edge of the cliff, outlined against the blue soaring vault of the heavens.
The deluge of huge boulders was coming from the very top of the cliff, and as Zouga stared, another and then another came raining down into the pa.s.s. Zouga squinted his eyes, head thrown back, as he studied the cliff rim. There was some animal up there. Zouga did not at first think of man, for he had already convinced himself that this new land was devoid of human presence.
He felt an almost superst.i.tious chill of horror that some pack of giant apes was on top of the cliff, bombarding his men with huge rocks, then he shook himself free of the feeling, and looked quickly for some way to get higher up his side of the pa.s.s, to reach a position from where he could fire across the rocky gateway at the attackers on the opposite cliff and give some protection to his servants.
Almost immediately he discovered another ledge rising at a steep angle from the one on which he stood.
Only a soldier"s eye would have picked it out. The tiny feet of the little rock hyrax that used it had put a light sheen on the rock and it was this that had drawn Zouga"s attention to the narrow pathway. Stay here! he shouted at Robyn, but she stepped in front of him. Zouga, what are you going to do? " she demanded, and then before he could answer. "Those are men up there!