Old Karanga led them cautiously wide of every occupied village along their route, although he assured Robyn they were also of the same tribe. There seemed to be no trade nor commerce between these settlements, each perched on its fortified hilltop in suspicious and hostile isolation.
By this time, Robyn could speak enough of the language to find out from Karanga more about the great wizard, from whom the chief had received the magical porcelain talisman, and the story filled her with excitement and anticipation.
Many rainy seasons ago, old Karanga was not sure how many, at his age every season blurred into the one before or the one after, anyway, at some not too far distant date an extraordinary man had come out of the forest, even as she had come, and like her he had been fair skinned.
However, his hair and beard were the colour of flames (he showed her the camp fire), and he was without doubt a magician and prophet and rainmaker, for the day he arrived the long drought had broken with thunderous storms that filled the rivers for the first time in many years.
This pale wizard had performed other rare and wonc erful feats, transforming himself first into a lion and then into an eagle, raising the dead from the grave, and directing the lightning with a wave of his hand. The tale had
lost nothing in the retelling Robyn noted wryly.
Did anybody speak to him? ' Robyn asked. We were all too afraid, Karanga admitted, shaking theatrically with terror, 'but I myself saw the wizard as an eagle fly over village and drop the talisman from the sky. ' He flapped his skinny old arms in pantomime.
The strong anchovy smell would have attracted the bird to the discarded pot, Robyn reflected, but when it proved inedible the bird would have dropped it, by chance over Karanga's village. The wizard stayed a short time near our village and then went away to the south. We have heard that he travelled swiftly, obviously in his guise as a lion. We heard of his miracles, the word shouted from hilltop to hill-top or tapped out by the drums. How he cured others sick to death, how he challenged the ancestral spirits of the Karanga in their most sacred places shouting abuse at them so all who heard him trembled.
rWe heard also how he slew the high priestess of the dead, an Umlimo of vast power in her own stronghold.
This strange pale magician slew her and destroyed her sacred relics.'
In fact he had raged through the land like a man-eating lion, which of course he was, until finally he came to rest upon a dark hilltop far to the south, the mountain of iron Thaba Simbi, where he stayed to perform diverse curses and miracles so that the people came to him from far and wide to buy his services with corn and other offerings.
Is he still there? ' Robyn demanded.
Old Karanga rolled his watery eyes and shrugged. 'It is always difficult and dangerous to predict the comings and goings of wizards and magicians, that eloquent gesture seemed to say.
The journey was not so straightforward as Robyn had hoped, for the further he went from his own village the less certain old Karanga became of his direction, or of the exact location of the Iron Mountain, which he had told her of.
At the beginning of each day's march, he informed Robyn confidently that they would reach their destination that day, and as they went into camp each evening he told her apologetically that it would be the next day for certain.
Twice he pointed out rocky kopies, That is indeed the Iron Mountain', but each time they were driven off with a hail of boulders and throwing spears from the heights. I was mistaken, Karanga mumbled, 'there is a darkness in my eyes sometimes, even under the noonday sun. 'Have you verily and truly seen this mountain? ' Robyn demanded sternly, almost at the end of her patience, and Karanga hung his silver-wrinkled head and with great industry picked at his nostrils with a bony finger to hide his discomfiture. It is true that I have not personally seen this place, not with my own eyes, but I have been told by one who spoke with a man who himself. . . ' he admitted, and Robyn was so angry that she shouted at him in English. You naughty old devil, why did you not say so beforeV Old Karanga understood the tone, if not the words, and his misery was so apparent that she could not sustain her anger for more than an hour, his gratitude when she once more allowed him to carry her water bottle and food bag was pathetic to see.
Robyn was now consumed with impatience. She had no way of knowing how far behind her was Zouga and his hunting-party. He might have returned to the camp at Mount Hampden and found her note the very day after her departure, or he might still be killing elephant a hundred miles away, completely unaware that she had marched without him.
Her disapproval of her brother, and her anger at his recent actions, had gradually evoked a sense of competition in her.
She had come so far and accomplished so much on her own, from the contact with the Karanga village to following the traces of her father so far and so doggedly, that she fiercely resented the idea of his arrival when she was at the very point of making the prayed-for and long-delayed reunion with Fuller Ballantyne. She guessed how the tale would be told in Zouga's journal, and in the book that would follow it. She knew who would get all the credit for the arduous search, and its brilliantly successful conclusion.
Once she had thought that fame and praise meant little to her, she believed she would be content to leave that to her brother. She had believed that her own reward would be her father's embrace, and the deep personal knowledge that she had brought some comfort or some surcease to the surf ering black peoples of her Africa. I still do not know myself all that well, she admitted, as she called the third successive tirikeza, double-marching her porters relentlessly to keep ahead of Zouga wherever he might be.
I want to find Pater, I want to find him alone, and I want the world to know I found him.'
Pride is sinful, but then I have always been a sinner.
Forgive me, Sweet Jesus, I will make it up in a thousand other ways. Only forgive this one small unimportant sin, she prayed in her rude grass shelter, and as she did so she listened with one ear for the shouts of Zouga's bearers coming into camp, and her heart tripped at each sudden noise. She was tempted to break camp and call a night march towards the next distant hill they had seen on the horizon at sunset and which old Karanga had once again confidently declared to be the Iron Mountain.
The moon was full and would rise in an hour, that one march might be all that was necessary to keep ahead of
