the journey to the coast; worry that once she reached it, her accounts would be the first to reach London; doubt as to the authenticity of the clues which Fuller Ballantyne had left for him to follow, but overlying it all a sense of relief and excitement that he was at last answerable only to himself, free to range as fast and far as hard legs and harder determination would take him.
He shook himself, a physical purging of guilt and doubt, leaving only the excitement and soaring sense of anticipation. and he turned to where Sergeant Cheroot waited at the perimeter of the forlorn and deserted camp. When you smile, your face makes the children cry, Zouga told him, 'but when you frown. . . What troubles you now, oh mighty hunter of elephants? ' The little Hottentot lugubriously indicated the bulky tin box that contained Zouga's dress uniform and hat.
Say not another word, Sergeant, ' Zouga warned him. But the porters complain, they have carried it so far. 'And they will carry it to the gates of hell itself, if I say so. Safari! ' Zouga raised his voice, elated with the sense of excitement still strongly upon him. 'We march! ' Zouga was prepared for wide discrepancies in the positions that his father had fixed by celestial observation, and his own. A few seconds of error in the chronometers would put them many miles out.
So he treated with suspicion the terrain features which he saw ahead and which seemed to match with uncanny accuracy the sketch maps he had copied from Fuller's journals.
Yet as each day's march that he made opened up country that fitted his father's descriptions, he became more confident, more certain that the Umlimo and the ruined city were real and that they lay not many days march ahead.
It was beautiful country they passed through, though the air was more sultry as they descended the sloping plateau towards the south and west. The long dry season, now drawing to its close, had scared the grasslands to the colour of fields of ripening wheat, and turned the foliage of the forests to a hundred shades of plum reds and soft apricots. Many of the trees were bare of all leaves, lifting arthritically contorted limbs to the sky as if beseeching it for the relief of rain.
Each day the thunderheads built up, tall silver ranges of cloud turning purple and sullen leaden blue, threatening rain, but never making good that threat, though the thunder muttered, and in the evenings the lightning flickered low on the horizon as though great armies were locked in battle far to the east.
The big game was concentrated on the remaining water, the deeper river pools and the strongest waterholes, so that each day's march was through a wonderland of wild animals.
In one herd Zouga counted thirty-two giraffe, from the old slink-bull almost black with age, his long neck taller than the trees on which he fed, to the pale beige splotched calves on their disproportionately long legs, galloping away in that slow rocking gait with their long tufted tails twisted up over their backs.
Every clearing had its family of rhinoceros, the cows with the distinctively long slender nose horn, running their calves ahead of them, guiding them with a touch of the horn on the flank. There were herds of Cape buffalo, a thousand strong, flowing in a black dense mass across the open glades, steaming with pale dust like the lava from an active volcano.
Then there were elephant. There was not one day they did not cut fresh spoor, veritable roads through the forest, tall trees pushed down or still standing but stripped of their bark so the trunks were naked and weeping with fresh sap, the earth beneath them strewn with chewed twigs and bunches of picked leaves only just beginning to wither, the huge piles of fibrous dung standing like monuments to the passing of the great grey beasts, and the baboon and the plump brown pheasant scratching and foraging enthusiastically in them for the half digested wild nuts and other tidbits.
Zouga could seldom resist him when Jan Cheroot looked up from his examination of the pad marks and said, 'A big bull, this one, walking heavy in the front quarters. Good teeth, I'd stake my sister's virtue on it. 'A commodity which was staked and lost many years ago, Zouga observed drily. 'But we will follow, none the less.'
Most evenings they could cut teeth and, having buried them, carry the bleeding heart to where they had left the porters, two men to carry the forty-pound hunk of raw flesh slung on a pole between them, a feast for the whole party. Because of the hunt, progress was slow and not always direct, but steadily Zouga identified and passed the landmarks that his father had described.
Then at last, knowing he was close, Zouga withstood the temptation to hunt, for the first time refusing to follow the fresh spoor of three fine bulls, and disappointing Jan Cheroot most grievously by doing so. You should never leave a good elephant, or a warm and willing lady, he advised dolefully, 'because you never know where or when you are going to meet the next one.'
Jan Cheroot did not yet know the new object of their quest and Zouga's behaviour puzzled him. Zouga often caught him watching him with a quizzical sparkle in his bright little slitty eyes, but he avoided the direct question diplomatically and accepted Zouga's orders to abandon the spoor with only a little further grumbling, and they went on.
it was the porters who first baulked. Zouga never knew how they guessed, perhaps old Karanga had spoken of the Umlirno around the camp fire, or perhaps it was part of their tribal lore, although the gunbearers and most of the porters were from the Zambezi many hundreds of miles to the north. Yet Zouga had learned enough of Africa by now to recognize the strange, almost telepathic knowledge of far events and places. Whatever it was, and however they had acquired forewarning, there were thorns in the porters' feet for the first time in months.
At first Zouga was angry, and would have lived up to his nickname of 'Bakelal, the Fist, but then he realized that their reluctance to continue towards the range of bald hills that showed above the horizon was confirmation that he was on a hot scent and close to his goal.
In camp that night, he drew Jan Cheroot aside and, speaking in English, explained what he was seeking and where. He was unprepared for the sickly expression that slowly spread over Jan Cheroot's wizened yellow features. Nie wat! Ik lol me met daai goed nieP The little Hottentot was driven in his superstitious terror to fall back on the bastard Cape Dutch. 'No what! I don't mess around with that sort of thing, he repeated in English, and Zouga smiled tauntingly across the camp fire at him. Sergeant Cheroot, I have seen you run, with a bare backside, right up to a wounded bull elephant, and wave your hat to turn him when he chargedElephants, said Jan Cheroot without returning the smile, 'is one thing. Witches is another thing Then he perked up and twinkled like a mischievous gnome. Somebody must stay with the porters or they'll steal our traps and run for home.'
Zouga left them camped near a muddy little waterhole, within an hour's match of the northernmost granite kopje. At the water-hole he filled the big enamelled water bottle, and wet its thick covering of felt to keep the contents cool, slung a freshly charged powder sack on one hip and a food bag on the other, and, with the heavy smooth-bore elephant gun over his shoulder set out alone while the shadows were still long on the earth, and the grass wet with the dew.
The hills ahead of him were rounded domes of pearly grey granite, smooth as a bald man's pate and completely free of vegetation. As he trudged towards them across the lightly forested plain, his spirit quailed at the task ahead
