imagine himself with his pants filled with gold coin seated in his favourite tavern. on the Cape Town dockside with a dozen butter yellow Hottentot beauties crowding close to him to hear the story, while the bartender prised the wax seal off another bottle of Cape Smoke. Now his enthusiasm almost matched that of Zouga himself.
He worked swiftly and when Zouga stooped and peered into the passage that he had cut through the dense secondary growth that had sprung up behind Fuller Ballantyne's axe, he saw the outline of the curved portals of the gateway, and the chiselled granite steps that led up to the narrow opening.
The steps had been worn into a smooth dish shape by the passage of thousands of feet over the centuries, but the gateway Had been deliberately blocked with stone and rubble, not the neat stonework of the main wall, but a careless and hurried attempt to seal the entrance, probably in the face of an advancing enemy, Zouga thought.
Somebody, probably Fuller Ballantyne, had pulled down this barrier sufficiently to enter. Zouga followed his tracks, the loose stone rolling under foot, he squeezed his way through the gateway, and found that it turned abruptly to the left, into a narrow vegetation-choked passage, between high walls open to the sky.
his disappointment was intense. He had hoped that once he forced the gateway, all the city and its wonders and treasures would lie before him. instead there were many hours of hard sweating labour facing him. It had been years, four years at least, since Fuller Ballantyne had entered through this gate and passageway, and it was as though he had never been.
Where the stonework had collapsed, Zouga clambered over it gingerly, the thought and dread of snakes was very much with him since the cave of the Umlimo. The long narrow passage, obviously constructed as a defensive measure against intruders, followed the curve of the main wall until abruptly it opened into a clear space, again choked with dense green thorny growth, and dominated by a tall cylindrical tower of lichen-covered granite blocks. The tower was immense, seeming in Zouga's excitement to reach to the very clouds.
Zouga started across the intervening courtyard, hacking impatiently at the bush and creepers, and halfway across he saw that there was a second tower, an identical twin to the first that had until that moment obscured it.
Now his heart was pounding fiercely against his ribs, not from the exertion of swinging the axe, but with an intuitive belief that the towers were the centre of this strange ancient city, and that they held the key to the mystery.
He stumbled in his haste, and went down on his knees, tearing another long rent in his breeches and abrading a strip of skin from his shin, so he swore in his impatience and his pain. He had lost the axe but when he groped for it in the tangled roots and interwoven branches, he found it almost immediately, and at the same time, uncovered the stone that had tripped him.
It was not the granite of which the walls and tower had been constructed. That fact caught his attention, and still on his knees he used the axe to clear the bush around the stone. He felt his nerves thrill as he realized that it was a work of sculpture.
Jan Cheroot had come up behind him, and now he knelt also and tore at the plants with his bare hands then the two of them rocked back on their heels, and still squatting examined the statue that they had uncovered. It was not large, probably weighed less than a hundredweight. It was carved in satiny, greenish soapstone, sitting on that familiar ornamental plinth, the simple pattern of triangles, like a row of shark's teeth.
The head was smashed off the statue, seemingly by a blow from a sledge hammer, but more likely from a rock used as a hammer. The body of the statue was still intact, the body of the raptor, with the folded pointed wings of a bird of prey, crouching on the point of flight.
Zouga slipped his hand into the opening of his shirt and drew out the little ivory charm on its leather thong, that he had taken from the body of the Mashona chieftain he had killed at the pass of the elephant road.
He let it nestle in the palm of his hand, comparing it with the statue. Beside him Jan Cheroot murmured, 'It is the same bird! 'Yes, ' Zouga agreed softly. 'But what does it mean? '
He dropped the ivory charm back inside his shirt. It is from long ago.
' Jan Cheroot shrugged. 'We will never know. ' And dismissing it thus, he would have risen to his feet again, but something else caught his beady bright eye and he darted forward, his hand pecking at the loose earth beside the statue like a greedy hen, and held it up between thumb and forefinger to catch the slanted morning light.
It was a perfectly round bead of metal pierced for the string of a necklace, a tiny bead only slightlyitly bigger than the head of a wax Vesta, and it was irregular in shape, as though beaten out under the hammer of a primitive smithy, but the colour was red-yellow, and its surface was undulled by either tarnish or corrosion; there is only one metal that has that peculiar lustre and sheen.
Zouga held out his hand for it almost reverently, and it had the weight and the warmth of a living thing. Gold! ' said Zouga, and beside him Jan Cheroot giggled ecstatically, like a young bride at her first kiss. Gold, he agreed.
'Good yellow gold.'
Zouga was always aware of the very limited time left to him, and every hour or so as they worked he would lift his head to the sky with the sweat streaming down his face and neck, and greasing the flat hard muscles of his naked upper body, and always the clouds were taller and blacker, the heat more punishing, and the wind sullen as a captive tribe on the point of rebellion.
In the night he would start awake, breaking up through the drugged surface of exhausted sleep, to lie and listen to the thunder growling below the horizon like a man-killing monster.
Each dawn he shook his men from their blankets and drove them in a suppressed frenzy of impatience to their labour, and when Matthew, the gunbearer, refused to rise again after the short rest which Zouga allowed them in the hottest hour of the day, Zouga dragged him to his feet and hit him once, a short, perfectly timed chopping blow that sent him spinning backwards full length into his own excavation. Matthew crawled out again with blood dribbling from his chin, and picked up the crude sieve of plaited split bamboos with which he was sifting the earth from the digging, and began again working over the piles of loose earth and rubble.
Zouga drove himself harder than he drove his small band of temple plunderers. He worked shoulder to shoulder with them as they cut out all the undergrowth from the courtyard below the twin stone towers, exposing the broken cobbles, and piles of loose rubble amongst which lay the fallen statues.
He found six more of the bird carvings virtually undamaged, except for minor chips and the attrition of the ages, but there were the fragments of others that had been broken with a savagery which could only have been deliberate, so that he was uncertain of the original number of statues. Zouga spent little time puzzling over them. The loose earth and rubble on which they lay was rich ground for his band to pick over, though they were
