, comev Jan cheroot whistled and they stepped out on to the narrow secret ledge, with the deep drop close at hand and followed the road that had been smoothed for them by tens of thousands of roughly padded feet over the centuries.
zouga at last was allowing himself to hope, for the road climbed always, and there seemed to be a definite purpose and direction to it, unlike the meandering game trails of the valley. This road was going somewhere, climbing and bearing determinedly southwards.
Zouga paused a moment and looked back. Far behind and below the sunken plain of the Zambezi shimmered in the blue and smoky haze of heat. The gigantic baobab trees seemed like children's miniatures, the terrible ground over which they had laboured for weeks seemed smooth and inviting, and far away just visible through the haze the serpentine belt of darker, denser vegetation marked the course of the great wide river itself.
Zouga. turned his back upon it and followed Jan Cheroot up around the shoulder of the mountain, and a new and majestic vista opened around him as dramatically as though a theatre curtain had been drawn aside.
Another steep slope stretched away above the cliffs, and there were luxuriant forests of marvellously shaped trees, the colours of their foliage was pink and flaming scarlet and iridescent green. These lovely forests reached up to a rampart of rocky peaks that Zouga was certain must mark the highest point of the escarpment.
There was something different with this new scene, and it took Zouga some moments to realize what it was.
Then suddenly he drew a deep breath of pleasure. The air fanning down from the crest was sweet and cool as that on a summer's evening on the South Downs, but carrying with it the scent of strange shrubs and flowers and the soft exotic perfume of that beautiful pink and red forest of msasa trees.
That was not all, Zouga realized suddenly. There was something more important still. They had left the tsetsefly-belt' behind them. It was many hours and a thousand feet of climbing since he had noticed the last of the deadly little insects. The land ahead of them now was clean, they were entering a land where man could live and rear his animals. They were leaving the killing heat of that harsh and forbidding valley for something softer and cleaner, something good, Zouga was certain of it, at last.
He stared about him with delight and wonder. Below him in the void a pair of vultures came planing in on wide-stretched pinions, so close that he could see every individual feather in their wingtips. and above the shaggy mound of their nest that clung Precariously to a fissure in the sheer rock cliff they beat at the air, hovering, before settling upon the nest site. Clearly Zouga heard the impatient cries of the hungry nestlings.
On the rock shelf high above his head a family of hyrax, the plump rabbit-like rock dassie, sat in a row and stared down at him with patent astonishment, fluffy as children's toys, until at last they took flight and disappeared into their rocky warrens with the speed of a conjurer's illusion.
The sun, sinking through the last quadrant of its course, lit it all with richer and mellower light, and turned the cloud ranges to splendour, tall mushroomshaped thunderheads of silver and brightest gold, touched with fleshy pink tongues and the tinge of wild roses.
Now at last Zouga could not doubt where the elephant road was leading him and he felt his spirits soaring, his body wearied from the climb was suddenly recharged with vigour, with vaulting expectations. For he knew that those rugged peaks above him were the threshold, the very frontiers of the fabled kingdom of Monomatapa.
He wanted to push past Jan Cheroot on the narrow track, and run ahead up the broad beautiful forested slope that led to the crest, but the little yellow Hottentot stopped him with a hand upon his shoulder. Look! he hissed softly.
'There they are! '
zouga followed his outflung arm and saw instantly.
Far ahead amongst those magical red and pink groves something moved, vast and grey and slow, ethereal and insubstantial as a shadow. He stared at it, feeling his heartbeat quicken at this, his first glimpse of an African elephant in its savage habitat, but the slow grey movement was immediately screened by the dense foliage. My telescope. ' He snapped his fingers urgently behind his back, never taking his eyes from the spot where the huge beast had disappeared, and Matthew thrust the thick cylinder of cool brass into his hand.
With fingers that shook slightly he pulled out the sections of the spy-glass, but before he could lift it to his eye the tree that had screened the elephant's body began to tremble and shake as though it had been struck by a whirlwind, and faintly they heard the rending crackle of tearing timber, the squealing protest of living wood, and slowly the tall tree leaned outwards and then toppled with a crack that echoed off the cliffs like a cannon shot.
ZOUP lifted the telescope and rested it on Matthew's patient shoulder. He focused the eye-piece. Abruptly, in the rounded field of the glass, the elephant was very close. His head was framed by the foliage of the tree he had uprooted. The vast ears seemed wide as a clipper's mainsail as they flapped lazily and he could see the puffs of dust that their breeze raised from the massive grey withers.
Clearly he could see the dark wet tear-path from the little eye down the sered and wrinkled cheek, and when the animal raised its head, Zouga drew breath sharply at the unbelievable size of the double arches of stained yellow ivories. One -tip was foreshortened, broken off cleanly, and the ivory was brilliant snowy white in the fresh break.
As Zouga watched, the bull used his trunk, with its rubbery fingers of flesh at the tip, to pluck a handful of the delicate new leaves from the fallen tree. He used his trunk with the finesse of an expert surgeon, and then drooped open his triangular lower lip and thrust the leaves far down his own throat, and his rheumy old eyes wept with slow contentment.
An urgent tap on his shoulder disturbed Zoup and irritably he lifted his eye from the telescope. Jan Cheroot was pointing further up the slope.
Two other elephants had drifted into view from out of the forest. Zouga refocused upon them and then gasped.
He had thought the first elephant massive, and here was another bull just as big, yet it was the third elephant which daunted his belief.
Beside him Jan Cheroot was whispering with suppressed tension making his voice hoarse and his slanted black eyes shine.
The younger bulls are his two askari, his indunas.
They are his ears and his eyes. For in his great age he is probably almost deaf and more than half blind, but
