If he had been alone Zouga. realized that he might have defaced that inscription, scraped 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 passed 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 pass 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 pass, 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 pass debauched on to the foothills. From where Zouga stood, he could see a patch of green grass 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 pass 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 pass 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 pass. 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 superstitious 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 pass, 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!
You cannot fire upon them! ' Her cheeks were still smeared with tears, but her pate face was set and determined.
Get out of the way, he snapped at her. Zouga, it will be murder.
'That's what they are trying to do to my men. 'We must bargain with them. ' Robyn caught at his arm as he pushed past her, but he shook her off and ran to the higher ledge. It will be murder! Robyn's cry followed him, and as he climbed, Zouga was reminded of the words of old Tom Harkness. The accusation that his father would not stop at killing anybody who stood in his way. This was what he had meant, Zouga. was suddenly sure of it. He wondered if his father had fought his way through this pass, just as Zouga. himself was about to do. if the champion of the Almighty can do it, then what a fine example to follow, ' he muttered to himself as he went up the steep ledge.
Below him the Enfield rifle thudded again, the sound muted by distance, almost lost in the roar of a new avalanche of murderous rock. Jan Cheroot could only hope to discourage his attackers with rifle fire from that angle; only if one of them actually leaned far out over the edge of the cliff would he be vulnerable to fire from the gut of the pass.
Zouga climbed in cold anger, stepping unhesitatingly over dangerous spots in the narrow ledge where small pieces of rock crumbled under his boots and went rattling down into the pass hundreds of feet below.
Abruptly he came out on to a broader ledge, formed by the strata of rock, which rose at a gentler pitch so that now Zouga could run along it without fear of losing his footing. He climbed swiftly, it was less than ten minutes
