tone and followed him submissively as he started back towards the pass.
Zouga moved back cautiously, pausing every fifty paces or so to survey the clifftops suspiciously, although, he was fairly certain that there would be no renewal of the boulder rolling. However, he kept in close under the sheer rock face so that any boulder would fall beyond them.
The going was difficult over the loose scree, and through the thick scrub that covered it. It took them nearly an hour to get back to the spot where Zouga had marked the fall of the body of the warrior in the lion headdress, and then they had to search for nearly as long again before they found the corpse.
He had fallen into a deep crevice between two rocks, and he lay at the bottom of it on his back. The body appeared unmarked except for the small black bullet hole low on the left side of his naked chest.
The eyes were still wide open, but he had lost his headdress.
After a moment Zouga turned to Juba enquiringly. Who is he? Of what tribe is he? ' he asked, and the child showed no concern at the presence of violent death. She had seen very much worse in her short life. Mashona! ' she told Zouga scornfully. Juba was Matabele of Zanzi blood, and there was no more noble breeding outside the kraal of King Mzilikazi himself. She felt nothing but contempt for all the other tribes of Africa, especially for these people. Mashona! ' she repeated. 'Eaters of dirt.'
It was the ultimate term of denigration that the Matabele applied to all the tribes that they have taken into slavery, or driven to the very point of extinction. It is always the way these baboons fight. ' She indicated the dead man with a toss of her pretty head. 'They stand on the hilltops and throw down stones.'
Her dark eyes sparkled. 'It becomes more difficult each year for our young men to blood their spears, and until they do so the King will not give them leave to marry.'
She broke off, and Zouga smiled ironically. The child'sresentment was clearly not so much at the Mashona's alleged lack of sportsmanship, but at the havoc that this wrought on the Matabele marriage markets.
Zouga scrambled down into the rocky crevice, and stooped over the dead warrior. Despite Juba's contempt, the man was well formed, with straight strong limbs, and handsome intelligent features. For the first time Zouga felt a twinge of regret at having fired the ball which had caused that innocuous-looking little wound.
It was a good thing that the warrior lay upon his back for the exit would have been ghastly. A soldier should never examine the bodies of the men he kills in the heat of battle. Zouga had made that discovery long ago in India, for afterwards there was always this moment of guilt and remorse. He shrugged it away, for he had not come either to gloat over the kill or to torture himself with it, but to merely identify his enemy.
Why had these warriors attacked the caravan without warning, he wondered? Were they the border guards of the fabled Monomatapa? It seemed the most likely explanation, though, of course, they could be ordinary bandits, like the dacoits of India wit i W. iom he had made bitter acquaintance.
Zouga stared moodily down at the corpse. Who had he been? And how much danger did his tribe still present to Zouga's caravan? But there was nothing more to learn and Zouga began to straighten up again when he noticed the necklace around the corpse's throat. He knelt again to examine it.
It was made of cheap trade beads on a thong of gut, a gaudy little trifle except for the pendant that had hung on to his chest but had slipped back under the armpit, half concealed so that Zouga noticed it now for the first time.
He pulled it free, examined it a moment and then slipped the entire necklace off over the man's head. When he put his hand around the back of the dead man's head to lift it he felt the pieces of skull grate together deep in his head like shards of broken pottery under his fingers.
He lowered the shattered head and stood up with the necklace twined about his fingers, examining the pendant.
It had been carved from ivory that had yellowed with age, and tiny black cracks formed a fine web across its polished surfaces. Zouga held it to catch the sunlight, and turned it between his fingers to study it from every angle.
He had seen another figurine that was almost a twin to this one, a golden figurine that was now in a bank vault in Cape Town where he had deposited it before they had sailed on board the gunboat Black joke.
This was the same stylized bird-like shape, perched on a round plinth. The plinth was decorated with the same triangular shark's-teeth pattern, and the bird had the same swelling chest and short, sharply pointed wings folded across its back. It could have been a pigeon or a dove, except for one detail. The beak was the curved and hooked weapon of a raptor.
It was a falcon, be knew it beyond any doubt, and it was certain that the heraldic bird had some deep significance. The golden necklace that Tom Harkness had left him must have belonged to a king or a queen or a high priest. The choice of material, gold, was an indication of that. Now here was the same shape, worn by a man who seemed to be a chieftain, and once again the shape was faithfully copied in a precious material, ivory.
The falcon of Monomatapa, Zouga wondered, studying the ancient pendant, ancient it must be, for the ivory had acquired a deep patina and lustre.
Zouga looked up at the little Matabele girl, standing almost naked above him, and watching him with interest.
Do you see this? ' he asked. It is a bird. 'Have you seen it before?
' Juba shook her head, and her fat little breasts joggled at the movement. It is a Mashona thing, ' and she shrugged. What would a daughter of the sons of Senzangakhona and Chaka want with such a nonsense?
On an impulse Zouga lifted the necklace and dropped it over his own head, letting the ivory falcon fall inside the vee of his flannel shirt, where it nested against the darkly springing curls of his body hair. Come! ' he told Juba.
'There is nothing more -for us here, and he led the way back towards the camp beyond the pass.
The land into which the old bull had led them by the secret road through the pass was an elephant kingdom.
Perhaps the pressure of the hunters moving up from the far southern tip of the continent had driven them into this unpeopled world. The herds were everywhere. Each day Zouga and Jan Cheroot hunting far ahead of the main caravan came up with the huge grey- pachyderms, and they shot them down.
