It is a trick of the wise ones.'
'Count me amongst them then, Isazi,' Ralph told him solemnly, and walked out of camp to find a place upon the riverbank from which to enjoy the sunset.
Here the banks of the Vaal were churned into mounds and irregular hollows, the old river workings, picked over by the first diggers and now abandoned and overgrown.
It was a mass burial ground of men's dreams, and looking upon it Ralph's high spirits that had buoyed this first day's trek upon the open road began to evaporate.
It was the first day in his life that Ralph had been free and completely his own man. Walking at the wheel of his own wagon, he had woven dreams of fortune. He had imagined his wagons, fifty, a hundred, carrying his cargoes across the continent. He had seen them coming south again, loaded with ivory and bars of yellow gold.
He had seen in his mind's eye the wide lands, the herds of elephant, the masses of native cattle, the riches that lay out there in the north beckoning to him, warbling the siren call in his ears.
He had been carried so high that now as his spirits turned they fell as low. He looked at the deserted diggings on the banks across the river, the vain scratchings where other men had attempted to turn this great brown slumbering giant of a continent to their own account.
Then suddenly he felt very small and lonely, and afraid. His thoughts turned to his father, and his spirits plunged lower still as he recalled the last words he had spoken.
'Go then! Go and be damned to you.'
That was not the way he had wanted it. Zouga Ballantyne had been the central figure in his life until that day.
A colossus who overshadowed each of his actions, each of his thoughts.
Much as he had chafed under the shackles that his duty to his father had placed upon him, much as he had resented every one of his decisions being made for him, each of his actions ordered, yet now he felt as though the greater part of himself had been removed by some drastic surgery of the soul.
Until this moment he had not really thought of losing his father, he had not let the memory of their brutal parting cut him too deeply. Now suddenly this dirty slow river was the barrier between him and the life he had known. There was no going back, now or ever. He had lost his father and his brother and Jan Cheroot and he was alone and lonely.
He felt the acid tears scald his eyelids.
His vision wavered, played him tricks, for across the wide river course, on the far bank was the figure of a horseman.
The horseman slouched easily in the saddle, one hand on his hip, the elbow cocked; and the set of the head upon the broad shoulders was unmistakable.
Slowly Ralph came to his feet, staring in disbelief, and then suddenly he was running and sliding down the sheer bank and splashing waist deep through the grey waters of the ford. Zouga swung down from Tom's back and ran forward to meet Ralph as he came up the bank.
Then both of them stopped and stared at each other.
They had not embraced since the night of Aletta's funeral, and they could not bring themselves to do so now, though longing was naked in the eyes of both of them.
'I could not let you go, not like that,' said Zouga, but Ralph had no reply, for his throat had closed.
,'It is time for you to go out on your own,' Zouga nodded his golden beard. 'Past time. You are like an eaglet that has outgrown the nest. I realized that before you did, Ralph, but I did not want it to be. That is why I spoke so cruelly.'
Zouga picked up Tom's reins and the pony nudged him affectionately. Zouga stroked his velvety muzzle.
'There are two parting gifts that I have for you.' He placed the reins in Ralph's hand. 'That is one,' he said evenly, but the green shadows in his eyes betrayed how dearly that gesture had cost him. 'The other is in Tom's saddle-bag. It's a book of notes. Read them at your leisure. You may find them of interest, even of value.'
Still Ralph could not speak. He held the reins awkwardly, and blinked back the stinging under his eyelids.
'There is one other small gift, but it has no real value.
It is only my blessing.'
'That is all that I really wanted,' whispered Ralph.
It was six hundred miles to the Shashi river, to the border of Matabeleland.
Isazi inspanned at dusk each evening and they trekked through the cool of the night. When the moon went down and it was utterly dark, then Umfaan threw the lead rein over Dutchman's head, and the big black ox put his nose down and stayed on the track, like a hunting dog on the spoor, until the first glimmering of dawn signalled the outspan.
During a good night's trek they made fifteen miles but when the going was heavy with sand they might make only five miles.
During the days, while the cattle grazed or chewed the cud in the shade, Ralph saddled up Tom and, with Bazo running beside his stirrup, they hunted.
They found herds of buffalo along the banks of the Zouga river, the river on whose bank Ralph's father had been born, big herds, two hundred beasts together.
The herd bulls were huge, bovine and bald with age, their backs crusted with the mud from the wallow, the spread of their arnioured heads wider than the stretch of a man's arms, the tips of the polished black horns rising into symmetrical crescents like the points of the sickle moon, while the bosses above their broad foreheads were massively crenellated.
