oh, he's beautiful, Ralph,' she had said and kissed Tom's velvety muzzle.
'We don't have a horse,' Victoria explained. 'Daddy is a man of God, and men of God are too poor to have horses.'
The small party straggled over the first low rise beyond the river, and Salina stopped and pointed down into the shallow basin ahead of them.
'Khami!' she said simply, and all of them looked to Ralph for approbation.
There was a notch in the next line of granite hills, a natural divide and shed for underground water, which accounted for the spread of lush grass that carpeted the valley.
Like chickens under the hen, the small huddle of buildings crouched beneath the hills. They were neatly laid out, thatched with yellow grass and painted dazzlingly white with burnt limewash. The largest building had a wooden cross set proudly on the ridge of the roof.
'Daddy and Mummy built the church with their own hands. King Silly Cat would not allow any of his people to help them,' Victoria explained.
'Silly Cat?' Ralph asked, puzzled.
'King Mzilikazi,' Salina translated. 'You know Mama does not like you using fun names for the kings, Vicky,' she rebuked the child mildly; but Victoria was shaking Ralph's hand excitedly and pointing to a distant figure in the valley below them.
'Daddy!' shrieked the twins in unison. There's Daddy!'
He was working in the precise geometrically laid out gardens below the church, a lanky figure whose shoulders remained stooped even when he stood upright and looked towards them, stabbed his spade into the earth and came striding up the hill.
'Ralph!' He swept off the sweatstained hat, and he was bald, like a monk, with just a fringe of silky hair forming a halo around his pate at the level of his ears. It was immediately apparent from whom Salina had inherited her glorious white-gold tresses.
'Ralph,' the man repeated, and he wiped his right hand on the seat of his pants and then held it out. Despite the stoop, he was as tall as Ralph, his face deeply tanned, his bald dome as shiny as if it had been waxed and polished, his eyes pale blue as a summer sky, washed out by heat haze; but his smile was like Salina's, calm and tranquil, so that as he took the hand Ralph realized that this was the most contented and deeply happy man he had ever met in his life.
'I'm Clinton Codrington,' he said. 'And I suppose I must count as your uncle, though goodness knows I do not feel that old.'
'I would have known you anywhere, sir,' said Ralph.
'Would you indeed?'
'I have read Aunt Robyn's books, and I have always admired your exploits as a Royal Naval officer.'
'Oh dear.' Clinton shook his head in mock dismay. 'I thought to have left that all far behind me., 'You were one of the most illustrious and courageous officers in the African anti-slavery squadron, sir.' Ralph's eyes shone with a still boyish hero worship.
'Your Aunt Robyn's account suffered a dreadful list to port, I'm afraid.'
'Daddy is the bravest man in the world,' Victoria declared stoutly, and she released Ralph's hand and ran to her father.
Clinton Codrington gathered her up and held her on his hip.
'And yours, young lady, is probably the most unbiased opinion in Matabeleland,' he chuckled, and Ralph was suddenly sharply jealous of this palpable aura of deep affection and love which welded the little group, from which he felt himself excluded. It was something beyond his experience, something he had never missed until that moment. Somehow Salina seemed to sense his pang of melancholy, and she took the hand that Victoria had relinquished.
,'come,' she said. 'Mama will be waiting. And there is one thing you will soon learn, Ralph. in this family, nobody keeps Mama waiting.'
They went down towards the church, passing between the beds of growing vegetables.
'You didn't bring any seed?' Clinton asked, and when Ralph shook his head, 'Well, how were you to know?'
and he went on to point out with pride his flourishing crops. 'Maize, potatoes, beans, tomatoes do particularly well here.'
'We divide it this way,' Cathy told Ralph, teasing her father. 'One for the bugs, two for the baboons, three for the bushbuck, and one for Daddy.'
'Be good to all God's creatures.' Clinton reached out to niffle her dark hair, and Ralph realized that these gentle people were always touching and kissing one another. He had never experienced anything like it.
Squatting patiently on the shady side against the wall of the church were twenty or more Matabele of all ages and sexes, from a skeleton-thin ancient with a completely white cap of wool on his bowed head and both his eyes turned to blind orbs of milky jelly by tropical oph thalmia to a new-born infant held against its mother's milk-swollen breasts with its tiny dark face screwed up with the terrible colic of infant dysentery.
Catherine tethered Tom beside the church door, and they all trooped into the cool interior, insulated by thatch and thick walls of unbaked brick from the outside heat. The church smelled of homemade soap, and of iodine. The pews of rough-hewn timber had been pushed aside to make way for an operating table of the same material.
There was a girl at work over the table, but as they came in she tied the last knot in a bandage and dismissed her semi-naked black patient with a word and a pat then, wiping her hands on a clean but threadbare cloth, she came down the aisle of the church towards them.
Ralph was certain that she was Cathy's twin, for though she was a little taller, she was as slim and as flat-
