Though her lips did not move, a voice boomed from her tortured throat. It was the deep bass of a man, the stentorian voice of a warrior, and it bore no trace of the terrible travail of the young woman from whom it issued.
'The falcons! The white hawk has torn open the nest of stone. The falcons are flying. Save the falcons! The falcons!'
The voice rose abruptly into a wild shriek, and Tanase collapsed and writhed like a squashed insect upon the earth.
'No black man, neither Matabele nor Rozwi nor Karanga, none of them would dare desecrate the nest of the falcons,' said Lobengula, and the circle of indunas nodded. 'Only a white man would have the effrontery to defy the word of the king and chance the wrath of the spirits.'
He paused and took snuff, drawing out the little ritual to put off the moment of decision.
'If I send an impi to Zimbabwe and we take a white man in the red act of plundering the ancient place, dare I send steel through his heart?' Loberigula turned to Somabula, and the old man lifted his grey head and looked sadly at his king.
'Kill one of them, and the others will come swarming like ants,' he said. 'Set not a feast for the birds, when it will bring a pride of lions instead.'
Lobengula sighed and looked to Gandang: 'Speak, my father's son.'
'Oh King, Somabula is wise and his words have the same weight as boulders of black ironstone. Yet the king's words are heavier still, and the king's words have been given, the despoilers of the ancient places must die. Those are the words of Lobengula.'
The king nodded slowly.
'Bazo!' he said softly, and the young induna dropped on one knee before the king's stool.
'Take one of the wizards to guide your impi to the nest of the falcons. If the stone birds are gone, follow them. Find the despoiler. If it is a white man, take him where no other eyes can see you, not even those of your most trusted warriors. Kill the man and bury him in a secret place, and speak of it to no man but your king.
Do you hear the words of Lobengula?'
'i hear, oh Great King and to hear is to obey.'
Dutchman, the bullock with the narrowest spread of horns, was the only one which Isazi could coax down the narrow passageways and over the tumbled stonework into the temple enclosure of the ruins. In the baskets on his sturdy, dappled back, they ferried out the bird images, even the damaged ones, and repacked them onto the backs of the other oxen which waited outside the massive walls.
With Isazi's skilful handling of the bullocks and their burdens, the work was finished by midafternoon, and they roped the oxen in single file. With patent relief, Isazi led them away through the forest towards the south.
Ralph's relief was every bit as intense. He had been uneasy ever since that chance encounter with the Matabele impi in the hills. Now he let Isazi go on with the oxen, while he circled back across their incoming tracks to the north-west of the ruined city, examining the ground with the hunter's eye for any sign that they had been followed, or that there were any other human beings in the area. It need not be a war party, even a band of honey-gatherers or a hunter could carry word back to Lobengula's kraal or alert the border impis.
He knew what he would have to do if he found a wanderer or solitary hunter, and he eased the rifle in the leather boot at his knee. These forests were populous.
He saw troops of big-eared striped kudu, sable antelope with snowy bellies and sweeping scimitar horns, big black bovine buffalo and spreading herds of plump zebra with alert pricked ears and stiff, black manes, but there was no sign of human presence.
He was only slightly mollified when he turned back and picked up the spoor of the bullock file five miles on the other side of the ruins. He trotted along the widely beaten sign, and his misgivings returned at full strength.
This was too easy to follow.
He caught up with Isazi and his bullock train as the dusk was falling, and he helped him lift the heavy packs down from the backs of the oxen and examine them for galling or saddle sores, before hobbling them and letting them graze. More than once during the night he started awake, and listened for the sound of men's voices, but heard only the yipping of jackal.
In the early light they entered a wide grassy plain; the trees on the far side were a dark line on the horizon, and there were huge troops of zebra grazing out in the open.
They lifted their heads to watch the strange little caravan.' an go past, and sounded their curiosity and concern with their sharp, almost dog-like, barks.
Halfway across the plain Ralph turned the bullock train at a right angle to their track, and they marched due east until noon, when they re-entered the forest. Still Ralph headed on cast until darkness fell and they camped.
Isazi muttered and complained about the wasted day, and the detour of so many miles out of their direct route towards the Limpopo river and the Bushman wells beyond, where Umfaan waited for them with the wagons.
'Why do we do this?'
'For the benefit of anyone who follows us.'
'They will still be able to follow the spoor we have laid,' Isazi protested.
'i will change that, in the morning,' Ralph assured him, and in the dawn he allowed Isazi to resume the southerly direction again.
'if I do not rejoin you, do not wait for me. Keep on until you reach the wagons, we'll beyond the frontier of the Matabele. Wait for me there,' he ordered, and he left Isazi and rode back on their spoor of the previous day.
He reached the open grassland where they had made such a dramatic change of direction the preceding
