'Has the king killed any white ment' a deep voice challenged. 'If he has not, then why has this impi of warriors crossed his border?'
Tobengula has killed nobody,' Ralph called back.
'Then have the white men mislaid something of value that they come to seek it here?' Ralph said quietly to Selous. 'I know this man. He is one of the king's senior indunas. The one with the red shield behind him is his son; between them they disposed of eight thousand men. It would be as well to tread warily, mister Selous. We are surrounded by an army.'
Then he addressed himself to the watching and waiting warriors: 'The king has given us the road.'
'The king denies that he called an army to enter his domain.'
'We are not an army,' Ralph denied, and Gandang threw back his head and laughed briefly and bitterly.
Then he spoke again: 'Hear me, Henshaw, no white man steps beyond this place without the word of Lobengula. Tell that to your masters.'
Ralph whispered briefly with Selous, and then faced Gandang again.
'We will wait,' he agreed, 'for the king's word.'
'And we will watch while you wait,' Gandang promise ominously, and at a gesture the warriors melted away into the forest again and it seemed they had never been.
'Pull in the pickets,' Colonel Pennefather ordered. 'Put the wagons into laager. Ballantyne, can you get a message back to Tuhon the heliograph and have someone post up to Gubulawayo to find what are Lobengula's real intentions.' And, as Ralph turned to hurry away, 'Oh, one other thing, Ballantyne, can you start the generator and have the searchlight ready to sweep the area around the camp tonight. We don't want those fellows creeping up on us in the dark.'
Gandang and his son stood together on the crest of one of the little rocky kopjes that dotted the wide hot plain between the rivers.
They were alone, although when Bazo turned his head and looked down the steep back-slope of the hill, he could see the bivouac of their combined impis. There were no cooking fires to disclose their presence to the white men; they would eat cold rations and sleep in darkness this night. The long, black ranks squatted with enforced patience, dense as hiving bees beneath the shading branches of the mopani.
Bazo knew that he had only to lift his right arm above his shield to bring them to their feet and send them racing away, silent and ferocious as hunting leopards, and the thought gave him a savage joy. Reluctantly he turned back, and stood quietly with his shield not quite touching his father's.
The little afternoon breeze coming up from the river stirred their war plumes, and they gazed down upon the laager of the white men.
The bullocks had been penned within the circle of the wagons, and they could see the field guns and the Maxim machine-guns posted at the points of the barricade, their positions fortified with biscuit boxes and Ammunition cases from the wagonloads. The gun crews lounged near their weapons, yet somehow the whole scene appeared tranquil and unwarlike.
'In the dark hour before the dawn, we could take them before they could stand to their guns,' murmured Bazo.
'It would be so quick, so easy.'
'We will wait on the king's word,' his father replied, and then started and exclaimed.
'What is it, my father?'
Gandang lifted his assegai and pointed with it southwards, to the pale blue horizon, far beyond the Shashi river, to the faint line of hills, shaped as fantastically as the turreted towers of a fairy castle.
On those far pale hills, something flickered and sparkled, a tiny speck of brightest white light, like a fire-fly in flight, or like the twinkle of the morning star.
'The stars,' Gandang whispered with superstitious awe, 'the stars are shining on the hills.'
The little group of officers stood behind the tripod of the instrument and focused their telescopes on the distant twinkle of light.
The heliograph operator called the message aloud, at the same time scribbling it on his signal pad. 'Jove advises hold your position pending clarification Lobengula's intention.' Jove was the code for mister Rhodes.
'Very well.' Pennefather closed his telescope with a snap. 'Acknowledge message received and understood.'
The operator bent to the prism of the instrument and made a minute adjustment in its focus, turning one mirror to catch the sunlight and the second to reflect it directly towards the line of distant hills; then he seized the handle and the shutter clattered as it blinked the beam of sunlight, speeding the dots and dashes of the Morse code instantaneously across fifty miles of wilderness.
Pennefather turned away and crossed briskly to the massive steam engine on its tall steel wheels. He looked up at Ralph on the footplate.
'Are you ready to light up, Ballantyne?'
Ralph removed the long black cheroot from between his teeth, and gave a parody of a military salute.
'Weve got sixty pounds of pressure on the boiler.
Another half hour and she'll be whistling out of the valve.'
'Very well.' Pennefather hid his mystification. He neither understood nor admired these demoniacal contraptions 'Just as long as we have light by nightfall.'
Gandang sat on his shield with his fur kaross of monkey skins over his shoulders. The winter evenings were cold, even here in the lowlands. There were no fires in the bivouac, and he could barely make out the faces of his
