even without moving they seemed to have drawn closer, and their talk was easier, more intimate.
'We are the first nation in the world and anything less than our total duty is unworthy of us,' Zouga went on, and Rhodes nodded. 'We destroyed the slave trade on this continent; that was only a beginning.
When you have seen the conditions that still exist, the savagery and barbarism, to the north of us, only then can you appreciate how deep that duty still is.'
'Tell me about the hinterland,' Rhodes demanded in that thin, almost querulous voice that so ill-suited his big loose-knit frame.
'The hinterland.' It was an unusual term, but it stuck like a burr, and Zouga heard himself use it as he described that wilderness through which he had travelled and hunted and prospected.
Rhodes sat on a log of firewood, the shaggy leonine head sunk forward, brooding and silent, only his eyes quick and attentive, listening with an almost religious fervour, rousing himself every few minutes, lifting his head to ask a question and then letting it sink again to the answer.
Zouga spoke of the wide slow rivers that ran in their deep valleys where the cream of tartar trees grew upon the banks and in the green shallows herds of hippopotamus challenged the traveller with gaping pink mouths and curved white tusks.
He described the deadly malarial swamps, vast stands of papyrus reeds swaying like dancers from horizon to horizon, where the sky pressed down, smothering the world under a heavy blue blanket sodden with steamy vapours, and he told of the relief of climbing the steep rocky escarpments to the cool high plateau of golden grasslands.
With words he showed them the vast and empty spaces, the plains dotted with moving herds of wild game, the cool green forests of standing timber, the streams of sweet water, crystal cold, from which a man could water his herds or his homestead.
He talked of vanished kingdoms of long dead kings, the Mambo and the Monornatapa, who had built cities of massive grey stone and left them to the smothering vines, their idols thrown down and shattered, the foundations of the walls menaced by the twisted grey python roots of the wild fig trees which found the joints in the stonework and forced them inexorably apart.
He told them of the square mine shafts that these vanished people had driven into the matrix and then abandoned, leaving the gold-bearing quartz where they had piled it before they fled.
'Visible gold,'he told them, 'thick as butter in the reef.
Lying out there in the bush.'
He spoke of the people, the remnants of the subjects of the Monornatapa, their glories long past, decimated by war. He told them of the conquerors, the Matabele, the cruel legions from the south, calling the subservient tribes 'cattle' and, contemptuously, 'Mashona, eaters of dirt', taking them as slaves, killing them as sport, to prove their manhood, or merely on the king's whim.
He described the wealth of the Matabele, their uncountable herds of cattle, thousands upon tens of thousands of fine beasts, glossy hump-backed bulls whose blood lines ran back to Egypt and the land between the Tigris and Euphrates, big rangy animals with widespread horns and hides of every colour from unrelieved black to purest white.
He told them of deep and secret caverns in the hills where the priests of the vanished kings still conducted their mysteries and sustained the oracle, weaving a gossamer net of witchcraft and magic which enfolded even their proud and arrogant Matabele overlords.
Then, as the day wasted away and the sun began to set behind a flaming curtain of red dust, Zouga told them of the kraals of the Matabele, the impis trained into the most merciless killing machine Africa had ever brought forth, racing barefoot into battle behind their tall rawhide shields, the plumes nodding and streaming from their dark heads and the dazzle of their assegais lighting the plains as the stars light the night sky.
'How would you fight them, Ballantyne?' Rhodes fired the question harshly, and it checked Zouga in full lyrical flow. They stared at each other for a moment, but a moment that was fraught with portent, a moment in which the lives of many thousands black men and white teetered in the balance. Then slowly the arm of the balance came down on one side, and the destiny of a continent moved, like a fiery planet shifting its orbit through the universe.
'I would thrust for the heart,' Zouga said, suddenly his eyes cold and green, 'a small mobile force of mounted men, '
'How many men?'
And suddenly they were talking war as the sun fell below the dusty mauve and purple plain, leaving the sinister shadows to draw in around the little group under the camel-thorn tree.
Jan Cheroot threw logs on the fire and they sat on in the ruddy wavering light and the talk was of gold and of war, diamonds and gold and war, Empire and war, and their words conjured columns of armed and mounted men from the night, dark phantoms riding into the future.
Suddenly Zouga checked in the middle of a sentence, his expression changed as though he had seen a ghost or recognized an old implacable enemy in the shadows under the camel-thorn tree.
'What is it, Ballantyne?' Rhodes asked sharply, swivelling the big untidy head to follow the direction of Zouga's gaze.
A Against the bole of the thorn tree stood the tall green soapstone bird-statue. Unnoticed until now, hidden by the welter of harness and loose equipment that festooned the branches around it, some trick of the flames, the fall and flare of one of the burning logs, had illuminated it with sudden and dramatic firelight.
It stood taller than the seated men, seeming to preside over their counsels, listening to and directing the talk of gold and of blood. The falcon head, timeless as evil itself, as ancient as the hills of the far land from which it had been hewn, stared back at Zouga with sightless, yet somehow all-seeing, blank eyes, the cruel curve of the beak seemed on the point of opening to emit the falcon's hunting cry, or to bury itself in living flesh. To Zouga it seemed that in the darkness above the statue the words of the prophecy, spoken so long ago in that deep cavern of the Matopos hills by the beautiful naked witch who was the Umlimo of Monomatapa, still persisted, hovering in the shadows like living things: The stone falcons will fly afar... There shall be no peace in the kingdoms of the Marnbos or the Monomatapas until they return. For the white eagle will war with the black bull until the stone falcons return to roost.
