wattle planted ten months before had started to come away.
Already it was waist high with fluffy green tops. It was an
achievement of almost superhuman proportion, ten months of ceaseless
gruelling labour by two thousand native labourers. Now it was done.
He had retained a gang of fifty Zulus, who would work under Ada's
supervision, clearing the undergrowth between the rows and guarding
against fire. That was all there was to it; four years of waiting
until the trees reached maturity and were ready for stripping.
But now he was so completely absorbed in thought that he passed over
the boundary of Lion Kop without noticing, and rode on along the foot
of the escarpment. He crossed the road and the railway line.
From ahead the murmur of the White Falls blended with the wind whisper
in the grass, and he glimpsed the flash of water cascading down from
the high rock in the sunshine. The acacia trees were in bloom, covered
with the golden mist of their flowers above, gloomy with shadows
beneath.
He crossed the river below the pool of the falls. The escarpment rose
steeply above him, striped with dark dense bush in the gulleys, a
thousand feet high so it blocked out the sunlight.
The pool was a place of fern and green moss, and the rocks were black
and slippery with the spray. A cold place, out of the sun-and the
water roared as it fell in a white, moving veil like smoke.
Sean shivered and rode on, ambling up the slope of the escarpment.
Then he knew that instinct had directed him. In his distress he had
come back to the first home he had ever known.
This was Courtney land beneath his feet, and spreading down and out
towards the Tugela. The nostalgia came upon him more strongly as he
climbed, until at last he reached the rim and stood looking down upon
the whole of Theuniskraal.
He picked out the landmarks below him; the homestead with the stables
and the servants' quarters behind it; the paddocks with the horses
grazing heads down and tails swinging; the dip tanks among the
trees-and each of them had some special memory attached to it.
Sean dismounted and sat down in the grass. He lit a cheroot, while his
mind went back and picked over the scrap-heap of the past.
An hour, and then another, passed before he came back to the present,
pulled his watch from the front pocket of his waistcoat and checked the
time.
'After one!' he exclaimed, and stood to dust the seat of his pants
and. settle his hat on to his head before beginning the descent of the
escarpment. Instead of crossing the river at the pool, he stayed on
Theuniskraal and keeping to higher ground aimed to intersect the mad on
this side of the bridge. Occasionally he found cattle feeding together
in herds of less than a dozen; they were all in condition, fat on the
new grass, for the land was not carrying nearly its full capacity. As
he passed they lifted their heads and watched him with vacant, bovine
expressions of un surprise
forest thickened, then abruptly ended and before him lay one of the
small swampy depressions that bellied out from the river. From his
