Bubezi was the Zulu name for the lion, and indeed Mark had hunted and killed his first lion on its banks, half a mile below the confluence of the two tributaries.
It was almost noon, when at last Mark reached the river at the point where it emerged from the gorge between the gates. He reached for his watch to check the time and then arrested the gesture. Here time was not measured by metal hands, but by the majestic swing of the sun and the eternal round of the seasons.
He dropped his pack and propped the rifle against a tree trunk; the gesture seemed symbolic. With the weight from his shoulders, the dark weight on his heart seemed to slip away also.
He looked up at the rock cliffs that filled half the sky above him, and was lost in awe as he had been when he looked up at the arched stone lattice-work of the Henry V11 chapel in Westminster Abbey.
The columns of rock, sculptured down the ages by wind and sun and water, had that same ethereal grace, yet a freedom of line that was not dictated by the strict rules of man's vision of beauty. The cliffs were painted with lichen growth, brilliant smears of red and yellow and silvery grey.
In cracks and irregularities of rock grew stunted trees; hundreds of feet above their peers, they were deformed and crippled by the contingencies of nature as though by the careful skills of a host of Japanese Banzai gardeners, and they twisted out at impossible angles from the face of the cliff; holding out their branches as if in supplication to the sun.
The rock below some narrow ledges was darkened by the stain of the urine and faeces of the hydrax, the fluffy rock rabbits, which swarmed from every crack and hole in the cliff. Sitting in sleepy ranks, on the very edge of the drop, sunning their fat little bodies and blinking down at the tiny figure of the man in the depth of the gorge, Following the floating wide-pinioned flight of a vulture, Mark watched it swing in steeply, planing and volleying its great brown wings to meet the eddy of the wind across the cliff face, reaching forward with its talons for a purchase as it pulled up and dropped on to its nesting ledge a hundred and fifty feet above the river, folding its wings neatly and then crouching in that grotesque vulturine attitude with the bald scaly head thrust forward, as it waddled sideways along the rim of its huge shaggy nest of sticks and small branches built into the rockface.
From this angle Mark could not see the chicks in the nest, but clearly he recognized the heaving motions of the bird as it began to regurgitate its cropful of rotten carrion for its young. Gradually a sense of peace settled like a mantle over Mark, and he sat down, his back against the rough hole of a fever tree, and slowly, without sense of urgency, he selected and lit a cigarette, drawing the smoke with an unhurried breath and then letting it trickle out through his nostrils, watching the pale blue tendrils rise and swirl on the lazy air.
He thought perhaps that the nearest human being was forty miles distant, the nearest white man almost a hundred, and the thought was strangely comforting.
He wondered at the way in which all man's petty striving seemed insignificant in this place, in this vast primeval world, and suddenly he thought that if all men, even those who had known nothing but the crowded ratlike scrambling of the cities, could be set down in this place, even for a brief space of time, then they might return to their lives cleansed and refreshed, their subsequent strivings might become less vicious, more attuned to the eternal groundswell of nature.
Suddenly he grunted, his reverie shattered by the burning needle sting in the soft of his neck below the ear, and he slapped at it with open palm. The small flying insect was stunned, its carapace too tough to be crushed, even by a blow that heavy. It fell spinning and buzzing into Mark's lap, and he picked it up between thumb and forefinger, examining it curiously, for it was many years since last he had seen one.
The tsetse fly is slightly larger than the house fly, but it has a sleeker more streamlined body, with transparent wings veined in brown. The saviour of Africa, the old man had called it once, and Mark repeated the words aloud as he crushed it between his fingers. It burst in a bright liquid red explosion of the blood it had sucked from his neck. He knew the bite would swell and turn angry red, all the subsequent bites would react in the same way, until swiftly his body rebuilt its immunity. Within a week he would not even notice 4 their stings, and the bite would cause less discomfort than that of a mosquito. The saviour of Africa, the old man had told him. This little bastard was all that saved the whole country being overrun and over-grazed with domestic animals. , Cattle first, and after cattle the plough, and after the plough the towns and the railway tracks. The old man had chewed slowly, like a ruminating bull in the light of the camp fire, his face shaded by the spread of the terai hat. One day they will find some way to kill him, or something to cure the sleeping sickness, the nagana, that he carries. Then the Africa we know will have gone, lad. He spat a long honey-brown spirt of juice into the fire. What will Africa be without its lonely places and its game? A man might as well go back and live in London town. Looking with new eyes and new understanding at the majestic indigenous forest around him, Mark saw in his imagination what it might have been like without its tiny brown-winged guardians; the forests chopped out for firewood, and cleared for ox-drawn cultivation, the open land grazed short and the hooves of the cattle opening the ground cover to begin the running ulcers of erosion, the rivers browned and sullied by the bleeding earth and by man's filth.
The game hunted out, for its meat and because it was in direct competition to the domestic animals for grazing.
For the Zulu, cattle was wealth, had been for a thousand years, and wherever cattle could thrive, they came with their herds.
Yet it was ironic that this wilderness had had another guardian, apart from the winged legions, and that guardian had been a Zulu. Chaka, the great Zulu king, had come here long ago. Nobody knew when, for the Zulu does not measure time as a white man does, nor record his history in the written word.
The old man had told Mark the story, speaking in Zulu which was fitting for such a story, and his old Zulu gunbearer had listened and nodded approvingly, or grunted a correction of fact; occasionally he spoke at length embroidering a point in the legend.
in those days there had lived here in the basin a small tribe of hunters and gatherers of wild honey, so they called themselves Inyosi, the bees. They were a poor people but proud, and they resisted the mighty king and his insatiable appetite for conquest and power.
Before his swarming impis, they had withdrawn into the natural fortress of the northern bluff. Remembering the story, Mark raised his eyes and looked across the river at the sheer cliffs.
Twelve hundred men and women and children, they had climbed the only narrow and dangerous path to the summit, the women carrying food upon their heads, a long dark moving file against the rock wall, they had gone up into their sanctuary. And from the summit the Chief and his warriors had shouted their defiance at the king.
Chaka had gone out alone and stood below the cliff, a tall and lithe figure, terrible in the strength of his youth and majesty of his presence. Come down, oh chief, and receive the king's blessing and be a chief still, under the sunshine of my love. The Chief had smiled and called in jest to his warriors around him, I heard a baboon bark' Their laughter rang against the rock cliffs. The king turned and strode back to where his impis squatted in long patient ranks, ten thousand strong.
