in the night Chaka picked fifty men, calling each softly by name. Those of great heart and fearsome reputation.
And he had told them simply, When the moon is down, my children, we will climb the cliff above the river, and he laughed that low deep laugh, the sound of which so many had heard as their last sound on this earth. For did not that wise chief call us baboons -and the baboon climbs where no man dares. The old gunbearer had pointed out to Mark in daylight the exact route that Chaka had taken to the top. It needed binoculars to trace the hairline cracks and the finger-wide ledges.
Mark shuddered now, retracing the route with his eyes, and he remembered that Chaka had led that climb without ropes, in the pitch darkness after the moon, and carrying his shield and his broad-bladed stabbing spear strapped on his back.
Sixteen of his warriors had slipped and fallen during the climb, but such was the mettle of the men that Chaka. had chosen that not one of them had uttered a sound during that terrible dark plunge, not a whisper of sound to alert the Inyosi sentries until the final soft thud of flesh on rock down below in the gorge.
In the dawn, while his impis diverted the Inyosi by skirmishing on the pathway, Chaka had slipped over the rim of the cliff, regrouped his remaining warriors and thirty-five against twelve hundred, carried the summit with a single shattering charge, each stab of the great blades crashing through a body from chest to spine, and the withdrawal sucking the life blood out in a gushing burst of scarlet. Ngidhla! I have eaten, roared the king and his men as they worked, and most of the Inyosi threw themselves from the cliff top into the river below, rather than face Chaka's wrath. Those who hesitated to jump were assisted in their decision.
Chaka lifted the chief of the Inyosi with both hands high above his head, and held him easily as he struggled. If I am a baboon, then you are a sparrow' He roared with savage laughter. Fly, little sparrow, fly!
and he hurled the man far out into the void.
For once they spared not even the women nor the children, for among the sixteen Zulus who had fallen from the cliff during the climb were those whom Chaka loved.
The old gunbearer scratched in the debris of the scree face below the cliff and showed Mark in the palms of his hand chips of old bone that might have been human.
After his victory on the summit, Chaka. had ordered a great hunt in the basin of the two rivers.
Ten thousand warriors to drive the game, and the hunt had lasted four days. They said that the king alone with his own hands had slain two hundred buffalo. The sport had been such that afterwards he had made the decree:This is a royal hunting ground, no man will hunt here again, no mari but the king. From the cliffs over which Chaka threw the Inyosi, east to the mountain crests, south and north for as far as a man may run in a day, and a night, and another day, this land is for the king's hunt alone. Let all men hear these words, tremble and obey. He had left a hundred men under one of his older indunas to police the ground, under the title of keeper of the king's hunt, and Chaka returned again and again, perhaps drawn to this well of peace to refresh and rest his tortured soul with its burning crippling craving for power. He had hunted here, even in that period of dark madness while he mourned his mother Nandi, the Sweet One. He had hunted here nearly every year until at last he had died beneath the assassin's blades wielded by his own brothers.
Probably nearly a century later, the legislative council of Natal, sitting in solemn conclave, hundreds of miles distant from the cliffs of Chaka's Gate, had echoed his decree and proclaimed the area reserved against hunting or despoliation, but they had not policed the Royal Hunt as well as had the old Zulu King. The poachers had been busy over the years, with bow and arrow, with snare and pit, with spear and dog pack, and with high-powered rifled weapons.
Perhaps soon, as the old man had predicted, they would find a cure for the nagana or a means of eradicating tsetse fly. A man-made law would be repealed, and the land given over to the lowing, slow-moving herds of cattle and to the silver-bright blade of the plough. Mark felt a physical sickness of the stomach at the prospect, and he rose and set off along the scree slope to let the sickness pass.
The old man had always been a creature of habit, even to the clothes he wore and his daily rituals of living. He always camped at the same spot when he travelled a familiar road or returned to a place he had visited before.
Mark went directly to the old camp site above the river junction in the elbow of the main river course, where flood waters had cut a steep high bank and the elevated ground above it formed a plateau shaded by a grove of sycamore fig trees, with stems thick as Nelson's column in Trafalgar Square and the cool green shade below them murmurous with the sound of insects and purple doves.
The hearth stones for the camp fire were still there, scattered a little and blackened with soot. Mark built them back into the correct shape.
There was plenty of firewood, dead and fallen trees and branches, driftwood brought down by the floods and cast up on the high watermark on the bank.
Mark drew clear water from the river, put the billy on to boil for tea, and then, from the side pocket of the pack, brought out the sheath of paper, held together by a clasp and already much ngere an a itt e tattered, that Marion had sent him. Transcript of the evidence from the coroners inquiry into the death Of JOHN ANDERS ESQUIRE of the farm ANDERSin the district Of LADYBURG. LAND Mari on Littlejohn had typed it out laboriously during her lunch hours, and her lack of skill with the machine was evident in the many erasures and over-types.
Mark had read it so many times before that he could almost repeat the entire text from memory, even the irrelevant remarks from the bench.
Mr Greyling (Snr): We was camped there by the Bubezi River, judge Magistrate: I am not a judge, Sir. The correct form of ddress to this Court is Your Worship.
But now he began again at the beginning, searching carefully for some small clue to what he was seeking that he might have overlooked in his previous readings.
But always he came back to the same exchange.
Magistrate: Will the witness please refer to the deceased as'the deceased'and not'the old man.
Mr Greyling JSnr): Sorry, your worship. The deceased left camp early on the Monday morning, he says like he's going to look for kudu along the ridge. It would be a little before lunchtime we hears a shot and my boy, Cornelius, he says -'Sounds like the old man got one'- beg your pardon, I mean the deceased.
Magistrate: You were still in camp at that time?
