‘Yes.’ Xhai nodded, and took another bite of his five-dollar cigar.
‘Where, Xhai? Where? Can you show it to me?’
‘No.’ Xhai shook his head regretfully.
‘Why not, Xhai? I am your brother. I am of your clan,’ I pleaded. ‘Your secrets are my secrets.’
‘You are my brother,’ Xhai agreed, ‘but I cannot show you the City of the Moon. It is a ghost city. Only when the moon is full and the white ghosts come down, then the city stands upon the plain below the hills - but in the morning it is gone.’
My blood no longer raced, and my excitement cooled.
‘Have you seen the Moon City, Xhai?’
‘My grandfather saw it, once long ago.’
‘Grandpa was a big mover,’ I remarked bitterly in English.
‘What is it?’ Sally wanted to know.
‘I’ll explain later, Sal,’ I said, and turned back to the old bushman. ‘Xhai, in all your life have you ever seen such a city as this? A place of tall stone walls, of round stone towers? I don’t mean here at these hills, but anywhere. In the north, by the great river, in the desert of the west - anywhere?’
‘No,’ said Xhai, ‘I have never seen such a place.’ And I knew that there was no lost city north of the great Pan or south of the Zambezi, for if there were, Xhai would have come across it in seventy years of ceaseless wandering.
‘It was probably some old bushman who wandered 270 miles east of here and saw the temple at Zimbabwe,’ I suggested to Sally that night as we sat around the fire and discussed the old bushman’s story. ‘He was so impressed that on his return he painted it.’
‘Then how do you explain your white king?’
‘I don’t know, Sal,’ I told her honestly. ‘Perhaps it is a white lady with a bouquet of flowers.’
It seems that whenever I receive a serious disappointment -Sally’s rejection of my proposal, and the story of the Moon City were both serious - my brain ceases to function for a period. I missed the clue completely, and the link-up was so obvious. I mean, for God’s sake, I have a tested IQ of 156 - I’m a goddamned genius!
In the morning the two bushmen went back to the families they had left by the Pan. They took with them the treasures we lavished upon them. A hatchet, Sally’s make-up mirror, two knives and half a box of Romeo and Juliette cigars. They trotted away into the vastness of the Kalahari, without a backward glance, and left us the poorer for their going.
The helicopter came the following week, bringing in a full load of supplies and the special equipment I had asked Louren to send us.
Sally and I carried the rubber dinghy up to the cavern and inflated it beside the pool, taking it in turns to blow until we felt dizzy.
Sally launched it and paddled happily around the pool while I assembled the rest of the equipment. There was a short glass-fibre fishing-rod, a heavy one, twenty-five ounces, and in the case which held a 12/0 Penn Senator fishing-reel was a note from Louren: ‘What are you after, for crying out loud? Sand fish, or desert trout? “L”’
I fitted the reel to rod, threaded the line through the runners, and attached the five-pound lead weight to the end of it. Sally paddled us out into the centre of the pool. I dropped the lead weight over the side, disengaged the clutch on the reel, and let the line start running out.
As I had requested, the plaited Dacron line was marked at intervals of fifty feet, and as each marker of coloured cotton disappeared into the luminous green water, we counted aloud.
‘Five, six, seven - my God, Ben. It’s bottomless.’
‘These limestone sink-holes can go down to tremendous depths.’
‘Eleven, twelve, thirteen.’
‘I hope we’ve got enough line.’ Sally eyed what remained on the spool dubiously.
‘We have got 800 yards here,’ I told her. ‘It will be more than enough.’
‘Sixteen, seventeen.’ Even I was impressed, I had guessed at a depth of around 400 feet, the same as the Sleeping Pool at Sinoia, but still the line unwound steadily from the big-game fishing-reel.
At last I felt the weight bump on the bottom, and the line went slack. We looked at each other with awe.
‘A little over 850 feet,’ I said.
‘It makes me feel scary, hanging over a hole in the earth that deep.’
‘Well,’ I said with finality, ‘I had plans to explore the bottom with a Scuba, but that’s out now. Whatever is down there will stay there for ever. Nobody can dive that deep.’
Sally looked down into the green depths, and the dappled, moving, reflected light illuminated her face weirdly. There were shadows in her eyes, and her expression was dazed. Suddenly she shook herself violently, a shudder that went through her whole body, and she tore her eyes away from the green surface.
‘Oh! I felt funny then. A really creepy sensation, as though something walked over my grave.’
I began to wind in the fishing-line, and Sally lay back flat on the floor of the dinghy staring up at the rock roof high above. It was a laborious task to recover all that line, but I worked away steadily.
‘Ben.’ Sally spoke suddenly. ‘Look up there.’ I stopped winding and looked up. We had never looked up at the opening in the roof from this angle. The shape of the opening was different.
‘There, Ben. On the side,’ Sally pointed. ‘That piece of rock sticking out. It’s square, too regular to be natural, surely?’
