me. I sent the young African assistant away and prevailed on Sally to join me on the rocks beside the emerald pool, hoping that its beauty and associations would soften her mood.
‘Is something wrong, Sal?’
‘Good Lord, should there be?’ It was an awkward unsatisfying conversation. Sally seemed to feel I was prying into affairs that did not concern me. I felt my anger rising, and I wanted to shout at her, ‘I am your lover, damn you, and everything you do concerns me!’
But good sense prevailed, for I am sure presumption of that magnitude from me would have severed the last tenuous threads of our relationship. Instead I took her hand and, hating myself for the blush that burned my cheeks, I told her softly, ‘I love you, Sally. Just remember that - if there is ever anything I can do—’
I think it was probably the best thing I could have said, for immediately her hand tightened on mine and her face softened, her eyes went slightly misty.
‘Ben, you are a sweet dear person. Don’t take any notice of me for a while. I’ve just got the blues, there is nothing anybody can do about it. They will go on their own, if you don’t fuss.’
For a moment she was my old girl again, a smile quivering precariously on the corners of her mouth, and in those great green eyes.
‘Let me know when it’s over, won’t you?’ I stood up.
‘That I will, Doctor. You’ll be the first to know.’
The following week I flew back to Johannesburg. There was the Annual General Meeting of the trustees of the Institute which I could not avoid, and I was committed to a series of lectures for the Faculty of Archaeology at the University of Witwatersrand.
I was scheduled to be away from the site for eleven days. I left it all in Peter Willcox’s safe hands, after extracting from him a promise that he would cable me immediately if any new development broke.
The three girls fussed around me, packing my case, making a picnic lunch for me to eat on the plane, and lining up to kiss me goodbye at the airstrip. I must admit that I rather enjoyed all the attention.
I have often found that living too close to any problem narrows one’s view of the whole. Three hours after leaving the City of the Moon, I made a minor breakthrough. If there had been walls and towers standing on the ruined foundations, then the rock must have been brought from nearby. The obvious place was from the cliffs themselves. Somewhere in those cliffs, close to the city, there was a quarry.
I would find it, and from its extent I would calculate the actual size of the city.
For the first time in weeks I felt good, and the days that followed were gratifying and solidly enjoyable. The meeting of the trustees was the type of festive affair which can be expected when funds are unlimited and prospects are favourable. From the Chair Louren was most complimentary when he renewed my contract as Director of the Institute for a further twelve months. To celebrate the thirty per cent rise in my remuneration, he invited me to a dinner at his home where forty people sat down at the yellow wood table in the huge dining-room, and I was the guest of honour.
Hilary Sturvesant, in a gown of yellow brocade silk and wearing the fabled Sturvesant diamonds, gave me her almost undivided attention during the meal. I have a weakness for beautiful things, particularly if they are women. There were twenty of them there that night, and in the drawing-room afterwards I held court like royalty. The wine had loosened my tongue, and washed away my confounded shyness. No matter that Hilary and Louren had probably primed the other guests to make a fuss of me, for when at two o’clock in the morning I went down to the Mercedes with Hilary and Louren escorting me I swaggered along seven feet tall.
This new-found confidence carried me through the series of four lectures at the University of Witwatersrand, the first of which was attended by twenty-five students and faculty members, the latter outnumbering the former two to one. The word got out, however, and my final venue was changed to one of the main lecture theatres to handle the audience of 600 that turned up. I was an unqualified success. I was prevailed upon to return at an early date - and there was an unsubtle hint from the Vice-Chancellor of the University that the Archaeology Chair would fall vacant the following year.
For the last three days of my visit I spent every minute at the Institute. With relief I found that not much had suffered in my absence, and my multitudinous staff had kept things running smoothly.
The bushman exhibition in the Kalahari Room was completed, and open to the public. It was magnificently executed, and the central figure of the main group reminded me sharply of my little friend Xhai. The model was depicted in the act of painting on the stone wall of a cave abode. With his stoppered buck-horn paint pots, and reed pipes and brushes, I imagined that this was how the artist who had painted my white king had worked. It gave me an odd sensation, as though two millennia had rolled away, as though I could send my mind back along the years. I spoke of it to Timothy Mageba.
‘Yes, Machane. I have told you before that you and I are marked. We have the sign of the spirits on us, and we have the sight.’
I smiled and shook my head. ‘I don’t know about you, Timothy, but I’ve never been able to pick a winner —’
‘I am serious, Doctor,’ Timothy rebuked me. You have the gift. It is merely that you have not been taught to develop it.‘
I will accept hypnotism, but talk of clairvoyance, necromancy, mantology and the like leaves me feeling embarrassed. To divert the conversation from me and my gifts, I asked, ‘You have told me before that you are also marked by the spirits…’
Timothy looked at me steadily from out of those disturbing black eyes. At first I thought I had insulted him by my thinly disguised question, but suddenly he nodded that cannon-ball head. He stood up, closed and locked the door of his office before returning to his seat. Quickly he stripped shoe and sock from his right foot, and showed it to me.
The deformity was shocking, although I had seen photographs of it before. It was of fairly common occurrence among the Batonga tribe of the Zambezi Valley. There had been a paper on it published in the
