Now he stubbed out his cigar and jumped up from his chair, began pacing with a barely controlled violence.
‘It’s about time we announced this, Ben. I will set up a Press conference. I’ll want you all there to explain it. The world must know about these men.’
My stomach dropped steeply with alarm, and I stuttered a protest.
‘But, Lo, we can’t do that. Not now, not yet - please!’
‘Why not?’ He wheeled on me belligerently.
‘We haven’t got enough proof yet.’ I went chill with horror, as I thought how my critics would hang, draw and quarter me if I went out on the stage with such a sorry script. ‘They’ll scalp us, Lo. They’ll tear us to pieces.’
‘We’ll show them these.’ He pointed at the paintings.
‘God!’ I shuddered at the thought. ‘Those are just conjecture, fantasy, in that picture the only single detail we could substantiate would be the chalice.’
Louren stared at me, but I saw the madness fading in his eyes. Suddenly he laughed guiltily, and struck his forehead with the heel of his hand.
‘Wow!’ he laughed. ‘I must be tired! For a moment there those paintings were real, from life!’ He went to stand before the painting again and examined it wistfully. ‘I’ve got to know, Ben,’ he said again, ‘I’ve just got to know.’
The following day, while we ate lunch beside the emerald pool, Louren told me how he and I were to get away together. He used Sally’s charcoal stick to draw on the flat surface of a rock.
‘Here we are, and here sixty-five miles to the north-east are the ruins at Doinboshaba. If your theories are correct then there was an ancient caravan route between the two cities You and I are going to take the Land- Rover. and go crosscountry, trying to pick up the old trail.’
‘It’s pretty rough country,’ I pointed out, without enthusiasm. ‘Completely unexplored, no roads, no water.’
‘And no BYM,’ Louren smiled.
‘That makes it irresistible.’ I returned his smile, remembering that this was therapeutic not scientific. ‘When do we leave?’
‘Tomorrow morning at first light.’
It was still dark when I awoke, and my bedside clock showed four-thirty. It was too late to go back to sleep and too early to get up. I was pondering the problem when the door of the hut opened stealthily and, as I prepared to repel burglars, Ral’s hairy head silhouetted by the moonlight appeared around the jamb.
He had given me a fright so I shouted at him, ‘What are you doing?’
If I had been frightened, it was as nothing to Ral’s reaction to my question. Letting out a howl of terror he leapt about three feet in the air with his arms flapping, rather like a crested crane doing its mating dance. It took him a minute or two to recover himself sufficiently to shamble across to his bed and reply in a shaky voice, ‘I’ve been to the toilet.’ Which was just as well, I thought, otherwise my challenge could have had disastrous consequences. I got up, dressed and went out to check the Land-Rover. I suppose I guessed that Ral had been with Leslie, but I did not realize the implications of this.
It took Louren and me most of the first day to find a way over the Hills of Blood that the Land-Rover could negotiate. We followed the line of cliffs northward until they dwindled away and broke up into low kopjes and we could climb one of the gullies between them. It was a rugged ascent that taxed even that sturdy vehicle, but once on the top the going was through open savannah and scattered acacia forest and we made good progress, swinging away southward again to pick up the caravan route that Louren had hopefully drawn in on his large scale map.
That night we camped astride it, or at least where we hoped it might have been. With the amount of gasoline and water aboard, there was scant room for the luxuries of camp life. Besides it was meant to be a rough trip to dispel the smogs and grimes of civilization, a nostalgic return to the expeditions we had made together in our youth.
We grilled a brace of sand-grouse over the coals, and drank Glen Grant and sun-warmed water from enamel mugs. Then with hollows scraped from the hard earth for hip and shoulder we rolled into our sleeping bags beside the Land-Rover and chatted drowsily and contentedly for an hour before falling asleep.
In the dawn Louren massaged his back and gingerly worked the stiffness out of his muscles.
‘I’ve just remembered I’m not twenty any longer,’ he groaned, but by the third day he was looking it. The sun coloured him again, the bruises under his eyes were gone and he laughed freely.
Our progress was slow. Often it was necessary to retrace our spoor out of broken ground whose kopjes and ridges denied us passage. Then we would leave the Land-Rover and go in on foot to try and pioneer a way through. There was no hurry, however, so we could fully enjoy each mile as we groped our way north and east through country that changed its character and mood with the bewitching rapidity that is Africa’s alone.
Each hour of eastward travel rewarded us with more evidence of bird and animal life. The dry-land birds gave way to guinea fowl, francolin, and the gigantic korrie bustard. While amongst the mopani and masasa trees there was the occasional silver-grey flash of a running kudu, with his long corkscrew horns laid flat along his back.
‘Water not far away,’ Louren commented as we stopped the Land-Rover at the edge of one of those open glades of yellow grass and watched a herd of stable antelope move away into the trees on the far side. The most stately antelope in Africa, proud heads holding the curved scimitar horns high and the dazzling contrast of snowy breast against black body.
‘Another endangered species,’ I remarked sadly. ‘Making way for the greed and excesses of man.’
‘Yes,’ Louren agreed. ‘And you know something, there’s not one single specimen of
That night we camped in a grove of masasa trees, clad in their outlandish spring foliage which has the colours of no other tree on earth - pinks, soft shiny beige, and flaming reds. Louren had shot a young impala ram during the day and he wrapped the fillets in bacon and roasted them in a heavy iron pot while I made a sauce of onions and
