asked.
'Bloody marvelous,' he gasped. 'Nothing likea bracing dip 'He's all right,' Tungata assured them, 'as soon as he St. arts snarling, he's all right.' Craig cupped his hands over the chimney of the lantern for warmth and gradually his shivering eased. Sarah leaned across to Tungata, and with a wicked smile directed at Craig's naked lower body, whispered something.
'Right on! Tungata chuckled, imitating a black Amen, can accent. 'And what's more, these honkys ain't got no rhythm neither.' Craig quickly reached for his underpants, and Sally, Anne rushed loyally to his defence. 'You're not seeing him at his best, that water is freezing.' Craig's hands were stained red, brown with rust, they marked his underpants and he remembered the metal object he had found at the wall of the tomb. It lay where he had dropped it at the' edge of the slab.
'Part of a trek chain,' he said, as he picked it up. 'From an ox wagon.' Vusamanzi had been squatting silently on one side, at the edge of the lantern light. Now he spoke. 'That chain was from the king's wag4. My grandfather used it to lower the king's body down the shaft.' 'So you have found the king's grave?' Tungata asked.
This mundane little scrap of metal was for all of them the proof that changed fantasy to factual reality.
'I think so,' Craig began strapping on his leg, 'but we will never know for certain.' They all watched his face and waited. Craig suffered another paroxysm of coughing, then his breathing settled and he went on, 'There is a passage, just as Vusamanzi described. It is about another fifteen feet below that pinnacle and it goes off to die left, a round opening with a shaft that rises sharply. About twenty feet from the entrance, the shaft has been blocked with masonry, big blocks and lumps of limestone, packed closely together. There is no way of telling how thick the wall is, but one thing is certain, it is going to take a lot of work to get through it I had about twenty seconds' endurance at the face, not long enough to prise out even a single block.
Without diving apparatus, nobody is going to get past that seal.' Sally-Anne was shrugging on her damp shirt over her white bra, but she stopped and stared at him challengingly.
'We can't just give up, Craig darling, we can't just walk away and never know. It would eat me up not knowing a mystery like that! I'd never be happy, never again as long as I lived.'
'I'm open to suggestions,' Craig agreed sarcastically.
'Anybody got a scuba tucked in their back pocket? How about paying Vusamanzi a goat and he can make the water jump aside, shades of Moses and the Red Sea.'
'Don't be flippant, 'said Sally-Anne.
'Come on somebody, be intelligent and inventive what? No takers?
Okay, then let's get back to where there ri is a re and a little sun light.' Craig dropped the rusted piece of chain back into the pool.
'Sleep well, Lobengula, 'the one who drives like the wind', keep your fire-stones beside you, and shala ease, stay in peace!' he climb back up through the maze of passages and inter leading caverns was a dismal and silent procession, although Craig checked and remarked each turn and juncture as he passed it.
When they reached the main cavern again, it took only a few minutes to blow the embers on the hearth to flames and boil a canteen of water.
The strong, over sweetened tea warmed away the last of Craig's chills and heartened them all.
must return to the village,' Vusamanzi told them. 'If the Shana soldiers come and do not find me, they will become suspicious they will begin to bully and torture my women. I must be there to protect them, for even the Shana fear my magic.' He gathered up his pouch and cloak and his ornately carved staff. 'You must remain in the cavern at all times. To leave it is to risk discovery by the soldiers. You have food and water and firewood and blankets and paraffin for the lanterns, there is no need for you to go out. My women will come to you the day after tomorrow with food and news of the Shana.' He went to kneel before Tungata. 'Stay in peace, great prince of Kumalo. My heart tells me that you are the leopard-cub of the prophecy, and that you will find a way to free the spirit of Lobengula.'
'Perhaps I will return here one day with the special machines that are necestry to reach the king's resting place.'
'Perhaps,' Vusamanz'iagreed. 'I will make sacrifice and consult the spirits, They might condescend to show me the way.' At the entrance of the cave he paused and saluted them. 'When it is safe, I shall return. Stay in peace, my children.' And then he was gone.
'Something tells me it's going to be a long, hard time,' said Craig, 'and not the most attractive place to pass it.' They were all active and restlessly intelligent people, and the confinement began to irk almost immediately.
Tacitly they divided the cavern, a communal area around either end for each couple.
the hearth and a private area at The seepage of water down the rock face when collected in a clay pot was sufficient for all their needs, including ablutions, and there was a vertical pothole shaft in one of the passages which served as a natural latrine. But there was nothing to read and a lack that Craig felt keenly no writing material. To alleviate the boredom, Sarah began teaching Sally- Anne Sindebele, and her progress was so rapid that she could soon follow ordinary conversation and respond to it fairly fluently.
Tungata recovered rapidly during those days of enforced inactivity. His gaunt frame filled out, the scabs on his face and body healed rapidly, and he regained his vitality. It was often Tungata who led the long rambling discussions at the fireside, and that irrepressible sense of humour that Craig remembered so well from the old days began to break through the sombre moods that had at first overwhelmed him.
When Sally-Anne made a disparaging remark about the neighbouring South African state and its apartheid polities, Tungata contradicted her with mock severity.
'No, no, Pendula-' Tungata had given her the Matabele name of 'the one who always answers back' no, Pendula, rather than condemning them, we black Africans should give thanks for them every time we pray! For they can bring a hundred tribes together with a single rallying cry. It is only necessary for one of us to stand up and shout, 'Racist Apartheid Boers!' and all the others stop beating each other over the head and for a moment we become a band of brothers.' Sally-Anne clapped her hands. 'I'd love to hear you make that speech at the next meeting of the Organization for African Unity!' Tungata chuckled at her, they were becoming good friends. 'Another thing we have to be grateful for-' he went on.
'Tell me more, 'she incited him.
'Those tribes down there are some of the fight ingest niggers in Africa,' Tungata obeyed. 'Zulus and Xhosas and Tswanas. We have got our hands full with the Shana.
Imagine if that lot were turned loose on us also. No, from now on my motto is going to be 'Kiss an Afrikaner every day'T 'Don't encourage him,' Sarah pleaded with Sally- Anne.
'One day he is going to talk like this in front of people who will take him seriously.' At other times Tungata relapsed back into those intense and dark moods. 'It is like Northern Ireland or Palestine, only a hundred times bigger and more complex. This conflict between ourselves and the Shana is a microcosm of the entire problem of Africa.'
'Do you see a solution?' Sally- Anne demanded.
'Only a radical and difficult one,' he told her. 'You see, the European powers in their nineteenth-century scramble for Africa divided the continent up amongst themselves with no thought for tribal boundaries, and it is an entrenched article of the Organization for African Unity that these boundaries are sacrosanct. One possible solution would be to overturn the article and repartition the continent along tribal b(*;ndaries, but after the terrible experience of partitior*ig India and Pakistan, no rational person would support that view. The only other solution seems to me to be a form of federal government, based loosely on the American system, with the state divided into tribal provinces possessing autonomy in their own affairs.' Their talk ranged across time, and for the entertainment and instruction of the two girls, both Craig and Tungata related the history of this land between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers, with each of them concentrating on the role played by their own nations and families in the discovery and occupation and the strife that had torn it.
Twice on successive days their talk at the hearth was interrupted by sounds from the world outside the cavern the unmistakable whistling, clattering roar of a helicopter rotor hammering through the air in coarse pitch setting, and they fell silent and looked up at the roof of stone above them until the sound faded. Then the talk would turn to their chances of escape from the forces that pursued and hunted them so relentlessly.
Every second day the women came from Vusamanzi's village, travelling in the darkness of predawn to elude the es in the sky above them. They brought food and news.
ey The Third Brigade troopers had come to the village, surrounding it first and then storming in and ransacking the huts. They had cuffed one of the young girls and they had shouted threats and badgered the old man, but Vusamanzi had faced them down with dignity and in the end his formidable reputation for magic had protected them.
The soldiers had left without stealing much of value, without burning a single hut or killing more than a few chickens but they had promised to return.
However, a massive manhunt was still in progress over the entire area. On foot and from the helicopters the Shana scoured the forest and hills during the hours of daylight and
