cavern,'Tungata answered.
Craig cupped his hands around the mug, and edged closer to the smoky little fire, shaking with the cold.
'I have started a small hole in the top of the wall and gone into it about three feet, but there is no way of guessing how thick it is or how many more dives it will need to get through it.' He sipped the tea.
'One thing we have overlooked: I will need something to carry the goodies, if we find them.' Craig crossed his fingers and Sarah made her own sign to ward off misfortune. 'The beer-pots are obviously brittle old Insutsha broke one and they will be awkward to carry. We will have to use the bags I made from the canvas seat covers. When Sarah goes up to relieve Pendula, she must send them down.' As the numbness of cold was dispelled by the fire and hot tea, so the pain in his head began. Craig knew that it was the effect of breathing high-pressure oxygen, the first symptom of poisoning. It was likea high-grade migraine, crushing in on his brain so that he wanted to moan aloud.
He fumbled three painkillers from the first-aid kit and washed them down with hot tea.
Then he sat in a dejected huddle and waited for them to take effect. He was dreading his return to the wall so strongly that it sickened his stomach and corroded his will.
He found that he was looking for an excuse to postpone the next dive, anything to avoid that terrible cold and die suffocating press of dark waters upon him.
Tungata was watching him silently across the fire, and Craig slipped the frir cape off his shoulders and handed the empty mug back to Sarah. He stood up. The headache had degraded to a dull throb behind his eyes.
'Let's go,' he said, and Tungata laid a hand on his upper arm and squeezed it before he stooped to lift the oxygen set over Craig's head.
Craig quailed at this new contact with the icy water, but he forced himself into it, and the stone he held weighted him swiftly into the depths. In his imagination the entrance to the tomb no longer resembled an eyeless socket, but rather the toothless maw of some horrible creature from African mythology, gaping open to ingest him.
He entered it and swam up the inclined shaft, and anchored himself before the untidy hole he had burrowed into the wall. The sediment had settled, and in the glow of his lamp the shadows and shapes of rock crowded in upon him, and he wrestled with another attack of claustrophobia, anticipating the clouds of filth which would soon render him blind. He reached out and the rock was brutally rough on his torn hands. He prised a lump of limestone free, and a small slide of the surrounding stones sent sediment billowing around his head. He switched off his lamp and began the cold blind work again.
The rope signals at his waist were his only contact with reality and finite time A somehow they helped him to control his mount in terror of the cold and darkness.
Twenty minutes, and his headache was breaking through the drugs with which he had subdued it. It felt as though a blunt nail was being driven with hammer blows into his temple, and as though the iron point was cutting in behind his eyes.
'I can't last another ten minutes,' he thought. 'I'm going up now.' He began to turn away from the wall and then just managed to prevent himself.
'Five minutes,' he promised himself 'Just five minutes more.' He forced his upper body into the opening, and the steel oxygen cylinder struck a rock and rang likea bell. He groped around the edges of a triangular-shaped rock that had been frustrating his efforts for the past few minutes.
Once again he wished for a short jeremy bar to -get into that crack and break it open. His fingers ached as he used them instead, getting them in under the rock, and then he wedged himself against the sides of the hole and began to jerk at it, slowly exerting more strength with each heave, until his back was bunched with muscle and his belly ached with the effort.
Something moved and he heard rock grate on rock. He heaved again and the crack closed on his fingers and he screamed with pain into his mask. But the pain of his crushed fingertips unlocked reserves of strength he had not yet tapped. He flung all of this against the rock and it rolled, his fingers came free and there was a rumbling, clanking roar of falling sliding stone blocks.
He lay in the hole and hugged his injured fingers to his chest, whimpering into his mask, half drowning in the water that flooded in when he screamed.
'I'm going up now,' he decided. 'That's it. I've had enough.' He began to wriggle out of the aperture, gingerly putting out one hand to push himself backwards. He felt nothing. In front of him, his hand was waving around in the open. He lay still, the water sloshing in his mask, trying to make a decision. Somehow he knew that if he pulled out now and surfaced, he would not be able to force himself to enter the pool again.
Once again he groped ahead, and when he touched nothing, he inched forward and reached out again. His anchor-line held him and he slipped the knot, crept forward a little further and the pack on his back jammed u p under the stone roof He rolled half onto his side, and was able to free it. Still he could touch nothing ahead of him. He was through the wall, and a sudden superstitious dread seized him.
He pulled back and the pack hit the roof again, and this time it jammed solidly. He was stuck fast, and immediately he began to fight to be free. His breathing hunted, beating the mechanical efficiency of the valves in his mask so that he could get no more oxygen and as he starved, his heart began to race and the pulse in his ears deafened him.
He could not go backwards, and he kicked with his one good leg, and with his stump got a purchase against smooth rock. He pushed forward with both legs and, in a sudden rush similar to the moment of childbirth, he slid forward through the hole in the wall of the tomb into the space beyond.
He groped wildly about him and one hand hit the smooth wall of the shaft at his side, but now he was free of his anchor and the buoyancy of the bag on his chest bore him helplessly upwards. He threw up both hands to prevent his head striking the roof of the shaft, and to grab a handhold. Under his numb fingertips the rock was slippery as soaped glass, and as he ascended, so the oxygen in the bag expanded with the release of pressure and he went up more swiftly, only the signal rope at his waist slowing his headlong upward rush. As he struggled to stabilize himself, the excess oxygen poured. out of the sides of the mask, and panic a t last rode him 66mpletely. He was swirled aloft in total terrifying darknAs.
rfac Suddenly he burst out through the s,u e and lay on his back bobbing around likea cork. He tore the mask off his face and took a lungful of air. It was clean, but faintly tainted with the smell of bat guano. He lay on the surface and sucked it down gratefully.
The rope tugged rapidly at his waist. Six tugs repeated.
It was the code question from Tungata. 'Are you all right?' His uncontrolled ascent must have ripped rope off the coil Emma-_
that lay between Tungata's feet and thoroughly alarmed him. Craig signalled back to reassure him and fumbled with the switch of his lamp.
The dim glow of light was dazzling to his eyes that had been blinded so long and they smarted from the irritation of the muddied waters. He blinked around him.
The passage had come up at a sharply increased angle from the masonry wall, until it was now a vertical shaft.
The old witch-doctors had been forced to chip niches in the walls and build in a ladder of rough-hewn timber to enable them to make the ascent. The poles of the ladder were secured with bark rope and were latticed up the open shaft above Craig's head, but the light of his lantern was too feeble to illuminate the top of the steep shaft. The ladder disappeared into the gloom.
Craig paddled to the side and steadied himself with a iandhold on the primitive wooden ladder while he ass em led his thoughts and figured out the lay of the shaft and its probable shape. He realized that by returning to water level, he must have ascended forty feet after his access through the wall. He must have travelled an approximately U-shaped journey the first leg was down the grand gallery, the bottom of the U was along the shaft to the wall, and the last leg was up the steeper branch of the shaft to return to water level again.
He tested the timber ladder work and though it creaked and sagged a little, it bore his weight. He would have to jettison the diving-gear and leave it floating in the shaft while he climbed up the rickety ladder, but first he must rest and regain full control of himself. He put both hands to his head and squeezed his temples, the pain was scarcely bearable.
At that moment, the rope at his waist jerked taut three tugs, repeated. The urgent recall the signal for mortal danger something was desperately wrong, and Tungata was sending a warning and a plea for help.
Craig crammed the mask back onto his face and signalled, 'Pull me up!' The rope came taut and he was drawn swiftly below the surface.
he young Matabele mother was allowed to keep her infant strapped to her back, but she was manacled by her wrist to the wrist of the Third Brigade sergeant.
Peter Fungabera was tempted to use the helicopter to speed the pursuit and recapture of the fugitives, but finally he made the decision to go in on foot, silently. He knew the quality of the men he was hunting. The beat of a helicopter would alert them and give them a chance to slip away into the bush once again. For the same reasons of stealth, he kept the advance party small and manageable twenty picked men, and he briefed each of them individually.
