of dawn he was sitting close beside him.
'Somoya, when you snore you shame the lions,' he greeted him.
When Jim recovered from the shock, he embraced him. 'I swear to the Kulu Kulu, Bakkat, that you have grown even smaller since last I saw you. Soon I will be able to carry you in my pocket.'
Bakkat rode ahead on the gelding, Frost. He led them straight towards the cliff that blocked off the head of the valley like a mighty fortress. Jim pushed his hat to the back of his head and gazed up at the wall of rock.
There is no way through.' He shook his head. High above them the vultures sailed across the rock face on wide wings, coming in to land on the ledges beside their bulky nests of sticks and twigs.
'Bakkat will find the way,' Louisa contradicted him. Already she had complete confidence and trust in the little Bushman. They shared not a single word of a common language, but in the evenings at the campfire the two often sat close together, communicating with hand signs and facial expressions, laughing at jokes that they both seemed to understand perfectly. Jim wondered how he could be jealous of Bakkat, but Louisa was not as at ease with him as she was with the Bushman.
They climbed on upwards, straight towards the solid wall of rock. Louisa had dropped back to ride with Zama, who was bringing up the two spare horses at the rear of the column. Zama had been her protector and constant companion during all the long, hard days of the flight from Keyser, while Jim had been occupied with guarding the back trail and keeping the pursuit at bay. They had developed a rapport too. Zama was teaching her the language of the forests, and as she had an ear for the language she was learning swiftly.
Jim had come to realize that Louisa possessed some quality that drew others to her. He tried to fathom what it was. He cast his mind back to their first encounter on the deck of the convict ship. For him the attraction had been immediate and compelling. He tried to put it into words. Is it that she emanates a feeling of compassion and goodness? He was not sure. It seemed that she hid only from him behind the defensive armour he called her hedgehog prickles; to others she was open and friendly. It was confusing and at times he resented it. He wanted her to ride at his side, not with Zama.
She must have felt his gaze upon her for her head turned towards
him. Even at that distance her eyes were an extraordinary blue. She smiled at him through the thin veil of dust kicked up by the hoofs of the horses.
Bakkat stopped half-way up the scree. 'Wait for me here, Somoya,' he
said.
'Where are you going, old friend?' Jim asked.
'I go to speak to my fathers, and take them a gift.'
'What gift?'
'Something to eat, and something pretty.' Bakkat opened the pouch on his belt and brought out a stick of eland chagga half the length of his thumb that he had been hoarding, and the dried wing of a sunbird. The iridescent feathers gleamed like emeralds and rubies. He dismounted and handed Frost's reins to Jim. 'I have to ask permission to enter the sacred places,' he explained, and disappeared among the pro teas and sugar bushes. Zama and Louisa came up and they unsaddled the horses and settled down to rest. Time passed and they were drowsing in the shade of the pro teas when they heard the sound of a human voice, tiny with distance, but the echoes whispered along the cliff. Louisa scrambled to her feet and looked up the slope. 'I told you Bakkat knew the way,' she cried.
High above them he stood at the base of the cliff, and waved to them to follow. They saddled up quickly, and climbed up to meet him.
'Look! Oh, look!' Louisa pointed to the vertical gash that split the rock face from the base of the cliff to the crest. 'It is like a gateway, the entrance to a castle.'
Bakkat took Frost's reins from Jim and led the horse into the dark opening. They dismounted and, leading their own horses, they followed him. The passage was so narrow that they were forced to walk in single file with their stirrup irons almost scraping the rock walls on each side. On both sides of them the glassy smooth stone seemed to reach to the strip of blue high above them. The sky was so remote that it appeared thin as the blade of a rapier. Zama drove the spare horses into the opening behind them but their hoofbeats were muffled by the floor of soft white sand. Their voices echoed weirdly in the confined spaces as the passage twisted and turned through the depths of the rock.
'Oh, look! Look!' Louisa cried, with delight, and pointed to the paintings that covered the walls from the sandy floor to her eye-level. 'Who painted these? Surely they are not the work of men, but of fairies.'
The paintings depicted men and animals, herds of antelope that galloped wildly across the smooth stone, and dainty little men who pursued them with arrows nocked to their bows, ready to shoot. There were herds of giraffe, blotched with ochre and cream, long sinuous necks
entwined like serpents. There were rhinoceros, dark and menacing, with nose horns longer than the little human hunters who surrounded them and fired arrows into them so that the red blood flowed and dribbled into pools beneath their hoofs. There were elephant, birds and snakes, all the profusion of creation.
'Who painted these, Bakkat?' Louisa asked again. Bakkat understood the sense of the question but not the language she spoke. He turned on Frost's back and answered her in a rush of clicking words that sounded like snapping twigs.
'What does he say?' Louisa turned to Jim.
'They were painted by his tribe, by his fathers and grandfathers. They are the hunting dreams of his people praise-pictures to the courage and beauty of the quarry and the cunning of the hunters.'
'It's like a cathedral,' Louisa's voice was hushed with awe.
'It is a cathedral.' Jim agreed. 'It is one of the holy places of the San.'
The paintings covered the walls on both sides. Some must have been ancient, for the paint had faded and crumbled and other artists had painted over them, but the ghostly images of the ages blended together and formed a tapestry of infinity. They were silent at last, for the sound of their voices seemed sacrilegious in this place.
At last the rock opened ahead of them and they rode towards the narrow vertical blade of sunlight at the end of the passage. Then they emerged through the rock cleft and the sunlight dazzled them. They found themselves high above the world, with a vulture's view across a vastness that left them silent and astonished. Great plains stretched away, dun and limitless, laced with veins of green where the rivers flowed, and dotted with patches of darker forest. Beyond the plains, almost at the reach of the eye, rose an infinity of hills, rank upon rank, like the serrated fangs of a monstrous shark, fading with distance, purple and blue, until they merged with the blue of the tall African sky.
Louisa had never imagined a sky so high or a land so wide, and gazed upon it with a rapt expression, silent until Jim could bear it no longer. This was his land and he wanted her to share it with him and love it the way he loved it.
'Is it not grand?'
'If I had never believed in God before, I would now,' she whispered.
They reached the Gariep river the next morning, at the point where it debouched from the mountains. Over the aeons its waters had cut this deep pass through the rock. The river was running wide and apple green with the thawing of the high snows. After the mountains, the air here was warm and caressing. The banks of the river were lined with dense stands of sweet thorn and wild willows, carpeted with spring flowers. The saffron-plumed weaver birds were shrieking and fluttering as they wove their basket nests on to the drooping wands of the willows. Five kudu bulls were drinking at the water's edge. They threw up their massive spiralled horns and stared with astonishment at the cavalcade of horses coming down the far bank to the ford. Then they fled into the sweet thorn with their horns laid back and water dripping from their muzzles.
Jim was the first across the river, and let out a hoot of triumph as he examined the deep tracks cut by steel-shod wheels into the soft earth of the opposite bank. 'The wagons!' he shouted. 'They passed through here less than a month ago!'
They rode on faster, Jim barely able to contain his eagerness. From a distance of many miles he picked out the single kopje that stood upon the plain ahead. A forest of camel-thorn trees surrounded the base of the hill, then the conical slopes rose steeply to a buttress of grey rock. This formed a plinth for the weird, wind- carved natural sculpture that surmounted it. It was the shape of a squatting bull baboon, with domed pate and low, beetling brows, his elongated muzzle pointed towards the north, staring out across the lion-coloured plain over which the spring buck herds drifted like puffs of cinnamon-coloured smoke.
Jim kicked his feet out of the stirrups and stood erect on Drumfire's back. Through the lens of the telescope he swept the base of the distant kopje. He laughed with joy as he picked out a flash of white in the sunlight, like the sail of a tall ship seen from afar.
The wagons! They are there, waiting for us.' He dropped into the saddle and as his backside slapped against the leather Drumfire jumped forward and bore him away at full gallop.
Tom Courtney was butchering the venison he had killed that morning. Under the wagon tent one of the servants was turning the handle, another feeding the strips of fresh meat into the sausage-making machine. Sarah was working at the nozzle from which the paste oozed, filling
