him, and that had a hidden meaning. The great storm was the secret thing that they were planning.
'First there are things that I must do, but once they are done, I will seek you out,' Bazo promised.
Bazo led up the steep gradient of the narrow pathway through the deep gut of the granite hills. Tanase followed a dozen paces behind him. The roll of sleeping-mats and the iron cooking pot were carried easily on her head, and her spine was straight and her step fluid and smooth to balance the load. The boy skipped at her side, singing a childish nonsense in a high piping chant. He was the only one unaffected by the brooding menace of this dark valley. The scrub on each side of the path was dense and armed with vicious thorn. The silence was oppressive, for no bird sang and no small animal rustled the leaves.
Bazo stepped lightly across the boulders in the bed of the narrow stream that crossed the trail and paused to look back as Tanase scooped a handful of the cool water and held it to the boy's lips. Then they went on.
The path ended abruptly against a sheer cliff of pearly granite, and Bazo stopped and leaned on the light throwing, spear, the only weapon that the white administrator in Bulawayo allowed a black man to carry to protect himself and his family against the predators which infested the wilderness. It was a frail thing, not an instrument of war like the broad stabbing assegai.
Leaning his weight on the spear, Bazo looked up the tall cliff.
There was a watchman's thatched hut on a ledge just below the summit, and now a quavering old man's voice challenged him.
'Who dares the secret pass?' Bazo lifted his chin and answered in a bull-bellow which sent the echoes bouncing from the cliffs.
'Bazo, son of Gandang. Bazo, Induna of the Kumalo blood royal.'
Then, not deigning to await the reply, Bazo stepped through the convoluted portals of granite, into the passageway that split the cliff.
The passage was narrow, barely wide enough for two grown men to walk shoulder to shoulder, and the floor was clean white sand with chips of bright mica that sparkled and crunched like sugar under his bare feet. The passage twisted like a maimed serpent, and then abruptly debouched into a sweeping valley of lush green, bisected by a tinkling stream that spilled from the rock-face near where Bazo stood.
The valley was a circular basin a mile or so across, completely walled in by the high cliffs. In its centre was a tiny village of thatched huts, but as Tanase came out of the mouth of the secret passage and stopped beside Bazo, both of them looked beyond the village to the opposite wall of the valley.
In the base of the cliff, the low wide opening of a cavern snarled at them like a toothless mouth. Neither of them spoke for many minutes as they stared across at the sacred cave, but the memories came crowding back upon both of them. In that cavern Tanase had undergone the frightful indoctrination and initiation which had transformed her into the Umlimo, and on the rocky floor she had suffered the cruel abuse that had stripped her of her powers, and made her an ordinary woman once more.
Now in that cavern another being presided in Tanase's place as spiritual head of the nation, for the powers of the UmliMO never die, but are passed on from one initiate to another, as they had been from forgotten times when the ancients had built the great stone ruins of the Zimbabwe.
'Are you ready?' Bazo asked at last.
'I am ready, lord,' she replied, and they started down towards the village. But before they reached it, they were met by a weird procession of creatures, some of them barely recognizable as human, for they crawled on all fours and whined and yapped like animals. There were ancient withered crones with empty dugs flapping against their bellies, pretty little girls with pubescent breast-buds and blank unsmiling faces, old men with deformed limbs who dragged themselves in the dust, and slim mincing youths with well formed muscular bodies and mad eyes that rolled back into their skulls, all of them decked with the gruesome paraphernalia of the necromancer and wizard, bladders of lion and crocodile, skin of python and bird, skulls and teeth of ape, of man, and of beast. They ringed Bazo and Tanase, prancing and mewling and leering, until Bazo felt his skin itching with the insects of loathing and he lifted his son high on his shoulder away from their touching, prying hands.
Tanase was unperturbed, for this fantastic throng had once been her own retinue, and she stood expressionless as one of the horrible witches crawled to her and slobbered and frothed over her bare feet.
Dancing and chanting, the guardians of the Umlimo led the two wanderers into the village, and then disappeared, slipping away into the thatched huts.
However, they were not alone. In the centre of the village stood a setenghi, an airy open- sided hut of white mopani poles, and a roof of neat thatch. In the shade of the setenghi there 'were men waiting, but' these were entirely different from the strange throng which had met them at the entrance of the village.
Each of these men sat upon a low carved stool. Though some of them were grossly fat and others skinny and stooped, they were all of them surrounded by an almost palpable air of dignity and authority.
Though some were white-headed with snowy woollen beards and deeply wrinkled faces and others were in the prime of their life and powers, they all of them wore upon their heads the simple black head ring of gum and clay.
Here assembled in the secret valley of the Umlimo were what was left of the leaders of the Matabele nation, men who had once stood at the head of the fighting imp is as they formed the bull-formation of encircling horns and crushing chest. Some of them, the eldest, remembered the exodus from the south driven by the mounted Boer horsemen, they had fought as young men under great Mzilikazi himself and still wore with pride the tassels of honour which he had awarded to them.
All of them had sat upon the councils of King Lobengula, son of great Mzilikazi, and had been on the Hills of the Indunas that fateful day when the king had stood before the assembled regiments and had faced eastward, the direction from which the column of wagons and white soldiers was entering Matabeleland. They had shouted the royal salute 'Bayete!' as Lobengula poised his great swollen body on gout- distorted legs and then defiantly hurled the toy spear of kingship at the invaders who were still out of sight beyond the blue horizon. These were the indunas who had led their fighting men past the king in review singing his praises and the battle hymns of the regiments, saluting Lobengula for the last time, and then going out to where the Maxim guns waited for them behind the wagon-sides and plaited thorn bush walls of the white men's laager.
In the midst of this distinguished assembly sat three men the three surviving sons of Mzilikazi, the noblest and most revered of all the indunas. Somabula, on the left, was the eldest, victor of a hundred fierce battles, the warrior for whom the lovely Somabula forests had been named. On the right was Babiaan, wise and brave. The honourable scars laced his torso and limbs. However, it was the man in the centre who rose from his ornately carved stool of wild ebony and came out into the sunlight.
'Gandang, my father, I see you and my heart sings,' cried Bazo. see you, my son,' said Gandang, his handsome face made almost beautiful by the joy that lit it, and when Bazo knelt before him, he touched his head in blessing, and then raised him up with his own hand.
'Babo!' Tanase clapped her hands respectfully before her face, and when Gandang nodded his acknowledgement, she withdrew quietly to the nearest hut, where she could listen from behind the thin reed wall.
It was not for a woman to attend the high councils of the nation.
In the time of the kings, a lesser woman would have been Weared to death for daring to approach an indaba such as this. Tanase, however, was the one that had once been the Umlimo, and she was still the mouth-piece of -the chosen one. Besides which, the world was changing, the kings had passed, the old customs were dying with them, and this woman wielded more power than any but the highest of the assembled indunas. Nevertheless, she made the gesture of retiring to the closed hut, so as not to offend the memory of the old ways.
Gandang clapped his hands and the slaves brought a stool and a baked clay beer pot to Bazo. Bazo refreshed himself with a long draught of the thick tart bubbling gruel and then he greeted his fellow indunas in strict order of their seniority, beginning with Somabula and going slowly down the ranks, and while he did so he found himself mourning their pitiful shrunken numbers, only twenty-six of them were left.
'Kamuza, my cousin.' He looked across at the twenty sixth and most junior of the indunas. 'My sweetest friend, I see you.' Then Bazo did something that was without precedent, he came to his feet and looked over their heads, and went on with the formal greetings.
'I greet you, Manonda, the brave!' he cried. 'I see you hanging on the branch of the mkusi tree. Dead by your own hand, choosing death rather than to live as a slave of white men.
The assembled indunas glanced over their own shoulders, following the direction of Bazo's gaze with expressions of superstitious awe.
'Is that you, Ntabene? In life they called you the Mountain, and like a mountain you fell on the banks of the Shangani. I greet you, brave spirit.' The assembled indunas understood then. Bazo was calling the roll of honour, and they took up the greeting in a deep growl.
'Sakubona, Ntabene.' 41 see you, Tambo. The waters of the Bembesi crossing ran red with your blood.'
