knee as high as his shoulder and brought his booted foot down on the hard earth with a crash, and the other dancers hummed in encouragement and approbation.
'Jee! Jee!' Ralph leaped and stamped and postured, and the other dancers were pressed to match him, the women clapped and sang and on the kraal fence Jonathan howled with excitement and pride.
'Look at my daddy!' His shirt soaked with sweat, his chest heaving, chuckling breathlessly, Ralph dropped out at last and lifted Jonathan back onto his shoulder. The two of them went on, greeting by name those they recognized in the throng, accepting a proffered morsel of beef or a swallow of tart gruel-thick beer, until at last on the rise beyond the kraal, seated on a log, aloof from the dancers and revellers, Ralph found the man he was seeking.
'I see you, Bazo the Axe,' he said, and sat down on the log beside him, set the champagne bottle between them and passed Bazo one of the cheroots for which he had developed a taste so long ago on the diamond fields. They smoked in silence, watching the dancers and the feasting until Jonathan grew restless and edged away to seek more exciting occupation, and found it immediately.
He was confronted by a child a year or so younger than he was.
Tungata, son Of Bazo, son of Gandang, son of great Mzilikazi, was stark naked except for the string of bright ceramic beads around his hips.
His navel popped out in the centre of his fat little belly, his limbs were sturdy, dimpled knees and bracelets of healthy fat at his wrists.
His face was round and smooth and glossy, his eyes huge and solemn as he examined Jonathan with total fascination.
Jonathan returned his scrutiny with equal candour, and made no attempt to pull away as Tungata reached and touched the collar of his sailor suit.
'What is your son's name?' Bazo asked, watching the children with an inscrutable expression on his dark features. 'Jonathan.' 'What is the meaning of that name?' 'The gift of God, 'Ralph told him.
Jonathan suddenly took the straw hat from his own head and placed it upon that of the Matabele princeling. It made such an incongruous picture, the beribboned boater on the head of the naked black boy with his pot belly and little uncircumcised penis sticking out under it at a jaunty angle, that both men smiled involuntarily. Tungata gurgled with glee, seized Jonathan's hand and dragged him away unprotestingly into the throng of dancers.
The lingering warmth of that magical moment between the children thawed the stiffness between' the two men. Fleetingly, they recaptured the rapport of their young manhood. They passed the champagne bottle back and forth, and when it was empty, Bazo clapped his hands and Tanase came to kneel dutifully before him and offered a clay pot of bubbling brew. She never looked up at Ralph's face, and she withdrew as silently as she had come.
At noon she returned to where the two men were still deep in conversation. Tanase led Jonathan by one hand and Tungata still with the straw hat on his head, by the other. Ralph, who had forgotten all about him, started violently when he saw his son. The child's beatific grin was almost masked by layers of grime and beef fat. His sailor suit was the victim of the marvelous games which he and his newly found companion had invented. The collar hung by a thread, the knees were worn through, and Ralph recognized some of the stains as ash and ox blood and mud and fresh cow dung. He was less certain of the others.
'Oh my God,' Ralph groaned, 'your mother will strangle us both.'
He picked up his son gingerly. 'When will I see you again, old friend? 'he asked Bazo.
'Sooner than you think,' Bazo replied softly. 'I told you I would work for you again when I was ready.' Yes, 'Ralph nodded.
'I am ready now,' said Bazo simply.
Victoria was amazingly gracious in her acceptance of the change of honeymoon venue, when Harry Mellow explained shamefacedly, 'Ralph has this idea. He wants to follow up one of the African legends, at a place called Wankie's country, near the great falls that Doctor Livingstone discovered on the Zambezi river. Vicky, I know how you looked forward to Cape Town and to seeing the sea for the first time, but, 'I've lived without the sea for twenty years, a little longer won't hurt much.' And she took Harry's hand. 'Wherever thou go est MY love, Wankie's country, Cape Town, or the North Pole, just as long as we are together.' The expedition was conducted in Ralph Ballantyne's usual style, six wagons and forty servants to convey the two families northwards through the magnificent forests of northern Matabeleland towards the great Zambezi river. The weather was mild and the pace leisurely. The country teemed with wild game, and the newly-weds billed and cooed and made such languorous eyes at each other that it was infectious.
'Just whose honeymoon is this?' Cathy mumbled in Ralph's ear one lazy loving morning.
'Action first, questions later,' Ralph replied, and Cathy chuckled in a throaty self-satisfied way and cuddled back down in the feather mattress of, the wagon bed.
At evening and mealtimes, Jonathan had to be forcibly removed from the back of the pony that Ralph had given him for his fifth birthday, and Cathy anointed the saddle sores on his buttocks with Zambuk.
They reached Wankie's village on the twenty-second day and for the first time since leaving Bulawayo, the idyllic mood of the caravan bumped back to earth.
Under the reign of King Lobengula, Wankie had been a renegade and outlaw. Lobengula had sent four separate punitive imp is to bring his severed head back to GuBulawayo, but Wankie had been as cunning as he was insolent, as slippery as he was mendacious, and the imp is had all returned empty- handed to face the king's wrath.
After Lobengula's defeat and death, Wankie had brazenly set himself up as chieftain of the land between the Zambezi and the Gwaai rivers, and he demanded tribute of those who came to trade or hunt the elephant herds that had been driven into the bad lands along the escarpment of the Zambezi valley, where the tsetse fly turned back the horsemen and only the hardiest would go in on foot to chase the great animals.
Wankie was a handsome man in his middle age, open faced and tall, with the air of the chief he claimed to be, and he accepted the gift of blankets and beads that Ralph presented to him with no effusive gratitude, enquired politely after Ralph's health and that of his father, and brothers and sons, and then waited like a crocodile at the drinking place for Ralph to come to the real purpose of his visit.
'The stones that burn?' he repeated vaguely, his eyes hooded as he pondered, seeming to search his memory for such an extraordinary subject, and then quite artlessly he remarked that he had always wanted a wagon. Lobengula had owned a wagon, and therefore Wankie believed that every great chief should have one, and he turned on his stool and glanced pointedly at Ralph's six magnificent Cape-built eighteen-footers out spanned in the glade below the kraal.
'That damned rogue has the cheek of a white man,' Ralph protested bitterly to Harry Mellow across the campfire. 'A wagon, no less.
Three hundred pounds of any man's money.' 'But, darling, if Wankie can guide you, won't it be a bargain price?' Cathy asked mildly.
'No. I'm damned if I'll give in to him. A couple of blankets, a case of brandy, but not a three hundred pound wagon!'
'Damned right, Ralph,' Harry chuckled. 'I mean we got Long Island for that price ' He was interrupted by a discreet cough behind him.
Bazo had come across silently from the other fire where the drivers and servants were bivouacked.
'Henshaw,' he started, when Ralph acknowledged him. 'You told me that we had come here to hunt buffalo to make trek ri ems from their hides.' he accused. 'Did you not trust me?' 'Bazo, you are my brother.' 'You lie to your brothers?' 'If I had spoken of the stones that burn in Bulawayo, we would have had a hundred wagons following us when we left town.' 'Did I not tell you that I had led my impi over these hills, chasing the same hairless baboon upon whom you now shower gifts?' 'You did not tell me,' Ralph replied, and Bazo moved on hastily from that subject. He was not proud of his campaign against Wankie, the only one during all the years that he had been and una of the 'Moles' which had not ended in complete success. He still recalled the old king's recriminations, would that he could ever forget them.
'Henshaw, if you had spoken to me, we would not have had to waste our time and demean ourselves by parleying with this son of thirty fathers, this unsavoury jackal-casting, this-' Ralph cut short Bazo's opinion of their host, by standing up and seizing Bazo's shoulders.
'Bazo, can you lead us there? Is that what you mean? Can you take us to the stones that burn?' Bazo inclined his head, in assent. 'And it will not cost you a wagon, either, 'he replied.
They rode into a red and smoky dawn through the open glades in the forest. Ahead of them the buffalo herds opened to give them passage and closed behind them as they passed. The huge black beasts held their wet muzzles high, the massive slaty bosses of horn giving them a ponderous dignity, and they stared in stolid astonishment as the horsemen passed within a few hundred paces, and then returned unalarmed to graze. The riders barely glanced at them, their attention was fastened instead on Bazo's broad bullet-scarred back as he led them at an easy trot towards the low line of flat-topped hills that rose out of the forest ahead.
On the first slope they tethered the horses, and climbed, while above them the furry little brown klipspringer, swift as chamois, flew
