smelled before. Faint though the whiff of it was, it made his gorge rise. It smelled like a beggar's breath or a leper's sores. He had to force himself to go forward against the smell and his own dread.
'Dutchman,'he called. 'Where are you, my beauty?' There was the explosive spluttering sound of a beast racked by dysentery, and Isazi ran towards it. Even in the bad light he recognized the bulky dappled shape. The bullock was lying down.
Isazi ran to it. 'Up!' 'he called. Vusa, thandwa! Get up, my darling. 'For a beast only lies down when it has given up hope. The bullock heaved convulsively, but did not come to its feet. Isazi dropped to his knees, and placed his arm around its neck. The neck was twisted back at an awkward unnatural angle. The velvety muzzle pressed into the beast's flank. The muscles under the sleek skin were convulsed as rigidly as cast iron.
Isazi ran his hands down the beast's neck, feeling the fierce heat of fever. He touched the cheek, and it was slick and wet. Isazi lifted his hand to his own nose. It was coated with a thick slime and the little Zulu gagged at the smell of it. He scrambled to his feet, and backed away fearfully until he reached the gate. Then he whirled and ran to the wagons.
'Henshaw,'he yelled wildly. 'Come quickly, little Hawk.' 'Flame lilies,' Ralph Ballantyne growled. His face was congested with black angry blood, as he strode 'Fthrough the kraal. The lily was a lovely flower of crimson edged with gold that grew on a bright green bush that tempted any grazing animal that did not know them.
'Where are the herd boys Bring those bloody mupba here.' He stopped beside the twisted carcass of Dark Moon, a trained wheeler like this was worth 50 pounds. It was not the only dead ox, eight others were down and as many more were sickening.
Isazi and the other drivers dragged in the herders. They were terrified children, the eldest on the verge of puberty, the youngest ten years old, their immature groins covered only by a scrap of mutsha cloth, their little round buttocks naked.
'Don't you know what a flame lily is?' Ralph shouted at them.
'It's your job to watch for poison plants and keep the oxen off them.
I'm going to thrash the skin off your black backsides to teach you.'
'We saw no lilies,' the eldest boy declared stoutly, and Ralph rounded on him.
'You cocky little bastard.' In Ralph's hand was a sjambok of hippo hide. It was almost five foot long, thicker than a man's thumb at the butt and tapering to whip cord at the tip. It had been cured to the lovely amber colour of a meerschaum pipe.
'I'll teach you to look to the oxen, instead of sleeping under the nearest tree.' Ralph swung the lash around the back of the child's legs. It hissed like a puff-adder, and the boy screamed at the cut of it. Ralph seized his wrist, and held him up for a dozen more strokes across the legs and buttocks. Then he let him go and grabbed the next mujiba. The child danced to the tune of the sjambok, howling at each cut.
'All right.' Ralph was satisfied at last. 'Get the healthy animals into the span.' There were only sufficient oxen left to make up three teams. Ralph was forced to abandon half of the wagons, with their loads of salted buffalo hides, and they trekked on southwards as the sun came up over the horizon.
Within an hour another ox had fallen in the traces, with its nose twisted back against its side. They cut it loose and left it lying beside the track. Half a mile further two more bullocks went down.
Then they began dropping so regularly that by noon Ralph was forced to abandon two more wagons, and the last one rolled on with a depleted span dragging it. Long ago Ralph's rage had given way to bewilderment.
It was clear that this was no ordinary case of veld poisoning. None of his drivers had seen anything to equal it, and there was not even a precedent in the whole vast body of African folklore.
'It is a tagathi,' Isazi gave his opinion. He had seemed to shrink with grief for his beloved bullocks, so now he was a mournful little black gnome of a man. 'This is a terrible witchcraft.' 'By God, Harry,' Ralph led his new brother-in-law out of earshot of the women.
'We'll be lucky to get even the one wagon home. There are a few bad river drifts to cross yet. We had better ride ahead and try to pick an easier crossing on the Lupane river.' The river was only a few miles ahead, they could already make out the dark green of the forest along its course. Ralph and Harry rode side by side, both of them worried and anxious.
'Five wagons lying out here,' Ralph muttered moodily. 'At three hundred pounds each, to say nothing of the cattle I've lost-' He broke off and sat up very straight in the saddle.
They had come out onto another open glade beside the river, and Ralph was staring across it at the three huge dappled giraffe. With the stilt legs of herons and the long graceful necks of swans, they were the strangest looking of all Africa's mammals. Their huge eyes were soft and sorrowful, their heads, strangely ugly-beautiful, were topped not by true horns but by outgrowths of bone covered with skin and hair. Their gait had the same deliberate slow motion of a chameleon, and yet a big bull would weigh a ton and stand eighteen feet tall. They were mute, no extremity of pain or passion could induce a whisper of sound from their swanlike throats. Their heart was large as a drum to pump as high as that head, and the arteries of the neck were fitted with valves to prevent the brain exploding under the pressure when the giraffe stooped, splay-legged, to drink.
These three animals were moving in single file across the vlei.
The old stink-bull leading them was almost black with age, the cow that followed was splotched with reddish fawn, and the half-grown calf was a lovely soft beige.
The calf was dancing. Ralph had never seen anything like it. It was swaying, and turning in slow and elegant pirouettes, the neck twisting and untwisting, swinging first to one side then to the other.
Every few paces the mother turned back anxiously to watch its offspring, and then torn between duty and maternal love, swung again to follow the old bull. At last, quite slowly, with a kind of weary grace, the calf slumped to the grassy earth, and lay in a tangle of long limbs. The mother hovered for a minute or two, and then in the way of the wilderness, deserted the weak and went on after her mate.
Ralph and Harry rode up, slowly, almost reluctantly, to where the calf lay. Only when they reached it were they aware of the fatal mucous discharge from jaws and nostrils, and the diarrhoea painting the dappled hind-quarters. They stared at the corpse in disbelief, until suddenly Harry wrinkled his nose and sniffed.
'That smell, the same as the oxen-' he started, and suddenly realization dawned upon him. 'A murrain,' he whispered. 'By the sweet name of the Virgin, Harry, it's some kind of plague. It is wiping out everything, game and oxen.' Under his deep tan, Ralph had turned a muddy colour. 'Two hundred wagons, Harry,' he whispered, 'almost four thousand bullocks. If this thing goes on spreading, I'm going to lose them all.' He reeled in the saddle so that he had to clutch at the pommel for his balance. 'I'll be finished. Wiped out all of it.'
His voice trembled with self- pity, and then a moment later he shook himself like a wet span iO sloughing off despair, and colour rushed back into his darkly handsome face.
'No, I'm not,' he said fiercely. 'I'm not finished yet, not without a fight anyway.' And he whirled to face Harry. 'You'll have to bring the women back to Bulawayo alone,' he ordered. 'I'm taking the four best horses.' 'Where are you going?' Harry asked. 'Kimberley.'
'What for?' But Ralph had pivoted his horse like a polo pony, and was lying along its neck as he raced back towards the single wagon that had just come out of the forest behind them. Even as he reached it, one of the lead oxen collapsed and lay convulsed in the traces.
Isazi did not go to the kraal the following dawn. He was afraid of what he would find. Bazo went in his place.
They were all dead. Every single bullock. They were already stiff and cold as statues, locked in that dreadful final convulsion.
Bazo shivered, and pulled his monkeys king cloak more closely around his shoulders. It was not the dawn chill, but the icy finger of superstitious awe that had touched him.
'When the cattle lie with their heads twisted to touch their flank, and cannot rise-' he repeated aloud the exact, words of the Umlimo, and his dread was carried away by the jubilant rush of his warlike spirits. 'It is happening, just as it was prophesied.' Never before had the Chosen One's words been so unequivocal. He should have seen it immediately, but the whirlwind of events had confused him so that it was only now that the true significance of this fatal plague had come upon him. Now he wanted to leave the laager, and run southwards, day and night, without stopping, until he reached that secret cavern in the sacred hills.
He wanted to stand 'before the assembled indunas and tell them.
'You who doubted, believe now the words of the Umlimo. You with milk and beer in your bellies, put a stone in their place.' He wanted to go from mine to farm to the new villages the white men were building where his comrades now laboured with pick and shovel instead of the silver blade, wearing the ragged cast-offs of their masters rather than the plumes and kilts of the regiment.
He wanted to ask them, 'Do you remember the war song of the 1zimvukuzane Ezembintaba, the Moles-that-burrow under-a-mountain? Come, you diggers of the other men's dirt, come rehearse the war song of the Moles with me.' But it was not yet full term, there was the third and
