dart of light into Ralph's face as though a god had been listening, and had sealed the pact with flame.

'My father killed a great elephant upon this spot. The tusks stand on the stoep at King's Lynn,' Ralph said quietly. 'And I shot a fine lion here myself. It seems strange that things like that will never happen again at this place.' Beside him Harry Mellow straightened up from the theodolite, and for a moment his face was grave.

'We have come to conquer the wilderness, he said. 'Soon there will be a high headgear reaching up into the sky, and if the Harkness reef runs true, one day a town with schools and churches, hundreds perhaps thousands of families. Isn't that what we both want?' Ralph shook his head. 'I would be getting soft if I did not. It just seems strange, when you look at it now.' The low valleys were still blowing with the soft pink grasses, the timber along the ridges was tall, the tree trunks silver in the sunlight, but even as they watched one of them shivered against the sky and then toppled with a rending crackling roar. The Matabele axe men swarmed over the fallen giant to lop off the branches and for a moment longer the shadow of regret lingered in Ralph's eyes, then he turned away. 'You have picked a good site,' he said, and Harry followed the direction of his gaze.

'Knobs Hill,'he laughed.

The thatch and daub hut was sited so that it would not overlook the compound for the black labourers. Instead it had a breathtaking view over the forest to where the southern escarpment dipped away into infinite blue distances. A tiny feminine figure came out of the hut, her apron a merry spot of tulip yellow against the raw red earth which Vicky hoped would one day be a garden. She saw the two men below her and waved.

'By God, that girl has done wonders.' Harry lifted his hat above his head to acknowledge the greeting, his expression fondly besotted.

'She copes so well, nothing upsets her not even the cobra in the lavatory this morning she just up and blasted it with a shotgun. Of course, I'll have to fix the seat.' 'It's her life,' Ralph pointed out.

'Put her in a city and she'd probably be in tears in ten minutes.'

'Not my girl, 'said Harry proudly.

'All right, you made a good choice,' Ralph agreed, 'but it's bad form to boost your own wife.' 'Bad form?' Harry shook his head wonderingly. 'You limeys!' he said, and stooped to put his eye back to the lens of the theodolite.

'Leave that damn thing for a minute.' Ralph pinched his shoulder lightly. 'I didn't ride three hundred miles to look at your backside.'

'Fine.' Harry straightened. 'I'll let the work lie. What do you want to talk about?' 'Show me how you decided on the site of your No.1 shaft,' Ralph invited, and they went down the valley, while Harry pointed out the factors which had led him to choose the spot.

'The ancient trenches are inclined at just over forty degrees, and we have three layers of schists over- running. Now I extended out the strike of the ancient reef, and we put in the potholes here-' The exploratory potholes were narrow vertical shafts, each under a gantry of raw native timber, spaced out in a straight line along the slope of the hill.

'We went down -a hundred feet on five of them, down through the friable levels, and we picked up the upper schist layer again-' 'Schist isn't going to make us rich.' 'No, but the reefs still under it.' 'How do you know?' 'You hired me for my nose.' Harry chuckled. 'I can smell it.' And led Ralph on. 'So you see this 'is the only logical spot for the main shaft. I reckon to intersect the reef again at three hundred feet and once we are on it we can stope it out.' A small gang of black men were clearing the collar area of the reef and Ralph recognized the tallest of them.

'Bazo,' he cried, and the and una straightened up and rested on his pick handle.

'Henshaw,' he greeted Ralph gravely. 'Have you come to watch the real men at work?' Bazo's flat hard muscle shone like wet anthracite, and running sweat had left snaking trails down it.

'Real men?' Ralph asked. 'You promised me two hundred, and you have brought me twenty.' 'The others are waiting,' Bazo promised. 'But they will not come if they cannot bring their women with them.

One-Bright-Eye wants the women to stay in the villages.' 'They can bring their women, as many as they wish. I will speak to One-Bright-Eye. Go to them. Choose the strongest and the best. Bring me your old comrades from the Moles impi, and tell them I will pay them well and feed them better, and they can bring their women and breed strong sons to work my mines.' 'I will leave in the morning,' Bazo decided. 'And be back before the moon shows its horns again.' When the two white men moved on down the survey line, Bazo watched them for a while, his face expressionless and his eyes inscrutable, then he looked at his gang and nodded.

They spat on their palms, hefted their pick-axes and Bazo sang out the opening chorus of the work chant.

Vbunyonyo bu gin ye entudh1a. The little black ants can eat up the giraffe.' Bazo had composed the line beside the corpse of a giraffe struck down by the rinderpest, and untouched by all the gorged scavengers of the veld except a colony of the black safari ants which had cleaned the cadaver down to the bone. The significance of it had stayed with Bazo, how, by persistence, even the greatest are overcome, and the seemingly innocent line of gibberish was now insidiously preparing the minds of the amadoda who laboured under him. At the invocation they swung the picks on high, standing shoulder to shoulder, the crescent-headed tools silhouetted against the flat blue of the sky.

'Guga mzimba!' they replied in soaring chorus. 'Sola nhhziyo.

Though our bodies are worn out, our hearts are constant.' And then together the humming 'Jee!' as the pick-heads hissed downwards in unison, and with a crash buried themselves in the iron earth.

Each man levered his pick-head free, took one step forward and braced himself as Bazo sang. 'The little black ants can eat up the giraffe.' And again the act was repeated, and again, and a hundred times more, while the sweat was flung from their bodies and the red dust flew.

Bazo loped along at a deceptively easy gait that never varied, though the hills were steep and the valleys abrupt. His spirits were joyous, he had not truly realized how much the labours of the last weeks had galled until he was released from them. Once long ago he had worked with pick and shovel in the yellow diamond pit at Kimberley.

Henshaw had been his companion then, and the two of them had made a game of the brutal endless labour. It had built their muscles and made them strong, but had caged and cramped their spirits, until neither of them could suffer it longer, and they had escaped together.

Since those days Bazo had known the savage joy and the divine madness of that terrible moment that the Matabele call the 'closing in.' He had stood against. the king's enemies and killed in the sunlight with his regimental plumes flying.

He had won honours and the respect of his peers. He had sat on the king's council with the and una head ring on his brow, and he had come to the brink of the black river and briefly looked beyond it into the forbidden land that men call death, and now he had learned a new truth. It was more painful for a man to go backwards than it is for him to go forward. The drudgery of menial labour rankled the more now for the glories that had preceded it.

The path dropped away towards the river and disappeared into the dense dark green vegetation like a serpent into its hole. Bazo followed it down and stopped into the gloomy tunnel, and then froze. Instinctively his right hand reached for the non-existent - assegai on its leather thong under the grip of the long shield that also was not there so hard do old habits die. The shield had long ago been burned on the bonfires with ten thousand other shields, and the steel snapped in half on the anvils of the BSA Company blacksmiths.

Then he saw this was no enemy that came towards him down the narrow tunnel of riverine bush, and his heart bounded almost painfully against his ribs.

'I see you, Lord,'Tanase greeted him softly.

She was slim and upright as the young girl he had captured at the stronghold of Pemba the wizard, the same long graceful legs and clinched-in waist, the same heron's neck like the stem of a lovely black lily.

'Why are you so far from the village?' he demanded, as she knelt dutifully before him, and clapped her hands softly at the level of her waist.

'I saw you on the road, Bazo, son of Gandang.' And he, opened his mouth to question her further, for he had come swiftly, then he changed his mind and felt the little superstitious prickle of insect feet along the nape of his neck. Sometimes still there were things about this woman that disquieted him, for she had not been stripped of all her occult powers in the cave of the Umlimo.

'I see you, Lord,' Tanase repeated. 'And my body calls to yours the way a hungry infant fresh roused from sleep frets for the breast.'

He lifted her up, and held her face between his hands to examine it as though he had picked a rare and beautiful flower in the forest. It had taken much to accustom himself to the way she spoke of their secret bodily desires. He had been taught that it was unseemly for a Matabele wife to show pleasure in the act of generation, and to speak of it the way a man does. Instead she should be merely a pliant and unprotesting vessel for her husband's seed, ready whenever he was, and unobtrusive and self-effacing when he was not.

Tanase was none of these things. At first she had shocked and horrified him with some of the things she had learned in her apprenticeship for the dark mysteries. However, shock had

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