Authors: Wilbur Smith
That night she did not have the strength to climb to a tree fork. She crouched at its base, and when at last exhausted sleep assailed her, she was tormented by dreams of running mountain streams
– from which she woke mumbling and coughing to the worse torment of reality.
Somehow she dragged herself up again when the light woke her. Each step now was an effort to which she had to steel herself. She leaned on the staff, staring through bloodshot eyes and swollen
lids at the spot where she would place her foot, then she lunged forward and swayed to catch her balance before she drew her injured foot up beside the other.
‘Five hundred and four—’ She counted each step, and then steeled herself for the next pace. At every count of ‘one thousand’ she rested and peered around her at the
wavering heat mirage.
In mid-afternoon she lifted her head during one of the rest pauses and saw ahead of her a file of human figures. Her joy was so intense that for a moment her vision darkened, then she roused
herself and tried to shout. No sound came out of her dry, cracked, swollen mouth.
She lifted the crutch and waved it at the oncoming figures – and realized at that moment that the mirage and her own hallucinations had tricked her. In her wavering, uncertain vision the
line of human figures resolved into a troop of wild ostrich, and they scattered away across the plain.
There were no tears to tell the depths of her disappointment. Her tears had dried long ago. At dusk she fell face down, and her last conscious thought was, ‘It’s over. I cannot go
on.’
But the dawn chill roused her and she lifted her head painfully and in front of her face she saw a stalk of grass curved under the weight of the drops of dew that hung from it, trembling
precariously and sparkling like precious jewels. She reached out her hand and touched it, and instantly the lovely drops fell into the dry baked earth and left no trace of their going.
She crawled to the next stalk and this time let the liquid diamonds fall into her black swollen mouth. The pleasure was so intense as to change its shape to pain. The sun came up swiftly to dry
the dew, but she had taken enough strength at least to push herself upright and go on.
The following night there was a small warm breeze that nagged at her while she slept, and because of it there was no dew, and she knew that this was the day she would die. It would be easier to
do it here where she lay, and she closed her eyes – then opened them again and struggled into a sitting position.
Each thousand paces seemed to take an infinity, and she was hallucinating again. Once her grandfather walked beside her for a while. He wore his war bonnet of eagle feathers, and his beaded and
tasselled buckskins. When she tried to talk to him he smiled sadly at her and his face folded into ancient leathery brown seams, and he disappeared.
At another time Mungo St John galloped past on Shooting Star. He did not look in her direction and the great golden stallion’s hooves made no sound. They whirled away into the dusty
distances. Then suddenly the earth opened under her and she fell, lightly as a feather from the breast of a goose, lightly as a snowflake, twisting and turning, down and down, then a jarring impact
shocked her back to reality.
She lay face down in a bed of sugary white sand. For a moment she thought it was water, and she scooped a double handful and lifted it to her lips, but the dry sharp grains were like salt on her
tongue. She looked about her and realized with a sort of bitter triumph that she had at last reached the Tati river and that she lay now in the parched river bed. The fine sand, white as salt,
reached from bank to bank – she was about to die of thirst in a river.
‘A pool—’ she thought. ‘There must be a pool.’ She began to crawl through the sand, down towards the first bend in the course.
It opened to another long vista of tall banks, and overhanging trees – but the white glittering unbroken sand taunted her. She knew she did not have the strength to crawl as far as the
next bend. Her vision was starring and breaking up again; but she frowned with concentration at the piles of brown ball-shaped lumps in the centre of the river bed, and vaguely realized that they
were heaps of elephant dung, and that near them were mounds of sand, like children’s sandcastles on the beach.
She remembered suddenly a description of the elephant digs from Zouga Ballantyne’s book – and it gave her the final burst of strength to pull herself onto her feet and stagger to the
nearest sandcastle. The elephants had kicked aside the sand, and made an excavation in the bottom of the river bed as deep as a man’s waist. She slid down into it and began frantically to dig
with her bare hands. Within minutes her nails were broken and her fingertips bleeding, and the sand kept collapsing back into her hole, but she dug on doggedly.
Then the white sand changed colour, became damp and firm, and at last there was a glint in the very bottom. She tore a strip of cloth from the hem of her ragged skirt and pressed it down into
the hole, then after a moment lifted it to her mouth, and with bleeding fingers squeezed out a drop of water onto her cracked and blackened tongue.
I
t was as Zouga had always imagined that it would be.
He crossed the Shashi river an hour before high noon on a hot windless day, with the silver and blue thunder-heads piled on the far horizons and the teeming forests and hunting veld of
Matabeleland ahead.
He sat astride a fine salted horse, and at his right hand rode his eldest son, a man full grown, straight and strong, a man to delight his father’s heart.
‘There she is, Papa.’ Ralph swept his hat from his head and gestured with it to include the horizon of smoky-blue hills and green forests. ‘There is your north at last. We are
coming to take her now.’
Zouga laughed with him, his golden beard glowing in the sunlight and his teeth as white and even as his son’s.
‘Not quite yet, my boy. This time we have come to woo her – and the next time to take her as a bride.’
Zouga had broken his journey three months at Kimberley, and with the full resources of De Beers Diamond Mines at his disposal had done the planning that Rhodes had ordered.
He had decided on a band of two hundred men to take and hold Mashonaland, to ride the boundaries of the farms and peg the gold reefs. They were to be supported by a detachment of Sir Sidney
Shippard’s Bechuanaland Police from Khama’s kraal – and another detachment of Rhodes’ own police which he would raise. Zouga detailed the arms and equipment that they would
need – one hundred and sixteen pages of schedules and lists – and Rhodes approved it with that bold sweeping signature and a curt injunction. ‘Do it!’
Four days later Ralph had come into Kimberley with two dozen wagons from the Witwatersrand goldfields, and Zouga sat with him all night in his suite in Lil’s new hotel.
In the morning Ralph had whistled with excitement.
‘It’s so big, so many men, so much equipment—’
‘Can you do it, Ralph?’
‘You want me to tender for a price to recruit the men, buy the equipment and assemble it here at Kimberley, provide the wagons and oxen to carry it all, horses for the men, rifles and
ammunition, machine-guns, a steam engine to power a searchlight; then you want me to tender to build a road to get it all to a map reference, a place which you call Mount Hampden, somewhere in the
wilderness, and you want it all to be ready to leave in nine months?’
‘You have grasped it fairly,’ Zouga smiled. ‘Can you do it?’
‘Give me a week,’ Ralph said, and five days later he was back.
‘It’s too big for me, I’m afraid, Papa,’ he said, and then grinned mischievously at Zouga’s expression of disappointment. ‘I had to take in a partner –
Frank Johnson.’
Johnson was another young man in a hurry, and, like Ralph, had already acquired a reputation for being able to get things done.
‘Have you and young Johnson worked out a price?’
‘We’ll do it for eighty-eight thousand two hundred and eighty-five pounds and ten shillings.’ Ralph handed him the signed tender and Zouga studied it in silence. When at last
he looked up he asked:
‘Tell me, Ralph, what is that ten shillings on the end for?’
‘Why, Papa—’ Ralph widened his eyes disarmingly. ‘That is our profit on the deal.’
Zouga had cabled the tender price to Rhodes at Claridge’s Hotel in London, and the following day Rhodes had cabled back his acceptance in principle.
All that was still needed was Lobengula’s ratification of the consolidated concessions – and Zouga was under Rhodes’ orders to go immediately to GuBulawayo and find out from
Rudd the reasons for the delay.
Ralph had immediately elected to ride with Zouga.
‘Once Mr Rhodes gives us the word to go – there will be no time for anything else. I have some unfinished business in Matabeleland, at Khami Mission and beyond—’ And an
uncharacteristic dreamy look had come into Ralph’s eyes. ‘This is the time to do it. While I still have the chance.’
So now, side by side, Zouga and Ralph spurred their mounts up the bank of the Shashi river and rode into Matabeleland.
‘We will outspan here for a few days, Papa,’ Ralph said; it was still strange for Zouga to have his son make decisions without deferring to him. ‘The grazing is good and sweet,
and we will rest the oxen and do a little hunting; there is still plenty of game up near the confluence of the Tati river.’
A
t the beginning of this long journey together, Zouga had been disconcerted by his son’s competitive spirit that turned even the most
mundane task into a contest. He had forgotten this trait of Ralph’s in the time they had been separated but found now that it had grown stronger and fiercer during that period.
His energy daunted Zouga, who found that on this journey – for lack of other opposition – he was a foil for his son’s need to compete.
They shot bird, on foot in heavy cover – guinea-fowl and francolin, Ralph counted the bag and scowled when Zouga outgunned him. They sat late at each outspan over the ivory dice, or the
greasy dog-eared pack of cards, and Ralph glowed when he won a shilling, and growled when he lost one.
So now, when he said, ‘We’ll hunt together tomorrow, Papa,’ Zouga knew he was in for an early start, and a long hard day.
They rode out from the wagons an hour before the first glimmer of dawn.
‘Old Tom is getting
madala
– he’s getting old – but I have a sovereign that says he’ll run rings around that fancy beast of yours,’ Ralph
offered.
‘I cannot afford that sort of money,’ Zouga told him. He was hard and fit, his long professional hunting expeditions had kept him that way but the pace that Ralph set once he was
aroused would be punishing. There was something else that troubled Zouga. When Ralph hunted competitively, he could be murderous. If he were challenged, there was only one consideration for him,
the size of the bag.
Zouga had been a hunter for the greater part of his life. He had hunted for ivory, and for the peculiar fascination of the beautiful and noble animals he pursued. It was almost a form of love,
that made a man want to study and understand and finally take the quarry irrevocably for his own.
These last seasons he had hunted, of necessity, with many men, but he had never yet met a man who hunted like his own son when his blood was up. It seemed as if the game were merely counters in
another of Ralph’s contests, the score all that counted. ‘I don’t want to be a sportsman, Papa. I leave that to you. I just want to be a winner.’
‘I cannot afford that sort of money,’ Zouga repeated, trying lightly to defuse Ralph’s escalating tension.
‘You can’t afford a sovereign?’ Ralph threw back his darkly handsome head, and his green eyes flashed as he laughed delighted. ‘Papa, you have just sold that fat diamond
of yours for thirty thousand pounds.’
‘Ralph, let’s make an easy day of it. If we get one giraffe, or a buffalo, that’s all we need.’
‘Papa, you are getting old. A sovereign. If you can’t pay immediately, why then, your credit is always good!’
In mid-morning they cut the spoor of a troop of giraffe, feeding slowly eastward along the river bank.
‘I make out sixteen of them.’ Ralph leaned from the saddle to examine the huge double bean-shaped spoor in the sandy earth. ‘They’ll not be an hour ahead of us.’
And he put his heels into old Tom’s flanks.
The forest alternated with open glades through which meandered little streams, draining the escarpment down to the Shashi river. They were dry at this season of the year, but that did not
account for the paucity of game.
When Zouga had first travelled this road, going south from old King Mzilikazi’s kraal, the herds had darkened every one of these open glades. In one day’s ride he had counted over a
hundred monstrous grey rhinoceros, but there had been no counting the silvery herds of fat zebra and clowning purple wildebeest.
In those days, after a man had fired a shot, the dust rising from the galloping herds had looked like the smoke from a bush fire – and yet this day they had ridden since dawn without
seeing a single wild animal.
Zouga brooded on it as he rode stirrup for stirrup with his son. Of course, this area was on the direct road to Lobengula’s kraal, over which steadily more and more wagons and travellers
passed. There were still vast areas beyond where the herds were thick as the grass on which they grazed. But after the road they would cut into Mashonaland – and the railway line that would
follow – he wondered what would remain.
Perhaps one day his grandchildren would live in a land of which every corner was as barren as this. He did not envy them the prospect; and even as he thought that, his trained hunter’s eye
picked up the tiny speck just above the forest line, far ahead.
For a moment he was reluctant to call Ralph’s attention to it. It was the head of a giraffe, raised inquisitively high above the mimosa tree on which it was feeding.
For the first time in the hunting veld Zouga felt sick to the gut at the slaughter he knew was about to follow – and he thought to distract Ralph’s attention from the herd of huge
spotted animals in the mimosa forest ahead. But at that moment Ralph shouted gaily: