There was a column of dun-coloured smoke rising into the washed-out blue sky far ahead. In this terrain, it lay a day’s march away against the steep and fearsome edge of the escarpment.
Around him his men, once again loyal and filled with fire, were laughing and hugging each other with delight. It was a pity about the Abyssinian, Camacho conceded, like all his people he had been a good fighter, and now they had found the Englishman, he would be missed.
Camacho cupped the cheroot in both hands and inhaled deeply. Holding the smoke in his lungs, he squinted his eyes against the flat glare of rising noon. The sun had bleached all colour from the landscape, only the shadows were cut clearly, very sharp-edged and black below each tree and rock.
Across the narrow valley the long column of men he was watching moved at the pace of the slowest. Camacho doubted if they were making a single mile in an hour.
He removed the beaver hat from his head and blew the smoke into it gently, so that it dispersed into nothingness instead of standing in the still air to draw the eye of a watcher.
Camacho saw nothing odd in that the leading Hottentot musketeer in the column carried an English flag. Even in this barren, forsaken corner of the earth, although its gaudy folds were already dulled with dust and the ends shredded by grasping thorn, it was the promise of protection, a warning to those who might check their passage. All caravans in Africa went under a banner.
Camacho dragged on the black cheroot and considered once again how infallible was the advice of his brother Alphonse. The night was the only time to do the business. Here the column was spread out for more than a mile, there were wide gaps between each of the four divisions – and with himself he had eighteen men left. If he attacked in daylight, he would be forced to concentrate them on the detachments of Hottentot musketeers at the head and tail of the caravan. He imagined vividly what might happen at the first shot. One hundred porters would drop their packs and scatter away into the bush, and when the fighting was over he would have nobody to carry the loot.
It was necessary, furthermore, for him to wait until the Englishman rejoined the caravan. He guessed that Zouga Ballantyne was scouting or hunting, but that he would rejoin the column before nightfall.
The woman was there. He had another glimpse of her at that moment as she stepped up on to a log that lay across the path; for a moment she balanced there, long-legged, in those maddening breeches, and then jumped down off the log. Camacho passed a pleasant few minutes in erotic imaginings. He had been twenty days without a woman and it had put a razor edge to his appetite which even the hot hard trek had not dulled.
He sighed happily, and then squinted his eyes again as he concentrated on the immediate problems. Alphonse was right, they would have to wait until night. And tonight would be a good night for it, three days after the full moon, and yet the moon would rise very late, an hour or so after midnight.
He would let the Englishman come in, let the camp settle down, let the fires die, and let the Hottentot sentries drowse off. Then when the moon rose and the vitality of the camp was at its lowest ebb, he and his men would go in.
Every one of his men was good with the knife, the fact that they had lived so long showed that, Camacho smiled to himself, and they would have an opportunity to prove it again tonight. He personally would mark the position of the sentries while it was still light. They would start with them, Camacho did not expect more than three or four. After the sentries, then the Hottentot musketeers that were sleeping. They were the most dangerous, and after them there would be time for indulgence.
He would go to the woman’s tent himself, he squirmed slightly at the thought and adjusted his dressing. It was just a terrible pity that he could not take care of the Englishman as well. He would send two of his best men to do that work. He had dreamed of driving a long wooden spike up between the Englishman’s buttocks, and then taking wagers on how long he would take to die, amusing himself and the company while regaining some of his previous losses at the same time.
Then reluctantly, and prudently, he had decided not to chance such pleasures, not with a man like that. Best to cut his throat while he still slept. They could have their fun with the woman instead, Camacho decided firmly.
His single regret was that he would have only a short time with her, before the others demanded their turns, though a few minutes would probably be enough for him. Strange how months of craving could be satiated so swiftly, and after that brief out-pouring become indifference and even distaste. That was a very philosophical thought, Camacho realized. Once again he had astonished himself with his own wisdom and sensitivity to things of the mind. He had often thought that if he had ever learned to read and write he could have been a great man, like his father the Governor. After all, the blood in his veins was that of aristocrats and Dons, only slightly diluted.
He sighed, yes, five minutes would suffice and then the others could have her, and when they also had finished they could play the betting game with the long wooden stake – and, of course, there was a more amusing place to put it. He chuckled aloud at the thought and took a last draw on the cheroot, and the stub was so short that the ember scorched his fingers. He dropped it and crushed it under his heel. He moved like a panther, slipping quietly over the skyline and circling out stealthily to get ahead of the creeping caravan.
Zouga had left his bearers tending the smoking-racks, feeding the fire with chips of wet wood, and turning the hunks of red meat so they cured evenly. It was wearisome work, for the racks had to be guarded at all times from the hyena and jackals, the crows and kites which hung about the camp, while there was always wood to cut and the baskets of mopani bark to weave in which the smoked meat would be carried.
Jan Cheroot was happy to escape with Zouga as he marched back to find the main caravan and guide it to the buffalo camp. Even the tsetse fly could not repress his high spirits. They had been in ‘fly-country’ for a week or more now. Tom Harkness had called these importunate little insects ‘the guardians of Africa’ and certainly they made it impossible for man to move his domestic animals through vast tracts of country.
Here they were one of the many reasons why the Portuguese colonization had been confined to the low coastal littoral. Their cavalry had never been able to penetrate this deadly screen, nor had their draught animals been able to drag their war trains up from the coast.
They were the reason, also, why Zouga had not attempted to use waggons or beasts of burden to carry his stores. There was not even a dog with the caravan, for only man and wild game were immune to the dreadful consequences of the bite.
In some areas of the ‘fly-belt’ there were so few of the insects as to cause little annoyance, but in others they swarmed like hiving bees, plaguing and persecuting even during the moonlight periods of the night.
That day on the march back to rejoin the column, Zouga and Jan Cheroot suffered the worst infestation of fly they had yet met with in the valley of the Zambezi. They rose from the ground to sit thickly upon their legs, and clustered on the backs of their necks and between their shoulder blades, so that he and Jan Cheroot took turns to walk behind each other and brush them off with a freshly cut buffalo tail.
As suddenly as they had entered it, they found themselves out of the ‘fly-belt’ and with blessed relief from the torment they settled down to rest in the shade. Within half an hour they heard distant singing, and as they waited for the caravan to come up, they smoked and chatted in the desultory fashion of the good companions they had become.
During one of the long pauses in their talk Zouga thought he saw vague movement on the far side of the shallow valley in front of them. Probably a herd of kudu or a troop of baboon, both of which were plentiful in the valley, but apart from the buffalo herd the only game they had encountered since leaving Tete.
The approaching caravan would have alarmed whatever it was, Zouga thought, removing his cap and using it to drive away the persistent cloud of tiny black mopani bees which hovered around his head, a
ttracted by the moisture of his eyes and lips and nostrils. The movement in the forest opposite was not repeated. Whatever it was had probably crossed the ridge. Zouga turned back to listen to Jan Cheroot.
‘The rains only stopped six weeks ago,’ Jan Cheroot was musing aloud. ‘The water-holes and rivers up on the high ground will still be full, not here, of course – this ground drains too steeply.’ He indicated the dry and rocky water course below them. ‘So the herds spread out, and follow their old roads.’ He was explaining the complete lack of elephant, or even recent evidence of elephant herds in the valley, and Zouga listened with attention, for here was an expert speaking. ‘The old elephant roads, they used to run from the flat mountain of Good Hope to the swamps of the far Sud,’ he pointed north. ‘But each year they shrink as we, the jagters (hunters), and men like us, follow the herds and drive them deeper and deeper into the interior.’
Jan Cheroot was silent again, and his pipe gurgled noisily as he sucked on it.
‘My father told me that he killed the last elephants south of the Olifants river – the river of elephants – when he was still a young man. He boasted that he killed twelve elephants that day, he alone with his old roer (muzzle-loader) that was too heavy to hold to the shoulder. He had to rest it on the crutch of a forked stick he carried for it. Twelve elephants in one day – by one man. That is a feat.’ He gurgled his pipe again, and then spat a little yellow tobacco juice. ‘But then my father was even more famous as a liar than he was as a hunter,’ Jan Cheroot chuckled and shook his head fondly.
Zouga smiled, and then the smile vanished and his head jerked up. He narrowed his eyes, for a tiny dart of reflected sunlight had struck his eye coming from the same place across the valley. Whatever he had seen was still there, and it was neither kudu nor baboon. It had to be a man, for only metal or glass could have shot that reflection. Jan Cheroot had noticed nothing and he was musing on.
‘When I rode with Cornwallis Harris, we found the first elephant on the Cashan mountains, that’s a thousand miles further north of where my father killed his herd. There was nothing in between – it had all been hunted bare. Now there are no elephant in the Cashan mountains. My brother Stephan was there two years ago. He tells me that there are no elephant south of the Limpopo river. The Boers graze their herds where we hunted ivory – perhaps we will find no elephant even up there on the high ground, perhaps there are no elephant left in all the world.’
Zouga was not really listening any more. He was thinking about the man on the opposite side of the valley. It was probably somebody from the caravan, a party sent ahead to cut firewood for the night’s bivouac, yet it was still early to think of making camp.
The singing of the bearers was louder now. There was a single voice carrying the marching song. Zouga recognized it. The man was a tall Angoni, with a fine tenor voice, and a poet who improvised his own verses, adding to them and altering them on the march. Zouga, cocking his head, could make out the words.
‘Have you heard the Fish Eagle cry above Marawi? Have you seen the setting sun turn the snows of Kilimanjaro to blood?’
And then the chorus coming in after him, those haunting African voices, so beautiful, so moving,
‘Who will lead us to these wonders, my brother?
We will leave the women to weep,
We will let their sleeping mats grow cold,
If a strong man leads, we will follow him, my brother.’
Zouga smiled at the next verse, as he recognized his name.
‘Bakela will lead us like a father leads his children,
Bakela will give you a khete of sam-sam beads—
Bakela will feed you upon the fat of the hippopotamus
and meat of the buffalo—’
Zouga closed his mind against the distraction, concentrating on the man across the valley. Here, a hundred miles from the nearest habitations of men, it must have been somebody from the caravan – woodcutter, honey-hunter, deserter, who knew?
Zouga stood up and stretched, and Jan Cheroot knocked out his pipe and stood with him. The head of the column appeared amongst the trees lower down the slope, the red, white and blue banner flapped lazily open and then drooped again dejectedly.
Zouga glanced once more at the opposite slope, it seemed deserted again. He was tired, the soles of his feet felt as though he had marched across burning embers, for they had been going hard since dawn, and the barely healed knife wound in his hip ached dully.
He should really go up that slope to check what he had seen, but it was steep and rocky. It would take another half an hour of scrambling to reach the crest and return. They went down to meet the caravan, and when Zouga saw Robyn striding along with that easy coltish grace of hers behind the standard bearer, he lifted his cap and waved it above his head.
She ran to meet him, laughing like a child with delight. He had been gone three days.
Below a polished face of smooth black rock, that when the river was in spate would be a roaring cascade, there was a bend in the dry waterbed filled with pure white sand.
On the banks above it the wild mahogany stood tall and vigorous, its roots in water and the baboon had been scratching in the sand below the bank.
Robyn and Zouga sat together on the edge of the dry waterfall, watching the men that Zouga had set to digging for water.
‘I pray there will be enough.’ Robyn watched them with interest. ‘I have not used my bath since we left Tete.’ Her enamelled hip bath was the expedition’s single bulkiest item of equipment.
‘I’ll be satisfied with enough for a pot of tea,’ Zouga replied vaguely, but he was clearly distracted.
‘Something is worrying you?’ she asked.
‘I was thinking of a valley in Kashmir.’
‘Was it like this?’
‘Not really – it is just that,’ he shrugged. In that far away valley, when he had been a young ensign leading a patrol ahead of the battalion, he had seen something as he had today. Something of no account, a stray movement, a glint of light that might have been off a gunbarrel, or the horn of a wild goat. Then, as now, it had been too much trouble to check it. That night he had lost three men, killed while they fought their way out of the valley. The fight had earned praise from his Colonel, but the men remained dead.
He glanced up at the slanting sun, there was an hour of light left. He knew he should have climbed that slope. While Robyn watched him with a puzzled expression, he wavered a few seconds longer and then with an exclamation of exasperation stood up wearily. His feet still ached abominably and he rubbed his hip where the knife-wound throbbed. It was going to be a long walk back down the valley.
Zouga used a deep and narrow ravine to get out of the camp unobtrusively, and once clear he scrambled out and kept to the thicker bush just above the river-bed until he reached a tangled barrier of driftwood carried down during the recent rains which blocked the dry watercourse from bank to bank.
He used this to cover his crossing, and started up the far slope. He went very carefully, dodging from one tree to another and watching and listening before each move.
On the crest there was a faint movement of cooler air, the evening breeze coming down the escarpment that cooled the sweat on his neck and almost made the hard climb worthwhile. It seemed that was all the reward he would get. The stony ground was too hard to carry sign, and it was deserted of life, animal or human. However, Zouga was determined to make up for his previous sloth. He stayed too long. It would be fully dark before he reached the camp again, moon-rise was late, and he risked a broken leg moving over this sort of terrain in the pitch dark.
He turned to go back, and he smelt it before he saw it, and the hair prickled along his forearms and he felt his belly muscles contract, yet it was such a commonplace smell. He stooped and picked up the small squashed brown object. He had smoked the last of his own cheroots two days before, perhaps that was why his nose was so sensitive to the smell of tobacco.
The cigar had been smoked down to a thin rin
d, and crushed out so it resembled a scrap of dried bark. Without the smell to guide him, he would never have found it. Zouga shredded it between his fingers, and there was still a little residual dampness of saliva in the chewed end. He lifted his fingers and sniffed them. He knew where he had smelled that particular scented type of Portuguese tobacco before.
Camacho left fifteen of his men well back off the crest, in a tumble of rock that looked like a ruined castle, and whose caves and overhangs gave shade and concealment. They would sleep, he knew, and he grudged it to them. His own eyelids were drooping as he lay belly down in cover, on the other side of the ridge watching the caravan making camp.
He had only two of his men with him to help him mark the sentries and scherms, the watch fires and the tent sites. They would be able to lead the others in, even in the complete darkness before the moon, if that should become necessary. Camacho hoped not. In the dark mistakes could be made, and it needed only a shot or a single shout. No, they would wait for the moon, he decided.
The Englishman had come into camp earlier, just before the caravan halted. He had the Hottentot with him, and they both hobbled stiffly like men who had made long, hard marches. Good, he would sleep soundly, was probably doing so already, for Camacho had not seen him in the last hour. He must be in the tent beside the woman’s. He had seen a servant carrying a steaming bucket of water to her.
They had watched the Hottentot Sergeant set only two sentries. The Englishman must be feeling very secure, two sentries merely to watch against lions. They would probably both be fast asleep by midnight. They would never wake again. He, personally, would cut one of them. He smiled in anticipation, and he would send a good knife to cut the other.
The remaining Hottentots had built their usual lean-to shelter and thatched it in a rudimentary fashion. There was no chance of rain, not at this season and not with that unblemished eggshell-blue sky. It was almost two hundred paces from the tents, a groan or a whimper would not carry that far. Good, Camacho nodded again. It was working out better than he had hoped.