‘We won’t be able to go on,’ he said quietly. She stared at him a moment without change of expression, and then dropped her eyes and went on smearing salve on the badly burned leg of one of the porters. She had treated the worst cases first, and was now finishing with the burns and abrasions.
‘We’ve lost too much vital equipment,’ Zouga explained. ‘Stores that we need to survive.’ Robyn did not look up this time, ‘And we’ve not enough porters to carry what is left.’
Robyn began bandaging the leg with her full attention.
‘Papa made the Transversa with four porters,’ she observed mildly.
‘Papa was a man,’ Zouga pointed out reasonably, and Robyn’s hands stilled ominously and her eyes narrowed, but Zouga had not noticed. ‘A woman cannot travel or survive without the necessities of civilization,’ he went on seriously. ‘That is why I am sending you back to Tete. I’m sending Sergeant Cheroot and five of his Hottentots to escort you. You’ll have no difficulty, once you reach Tete. I will send with you what remains in cash, a hundred pounds for the launch down river to Quelimane and a passage to Cape Town on a trader. There you can draw on the money I deposited in Cape Town to pay for a passage on the mailship.’
She looked up at him. ‘And you?’ she asked.
Until then he had not made the decision. ‘The important thing is what happens to you,’ he told her gravely, and then he knew what he was going to do. ‘You will have to go back and I am going on alone.’
‘It’ll take more than Jan Cheroot and five of his damned Hottentots to carry me,’ she told him, and the oath was a measure of her determination.
‘Be reasonable, Sissy.’
‘Why should I start now?’ she asked sweetly.
Zouga opened his mouth to reply angrily, then closed it slowly and stared at her. There was a hard uncompromising line to her lips, and the prominent, almost masculine, jaw was clenched stubbornly.
‘I don’t want to argue,’ he said.
‘Good,’ she nodded. ‘That way you won’t waste any more of your precious time.’
‘Do you know what you are letting yourself in for?’ he asked quietly.
‘As well as you do,’ she replied.
‘We won’t have trade goods to buy our way through the tribes.’ She nodded. ‘That means we’ll have to fight our way through if anyone tries to stop us.’
He saw the shadow in her eyes at that, but there was no wavering of her determination.
‘No tents for shelter, no canned food, no sugar or tea.’ He knew what that meant to her. ‘We will live straight off the land, and what we can’t scavenge or kill or carry, we go without. We’ll have nothing but powder and shot.’
‘You’d be a fool to leave the quinine,’ she told him quietly, and he hesitated.
‘The bare minimum of medicines,’ he agreed, ‘and remember, it won’t be for just a week or a month.’
‘We’ll probably go a great deal faster than we have so far,’ she answered quietly, as she stood up and brushed off the seat of her breeches.
The choice of what to take and what to leave had been nicely balanced, Zouga thought, as he listed and weighed the new loads.
He had chosen paper and writing equipment in place of sugar and most of the tea. His navigational instruments in place of spare boots, for the boots they wore could be resoled with raw buffalo hide. Quinine and other medicines together with Robyn’s instruments in place of the extra clothing and blankets. Powder and shot in place of trade beads and cloth.
The pile of abandoned equipment grew steadily, cases of potted jams, bags of sugar, canned foods, insect nets, folding camp chairs and cots, cooking pots, Robyn’s enamel hip bath and her flowered chamber pot, trade goods, merkani cloth and beads, hand mirrors and cheap knives. When the pile was complete, Zouga put fire into it, a token of finality and of determination. Yet they watched it burn with trepidation.
There were two small concessions Zouga had made: a single case of Ceylon tea for, as Robyn pointed out, no Englishman could be expected to explore undiscovered territories without that sovereign brew, and the sealed tin which contained Zouga’s dress uniform, for their very lives might depend on impressing a savage African potentate. Otherwise they had divested themselves of all but the very essentials.
Chief of these essentials was the ammunition, the sacks of first-grade Curtis and May black powder and the ingots of soft lead, the bullet moulds, the flask of quicksilver to harden the balls and the boxes of copper caps. Out of the remaining forty-six porters, thirty of them carried this powder and shot.
Jan Cheroot’s musketeers were horrified when they were informed that their field packs would in future hold two hundred, and not fifty, rounds of Enfield ammunition.
‘We are warriors, not porters,’ his Corporal told him loftily. Jan Cheroot used the metal scabbard of his long bayonet to reason with him, and Robyn dressed the superficial wounds in the Corporal’s scalp.
‘They now understand the need for carrying extra ammunition, Major,’ Jan Cheroot reported to Zouga cheerfully.
It truly was interesting to realize how much fat they could shed, Zouga mused, as he watched the shorter, more manageable column start out. It was less than a hundred and fifty yards from head to tail, and the pace of its march was almost doubled. The main body nearly matched the speed of Zouga’s advance party – falling only a mile or so behind during the first day’s march.
That first day they reached the scene of the buffalo hunt before noon, and found more than bark baskets of cured black buffalo meat awaiting there. Zouga’s head gunbearer, Matthew, came running to meet him through the forest and he was so excited as to be almost incoherent.
‘The father of all elephant,’ he gibbered, shaking like a man in fever, ‘the grandfather of the father of all elephants!’
Jan Cheroot squatted beside the spoor and grinned like a gnome in a successful piece of sorcery, his slant eyes almost disappearing in the web of wrinkles and folds of yellow skin.
‘Our luck has come at last,’ he exulted. ‘This is indeed an elephant to sing about.’
He took a roll of twine out of the bulging pocket of his tunic and used it to measure the circumference of one of the huge pad marks. It was well over five feet, close to six feet around.
‘Double that is how high he stands at the shoulder,’ Jan Cheroot explained. ‘What an elephant!’
Matthew had at last controlled his excitement enough to explain how he had awoken that dawn, when the light was grey and uncertain, and seen the herd passing close to the camp in deathly silence, three great grey ghostly shapes, moving out of the forest and entering the blackened and barren valley through which the fire had swept. They were gone so swiftly, that it had seemed that they had never existed, but their spoor was impressed so clearly into the soft layer of fire ash that every irregularity in the immense footprints, the whorls and wavy creases of the horny pads, were clearly visible.
‘There was one of them, bigger and taller than the others, his teeth were long as a throwing spear and so heavy that he held his head low and moved like an old man, a very old man.’
Now Zouga also shivered with excitement, even in the stultifying heat of the burned-out valley, where it seemed the blackened earth had retained the heat of the flames. Jan Cheroot, mistaking the small movement, grinned wickedly around the stem of his clay pipe.
‘My old father used to say that even a brave man is frightened three times when he hunts the elephant, once when he sees its spoor, twice when he hears its voice and the third time when he see the beast – big and black as an ironstone kopje.’
Zouga did not trouble to deny the accusation, he was following the run of the spoor with his eyes. The three huge animals had moved up the centre of the valley, heading directly into the bad ground of the escarpment rim.
‘We will follow them,’ he said quietly.
‘Of course,’ Jan Cheroot nodded, ‘that is what we came for.’
The spoor led them over the cold grey
ash, amongst the blackened and bared branches of the burned-out jessie bush and up the rising funnel of the narrow valley.
Jan Cheroot led. He had discarded his faded tunic for a sleeveless leather jerkin with loops for the Enfield cartridges across the chest. Zouga followed him closely, carrying the Sharps and fifty extra rounds, together with his two-gallon water bottle. His gunbearers, in strict order of seniority backed him, each with his burden of blankets and water bottles, food bag, powder flask and ball pouch, and of course the big smooth-bored elephant guns.
Zouga was anxious to see Jan Cheroot work. The man talked a very good elephant hunt, but Zouga wanted to know if he was as good on the spoor as he was at telling about it around the camp fire. The first test came swiftly when the valley pinched out against another low cliff of impassable rock, and it seemed as though the great beasts they followed had taken wing and soared away above the earth.
‘Wait,’ said Jan Cheroot and cast swiftly along the base of the cliff. A minute later he whistled softly and Zouga went forward.
There was a smudge of dark ash on a block of ironstone, and another above it, seeming to lead directly into sheer rock face.
Jan Cheroot scrambled up over the loose scree at the foot of the cliff, and disappeared abruptly. Zouga slung his rifle and followed him. The blocks of ironstone had fractured in the shape of a giant’s staircase – each step as high as his waist so that he had to use a hand to climb.
Even the elephants would have extended themselves to make each step, rising on their back legs as he had seen them do at the circus, for an elephant is incapable of jumping. They must keep two feet on the earth before they can heave their ungainly bulks upwards.
Zouga reached the spot where Jan Cheroot had disappeared and stopped short in amazement at the threshold of the stone portals, invisible from below, which marked the beginning of the ancient elephant road.
The portals were symmetrically formed in fractured rock, and had eroded through the softer layers, leaving straight joints so they seemed to have been worked by a mason. The opening was so narrow that it seemed impossible that such a large animal could pass through, and looking above the level of his own head, Zouga saw how over the centuries their rough skin had worn the stone smooth as thousands upon thousands of elephant had squeezed through the gap. He reached up and plucked a coarse black bristle, almost as thick as a Swan Vesta, from a crack in the face. Beyond the natural gateway, the gap in the cliffs widened and rose at a more gentle pitch. Already Jan Cheroot was four hundred yards up the pathway.
‘Come!’ he called, and they followed him up.
The elephant road might have been surveyed and constructed by the corps of engineers, for never was the gradient steeper than thirty degrees and when there were natural steps they were never higher than a man or an elephant could comfortably negotiate, although it seemed there were always accidents, for within a quarter of a mile they found where one of the big animals had missed his footing and struck the tip of one tusk against the ironstone edge.
The tusk had snapped above the point, and twenty pounds of ivory lay in the path. The fragment was worn and stained, so thick around that Zouga could not span it with both hands, but where it had sheared the fresh ivory was a lovely finely grained porcelain white.
Jan Cheroot whistled again when he saw the girth of the fragment of tusk. ‘I have never seen an elephant so big,’ he whispered, and instinctively checked the priming of his musket.
They followed the road out of the rocky pass on to forested slopes, where the trees were different, more widely spaced, and here the three old bulls had paused to strip off long slabs of bark from the msasa trunks before moving on. A mile further along the road, they found the chewed balls of bark still wet and smelling of elephant saliva, a rank gamey smell. Zouga held one of the big stringy balls to his nostrils and inhaled the elephant smell. It was the most exciting odour he had ever known.
When they rounded a shoulder of the mountain, there was a terrifying drop of open blue space before them in which the tiny shapes of vultures soared. Zouga was sure that it was the end of the road.
‘Come!’ Jan Cheroot whistled and they stepped out on to the narrow secret ledge, with the deep drop close at hand and followed the road that had been smoothed for them by tens of thousands of roughly padded feet over the centuries.
Zouga at last was allowing himself to hope, for the road climbed always, and there seemed to be a definite purpose and direction to it – unlike the meandering game trails of the valley. This road was going somewhere, climbing and bearing determinedly southwards.
Zouga paused a moment and looked back. Far behind and below the sunken plain of the Zambezi shimmered in the blue and smoky haze of heat. The gigantic baobab trees seemed like children’s miniatures, the terrible ground over which they had laboured for weeks seemed smooth and inviting, and far away just visible through the haze the serpentine belt of darker, denser vegetation marked the course of the great wide river itself.
Zouga turned his back upon it and followed Jan Cheroot up around the shoulder of the mountain, and a new and majestic vista opened around him as dramatically as though a theatre curtain had been drawn aside.
Another steep slope stretched away above the cliffs, and there were luxuriant forests of marvellously shaped trees, the colours of their foliage was pink and flaming scarlet and iridescent green. These lovely forests reached up to a rampart of rocky peaks that Zouga was certain must mark the highest point of the escarpment.
There was something different with this new scene, and it took Zouga some moments to realize what it was. Then suddenly he drew a deep breath of pleasure. The air fanning down from the crest was sweet and cool as that on a summer’s evening on the South Downs, but carrying with it the scent of strange shrubs and flowers and the soft exotic perfume of that beautiful pink and red forest of msasa trees.
That was not all, Zouga realized suddenly. There was something more important still. They had left the tsetse ‘flybelt’ behind them. It was many hours and a thousand feet of climbing since he had noticed the last of the deadly little insects. The land ahead of them now was clean, they were entering a land where man could live and rear his animals. They were leaving the killing heat of that harsh and forbidding valley for something softer and cleaner, something good, Zouga was certain of it, at last.
He stared about him with delight and wonder. Below him in the void a pair of vultures came planing in on wide-stretched pinions, so close that he could see every individual feather in their wingtips, and above the shaggy mound of their nest that clung precariously to a fissure in the sheer rock cliff they beat at the air, hovering, before settling upon the nest site. Clearly Zouga heard the impatient cries of the hungry nestlings.
On the rock shelf high above his head a family of hyrax, the plump rabbit-like rock dassie, sat in a row and stared down at him with patent astonishment, fluffy as children’s toys, until at last they took fright and disappeared into their rocky warrens with the speed of a conjurer’s illusion.
The sun, sinking through the last quadrant of its course, lit it all with richer and mellower light, and turned the cloud ranges to splendour, tall mushroom-shaped thunderheads of silver and brightest gold, touched with fleshy pink tongues and the tinge of wild roses.
Now at last Zouga could not doubt where the elephant road was leading him and he felt his spirits soaring, his body wearied from the climb was suddenly recharged with vigour, with vaulting expectations. For he knew that those rugged peaks above him were the threshold, the very frontiers of the fabled kingdom of Monomatapa.
He wanted to push past Jan Cheroot on the narrow track, and run ahead up the broad beautiful forested slope that led to the crest, but the little yellow Hottentot stopped him with a hand upon his shoulder.
‘Look!’ he hissed softly. ‘There they are!’
Zouga followed his outflung arm and saw instantly. Far ahead amongst those magical red and pink groves something moved, vast and grey and slow, ether
eal and insubstantial as a shadow. He stared at it, feeling his heartbeat quicken at this, his first glimpse of an African elephant in its savage habitat, but the slow grey movement was immediately screened by the dense foliage.
‘My telescope.’ He snapped his fingers urgently behind his back, never taking his eyes from the spot where the huge beast had disappeared, and Matthew thrust the thick cylinder of cool brass into his hand.
With fingers that shook slightly he pulled out the sections of the spy-glass, but before he could lift it to his eye the tree that had screened the elephant’s body began to tremble and shake as though it had been struck by a whirlwind, and faintly they heard the rending crackle of tearing timber, the squealing protest of living wood, and slowly the tall tree leaned outwards and then toppled with a crack that echoed off the cliffs like a cannon shot.
Zouga lifted the telescope and rested it on Matthew’s patient shoulder. He focused the eye-piece. Abruptly, in the rounded field of the glass, the elephant was very close. His head was framed by the foliage of the tree he had uprooted. The vast ears seemed wide as a clipper’s mainsail as they flapped lazily and he could see the puffs of dust that their breeze raised from the massive grey withers.
Clearly he could see the dark wet tear-path from the little eye down the sered and wrinkled cheek, and when the animal raised its head, Zouga drew breath sharply at the unbelievable size of the double arches of stained yellow ivories. One tip was foreshortened, broken off cleanly, and the ivory was brilliant snowy white in the fresh break.
As Zouga watched, the bull used his trunk, with its rubbery fingers of flesh at the tip, to pluck a handful of the delicate new leaves from the fallen tree. He used his trunk with the finesse of an expert surgeon, and then drooped open his triangular lower lip and thrust the leaves far down his own throat, and his rheumy old eyes wept with slow contentment.
An urgent tap on his shoulder disturbed Zouga and irritably he lifted his eye from the telescope. Jan Cheroot was pointing further up the slope.