Ralph could tell by the spacing and weight of their gait that they were carrying a heavy litter.
He had guessed that the leading band was merely a vanguard. This was the main party, while the person on the litter was without any doubt Lobengula himself, and following him were his attendants, his high indunas and other important personages. After them again, more bearers carrying sleeping-mats and karosses of fur, beer pots and leather sacks of maize meal and other burdens. They filed past and disappeared, but still Ralph did not rise from hiding.
Another long silence, and then, with only a soft warning rustle, came the rear guard, two hundred more picked warriors trotting past. After five minutes Ralph felt it was safe to crawl out onto the path and dust the damp leaf mould from his knees and elbows.
From the top of the ridge he stared back in the direction which Lobengula’s party had taken, puzzled as to where they were all headed and why. He knew from Cathy that Rudd and his party were still at GuBulawayo and that Clinton Codrington and Robyn were with them, negotiating the concession that Mr Rhodes so desperately needed.
Why would Lobengula leave such important guests at his kraal and come up here into these sacred and deserted hills?
There was no answer, and Ralph had to be content with having so narrowly escaped discovery, and to be now alerted to the presence of large parties of warriors in the area.
He moved forward with even more caution than before so that it took three more nights of travel at the pace of the bullocks before they came out of another pass between bald granite cliffs and saw the open forests of tall and lovely trees rolling away below them, silver and charcoal in the moonlight.
In the dawn Ralph climbed the cliff to the peak of the last of the Matopos Hills, and on the eastern horizon – almost exactly where he had hoped to find it – he picked out the far blue silhouette of a solitary kopje standing above the forested plain. It was still thirty miles distant, but the shape of a crouching lion was unmistakable, and it fitted exactly the description in Zouga Ballantyne’s notes:
The hill which I have named ‘Lion’s Head’ stands high above the surrounding terrain, and points the traveller unerringly towards great Zimbabwe—
A man might have walked in the shadow of the massive stone walls and never known they were there, so dense was the growth that covered them. It was a jungle of liana and flowering creepers, while from the very walls themselves grew the twisting serpentine roots of the strangler figs, wedging open the mortarless joints of the stonework and bringing it down in screes of fallen blocks.
Above the level of the high walls soared the heads of other tall trees, grown to giants in the time since the last inhabitant had fled this place or died within its labyrinth of passages and courtyards. When Zouga Ballantyne had discovered this massive keep before Ralph’s birth, it had taken him almost two days to find the narrow gateway under this mass of tangled vegetation, but now his directions and descriptions led Ralph immediately to it.
Ralph stood before the ancient portals and looked up at the pattern of chevron stone blocks which decorated the top of the wall thirty feet above his head, and was seized with a primeval superstitious awe.
Though he could see the marks of his father’s axe, and the old stumps cut away on each side of the opening, a veil of trailing plants had regrown to screen the gateway – proof that no human being had entered it since Zouga’s visit more than twenty-five years before.
The steps that led up to the gateway had been dished by the passage of the feet of the ancient inhabitants over the centuries. Ralph drew a deep breath, and silently reminded himself that he was a civilized Christian; but his superstitious fears lingered as he climbed the stairs, ducked under the trailing creepers and stepped through the gateway.
He found himself in a narrow twisted stone gut between high walls open to the sky. He followed the passage, clambering over fallen stonework blocks and forcing his way through brush and undergrowth that choked it, until abruptly he came out into a wide courtyard, dominated by an immense cylindrical tower of lichen-coated grey granite.
It was exactly as his father had described it, even to the damaged parapet of the tower where Zouga had broken in to discover whether the interior of the towering structure contained a secret treasure chamber. He knew that his father had ransacked the ruins for treasure, he had even torn up and sieved the earth of this temple enclosure for gold. He had retrieved almost a thousand ounces of the yellow metal, small beads and flakes of foil, finely woven gold wire and tiny ingots the size of an infant’s finger, and Ralph knew that the only treasure left for him were the idols of green soapstone.
With a stoop of his spirits, Ralph thought for a moment that someone else had forestalled him. According to Zouga, the stone falcons should have been here in this courtyard, and he started forward, his superstitious chills forgotten in the bleaker fear of having been deprived of his booty.
He plunged into the waist-high undergrowth and waded through it towards the tower – and he tripped over the first of the statues, and almost fell. He crouched over it and with his hands tore away the tangle that covered it, and then he looked into the blank cruel eyes above the curved beak that he remembered so well from his childhood. It was the identical twin of the statue that had stood on the verandah of Zouga’s cottage at Kimberley, but this falcon had been cast down and lay half buried by roots and brush.
He ran his hands over the satiny green soapstone, then with one finger traced the well-remembered shark’s-tooth pattern around the plinth.
‘I’ve come for you at last,’ he whispered aloud, and then looked around him quickly. His voice had echoed eerily against the surrounding walls, and he shivered though the sun was still high. Then he stood up and went on searching.
There were six statues, as Zouga had counted them. One was shattered as though by the blows from a sledgehammer, the battered head lay beside it. Three others were damaged to a lesser extent, but the remaining two statues were perfect.
‘This is an evil place,’ a sepulchral voice intoned unexpectedly, and Ralph started and spun to face it.
Isazi had followed and stood close behind him, preferring the terrors of the narrow passages and ominous walls to the greater terror of remaining alone at the gateway to the city.
‘When can we leave here, Nkosi?’ Isazi shot restless little glances into the dismal corners of tumbled passageways. ‘It is not a place where a man should stay overlong.’
‘How soon can we load these onto the oxen?’ Ralph squatted and patted one of the fallen images. ‘Can we do it before nightfall?’
‘Yebho, Nkosi.’ Isazi promised fervently. ‘By nightfall we will be a good march away from here. You have my word upon it.’
The king had once again chosen Bazo for a special task – and Bazo’s heart was big with pride as he led the vanguard of his impi along the secret road that took them deeper and deeper into the dreaming Hills of the Matopos.
The road was well beaten, wide enough for two warriors to run abreast with their shields just touching, for it had been used since the time when Mzilikazi, the old king, had first brought the nation up from the south.
Mzilikazi himself had blazed the trail to the secret cavern of the Umlimo. At every crisis in the nation’s history, the old king had followed this road – in drought or pestilence or plague, he had come to hear the words of the chosen one. Every season he had come for advice on the herds and the crops, or to help him decide in which direction to send his raiding impis.
Lobengula, himself an initiate of the lesser mysteries, had first entered the cavern of the Umlimo as a youth – led by the crazed old magician who had been his mentor and his tutor. It had been the Umlimo’s word which had placed the toy spear of kingship in Lobengula’s hand when Mzilikazi had let it fall from his grasp. It was the Umlimo who had chosen Lobengula in preference to Nkulumane or the other older brothers of nobler birth – and it was the Umlimo who had made him the favourite of the ancestral spirits and had sustained him i
n the darkest hours of his reign.
Thus it was that Lobengula, plagued by the importunate demands of the emissaries of a white man whom he had never seen, confused by scraps of paper whose signs he could not read, troubled by doubts and tormented by fears, badgered and pulled by the conflicting advice of his senior indunas – was at last returning to the secret cavern.
He lay on his litter, on a mattress of the soft yellow and black spotted furs of the leopard, rocked by the motion of the trotting bearers, so that the naked folds and bulges of his gross black body shook and rippled, and he looked ahead with dark and haunted eyes.
Lodzi – that was the name on every white man’s lips. Everywhere he turned, Lobengula heard the name Lodzi.
‘Is this Lodzi a king, as I am a king?’ he had asked the white man with the red face; for Lobengula, as a Matabele, could not pronounce the ‘R’ of the name.
‘Mr Rhodes is not a king, yet he is greater than a king,’ Rudd had replied.
‘Why does not Lodzi come to me himself?’
‘Mr Rhodes has gone across the sea, he sends us lesser men to do this business.’
‘If I could look upon the face of Lodzi, then I would know if his heart was great.’
But Rhodes would not come, and day after day Lobengula had listened to the insistence of Lodzi’s minions, and in the nights his indunas cautioned and questioned him, and argued amongst themselves.
‘If you give the white men a finger, they want the hand,’ Gandang told him, ‘and having the hand, they desire the arm and then the chest and the heart and the head.’
‘Oh King, Lodzi is a man of pride and honour. His word is like Lobengula’s own. He is a good man,’ said Nomusa, whom he trusted as he trusted few others.
‘Give each of the white men a little – and give the same thing to each of them,’ counselled Kamuza, one of his youngest but most cunning indunas, a man who had lived with the white men and knew their ways. ‘Thus every white man becomes the enemy of the other. Set one dog on the other, lest the pack set upon you.’
‘Choose the strongest of the white men and make him our ally,’ said Somabula. ‘This Lodzi is the herd bull. Choose him.’
And Lobengula had cocked his ear to each of them in turn, and become more desperate and more confused with every conflicting view, until now there was only one path open to him, the path into the Matopos.
Behind his litter came the bearers with the gifts for the oracle, rolls of copper wire, leather bags of coarse salt, pots of trade beads, six great tusks of yellow ivory, bolts of bright cloth, knives made by his master smith with handles of rhinoceros horn, a considerable treasure to pay for the words which he hoped would give him solace.
The path twisted down like a maimed serpent into the gut of the hills, so that the sun was lost and there was only a narrow strip of blue sky showing between the tops of the granite cliffs.
The rank and thorny vegetation crowded the pathway and at last met overhead, forming a dreary tunnel, and the silence was a heavy oppressive presence, for no bird sang and no animal squeaked or scurried in the undergrowth.
But Bazo led on at the same pace, his head swinging from side to side, scanning for danger or menace, and his grip on the shaft of his stabbing spear was firm, his sweat-oiled muscles tense as the springs of a mantrap, ready to hurl his body forward to meet an enemy at any twist in the path.
There was a stream of slow green water and algae-slick boulders across the track, and Bazo leapt it easily with barely a break in his stride; and fifty paces farther on the bush thinned and the cliffs pinched in to form a natural gateway of stone that led into the looming precipice.
Here a determined spearman could hold a thousand and Bazo surveyed it with the swift appraisal of a soldier; and then he raised his gaze to the ledge high above on which was perched a small thatched watch-hut.
Bazo grounded the butt of his long red shield – and called up the cliff. ‘I, Bazo, induna of one thousand, demand passage.’ His voice boomed and broke into a myriad echoes against the stone walls.
‘In whose name do you come to trouble the spirits of the air and earth?’ a querulous old man’s voice replied, and a sticklike figure, foreshortened by the height of the cliff, appeared upon the lip.
‘I come in the king’s name, Lobengula the Black Bull of Matabele.’ Bazo scorned to wait on permission or favour and, sweeping his shield up onto his shoulder, he sprang forward through the ominous portals.
The passageway beyond was so narrow that his warriors could follow only in single file, and the grey sand that covered the floor sparkled with starry chips of mica and crunched under their bare feet. The passageway curved upon itself and then opened again without warning over a hidden valley.
The valley was completely enclosed by sheer cliffs, and this narrow passage was its only entrance. The bowl of the floor was lush with green grass, and watered by a clear fountain that sprang from the cliff face beside the gateway and meandered down into the valley bottom.
In the centre of the valley, a thousand paces ahead, was a tiny village, twenty or so thatched huts laid out in a neat circle. Bazo led his warriors down and, with a gesture of his assegai, formed them into a double rank on each side of the pathway that led to the huts.
They waited in stillness and silence until the distant chant of the litter-bearers grew louder, and at last the king’s party emerged into the hidden valley – and Bazo led his men in a deep chorus of praise and salutation.
The royal party camped two days beside the tiny stream, waiting on the Umlimo’s pleasure.
Each day her attendants came to Lobengula to receive gifts and tribute on the oracle’s behalf. They were a strange and macabre motley of lesser wizards and witches; some of them, touched by the spirits they served, were crazed and wild-eyed, others were young nubile girls, their bodies painted and their eyes blank and empty like the smokers of the hemp pipe. There were children with wise old eyes who did not laugh or play like other children, and ancients with withered bodies and sly eyes who spoke with the king in low, wheedling tones and took his gifts and promised: ‘Perhaps tomorrow; who knows when the power of divination will descend upon the Umlimo.’
Then on the dawn of the third day Lobengula sent for Bazo, and when he came to the king’s camp fire, his father Gandang was already with the king, dressed in full regimentals, plume and fur and tassels of valour at elbow and knee, and with him were six of the other senior indunas.
‘Bazo, my fine axe with a sharp edge, I have chosen you to stand by my shoulder when I face the Umlimo – to guard my back against treachery,’ ordered Lobengula, and Bazo felt his chest swell with pride at such a mark of the king’s trust.
A witch led them, prancing and mumbling and mouthing, through the village and up the far side of the valley. Burdened by his great bulk, Lobengula paused often on the climb, his breathing sobbing in his throat, and he rested on Gandang’s arm before going on again, until at last they reached the foot of the sheer high cliff. Here there was a cave in the rock. Its entrance was a hundred paces wide, but its roof low enough for a man to reach up and touch. Some time long ago the entrance had been walled up with square blocks of dressed stone, but the wall had tumbled down, leaving dark gaps like the missing teeth in an old man’s mouth.
At a nod from his father, Bazo placed the king’s carved stool facing the cave and Lobengula lowered his great black haunches upon it gratefully. Bazo stood at the king’s back, his assegai gripped underhand, and pointed forward towards the dark entrance in the rock.
Suddenly there came the terrible spitting, tearing snarl of an angry leopard from the cave mouth, so loud and close and real that the band of hardened old warriors started and swayed, and stood their ground only with an obvious effort of will. The old witch giggled and spittle ran down her chin.
The silence fell again, but charged with promise and the threat of an unseen presence watching them from the utter darkness of the cave’s recesses.
Then there was a voice, the voic
e of a child, sweet and piping clear. It issued not from the cave but from the air above the king’s head, so that all of them raised their eyes. There was nothing there except the voice.
‘The stars will shine upon the hills, and the Black Bull will not quench them.’
The little group of indunas drew closer together as though to take comfort from one another, and the silence fell again. Bazo felt himself shivering, although his sweat tickled like an insect as it ran down between his shoulder blades. Then he jerked his head as another voice spoke. It came from the ground at the king’s feet, and it used the liquid purring tones of a beautiful and seductive woman.
‘The sun will shine at midnight, and the Great Elephant will not dim it.’
Again that fraught and frightening silence, before something croaked from the cliff high above them, a hoarse inhuman sound, like the croak of a carrion crow.
‘Heed the wisdom of the vixen before that of the dogfox, Lobengula, King of—’ The voice broke off abruptly, and there was a scuffling sound deep in the black maw of the cave, and the old crone who had been nodding and grinning at Lobengula’s feet scrambled up and shouted an order in an unknown tongue.
Now there was a flash of movement within the cave, and it caused consternation to Lobengula and his indunas, for they had visited the cave a hundred times and more but they had never seen the Umlimo nor had any glimpse of her presence in the depths of the cave.
This was something beyond ritual and custom, and the crone hopped forward, shouting angrily; and now they could make out what was happening in the gloom. It seemed that two of the macabre attendants of the Umlimo were trying to restrain a smaller and more agile figure. They were unsuccessful, for the person threw off their clutching, claw-like hands and ran forward to the threshold of the cave, where the early sunlight revealed the Umlimo at last.
She was so beautiful that all of them, even the king, gasped and stared. Her skin was oiled and polished to the colour of dark amber.