Текст книги "Men of Men"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

Соавторы: Wilbur Smith
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"Count them," Kamuza instructed. "Let us agree on the number, and let Lobengula, the great Black Elephant, count the same number into his mighty hands when you lay the belt before him at the kraal of Gubulawayo, the place of killing., Bazo touched each diamond with his fingertip, his lips moving silently. "Amashurni amatatu!"

"Thirty," Kamuza repeated. "It is agreed."

And they were all large clean stones, the smallest the size of the first joint of a man's little finger.

Bazo tied the kilt about his waist, the fleecy tails of the bat-eared fox dangling to his knees.

"It looks well upon you" Kamuza nodded, and then went on. "Tell Lobengula, the Great Elephant, that I am his dog and I grovel in the dirt at his feet. Tell him that there will be more of the yellow coins and the bright stones. Tell him that his children labour each day in the pit, and there will be more, many more. Every man who takes the road north will bring him riches." Kamuza stepped forward and laid his right hand on Bazo's shoulder.

"Go in peace, Bazo the Axe."

"Stay in peace, my brother, and may the days disappear like raindrops into the desert sand until we smile upon each other once more.

Isazi put the span to its first real test in the drift of the Vaal river.

The grey waters were barely flowing, but they covered the hubs of the tall iron-shod rear wheels, and the bottom was broken waterwom rock that clanked and rolled under pressure, threatening to jam the wheels and denying purchase to the driving hooves of the span.

Yet they ran the wagon through under load, leaning into the yokes, noses down almost touching the surface of the river, and the wagon tent jolting and rocking behind them.

Until, under the steep cut up the far bank, the rear wheels stuck and the wagon bed tilted alarmingly. Then Isazi showed his expertise. He swung the team wide, giving them a run at it, and when he called to his leaders and burst the air asunder with the thirty-foot lash that tapered to the thickness of twine they went in stifflegged, jerked her clear, and took the load out of the river bed at a canter, while Isazi pranced and sang their praises and even Umfaan smiled.

Ralph ordered an early outspan under the tall trees on the far bank, for there was good grass and unlimited water, and the next leg of the road to his grandfather Moffat's mission station was a hundred and twenty miles, hard and dry going all the way.

"See, Little Hawk," Isazi was still rapturous over the performance of his span. "– See how clever they are. They pick a good patch of grass and eat it up; they do not wander from patch to patch, wasting their time and strength, as lesser beasts might do. Soon they will settle with the cud, and in the morning they will be strong and rested.

Each of them is a prince among cattle!"

"From tomorrow we begin night marches," Ralph ordered, and Isazi's smile faded and he looked severe.

"I had already made that decision," he said sternly, "but where did you ever hear of night marching, Little Hawk?

It is a trick of the wise ones."

"Count me amongst them then, Isazi," Ralph told him solemnly, and walked out of camp to find a place upon the riverbank from which to enjoy the sunset.

Here the banks of the Vaal were churned into mounds and irregular hollows, the old river workings, picked over by the first diggers and now abandoned and overgrown.

It was a mass burial ground of men's dreams, and looking upon it Ralph's high spirits that had buoyed this first day's trek upon the open road began to evaporate.

It was the first day in his life that Ralph had been free and completely his own man. Walking at the wheel of his own wagon, he had woven dreams of fortune. He had imagined his wagons, fifty, a hundred, carrying his cargoes across the continent. He had seen them coming south again, loaded with ivory and bars of yellow gold.

He had seen in his mind's eye the wide lands, the herds of elephant, the masses of native cattle, the riches that lay out there in the north beckoning to him, warbling the siren call in his ears.

He had been carried so high that now as his spirits turned they fell as low. He looked at the deserted diggings on the banks across the river, the vain scratchings where other men had attempted to turn this great brown slumbering giant of a continent to their own account.

Then suddenly he felt very small and lonely, and afraid. His thoughts turned to his father, and his spirits plunged lower still as he recalled the last words he had spoken.

"Go then! Go and be damned to you."

That was not the way he had wanted it. Zouga Ballantyne had been the central figure in his life until that day.

A colossus who overshadowed each of his actions, each of his thoughts.

Much as he had chafed under the shackles that his duty to his father had placed upon him, much as he had resented every one of his decisions being made for him, each of his actions ordered, yet now he felt as though the greater part of himself had been removed by some drastic surgery of the soul.

Until this moment he had not really thought of losing his father, he had not let the memory of their brutal parting cut him too deeply. Now suddenly this dirty slow river was the barrier between him and the life he had known. There was no going back, now or ever. He had lost his father and his brother and Jan Cheroot and he was alone and lonely.

He felt the acid tears scald his eyelids.

His vision wavered, played him tricks, for across the wide river course, on the far bank was the figure of a horseman.

The horseman slouched easily in the saddle, one hand on his hip, the elbow cocked; and the set of the head upon the broad shoulders was unmistakable.

Slowly Ralph came to his feet, staring in disbelief, and then suddenly he was running and sliding down the sheer bank and splashing waist deep through the grey waters of the ford. Zouga swung down from Tom's back and ran forward to meet Ralph as he came up the bank.

Then both of them stopped and stared at each other.

They had not embraced since the night of Aletta's funeral, and they could not bring themselves to do so now, though longing was naked in the eyes of both of them.

"I could not let you go, not like that," said Zouga, but Ralph had no reply, for his throat had closed.

,"It is time for you to go out on your own," Zouga nodded his golden beard. "Past time. You are like an eaglet that has outgrown the nest. I realized that before you did, Ralph, but I did not want it to be. That is why I spoke so cruelly."

Zouga picked up Tom's reins and the pony nudged him affectionately. Zouga stroked his velvety muzzle.

"There are two parting gifts that I have for you." He placed the reins in Ralph's hand. "That is one," he said evenly, but the green shadows in his eyes betrayed how dearly that gesture had cost him. "The other is in Tom's saddle-bag. It's a book of notes. Read them at your leisure. You may find them of interest, even of value."

Still Ralph could not speak. He held the reins awkwardly, and blinked back the stinging under his eyelids.

"There is one other small gift, but it has no real value.

It is only my blessing."

"That is all that I really wanted," whispered Ralph.

It was six hundred miles to the Shashi river, to the border of Matabeleland.

Isazi inspanned at dusk each evening and they trekked through the cool of the night. When the moon went down and it was utterly dark, then Umfaan threw the lead rein over Dutchman's head, and the big black ox put his nose down and stayed on the track, like a hunting dog on the spoor, until the first glimmering of dawn signalled the outspan.

During a good night's trek they made fifteen miles but when the going was heavy with sand they might make only five miles.

During the days, while the cattle grazed or chewed the cud in the shade, Ralph saddled up Tom and, with Bazo running beside his stirrup, they hunted.

They found herds of buffalo along the banks of the Zouga river, the river on whose bank Ralph's father had been born, big herds, two hundred beasts together.

The herd bulls were huge, bovine and bald with age, their backs crusted with the mud from the wallow, the spread of their arnioured heads wider than the stretch of a man's arms, the tips of the polished black horns rising into symmetrical crescents like the points of the sickle moon, while the bosses above their broad foreheads were massively crenellated.

they ran them down, and Tom loved those wild flying chases every bit as much as his rider.

They chased the ghostly grey gemsbuck over the smoking red dunes, and in the thorn country they hunted the stiff-legged giraffe and sent their grotesque but stately bodies plunging and sliding to earth with the crack of rifle fire, the long graceful necks twisting in the agony of death like that of a swan.

They baited with the carcasses of zebra, and the coppery red Kalahari lions came to the taint of blood, and Tom stood down their charge. Though he trembled and snorted and rolled his eyes at the shockingly offensive cat smell, he stood for the shot which Ralph had to take from the saddle, aiming between the fierce yellow eyes or into the gape of rose-pink jaws starred with white fangs.

Thus, fifty days out from Kimberley they came at last to the Shashi river, and when they had made the crossing Bazo was on his native soil. He put on his war plumes and carrying his shield on his shoulder he walked with a new spring and joy in his stride as he led Ralph to a hilltop from which to survey the way ahead.

"See how the hills shine," Bazo whispered with an almost religious fervour. And it was true. In the early sunlight the granite tops gleamed like precious jewels.

Soft, dreaming, ruby, delicate sapphires and glossy pearl shaded like a peacock tail into a fanfare of colour.

The hills rolled away, rising gradually towards the high central plateau ahead of them, and the valleys were clad with virgin forest.

"You never saw such trees on the plains around Kimberley," Bazo challenged him, and Ralph nodded. They stood on soaring trunks, some scaled like the crocodile, others white and smooth as though moulded from potter's clay, their tops sailing in traceries of green high above the open glades of yellow grass.

"See, the buffalo herds, thick as cattle."

There was other game. There were small family groups of grey kudo, pale as ghosts, trumpet-eared, the bulls carrying the burden of their long black cork-screw horns with studied grace.

There were clouds of red impala antelope upon the woven silk carpet of golden grasses. There were the darkly massive statues of the rhinoceros seemingly graven from the solid granite of the hills, and there were the noblest antelope of all, the sable antelope, black and imperial as the name implied, the long horns curved and cruel as Saladin's scimitar, the belly blazing white, the neck of the herd bull arched haughtily as he led his lighter coloured females out of the open glade into the cool green sanctuary of the forest.

"Is it not beautiful, Henshaw?" Bazo asked.

"It is beautiful."

There was the same awe in Ralph's voice, and a strange unformed longing in his throat, a wanting that he knew could never be satisfied, and suddenly he understood his own father's obsession with this fair land: "My north," as Zouga called it.

"My north," Ralph whispered, and then, thinking of his father, the next question came immediately to mind.

"Elephant, Indhlovu? There are no elephant, Bazo.

Where are the herds?"

"Ask Bakela, your own father," Bazo grunted. "He was the first to come for them with the gun, but others followed him, many others. When Gandang, my father, son of Mzilikazi the Destroyer, half brother of the great black bull Lobengula, when he crossed the Shashi as a child on his mother's hip, the elephant herds were black as midnight upon the land and their teeth shone like the stars. Now we will find their bones growing like white lilies in the forest."

In the last hours of daylight, when Bazo and Isazi and Umfaan still slept to fortify themselves for the. long night's trek, Ralph took the leather-bound notebook out of Tom's saddle-bag.

By now the pages were dog-eared and grubby from the constant perusal to which Ralph had subjected it. It was the gift that Zouga Ballantyne had given him on the bank of the Vaal river, and the inside cover was inscribed: To my son Ralph.

May these few notes guide your feet northwards, and may they inspire you to dare what I have not dared Zouga Ballantyne The first twenty pages were filled with hand-drawn sketch maps of those areas of the land between the Zambezi and the Limpopo and the Shashi rivers over which Zouga, and before him the old hunter Tom Harkness, had travelled.

Often the map was headed by the notation: Copied from the original map drawn by Tom Harkness in 1851.

Ralph recognized the unique value of this information, but there was more. Page 21 of the notebook bore a terse explanation in Zouga's precise spiky hand: In the winter of 1860 while on trek from Tete on the Zambezi River, to King Mzilikazi's town at Thabas Indunas I slew 216 elephant. Lacking porters or wagons I had perforce to cache the ivory along my route.

During my later expeditions to Zambezia, I was able to recover the bulk of this treasure.

There remain fifteen separate caches, containing eighty-four good tusks, which I was for various reasons unable to reach.

Here follows a list of these caches with directions and navigational notes to reach them:

And on page 22 the list began:

Cache made 16 September 1860.

Position by sun sight and dead reckoning300 5 5" E. 170 45" S. A granite kopje which I named Mount Hampden. The largest for many miles in any direction. Distinct peak with three turrets. On the northern face between two large ficus natalensis trees there is a rock fissure.

18large tusks total weight 426 pounds placed in fissure and covered with small boulders.

The current price of ivory was twenty-two shillings and sixpence the pound, and Ralph had added the total weights of the ivory still lying out in the veld. It exceeded three thousand pounds: a great fortune waiting merely to be picked up and loaded on his wagon.

Still that was not all. The final entry in the notebook read: In my book A Hunter's Odyssey I described my discovery of the deserted city which the tribes call "zimbabwe a name which can be translated as "The Grave yard of the Kings".

I described how I was able to glean fragments of gold from the inner courtyards of the walled ruins, a little over 50 pounds weight of the metal in all. I also carried away with me one of the ancient bird-like statues. A souvenir which has been with me from that time until very recently.

It is possible that there is precious metal which I overlooked, and certainly there remain within the walled enclosures six more bird carvings which I was unable to bring away.

In Hunter's Odyssey I deliberately refrained from giving the location of the ancient ruin. As far as I know, it has not been rediscovered by any other white Man while a superstitious taboo forbids any African to venture into the area.

Thus there is every reason to believe the statues lie where last I laid eyes upon them.

Bearing in mind that my chronometer had not been checked for many months when these observations were made, I now give you the position of the city as calculated by myself at that time.

The ruins lie on the same longitude as the kopje which I named Mount Hampden on 30" 55" E., but 175 miles farther south at 20" 0" S. There followed a detailed description of the route that Zouga had taken to reach Zimbabwe, and then the notes ended with this statement: mister Rhodes offered the sum of 1000 pounds for the statue which I rescued.

The following noon Ralph took the brass sextant from its travel-battered wooden case. He had bid ten shillings for it at one of the Saturday auctions in the Market Square of Kimberley, and Zouga had checked its accuracy against his own instrument and showed Ralph how to shoot an "apparent local noon" to establish his latitude. Ralph had no chronometer to fix a longitude, but he could guess at it from his proximity to the confluence of the Shashi and Macloutsi rivers.

Half an hour's work with Brown's Nautical Almanac gave him an approximate position to compare with the one that his father had given in the notes for Zimbabwe.

"Less than one hundred and fifty miles," he muttered to himself, still squatting over his father's map, but staring eastwards.

"Six thousand pounds just lying there," Ralph said quietly, and shook his head in wonder. It was a sum difficult to imagine.

He packed away the sextant, rolled the map and went to join the slumbering trio beneath the wagon for what remained of the drowsy afternoon.

Ralph woke to a stentorian challenge that seemed to echo off the granite cliffs above the camp.

"Who dares take the king's road? Who chances the wrath of Lobengula?"

Ralph scrambled out from under the wagon. The day was almost gone, the sun flamed in the top branches of the forest, and the chill of evening prickled his bare chest. He stared about him wildly, but some instinct warned him not to reach for the loaded rifle propped against the rear wheel of the wagon. Below the trees the shadows were alive, blackness moved on blackness, dusky rank on rank.

"Stand forth, white man," the voice commanded.

"Speak your business, lest the white spears of Lobengula turn to red."

The speaker stepped forward, out of the forest to the edge of the camp. Behind him the ring of dappled black and white war-shields overlapped, edge to edge in an unbroken circle surrounding the entire outspan, the "bull's borns" of the Matabele fighting formations.

There were many hundreds of warriors in that deadly circle, and the broad stabbing spears were held in an underhand grip so that the silver blades pointed forward at belly height between the shields.

Above each shield the frothy white ostrich-feather headdress trembled and swayed in the small evening breeze, the only movement in that silent multitude.

The man who had broken the ranks was one of the most impressive figures that Ralph had ever seen. The high crown of ostrich feathers turned him into a towering giant. The breadth of his chest was enhanced by the flowering bunches of white cowtails that he wore on his upper arms. Each separate tail had been awarded him by his king for an act of valour, and he wore them not only on his arms but around his knees also.

His broad intelligent face was lightly seamed by the passage of the years, as though by the chisel of a skilled carpenter, forming a frame for the dark penetrating sparkle of his eyes; yet his chest was covered with the elastic muscle of a man only just reaching his prime and his lean belly rippled with the same muscle as he moved forward.

His legs were long and straight under the kilt of black spotted civet tails, and the war-rattles bound about his ankles rustled softly at each pace.

"I come in peace," Ralph called, hearing the catch in his own voice.

"Peace is a word that sits as lightly on the tongue as the sunbird sits upon the open flower, and as lightly does it fly., There was movement beside Ralph, and Bazo came from his bed under the wagon.

"Baba!" Bazo said reverently, and clapped his hands softly at the level of his face. "I see you Baba! The sun has been dark all these years, but now it shines again, my father."

The tall warrior started, took a swift pace forward, and for an instant a wonderful smile bloomed upon the sculptured ebony of his face; then he checked himself, and drew himself up to his full height again, his expression grave, but the feathers of his headdress trembled and there was a light in his tar-bright eyes that he could not extinguish. Still clapping his hands, stooping with respect, Bazo went forward and knelt on one knee.

"Gandang, son of Mzilikazi, your eldest son, Bazo the Axe, brings you the greetings and the duty of his heart."

Gandang looked down at his son, and at that moment nothing else existed for him in all the world.

"Baba, I ask your blessing."

Gandang placed his open hand on the short cropped fleecy cap of the young man's head.

"You have my blessing," he said quietly, but the hand lingered, the gesture of blessing became a caress, and then slowly and reluctantly Gandang withdrew the hand.

"Rise up, my son."

Bazo was as tall as his father, and for a quiet moment they looked steadily into each other's eyes. Then Gandang turned, and flirted his war-shield, a gesture of dismissal, and instantly the still and silent ring of warriors turned their own shields edge on, so that they seemed to fold like a woman's fan, and with miraculous swiftness they split into small platoons and disappeared into the forest.

Within seconds it seemed as though they had never been. Only Gandang and his son still remained at the edge of the camp, and then they too turned and slipped away like two shadows thrown by the moving branches of the mopani trees.

Isazi came out from under the wagon, naked except for the sheath of hollowed gourd covering the head of his penis, and he spat in the fire with a thoughtful and philosophical air.

"Chaka was too soft," he said. "He should have followed the traitor Mzilikazi, and taught him good manners. The Matabele are upstart bastards, with no breeding and less respect."

"Would a Zulu induna have acted that way?" Ralph asked him, as he reached for his shirt.

"No," Isazi admitted. "He would certainly have stabbed us all to death. But he would have done so with greater respect and better manners."

"What do we do now?" Ralph asked.

"We wait," said Isazi. "While that vaunting dandy, who should wear the induna headring not on his forehead but around his neck like the collar of a dog decides what should become of us." Isazi spat in the fire again, this time with contempt. "We may have long to wait, a Matabele thinks at the same speed as a chameleon runs., And he crawled back under the wagon and pulled the kaross over his head.

in the night the cooking fires from the camp of the Matabele impi down the valley glowed amber and russet on the tops of the mopani, and every time the fickle night wind shifted, the deep melodious sound of their singing carried down to Ralph's outspan.

in the grey dawn Bazo appeared again, as silently as he had disappeared.

"My father, Gandang, induna of the Inyati Regiment, summons you to indaba, Henshaw."

Ralph bridled immediately. He could almost hear his father's voice. "Remember always that you are an Englishman, my boy, and as such you are a direct representative of your Queen in this land."

The reply rose swiftly to Ralph's lips: "If he wants to see me, tell him to come to me." But he held the words back.

Gandang was an induna of two thousand, the equivalent of a general. He was a son of an emperor and half brother of a king, the equivalent of an English duke, and this was the soil of Matabeleland on which Ralph was an intruder.

"Tell your father I will come directly., And he went to fetch a fresh shirt and the spare pair of boots, which he had taught Umfaan to polish.

"You are Henshaw, the son of Bakela," Gandang sat on a low stool, intricately carved from a single piece of ebony. Ralph had been offered no seat, and he squatted down on his heels. "And Bakela is a man." Arid there was a murmur of assent and a rustle of plumes as the massed ranks of warriors about them stirred.

"Tshedi is your great-grandfather, and in the king's name has given you the road to Gubulawayo. Tshedi has the right to do so, for he is Lobengula's friend and he was Mzilikazi's friend before that."

Ralph made no reply. He realized that these statements about his great-grandfather, old Doctor Moffat, whose Matabele name was Tshedi, were for the waiting warriors rather than for himself. Gandang was explaining his decision to his impi.

"But for what reason do you take the road to the king's kraal?"

"I come to see this fair land of which my father has told me."

"Is that all?" Gandang asked.

"No, I come also to trade, and if the king is kind enough to give me his word, then I wish to hunt the elephant."

Gandang did not smile, but there was a sparkle in his dark eyes. "It is not for me to ask which you desire most, Henshaw. The view from a hilltop, or a wagonload of ivory."

Ralph suppressed his own smile, and remained silent.

"Tell me, son of Bakela, what goods do you bring with you to trade?"

"I have twenty bales of the finest beads and cloth."

Gandang made a gesture of disinterest. "Women's fripperies," he said.

"I have fifty cases of liquor, of the kind preferred by King Lobengula and his royal sister Ningi."

This time the line of Gandang's mouth thinned and hardened. "If it were my word on it, I would force those fifty cases of poison down your own throat." His voice was almost a whisper, but then he spoke again in a natural tone. "Yet Lobengula, the Great Elephant, will welcome your load., And then he was silent and yet expectant. Ralph realized that Bazo would have reported to his father every detail of his little caravan.

"I have guns," he said simply, and suddenly there was an intense hunger in Gandang's expression. His eyes narrowed slightly and his lips parted.

"Sting the mamba with his own venom," he whispered, and beside him Bazo started. It was the Umlimo's prophecy that his father had repeated, and he wondered that Gandang could have uttered it in the presence of one who was not Matabele.

"I do not understand," Ralph said.

"No matter." Gandang waved it away with a graceful pink-palmed hand. "Tell me, Henshaw. Are these guns of yours of the kind that swallow a round ball through the mouth and place the life of the man that fires them in more danger than the man who stands in front?"

Ralph smiled at the description of the ancient trade muskets, many of which had survived Wellington's Iberian campaign and some of which had seen action at Bull Run and Gettysburg before being shipped out to Africa in trade; the barrel worn paper thin, the priming pan and hammer mechanism so badly abused that each shot fired threatened to tear the head off any marksman bold enough to press the trigger.

"These guns are the finest," he replied.

"With twisting snakes in the barrel?" Gandang asked, and it took Ralph a moment to recognize the allusion to the rifling in the barrel.

He nodded. "And the barrel opens to take the bullet."

"Bring me one of these guns," Gandang ordered.

"The price of each is one large tusk of ivory," Ralph told him, and Gandang stared at him impassively for a moment longer. Then he smiled for the first time, but the smile was sharp as the edge of his stabbing spear.

"Now," he said. "I truly believe that you have come to Matabeleland to see how tall stand the trees."

"I am leaving you now, Henshaw," Bazo said, without lifting his eyes from the thick yellow tusk that he had brought from his father in payment for the rifle.

"We knew it was not for ever," Ralph answered him.

"The bond between us is for ever," Bazo replied, "but now I must go to join my regiment. My father will leave ten of his men to escort and guide you to Gubulawayo where King Lobengula awaits you."

"Is Lobengula. not at Thabas Indunas, the Hills of the Chiefs?" Ralph asked.

"It is the same kraal, in the days of Mzilikazi it was Thabas Indunas, but now Lobengula has changed the name to Gubulawayo, the Place of Killing."

"I see," Ralph nodded, and then waited for it was clear that Bazo had more to say.

"Henshaw. You did not hear me say this, but the ten warriors who will go with you to the king's kraal are not only for your protection. Do not look too closely at the stones and rocks along the road, and do not dig a hole, even to bury your own excrement, else Lobengula will hear of it and believe that you are searching for the shiny pebbles and yellow metal. That is death."

"I understand."

"Henshaw, while you are in Matabeleland, give up your habit of travelling at night. Only magicians and sorcerers go abroad in the darkness, mounted on the backs of the hyena. The king will hear of it, and that is death."

"Yes."

"Do not hunt the hipopotamus. They are the king's beasts. To kill one, is death."

"I understand., "When you enter the presence of the king, be sure that your head is always below that of the Great Elephant, even if You must crawl on your belly., "You have told me this already."

"I will tell you again" Bazo nodded. "And I will tell you once more that the maidens of Matabeleland are the most beautiful in all the world. They light a raging fire in a man's loins, but to take one of them without the king's word is death for both man and maiden."

For an hour they squatted opposite each other, casionally taking a little snuff or passing one of Ralph's cheap black cheroots back and forth, but always with Bazo talking and Ralph listening.

Bazo spoke quietly, insistently, reciting the names of the most powerful indunas, the governors of each of atabeleland's military provinces, listing those who had M the king's ear and should be treated with care, explaining how a man should conduct himself so as not to give offence, advising how much tribute each would ask and finally accept, trying to give it all to Ralph in these last minutes, and then finally glancing up at the sky.

"It is time." He stood. "Go in peace, Henshaw." And he walked out of Ralph's camp without looking back.

As Ralph's wagon, with its escort of warriors, climbed out of the low veld, so the heat abated. The air was so sweet and clean that it made Ralph feel as though the blood sparkled and fizzed in his veins.

Isazi was infected by the same elation. He composed new verses to sing to his bullocks, lauding their strength and beauty, and occasionally he slipped in a reference to a "feathered baboon" or some other fanciful and unlovely creature, while rolling his eyes significantly in the direction of the bodyguard of Matabele warriors that preceded the wagon.

The forests thinned as they climbed, becoming open woodlands of shapely mimosa trees, the paper-thin bark peeling away to reveal the clear smooth underbark, and the branches loaded with the fluffy yellow flower heads.