Sunset at Sheba (9 page)

He nudged the Argentino into motion and dropped into position behind the cart, glancing back continually over his shoulder.

As they moved, the vultures were drifting towards the shining heaps of entrails, dropping lower as the cart moved away, not circling any longer. Then they came down in a long slanting dive that carried them low over the cart, ugly heads out, wings all but shut against their bodies, right over Polly’s head with breathy ‘whoosh’.

The little sand-covered heap of ashes stood out in the inhospitable earth of the veld like a sore, clear even in the fading light. Low down over the horizon, the long bars of cloud were purple and grey and the lavender-coloured hills had changed to blue.

The motorcars had stopped, the Rolls first, the Napier just behind, with the lorry with the supplies farther astern still, their engines throbbing and harsh in the silence, the faint scar their wheels had made stretching behind them into infinity across the veld. The cavalrymen, who had bunched together in a half circle near the Rolls-Royce, had dismounted, easing their behinds, walking their horses to cool them down. They were adjusting girths now, swilling their mouths from their canteens and slapping the dust from their clothes, weary after a day-long ride south until they had realised they had lost the track.

They had turned north again during the afternoon, pushing ahead to meet Le Roux and the group of Kaffir scouts who were working beyond the horizon, the cars smashing across country to keep in front of the horsemen and sending the squadrons of buck and zebra that they disturbed with the popple of their exhausts sprinting for miles into the folds of the plain.

The faces of the crews were masked now with a layer of dust which clung to eyebrows and moustaches, and their lips were cracked with the dryness of the air. Galled by the grit which had found its way down shirts and into eyes, nostrils and ears, their bodies ached with hanging on to the high swaying vehicles as they swung on two wheels like ships in a heavy swell every time they turned on the steep slopes. Their nerves were drawn taut as bowstrings with watching the patchy earth over the bonnets as they had ground through the hollows where the dust was deep and rushed along with wide-open throttles where the surface was firm.

Kitto stood by the running board of the Rolls, his blue goggles on his forehead, his eyes, inflamed by the flying particles, ringed with white dustless patches where his goggles had been. The binoculars on his chest had swept a clean swathe in the grime where they had swung across his clothes.

The Army Service Corps driver lovingly brushed the grit from the pasted-up magazine picture of a Kirchner girl on the dashboard who winked archly at them from a froth of inadequate lace lingerie, then climbed stiffly out to ease his legs, knocking the dirt from his face with an oily hand. For a while, he stamped his feet in the soft, heat-powdered ground whose carpeted dust waited for the low west wind from the Kalahari to sweep it across the plain in a blinding storm, then he stretched, reaching upwards to beg a drink from a cavalryman’s canteen.

‘Gawd, this dust,’ he said, licking his dry dirt-caked lips. ‘Give us a wet, man!’

Winter sat in the box body of the Rolls smoking, his face tired, his eyes gritty and burning, staring up at the spires of Sheba, that clawed at the sky like the atrophied fingers of a giant dead hand, dwarfing them all. After a while, he rose, stretched, and climbed down from the car. But his legs, numbed with sitting, gave way and he flopped down abruptly on the running board and reached into his pocket for a flask of Cape brandy. Romanis approached him from the tender, his face aged with the dust on it, his leather coat flapping as he walked, and offered him a cigarette.

‘Rum go, this,’ he said, like the rest of them jaded with the dust and the rough travelling.

Winter nodded heavily, holding out the flask.

‘Try it,’ he croaked. ‘It’ll help. It’s the stuff that kicks the boards loose and gives you room to move.’

He watched Romanis put the flask to his lips, his eyes smarting from the sunshine, his body feeling as though he had just come swimming up from the bottom of a muddy sleep in which he had endured a nightmare of violent movement.

He lit the cigarette Romanis had given him and watched the smoke unreeling upwards in the still air, dragging it down to his lungs in grateful gasps.

Romanis stared down at him, grinning and rubbing his stiff legs: ‘You’re always sitting or lying, Winter,’ he observed. ‘Don’t you ever get tired of it?’

‘I’m a tired man,’ Winter replied. ‘This sort of travel doesn’t go with dopper brandy. What’s the situation?’

‘We’ll know in a minute.’

Le Roux, Kitto’s scout, was kneeling by the little pile of ashes. His horse, its chestnut flanks and neck smeared with dirty white lather, was held by one of the other men while he peered at the remains of the fire, his broad Dutch face keen and suspicious.

Kitto, his maps and compass in his hand, moved forward to stand by him as he stirred the grey-blue ashes with his foot. Finding them cold, Le Roux prodded them with his fingers, feeling deep into the heart where the last hot cinders had been, then he rose and moved around, staring at footprints and hoof marks, and the place where the horses had been standing for the night. The dark stain on the stones where the blood of the duiker had dripped and the scattered remains of its innards were covered by swarming battalions of black flies, and on the ground all round were the sharp claw marks of the mice and the field rats which had come nosing out of the donga for food.

Le Roux glanced around him, at the indentations in the grass and the blackened splashes of blood, then he walked away slowly until he found the bones of the buck lying bare, dragged behind the rocks and picked clean already by the vultures.

‘This morning,’ he said in his thick South African tongue as he looked up at Kitto, ‘he killed and cut up a buck here. A duiker by the look of it. They slept the night here. Good place for a camp.’ He grinned, his flat expressionless face suddenly lit with evil. ‘Especially with a woman!’ he added. ‘Nice and cosy.’

Kitto seemed impatient to move on. ‘How far ahead are they?’ he asked.

‘Eight-ten hours.
Ek weet nie.
Hard to say.’

Kitto stared towards the west and the last bright line of yellow sunshine.

‘We’ll push on,’ he said. ‘We’ll push on till it’s too dark to go any farther. Which way would they go?’

‘They’d maybe turn south here,’ Le Roux said. ‘Unless they were going over the plateau.’ He indicated the low ridge of hills in the distance. ‘But they wouldn’t go that way. There’s only the salt flats that way.’

‘Where
are
they going then? Not
east,
for God’s sake!’

Le Roux pointed.
‘Nee.
They swung out to the west. I found a dead buck. Hadn’t stopped to gut it even. Must have seen us. It’s up on the hill. The vultures took me to it.’ He swung an arm up to the sky where they could still see the black ragged shapes wheeling in the south. ‘If we go out that way, we’re bound to come up with their spoor somewhere.’

‘Let’s get going then. We’ve wasted enough time.’ Kitto turned to the men behind him, their horses grouped round the cars, and waved his arms. Winter almost expected him to call for a bugler.

‘Do we
have
to push on?’ Romanis was demanding in a whine, still rubbing his legs. ‘There’s always tomorrow.’

Kitto looked at him contemptuously. ‘Better get back in the Napier,’ he said quietly, and Romanis moved away sullenly, his feet kicking the sand in little puffs as he walked.

The horsemen were edging forward now, the iron-shod hooves of their mounts clicking against the pebbles between the sparse grass. Behind them the two or three Kaffirs huddled on their Basuto ponies were staring backwards longingly in the direction of the lorry on the rise of the ground in the last of the light.

Something in Kitto’s keenness made Winter uneasy at being there. Suddenly Kitto seemed to have forgotten that ostensibly he was supposed to be searching for De Wet as he became absorbed with the task of finding Sammy Schuter. There was an urgency about him that seemed to suggest he needed and expected a success to set against thirty years of indifferent plodding which, after the beginning in Dhanziland, should have reaped him glittering rewards instead of a third-rate job with Offy Plummer and a lowly volunteer’s rank in the army.

He was standing now by the open door of the Rolls, waiting for Winter, his expression keen and optimistic.

‘Are we
really
in such a hurry?’ Winter protested weakly.

‘You want to look after Offy, don’t you?’

Winter shrugged at the sarcasm. ‘I don’t want to look after
Offy,’
he said. ‘I want to look after my salary, that’s all.’

He stared round at the scattered remains of the camp, feeling vaguely like an intruder, then up at Sheba, seeing nothing but rock, spire on spire of it, valleys and slabs and grottoes of rock, between which the steep stony sides of the kopje slid upwards through patches of cactus and sparse shrub.

He shuddered, awed by the fierce silence of it, and turned towards the car. One or two tired men were trying to pad the dusty box behind the driver’s seat with blankets and they looked up and grinned as he approached.

‘Ready?’ Kitto asked.

‘It’s all yours,’ Winter replied. ‘Don’t ask me to make a decision. I haven’t the initiative of a wet dishrag. All I ask is that you come up on ‘em soon and get it over with, so we can go home.’

He knew he was turning his back on the unethicalness of Kitto’s behaviour - as he had turned his back on unpleasant things before - because he didn’t wish to see it. He climbed into the car, telling himself, as he had so often in the past, that Offy represented civilisation and progress in a still primitive country, and that civilisation and progress demanded their victims; but faced with Kitto’s growing enthusiasm for the chase he began to wonder if all they were doing and had done was right.

Kitto was climbing into the car now behind him and slamming the door. He signed to the driver and the engine roared as the wire-spoked double wheels thrashed at the deep sand. As he waved he got an answering wave from Romanis in the Napier, then the car jerked forward and ground ahead, whining and shaking in low gear.

What they drove over now was not a road but a set of dim tracks with deep beds of dust sucking at the wheels, and patches of stone, shingle and potholes, hiding fangs of rock, ready to break a spring or bend a back axle.

‘Rough country,’ Kitto said enthusiastically, his face full of fierce pleasure. He was standing up in the front seat, clinging on beside the driver, his body swinging to the roll of the vehicle. ‘But it’s quicker this way,’ he said. ‘And war’s an impatient thing. We’d better start asking them to hurry.’

They were moving more slowly now along the raw red wound of an old hunting route, the horses sleepy in the sunshine - over wretched ground covered with nothing much more than hundreds of anthills, stones and dwarf karroo bushes and the eternal white camel thorn which, though sparse, seemed with the illusion of distance to crowd together into bushland, so that they seemed to be travelling in a perpetual clearing. The boiling power of the molten sun poured down from an immense empty sky, metallic as a brass gong, and as the shade grew smaller, the thunder began to growl and rumble in the curve of distance beyond the flat-topped mimosas with their scanty foliage. It was so hot now even the birds and the insects seemed to be still among the shrivelled flowers, and the meerkats prowling between the brick-hard anthills and the tail-trailing widow birds had vanished. For hours they had seen no sign of game - not even a solitary duiker plunging for cover, or a scattered squadron of springbok in the distance -- and the dried leaves were silent, for the air seemed like a scorching breath. There was no wind, but little dust devils kept whirling around them, so that there seemed to be a warning in the atmosphere, probing through the fine impalpable smell of dust that permeated the whole countryside, a stillness, a heaviness that caught the breath.

Sammy seemed impatient and was watching the sky, sniffing the air from time to time, turning his head this way and that like a dog which has picked up a scent, sitting with one leg over the saddle as usual, letting the tired old Argentino choose its own pace. Away in the east, across the flat solitude, the thunder rumbled and the roof of the sky seemed to have come down to meet the earth, grey and purple and sullen-looking.

‘Storm blowing up,’ he said, indicating the clouds building up behind them.

Polly stared round her with aching eyes at the endless veld, and the steel-blue stillness of the sky. ‘That’s hard luck on us,’ she commented shakily. ‘There’s not much shelter, as I can see.’

Everywhere about her the view seemed the same and every mile looked exactly like the last mile. The land seemed to her like a brazen oven, the karroo bushes mere withered sticks with twisted fingers. Only the marching ants and the basking lizards moved before their wheels and, caught by the immensity of it and the silence, she was suffering from the nameless horror of being lost.

She stared round her uneasily, lacking Sammy’s confidence and knowledge of the countryside, doubtful of their route and uncertain of her courage.

‘It’s flat as a billiard table here,’ she said. She indicated the growing sombre mass of cloud. ‘Nowhere to hide when it comes down.’

Sammy grinned. ‘You’ve got the cart,’ he said. He indicated the canvas cover they had dragged out and fitted over the iron hoops when the first big drops had fallen and vanished again half an hour before, disappearing at once into the dry, greedy earth.

Polly stared at the threadbare sheet. ‘That’ll keep a lot out,’ she said.

She glanced behind her anxiously. She knew something of veld storms. They could come with sufficient power to destroy all movement, flooding the dongas in a matter of minutes, drowning sheltering cattle, even men and horses. There was sometimes even hail that could kill small buck and reduce birds as big as quail to pitiful heaps of wet feathers in the flattened dust. Back in Plummerton she had seen them stop the traffic and drive the people off the streets, smashing the leaves from the pepper trees and scattering them across the square, coming down with the sudden stunning force of a hammer blow.