The Angels Weep (2 page)

‘And Great Zimbabwe is there. Due east of us now.’
Ralph reined in his horse as they came out on the next ridge.
‘That is the Sentinel.’ He pointed at a rocky kopje,
the distant blue summit shaped like a crouching lion. ‘The
ruins are just beyond, I would never mistake that
view.’

For both father and son the ruined city had a special
significance. There within the massive stone-built walls Zouga
and Jan Cheroot had found the ancient graven bird images that had
been abandoned by the long-vanished inhabitants. Despite the
desperate straits to which they had been reduced by fever and the
other hardships of the long expedition from the Zambezi river in
the north, Zouga had insisted on carrying away with him one of
the statues.

Then many years later it had been Ralph’s turn. Guided
by his father’s diary and the meticulous sextant
observations that it contained, Ralph had once again won through
to the deserted citadel. Though he had been pursued by the border
impis of Lobengula, the Matabele king, he had defied the
king’s taboo on the holy place and had spirited away the
remaining statues. Thus all three men had intimate knowledge of
those haunting and haunted ruins, and as they stared at the far
hills that marked the site, they were silent with their
memories.

‘I still wonder, who were the men who built
Zimbabwe?’ Ralph asked at last. ‘And what happened to
them?’ There was an uncharacteristic dreamy tone to his
voice, and he expected no answer. ‘Were they the Queen of
Sheba’s miners? Was this the Ophir of the Bible? Did they
carry the gold they mined to Solomon?’

‘Perhaps we will never know.’ Zouga roused
himself. But we do know they valued gold as we do. I found gold
foil and beads and bars of bullion in the courtyard of Great
Zimbabwe, and it must be within a few miles of where we stand
that Jan Cheroot and I explored the shafts that they drove into
the earth, and found the broken reef piled in dumps ready for
crushing.’ Zouga glanced across at the little Hottentot.
‘Do you recognize any of this?’

The dark pixie face wrinkled up like a sun-dried prune as Jan
Cheroot considered. ‘Perhaps from the next ridge,’ he
muttered lugubriously, and the trio rode down into the valley
that looked like a hundred others they had crossed in the
preceding weeks.

Ralph was a dozen strides ahead of the others, cantering
easily, swinging his mount to skirt a thicket of the dense wild
ebony, when abruptly he stood in the stirrups, snatched his hat
from his head and waved it high.

‘Tally ho!’ he yelled. ‘Gone
away!’

And Zouga saw the burnt gold flash of fluid movement across
the far slope of open ground.

‘Three of the devils!’ Ralph’s excitement
and his loathing were clear in the pitch and timbre of his voice.
‘Jan Cheroot, you turn ‘em on the left! Papa, stop
them crossing the ravine!’

The easy manner of command came naturally to Ralph Ballantyne,
and the two older men accepted it as naturally, while none of
them questioned for an instant why they should destroy the
magnificent animals that Ralph had flushed from the ebony
thicket. Ralph owned two hundred wagons, each drawn by sixteen
draught oxen. King’s Lynn, Zouga’s estates, taken up
with the land grants that the British South Africa Company had
issued to the volunteers who had destroyed the Matabele
king’s impis, covered many tens of thousands of acres that
were stocked with the pick of the captured Matabele breeding
herds running with blood bulls imported from Good Hope and old
England.

Father and son were both cattlemen, and they had suffered the
terrible depredations of the lion prides which infested this
lovely land north of the Limpopo and Shashi rivers. Too often
they had heard their valuable and beloved beasts bellowing in
agony in the night, and in the dawn found their ravaged
carcasses. To both of them, lions were the worst kind of vermin,
and they were elated with this rare chance of taking a pride in
broad daylight.

Ralph yanked the repeating Winchester rifle from the leather
scabbard under his left knee, as he urged the chestnut gelding
into full gallop after the big yellow cats. The lion had been the
first away, and Ralph had only a glimpse of him, sway-backed and
swing-bellied, the dense dark ruff of his mane fluffed out with
alarm, padding majestically on heavy paws into the scrub. The
older lioness followed him swiftly. She was lean and scarred from
a thousand hunts, blue with age across the shoulders and back.
She went away at a bounding gallop. However, the younger lioness,
unaccustomed to men, was bold and curious as a cat. She was still
faintly cub-spotted across her creamy gold belly, and she turned
on the edge of the thicket to snarl at the pursuing horseman. Her
ears lay flat against her skull, her furry pink tongue curled out
over her fangs, and her whiskers were white and stiff as
porcupine quills.

Ralph dropped his reins onto the gelding’s neck, and the
horse responded instantly by plunging to a dead stop and freezing
for the shot, only the scissoring of his ears betraying his
agitation.

Ralph tossed up the Winchester and fired as the buttplate
slapped into his shoulder. The lioness grunted explosively as the
bullet thumped into her shoulder, angled for the heart. She went
up in a high sunfishing somersault, roaring in her death frenzy.
She fell and rolled on her back, tearing at the scrub with fully
extended yellow claws, and then stretching out in a last
shuddering convulsion before slumping into the softness of
death.

Ralph pumped a fresh round into the chamber of the Winchester,
and gathered up the reins. The gelding leaped forward.

Out on the right Zouga was pounding up the lip of the ravine,
leaning forward in the saddle, and at that moment the second
lioness broke into the open ahead of him, going for the deep
brush-choked ravine at a driving run, and Zouga fired still at
full gallop. Ralph saw dust spurt under the animal’s
belly.

‘Low and left. Papa is getting old,’ Ralph thought
derisively, and brought the gelding crashing down to a
stiff-legged halt. Before he could fire, Zouga had shot again,
and the lioness collapsed and rolled like a yellow ball on the
stony earth, shot through the neck a hand’s span behind the
ear.

‘Bully for you!’ Ralph laughed with excitement,
and kicked his heels into the gelding’s flank as they
charged up the slope, shoulder to shoulder.

‘Where is Jan Cheroot?’ Zouga shouted, and as if
in reply they heard the clap of rifle fire in the forest on the
left, and they swung the horses in that direction.

‘Can you see him?’ Ralph called.

The bush was thicker ahead of them, and the thorn branches
whipped at their thighs as they passed. There was a second shot,
and immediately afterwards the furious ear-numbing roars of the
lion mingled with Jan Cheroot’s shrill squeals of
terror.

‘He is in trouble!’ Zouga called anxiously, as
they burst out of the thick scrub.

Before them there lay parkland, fine open grass beneath the
tall flat-topped acacia trees along the crest of the ridge. A
hundred yards ahead Jan Cheroot was tearing along the crest,
twisted in the saddle to look over his shoulder, his face a mask
of terror, his eyes huge and glistening white. He had lost his
hat and rifle, but he was lashing his mount across the neck and
shoulders, although the animal was already at a wild uncontrolled
gallop.

The lion was a dozen strides behind them, but gaining with
each elastic bound as though they were standing still. Its
heaving flank was painted slick and shiny with bright new blood,
shot through the guts, but the wound had not crippled nor even
slowed the beast. Rather it had maddened him, so that the solid
blasts of sound from his throat sounded like the thunder of the
skies.

Ralph swerved his gelding to try and intercept the little
Hottentot, and alter the angle to give himself an open shot at
the lion, but at that moment the cat came up out of its flat
snaking charge, reared up over the bunched and straining quarters
of the horse and raked them with long curved talons so that the
sweat-darkened hide opened in deep parallel wounds, and the blood
smoked from them in a fine crimson cloud.

The horse shrieked and lashed out with its hind hooves,
catching the lion in his chest, so that he reeled and lost a
stride. Immediately he gathered himself and came again,
quartering in beside the running horse, his eyes inscrutably
yellow as he prepared to leap astride the panic-driven
animal.

‘Jump, Jan Cheroot!’ Ralph yelled. The lion was
too close to risk a shot. ‘Jump, damn you!’ But Jan
Cheroot did not appear to have heard him, he was clinging
helplessly to the tangled flying mane, paralysed with fear.

The lion rose lightly into the air, and settled like a huge
yellow bird on the horse’s back, crushing Jan Cheroot
beneath his massive, blood-streaked body. At that instant, horse
and rider and lion seemed to disappear into the very earth, and
there was only a swirling column of dust to mark where they had
been. Yet the shattering roars of the enraged animal and Jan
Cheroot’s howls of terror grew even louder as Ralph
galloped up to the point on the ridge where they had
disappeared.

With the Winchester in one hand he kicked his feet from the
stirrup irons and jumped from the saddle, letting his own
momentum throw him forward until he stood on the edge of a
sheer-sided pitfall at the bottom of which lay a tangle of
heaving bodies.

‘The devil is killing me!’ screamed Jan Cheroot,
and Ralph could see him pinned beneath the body of the horse. The
horse must have broken its neck in the fall, it was a lifeless
heap with head twisted up under its shoulder and the lion was
ripping the carcass and saddle, trying to reach Jan Cheroot.

‘Lie still,’ Ralph shouted down at him.
‘Give me a clear shot!’

But it was the lion that heard him. He left the horse and came
up the vertical side of the pit with the ease of a cat climbing a
tree, his glossy muscular hindquarters driving him lightly
upwards and his pale yellow eyes fastened upon Ralph as he stood
on the lip of the deep hole.

Ralph dropped on one knee to steady himself for the shot, and
aimed down into the broad golden chest. The jaws were wide open,
the fangs long as a man’s forefinger and white as polished
ivory, the deafening clamour from the open throat dinned into
Ralph’s face. He could smell the rotten-flesh taint of the
lion’s breath and flecks of hot saliva splattered against
his cheeks and forehead.

He fired, and pumped the loading-handle and fired again, so
swiftly that the shots were a continuous blast of sound. The lion
arched backwards, hung for a long moment from the wall of the
pit, and then toppled and fell back upon the dead horse.

Now there was no movement from the bottom of the pit, and the
silence was more intense than the shattering uproar that had
preceded it.

‘Jan Cheroot, are you all right?’ Ralph called
anxiously.

There was no sign of the little Hottentot, he was completely
smothered by the carcasses of horse and lion.

‘Jan Cheroot, can you hear me?’

The reply was in a hollow, sepulchral whisper. ‘Dead men
cannot hear – it’s all over, they have got old Jan
Cheroot at last.’

‘Come out from under there,’ Zouga Ballantyne
ordered, as he stepped up to Ralph’s shoulder. ‘This
is no time to play the clown, Jan Cheroot.’

R
alph dropped a
coil of manilla rope down to Jan Cheroot, and between them they
hauled him and the saddle from the dead horse to the surface. The
excavation into which Jan Cheroot had fallen was a deep narrow
trench along the crest of the ridge. In places it was twenty feet
deep, but never more than six feet wide. Mostly it was choked
with creepers and rank vegetation, but this could not disguise
the certainty that it had been dug by men.

‘The reef was exposed along this line,’ Zouga
guessed, as they followed the edge of the old trench, ‘the
ancient miners simply dug it out and did not bother to
refill.’

‘How did they blast the reef?’ Ralph demanded.
‘That’s solid rock down there.’

‘They probably built fires upon it, and then quenched it
with water. The contraction cracked the rock.’

‘Well, they seem to have taken out every grain of the
ore body and left nary a speck for us.’

Zouga nodded. ‘They would have worked out this section
first, and then when the reef pinched out they would have started
sinking potholes along the strike to try and intercept it
again.’ Zouga turned to Jan Cheroot and demanded,
‘Now do you recognize this place, Jan Cheroot?’ And
when the Hottentot hesitated, he pointed down the slope.
‘The swamp in the valley down there, and the teak
trees—’

‘Yes, yes.’ Jan Cheroot clapped his hands, and his
eyes twinkled with delight. ‘This is the same place where
you killed the bull elephant – the tusks are on the stoep
at King’s Lynn.’

‘The ancient dump will be just ahead.’ Zouga
hurried forward.

He found the low mound covered by grass, and went down on his
knees to scrabble amongst the grass roots, picking out the chips
of white sugar quartz, examining each one swiftly and discarding
it. Occasionally he wet one with his tongue, held it to the
sunlight to try and highlight the sparkle of metal, then frowned
and shook his head with disappointment.

At last he stood and wiped his hands on his breeches.

‘It’s quartz all right, but the ancient miners
must have hand-sorted this dump. We will have to find the old
shafts if we want to see visible gold in the ore.’

From the top of the ancient dump Zouga orientated himself
rapidly.

‘The carcass of the bull elephant fell about
there,’ he pointed, and to confirm it Jan Cheroot searched
in the grass and lifted a huge thighbone, dry and white as chalk,
and at last after thirty years beginning to crumble.