The Angels Weep (25 page)

‘I’ve lived without the sea for twenty years, a
little longer won’t hurt much.’ And she took
Harry’s hand. ‘Wherever thou goest, my love,
Wankie’s country, Cape Town, or the North Pole, just as
long as we are together.’

The expedition was conducted in Ralph Ballantyne’s usual
style, six wagons and forty servants to convey the two families
northwards through the magnificent forests of northern
Matabeleland towards the great Zambezi river. The weather was
mild and the pace leisurely. The country teemed with wild game,
and the newly-weds billed and cooed and made such languorous eyes
at each other that it was infectious.

‘Just whose honeymoon is this?’ Cathy mumbled in
Ralph’s ear one lazy loving morning.

‘Action first, questions later,’ Ralph replied,
and Cathy chuckled in a throaty self-satisfied way and cuddled
back down in the feather mattress of the wagon bed.

At evening and mealtimes, Jonathan had to be forcibly removed
from the back of the pony that Ralph had given him for his fifth
birthday, and Cathy anointed the saddle-sores on his buttocks
with Zambuk.

They reached Wankie’s village on the twenty-second day
and for the first time since leaving Bulawayo, the idyllic mood
of the caravan bumped back to earth.

Under the reign of King Lobengula, Wankie had been a renegade
and outlaw. Lobengula had sent four separate punitive impis to
bring his severed head back to GuBulawayo, but Wankie had been as
cunning as he was insolent, as slippery as he was mendacious, and
the impis had all returned empty-handed to face the king’s
wrath.

After Lobengula’s defeat and death, Wankie had brazenly
set himself up as chieftain of the land between the Zambezi and
the Gwaai rivers, and he demanded tribute of those who came to
trade or hunt the elephant herds that had been driven into the
bad lands along the escarpment of the Zambezi valley, where the
tsetse fly turned back the horsemen and only the hardiest would
go in on foot to chase the great animals.

Wankie was a handsome man in his middle age, open-faced and
tall, with the air of the chief he claimed to be, and he accepted
the gift of blankets and beads that Ralph presented to him with
no effusive gratitude, enquired politely after Ralph’s
health and that of his father, and brothers and sons, and then
waited like a crocodile at the drinking place for Ralph to come
to the real purpose of his visit.

‘The stones that burn?’ he repeated vaguely, his
eyes hooded as he pondered, seeming to search his memory for such
an extraordinary subject, and then quite artlessly he remarked
that he had always wanted a wagon. Lobengula had owned a wagon,
and therefore Wankie believed that every great chief should have
one, and he turned on his stool and glanced pointedly at
Ralph’s six magnificent Cape-built eighteen-footers
outspanned in the glade below the kraal.

‘That damned rogue has the cheek of a white man,’
Ralph protested bitterly to Harry Mellow across the camp-fire.
‘A wagon, no less. Three hundred pounds of any man’s
money.’

‘But, darling, if Wankie can guide you, won’t it
be a bargain price?’ Cathy asked mildly.

‘No. I’m damned if I’ll give in to him. A
couple of blankets, a case of brandy, but not a three hundred
pound-wagon.’

‘Damned right, Ralph,’ Harry chuckled. ‘I
mean we got Long Island for that price—’

He was interrupted by a discreet cough behind him. Bazo had
come across silently from the other fire where the drivers and
servants were bivouacked.

‘Henshaw,’ he started, when Ralph acknowledged
him. ‘You told me that we had come here to hunt buffalo to
make trek riems from their hides,’ he accused. ‘Did
you not trust me?’

‘Bazo, you are my brother.’

‘You lie to your brothers?’

‘If I had spoken of the stones that burn in Bulawayo, we
would have had a hundred wagons following us when we left
town.’

‘Did I not tell you that I had led my impi over these
hills, chasing the same hairless baboon upon whom you now shower
gifts?’

‘You did not tell me,’ Ralph replied, and Bazo
moved on hastily from that subject. He was not proud of his
campaign against Wankie, the only one during all the years that
he had been induna of the ‘Moles’ which had not ended
in complete success. He still recalled the old king’s
recriminations – would that he could ever forget them.

‘Henshaw, if you had spoken to me, we would not have had
to waste our time and demean ourselves by parleying with this son
of thirty fathers, this unsavoury jackal-casting,
this—’

Ralph cut short Bazo’s opinion of their host, by
standing up and seizing Bazo’s shoulders. ‘Bazo, can
you lead us there? Is that what you mean? Can you take us to the
stones that burn?’

Bazo inclined his head, in assent. ‘And it will not cost
you a wagon, either,’ he replied.

They rode into a red and smoky dawn through the open glades in
the forest. Ahead of them the buffalo herds opened to give them
passage and closed behind them as they passed. The huge black
beasts held their wet muzzles high, the massive slaty bosses of
horn giving them a ponderous dignity, and they stared in stolid
astonishment as the horsemen passed within a few hundred paces,
and then returned unalarmed to graze. The riders barely glanced
at them, their attention was fastened instead on Bazo’s
broad bullet-scarred back as he led them at an easy trot towards
the low line of flat-topped hills that rose out of the forest
ahead.

On the first slope they tethered the horses, and climbed,
while above them the furry little brown klipspringer, swift as
chamois, flew sure-footed up the cliffs and from the summit an
old dog baboon barked his challenge down at them. Though they ran
at the slope, they could not keep up with Bazo, and he was
waiting for them halfway up on a ledge above which the cliff rose
sheer to the summit. He made no dramatic announcement, but merely
pointed with his chin. Ralph and Harry stared, unable to speak,
their chests heaving and their shirts plastered to their backs
with sweat from the climb.

There was a horizontal seam, twenty foot thick, sandwiched in
the cliff face. It ran along the cliff as far as they could see
in each direction, black as the darkest night and yet glittering
with a strange greenish iridescence in the slanted rays of the
early sun.

‘This was the only thing we lacked in this land,’
Ralph said quietly. ‘The stones that burn, black gold
– now we have it all.’

Harry Mellow went forward and laid his hand upon it
reverently, as though he were a worshipper touching the relic of
a saint in some holy place.

‘I have never seen coal of this quality in a seam so
deep, not even in the Kentucky hills.’

Suddenly he snatched his hat off his head and with a wild
Indian whoop threw it far out down the slope.

‘We are rich!’ he shouted. ‘Rich! Rich!
Rich!’

‘Better than working for Mr Rhodes?’ Ralph asked,
and Harry grabbed his shoulders and the two of them spun together
in a yelling, stomping dance of jubilation on the narrow ledge,
while Bazo leaned against the seam of black coal and watched them
unsmilingly.

It took them two weeks to survey and peg their claims,
covering all the ground beneath which the seams of coal might be
buried. Harry shot the lines with his theodolite, and Bazo and
Ralph worked behind him with a gang of axemen driving in the pegs
and marking the corners with cairns of loose stones.

While they worked, they discovered a dozen other places in the
hills where the deep rich seams of glittering coal were exposed
at the surface.

‘Coal for a thousand years,’ Harry predicted.
‘Coal for the railways and the blast furnaces, coal to
power a new nation.’

On the fifteenth day the two of them traipsed back to camp at
the head of their bone-weary gang of Matabele. Victoria, deprived
of her new husband for two weeks, was as palely forlorn as a
young widow in mourning, but by breakfast the following day she
had regained her fine high colour and the sparkle in her eyes as
she hovered over Harry, replenishing his coffee cup and heaping
his plate with slices of smoked warthog and piles of rich yellow
scrambled ostrich egg.

Sitting at the head of the breakfast table set under the giant
msasa trees, Ralph called to Cathy:

‘Break out a bottle of champagne, Katie my sweeting, we
have something to celebrate,’ and he saluted them with a
brimming mug. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I give you a toast to
the gold of the Harkness Mine and the coal of the Wankie field,
and to the riches of both!’

They laughed and clinked their mugs and drank the toast.

‘Let’s stay here for ever,’ said Vicky.
‘I’m so happy. I don’t want it to
end.’

‘We’ll stay a little longer,’ Ralph agreed,
with his arm about Cathy’s waist. ‘I told Doctor Jim
we were coming up here to hunt buffalo. If we don’t bring a
few wagon-loads of hides back with us, the little doctor is going
to start wondering.’

T
he evening
wind came softly out of the east. Ralph knew that at this season
it would hold steadily during the night, and increase with the
warmth of the sun.

He sent out two teams of his Matabele, each team armed with a
package of Swan Vestas and leading a span of trek oxen. They
moved out eastwards and by dawn they had reached the bank of the
Gwaai river. Here they felled two big dried-out thorn trees and
hooked the trek chains onto the trunks.

When they put fire into the branches, the dried wood burned
like a torch and the oxen panicked. The drivers ran beside each
span, keeping them galloping in opposite directions, heading
across the wind, dragging the blazing trees behind them and
spreading a trail of sparks and flaring twigs through the tall
dry grass. Within an hour, there was a forest fire burning across
a front of many miles, with the wind behind it roaring down
towards the long open vlei where Ralph’s wagons were
outspanned. The smoke billowed heaven-high, a vast dun pall.

Ralph had roused the camp before first light, and he
supervised the back-burn while the dew on the vlei subdued the
flames and made them manageable. The Matabele put fire into the
grass on the windward side of the open vlei and let it burn to
the forest line on the far side. Here they beat it out before it
could take hold of the trees.

Isazi rolled his wagons out onto the blackened still-hot
earth, and formed them into a square with his precious oxen
penned in the centre. Then, for the first time, they had a chance
to pause and look eastward. The dark smoke cloud of the forest
fire blotted out the dawn, and their island of safety seemed
suddenly very small in the path of that terrible conflagration.
Even the mood of the usually cheerful Matabele was subdued, and
they kept glancing uneasily at the boiling smoke line as they
honed their skinning knives.

‘We will be covered with soot,’ Cathy complained.
‘Everything will be filthy.’

‘And a little singed, like as not,’ Ralph laughed,
as he and Bazo checked the spare horses and slipped the rifles
into their scabbards.

Then he came to Cathy and with an arm about her shoulders,
told her, ‘You and Vicky are to stay in the wagons.
Don’t leave them, whatever happens. If you get a little
warm, splash water on yourselves, but don’t leave the
wagons.’

Then he sniffed the wind, and caught the first whiff of smoke.
He winked at Harry, who had Vicky in his arms in a lingering
farewell.

‘I’ll bet my share of the Wankie field against
yours.’

‘None of your crazy bets, Ralph Ballantyne,’ Vicky
cut in quickly. ‘Harry has a wife to support
now!’

‘A guinea, then!’ Ralph moderated the wager.

‘Done!’ agreed Harry.

They shook hands on it and swung up into the saddles.

Bazo led up Ralph’s spare horse, with a rifle in the
scabbard and a bandolier of bright brass cartridges looped to the
pommel.

‘Keep close, Bazo,’ Ralph told him, and looked
across at Harry. He had his own Matabele outrider and spare horse
close behind him.

‘Ready?’ Ralph asked, and Harry nodded, and they
trotted out of the laager.

The acrid stink of smoke was strong on the wind now, and the
horses flared their nostrils nervously and stepped like cats over
the hot ash of the back-burn.

‘Just look at them!’ Harry’s voice was
awed.

The herds of buffalo had begun moving down-wind ahead of the
bush-fire. Gradually one herd had merged with another, a hundred
becoming five hundred, then a thousand. Then the thousand began
multiplying, the westward movement becoming faster, black bodies
packing closer, the earth beginning to tremble faintly under the
iron-black hooves. Now every few minutes one of the herd bulls,
an animal so black and solid that he seemed to be hewn from rock,
would stop and turn back, stemming the moving tide of breeding
cows. He would lift his mighty horned head with its crenellated
bosses and snuffle the east wind into his wet nostrils, blink at
the sting of the smoke, turn again and break into a heavy
swinging trot; and his cows would be infected by his agitation,
while the red calves bawled in bewilderment and pressed to the
flanks of their dams.

Now the herds were being compressed against each other. The
huge beasts, the largest of them a ton and a half of flesh and
bone, were moving shoulder to shoulder and muzzle to tail across
a front almost a mile wide. The leaders came cascading out of the
forest onto the edge of the vlei, while the serried ranks reached
back into the looming dust and were hidden by the twisted silver
trunks of the msasa trees.

Ralph knotted the scarf up over his nose and mouth, and pulled
his hat low over his eyes.

‘Harry, my lad, every one that falls this side of the
wagons,’ he made a wide gesture, ‘is mine. Everything
that side is yours.’