"Cathy, I didn't mean this to happen -" He tried with a last sudden lash of his conscience to push her away.
"I did," she said, clinging stubbornly to him. "Why else do you think I came here?"
"Cathy, "
"I love you, Ralph, I loved you from the very first moment I ever saw you."
"i love you, Cathy." And he was amazed to find that what he said was the truth. "I really and truly love you," he said again, and then later, much later: "I didn't realize how much until now."
"I didn't know that it would be like this," she whispered. "I have thought about it often, every day since you first came to Khami. I even read about it in the Bible it says that David knew her. Do we know each other now, Ralph?"
"i want to know you better, and more often," he grinned at her, his tousled hair still damp with sweat.
"I felt as though I had fallen through a dark hole in my soul into another beautiful world, and I didn't want to come back again."
Cathy's voice was awed and marvelling, as though she were the first in all the infinite lists of creation to experience it. "Didn't you feel that, Ralph?"
They held each other close under the blanket, and they talked softly, examining each other's faces in the yellow lantern light, breaking off every few minutes to kiss the other's throat and eyelids and lips.
It was Cathy who pulled away at last. "I don't want to know the time, but listen to the birds, it will be light too soon." Then, with a rush of words, "Oh Ralph, I don't want you to go."
it will not be for long, I promise you. Then I will be back."
"Take me with you."
"You know I can't."
"Why not, because it's dangerous, isn't it?"
But he avoided the question by trying to kiss her again.
She put her hand over his mouth.
"I'll die a little every moment of the time you are gone, but I'll pray for you. I'll pray that Lobengula's warriors do not find you."
"Don't worry about me," he chuckled fondly. "We'll fall through that dark hole in your soul again soon."
"Promise," she whispered, and brushed the damp curls off his forehead with her lips. "Promise me you will come back, my beautiful, darling Ralph."
Ralph started his wagon train south again on the road to the Shashi, and for the first morning he rode at the head of the unusually lightly loaded vehicles. At noon he gave the order to outspan. He and Isazi slept away the hot afternoon, while the bullocks and horses grazed and rested.
Then at dusk they cut the five chosen bullocks out of the herd and tied them to the wagon wheels by leather reins around the boss of their horns while they fitted the back packs. Ralph and Isazi had selected these beasts for their strength and willingness, and during the long trek up from Kimberley he had trained them to accept these unusual burdens with resigned docility.
Jordan had provided Ralph with the precise measurements and weight of the bird statue that now graced the entrance to mister Rhodes" new mansion, Groote Schuur, and Ralph had used these figures to design the back packs and constructed them with his own hands, not trusting anyone else with his secret intentions.
Each pack could carry two statues like the one at Groote Schuur. They would be slung in woven nets of good mania rope on each side of the bullock, and Ralph had worked meticulously to ensure a perfect fit of the saddle to protect the beasts" back from galling, and prevent the load from shifting even over the roughest ground or on the steepest inclines.
Now, when Isazi, the little Zulu driver, led the file of three bullocks quietly out of the camp and disappeared into the darkening forest, they followed meekly. Ralph stayed behind just long enough to repeat his orders to the other drivers.
"You will double-march to the Shashi river. If the border impis question where I am, you will tell them I am hunting to the east with the king's permission, and that you expect me to rejoin the wagons at any time. Do you understand?"
"I understand, Nkosi," said Umfaan, who, although now promoted from voorlooper to driver, still answered to the name of "Boy".
"Once you cross the Shashi, you will trek on as far as the Bushman wells five days" march beyond the frontier.
Lobengula's impis'will not follow you that far. Wait there until I come, do you understand, Umfaan?"
"I understand, Nkosi."
"Then repeat it to me."
Satisfied at last, Ralph stepped up into Tom's stirrup and looked down at them from his back.
"Go swiftly," he said.
"Go in peace, Nkosi."
He trotted out of camp, following Isazi's bullock train and dragging behind him a bulky branch of thorn mimosa to sweep their spoor clean. By mid-morning the following day they were well clear of the wagon road and had entered the mystical Matopos Hills. While the oxen grazed and rested, Ralph rode ahead to mark a trail between the soaring granite kopjes, and through the deep an d sullen gorges. At dark they resaddled the bullocks with their packs and went on.
The next day Ralph made a noon observation of the sun with the old brass sextant. From experience he made allowance for the cumulative error in his boxed chronometer, and worked out a position which he knew was accurate to within ten miles. Also from experience, he knew that his father's observations, made before he was born, were usually as accurate. Without them he would never have found the caches of ivory which had been the start of his growing fortune.
His calculations compared to his father's showed that he was one hundred and sixty miles west of the ancient ruined city that the Matabele called Zimbabwe, the burial place of the old kings.
Then, while he waited for darkness to resume the march, he took from his saddle-bags the sheaf of notes which Zouga had given him as a parting gift when he first left Kimberley. He read the description of the route to Zimbabwe, and of the city itself, for possibly the hundredth time.
"How much longer must we march through these hills?" Isazi broke his concentration. He was cooking maize cakes on a small smokeless fire of dry wood. "My beasts suffer on these rocks and steep places," he grumbled. "We should have gone farther south and passed below the hills on the open ground."
"Where Lobengula's bucks wait and pray every day for the chance to stick an assegai through a skinny little Zulu," Ralph smiled.
"There is the same danger here."
"No," Ralph shook his head. "No Matabele comes into these sacred hills without good reason. We will find no impi here, and once we come out on the far side, we will be beyond the farthest regimental kraals., "And this place of stone to which we go? There will be no impi waiting for us there?"
"Lobengula forbids any man even to look into the valley in which the stones stand. It is a death-marked place, cursed by Lobengula and his priests., azi shifted uncomfortably. "Who sets store by the Is curse of a fat Matabele dog?" he demanded, and touched the charm on his belt which warded off devils and hobgoblins and other dark secret things.
Despite his assurances to Isazi, Ralph moved with utmost caution in threading the maze of the Matopos.
During daylight he hid the bullocks in some thick patch of bush in a rock gorge, and he went ahead to reconnoitre every yard of the way and to mark it for Isazi to follow with a discreetly blazed tree trunk or a broken twig of green leaves at every turning or difficult place.
These precautions saved him from disaster. On the third day he had tied Tom in good cover and gone forward on foot to the ridge from where he could look into the next valley.
Just below the brow he was alerted by the raucous alarm call of a grey lourie, the "Go-Away" bird of the African bush. The cry came from just beyond the ridge, and as he froze to listen he heard a gentle susurration like the wind in tall grass; he ducked and jumped off the path, sprawling on his belly with his rifle tucked into the crook of his elbows, and rolled under the spreading branches of a low red berry bush, just as the first rank of Matabele warriors came sweeping over the rise ahead of him, with their cloaks and kilts and headdresses rusthng, the sound which had warned him.