Lobengula, himself an initiate of the lesser mysteries, had first entered the cavern of the Umlimo as a youth led by the crazed old magician who had been his mentor and his tutor. It had been the Umlimo's word which had placed the toy spear of kingship in Lobengula's hand when Mzilikazi had let it fall from his grasp. It was the Umlimo who had chosen Lobengula in preference to Nkulumane or the other older brothers of nobler birth and it was the Umlimo who had made him the favourite of the ancestral spirits and had sustained him in the darkest hours of his reign.
Thus it was that Lobengula, plagued by the importunate demands of the emissaries of a white man whom he had never seen, confused by scraps of paper whose signs he could not read, troubled by doubts and tormented by fears, badgered and pulled by the conflicting advice of his senior indunas, was at last returning to the secret cavern.
He lay on his litter, on a mattress of the soft yellow and black spotted furs of the leopard, rocked by the motion of the trotting bearers, so that the naked folds and bulges of his gross black body shook and rippled, and he looked ahead with dark and haunted eyes.
Lodzi, that was the name on every white man's lips.
Everywhere he turned, Lobengula heard the name Lodzi.
"Is this Lodzi a king, as I am a king?" he had asked the white man with the red face; for Lobengula, as a Matabele, could not pronounce the "R" of the name.
"mister Rhodes is not a king, yet he is greater than a king," Rudd had said.
"Why does not Lodzi come to me himself?"
Rhodes has gone across the sea, he sends us lesser men to do this business."
"If I could look upon the face of Lodzi, then I would know if his heart was great."
But Rhodes would not come, and day after day Lobengula had listened to the insistence of Lodzi's minions, and in the nights his indunas cautioned and questioned him, and argued amongst themselves.
"If you give the white men a finger, they want the hand," Gandang told him, "and having the hand, they desire the arm and then the chest and the heart and the head."
"Oh King, Lodzi is a man of pride and honour. His word is like Lobengula's own. He is a good man," said Nomusa, whom he trusted as he trusted few others.
"Give each of the white men a little, and give the same thing to each of them," counselled Kamuza, one of his youngest but most cunning indunas, a man who had lived with the white men and knew their ways. "Thus white man becomes the enemy of the other. Set every one dog on the other, lest the pack set upon you."
"Choose the strongest of the white men and make him our ally" said Somabula. "This Lodzi is the herd bull.
Choose him."
And Lobengula had cocked his ear to each of them in turn, and become more desperate and more confused with every conflicting view, until now there was only one path open to him, the path into the Matopos.
Behind his litter came the bearers with the gifts for the oracle, rolls of copper wire, leather bags of coarse salt, pots of trade beads, six great tusks of yellow ivory, bolts of bright cloth, knives made by his master smith with handles of rhinoceros horn, a considerable treasure to pay for the words which he hoped would give him solace.
The path twisted down like a maimed serpent into the gut of the hills, so that the sun was lost and there was only a narrow strip of blue sky showing between the tops of the granite cliffs.
The rank and thorny vegetation crowded the pathway and at last met overhead, forming a dreary tunnel, and the silence was a heavy oppressive presence, for no bird sang and no animal squeaked or scurried in the undergrowth.
But Bazo led on at the same pace, his head swinging from side to side, scanning for danger or menace, and his grip on the shaft of his stabbing spear was firm, his sweat-oiled muscles tense as the springs of a mantrap, ready to hurl his body forward to meet an enemy at any twist in the path.
There was a stream of slow green water and algae-slick boulders across the track, and Bazo leapt it easily with barely a break in his stride; and fifty paces farther on the bush thinned and the cliffs pinched in to form a natural gateway of stone that led into the looming precipice.
Here a determined spearman could hold a thousand and Bazo surveyed it with the swift appraisal of a soldier; and then he raised his gaze to the ledge high above on which was perched a small thatched watch-hut.
Bazo grounded the butt of his long red shield, and called up the cliff. "I, Bazo, induna of one thousand, demand passage." His voice boomed and broke into a myriad echoes against the stone walls.
in whose name do you come to trouble the spirits of the air and earth?" a querulous old man's voice replied, and a sticklike figure, foreshortened by the height of the cliff, appeared upon the lip.
"I come in the king's name, Lobengula the Black Bull of Matabele."
Bazo scorned to wait on permission or favour and, sweeping his shield up onto his shoulder, he sprang forward through the ominous portals.
The passageway beyond was so narrow that his warriors follow only in single file, and the grey sand nors co that covered the floor sparkled with starry chips of mica and crunched under their bare feet. The passageway curved upon itself and then opened again without warning over a hidden valley.
The valley was completely enclosed by sheer cliffs, and this narrow passage was its only entrance. The bowl of the floor was lush with green grass, and watered by a clear fountain that sprang from the cliff face beside the gateway and meandered down into the valley bottom.
In the centre of the valley, a thousand paces ahead, was a tiny village, twenty or so thatched huts laid out in a neat circle. Bazo led his warriors down and, with a gesture of his assegai, formed them into a double rank on each side of the pathway that led to the huts.
They waited in stillness and silence until the distant chant of the litter-bearers grew louder, and at last the king's party emerged into the hidden valley, and Bazo led his men in a deep chorus of praise and salutation.
The royal party camped two days beside the tiny stream, waiting on the Umlimo's pleasure.
Each day her attendants came to Lobengula to receive gifts and tribute on the oracle's behalf. They were a strange and macabre motley of lesser wizards and witches; some of them, touched by the spirits they served, were crazed and wild-eyed, others were young nubile girls, their bodies painted and their eyes blank and empty like the smokers of the hemp pipe. There were children with wise old eyes who did not laugh or play like other children, and ancients with withered bodies and sly eyes who spoke with the king in low, wheedling tones and took his gifts and promised: "Perhaps tomorrow; who knows when the power of divination will descend upon the Umlimo."
Then on the dawn of the third day Lobengula sent for Bazo, and when he came to the king's camp fire, his father Gandang was already with the king, dressed in full regimentals, plume and fur and tassels of valour at elbow and knee, and with him were six of the other senior indunas.
"Bazo, my fine axe with a sharp edge, I have chosen you to stand by my shoulder when I face the Umlimo to guard my back against treachery," ordered Lobengula, and Bazo felt his chest swell with pride at such a mark of the king's trust.
A witch led them, prancing and mumbling and mouothing, through the village and up the far side of the valley. Burdened by his great bulk, Lobengula paused often on the climb, his breathing sobbing in his throat, and he rested on Gandang's arm before going on again, until at last they reached the foot of the sheer high Cliff.
Here there was a cave in the rock. Its entrance was a hundred paces wide, but its roof low enough for a man to reach up and touch. Some time long ago the entrance had been walled up with square blocks of dressed stone, but the wall had tumbled down, leaving dark gaps like the missing teeth in an old man's mouth.