Do you hear the words of Lobengula?"
"i hear, oh Great King and to hear is to obey."
Dutchman, the bullock with the narrowest spread of horns, was the only one which Isazi could coax down the narrow passageways and over the tumbled stonework into the temple enclosure of the ruins. In the baskets on his sturdy, dappled back, they ferried out the bird images, even the damaged ones, and repacked them onto the backs of the other oxen which waited outside the massive walls.
With Isazi's skilful handling of the bullocks and their burdens, the work was finished by midafternoon, and they roped the oxen in single file. With patent relief, Isazi led them away through the forest towards the south.
Ralph's relief was every bit as intense. He had been uneasy ever since that chance encounter with the Matabele impi in the hills. Now he let Isazi go on with the oxen, while he circled back across their incoming tracks to the north-west of the ruined city, examining the ground with the hunter's eye for any sign that they had been followed, or that there were any other human beings in the area. It need not be a war party, even a band of honey-gatherers or a hunter could carry word back to Lobengula's kraal or alert the border impis.
He knew what he would have to do if he found a wanderer or solitary hunter, and he eased the rifle in the leather boot at his knee. These forests were populous.
He saw troops of big-eared striped kudu, sable antelope with snowy bellies and sweeping scimitar horns, big black bovine buffalo and spreading herds of plump zebra with alert pricked ears and stiff, black manes, but there was no sign of human presence.
He was only slightly mollified when he turned back and picked up the spoor of the bullock file five miles on the other side of the ruins. He trotted along the widely beaten sign, and his misgivings returned at full strength.
This was too easy to follow.
He caught up with Isazi and his bullock train as the dusk was falling, and he helped him lift the heavy packs down from the backs of the oxen and examine them for galling or saddle sores, before hobbling them and letting them graze. More than once during the night he started awake, and listened for the sound of men's voices, but heard only the yipping of jackal.
In the early light they entered a wide grassy plain; the trees on the far side were a dark line on the horizon, and there were huge troops of zebra grazing out in the open.
They lifted their heads to watch the strange little caravan." an go past, and sounded their curiosity and concern with their sharp, almost dog-like, barks.
Halfway across the plain Ralph turned the bullock train at a right angle to their track, and they marched due east until noon, when they re-entered the forest. Still Ralph headed on cast until darkness fell and they camped.
Isazi muttered and complained about the wasted day, and the detour of so many miles out of their direct route towards the Limpopo river and the Bushman wells beyond, where Umfaan waited for them with the wagons.
"Why do we do this?"
"For the benefit of anyone who follows us."
"They will still be able to follow the spoor we have laid," Isazi protested.
"i will change that, in the morning," Ralph assured him, and in the dawn he allowed Isazi to resume the southerly direction again.
"if I do not rejoin you, do not wait for me. Keep on until you reach the wagons, we'll beyond the frontier of the Matabele. Wait for me there," he ordered, and he left Isazi and rode back on their spoor of the previous day.
He reached the open grassland where they had made such a dramatic change of direction the preceding morning, and the zebra barked at him. Their stripes were indistinguishable at this distance, and the herds were moving silver-grey masses on the yellow grassland.
"You are going to enjoy this, old Tom." Ralph patted the horse's neck and then trotted out onto the plain towards the nearest herd of zebra. There were more than a hundred animals in the group, and they let horse and rider approach to within a few hundred paces before bunching up and galloping away.
"After them, Tom!"Ralph whooped, and they tore into the bellowing dust cloud, gaining swiftly on the chubby, striped ranks of bobbing hindquarters. Ralph quartered and turned them, and they gathered up another herd, and then another, until there were two or three thousand zebra in stampede ahead of them.
He rode out onto one flank and pushed the herd over the ground which his bullock train had crossed the previous day. Thousands of broad hooves churned the earth into soft explosions of dust. When they reached the far side of the plain, Ralph forced Tom ahead of the leading zebras and rode across their front, yelling and waving his hat about his head. The dense mass of animals turned like a living whirlpool, and the dust boiled up into the sky.
Back they went across the open ground with Tom delighting in the chase, and Ralph worked them northward until the zebra herds reached the forest line and swung parallel with the trees, and they scoured the earth with driving hooves in a swathe five hundred yards wide.
Back and forth again Ralph drove them, sheep-dogging them deliberately over the bullock tracks on each pass, until at last even Tom's pace was short and knocked up, and he was sweating in black streaks down his shoulders and flanks and blowing like a south-easterly gale over False Bay.
Ralph off-saddled in the shade of the treeline, while out on the plain the zebra herds, skittish and nervous at the harassment, still galloped in aimless circles, or snorted and pawed the torn earth.
"Nobody, not even a Bushman, will be able to pick the spoor through that," Ralph told Tom, and stooped to lift each of his hooves in turn.
With his clasp knife Ralph prised off Tom's iron horseshoes and bundled them into the saddle-bag.
Without shoes, Tom's tracks were almost identical to those of a zebra stallion. He might go lame before they reached the wagons at Bushman wells, but they could limp in at their own speed, sure at last that there would be no pursuit. Once they reached the wagon, there was forge and anvil to re-shoe him, and Tom would suffer no lasting injury.
Ralph wiped Tom down with the saddle blanket and let him rest for another hour before re-saddling. Then he rode back amongst the scattered zebra herds to mingle and lose Tom's hoof prints amongst theirs before deliberately turning westwards, the opposite direction to Isazi's bullocks. He settled down in the saddle to lay a false trail into the forest before circling back southwards to find Isazi.
Ralph slept until sunrise the following morning, secure at last, and the temptation to drink coffee was to much for him. He chanced a small fire and delighted in the strong hot brew.
When they rode on, the sun was well up, and clear of the forest tops. Ralph let old Tom amble along at his own pace to save his unshod hooves, and he pushed his hat onto the back of his head and repeated the opening bars of Yankee Doodle over and over in a flat tuneless whistle.
The morning was cool and fresh. He felt elated at the success of his coup; already he was planning the sale of the statues. He would send letters to the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
Out on his right a red-breasted cuckoo uttered its staccato call that sounded like a greeting "Pete-my-friend!".
Tom flicked his ears but Ralph went on whistling happily, slouched down in the saddle.
Old J. B. Robinson, one of the Kimberley millionaires who had made millions more on the new Witwatersrand goldfield, would buy at least one of the birds simply because Rhodes had one. He could not bear In the grassy glade ahead of Ralph a francolin called harshly, "Kwali!
Kwali!" only twice, and it rang falsely to Ralph's ear. These brown partridges usually called five or six times, not twice.
Ralph checked Tom and stood up in the stirrups. Carefully he surveyed the narrow open strip of head-high elephant grass. Suddenly a covey of brown partridge burst out of the grass and whirled away on noisy wings.