They had almost reached the high stagings and Bazo slipped off his canvas covering before he could be spotted by one of the black constables who patrolled the area inside the new security fences.
"You ask me if I am unhappy." Bazo stood up, and did not look at Ralph's face. "I was thinking of the land in which I am a prince of the House of Kumalo. In that land the calves I tended as a boy have grown into bulls and have bred calves which I have never seen. Once I knew every beast in my father's herds, fifteen thousand head of prime cattle, and I knew each of them, the season of its birth, the twist of its horns and the markings of its hide."
Bazo sighed and came to stand beside Ralph on the rim of the skip.
They were of a height, two tall young n, well formed, and each, in the manner of his race, becomely.
"Ten times I have not been with my impi when it danced the Festival of Fresh Fruits, ten times I did not witness my king throw the war-spear and send us out on the red road."
Bazo's sombre mood deepened, and his voice sank lower.
"Boys have grown to men since I left, and some Of them wear the cowtails of valour on their legs and arms."
Bazo glanced down at his own naked body with its single dirty rag at the waist. "Little girls have grown into maidens, with ripe bellies, ready to be claimed by the warriors who have won the honour on the red road of war." And both of them thought of the lonely nights when the phantoms came to haunt them. Then Bazo folded his arms across his wide chest and went on.
"i think of my father, and I wonder if the snows of age have yet settled upon his head. Every man of my tribe that comes down the road from the north brings me the words of Juba, the Dove, who is my mother.
She has twelve sons, but I am the first and the eldest of them."
"Why have you stayed so long?" Ralph asked harshly.
"Why have you stayed so long Henshaw?" The young Matabele challenged him quietly, and Ralph had no answer.
"Have you found fame and riches in this hole?" Again they both glanced down into the pit, and from this height the off-shift waiting to come up in the skips were like columns of safari ants.
"Do you have a woman with hair as long and pale as the winter grass to give you comfort in the night, Henshaw? Do you have the music of your sons" laughter to cheer you, Henshaw? What keeps you here?"
Ralph lifted his eyes and stared at Bazo, but before he could find an answer the skip came level with the platform on the first ramp of the stagings. The jerk brought Ralph back to reality and he waved to his father on the platform above them.
The roar of the steam winch subsided. The skip slowed and Bazo led the party of Matabele workers onto the ramp. Ralph saw them all clear before he jumped across the narrow gap to the wooden platform and felt it tremble under the combined weight of twenty men.
Ralph signalled again. Then the winch growled, and the steel cable squealed in its sheaves. The heavy-laden skip ran on until it hit the striker blocks. Ralph and Bazo drove the jumper bars under it, and threw their full weight on them. The skip tipped over, and the load of gravel went roaring down the chute into the waiting cart.
Ralph looked up to see his father's encouraging smile and to hear his shouted congratulations.
"Well done, boy! Two hundred tons today!"
But the staging was deserted. Zouga had gone.
Zouga had packed a single chest, the chest that had belonged to Aletta and which had come up with her from the Cape. Now it was going back, and it was almost all that was going back.
Zouga put Aletta's Bible in the bottom of the chest, and with it her diary and the trinket box which contained the remaining pieces of her jewellery. The more valuable pieces had long ago been sold, to support the dying dream.
over these few mementoes he packed his own diaries and maps, and his books. When he came to the bundled pile of his unfinished manuscript, he paused to weigh it in his hand.
"Perhaps I shall find time to finish it now," he murmured, and laid it gently in the chest.
On top of that went his clothing, and there was so little of that, four shirts, a spare pair of boots, barely an armful.
The chest was only half-full, and he carried it easily down the steps into the yard. That was all that he was taking, the rest of it, the meagre furnishings of the bungalow he had sold to one of the auctioneers in Market Square. Ten pounds the lot. As Rhodes had predicted, he was leaving as he had come.
"Where is Ralph?" he demanded of Jan Cheroot, and the little Hotten tot paused in chaining the cooking-pot and black iron kettle onto the tailboard of the cart.
"Perhaps he stopped at Diamond Lil's. The boy has got a right to his thirst, he worked hard enough for it."
Zouga let it pass, and instead ran an appraising eye over the cart. It was the newest and strongest of the three vehicles he owned. One cart had gone with Louise Sint John, and she had taken the best mules, but this rig would get them back to Cape Town, even under the additional burden that he was planning to put into it.
Jan Cheroot ambled across to Zouga and took the other handle of the chest, ready to boost it up into the body of the cart.
"Wait," Zouga told him. "That first." And he pointed to the roughly-hewn block of blue mottled rock that lay below the camel-thorn tree.
"My mother -" Jan Cheroot gaped. "This I don't believe.
In twenty-two years I've seen you do some stupid crazy things Zouga strode across to the block of blue ground that Ralph had brought up from the Devil's Own and put his foot on it. "We'll hoist it up with the block and tackle."
He glanced at the sturdy branch above his head from which the sheave block and manila rope hung. "And we'll back the cart up under it."
"That's it!" Jan Cheroot sat down on the chest and folded his arms. "This time I refuse. Once before I broke my back for you, but that was when I was young and stupid."
"Come on, Jan Cheroot, you are wasting time."
"What do you want with that, piece of ugly bloody stone? With another piece of thundering nonsense."
"I have lost the bird, I need a household god."
"I have heard of someone putting up a monument to a brave man, or a great battle, but to put up a stone to stupidity," Jan Cheroot mourried.
"Back the cart up."
"I refuse, this time I refuse. I won't do it. Not for anything. Not for any price."
"When we get it loaded, you can have a bottle of smoke all to yourself to celebrate."
Jan Cheroot sighed, and stood up. "That's my price."
He shook his head and came across to stand beside Zouga. He glared at the block of blue stone venomously.
"But don't expect me to like it."
Zouga chuckled, for the first time in weeks, and in an unusual display of affection he put one arm around Jan Cheroot's shoulders.
"Now that you have something to hate again, just think how happy it will make you," he said.
"You have been drinking," Zouga said, and Ralph tossed his hat into the corner and agreed.
"Yes, I have had a beer or two." He went to the black iron stove and warmed his hands. "I would have had more, if I had had the money."
"i have been waiting for you," Zouga went on, and Ralph turned back to him truculently.
"i give you every hour of my day, Papa, let me have a little time at the end of it."
"i have something of great importance to tell you," Zouga nodded to the deal chair facing him. "Sit down, Ralph."
Zouga rubbed his eyes with forefinger and thumb as he collected his words. He had tried so often in the last days to find an easy way to tell Ralph that it was over, that they were destitute, that all that toil and heartbreak had been in vain, but there was no easy way. There were only the stark hard words of reality.
He dropped his hand, and looked at his son, and then slowly and carefully he told him, and when he had finished he waited for Ralph to speak. Ralph had not moved during the long recital, and now he stared at Zouga stonily.