There was a furious thunderstorm the night of Lobengula's return, and the blue lightning clanged upon the anvil of the hills with strokes that tortured their eardrums as they lay together under the kaross. Then it was that the little orphan white girl made the boy into a man, the princeling into a king; and when her term was run she gave him a son who was the colour of the early morning sunlight on the yellow winter grass, and Lobengula knew happiness for the only time in his life.
In their joy they paid little attention to tidings which the mad old wizard brought to their cave.
He told them how Mzilikazi, great with plunder, fat with cattle, had come back to Thabas Indunas, arriving suddenly with the blood barely dried on the spears of his impi, and red rage in his art.
At Mzilikazi's nod the Black Ones gathered all those who had acted as if the king were dead. Some they hurled from the cliff of execution, some they pegged down upon the sandbanks of the river where the crocodiles sunned themselves, others they skewered with bamboo spikes through the secret openings of their bodies.
But when the mother of Nkulumane was led before the king, she wept so and tore her own flesh with her nails while she called on all the spirits of the dead to witness how faithful she had been to Mzilikazi in his absence, how constant had been her belief in his eventual safe return and how during his absence she had guarded the other royal sons from the Black Ones and even sent Lobengula into the wilderness to save him so that Mzilikazi, who at the bottom was only a man, believed her. However, the others died in their hundreds, victims of the king's wrath, and the nation rejoiced for the king had returned and the good old days were back.
Through all this Lobengula and Saala and their little yellow son stayed on in the cave of the Matopos and knew happiness.
Far away in the south below the Limpopo river, a Hottentot elephant hunter stopped to water his horse at the well beside a Boer homestead that stood not far from the battlefield where the Boer horsemen had long ago first defeated Mzilikazi before driving him out of this country.
"I saw a curious thing" said the Hottentot to the big, solemn, bearded man who was his host. "In the southern hills of Matabeleland, I saw a white woman, full grown and naked. She was shy as a wild buck and ran into the rocky ground where I could not follow her."
Two months later, when the Boer farmer took his family into the service of Nachtmaal in the new church at Rustenberg, he repeated the strange story which the Hottentot hunter had brought from the north. Someone recalled the story of the massacre of the Van Heerden family, and the two little girls, Sarah and Hannah, taken by the murderous plundering savages.
Then Hendrik Potgieter, that doughty trekker and kaffir-fighter, stood up in the pulpit, and thundered: "The heathen have a Christian woman as captive!" And the words offended much that the congregation held dear: God and their womankind.
"Commando!" roared Hendrik Potgieter. "I call commando!"
The women filled the powder-horns and Poured the lead into the bullet moulds, and the men picked out their best horses and elected Potgieter as their leader.
Not all of it was for God and womankind; for one whispered to another, "Even if there is no white woman, I have heard that there are fine new herds in Matabeleland."
Then the old wizard came to Lobengula's cave and rolled his eyes and cackled.
The buni have crossed the river of crocodiles, riding on the backs of strange beasts. Many men, many men!"
Instinctively Lobengula knew why the Boer commando was coming, and he knew also what to do about it. "Stay here, with the child," he ordered Saala. "I am going to my father's kraal, and I will lead his impis back here."
But Saala was a woman, with a woman's curiosity, and blood called to blood. Vaguely she remembered that these strange white men had once been her kin.
When Lobengula had gone north to Thabas Indunas, she slung the baby on her back and crept out of the cave.
At first the distant sound of gunfire guided her, for the Boer commando was living off the abundant herds of wild game. Then later she heard the shout of voices, and the whicker of horses, sounds that awakened a terrible nostalgia in her breast.
She crept closer and closer to the bivouac, with all the stealth of a wild animal, closer still until she could clearly see the tall sun-bronzed men, dressed to throat and wrists in brown homespun, the white-brimmed felt hats on their heads, closer still until she could hear their voices lifted in praise of their God as they sang their hymns around the camp fire.
She recognized the words, and memories flooded back to her. She was no longer Saala but Sarah, and she rose from her place of hiding to go down to her people. Then she looked down at her body, and she saw that she was naked. She looked at the child on her hip, and saw that it was yellow, and its features were neither hers nor yet those of its Matabele father.
The awareness of sin came upon her, as it had done to Eve in another Paradise, and Sarah was ashamed.
She crept away, and in the dawn she stood on the top of one of those soaring granite precipices that rend the Matopos hills.
She kissed her baby and then holding the little mite to her breast she stepped out into the void.
Lobengula found them at the bottom of the cliff. He found them before the vultures did, and they were still together, Sarah's grasp on the infant had not faltered during the long plunge from the top of the precipice.
Strangely, both she and the child seemed to be merely sleeping, quiet and at peace.
At the memory Lobengula sighed now, and returned his gaze to his half-brother, the Induna Gandang who still sat across him from the fire.
If only he had been able to escape the prophecy of the Umlimo, for she had foreseen this destiny for him: Your name is Lobengula, the one who drives like the wind. Yet the winds will drive you, high as an eagle.
"Lobengula will hold the spear of Mzilikazi. Yet again the winds will drive you, down, down, down, and your nation with you.
Those were the words of that strange and beautiful woman of the cave, and already the first part of the prophecy had held true.
Mzilikazi, the mighty warrior, had died like an old woman, riddled with arthritis and dropsy and gout and liquor, in his royal hut.
His widows had wrapped him in the skin of a freshlykilled bull, and sat mourning over him for twelve days: until his remains were almost liquid with putrefaction in the summer heat.
After the mourning the regiments had carried his corpse into the Matopos Hills, the Sacred Hills, and they had seated Mzilikazi in the cave of the king. They placed all his possessions about him: his assegais, his guns, his ivory; even his wagon was taken down and the pieces piled in the crevices of the cave.
Then masons closed the opening with blocks of granite, and after the feasting and dancing the indunas of Matabele met to decide who would succeed Mzilikazi as king.
The argument and counter-argument lasted many weeks, until the indunas led by the princes of Kumalo returned into the Matopos bearing rich gifts to the cave of the Umlimo.
"Give us a king!" they pleaded.
"The one who drives like the wind!" replied the Umlimo, but Lobengula had fled, trying even at the last moment to escape his destiny.
The border impis captured him, and led him back to Thabas Indunas like a criminal to judgement. The indunas came to him one by one, and swore their allegiance and loyalty unto death.
"Black Bull of Matabele, The Thunderer, The Great Elephant. The one whose tread shakes the earth., Nkulumane was the first of his brothers to crawl before him, and Nkulumane's mother, the senior wife of Mzilikazi, followed her son on her knees.
Lobengula turned to the Black Ones who stood behind him, like hounds on the leash.
"I do not wish to look upon their faces again."
It was Lobengula's first command, spoken like a true king, and the Black Ones took mother and son into the cattle stockade and twisted their necks, quickly and mercifully.