Ralph pushed himself up, and limped and staggered away into the empty veld. Half a mile from the tracks he fell to his knees again, and gagged and retched as he vomited up the whisky and his own disgust.
The dawn was an unearthly orange wash behind a crisp black cut-out of flat-topped hills. Ralph lifted his face to it, and he spoke aloud.
"I swear I will have him. I swear that I will destroy this monster, or destroy myself in the attempt." At that moment the rim of the sun pushed up above the hills and hurled a brazen dart of light into Ralph's face as though a god had been listening, and had sealed the pact with flame.
"My father killed a great elephant upon this spot. The tusks stand on the stoep at King's Lynn," Ralph said quietly. "And I shot a fine lion here myself. It seems strange that things like that will never happen again at this place." Beside him Harry Mellow straightened up from the theodolite, and for a moment his face was grave.
"We have come to conquer the wilderness, he said. "Soon there will be a high headgear reaching up into the sky, and if the Harkness reef runs true, one day a town with schools and churches, hundreds perhaps thousands of families. Isn't that what we both want?" Ralph shook his head. "I would be getting soft if I did not. It just seems strange, when you look at it now." The low valleys were still blowing with the soft pink grasses, the timber along the ridges was tall, the tree trunks silver in the sunlight, but even as they watched one of them shivered against the sky and then toppled with a rending crackling roar. The Matabele axe men swarmed over the fallen giant to lop off the branches and for a moment longer the shadow of regret lingered in Ralph's eyes, then he turned away. "You have picked a good site," he said, and Harry followed the direction of his gaze.
"Knobs Hill,"he laughed.
The thatch and daub hut was sited so that it would not overlook the compound for the black labourers. Instead it had a breathtaking view over the forest to where the southern escarpment dipped away into infinite blue distances. A tiny feminine figure came out of the hut, her apron a merry spot of tulip yellow against the raw red earth which Vicky hoped would one day be a garden. She saw the two men below her and waved.
"By God, that girl has done wonders." Harry lifted his hat above his head to acknowledge the greeting, his expression fondly besotted.
"She copes so well, nothing upsets her not even the cobra in the lavatory this morning she just up and blasted it with a shotgun. Of course, I'll have to fix the seat." "It's her life," Ralph pointed out.
"Put her in a city and she'd probably be in tears in ten minutes."
"Not my girl, "said Harry proudly.
"All right, you made a good choice," Ralph agreed, "but it's bad form to boost your own wife." "Bad form?" Harry shook his head wonderingly. "You limeys!" he said, and stooped to put his eye back to the lens of the theodolite.
"Leave that damn thing for a minute." Ralph pinched his shoulder lightly. "I didn't ride three hundred miles to look at your backside."
"Fine." Harry straightened. "I'll let the work lie. What do you want to talk about?" "Show me how you decided on the site of your No.1 shaft," Ralph invited, and they went down the valley, while Harry pointed out the factors which had led him to choose the spot.
"The ancient trenches are inclined at just over forty degrees, and we have three layers of schists over-running. Now I extended out the strike of the ancient reef, and we put in the potholes here-" The exploratory potholes were narrow vertical shafts, each under a gantry of raw native timber, spaced out in a straight line along the slope of the hill.
"We went down -a hundred feet on five of them, down through the friable levels, and we picked up the upper schist layer again-" "Schist isn't going to make us rich." "No, but the reefs still under it." "How do you know?" "You hired me for my nose." Harry chuckled. "I can smell it." And led Ralph on. "So you see this "is the only logical spot for the main shaft. I reckon to intersect the reef again at three hundred feet and once we are on it we can stope it out." A small gang of black men were clearing the collar area of the reef and Ralph recognized the tallest of them.
"Bazo," he cried, and the and una straightened up and rested on his pick handle.
"Henshaw," he greeted Ralph gravely. "Have you come to watch the real men at work?" Bazo's flat hard muscle shone like wet anthracite, and running sweat had left snaking trails down it.
"Real men?" Ralph asked. "You promised me two hundred, and you have brought me twenty." "The others are waiting," Bazo promised. "But they will not come if they cannot bring their women with them.
One-Bright-Eye wants the women to stay in the villages." "They can bring their women, as many as they wish. I will speak to One-Bright-Eye. Go to them. Choose the strongest and the best. Bring me your old comrades from the Moles impi, and tell them I will pay them well and feed them better, and they can bring their women and breed strong sons to work my mines." "I will leave in the morning," Bazo decided. "And be back before the moon shows its horns again." When the two white men moved on down the survey line, Bazo watched them for a while, his face expressionless and his eyes inscrutable, then he looked at his gang and nodded.
They spat on their palms, hefted their pick-axes and Bazo sang out the opening chorus of the work chant.
Vbunyonyo bu gin ye entudh1a. The little black ants can eat up the giraffe." Bazo had composed the line beside the corpse of a giraffe struck down by the rinderpest, and untouched by all the gorged scavengers of the veld except a colony of the black safari ants which had cleaned the cadaver down to the bone. The significance of it had stayed with Bazo, how, by persistence, even the greatest are overcome, and the seemingly innocent line of gibberish was now insidiously preparing the minds of the amadoda who laboured under him. At the invocation they swung the picks on high, standing shoulder to shoulder, the crescent-headed tools silhouetted against the flat blue of the sky.
"Guga mzimba!" they replied in soaring chorus. "Sola nhhziyo.
Though our bodies are worn out, our hearts are constant." And then together the humming "Jee!" as the pick-heads hissed downwards in unison, and with a crash buried themselves in the iron earth.
Each man levered his pick-head free, took one step forward and braced himself as Bazo sang. "The little black ants can eat up the giraffe." And again the act was repeated, and again, and a hundred times more, while the sweat was flung from their bodies and the red dust flew.
Bazo loped along at a deceptively easy gait that never varied, though the hills were steep and the valleys abrupt. His spirits were joyous, he had not truly realized how much the labours of the last weeks had galled until he was released from them. Once long ago he had worked with pick and shovel in the yellow diamond pit at Kimberley.
Henshaw had been his companion then, and the two of them had made a game of the brutal endless labour. It had built their muscles and made them strong, but had caged and cramped their spirits, until neither of them could suffer it longer, and they had escaped together.
Since those days Bazo had known the savage joy and the divine madness of that terrible moment that the Matabele call the "closing in." He had stood against. the king's enemies and killed in the sunlight with his regimental plumes flying.