The Sunbird Read online

  ‘Hold your fire!’ he shouted. ‘We have hostages aboard.’

  ‘Attack!’ I screamed, tearing and jerking at my bonds. ‘They’ll murder us anyway! Open fire!’

  The Mirage jet pulled up steeply ahead of us, without opening fire, and howled a few feet over our heads. The Dakota rocked violently in the slipstream. I was still screaming and struggling to tear myself loose. I wanted to get at them. The steel chair was rocking from side to side. I got my feet against the side of the fuselage and heaved with all my strength. The seat buckled a little, and again the guard lifted his machine-pistol.

  ‘No,’ shouted Timothy. ‘We need him alive. Tell Mary to bring the morphine.’

  The Mirage sheered off, then circled to take up station a hundred feet off our starboard wingtip, I could see the pilot staring helplessly across the gap at us.

  ‘You have spoken to Dr Kazin,’ Timothy warned the pilot of the jet. ‘And we have four other hostages. We have already executed one white hostage and we will not hesitate to execute another if you take any further hostile action.’

  ‘They’re going to kill us anyway,’ I shouted, but Timothy broke the contact.

  It took five of them to hold me still for the hypodermic, but at last they got it into my arm, and though I tried to resist the drug, I felt myself going muzzy and misty. I tried to maintain my struggle, but my movements became lethargic and uncoordinated and slowly I drifted off into unconsciousness. My last waking memory was hearing Timothy giving Roger a new course to fly.

  Pain and thirst woke me. My mouth was thick and scummy and my head was a mass of solid blinding agony. I tried to sit up and cried out aloud.

  ‘Are you all right, Doctor? Take it easy.’ Roger van Deventer’s voice, and I focused my eyes on him.

  ‘Water?’ I asked.

  ‘Sorry, Doc.’ He shook his head, and I looked around the bare whitewashed room. Four wooden bunks and a lavatory bucket were all the furnishings, and the door was barred and grilled. The three Bantu ground crew sat on one of the bunks across the room, looking lost and unhappy.

  ‘Where are we?’ I whispered.

  ‘Zambia. Some sort of military camp. We landed an hour ago-’

  ‘What happened to the Air Force jet?’

  ‘It turned back when we crossed the Zambezi. Nothing they could do.’

  And there was nothing we could do, either. For five days we sat in the airless, oven-like room with its stinking bucket, until on the fifth day our guards came to fetch me. With much shouting and many unnecessary shoves and blows I was marched down a corridor and into a sparsely furnished office whose main furnishing was a portrait of Chairman Mao. Timothy Mageba rose from behind the desk and motioned my guards to leave.

  ‘Sit down, Doctor, please.’ He wore paratrooper camouflage, and the bars and stars of a Colonel in the Chinese People’s Army.

  I sat on the wooden bench, and my eyes fastened on the half-dozen bottles of Tusker beer that stood on a tray. The bottles were bedewed with cold, and I felt my throat contracting.

  ‘I know how fond you are of a bottle of cold beer, Doctor.’ Timothy opened one of the bottles, and offered it to me, I shook my head.

  ‘No, thank you. I don’t drink with murderers.’

  ‘I see.’ He nodded, and I saw the little shadows of regret in those dark brooding eyes. He lifted the bottle to his own lips and drank a mouthful. I watched him thirstily.

  ‘The engineer,’ he said, ‘the execution, it was not intended. I did not mean it to happen. Please understand that, Doctor.’

  ‘Yes. I understand. And when the smoke of our burning land blackens the skies, and the stink of our dead sickens even your dark spirits, will you cry out, I did not mean it to happen?’

  Timothy turned away and went to stand at the window, looking out over a parade ground where squads of uniformed Bantu drilled under a dazzling sun.

  ‘I have been able to arrange for your release, Doctor. You will be allowed to return in the Dakota.’ He came back to stand before me, and then he changed from English into Venda. ‘My heart cries out to see you go, Machane, for you are a man of gentleness, and strength, and great courage. Once I hoped that you might join us.’

  In Venda I answered, ‘My heart weeps also, for a man who was a friend, one I trusted, one who I believed was a man of goodwill, but he is gone now into the half-world of the criminals and the destroyers He is dead to me, and my heart weeps.’

  It was true, I realized. It was not just an attempt to shame him. Beneath my hatred and anger, there was a sense of sorrow, of loss. I had believed in him. I had seen in a man such as he was, a hope for the future of this poor tormented continent of ours. We looked at each other wistfully, regretfully across a space of four feet that was as wide as the span of the heavens and as deep as the chasms of Hell.

  ‘Goodbye, Doctor,’ he said softly. ‘Go in peace, Machane.’

  They took us in the covered back of a three-ton truck to the airstrip, bare-footed and stripped to our underclothes.

  They formed a double line from the truck to the Dakota, There were perhaps 200 of them in paratrooper uniform, and we were forced to walk down the narrow aisle with jeering black faces on each side of us. There were Chinese instructors with them, their lank black hair flopping out from under the cloth uniform caps, grinning hugely as we passed. I was bitterly aware of the mocking eyes and jibes aimed at my crooked exposed back, and I hurried towards the refuge of the Dakota, Suddenly one of them stepped out of the ranks in front of me. Deliberately he spat at me, and a storm of laughter went up from them. With a thick gob of yellow phlegm plastered in my hair, I scrambled up into the cabin of the aircraft.

  The Air Force Mirages picked us up an hour after we crossed the Zambezi river and they escorted us to the military airfield at Voortrekker Hoogte. However, my almost hysterical relief at our safe home-coming was shortlived. Once a doctor had cleaned and dressed the clotted and suppurating gashes in my head, I was hustled away in a closed car to a meeting with four unsmiling, grimly polite, officers of the police and military intelligence.

  ‘Dr Kazin, is this your signature?’

  It was my recommendation for the issue of Timothy Mageba’s passport.

  ‘Dr Kazin, do you remember this man?’

  A Chinaman I had met when I visited Timothy at London University.

  ‘Are you aware that he is an agent of the Communist Chinese government. Doctor?’

  There was a photograph of the three of us drinking beer on the tow-path beside the Thames.

  ‘Can you tell us what you spoke about, please, Doctor?’

  Timothy had told me that the Chinaman was an anthropology major, and we had discussed Leakey’s discoveries at Olduvai Gorge.

  ‘Did you recommend Mageba for the Sturvesant travel scholarship, Doctor?’

  ‘Did you know that he went to China and received training as a guerrilla leader?’

  ‘Did you sign these order forms for twenty-seven drums of fuller’s earth from Hong Kong, Doctor - and these customs declarations?’

  They were standard Institute forms, I could recognize my signature on the customs form across the desk. I did not remember the shipment.

  ‘Were you aware that this shipment contained 150 lb of plastic explosives, Doctor?’

  ‘Do you recognize these, Doctor?’

  Pamphlets in a dozen African languages. I read the first line of one of them. Terrorist propaganda. Exhortations to kill, burn and destroy.

  ‘Were you aware that these were printed on your press at the Institute, Doctor?’

  The questions went on endlessly, I was tired, confused, and began contradicting myself. I pointed out the wounds on my head, the rope burns at my wrists and ankles, and the questions went on. My head throbbed, my brain felt like a battered jelly.

  ‘Do you recognize these, Doctor?’

  Machine-pistols, ammunition.

  ‘Yes!’ I shouted at them. I had pistols like that against my head, in my belly!‘


  ‘Did you know that these were imported in cases of books addressed to your Institute?’

  ‘When you obtained police clearance for the Dakota flight, Doctor, you stated—’

  ‘They jumped me after the phone call, I’ve explained that a dozen times, damn you!’

  ‘You’ve known Mageba for twelve years. He was a protege of yours, Doctor.’

  ‘Do you mean to tell us that you were never approached by Mageba? Never discussed politics with him?’

  ‘I’m not one of them! I swear it—’ I remembered the blood spraying against the cabin roof, the crunch of steel biting into the bone of my skull, the spittle clinging in my hair. ‘You’ve got to believe me, please! Oh God, please!’ And I think I must have fainted, it went all dark and warm in my head and I slumped sideways off the chair onto the floor.

  I woke in a hospital room, between clean crisp sheets - and Louren Sturvesant sat beside the bed.

  ‘Lo, oh thank God.’ I felt all choked up with relief. Louren was here, and it would be all right now.

  He leaned forward, unsmiling, that marvellous face cold and hard as though it had been cast in bronze. ‘They think you were one of the gang. That you set it up, that you were using the Institute as the headquarters for a terrorist organization.’

  I stared at him, and he went on remorselessly, ‘If you have betrayed me and your country, if you have gone over to our enemies, then you can expect no mercy from me.’

  ‘Not you also, Lo. I don’t think I can stand that.’

  ‘Is it true?’ he demanded.

  ‘No!’ I shook my head. ‘No! No!’ And suddenly there were tears streaming down my face and I was shaking and blubbering like a baby. Louren leaned forward and gripped my shoulder hard.

  ‘Okay, Ben.’ He spoke with infinite gentleness and pity. ‘It’s okay, partner. I’ll fix it. It’s all over now, Ben.’

  Louren would not let me go back to my bachelor quarters at the Institute, and I was installed in a guest suite at Kleine Schuur, the Sturvesant residence.

  The first night Louren woke me from a screaming nightmare of blood and mocking black faces. He was in a dressing-gown, with his golden curls disordered from sleep. He sat on the side of my bed, and we talked of the good, sane things we had done together and the things we would do together in the future, until at last I slipped off into untroubled sleep.

  For ten lazy, idyllic days I stayed at Kleine Schuur, spoiled by Hilary and fussed by the children, protected from the news-hungry Press, and sheltered from the realities and alarums of the outside world. The bruises faded, the scabs dried and fell away, and I found it more and more difficult to respond to the children’s cry of ‘Story’ with something new. They shouted the punch-lines in chorus, and corrected me on the details. It was time to go back into the stream.

  In one unpleasant day-long session I told the story of the hijacking at the public inquiry, and afterwards faced the Press of the world. Then Louren flew me north in the Lear jet, back to the City of the Moon.

  On the way I told him how I intended to find the stone quarries - and then the tombs of the ancients.

  When he grinned and told me, ‘That’s the tiger - get in there, boy, and tear the bottom out of it!’ I realized that I had been enthusing and emoting a little. I remembered old Xhai’s imitation of the Sunbird, and put my fluttering hands firmly back in my lap.

  A hero’s welcome was waiting for me at the City of the Moon, they had followed my adventures on the radio. But now they opened a case of Windhoek beer and sat round me in a circle while I told the whole story again.

  ‘That Timothy, he always gave me a funny feeling.’ Solemnly Sally demonstrated her amazing gift of hindsight. ‘I could have told you there was something fishy about him.’ Then she stood up and came to kiss me on the forehead in front of them all, while I blushed crimson. ‘Anyway, we are glad you’re safe, Ben. We were so worried about you.’

  The next morning, after I had driven Louren to the airstrip and watched him take off, I went looking for Ral Davidson. I found him in the bottom of a trench measuring a slab of sandstone. He was covered by a skimpy pair of shorts and a mass of hair that almost completely obscured his features, but he was burned a deep mahogany brown by the sun and was lean and fit. I had become very fond of him. We sat on the edge of the trench dangling our feet over the side, and I explained to him about the quarry.

  ‘Gee, Doc! Why didn’t we think of that before?’ he enthused. That evening we drew up an elaborate search pattern, with a schedule to enlarge the area of search in expanding spirals each day. Ral’s gang was temporarily withdrawn from the excavations within the temple, and armed with machetes for the assault on the thick, spiny vegetation on top of the cliffs.

  The whole search was planned like a military operation. I had been dying to find an opportunity to use the walkie-talkie radio sets with which Louren had, unbidden, supplied us. This was it. Ral and I checked the radios, shouting things like ‘Over to you’ and ‘Roger!’ and ‘Read you five five!’ at each other.

  Peter Willcox muttered something about ‘boy scouts’, but I think he was a little jealous that he hadn’t been invited to join the search. Leslie and Sally, however, were infected by our enthusiasm and they victualled the expedition with sufficient food and drink to keep an army bloated and drunk for a week. They turned out in a pink dawn, still in their pyjamas and dressing-gowns, Leslie with her hair in curlers, to wave us off and wish us luck. At the head of my gang of stalwarts, laden with food and equipment, feeling a little like Scott or bold Cortez, I led them towards the gap in the cliffs which had become our regular route to the top - and ten hours later, sweaty, bedraggled, scratched by thorns, stung by hippo fly and other insects, broiled by the sun and in a filthy temper, I led them down again.

  We repeated this routine daily for the next ten days, and on the tenth evening when we paused halfway down the gap in the cliff to rest, Ral suddenly looked at the steep sides of the gap and said in a voice of wonder:

  ‘Gee, Doc! This is it!’

  For ten days we had been using the steps cut by the ancients into their quarry. Thick growth had covered the neat terraces from which they had sawn the red stone. We found some of the half-formed blocks of masonry still in situ, only a little undercut and almost unweathered in this protected gully. The marks of the saws were fresh upon them as though the workmen had laid down their tools the day before, instead of 2000 years ago. Then there were blocks, cut in the rough, and abandoned halfway through the process of dressing. Others were completed, ready for transporting - yet others were in transit, discarded haphazard along the floor of the gully.

  We cleared the undergrowth from around them and were then able to follow each fascinating step of the process of manufacture. The whole team came up to assist. They were jubilant with this new success, for we had all been a little put down with the recent total lack of progress. We sketched and mapped, measured and photographed, argued and theorized, and there was an evident renaissance of enthusiasm in all of us. The feeling that we had reached a dead end in the investigation was dispelled. I have a photograph, taken by one of the Bantu foremen who thought us all mad. We are clowning it up, posing on one of the bigger blocks of masonry. Peter strikes a Napoleonic attitude, hand in the breast of his jacket. Ral’s hairy visage is adorned with a ferocious squint, and he poises a pick-axe murderously above Peter’s head. Leslie is coyly showing a little cheesecake, and that is almost as bad as Ral’s squint, with those legs she could kick elephants to death. I am sitting on Heather’s lap, sucking my thumb. Sally has Peter’s glasses on her nose and my hat pulled down over her ears, she is trying to look hideous, but failing resoundingly. This photograph illustrates the mood of those days.

  After their assistance was no longer needed, the others went back to their separate tasks with renewed energy. Ral and I stayed on in the quarry. I brought up my theodolite and we set about calculating its extent and the amount of masonry removed from it. It was impossible to measure accur
ately the irregular excavation, but we decided that approximately a million and a half cubic yards of rock had been removed.

  Then by a study of the method of quarrying and using the volume of abandoned blocks as a very rough guide, we guessed that the ratio of dressed finished blocks to waste material would be about 40 :60. Finally we arrived at a figure of 600,000 cubic yards.

  Up to this point we had been working with fairly factual figures, but now we pushed off into an ocean of conjecture.

  ‘At least it’s not as bad as drawing a dinosaur from its footprints,’ Ral defended us, as we used the map of the foundations of the temple together with our calculation of rock volumes to reconstruct a complete elevation of the vanished City of the Moon.

  ‘Here, let me do that!’ Irritably Sally took the paint brush out of my hand on the first evening, after she had watched my efforts for ten minutes.

  ‘I think the batter of the main walls is a little excessive,’ Peter murmured critically, watching her, ‘if you compare the walls of the elliptical building at Zimbabwe—’

  ‘Yes, but take the temple of Tarxien at Malta,’ Heather interceded. ‘Or the main walls of Knossos.’ And before Ral and I could do a thing to prevent it, the project had become a group effort that replaced the nightly song-fest in the common room.

  With everybody contributing from their own particular area of the dig, and from their own specialized talents and interests, we built up a series of pictures of our city.

  Massive red walls, ornamented with the chevron patterns of the waves that made Phoenicia great. Red walls that caught the rays of the setting sun, the evening blessing of the great sun god Baal. The tall towers, symbols of fertility and prosperity, rising from the dark green foliage of the silent grove. Beyond it, the vertical gash in the cliffs that led through a secret passage into the mysterious cavern. Again a symbol of the organs of reproduction. Surely this must have been sacred to Astarte - more commonly worshipped by the Carthaginians as Tanith - goddess of earth and moon, and so ranks of white-clad priests wound in procession through the grove, past the towers and into the secret cavern.