The Sunbird Page 4

  ‘Okay, Roger,’ he said, slipping the map and stopwatch into the pocket beside his seat. ‘I’ve got her.’ And the Lear stood on one wing as he pulled her around in a maximum-rate turn. It was so finely executed that Sally and I merely sagged a little at the knees as gravity caught us.

  He levelled out and flew for three minutes on even keel, retracing our course. I stole a glance at Sally’s face. It was bright-eyed, and flushed with excitement - she was staring ahead into the impenetrable murk.

  Again Louren banked the aircraft steeply and came out of the turn flying the reciprocal of our previous course and eased the nose downwards. This was no cautious groping with flaps and half throttle. Louren flew us in boldly and fast. Sally’s hand groped for mine and squeezed. I was afraid and angry with both of them, I was too old for these children’s games, but I returned her grip. As much for my own comfort as hers.

  ‘Christ, Lo,’ I blurted. ‘Take it easy, will you!’ And no one took the least notice of me. Roger was frozen in his seat, hands gripping the armrests, staring ahead. Louren was deceptively relaxed behind the controls, as he hurtled us into mortal danger - and Sally, damn her, was grinning all over her face and hanging on to my icy hand like a child on a roller coaster.

  Suddenly we were into rain, pearly strings and snakes of it writhing back over the rounded Perspex windscreen. I tried to protest again, but my voice stuck somewhere in my parched throat. There was wind outside now. It buffeted the sleek gleaming body of the Lear, and the wings rocked. I felt like crying. I didn’t want to die now. Yesterday would have been fine, but not after last night.

  Before my own reflexes had even registered, Louren had seen the ground and caught the headlong plunge of the jet. With a soft shudder that threw Sally and me gently together he pulled us up level with the earth.

  This was even more terrifying than the blind fall through space. The dark hazy outlines of the low scrubby tree-tops flicked by our wingtips close enough to touch, while ahead of us through the rain-mist an occasional big baobab tree loomed and Louren eased the jet over its greedily clutching branches. Seconds that seemed like a lifetime passed, then abruptly the filthy curtains of rain and cloud were stripped aside and we burst into a freak hole in the weather.

  There before us, full in our path and washed by watery sunlight, stood a rampart of red stone cliffs. It was only the merest fleeting glimpse of red rock rushing down on us, then Louren had dragged the jet up on its tail and the rock seemed almost to scrape our belly as we slid over the crest and arrowed upwards into the clouds with the force of gravity squashing me down on buckling knees.

  No one spoke until we had plunged out into the sunlight high above. Sally softly disengaged her hand from mine as Louren turned in his seat to look at us. I noticed with grim satisfaction that both he and Sally were looking slightly greenish with reaction. They stared at each other for a moment. Then Louren snorted with laughter.

  ‘Look at Ben’s face!’ he roared and Sally thought that was very funny. When they finished laughing, Sally asked eagerly.

  ‘Did anyone see the ruins? I just got a glimpse of the hills, but did anyone see the ruins?’

  ‘The only thing I saw,’ muttered Roger, ‘was my own hairy little ring.’ And I knew how he felt.

  The cloud was breaking up by the time we reached Maun. Roger took us in through a gap and put us down sedately, and Peter Larkin was waiting for us.

  Peter is one of the very few left. An anachronism, complete with fat cartridges looped to the breast of his bush jacket and his trousers tucked into the tops of mosquito boots. He has a big red beefy face and huge hands, the right index finger scarred by the recoil of heavy rifles. His single level of communication is a gravelly, whisky-raddled shout. He has no feelings and very little intelligence, so consequently never experiences fear. He has lived in Africa all his life and never bothered to learn a native language. He uses the lingua franca of South Africa, the bastard Fanagalo, and emphasizes his points with boot or fist. His knowledge of the animals on which he preys is limited to how to find them and where to aim to bring them down. Yet there is something appealing about him in an elephantine oafish way.

  While his gang of hunting boys loaded our gear into the trucks he shouted amiable inanities at Louren and me.

  ‘Wish I was coming with you. Got this bunch of yanks arriving tomorrow - with a big sack of green dollars. Short notice, you gave me, Mr Sturvesant. But I’m giving you my best boys. Good rains in the south, be plenty of game in the area. Should run into gemsbok this time of year. And jumbo, of course, shouldn’t be surprised if you get a simba or two—’

  The coy use of pet names for game animals sickens me, especially when the intention is to blast them with a high-velocity rifle. I went to where Sally was supervising the packing of our gear.

  ‘It’s after one o’clock already,’ she protested. ‘When do we get cracking?’

  ‘We’ll probably push through to the top end of the Makarikari Pan tonight. It’s about 200 miles on a fair road. Tomorrow we’ll bash off into the deep bush.’

  ‘Is Ernest Hemingway coming with us?’ she asked, eyeing Peter Larkin with distaste.

  ‘No such luck,’ I assured her. I was trying to form some idea of those who were accompanying us. Two drivers, their superior status evident in the white shirts, long grey slacks and shod feet, with paisley-patterned scarves knotted at the throat. One for each of the three-ton trucks. Then there was the cook, carrying a lot of weight from his sampling, skin glossy from good food. Two gnarled and grey-headed gunboys who had jealously taken out Louren’s sporting rifles from the other luggage, had unpacked them from their travelling cases, and were now fondling and caressing them lovingly. These were the elite and took no part in the frenzied scurryings of the camp boys as they packed away our gear. Bamangwatos most of them, I listened briefly to their chattering. The gunboys were Matabele, as was to be expected and the drivers were Shangaans. Good, I would understand every word on this expedition.

  ‘By the way. Sal,’ I told her quietly, ‘don’t let on that I speak the language.’

  ‘Why?’ She looked startled.

  ‘I like to monitor the goings-on and if they know I understand they’ll freeze.’

  ‘Svengali!’ She pulled a face at me. I don’t think I’d have laughed if anyone else had called me that. It was a bit too close to the bone. We went to shake hands and say goodbye to Roger, the pilot.

  ‘Don’t frighten the lions,’ Roger told Sally. Clearly she had made another conquest. He climbed into the jet and we stood in a group and watched him taxi out to the end of the runway and then take off and wing away southwards.

  ‘What are we waiting for?’ asked Louren.

  ‘What indeed,’ I agreed.

  Louren took the wheel of the Land-Rover and I climbed in beside him. Sally was in the back seat with the gunbearers on the bench seats.

  ‘With you two I feel a damned sight safer on the ground,’ I said.

  The road ran through open scrubland and baobab country. Dry and sun-scorched. The Land-Rover lifted a pale bank of drifting dust, and the two trucks followed us at a distance to let it settle.

  There were occasional steep, rock-strewn dry river-beds to cross, and at intervals we passed villages of mud and thatched huts where the naked pot-bellied piccaninnies lined the side of the road to wave and sing as though we were royalty. Sally soon ran out of pennies, throwing them to watch the resulting scramble, and clapping her hands with delight. When she started tossing our lunch out of the window I pulled my guitar from its case to distract her.

  ‘Sing happy, Ben,’ Sally instructed.

  ‘And bawdy,’ added Louren. I think it was to needle her, or perhaps test her.

  ‘Yes,’ Sally agreed readily. ‘Make it meaty and happy.’

  And I started with the saga of the Wild, Wild Duck, with Sal and Louren shouting the chorus at the end of each verse.

  We were children going on a picnic that first day out, and we made a good ru
n of it to the pan. The sun was a big fat ball of fire amongst the tattered streamers of cloud on the horizon when we came out on the edge of the pan. Louren parked the Land-Rover and we climbed out to wait for the trucks and stared out with silent awe across that sombre, glistening plain that stretched away to the range of the eye.

  When the trucks arrived they spilled their load of black servants before they had properly stopped, and I timed it at seventeen and a half minutes to when the tents were pitched, the camp-beds made up and the three of us sitting around the fire, drinking Glen Grant malt on the rocks of glistening ice that dewed the glasses. From the cooking fire drifted the tantalizing smell of the hunter’s pot as our cook reheated it and tossed in a dash more garlic and oregano. They were a good, cheerful gang that Larkin had given us and after we had eaten they gathered around their own fire fifty yards away and sweetened the night with the old hunting songs.

  I sat and listened half to them, and half to the involved and heated argument between Sal and Louren. I could have warned her that he was playing the devil’s advocate, needling her again, but I enjoyed the interplay of two good minds. Whenever the discussion threatened to degenerate into personal abuse and actual physical violence, I intervened reluctantly and herded them back to safety.

  Sally was staunchly defending the premise of my book Ophir that postulated an invasion of southern central Africa by Phoenician or Carthaginian colonizers in about 200 BC and which flourished until about AD 450, before disappearing abruptly.

  ‘They were not equipped for a major voyage of discovery as early as that,’ Louren challenged. ‘Let alone a colonizing…’

  ‘You will find, Mr Sturvesant, that Herodotus records a circumnavigation of Africa in the reign of King Necho. It was led by six Phoenician navigators as early as 600 BC or thereabouts. They started at the apex of the Red Sea and in three years returned through the Pillars of Hercules.’

  ‘A single voyage,’ Louren pointed out.

  ‘Not a single voyage, Mr Sturvesant. Hanno sailed from Gibraltar to a point south in the west coast of Africa in about 460 BC, a voyage from which he returned with bartered ivory and gold sufficient to whet the appetites of all the merchant adventurers.’

  Still Louren attacked her dates. ‘How do you get a date of 200 BC, when the very earliest carbon-datings from the foundations of Zimbabwe are mid-fifth century AD and most of them are later?’

  ‘We are not concerned with Zimbabwe, but with the culture that preceded it,’ Sally came back at him. ‘Zimbabwe could have been built towards the end of the ancients reign, probably only occupied for a short time before they disappeared; that would fit neatly with your carbon-dating of around AD 450. Besides the carbon-dating from the ancient mines at Shala and Inswezwe show results at 250 and 300 BC.’ Then she ended it with fine feminine logic. ‘Anyway, carbon-dating isn’t that accurate. It could be out by hundreds of years.’

  ‘The mines were worked by the Bantu,’ declared Louren. ‘And Caton-Thomas - and of course, more recently, Summers - said—’

  Fiercely she attacked Louren. ‘Did the Bantu, who only probably arrived in the area about AD 300 suddenly conceive of a brilliant prospecting talent which enabled them to locate the metal lodes where not a scrap of it showed in the ore as visible gold or copper? Did they at the same time develop engineering know-how that enabled them to remove 250,000,000 tons of ore from rock at depth - remember they had never demonstrated these talents before - and did they abruptly forget or cease to use them for another thousand years?’

  ‘Well, the Arab traders - they may have—’ Louren began but Sally rode over him without a check.

  ‘Why did they mine it at such risk and expenditure of energy? Gold has no value to the Bantu - cattle are their standard of wealth. Where did they learn how to dress and use rock for building? The Bantu had never done it before. Suddenly the art was fully fledged and highly skilled and then instead of becoming more refined, the art deteriorated rapidly and then died out.’

  With assumed reluctance Louren retreated steadily before her onslaughts, but he made his final stand when my own theory of incursion from the west instead of the east came under discussion. Louren had read the views and arguments of all my many detractors and critics and he repeated them now.

  The accepted theory was that the point of entry was from the Sofala coast, or the mouth of the Zambezi. I had put forward the theory, based on the evidence of early texts and extensive excavations of my own, that a Mediterranean people left that sea through the Pillars of Hercules, and voyaged steadily down the western coast of Africa, probably establishing trading stations on the Gold, Ivory and Nigerian coasts, until their southward explorations led them into an unpeopled vacuum. I guessed at a river mouth long since dried and silted or altered in its course and depth in the present day. A river that drained what then would have been the huge lakes of Makarikari, Ngami, and others long since disappeared, shrivelled by the progressive desiccation of southern Africa. They entered the river, possibly the Cunene or the Orange, journeyed up it to the source, and from there sent their metallurgists overland to discover the ancient mines of Manica - and who knows but they discovered the diamonds in the gravel of the lakes and rivers, and certainly they would have hunted the vast herds of elephant that roamed the land. Sufficient wealth to justify the establishment of a city, a great walled fortress and trading station. Where would they site this city? Clearly at the limit of water-borne travel. On the shores of the farthest lake. Makarikari, perhaps? Or the lake that overflowed the present boundaries of the great salt pan.

  Sally and Louren argued with increasing acrimony and bitterness. Sally called him ‘an impossible man’, and he countered with ‘madam know-it-all’. Then suddenly Louren capitulated and the next minute all three of us were joyously anticipating the discovery of the lost city of Makarikari.

  ‘The lake would have spread at least fifty miles beyond the boundaries of the present pan,’ Louren pointed out. ‘Only a hundred years ago Burchell describes Lake Ngami as an inland sea, and nowadays it’s a puddle you can jump across without straining yourself. It’s altogether probable that the ancient lake extended to the foot of the hills on which our ruins are placed. We have plenty of evidence of the gradual desiccation and drying up of southern Africa, read Cornwallis Harris’ description of the forests and rivers which no longer exist.’

  ‘Ben.’ Sally grabbed my arm with excitement. ‘The crescent-shape of the city, do you remember me puzzling on it? It could be the shape of the ancient harbour with the two following the shoreline!’

  ‘God,’ Louren whispered. ‘I can hardly wait for tomorrow.’

  It was after midnight, and the whisky bottles had taken a terrible beating before Louren and Sally went off to their tents. I knew I could not sleep so I left the camp, passing the fire around which lay the blanket-cocooned bodies of our servants, and I walked out onto the surface of the pan. The stars lit the salt a ghastly grey, and it crunched crisply with each pace I took. I walked for a long time, stopping once to listen to the distant roaring of a lion, from the edge of the bush. When I returned to the camp a lantern still burned in Sally’s tent, and her silhouette was magnified against the pale canvas, a huge, dark portrait of my love. She was reading, sitting cross-legged upon her camp-bed, but as I watched she reached across and extinguished the lantern.

  I waited awhile, gathering my courage, then I went to her tent, and my heart threatened to hammer its way out of its malformed rib-cage.

  ‘Sal?’

  ‘Ben?’ she answered my whisper softly.

  ‘May I come in?’ She hesitated before she replied.

  ‘All right-just for a minute.’

  I went into the tent, and in the gloom her nightdress was a pale blur. I groped for her face, and touched her cheek.

  ‘I came to tell you that I love you,’ I said softly, and I heard her little catch of breath in the dark. When she answered her voice was gentle.

  ‘Ben,’ she whispered. ‘Dear, sweet B
en.’

  ‘I would like to be with you tonight.’

  And it seemed to me there was regret in her voice as she replied, ‘No, Ben. Everyone would know about it. I don’t want that.’

  The morning started off as the previous day had ended. Everybody was in high spirits, laughing at the breakfast table. The servants sky-larked as they broke camp and repacked the truck sand by seven o’clock we had left the road and were following the edge of the pan.

  The Land-Rover leading and the trucks following our tracks through scrub and rank grass, and across the dry ravines which meandered down to the pan.

  We had been going for an hour when I saw a flash of pale movement among the trees ahead of us, and three stately gemsbok broke out onto the open pan and trotted in single file away from us. They moved heavily, like fat ponies, the pale mulberry of their coats and the elaborate black and white face masks standing out clearly against the grey of the pan surface.

  Louren slammed the brake on the Land-Rover, and with the smoothly executed timing of the professional the old Matabele gunbearer put the big .375 Magnum Holland Holland into Louren’s hand and he was gone, running doubled-up behind the fringe of grass that lined the edge of the pan.

  ‘Is he going to kill them?’ asked Sally in her little-girl voice. I nodded and she went on, ‘Why-but why?’

  ‘It’s one of the things he likes doing.’

  ‘But they are so beautiful,’ she protested.

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed. Out on the pan, about six hundred yards from the Land-Rover, the gemsbok had stopped. They were standing broadside to us. Staring at us intently with heads held high, and long slender horns erect.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ Sal pointed at Louren who was still running along the edge of the pan.