Leopard Hunts in Darkness - Smith Wilbur (книга бесплатный формат .TXT) 📗
This was the provocation for which Rhodes and his henchmen had worked and planned. They fell upon Lobengula in a savage and merciless campaign. They machine-gunned his famous imp is and shattered the Matabele nation. Then they galloped to Lobengula's kraal at GuBulawayo. However, Lobengula, that wily thief and coward, had already fled northwards, taking with him his wives, his herds, what remained of his fighting imp is and his diamonds.
"A small force of white men pursued him for part of the way, until they ran into a Matabele ambush and were slaughtered to a man. More white men would have followed Lobengula, but the rains came and turned the veld to mud and the rivers to torrents. So Lobengula escaped with his treasure. He wandered on northwards without a goal, until the will to go on deserted him.
"In a wild and lonely place, he called Gandang, his half brother to him. He entrusted to him the care of the nation, and, coward to the very end, ordered his witch doctor to prepare a poisonous potion and drank it down.
"Gandang sat his body upright in a cave. Around his body he placed all Lobengula's possessions: his assegais and regimental plumes and furs, his sleeping-mat and head stool his guns and knives and beer-pots and his diaMOnds. Lobengula's corpse was wrapped in a sitting osition in the green skin of a leopard and at his feet were placed the five gallon beer-pots of diamonds. Then the entrance to the cave was carefully sealed and disguised, and Gandang led the Matabele nation back to become the slaves of Rhodes and his Royal Charter Company.
"You ask when this occurred? It was in the rainy season of the year 1894. Not long ago barely ninety years ago. IN_ "You ask where? The answer is very close to where we now sit. Probably within twenty miles, of us. Lobengula travelled directly northwards from GuBulawayo and had almost reached the Zambezi river before he despaired and committed suicide.
"You ask if any living man knows the exact location of the treasure cave? The answer is yes!" Peter Fungabera stopped, and then exclaimed, "Oh, do forgive me, my dear Tungata, I have neglected to offer you File 342 any refreshment." He called for another glass, and when it came, filled it with water and ice and, with his own hands, carried it to Tungata.
Tungata held the glass in both hands and drank with careful control, a sip at a time.
"Now, where was ! Peter Fungabera returned to his chair behind the desk.
"You were telling us about the cave," the white man with the pale eyes could not resist.
"Ah, yes, of course. Well, it seems that before Lobengula died, he charged this half-brother of his, Gandang, with the guardianship of the diamonds. He is supposed to have told him, "There will come a day when my people will need these diamonds. You and your son and his sons will keep this treasure until that day."
"So the secret was passed on in the Kumalo family, the so-called royal family of the Matabele. When a chosen son reached his manhood he was taken by his father or his grandfather on a pilgrimage." Tungata. was so reduced by his ordeal that he felt weak and feverish, his mind-floated and the iced water in his empty stomach seemed to drug him, so that fantasy became mixed with reality, and the memory of his own pilgrimage to Lobengula's tomb was so vivid that he seemed to be reliving it as he listened to Peter Fungabera's voice.
It had been during his-first year as an undergraduate at the University of Rhodelia. He had gone home to spend the long vacation with his grandfather. Gideon Kumalo was the assistant headmaster at Khami Mission School, just outside the town of Bulawayo.
"I have a great treat for you," the old man had greeted him, smiling through the thick lenses of his spectacles. He still had a little of his eyesight left, though within the following five years he would lose the last vestiges of it.
"We are going on a journey together, Vundla." It was the old man's pet name for him. VundLa, the hare, the clever lively animal always beloved by the Africans. The slaves had taken him with them in legend to America in the form of Bret Rabbit.
The two of them took the bus northwards, changing half a dozen times at lonely trading, stores or remote crossroads, sometimes waiting for forty-eight hours at a stop, when their connection was delayed. However, the delay did not rankle. They made a picnic of it, sitting at night round their camp-fire and talking.
What marvelous stories old grandfather Gideon could tell. Fables and legends and tribal histories, but it was the histories that fascinated Tungata. He could hear them repeated fifty times without tiring of them: the story of Mzilikazi's exodus from Zululand, and the umfecane, the war with the Boers, and the crossing of the Limpopo river.
He could recite the names of the glorious imp is and the men who had commanded them, the campaigns they had waged and the battle honours they had won.
Most especially, he learned from the old man the history 0 f the "Motes who burrowed under a mountain', the impi that had been founded and commanded by his great grandfather, Baro the Axe. He learned to sing the war songs and the praise songs of the Moles, and he dreamed that in a perfect world he would himself have commanded the Moles one day, wearing the regimental head-band of mole-skin and the furs and the feathers.
So the pair, the greybeard with failing eyesight and the stripling, travelled together for five leisurely companionship-filled days, until at the old man's request, the rackety, dusty old bus set them down on a rutted dirt track in the forest.
"Mark this spot well, Vundla," Gideon instructed. "Here, the water-course with the fall of rock, and the kopje over there shaped likea sleeping lion this is the starting point.
*I "They set off northwards through the forest, following a Succession of landmarks that the old man made him recite in the form of a rhyming poem. Tungata found he could still recite it without hesitation: The beginning is the lion that sleeps, follow his gaze to the crossing place of the e rant-" It was another three days" travel at Gideon's reduced "pace before he toiled up the steep hillside with Tungata handing him over the worst places, and they stood before the tomb of Lobengula at last.
