Men of Men - Smith Wilbur (книги бесплатно без txt) 📗
"How much longer must we march through these hills?" Isazi broke his concentration. He was cooking maize cakes on a small smokeless fire of dry wood. "My beasts suffer on these rocks and steep places," he grumbled. "We should have gone farther south and passed below the hills on the open ground."
"Where Lobengula's bucks wait and pray every day for the chance to stick an assegai through a skinny little Zulu," Ralph smiled.
"There is the same danger here."
"No," Ralph shook his head. "No Matabele comes into these sacred hills without good reason. We will find no impi here, and once we come out on the far side, we will be beyond the farthest regimental kraals., "And this place of stone to which we go? There will be no impi waiting for us there?"
"Lobengula forbids any man even to look into the valley in which the stones stand. It is a death-marked place, cursed by Lobengula and his priests., azi shifted uncomfortably. "Who sets store by the Is curse of a fat Matabele dog?" he demanded, and touched the charm on his belt which warded off devils and hobgoblins and other dark secret things.
Despite his assurances to Isazi, Ralph moved with utmost caution in threading the maze of the Matopos.
During daylight he hid the bullocks in some thick patch of bush in a rock gorge, and he went ahead to reconnoitre every yard of the way and to mark it for Isazi to follow with a discreetly blazed tree trunk or a broken twig of green leaves at every turning or difficult place.
These precautions saved him from disaster. On the third day he had tied Tom in good cover and gone forward on foot to the ridge from where he could look into the next valley.
Just below the brow he was alerted by the raucous alarm call of a grey lourie, the "Go-Away" bird of the African bush. The cry came from just beyond the ridge, and as he froze to listen he heard a gentle susurration like the wind in tall grass; he ducked and jumped off the path, sprawling on his belly with his rifle tucked into the crook of his elbows, and rolled under the spreading branches of a low red berry bush, just as the first rank of Matabele warriors came sweeping over the rise ahead of him, with their cloaks and kilts and headdresses rusthng, the sound which had warned him.
From where he lay under the bush beside the path, Ralph could see only as high as their knees as they passed, but their gait was that determined businesslike trot which the Matabele call "minza h1abathi", to eat the earth greedily.
He counted them. Two hundred warriors in all went d the soft rustle of their feet dwindled, but past, an Ralph lay frozen beneath his bush, not daring even to creep deeper into the undergrowth. Minutes later, he heard the soft chant of bearers coming up from the next valley, and then they were trotting past his hiding-place, singing the praise song to the king in their deep melodious voices.
Ralph could tell by the spacing and weight of their gait that they were carrying a heavy litter.
He had guessed that the leading band was merely a vanguard. This was the main party, while the person on the litter was without any doubt Lobengula himself, and following him were his attendants, his high indunas and other important personages. After them again, more bearers carrying sleeping-mats and karosses of fur, beer pots and leather sacks of maize meal and other burdens. They filed past and disappeared, but still Ralph did not rise from hiding.
Another long silence, and then, with only a soft warriing rustle, came the rear guard, two hundred more picked warriors trotting past. After five minutes Ralph felt it was safe to crawl out onto the path and dust the damp leaf mould from his knees and elbows.
From the top of the ridge he stared back in the direction which Lobengula's party had taken, puzzled as to where they were all headed and why. He knew from Cathy that Rudd and his party were still at Gubulawayo and that Clinton Codrington and Robyn were with them, negotiating the concession that mister Rhodes so desperately needed.
Why would Lobengula leave such important guests at his kraal and come up here into these sacred and deserted hills?
There was no answer, and Ralph had to be content with having so narrowly escaped discovery, and to be now alerted to the presence of large parties of warriors in the area.
He moved forward with even more caution than before so that it took three more nights of travel at the pace of A the bullocks before they came out of another pass between bald granite cliffs and saw the open forests of tall and lovely trees rolling away below them, silver and charcoal in the moonlight.
n the dawn Ralph climbed the cliff to the peak of the last of the Matopos Hills, and on the eastern horizon almost exactly where he had hoped to find it, he picked out the far blue silhouette of a solitary kopje standing above the forested plain. It was still thirty miles distant, but the shape of a crouching lion was unmistakable, and it fitted exactly the description in Zouga Ballantyrie's notes: "The bill which I have named "Lion's Head" stands high above the surrounding terrain, and points the traveller unerringly towards great Zimbabwe A man might have walked in the shadow of the massstone walls and never known they were there, so ive dense was the growth that covered them. It was a jungle of hana and flowering creepers, while from the very walls themselves grew the twisting serpentine roots of the strangler figs, wedging open the mortarless joints of the stonework and bringing it down in screes of fallen blocks.
Above the level of the high walls soared the heads of other tall trees, grown to giants in the time since the last inhabitant had fled this place or died within its labyrinth of passages and courtyards. When Zouga Ballantyne had discovered this massive keep before Ralph's birth, it had taken him almost two days to find the narrow gateway under this mass of tangled vegetation, but now his directions and descriptions led Ralph immediately to it.
Ralph stood before the ancient portals and looked up at the pattern of chevron stone blocks which decorated the top of the wall thirty feet above his head, and was seized with a primeval superstitious awe.
Though he could see the marks of his father's axe, and the old stumps cut away on each side of the opening, a veil of trailing plants had regrown to screen the gateway , proof that no human being had entered it since Zouga's visit more than twenty-five years before.
The steps that led up to the gateway had been dished by the passage of the feet of the ancient inhabitants over the centuries. Ralph drew a deep breath, and silently reminded himself that he was a civilized Christian; but his superstitious fears lingered as he climbed the stairs, ducked under the trailing creepers and stepped through the gateway.
He found himself in a narrow twisted stone gut between high walls open to the sky. He followed the passage, clambering over fallen stonework blocks and forcing his way through brush and undergrowth that choked it, until abruptly he came out into a wide courtyard, dominated by an immense cylindrical tower of lichen-coated grey granite.
It was exactly as his father had described it, even to the damaged parapet of the tower where Zouga had broken in to discover whether the interior of the towering structure contained a secret treasure chamber.
He knew that his father had ransacked the ruins for treasure, he had even torn up and sieved the earth of this temple enclosure for gold. He had retrieved almost a thousand ounces of the yellow metal, small beads and flakes of foil, finely woven gold wire and tiny ingots the size of an infant's finger, and Ralph knew that the only treasure left for him were the idols of green soapstone.
