Leopard Hunts in Darkness - Smith Wilbur (книга бесплатный формат .TXT) 📗

He reached it and gave himself a push off from the rock.

He was going down more readily now as the water pressure compressed the air in his lungs and reduced his buoyancy.

The steep rocky floor of the pool flew in a myopic blur past his face, and he rolled on his side and scanned the walls of gleaming limestone on each side for an opening.

There was a double tug on the rope around his waist: one minute gone, and he saw the entrance to the tomb below him. It was an almost circular opening in the left-hand wall of the main gallery, and it reminded Craig of the empty eye-socket in a human skull.

He sank down towards it and put out a hand to brace himself on the limestone sill above the opening. The mouth of the tomb was wide enough for a man to stoop through. He ran his hand over the walls and they were polished by running water and silky with a coating of slime. Craig guessed that this was a drain-hole from the earth's surface carved out of the limestone by the filtering of rain waters over the millennia.

He was suddenly afraid. There was something forbidding and threatening about this dark entrance. He glanced back towards the surface. He could see the faint reflected glow of old Vusamanzi's lantern forty feet above him, and the icy water sapped his vitality and courage. He wanted to thrash wildly back towards the surface, and he felt the first involuntary pumping of his lungs.

Something tugged at his waist, and for an instant he teetered on the edge of wild Panic before he realized it was the signal. Two minutes almost his limit.

He forced himself forward into the entrance of the tomb. It angled gently upwards again, round as a sewer pipe. Craig swam for twenty feet flashing the torch beam ahead of him, but the water was turning murky and dark as he stirred up the sediment from the floor.

Abruptly the passagended and he ran his hand over rough rock. His lungm were beginning to pump in earnest and there was a singing in his ears, his vision was clouded with swirling sediment and the beginnings of dizzy vertigo, but he forced himself to stay on and examine the end of the tunnel from side to side and top to bottom, running his free hand over it.

Quickly he realized that he was feeling a wall of limestone masonry, packed carefully into place to block off the tunnel, and his spirits plunged. The old witch-doctors had once again sealed Lobengula's tomb, and in the brief seconds he had left, he realized that they had made a thorough job of it.

His searching fingers touched something with a smooth metallic feel lying at the foot of the wall. He took it up and turned away from the wall, shoving himself down the passage, with panic and the need for air rising in him. He reached the main gallery again, still carrying the metallic object in one hand.

High above him, the lantern glowed and he swam upwards, with his senses beginning to flutter likea candle flame in the wind; darkness and stars of light played before his eyes as his brain starved and he felt the first deadly lethargy turning his hands and his foot to lead.

With a jerk, the rope around his waist came tight, and he felt himself being drawn swiftly upwards. Three minutes, and Tungata was pulling him out. The lantern light spun dizzily overhead as he windmilled on the end of the rope, and he could not pre vent himself, he tried to breathe and freezing water shot down his throat and went into his lungs, stinging like the cut of a razor.

He exploded out through the surface, and Tungata was waist-deep, hauling double-handed on the life-line. The instant he broke through, Tungata seized him, a thick muscled arm around his chest, and he dragged Craig to the edge.

The two girls were ready to grab his wrists and help him up onto the slab. Craig collapsed on his side, doubled up likea foetus, coughing and heaving the water from his lungs and shaking violently with cold.

Sally-Anne rolled him onto his stomach and bore down on his back with both hands. Water and vomit shot up his throat, but his breathing gradually eased and at last he sat up wiping his mouth. Sally-Anne had stripped off her own shirt and was chafing him vigorously with it. In the lantern light his body was dappled blue with cold and he was still shivering uncontrollably.

"How do you feel?" Sarah asked.

"Bloody marvelous," he gasped. "Nothing likea bracing dip "He's all right," Tungata assured them, "as soon as he St. arts snarling, he's all right." Craig cupped his hands over the chimney of the lantern for warmth and gradually his shivering eased. Sarah leaned across to Tungata, and with a wicked smile directed at Craig's naked lower body, whispered something.

"Right on! Tungata chuckled, imitating a black Amen, can accent. "And what's more, these honkys ain't got no rhythm neither." Craig quickly reached for his underpants, and Sally, Anne rushed loyally to his defence. "You're not seeing him at his best, that water is freezing." Craig's hands were stained red, brown with rust, they marked his underpants and he remembered the metal object he had found at the wall of the tomb. It lay where he had dropped it at the" edge of the slab.

"Part of a trek chain," he said, as he picked it up. "From an ox wagon." Vusamanzi had been squatting silently on one side, at the edge of the lantern light. Now he spoke. "That chain was from the king's wag4. My grandfather used it to lower the king's body down the shaft." "So you have found the king's grave?" Tungata asked.

This mundane little scrap of metal was for all of them the proof that changed fantasy to factual reality.

"I think so," Craig began strapping on his leg, "but we will never know for certain." They all watched his face and waited. Craig suffered another paroxysm of coughing, then his breathing settled and he went on, "There is a passage, just as Vusamanzi described. It is about another fifteen feet below that pinnacle and it goes off to die left, a round opening with a shaft that rises sharply. About twenty feet from the entrance, the shaft has been blocked with masonry, big blocks and lumps of limestone, packed closely together. There is no way of telling how thick the wall is, but one thing is certain, it is going to take a lot of work to get through it I had about twenty seconds" endurance at the face, not long enough to prise out even a single block.