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

He went down to his own dugout and lit one of the candles, stuck it in a niche of the wall and from his holdall took his notebook and ballpoint pen. The words were bubbling and frothing in his brain, like boiling milk. He put the point of the pen to the lined white paper and it sped away across the page likea living thing. Words came spurting out of him in a joyous, long, pent-up orgasm and All spilled untidily over the paper. He stopped only to relight fresh candles from the guttering stump.

In the morning his eyes were red and burning from the strain. He felt weak and shaky as though he had run too far and too fast, but the notebook was three, quarters filled and he was strangely elated.

His elation lasted him well into the hot brilliant morning, enhanced by Sally Anne change of attitude towards him. She was still reserved and quiet, but at least she listened when he spoke and replied seriously and thoughtfully. Once or twice she even smiled, and then her too-large mouth and nose were at last in harmony with the rest of her face. Craig found it difficult to concentrate on the plight of the men that they had come to study, until he realized Sally-Anne's compassion and listened to her speaking freely for the first time.

"It would be so easy to dismiss them as brutish criminals," she murmured, watching their expressionless faces and guarded eyes, "until you realize how they have been deprived of all humanizing influences. Most of them were abducted from their schoolrooms in their early teens and taken into the guerrilla training-camps. They have nothing, have never had any possession of their own except an AK 47 rifle. How can we expect them to respect the persons and properties of others? Craig, please ask that one how old he is"

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"He does not knoW," Craig translated for her. "He does not know when he' was born, nor where his parents are."

"He does not even have a simple birthright," Sally' Anne pointed out, and suddenly Craig remembered how churlishly he could reject a wine that was not exactly to his taste, or how thoughtlessly he could order a new suit of clothing, or enter the first-class cabin of an airliner while these men wore only a ragged pair of shorts, without even a pair of shoes or a blanket to protect them.

"The abyss between the haves and the have-nots of this world will suck us all into destruction," Sally' Anne said as she recorded through her Nikon lens that dumb-animal resignation that lies beyond despair. "Ask that one how he is treated here," she insisted, and when Craig spoke to him the man stared at him without comprehension, as though the question was meaningless, and slowly Craig's sense of well-being burned off like mist in the morning.

In the open huts the lessons were political orientation, and the role of the responsible citizen in the socialist state.

On the blackboards, diagrams showed the relationship of parliament to the judiciary and the executive branches of the state. They had been copied onto the boards in a laboured, semi-literate hand by bored instructors and were recited parrot-fashion by the rows of squatting detainees.

Their obvious lack of comprehension depressed Craig even more.

As they trudged back up the hill to their quarters, a thought struck Craig and he turned to Peter Fungabera.

"All the men here are Matabele, aren't they?"

"That is true," Peter nodded. "We keep the tribes segregated it reduces friction." "Are there any Shana detainees?" Craig insisted.

oh, yes, Peter assured him. "The camps for them are up in the eastern highlands exactly the same conditions-" At sunset the generator powering the radio was started and twenty minutes later Peter Fungabera came down to the dugout where Craig was re-reading and correcting his writing of the previous night.

"There is a message for you, Craig, relayed by Morgan Oxford at the American Embassy." Craig jumped to his feet eagerly. He had arranged for Henry Pickering's reply to be passed on to him as soon as it was received. He took the sheet of notepaper on which Peter had jotted the radio transmission, and read; "For Mellow. Stop. My personal enthusiasm for your project not shared by others. Stop. Ashe Levy unwilling to advance or guarantee. Stop. Loans Committee here requires substantial additional collateral before funding. Stop. Regrets and best wishes. Henry." Craig read the message once fast and then again very slowly.

"None of my business," Peter Fungabera murmured, "but I presume this concerns your plans for the place you call Zambezi Waters?" "That's right and it puts the kibosh on those, I'm afraid," Craig told him bitterly.

"Henry?"

"A friend, a banker perhaps I relied on him too much." "Yes," Peter Fungabera said thoughtfully, "it looks that way, doesn't it?" Even though he had missed the previous night, Craig had difficulty sleeping. His mat was iron-hard and the hellish chorus of the hyena pack in the forest echoed his sombre mood.

On the long drive back to the airstrip at Tuti Mission, he sat beside the driver and took no part in the conversation of Peter and Sally' Anne in the seat behind him.

Only now did he realize how much store he had set on buying Rholands, and he was bitterly angry with Ashe Levy who had refused his qupport and with Henry Pickering who had not tried hard' enough and his damned Loans Committee who couI& not see the ends of their own noses.

Sally-Anne insisted on stopping once again at the mission schoolhouse to renew her acquaintance with Sarah, the Matabele teacher.

This time Sarah was prepared and offered her visitors tea. In no mood for pleasantries, Craig found a seat on the low veranda wall well separated from the others, and began scheming without real optimism how he might circumvent Henry Pickering's refusal.

Sarah came to him demurely with an enamel mug of tea

07 on a carved wooden tray. As she offered it, her back was turned to Peter Fungabera.