A Sparrow Falls [047 4.9]

By Wilbur Smith.

Synopsis:

Mark never heard the Mauser shot for the bullet came ahead of the sound.
There was only the massive shock in the upper part of his body, and then
he was hurled backwards with a violence that drove the air from his
lungs.  The earth opened before him, and as he fell there was the
sensation of being ingulfed in a swirling vortax of blacknessand he knew
for just a fleeting instant of time that he was dead.

From the trenches of France, General Sean Courtney comes back to fame
fortune and a seat in the Government.  Mark Anders the courageous young
South african whom he has come to regard as his own son, returns to
nothing, his grandfather murdered, his property seized by an unknown
company.  At the bottom of the mystery is Sean's son Dirk, the jealous ,
violent and power-crazed genius whose allconsuming hatred can only end
in blood.

The novels of Wilbur Smith

The Courtney Novels:

When the Lion Feeds

The Sound of Thunder

A Sparrow Falls

The Burning Shore

Power of the Sword

Rage

A Time to Die

The Ballantyne Novels:

A Falcon Flies

Men of Men

The Angels Weep

The Leopard Hunts in Darkness

Also: The Dark of the Sun

Shout at the Devil

Gold Mine

The Diamond Hunters

The Sunbird Eagle in the Sky

The Eye of the Tiger

Cry Wolf

Hungry as the Sea

Wild justice

Golden Fox

Elephant Song

A Sparrow Falls

Wilbur Smith was born in Central Africa in 1933.  He was educated at
Michaelhouse and Rhodes University.

He became a full-time writer in 1964 after the successful publication of
When the Lion Feeds, and has since written twenty novels, meticulously
researched on his numerous expeditions worldwide.

He normally travels from November to February, often spending a month
skiing in Switzerland, and visiting Australia and New Zealand for sea
fishing.  During his summer break, he visits environments as diverse as
Alaska and the dwindling wilderness of the African interior.  He has an
abiding concern for the peoples and wildlife of his native continent, an
interest strongly reflected in his novels.

He is married to Danielle, to whom his last nineteen books have been
dedicated.

WILBUR SMITH A Sparrow Falls

For Danielle

A Mandarin Paperback A SPARROW FALLS

First published in Great Britain 1977 by William Heinemann Ltd

This edition published 1992 by Mandarin Paperbacks an imprint of Reed
Consumer Books Ltd Michelin House, 81 Fulham Road, London SW3 6RB and
Auckland, Melbourne, Singapore and Toronto

Reprinted 1992 (five times), 1993

Copyright  Wilbur Smith 1977 A CIP catalogue record for this title is
available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7493 0551 7

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berks

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of
trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated
without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A sky the colour of old bruises hung low over the battlefields of
France, and rolled with ponderous dignity towards the German lines.

Brigadier-General Sean Courtney had spent four winters in France and
now, with the eye of a cattleman and a farmer, he could judge this
weather almost as accurately as that of his native Africa.  It will snow
tonight, he grunted, and Lieutenant Nick van der Heever, his orderly
officer, glanced back at him over his shoulder.  I shouldn't wonder,
sir.  Van der Heever was heavily laden.  In addition to his service
rifle and webbing, he carried a canvas kitbag across his shoulder, for
General Courtney was on his way to dine as a mess guest of the 2nd
Battalion.  At this moment the Colonel and officers of the.  2nd
Battalion were completely unaware of the impending honour, and Sean
grinned in wicked anticipation at the panic that his unannounced arrival
would create.  The contents of the kitbag would be some small
compensation for the shock, for it included half a dozen bottles of
pinch bottle Haig and a fat goose.

Nevertheless, Sean was aware that his officers found his informal
behaviour and his habit of arriving suddenly in the front lines,
unannounced and unattended by his staff, more than a little
disconcerting.  Only a week before, he had overheard a field telephone
conversation on a crossed line between a major and a captain.

The old bastard thinks he's still fighting the Boer War.

Can't you keep him in a cage back there at H.  Q.?  How do you cage a
bull elephant?  Well, at least warn us when he's on his way Sean grinned
again and trudged on after his orderly officer, the folds of his
great-coat flapping about his putteed legs and, for warmth, a silk scarf
wrapped around his head beneath the soup-plate shape of his helmet.  The
boards bounced under his feet and the gluey mud sucked and gurgled
beneath them at the passing weight of the two men.

This part of the line was unfamiliar, the brigade had moved in less than
a week previously, but the stench was well remembered.  The musty smell
of earth and mud, overladen with the odour of rotting flesh and sewage,
the stale lingering whiff of burned cordite and high explosive.

Sean sniffed it and spat with distaste.  Within an hour he knew he would
be so accustomed as not to notice it, but now it seemed to coat the back
of his throat like cold grease.  Once again he looked up at the sky, and
now he frowned.  Either the wind had shifted into the east a point or
two, or they had taken a wrong turning within the maze of trenches, for
the low cloud was no longer rolling in the direction that fitted with
the map that Sean carried in his head.  Nick!  Sir?  Are you still
right?

And he saw at once the uncertainty in the young subaltern's eyes as he
looked back.  Well, sir -The trenches had been deserted for the last
quarter of a mile, not a single soul had they passed in the labyrinth of
high earthen walls.  We'd better take a look, Nick.  I'll do it, sir.
Van der Heever glanced ahead along the trench, and found what he was
looking for.  At the next intersection a wooden ladder was fastened into
the wall.  It reached to the top of the sand-bagged parapet.  He started
towards it.

Careful, Nick, Sean called after him.  Sir, the young man acknowledged,
and propped his rifle before swarming upwards.

Sean calculated they were still three or four hundred yards from the
front line yet, and the light was going fast.

There was a purple velvet look to the air beneath the clouds, not
shooting light at all, and he knew that, despite his age, van der Heever
was an old soldier.  The glance he took over the top would be swift as a
meerkat looking out of its hole.

Sean watched him crouch at the top of the ladder, lift his head for a
single quick sweep and then duck down again.

The hill is too much on our left, he called down.

The hill was a low, rounded mound that rose a mere hundred and fifty
feet above the almost featureless plain.

Once it had been thickly forested, but now only the shattered stumps
stood waist-high and the slopes were dimpled with shell craters.  How
far is the farm house?  Sean asked, still peering upwards.  The farm
house was a roofless rectangle of battered walls that stood foursquare
facing the centre of the Battalion's sector. it was used as a central
reference point for artillery, infantry and aircorps alike.  I'll have
another look, and van der Heever lifted his head again.

The Mauser has a distinctive cracking report, a high and vicious sound
that Sean had heard so often as to be able to judge with accuracy its
range and direction.

This was a single shot, at about five hundred yards, almost dead ahead.

Van der Heever's head snapped backwards as though he had taken a heavy
punch, and the steel of his helmet rang like a gong.  The chin-strap
snapped as the round helmet spun high in the air and then dropped to the
floorboards in the bottom of the trench and rolled on its rim into a
pool of grey mud.

Van der Heever's hands remained locked closed on the top rung of the
ladder for a moment, then the nerveless fingers opened, and he tumbled
backwards, falling heavily into the bottom of the trench with the skirts
of his greatcoat ballooning around him.

Sean stood frozen and disbelieving his mind not yet accepting the fact
that Nick was hit, but, as a soldier and a hunter, judging that single
shot with awe.

What kind of shooting was that?  Five hundred yards in this murky light;
one fleeting glimpse of a helmeted head above the parapet; three seconds
to set the range and line UP, then another instant of time to sight and
fire as the head bobbed up again.  The Hun that fired that shot was
either a superb marksman with reflexes like a leopard, or the flukiest
sniper on the western front.

The thought was fleeting and Sean started forward heavily and knelt
beside his officer.  He turned him with a hand upon the shoulder and
felt the sickening slide in his guts and the cold grip on his chest.

The bullet had entered at the temple and exited behind the opposite ear.

Sean lifted the shattered head into his lap, removed his own helmet and
began to unwind the silk scarf from around his head.  He felt a
desolation of loss.

Slowly he wrapped the boy's head into the scarf, and immediately the
blood soaked through the thin material.

It was a futile gesture, but it served to keep -his hands occupied and
detract from his sense of helplessness.

He sat on the muddy floorboards, holding the boy's body, his heavy
shoulders bowed forward.  The size of Sean's bared head was accentuated
by the thick curls of dark wiry hair shot through with splashes and
strands of grey that sparkled frostily in the fading light.  The short
thick beard was laced with grey as well, and the big beaked nose was
twisted and battered-looking.

Only the black curved eyebrows were sleek and unmarked, and the eyes
were clear and dark cobalt blue, the eyes of a much younger man, steady
and alert.

Sean Courtney sat for a long time holding the boy, and then he sighed
once, deeply, and laid the broken head aside.

He stood up, hefted the kitbag on to his own shoulder, and set off along
the communications trench once again.

At five minutes before midnight, the Colonel commanding the 2nd
Battalion stooped through the blackout curtains that screened the
entrance to the mess, and beat the snow from his shoulders with a gloved
hand as he straightened.

The mess had been a German dugout six months before, and was the envy of
the brigade.  Thirty feet below ground level, it was impregnable, even
to the heaviest artillery barrage.  The floor was of heavy timber
boarding and even the walls were panelled against the damp and the cold.

A pot-bellied stove stood against the far wall, glowing cheerfully.

Gathered about it in a half circle of looted armchairs sat the off -duty
officers.

However, the Colonel had eyes only for the burly figure of his General,
seated in the largest and most comfortable chair closest to the stove,
and he shed his great-coat as he hurried across the dugout.  General, my
apologies.  If I'd known you were coming I was making my rounds.  Sean
Courtney chuckled and rose ponderously from the chair to shake his hand.
It's what I would expect of you, Charles, but your officers have made me
very welcome and we have kept a little of the goose for you The Colonel
glanced quickly about the circle and frowned as he saw the hectic cheeks
and sparkling eyes of some of his younger subalterns.  He must warn them
of the folly of trying to drink level with the General.  The old man was
steady as a rock, of course, and those eyes were like bayonets under the
dark brows, but the Colonel knew him well enough to guess that he had a
full quart of Dimple Haig in his belly, and that something was troubling
him deeply.  Then it came to him.  Of course I'm terribly sorry to hear
about young van der Heever sir.  Sergeant-Major told me what happened. I
Sean made a gesture of dismissal, but for a moment the shadows darkened
about his eyes.  If I'd only known you were coming up into the line this
evening, I would have warned you, sir.  We have had the devil of trouble
with that sniper ever since we moved up.

It's the same fellow, of course, absolutely deadly.  I've never heard of
anything like it.  Dreadful nuisance when everything else is so quiet.
Only casualties we've had all week.  What are you doing about him?  Sean
asked harshly.

They all saw the flush of anger darken his face, and the Adjutant
intervened swiftly.  I've been on to Colonel Caithness at 3rd Battalion,
and we did a deal, sir.  He has agreed to send us Anders and f MacDonald
You got them!  The Colonel looked delighted.  Oh I say, that's
excellent.  I didn't think Caithness would part with hisprizepair. 1They
came in this morning, and the two of them have been studying the ground
all day.  I gave them a free hand, but I understand they are setting up
the shoot for tomorrow.  The Young Captain who commanded A Company
pulled out his watch and studied it a moment.  They are going out from
my section, sir.  As a matter of fact, I was going to go down and give
them a send-off, they will be moving into position at half past twelve.
If you'll excuse me, sir!  Yes, of course, off with you, Dicky, wish
them good luck from me.  Everybody in the brigade had heard of Anders
and MacDonald.

I'd like to meet that pair.  Sean Courtney spoke suddenly, and dutifully
the Colonel agreed.  Of course, I'll come out with you, sir.  No, no,
Charles, you've been out in the cold all night as it is.  I'll just go
along with Dicky here.  The snow came down thickly out of the utter
darkness of the midnight sky.  It damped down the night sounds in its
thick muffling cloak, muting the regular bursts of a Vickers firing at a
hole in the wire on the battalion's left.

Mark Anders sat wrapped in his borrowed blankets and he bowed his head
to the book in his lap, adjusting his eyes to the yellow wavering light
of the candle-stump.

The rise in temperature that accompanied the first fall of snow and the
changed quality of sound entering the small dug-out awakened the man who
slept beside him.  He coughed, and rolled over to open a chink in the
canvas curtain beside his head.  Damn, he said, and coughed again, the
harsh hammering sound of a heavy smoker.  Damn it to hell.  It's
snowing. Then he rolled back to Mark.

You still reading?  he demanded roughly.  Always with your nose in a
bloody book.  You'll ruin your shooting eyes.  Mark lifted his head.
It's been snowing for an hour already.  What you want all that learning
for?  Fergus MacDonald was not so easily distracted.  It won't do you no
good.  I don't like the snow, said Mark.  We didn't reckon on the snow.
The snow complicated the task ahead of them.  It would cover the ground
out there with a sensitive mantle of white.  Anybody moving out from the
trench into noman's-land would leave tracks that the dawn light would
instantly betray to an observant enemy.

A match flared and Fergus lit two Woodbines and passed one to Mark. They
sat shoulder to shoulder, huddled in their blankets.

You can call off the shoot, Mark.  Tell em to shove it.

You're a volunteer lad.  They smoked in silence for a full minute before
Mark replied.  That Hun is a bad one.  If it's snowing, he probably
won't be out tomorrow.

Snow will keep him in bed also.  Mark shook his head slowly.  If he's
that good, he'll be out.  Yes.  Fergus nodded.  He's that good.  That
shot he made last evening, after lying up all day in the cold, then five
hundred yards if it was an inch, and in that light, Fergus cut himself
off, and then went on quickly, But you're good also, lad.  You're the
best, boy.

Mark said nothing, but carefully pinched out the glowing tip of the
Woodbine.

You're going?  Fergus asked.  Yes.  Get some sleep then, lad.  It's
going to be a long day.  Mark blew out the candle flame as he lay back
and pulled the blankets over his head.  You get a good sleep Fergus said
again. I'll-wake you in plenty of time, and he resisted the paternal
urge to pat the thin bony shoulder under the blanket.

The young Captain spoke quietly with one of the sentries on the forward
firing step, and the man whispered a reply and pointed with his chin
along the darkened trench.  This way, sir.  He went on down the boards,
swaddled in clothing so that he had the shape of a bear, and Sean
towered head and shoulders above him as he followed.

Around the next revert, through the soft curtains of falling snow, there
was the subdued red glow of a brazier from the shallow dugout in the
side of the trench.  Dark figures squatted close about it, like witches
at a sabbat.

Sergeant MacDonald?  One of the figures rose and stepped forward. That's
me.  There was a cocky, self-assured tone to the reply.  Is Anders with
you?  Present and correct, said MacDonald, and one of the other figures
rose from the circle about the brazier and came forward.  He was taller,
but moved with grace, like an athlete or a dancer.

.  You are ready, Anders?  the Captain went on, speaking in the soft
half-whisper of the trenches, and MacDonald replied for him.  The lad is
fighting fit, sir.  He spoke with the proprietary tone of the manager of
a prize-fighter.  It was clear that the boy was his property, and that
ownership gave him a distinction he would never have achieved on his
own.

At that moment another flare burst high overhead, a brilliant white and
silent explosion of light, softened by the snow.

Sean could judge a man like he could a horse.  He could pick the rotten
ones, or the big-hearted, from the herd.  It was a trick of experience
and some deeper inexplicable insight.

in the light of the flare his eyes flickered across the face of the
older Sergeant.  MacDonald had the bony undernourished features of the
slum-dweller, the eyes too close set, the lips narrow and twisted
downwards at the corners.

There was nothing to interest Sean there and he looked at the other man.

The eyes were a pale golden brown, set wide, with the serene gaze of a
poet or a man who had lived in the open country of long distant
horizons.  The lids were held wide open, so that they did not overlap
the iris, leaving a clear glimpse of the clean white about the cornea so
that it floated free like a full moon.  Sean had seen it only a few
times before, and the effect was almost hypnotic, of such direct and
searching candour that it seemed to reach deep into Sean's own soul.

After the first impact of those eyes, other impressions crowded in.  The
first was of the man's extreme youth.  He was nearer seventeen than
twenty, Sean judged, and then saw immediately how finely drawn the boy
was.  Despite the serenity of his gaze, he was stretched out tight and
hard, racked up with strain close to the snapping point.

Sean had seen it so often in the past four years.  They had found this
child's special talent and exploited it ruthlessly, all of them,
Caithness at 3rd Battalion, the ferrety MacDonald, Charles, Dicky and,
by association, himself.  They had worked him mercilessly, sending him
out time and again.

The boy held a steaming tin mug of coffee in one hand, and the wrist
that protruded from the sleeve of his coat was skeletal, and speckled
with angry red bites of body lice.

The neck was too long and thin for the head it supported, and the cheeks
were hollow, the eye-sockets sunken.  This is General Courtney, said the
Captain; and as the light of the flare died, Sean saw the eyes shine
suddenly with anew light, and heard the boy's breath catch with awe.
Hello, Anders, I've heard a lot about you, And I've heard about you,
sir.  The transparent tones of hero-worship irritated Sean.  The boy
would have heard all the stories, of course.  The regiment boasted of
him, and every new recruit heard the tales.  There was nothing he could
do to prevent them circulating.  It's a great honour to meet you, sir.
The boy tripped on the words, stuttering a little, another sign of the
terrible strain he was under, -yet the words were completely sincere.

The legendary Sean Courtney, the man who had made five million pounds on
the goldfields of the Witwatersrand and lost every penny of it in a
morning at a single coup of fortune.  Sean Courtney, who had chased the
Boer General Leroux across half of Southern Africa and caught him at
last after a terrible hand-to-hand fight.  The soldier who had held
Bombata's ravaging Zulu impis at the gorge and then driven them on to
the waiting Maxims, who had planned with his erstwhile enemy Leroux and
helped build the Charter of Union which united the four independent
states of Southern Africa into a single mighty whole, who had built
another vast personal fortune in land and cattle and timber, who had
given up his position in Louis Botha's Cabinet and at the head of the
Natal Legislative Council to bring the regiment out to France, it was
natural the boy's eyes should shine that way and his tongue trip, but
still it annoyed Sean.  At fifty-nine I'm too old to play the hero now,
he thought wryly, and the flare went down, plunging them back into the
darkness.  If there's another mug of that coffee, said Sean.  It's
bloody cold tonight.  Sean accepted the chipped enamel mug and hunkered
down close to the brazier, cupped the mug between his hands, blowing on
the steaming liquid and sipping noisily, and after a moment the others
followed his example hesitantly.  It was strange to be squatting like
old mates with a General and the silence was profound.  You're from
Zululand?  Sean asked the boy suddenly, his ear had picked up the
accent, and without waiting for a reply went on in the Zulu tongue,
Velapi wena?  Where are you from?  The Zulu language came naturally and
easily to Mark's lips though he had not spoken it for two years.  From
the north beyond Eshowe, on the Umfolosi River.  Yes.  I know it well. I
have hunted there.  Sean changed back to English.  Anders?  I knew
another Anders.  He rode transport from Delagoa Bay back in 89.  John?
Yes, that's it.  Old Johnny Anders.  Any relation?  Your father?  My
grandfather.  My father's dead.  My grandfather has land on the
Umfolosi.  That's where I live.  The boy was relaxing now.  In the
brazier glow, Sean thought he saw the lines of strain around his mouth
ironing out.  I didn't think you'd know poor folk, like us, sir.  Fergus
MacDonald spoke with cutting edge in his voice, leaning forward towards
the brazier with his head turned towards him so that Sean could see the
bitter line of his mouth.

Sean nodded slowly.  MacDonald was one of them then.

One of those who were intent on the new order, trade unions and Karl
Marx, Bolsheviks who threw bombs and called themselves comrades.
Irrelevantly he noticed for the first time that MacDonald had ginger
hair, and big golden freckles on the backs of his hands.  He turned back
to Mark Anders.  He taught you to shoot?  Yes, sir.  The lad grinned for
the first time, warmed by the memory.  He gave me my first rifle, a
Martini Hendry that blew a cloud of gunsmoke like a bush fire but would
throw dead true at a hundred and fifty yards.  I've hunted elephant with
it.  A great rifle, Sean agreed, and suddenly across an age difference
of forty years they were friends.

Perhaps, for Sean, the recent death of that other bright young man, Nick
van der Heever, had left an aching gap in his life, for now he felt a
flood of paternal protection for the youngster.  Fergus MacDonald seemed
to sense it also, for he cut in like a jealous woman.  You'd best be
getting ready now, lad The smile was gone from Mark's lips, the eyes
were too calm, and he nodded his thin neck stiffly.

Fergus MacDonald fussed over the lad, and once again Sean was reminded
of a trainer preparing his fighter in the dressing-room.  He stripped
off the heavy, voluminous great-coat and the battle-dress jacket.  Over
the long woollen full-length underwear went a woollen shirt and two
knitted jerseys.  A woollen scarf around the throat.

Then a mechanic's boiler-suit which covered the layers of clothing in a
single neat skin that would not snag, or flutter in a breeze to draw an
enemy eye.  A woollen balaclava over the head, and a leather airman's
helmet, and Sean saw the reason.  The British steel helmet had a
distinctive brim, and anyway was no protection from a Mauser bullet.
Keep your nut down, Mark, me boy.  Knitted mittens with fingers cut out,
and then thick loose gloves over them.  Keep the old fingers working,
lad.  Don't let them stiffen up on you.  A small leather shoulder bag
that slung comfortably under the left armpit.  Ham sandwiches with
plenty of mustard, chocolate and barley sugar, just the way you like it.
Don't forget to eat, keep you warm.  Four full clips Of .  303
cartridges, three slipped into the thigh pockets of the boiler-suit, and
one into the special pocket sewn into the forearm of the left sleeve.  I
waxed each round myself, Fergus announced mainly for the benefit of the
listening General.  They'll slide in like,- and the simile was crude and
obscene, meant to show Fergus scorn of rank and class.  But Sean let it
pass easily, he was too interested in the preparations for the hunt.

I won't show Cuthbert until the sun is right.  Cuthbert?  Sean asked,
and Fergus chuckled and indicated a third figure that lay quietly at the
back of the dugout.  It was the first time Sean had noticed him and
Fergus chuckled again at his puzzled expression reached out to the
reclining figure.

Only then Sean realized it was a dummy, but in the light of the brazier
the features were realistic and the helmeted head rode at a natural
angle on the shoulders.  The model ended abruptly at the hips and below
it there was only a broom handle.  I'd like to know how you are going to
do it?  Sean addressed the question to young Mark Anders, but Fergus
replied importantly.  Yesterday the Hun was shooting from low on the
northern slope of the hill.  Mark and me worked out the angles of the
two shots he made and we've got him pegged to within fifty yards.  He
may change position, Sean pointed out.  He'll not leave the north slope.
It's in shadow all day, even if the sun comes out.  He will want to
shoot from shade into light.  Sean nodded at the logic of it.  Yes, he
agreed, but be may shoot from a stand in the German line.  And Mark
answered quietly, I don't think so, sir.  The lines are too far apart
here', the German line ran across the crest of the hill, he'd want a
shorter range. No, sir, he's shooting from close in.  He makes a stand
in no-man's land, probably changes it every day, but each time he comes
close as he can get to our lines while still staying in the shadow.  The
boy had not tripped on a single word now that his mind had locked on to
the problem. His voice was low and intense.  I picked out a good stand
for the lad, just beyond the farm house.  He can cover the whole of the
northern slope at less than two hundred yards.  He'll move out now and
settle in while it's still dark.  I'm sending him out early.  I want him
to make his move before the Hun.  I don't want the lad walking on top of
the bastard in the dark.  Fergus MacDonald took over from Mark with an
air of authority.  Then we both wait until the light is good and clean,
then I start working with Cuthbert here, he patted the dummy and
chuckled again.  It's damned difficult to give him a nice natural look,
like some stupid rooky sticking his head -up to take a first look at
France.  If you let the Hun get too long a look at him, then he'll
tumble to the trick, but if you make it too quick, he won't get a chance
for a shot.

No, it's not easy.  Yes, I should imagine, Sean murmured wryly, that
it's the most dangerous and difficult part of the whole thing.

And he saw the deadly expression flit across Fergus MacDonald's face
before he turned to Mark Anders.  Another mug of coffee, lad, and then
it's time to be getting on.  I want you in place before the snow stops.
Sean reached into the breast of his great-coat and brought out the
silver flask that Ruth had given him on the day the regiment sailed. Put
some fangs in the coffee.  He offered the flask to Mark.

The boy shook his head shyly.  No thank you, sir.  Makes me see squill.
Don't mind if I do, sir.  Fergus MacDonald reached swiftly across the
brazier.  The clear brown liquid glugged freely into his own mug.

The Sergeant-Major had sent out a patrol before midnight to cut a lane
through the wire in front of A Company.

Mark stood at the foot of the trench ladder and changed his rifle from
the right hand; another flare burst overhead and in its light Sean saw
how intent the boy was on his task.  He pulled back the bolt of the
rifle, and Sean noted that he was not using the standard No.  1 short
Lee-Enfield, which was the work-horse of the British army, but that he
favoured the American P-4 which also fired the .  303

calibre but had the longer barrel and finer balance.

Mark stripped two clips of ammunition into the magazine and closed the
bolt, levering a round of carefully selected and waxed ammunition into
the breach.

In the last light of the flare he looked across at Sean, and nodded
slightly.  The flare died and in the darkness that followed Sean heard
the quick light steps on the wooden ladder.  He wanted to call good luck
after the boy, but suppressed the whim and instead patted his pockets
for his cheroot case.

, Sir Shall we get on back, sir?  the Captain asked quietly.  Off with
you, growled Sean, his voice gruff with the premonition of coming
tragedy.  I'll stay on a while.  Though he could give no help, somehow
it seemed like deserting the boy to leave now.

Mark moved quickly along the line that the patrol had laid to guide him
through the wire.  He stooped to keep contact with the line in his left
hand, and he carried the PJ4 in his right.  He lifted his feet
carefully, and stepped lightly, trying not to scuff the snow, trying to
spread his weight evenly on each foot so as not to break the crust.

Yet every time, a flare went up, he had to fall face forward and lie
still and huddled, a dark blot in the electric glare of light against
the sheet of white, screened only by the persistently falling veils of
snow.  When he scrambled up in the darkness and moved on, he knew he
left a disturbed area of snow.  Ordinarily it would not have mattered,
for in the barren, shell-churned wilderness of no-man's-land, such light
scrabble marks passed unnoticed.  But Mark knew that in the first cold
light of dawn an unusual pair of eyes would be scrutinizing every inch
of the ground, hunting for just this kind of sign.

Suddenly, colder than the icy snow-laden air against his cheeks, was the
deep chill of loneliness.  The sense of vulnerability, of being pitted
against a skilled and implacable enemy, an invisible, terrifying,
efficient adversary who would deliver instant death at the slightest
error.

The latest flare sank and died, and he scrambled to his feet and
blundered to the dark, jagged wall of the ruined farm house.  He
crouched against it, and tried to control his breathing for this newly
conceived terror threatened to smother him.  it was the first time it
had come upon him.

Fear he had known, had lived with it as his constant companion these
last two years, but never this terrible paralysing terror.

When he touched his fingers of his right hand to his ice-cold cheek, he
felt the tremble in them, and in sympathy his teeth chattered in a short
staccato rhythm.  I can't shoot like this, he thought wildly, clenching
his jaw until it ached and locking his hands together and holding them
hard against his groin, and I can't stay here.  The ruin was too obvious
a stand to make.  It would be the first point the German sniper would
study.  He had to get out of there, and quickly.  Back to the trenches.
Suddenly his terror was panic, and he lifted himself to begin the crazed
flight back, leaving his rifle propped against the ruined wall.  Bist du
da?  a voice whispered softly near him in the darkness.  Mark froze
instantly.  Ja!  The reply was further along the wall and Mark found the
rifle with his left hand settling naturally on to the stock and his
right curling about the pistol grip, forefinger hooking over the
trigger.

Women, wir gehen zurUck.  Close beside Mark, sensed rather than seen in
the darkness, passed a heavily laden figure.  Mark swung the rifle to
follow him, his thumb on the safety-catch ready to slip it.  The German
stumbled heavily in the treacherous snowy footing, and the wiring tools
he carried clanked together.  The man cursed.  Scheisse!  Halt den Mund,
snapped the other, and they moved on back towards the German line above
them on the crest of the hill.

Mark had not expected a wiring detail to be out in this weather.  His
first thought had been for the German sniper, but now his mind leaped
forward at this hidden good fortune.

The patrol would lead him through the German wire, and their heavy
blundering tracks would hide his own from the sniper.

It was only when he had decided this that he realized with surprise that
his panic had passed, his hands were rock steady and his breathing was
deep and slow.  He grinned without humour at his own frailty and moved
forward lightly after the German patrol.

They were a hundred paces beyond the farm house when it stopped snowing.
Mark felt the slide of dismay in his chest.  He had relied heavily on
the snow holdin& at least until dawn, but he kept on after the patrol.
They were moving faster and more confidently as they neared their own
lines.

Two hundred yards below the crest Mark left them to go on alone, and
began working his way sideways around the slope, groping his way
painstakingly through the heavily staked wire, until at last he
recognized and reached the stand that he and Fergus had picked out
through binoculars the previous afternoon.

The main trunk of one of the oaks that had covered the hill had fallen
directly down the slope, pulling up a great matted tangle of roots from
the soft high-explosive ploughed earth.

Mark crawled among the tangle of roots; selecting the side which would
be in deepest shadow from the winter-angled sun, he wriggled in on his
belly until he was half covered by them, but with head and shoulders
able to turn to cover the full.  curve of the northern slope ahead of
him.

Now his first concern was to check the P-14 carefully, paying particular
attention to the vulnerable, high-mounted Bisley-type rear sight to make
sure that it had not been knocked or misaligned during the journey
across noman's-land.  He ate two of the ham sandwiches, drank a few
rationed mouthfuls of sweet coffee and adjusted the woollen scarf over
his mouth and nose, for warmth and to prevent the steaming of his
breath.  Then he laid his forehead carefully against the wooden butt of
his rifle.  He had developed the knack of instant sleep, and while he
slept it snowed again.

When Mark woke in the sickly grey light of dawn, he was blanketed by the
fine white flakes.  Careful not to disturb them, he lifted his head
slowly, and blinked his eyes rapidly to clear them.  His fingers were
stiff and cold; he worked them steadily in the gloves, forcing warm
blood to flow.

He had been lucky again, twice in one night was too much.  First the
patrol to lead him through the wire and now this thin white coat of
natural camouflage to blend his shape with the tangled roots of the oak.
Too much luck, the pendulum must swing.

Slowly the darkness drew back, widening his circle of vision, and as it
expanded so the whole of Mark's existence came to centre in those two
wide golden brown eyes.  They moved quickly in the pattern of search,
touching in turn each irregularity and fold, each feature, each object,
each ting colour or texture of snow and mud and earth, contras each
stump of shattered timber or fallen branch, the irregular rim of every
shell hole, looking for shadows where they should not have been, seeking
the evidence of disturbance beneath the new thin coat of snow, seeking,
searching for life, literally for life.

The snow stopped again a little before nine, and by noon the sky had
lightened and there were holes in the cloudcover, a single watery ray of
sun fell and moved like a searchlight across the southern slope of the
hill.  Right, Cuthbert, let's draw some Hun fire.  Fergus had marked
each of the German sniper's kills on the trench map the Sergeant-Major
had loaned him.  There were two black spots close to each other in the
same section of trench.  At those places the parapet was too low for the
commanding bulk of the hill that commanded the front line.  After five
men had been killed at those two spots the parapet had been raised with
sand-bags and crudely lettered notices warned the unwary.

KEEP YOUR HEAD DOWN.  SNIPER AT WORK.  The two black spots were only
fifty paces apart, and Fergus guessed that the sniper had achieved his
successes here by waiting for a victim to pass down the trench.  He
would get a glimpse of a head in the first gap, and would be aiming into
the second gap with his finger on the hairtrigger as the man passed it.
He explained this to Sean Courtney as he made his preparations, for by
this time Sean was so intrigued by the hunt that only a major German
offensive would have lured him back to his headquarters.

During the morning he had spoken to his aide-de-camp over the field
telephone, and told them where they could find him in an emergency.

But make sure it's an emergency, he had growled ferociously into the
headset.  I'll draw him from south to north, Fergus explained, that will
force the bloody Hun to turn away from Mark's stand, it will give the
lad an extra second while he swings back towards the ridge.  Fergus
MacDonald was good with the dummy, Sean had to concede it.  He carried
it two feet higher than natural man height, to compensate for the raised
parapet, and he gave it a realistic roll of the shoulders, like a
hurrying man as he passed it through the first gap.

Sean, the young Captain and the beeffy red-faced Sergeant-Major were
waiting with a half dozen other ranks beyond the second gap, watching
Fergus come down the boards towards them steadily.

Instinctively they all drew breath and held it as he came up to the
second gap, all of them tensed with suspense.

Up the slope of the hill, the Mauser cracked, like a bullwhip on the icy
air, and the dummy kicked sharply in Fergus MacDonald's hands.

Fergus jerked it down out of sight, and fell to his knees to examine the
neat round hole punched through the papiermAche head.

oh shit!  he whispered bitterly.  Oh, shit all over itVWhat is it,
MacDonald?  The bloody Hun, oh, the sodding bastard MacDonald!  He's
picked the same stand as my boy.  Sean did not understand for a moment.
He's in among the oak trunks, he's sitting right on top of Mark.  They
picked the same stand.  The vicious stinging discharge of the Mauser was
so close, so high and sharp, that for a few seconds afterwards, Mark's
ear-drums buzzed with the mosquito hum of auditory memory.

For seconds he was stunned, frozen with the shock of it.

The German sniper was somewhere within twenty feet of where he lay.  By
some freak of coincidence, he had chosen the same point on the slope as
Mark.  No, it was no freak of coincidence.  With the hunter's eye for
ground, both men had selected the ideal position for their common
purpose to deliver swift death from hiding.  The pendulum of Mark's
fortune had swung to the other end of its arc.

Mark had not moved in the seconds since the Mauser shot, but every sense
was heightened by the adrenalin that sang through his veins and his
heart beat with a force that seemed to reverberate against the cage of
his ribs.

The German was on his left, higher up the slope, slightly behind his
shoulder.  The left was his unprotected side, a -ay from the tangled oak
roots.

He trained his eyes around, without moving his head, and in the
periphery of his vision saw another of the fallen oak trunks close by.
He did not move for another full minute, watching for the flicker of
movement in the corner of his eye.  There was nothing, and the silence
with awesome and oppressive, until a Spandau fired a shot burst, a mile
or more away down the line.

Mark began to turn his head towards the left, as slowly as a chameleon
stalking a fly.  Gradually the distortion of periphery vision cleared
and he could sweep the whole of the slope above him.

The nearest oak trunk had been savaged with shrapnel, all the bark was
torn away and raw chunks of timber ripped from it.  It had fallen across
a hollow in the earth, forming a bridge; and although the snow had piled
up against it, there was a narrow gap between earth and oak.  The gap
was perhaps three inches wide at the centre, and Mark could see
reflected light from the snow beyond.

At that moment, a minute blur of movement snapped his eyes in his skull.
It was a fleeting movement of a mere sixteenth of an inch, but it
riveted Mark's attention.  He stared for fully five seconds, before he
realized what he was seeing.

Beyond the screening end of the oak trunk, the very tip of a Mauser
barrel protruded.  It had been bound with burlap to break the stark
outline and to prevent reflection of light off metal, but the cruel
little mouth of the muzzle was uncovered.

The German was lying behind the oak log, like Mark, his right flank
protected, facing half-way from Mark, and less than twenty feet
separated them.

Mark watched the tip of the Mauser barrel for ten minutes more, and it
did not move again.  The German had stillness and patience.  Once he had
reloaded, he had frozen again into that rigour of watchfulness.  He's so
good that there is no way I can clear the shot, Mark thought.  If I move
an inch, he'll hear me, and he'll be fast.  Very fast.  To get a clear
shot, Mark would have to move back twenty feet or more, and then he
would be looking directly into the muzzle of the Mauser; a head-on shot,
with the German alerted by his movements.  Mark knew he could not afford
to give away that much advantage, not against an adversary of this
calibre.

The long still minutes crawled by without any break in tension.  Mark
had the illusion that every nerve and sinew of his body was quivering
visibly, but in reality the only movement was in the glove of his right
hand.  The fingers moved steadily in a kneading motion, keeping supple
and warm, and the eyes moved in Mark's skull, swivelling slowly back and
forth across the battered trunk of the oak, blinking regularly to clear
the tears that tension and the icy air induced.  What the hell is
happening up there?  Fergus MacDonald fretted nervously, peering into
the lens of the periscope that allowed the observer to keep well down
below the sand-bagged parapet.  The boy is pinned down.  General Sean
Courtney did not remove his own eyes from the other periscope, but swung
it slightly, sweeping back and forth across the slope.

Try the Hun with Cuthbert again.  I don't think he'll fall for it again,
Fergus began to protest immediately, looking up with those close-set
eyes, rimmed with pink now by the cold and the strain of waiting. That's
an order, Sergeant.  Sean Courtney's broad forehead wrinkled and the
dark brows drew sharply together, his voice growled like an old lion and
the dark-blue eyes snapped.  The power and presence of the man in this
mood awed even Fergus MacDonald.  Very well, sir, he muttered sulkily,
and went to where the dummy was propped against the firing step.

The lash of the Mauser cracked again, and at the shock Mark Anders
eyelids blinked twice very quickly and then flared wide open.  The
golden brown eyes stared fixedly up the slope intent as those of the
hunting peregrine.

The instant after the shot, he heard the rattle of the Mauser bolt being
drawn back and then thrust forward to reload, and again the tip of the
hessian-wrapped muzzle stirred slightly, but then Mark's eyes flicked
sideways.

There had been another movement, so fine that it might have gone
unnoticed by eyes less keen.  The movement had been a mere breath, and
it had been in the narrow three-inch gap between the oak trunk and the
snow-coated earth.  just that one brief stir and then stillness once
more.

Mark stared into the gap for long seconds, and saw nothing.  Merely
shadow and undefined shape, trickily reflected light from the snow
beyond.  Then suddenly, he was seeing something else.

It was the texture of cloth, a thin sliver of it in the narrow gap, then
his eyes picked up the stitched seam in the grey cloth, bulging slightly
over the living flesh beneath.

There was some small portion of the German's body showing through the
gap.  He was lying close up on the far side of the log, and his head was
pointed in the direction from which the muzzle of the Mauser projected.

Carefully Mark proportioned the man's body in his imagination.  Using
the rifle muzzle as his only reference point, he placed the man's head
and shoulders, his trunk and his hips Yes, his hips, Mark thought.  That
is his hip or upper thigh, and then there was a change in the light. The
sun found a weak spot in the cloud cover overhead and the light
brightened briefly.

In the better light, Mark made out a small portion of a German service
belt, with the empty loop which should have held a bayonet.  It
confirmed his guess.  Now he knew that the slight bulge in the field
grey material was caused by the head of the femur where it fitted into
the cup of the pelvic girdle.  Through both hips, Mark thought coldly.
It's a pinning shot, and then there is the femoral artery - Carefully he
began to work the glove off his right hand.

He must roll on his side, and swing the long barrel of the P-4 through
an arc of over ninety degrees, without making the least sound.  Please,
God, Mark asked silently, and began to make the move.  Achingly slowly,
the barrel of his rifle swung and, at the same time, he began to
transfer his weight on to his other side It seemed to be a complete
round of eternity before the P.  I 4 pointed into the narrow gap below
the oak trunk, and Mark was doubled up, straining to keep the barrel
bearing from this unnatural position.  He could not slip the safetycatch
from the rifle before firing; even that tiny metallic snick would alert
the German.

He curled his finger on the trigger, and took up the pull, feeling the
dead lock of the safety mechanism.  He aimed carefully, his head twisted
awkwardly, and he began to push the safety-catch acrosswithhis thumb,
while holding pressure on the hair trigger.  it had to be done smoothly,
so as not to pull his aim off the sliver of grey uniform cloth.

The thunder of the shot seemed to bounce against the low grey sky, and
the bullet crashed through the tiny gap.

Mark saw the impact of it, the rubbery shock of metal into flesh.

He heard the German cry out, a wild sound without form or meaning, and
Mark swept back the bolt of the P-4, and reloaded with instinctive
dexterity.  The next shot blended with the echo of the first, coming so
close together that they seemed as one.  The jacketed bullet crashed
through the gap, and this time Mark saw blood spurt, a bright scarlet
spray of it that splattered the snow, turning swiftly to pale pink as it
was diluted by the melt of its own heat.

Then there was nothing in the gap, the Germ an had been thrown back by
the impact, or had rolled aside.  Only the smear of pink stained snow.

Mark waited, a fresh cartridge in the breach of the P.  I 4, turned now
to face the oak trunk, tensed for the next shot.

If it had not been a decisive wound, the German would be coming after
him, and he was ready for the snap shot.

He felt coldly unemotional, but vitally aware, his every fibre and nerve
pitched to its utmost, his vision sharp and bright and his hearing
enhanced.

The silence drew out for a while longer, and then there was a sound. For
a moment Mark did not recognize it, then it came again.  The sound of a
man sobbing.

It came stronger now, more hysterical, gut-racking.  Ach, mein Gatt,
mein Heber Gatt -'the man's voice, pitiful, broken.  Dos Blut, ach Gatt,
dos Blut.  Suddenly the sound was tearing at Mark's soul, cutting deeply
into his being.  His hand began to shake, and he felt the tremor of his
lips once again.  He tried to clench his jaw, but now his teeth were
chattering wildly.  Stop it, oh God, stop it, he whispered, and the
rifle fell from his hands.  He pressed his mittened hands to his ears,
trying to shut out the terrible sounds of the dying German.  Please,
please, Mark pleaded aloud.  Stop it, please.

And the German seemed to hear him.  Hill mir, Heber Gatt, dos Blut!  His
voice was broken by the wet helpless sounds of his despair.

Suddenly Mark was crawling forward, through the snow, blindly up the
slope.  I'm coming.  It's all right, he muttered.  Only stop it.

He felt his senses swaying.

Ach mein Heber Gatt, ach, meine Mutti.  .  .  Oh Jesus, stop it.  Stop
it.

Mark dragged himself around the end of the oak log.

The German was half propped against the log.  With both hands he was
trying vainly to stem the fountain of bright pulsing arterial blood that
flowed through his fumbling fingers, The two bullets had shattered both
his hips, and the snow was a sodden mushy porridge of blood.

He turned his face to Mark, and already it was drained of all colour, a
shiny greyish white, slick with a fine sheen of perspiration.  The
German was young, as young as Mark, but swiftly approaching death had
smoothed out his features so he seemed younger still.  It was the face
of a marble angel, smooth and white, and strangely beautiful, with blue
eyes in pale blue sockets, a burst of pale golden curls escaping from
under the helmet on the smooth pale forehead.

He opened his mouth and said something that Mark did not understand, and
the teeth were white and even, beyond the full pale lips.

Then, slowly, the German sagged back against the log still staring at
Mark.  His hands fell away from his groin and the regular pulsing spurt
of blood from the shattered flesh slowed and shrivelled away.  The pale
blue eyes lost their feverish lustre, and dulled, no longer focused.

Mark felt a thread pull in the fabric of his mind, like silk beginning
to tear.  it was almost a physical thing, he could hear it beginning to
give way inside him.

His vision wavered, the dead German's features seemed to run like
melting wax, and then slowly reformed again.

Mark felt the tear widening, the silken veil of his reason ripping
through; beyond it was a dark and echoing chasm.

The dead German's features went on reforming, until they hardened and
Mark was looking into his own face as through a wavering distorted
mirror.  His own haunted face, the eyes golden brown and terrified, the
mouth that was his mouth opened, and a cry came from it that was the
despair and the agony of all the world.

The last shreds of Mark's reason whipped away on the tempest of horror,
and he heard himself screaming, and felt his feet running under him, but
there was only blackness in his head, and his body was light and without
weight, like the body of a bird in flight.

The German machine-gunner cocked the Maxim with a single savage wrench
on the crank handle, and traversed sharply left, at the same time
depressing the thick waterjacketed barrel of the weapon until it pointed
directly down the slope below the sand-bagged emplacement towards the
British lines.

The single wildly running figure was angling away towards the left, and
the gunner pulled the wooden butt of the Maxim into his shoulder and
fired a single short traversing burst, aiming a fraction low to
counteract the natural tendency to shoot high at a downhill target.

Mark Anders hardly felt the mighty hammer strokes of the two bullets
that smashed into his back.

Fergus MacDonald was crying.  That surprised Sean, he had not expected
it.  The tears slid slowly from pinkrimmed eyes, and he struck them away
with a single angry movement.  Permission to take out a patrol, sir?  he
asked, and the young Captain glanced uncertainty at Sean over the
Sergeant's shoulder.

Sean nodded slightly, a mere inclination of the head.  Do you think you
can find volunteers?  the Captain asked uncertainly, and the red-faced
Sergeant answered gruffly.  There'll be volunteers, sir, the lads have a
feeling for what that youngster did.  Very well, then, as soon as it's
dark.  They found Mark a little after eight o'clock.  He hung in the
rusting barbed wire at the bottom of the slope, like a broken doll.
Fergus MacDonald had to use a pair of wire-cutters to cut him down, and
it took them nearly another hour to get him back to the British lines,
dragging the stretcher between them through the mud and slushy snow.
He's dead, said General Courtney, looking down at the white drained face
on the stretcher in the lantern light.

No, he's not, Fergus MacDonald denied it fiercely.  They don't kill my
boy that easy.  The locomotive whistled shrilly as it clattered over the
steelwork of the bridge.  Silver steam flew high in a bright plume, and
then smeared back on the wind.

Mark Anders leaned far out over the balcony of the single passenger
carriage and the same wind ruffled the soft brown wing of his hair and a
spattering of ash particles from the furnace stung his cheek, but he
screwed up his eyes and looked down into the bed of the river as they
roared across.

The water flowed down under the dipping reeds, and then met the pylons
of the bridge and swirled sullenly, flowing green and strong and full
down to the sea.  Water's high for this time of year, Mark muttered
aloud.  Grandpapa will be happy, and he felt his lips tugging up into
the unaccustomed smile.  He had smiled only infrequently during the past
months.

The locomotive hurtled across the steel bridge, and threw itself at the
far slope.  Immediately, the beat of its engine changed and its speed
bled away.

Mark stooped and hefted his old military pack, opened the gate of the
balcony and clambered down on to the steel steps, hanging with one arm
over the racing gravel embankment.

The train slowed rapidly as the incline steepened and he swung the pack
off his shoulder and leaned far out to let it drop as gently as possible
on to the gravel.  It bounced once and went bounding away down the
embankment, crashing into the shrubbery like a living animal in flight.

Then he swung down towards the racing earth himself and, judging his
moment finely as the train crested the ridge, he let go to hit the
embankment on flying feet, throwing his weight forward to ride the
impact and feel the gravel sliding under him.

He stayed upright, and came to a halt as the rest of the train clattered
past him, and the guard looked out sternly from the last van and called
a reprimand.  Hey, that's against the law. Send the sheriff, Mark
shouted back, and gave him an ironic salute as the locomotive picked up
speed on the reverse slope with explosive grunts of power, the rhythm of
the tracks rising sharply.  The guard clenched a fist and Mark turned
away.

The jolt had hurt his back again and he slipped a hand into his shirt
and ran it around under his armpit as he started back along the tracks.
He fingered the twin depressions below the shoulder blade and marvelled
again at how close one of them was to the bony projections of the spine.
The scar tissue had a silky, almost sensuous feel, but they had taken
long months to close.  Mark shuddered involuntarily as he remembered the
rattle of the trolley that carried the dressings, and the impassive
almostmasculine face of the matron as she stuffed the long cotton plugs
into the open mouths of the bullet wounds; he remembered also the slow
tearing agony as the bloody dressing was pulled out again with the
glittering steel forceps, and his own breathing sobbing in his ears and
the matron's voice, harsh and impersonal.  Oh, don't be a baby!  Every
day, day after day, week after week, until the hot feverish delirium of
the pneumonia that had attacked his bullet-damaged lung had seemed a
blessed relief. How long had it been, from the V.  A.  D.  Station in a
French field with the muddy snow deeply rutted by the ambulances and the
burial details digging graves beyond the tented hospital, to the general
hospital near Brighton and the dark mists of pneumonia, the hospital
ship home down the length of the Atlantic, baking in the airless
tropics, the convalescent hospital with its pleasant lawns and gardens -
how long?  Fourteen months in all, months during which the war which men
were already misnaming Great had ended.  Pain and delirium had clouded
the passage of time, yet it seemed a whole lifetime.

He had lived one life in the killing and the carnage, in the pain and
the suffering, and now he was reborn.  The pain in his back abated
swiftly.  It was almost mended now, he thought happily, and he pushed
away the dark and terrible memories and scrambled down the embankment to
retrieve his pack.

Andersland was almost forty miles downstream, and the train had been
behind schedule it was noon already.  Mark knew that he would not make
it before the following evening, and strangely, now that he was almost
home, the sense of urgency was gone.

He moved easily, falling into that long, familiar stride of the hunter,
easing the pack on his back slightly as soon as the newly healed wounds
stiffened, feeling the good sweat springing cool on his face and through
the thin cotton of his shirt.

Absence of so many years had sharpened his appreciation of the world
through which he moved, so that which before had warranted only passing
attention became now a new and unfamiliar delight.

Along the banks the dense riverine bush was alive with riad life.  The
bejewelled dragonflies that skimmed the surface on transparent wings or
coupled in flight, male upon female, his long glittering abdomen arched
to join with hers; the hippopotamus that burst through the surface in an
explosive exhalation of breath, and stared at Mark upon the bank with
pink watery eyes, flicking the tiny ears, and wallowing like a
gargantuan black balloon in the green swirling current.

It was like moving through an ancient Eden, before the coming of man,
and suddenly Mark knew that this solitude was what his body and mind
needed to complete the healing process.

He camped that night on a grassy bluff above the river, above the
mosquitoes and the unpleasant darkness of the thick bush.

A leopard woke him after midnight, sawing hoarsely down in the river
bottom, and he lay and listened to it moving slowly upstream until he
lost it among the crags of high ground.  He did not sleep again
immediately, but lay and examined, with the pleasure of anticipation,
the day ahead of him.

For every day of the past four years, even the very bad days of darkness
and ghosts, he had thought of the old man.  Some days it had been only a
fleeting thought, on other days he had dwelt upon him as a homesick
schoolboy tortures himself with thoughts of home.  The old man was home,
of course, both the mother and father Mark had never known.  Always
there from his first vaguest memory to the present, unchanging in his
strength and quiet understanding.

Mark felt a deep physical pang of longing, as he recalled clearly a
picture of the old man sitting on the hard carved rocker on the wide
boarded stoep, the crumpled old khaki shirt, crudely patched and in need
of laundering, open at the neck to expose a fuzz of silver-white chest
hair; the neck and jowls wrinkled like those of a turkey cock, but a
face burned dark brown and pelted with five days growth of silver
stubble that sparkled like glass chips; the huge moustaches of
glistening white, the ends curled with beeswax into fearsome spikes, the
wide terai hat pulled low over the bright toffee-coloured humorous eyes.
The hat was always in place, sweat-soaked and greasy around the band,
but never removed, not even at mealtimes, nor, Mark suspected, in the
big brass bed at night.

Mark remembered him pausing from working with the whittling knife,
rolling the quid from one cheek to the other, then letting fly at the
old five-gallon Tate and Lyle golden syrup can that was his spittoon.
Hitting solidly at ten feet, spilling not a single drop of the dark
brown juice, and then continuing the story as though there had been no
interruption.  And what stories!  Stories to start a small boy's eyes
popping from their sockets and wake him in the night to peer fearfully
under the bed.

Mark remembered the old man in small things, stooping to take up a
handful of his rich soil and let it run through his fingers, then wiping
them on the seat of his pants with the proud fierce expression on his
withered old features.  Good land, Andersland, he would say, and nod
like a sage.  Mark remembered him in the big things, standing tall and
skinny beside Mark in thick thorn bush with the big old Martini Hendry
rifle bellowing and smoking, the recoil shaking his frail old body as,
like a black mountain, the buffalo bull came down upon them, blood mad
and crazed with its wounds.

Four years since last he had seen him, since last he had heard news of
him.  At first he had written, long homesick letters, but the old man
could not read nor write.  Mark had hoped that he might take them to a
friend, the postmistress perhaps, and that they might read them to him
and write back to Mark.

it had been a vain hope.  The old man's pride would never allow him to
admit to a stranger that he could not read.

Nevertheless, Mark had continued to write, once every month for all
those long years; but only tomorrow he would have his first news of the
old man in all that time.

Mark slept again for another few hours, then built up the fire again in
the darkness before dawn and brewed coffee.  He was moving again as soon
as it was light enough to see his feet on the path.

From the escarpment he watched the sun come up out of the sea.  There
were mountains of cumulus thunder clouds standing tall over the distant
sea, and the sun came up behind them so that they glowed with red and
roses, wine and deep purples, each cloud etched in outline by brilliant
red-gold and shot through with shafts of light.

At Mark's feet the land dropped away into the coastal low-lands, that
rich littoral of densely forested valleys and smooth golden grassy hills
that stretched to the endless white beaches of the Indian Ocean.

Below where Mark stood, the river tumbled over the edge of the
escarpment, leaping in sheets of white and silver from wet black rock to
deep dark pools which turned upon themselves in foam like huge wheels,
as though they rested before the next wild plunge downwards.

Mark began to hurry for the first time, following the steep path
downwards with the same urgency as the river, but it was midmorning
before he came out on to the warm and drowsing sweep of land below the
escarpment.

The river widened, and became shallower, changing its mood completely as
it meandered between the exposed sandbanks.  There were new birds here,
different beasts in the forest and upon the hills, but now Mark had no
time for them.  Hardly glancing at the flocks of long, heavybeaked
storks and scimitar-billed this on the sandbanks, even when the hadedah
this rose with their wild insanely ringing shrieks of laughter, he
hurried on.

There was a place, unmarked except for a small tumbled cairn at the foot
of a huge wild fig tree, that had a special significance to Mark, for it
marked the western boundary of Andersland.

Mark stopped to rebuild the cairn among the grey scaly roots that
crawled across the earth like ancient reptiles, and while he worked, a
flock of fat green pigeons exploded on noisy wings from the branches
above him where they had been feeding on the bitter yellow fruit.

When Mark went on beyond the fig tree, he walked with a new lightness
and resilience to his step, a new set to his shoulders and a new
brightness in his eyes, for he walked once again on Andersland.  Eight
thousand acres of rich chocolate loamy ground, four miles of river
frontage, water that never failed, softly rounded hills covered with
thick sweet grass, Andersland, the name the old man had given it thirty
years before.

Half a mile further on, Mark was about to leave the river and take a
short cut across the next ridge to the homestead, when there was a
distant but earth-trembling thud, and immediately afterwards the faint
sound of human voices on the still warm air.

Puzzled, Mark paused to listen, and again the thudding sound, but this
time preceded by the crackling and snapping of branches and undergrowth.
The unmistakable sound of timber being felled.

Abandoning his original intention, Mark kept on down the river, until he
emerged suddenly from forest into open country that reminded him at
first of those terrible devastated fields of France, torn and ravaged by
shell and high explosive until the raw earth lay exposed and churned.

There were gangs of dark men in white linen dhotis and turbans felling
the heavy timber and clearing out the undergrowth along the river.  For
a moment Mark did not understand who these strange men were, and then he
remembered reading a newspaper report that Hindu labourers were being
brought out in their thousands from India to work for the new sugar cane
estates.  These were the wiry, very dark-skinned men that worked now
like a colony of ants along the river.  There were hundreds of them, no,
Mark realized that they were in their thousands - and there were oxen
teams as well.  Big spans of heavy, strong-looking beasts plodding
slowly as they dragged the fallen timber into rows for burning.

Not truly understanding what he was seeing, Mark left the river and
climbed the slope beside it.  From the crest he had a new uninterrupted
view across Andersland, and beyond, eastwards towards the sea.

The devastation stretched as far as he could see, and now there was
something else to ponder.  The land was going to the plough, all of it.
The forest and grazing land had been torn out, and the trek oxen moved
slowly over the open ground, one team following the next, the rich
chocolate earth turning up under the plough shares in thick shiny welts.
The cries of the ploughmen and the muted popping of the long trek whips
carried to where Mark stood, bewildered, upon the slope of the hill.

He sat down on a boulder and for almost anhourwatched the men and the
oxen at work, and he was afraid.  Afraid for what this all meant.  The
old man would never let this happen to his land.  He had a hatred of the
plough and the axe; he loved too deeply the stately trees which now
groaned and crackled as they toppled.  The old man hoarded his grazing
like a miser, as though it were as precious as its golden colour
suggested.  He would never allow it to be turned under, not if he were
alive.

That was why Mark was afraid.  If he were alive.  For, God knows, he
would never sell Andersland.

Mark did not truly want to know the answer.  He had to force himself to
rise and go down the hill.

The dark turbaned labourers did not understand his questions, but they
directed him with expressive gestures to a fat babu in a cotton jacket
who strutted importantly from work gang to work gang, snapping at a
naked black back with a light cane or pausing to write a laborious note
in the huge black book he carried.

He looked up, startled, and then immediately became obsequious in the
presence of a white man.  Good day, master, He would have gone on, but
the shiny acquisitive eyes darted over Mark and they saw how young he
was, unshaven, his cheap army issue suit was stained with travel and
rumpled from having been slept in.  It was obvious he carried his entire
worldly possessions in his back pack.  To tell the truth, we are not
needing more men here. His manner changed instantly, becoming lordly.  I
am being in charge here.  Good.  Mark nodded.  Then you can tell me what
these men are doing on Andersland.  The man irritated him, he had known
so many like him in the army, bully those below and lick the backsides
of those above.  Beyond doubt we are making ground clear for sugar. This
ground belongs to my family, said Mark, and instantly the man's manner
changed again.  Ah, good young master, you are from the company at
Ladyburg?  No, no, we live here.  In the house, Mark pointed at the
ridge of the hill, beyond which lay the homestead, this is our ground.
The babu chuckled like a fat dark baby, and shook his head.  Nobody
living here now.  Alas!  The company owns everything.  And he made a
wide gesture that took in the whole landscape from escarpment to the
sea.  Soon everything is sugar, you will see, man.  Sugar, sugar. And he
laughed again.

From the ridge the old homestead looked the same, just a green-painted
roof of corrugated iron showing above the dark green of the orchard, but
as Mark came up the overgrown path past the hen coops, he saw that all
the window panes had been removed, leaving blank dark squares, and there
was no furniture on the wide stoep.  The rocker was gone, and there was
a sag to the roof timbers at one end of the veranda; a drainpipe had
come loose and hung away from the wall.

The garden had the wild untended look of neglect, the plants beginning
to encroach on the house itself.  The old man had always kept it trimmed
and neat with the leaves swept up daily from under the trees and the
white-painted beehives set up in orderly rows in the shade.  Somebody
had robbed the hives with brutal carelessness, smashing them open with
an axe.

The rooms were bare, stripped of anything of possible value, even the
old black wood-burning stove in the kitchen, everything except the Tate
and Lyle spittoon on the stoep which lay on its side; its spilled
contents had left a dark stain on the woodwork.

Mark wandered slowly from room to empty room, feeling a terrible sense
of loss and desolation as the windblown leaves rustled under his feet,
and the big black and yellow spiders watched him with myriad glittering
eyes from the webs they had spun in the corners and across the jambs of
the doorways.

Mark left the house and went down to the small family graveyard, feeling
a quick lift of relief when he realized there were no new graves there.
Grandmother Alice, her eldest daughter, and her cousin who had died
before Mark was born.  Still three graves, the old man was not there.

Mark drew a bucket from the well and drank a little of the cold sweet
water, then he wandered into the orchard and picked a hatful of guavas
and a ripe yellow pineapple.

In the backyard strutted a young cockerel who had escaped the
plunderers.  Mark had to hunt him for half an hour before a stone
brought him down off the roof in a squawking flutter of feathers.

Plucked and cleaned, he went into the canteen over the fire that Mark
made in the backyard, and while he boiled, Mark had a sudden thought.

He went back into the old man's bedroom and in the far corner, where the
big brass bed had once stood, he knelt and felt for the loose board.  He
prised the single nail that held it down with his clasp knife and then
lifted the plank.

He reached down into the opening below and brought out first a thick
bundle of envelopes tied with a strip of raw hide.  Mark riffled the
edge of the pack and saw that not a single envelope had been opened.
They were all addressed in his own spiky hand.  They had been carefully
stored in this hiding place.  Yet not all Mark's letters were there. The
sequence ended abruptly and Mark, checking the last letter, found it
postmarked eleven months previously.  Mark felt a choking sensation in
the base of his throat, and the sharp sting of tears.

He placed the bundle of letters aside and reached again into the opening
to bring out the Mazzawatee tea caddy, with the picture of the
grandmother in steel-rimmed spectacles on the lid.  It was the old man's
treasure-chest.

He carried the can and the bundle of letters out into the backyard for
the late afternoon light was going fast in the unlit rooms.  He sat on
the kitchen step, and opened the tea caddy.

There were forty gold sovereigns in a leather purse, some of them had
the bearded head of Kruger the old president of the South African
Republic, the others of Edward and George.  Mark slipped the purse into
the inner pocket of his jacket and in the fading light examined the rest
of the old man's treasure.  Photographs of grandmother Alice as a young
woman, yellowed and dog-eared with age, a wedding certificate, old
newspaper clippings from the Boer War, cheap articles of women's
jewellery, the same as those that Alice wore in the photographs, a medal
in a presentation case, a Queen's South Africa medal with six bars
including those for Tugela, Ladysmith and the Transvaal campaigns,
Mark's own school reports from the Ladyburg School and then the diploma
from the University College at Port Natal - these the old man valued
especially, with the illiterate's awe of learning and the written word.
He had sold some of his prize livestock to pay for Mark's education, he
rated it that highly.  Nothing in the tea caddy, apart from the
sovereigns, was of any value, but it had all been precious beyond price
to the old man.  Carefully Mark re-packed the tin and placed it in his
back-pack.

in the last light of day Mark ate the stringy cockerel and the fruit,
and when he rolled into his blanket on the wooden kitchen floor he was
still thinking.

He knew now that the old man, wherever he had gone, had intended
returning to Andersland.  He would never have left that precious hoard
behind unless that had been his intention.

A boot in the ribs brought Mark awake, and he rolled over and sat up,
gasping with the pain of it.  On your feet!  Get your arse moving, and
keep it going.  it was not yet fully light, but Mark could make out the
man's features.  He was clean-shaven with a heavy smooth jaw, and his
teeth seemed to have been ground down to a flat even line, very white
against the dark suntan.  His head was round, like a cannon ball, and
gave the impression of vast weightiness, for he carried it low on a
thick neck like a heavyweight boxer shaping up.  Up!  he repeated, and
drew back the scuffed brown riding-boot again.

Mark came up on his feet and squared to defend himself.  He found the
man was shorter than he was, but he was stocky and solid, with broad
thick shoulders and the same weightiness in his frame.  This is private
property, we don't want tramps hanging about.  I'm not a tramp, Mark
started, but the man cut him short with a snort of brusque laughter. You
with the fancy clothes, and the Rolls parked at the door, you had me
fooled for a moment there.  My name is Mark Anders, he said.  This land
belongs to my grandfather, John Anders -He thought he saw something move
in the man's eyes, a change in the set of his mouth, doubt or worry
perhaps.

He licked his lips, a quick nervous gesture, but when he spoke his voice
was still flat and quiet.  I don't know nothing about that, all I know
is this land belongs to the Ladyburg Estates now, and I am the foreman
for the company, and neither me nor the company wants you hanging around
here, he paused and settled on his feet, dropping his shoulders and
pushing out his heavy jaw, and one other thing I know is I like to break
a head now and then, and I haven't broken one for God knows a long time.
They stared at each other, and Mark felt a sudden hot rush of anger.  He
wanted to take up the man's challenge, even though he realized how
powerful and dangerous he was.  He had the look of a killer, and the
weight and the strength, but Mark felt himself coming into balance, his
own shoulders dropping.

His tormentor saw it also and his relish was obvious.  He smiled thinly,
clenching his jaw around the smile so that the cords stood out in his
throat, swaying slightly up on to the balls of his feet.  Then suddenly
Mark felt revolted and sickened by the presence of violence.  There had
been too much of it in his life already, and there was no reason to
fight now.  He turned away and picked up his boots.

The man watched him dress, disappointed perhaps, but ready for further
confrontation.  When he swung his pack up on to his shoulder, Mark
asked, What's your name?

The man answered him lightly, still keyed up for violence.  My friends
call me Hobday, he said.  Hobday who?  Just Hobday!  I won't forget it,
said Mark.  You've been a real brick, Hobday.  He went down the steps
into the yard, and fifteen minutes later when Mark looked back from the
ridge where the Ladyburg road crossed on its way northwards, Hobday was
still standing in the kitchen yard of Andersland, watching him intently.

Fred Black watched Mark come up the hill.  He leaned against the rail of
the dipping tank and chewed steadily on his quid of tobacco, stringy and
sun-blackened and dry as a stick of chewing tobacco himself .

Although he was one of John Anders cronies, and had known Mark since he
was a crawler, it was clear he did not recognize him now.  Mark stopped
fifteen paces off and lifted his hat.  Hello, Uncle Fred, Mark greeted
him, and still it was a moment before the older man let out a whoop and
leapt to embrace Mark. God, boy, they told me you'd got yourself killed
in France.  They sat together on the rail of the cattle pen, while the
Zulu herd boys drove the cattle below them through the narrow race,
until they reached the ledge from which they made the wild scrambling
leap into the deep stinking chemical bath, to come up again, snorting
fearfully, and swim, nose up, for the slope ramp beyond.  He's been dead
almost a year, no, longer, over a year now, lad, I'm sorry.  I never
thought to let you know.  Like I said, we thought you were dead in
France.  That's all right, Uncle Fred.  Mark was surprised that he felt
no shock.  He had known it, accepted it already, but there was still the
grief that lay heavy on his soul.  They were both silent for a longer
time, the old man beside him respecting his grief.  How did he -'Mark
hesitated over the word, how did he go?  Well, now.  Fred Black lifted
his hat and rubbed the bald pink pate lovingly.  It was all a bit sudden
like.  He went off to poach a little biltong with Piet Greyling and his
son up at Chaka's Gate. Vivid memories crowded back for Mark.  Chaka's
Gate was the vast wilderness area to the north where the old man had
taught him the craft of the hunter.  Years before, back in 1869 it had
been declared a hunting reserve but no warden had been appointed, and
the men of northern Natal and Zululand looked upon it as their private
hunting reserve.  On the fifth day, the old man did not come back into
camp.  They searched for him another four days before they found him. He
paused again and glanced at Mark.  You feeling all right, boy?  Yes, I'm
all right.  Mark wondered how many men he had seen die, how many he had
killed himself, and yet the death of one more old man could move him so.
Go on, please, Uncle Fred.  Piet said it looked like he had slipped
while he was climbing a steep place, and he had fallen on his rifle and
it had gone off.  It hit him in the stomach. They watched the last ox
plunge into the dip, and Fred Black climbed stiffly down from the pole
fence.  He held the small of his back for a moment.  Getting old, he
grunted, and Mark fell in beside him as they started up towards the
house.  Piet and his boy buried him there.  He wasn't fit to bring back,
he'd been in the sun four days.  They marked the place and made a sworn
statement to the magistrate when they got back to Ladyburg.

Fred Black was interrupted by a cry and the sight of a female figure
racing down the avenue of blue gum trees towards them, slim and young,
with honey brown hair in a thick braid bouncing on her back, long brown
legs and grubby bare feet beneath the skirts of the faded cheap cotton
skirt.  Mark!  she cried again.  Oh Mark!  But she was close before he
recognized her.  She had changed in four years.  Mary.  The sadness was
still on Mark, but he could not talk further now.  There would be time
later.  Even in the sadness, he could not miss the fact that Mary Black
was a big girl now, no longer the mischievous imp who once had been
below his lordly notice when he had been a senior at Ladyburg High
School.

She still had the freckled laughing face and the prominent, slightly
crooked front teeth, but she had grown into a big, wide-hipped, earthy
farm girl, with a resounding jolly laugh.  She was as tall as Mark's
shoulder and her shape under the thin, threadbare cotton was rounded and
full; she had hips and buttocks that swung as she walked beside him, a
waist like the flared neck of a vase and fat heavy breasts that bounced
loosely at each stride.  As they walked, she asked questions, endless
questions in a demanding manner, and she kept touching Mark, her hand on
his elbow, then grabbing his hand to shake out the answers to her
questions, looking up at him with mischievous eyes, laughing her big
ringing laugh.  Mark felt strangely restless.

Fred Black's wife recognized him from across the yard and let out a
sound like a milk cow too long deprived of her calf.  She had nine
daughters, and she had always pined for a son.  Hello, Aunt Hilda, Mark
began, and then was folded into her vast pneumatic embrace.

You're starved, she cried, and those clothes, they stink.

You stink too, Marky, your hair, you'll be sitting on it next.  The four
unmarried girls, supervised by Mary, set the galvanized bath in the
centre of the kitchen floor and filled it with buckets of steaming water
from the stove.  Mark sat on a stool on the back veranda with a sheet
around his shoulders, while Aunt Hilda sheared him of his long curling
locks with a huge pair of blunt scissors.

Then she drove her daughters protesting from the kitchen.  Mark fought
desperately for his modesty, but she brushed his defence aside.  An old
woman like me, you haven't got anything I haven't seen bigger and
better.  She stripped him determinedly, hurling the soiled and rumpled
clothing through the open doorway to where Mary hovered expectantly.
Wash them, child, and you get yourself away from that door.  Mark
blushed furiously and dropped quickly into the water.

In the dusk, Fred Black and Mark sat together on the coping of the well
in the yard, with a bottle of brandy between them.  The liquor was the
fierce Cape Smokewith a bite like a zebra stallion, and after the first
sip Mark did not touch his glass again.  Yes, I've thought about that
often, Fred agreed, already slightly owl-eyed with the brandy.  Old
Johnny loved that land of his.  Did he ever speak of selling it to you?
No, never did.  I always thought he'd be there for ever.

Often talked of being buried next to Alice.  He wanted that.  When did
you last see Grandpapa, Uncle Fred?  Well, now, he rubbed his bald head
thoughtfully, it would be about two weeks before he left for Chaka's
Gate with the Greylings.  Yes, that's right.  Held been into Ladyburg to
buy cartridges and provisions.  Pitched up here one night in the old
scotch-cart, and we had a good old chat He didn't say anything then,
about selling?  No, not a word The kitchen door flew open, spilling
yellow lantern light into the yard, and Aunt Hilda bellowed at them.
Food's up.  Come along now, Fred, don't you keep that boy out there,
teaching him your evil ways, and don't you bring that bottle into this
house.  You hear me! Fred grimaced, poured the last three inches of dark
brown liquor into his tumbler and shook his head at the empty bottle.
Farewell, old friend.  He sent it sailing over the hedge, and drained
the tumbler like medicine.

Mark was crowded into the bench against the kitchen wall with Mary on
one side of him and another of the big buxom daughters on the other.
Aunt Hilda sat directly opposite him, shovelling food on to his plate,
and loudly berating him if his rate of ingestion faltered.  Fred needs
somebody here to help him now.  He's getting old, though the old fool
doesn't know it.  Mark nodded, his mouth so full he was unable to reply,
and Mary reached across him for another hunk of home-baked bread that
was still warm from the oven.  Her big loose breast pressed against Mark
and he almost choked.  The girls don't get much chance to meet nice boys
stuck out here on the farm.  Mary shifted in her seat, and her upper
thigh came firmly against Mark's.  Leave the lad alone, Hilda, you
scheming old woman, Fred slurred amiably from the head of the table.
Mary, give Mark some more gravy on those potatoes.  The girl poured the
gravy, steadying herself as she leaned over towards Mark by placing her
free hand on Mark's leg above the knee.  Eat -up!  Mary's done you a
special milk tart for afters.  MarYs hand still rested on his leg, and
now it moved slowly but purposefully upwards.  Instantly Mark's entire
attention focused on the hand and the food turned to hot ashes in his
mouth.  Some more pumpkin, Marky?  Aunt Hilda asked with concern, and
Mark shook his head weakly.  He could not believe what was happening
below the level of the table and directly in front of Mary's mother.

He felt a rising sense of panic.

As casually as he could in the circumstances, he dropped one hand into
his lap, and without looking at the girl, gripped her wrist firmly. Have
you had enough, Mark?  Yes, oh yes, indeed, Mark agreed fervently, and
tried to drag Mary's hand away, but she was a big powerful lass and not
easily distracted.  Clear Mark's plate, Mary love, and give him some of
your lovely tart.  Mary seemed not to hear.  Her head was bowed demurely
over her plate, her cheeks were flushed bright glowing pink, and her
lips trembled slightly.  Beside her, Mark writhed and squirmed in his
seat.  Mary, what's wrong with you, girl?  Her mother frowned with
irritation.  Do you hear me, child?  Yes, Mother, I hear you.  At last
she sighed and roused herself.  She stood up slowly and reached for
Mark's plate with both hands, while he sagged slightly on the bench,
weak with relief.

Mark was exhausted from the long day's march and the subsequent
excitement, but though he fell asleep almost instantly, it was a sleep
troubled by dreams.

Through a ghostly, brooding landscape of swirling mist and weird
unnatural light, he pursued a dark wraith, but his legs were slowed, as
though he moved through a bath of treacle, and each pace was an enormous
effort.

He knew the wraith that flitted through the mist ahead of him was the
old man, and he tried to cry out, but though he strained with open mouth
no sound came.  Suddenly a small red hole appeared in the wraith's dark
back and from it flowed a bright pulsing stream of blood, and the wraith
turned to face him.

For a moment he looked into the old man's face, the intelligent yellow
eyes smiled at him over the huge spiked mustache, and then the face
melted like hot wax and the pale features of a beautiful marble statue
came up like a face through water.  The face of the young German, at
last Mark cried out and fell to cover his face.  in the darkness he
sobbed softly, until another sensation came through to his tortured
imagination.

He felt a slow cunning caress.  The sobbing shrivelled in his throat,
and gradually he abandoned himself to the wicked delight of his senses.
He knew what was coming, it had happened so often in the lonely nights
and he welcomed it now, drifting up slowly out of the depths of sleep,
At the edge of his awareness there was a voice now, whispering, crooning
gently.  There now, don't fuss, there now, it's all right now, it's
going to be all right.  Don't make that terrible noise. He came awake
gradually, for long moments not realizing that the warm firm flesh was
reality.  Above him were heavy white breasts, hanging big and heavy to
sweep across his chest white bare skin shining in the moonlight that
spilled through the window above his narrow steel bed.  Mary will make
it better, the voice whispered with husky intensity.  Mary?  he choked
out the name, and tried to sit up, but she pushed him back gently with
her full weight on his chest. You're mad.

He began to struggle, but her mouth came down over his, wet and warm and
all engulfing, and his struggles abated at the shock of this new
sensation.  He felt his sense whirl giddily.

Against the rising turmoil within him, was balanced the terrible things
that he knew about women.  Those strange and awful things that the
regimental chaplain had explained to him, the knowledge that had
sustained him against all the blandishments of the bold little poules of
France and the ladies who had beckoned to him from the dark doorways of
London's back streets.

The chaplain had told them how two equally evil terrible consequences
came from unlawful union with a woman.

Either there was a disease that was without cure, which ate away the
flesh, left a rotting hole in a man's groin and finally drove him
insane, or there was a child without a father, a bastard to darken a
man's honour.

The threat was too much, and Mark tore his mouth free from the girl's
sucking hungry lips and the thrusting, driving tongue.  Oh God!  he
whispered.  You'll have a baby.  That's all right, silly, she whispered
in a cheerful husky voice.  We can get married.

She shifted suddenly as he lay stunned by this intelligence, and she
swung one knee over his supine body, pinning him under the heavy soft
cushion of her flesh, smothering him with the fall of bright clinging
hair.  No.  He tried to wriggle out from under her.  No, this is mad.  I
don't want to marry, Yes, there, oh yes.  For another instant he was
paralysed by the feeling of it, and then with a violent wrench he
toppled her over.  She fell sideways, her hands clutched wildly at his
shoulders for an instant before she went over the side of the bed.

The washstand crashed over, and the thud of the girl's big body upon the
floorboards echoed through the silent sleeping house.

For a moment afterwards the echoes died, the silence re turned and then
was split by a chorus of screams from the bedroom of the younger girls
across the passage.

What is it?  bellowed Fred Black, from the big bedroom.  There's
somebody in the house.  Get him, Fred, don't just lie thereWhere's my
shotgun?  Help, papa!  Help!  With a single bound, Mary leapt up from
the bedroom floor, snatched her nightgown off the chair and swept it
over her head.  Mary!  Mark sat up, he wanted to explain, to try and
tell her about the chaplain.  He leaned towards her and even in the
faint moonlight he could see the fury that contorted her features.

mary!  He did not have time to avoid the blow, it came full-armed and
flat-handed, smashing into the side of his head with a force that
rattled his teeth and starred his vision.  She was a big strong girl.
When his head cleared, she was gone, but his ear still sang with the
sound of a thousand wild bees.

A dusty Daimler lorry pulled up beside Mark as he trudged along the side
of the deeply rutted road with thick glass growing along the central
hump.

There was a middle-aged man and his wife in the front seat, and he
called to Mark.  Where are you going, son?  Ladyburg sir. Jump in the
back, then.  Mark rode the last twenty miles sitting high on bagged
maize, with a coop of cackling hens beside him and the wind ruffling his
stiff newly cropped hair.

They rattled over the bridge across the Baboon Stroom, and Mark
marvelled at how it had all changed.  Ladyburg was no longer a village,
but a town.  It had spread out as far as the stream itself, and there
was a huge new goods yard below the escarpment in which half a dozen
locomotives busily shunted trucks heavily laden with freshly sawn timber
from the mills, or with bagged sugar from the new factory.

The factory itself was a monument to the town's progress, a towering
structure of steel girders and huge boilers.

Smoke and steam boiled from half a dozen stacks to form a grey mist that
smeared away on the gentle breeze.

Mark wrinkled his nose at the faint stink of it on the wind, and then
looked with awe down Main Street.  There were at least a dozen new
buildings, their ornate fagades decorated with scrolls of ironwork, and
beautifully intricate gables, stained glass in the main doors and the
owner's name and date of construction in raised plaster lettering across
the front; but these were all overshadowed by a giant structure four
stories tall, crusted with ornamentation like a wedding cake of a
wealthy bride.  Proudly it bore the legend Ladyburg Farmers Bank.  The
driver of the truck dropped Mark on the sidewalk in front of it, and
left him with a cheery wave.

There were at least a dozen motor vehicles parked among the scotch-carts
and horse-drawn carriages, and the people on the streets were well
dressed and cheerfullooking, the citizens of a prosperous and thriving
community.

Mark knew one or two of them from the old days, and as he trudged down
Main Street with his pack stung over one shoulder, he paused to greet
them.  There was always a momentary confusion until they recognized him,
and then, But, Marky, we heard, we thought you'd been killed in France.
It was in the Gazette.  The Land Deeds Registrar's Office was in the
sprawled labyrinth of Government offices behind the Magistrate's Court
and Police Station.  There had been plenty of time to think on the long
journey up from Andersland, and Mark knew exactly what he was going to
do, and in what order.

There was a cramped space in the front of the office with an uninviting
wooden bench, and a plain deal counter.

There was an elderly clerk with nearsighted eyes behind steel-rimmed
spectacles, and a peaked green eyeshade on his forehead.  He looked like
an ancient crow in his black alpaca jacket with paper guards over his
cuffs, and a bony beak of a nose, as he crouched over his desk making a
Herculean task of stamping a pile of documents.

He worked on for a few minutes.  Mark patiently read the Government
notices that plastered the walls, until the clerk looked up at last with
the exasperated air of a man interrupted in a labour that might alter
the destiny of mankind.  I'd like to look at a land deed, please sir A
certain piece of extinguished quit-rent land situate in the division of
Ladyburg being Err.  No.  42 Of Division A of One.  The farm known as
ANDERSLAND .  . .

Deed of Transfer passed in favour of Ladyburg Estates Ltd registered at
Ladyburg on ist day of June, 19.  rg.

Knowall men whom it may concern that DENNIS PETERSEN

appeared before me, Registrar of Deeds, he, the said appearer, being
duly authorized by a power of attorney executed at Ladyburg on the 12th
day of May, 1919, by JOHN ARCHIBALD ANDERS which power was witnessed in
accordance with law .  .  .  and that the said appearer declared that
his principal had truly and legally sold.  .  .

Mark turned to the next document.

Agreement of Sale of Immovable property That TOHNARCHIBALD ANDERS,
hereinafter known as the Seller, and LADYBURG ESTATES LTD hereinafter
known as the purchaser, the Farm known as ANDERSLAND, together with all
improvements and buildings, standing crops, implements and livestock for
the consideration of Three Thousand Pounds Sterling In witness whereof
the parties set their hand.

JOHN ARCHIBALD ANDERS (his mark) X For and on behalf of LADYBURG ESTATES
LTD DIRK COURTNEY (DIRECTOR) As witnesses of the above:PIETER ANDRIES
GREYLING CORNELIUS JOHANNES GREYLING Mark frowned at the two names. Piet
Greyling and his son had accompanied the old man up to Chaka's Gate
almost immediately after witnessing the Deed of Sale, and they had found
him dead a few days later and buried him out there in the wilderness.

General Power of Attorney in favour of DENNIS PETERSEN.

I, the undersigned, JOHN ARCHIBALD ANDERS do hereby empower the
above-mentioned DENNIS signed JOHNARCHIBALD ANDERS X (his mark)

as witness PIETER ANDRIES GREYLING.

CORNELIUS JOHANNES GREYLING.

Mark pored over the bundle of stiff legal parchment with its fancy
printing and red wax seals with dangling ribbons of watered silk.
Carefully he copied out the names of the parties involved in the
transaction into his notebook and when he had finished, the clerk who
had been jealously watching his precious papers reclaimed them and
reluctantly handed over an official receipt for the five-shilling search
fee.

The office of the registrar of companies was directly across the narrow
lane, and here Mark was received in a different mood.  The keeper of
this gloomy cavern was a young lady dressed in severe dove-grey jacket
and long sweeping skirt which was at odds with her lively eyes and pert
air.

The pretty little face, with freckled snub nose, lit with a quick
appreciative smile as Mark came in through the door and within minutes
she was helping him in a comradely and conspiratorial manner as he
perused the memoranda and articles of association of Ladyburg Estates
Ltd.  Do you live here? asked the girl.  I haven't seen you before.  No,
I don't, Mark answered warily without looking up at her.  He was finding
it difficult to concentrate on the documents, and he remembered vividly
his last encounter with a young girl.  You're lucky.  The girl sighed
dramatically.  It's so dull here, nothing to do after work in the
evenings.  She waited hopefully, but the silence drew out.

The Directors of Ladyburg Estates were Messrs Dirk Courtney and Ronald
Beresford Pye, but they held only a single share each, just sufficient
to qualify them to act as officers of the company.

The other nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and
ninety-eight ordinary fully paid up five-shilling shares were held by
the Ladyburg Farmers Bank.  Thank you very much, said Mark, returning
the file to the girl while avoiding her frank gaze.  Could I see the
file for Ladyburg Farmers Bank please?

She brought it promptly.

The one million one-pound shares of the Ladyburg Farmers Bank were owned
by three men, all of them Directors of the Company.

Dirk Courtney: Ronald Beresford Pye: Dennis Petersen: Mark frowned, the
web was tangled and intricately woven, the same names again and again.
He wrote the names into his notebook.  My name is Marion, what's yours?
Mark, Mark Anders. Mark, that's a strong romantic name.  Have you read
Julius Caesar?  Mark Antony was such a strong romantic character.  Yes,
agreed Mark.  He was. How much do I owe you for the search fee?  , oh,
I'll just forget about that.  No, look don't do that, I want to pay. All
right then, if you want to.

At the door he paused.  Thanks.  he said shyly.  You were very kind.  Oh
it's a pleasure.  If there's anything else, well, you know my name and
where to find me.  Then suddenly and unaccountably, she blushed scarlet.
To hide it, she turned away with the files.  When she looked again, he
was gone, and she sighed, holding the files to her plump little bosom.

Mark found the accounts of the old man's estate filed with the Master of
the Court almost contemptuously under the heading Intestate Estates less
than 100 pounds.

on the credit side were listed two rifles and a shotgun, four trek oxen
and scotch-cart, sold at public auction to realize eighty-four pounds
sixteen shillings.  On the debit side were legal and commission fees
accruing to one Dennis Petersen, and costs of winding up the estate.

The total was one hundred and twenty-seven pounds; the account had been
in deficit, a distribution had been made and the estate closed.  John
Archibald Anders had gone, and left hardly a ripple behind him, not even
the three thousand pounds he had been paid for Andersland.

Mark hefted his pack again and went out into the brilliant sunlight of
afternoon.  A water cart was moving slowly down Main Street drawn by two
oxen, its sprinklers pouring fine jets of water into the roadway to lay
the thick dust.

Mark paused and inhaled the smell of water on dry earth, and looked
across the street at the towering building of the Ladyburg Farmers Bank.

For a brief moment, he touched the idea of crossing and entering,
demanding of the men in there what had made the old man change his firm
resolve to die and be buried on Andersland, how the money had been paid
to him, and what he had done with it.

But the idea passed swiftly.  The men who worked in that building were
creatures of a different breed from the penniless grandson of an
illiterate hard-scrabble farmer.

There were orders in society, unseen barriers which a man could not
cross, even if he had a university diploma, a military medal for
gallantry and an honourable discharge from the army.

That building was the shrine of wealth and power and influence, where
dwelt men like giants, like gods.  The likes of Mark Anders did not
barge in there demanding answers to unimportant questions about an old
man of no account.  Intestate estate less than 100 pounds, Mark
whispered aloud, and set off across town, towards the clanking, buffing
sounds of the railway goods yard.  Yes, agreed the station master, Piet
Greyling was a mainline loco driver, and his son fired for him, but they
threw in their time months ago, back in 1919, both of them.  He rubbed
his chin thoughtfully.  No, I don't know where they were headed, just
too damned happy to see them go, I guess.  Oh, yes, now I come to think
on it, the son did say something about they were going up to Rhodesia.
Going to buy a farm, or something, and the man chuckled.  Buy a farm!
With what, I wonder, wishes and dreams, not on the salary of a loco
driver or fireman.  The board room of the Ladyburg Farmers Bank occupied
half of the top floor of the building; one set of floor-to ceiling
windows faced eastwards to catch the cool sea breeze on hot summer days,
the other windows faced the tall escarpment.  This made a fine backdrop
to the town, and gave an interesting aspect to the huge room with its
high ornately plastered ceiling where dancing white cherubs bearing
bunches of grapes were suspended upsidedown, frozen in their endless
jollification.

The walls were panelled in dark mahogany that set off the green velvet
curtaining with golden corded edges.

The carpet was green also, and thick enough to muffle the hoofs of a
cavalry charge.  The board room table was of marble with golden ormolu
work, vine leaves and nude female figures clambering up the legs,
playing harps or dancing demurely.

At one end of the table, a man stood respectfully, a man with the short
neck and heavy shoulders of a wrestler.  The seat of his khaki breeches
was shiny from the saddle, and his boots were dusty from hard riding. He
twisted the rim of a slouch hat nervously between his fingers.

Opposite where he stood at the far end of the marble table, another man
slouched elegantly in the leather-padded chair.  Even seated, it was
clear that he was a big man, the shoulders under the expensive British
broadcloth were wide and powerful.

However, his head was nicely balanced on these shoulders, a glorious
head of lustrous but skilfully barbered hair, dark curls that extended
low down on to his cheeks into magnificent sideboards.  The strong
smoothly shaven chin had the jut and set of a man accustomed to command,
a wide determined mouth and perfect white teeth with which he now
nibbled thoughtfully at his lower lip.  A small frown formed a bird's
foot at the bridge of his nose, between the dark intelligent eyes, and
one carefully manicured fist supported his chin as he listened quietly.
Anyway, I thought you might like to know, mr Courtney, the speaker ended
lamely, and shuffled his dusty boots on the thick carpet.  For a long
moment there was silence. The man glanced uneasily at the other two
gentlemen who flanked Dirk Courtney, but then flicked back to the
central figure.

Dirk Courtney dropped his hand into his lap, and the frown cleared.  I
suspect you did the right thing, Hobday.  He smiled slightly, a smile
that enhanced his powerful good looks.  You can rest in the antechamber.
The clerk there will find refreshment for you, but I will want to talk
to you again.  .  .  Yes, sir, Mr Courtney, sir-'The man crossed to the
door with alacrity, and as it closed behind him the two men flanking
Dirk Courtney burst out together.  I told you at the time something like
this would happen, But you told us he had been killed.  I never liked
the idea.  Oh, I thought it was going too far this time They spoke
across each other, quick breathless outbursts while Dirk Courtney sat
with an enigmatic halfsmile hovering on his lips, examining with
attention the diamond on the little finger of his right hand, turning
the big white stone to catch the light from the windows so that it
flicked spots of brilliant light across the ceiling high above where he
sat.

After a few minutes, the two of them faltered into silence, and Dirk
Courtney looked up politely.  Have you both finished? I found that most
helpful, constructive, imaginative.  He looked from one to the other
expectantly, and then when they were silent he went on, Unfortunately,
you are not in possession of all the facts, Here is some more news for
you.  He arrived in town this morning, and he went straight to the Land
Deeds, from there to the Register of Companies, the Master's Office
-There was a fresh outburst of lamentation from his listeners, while
Dirk Courtney selected a cigar from the humidor and prepared it
carefully, cutting the end with a goldplated pocket-knife and moistening
it between his lips, then he held it poised between thumb and forefinger
while he waited for silence again.  Thank you, gentlemen, but as I was
saying, the gentleman in question then went down to the goods yard, and
began making inquiries about Greyling and son.  This time they were
silent, exchanging appalled and disbelieving glances, and the silence
drew out while Dirk Courtney struck a Swan Vesta and waited for the
sulphur to burn off before he lit the cigar.  It was all your idea, said
Ronald Pye.  He was at least thirty years senior to Dirk Courtney.  Once
prosperously bulging flesh had sagged beneath his expensive waistcoat,
his jowls drooped also, like the wattles of a rooster, and his cheeks
were mottled with faded freckles and old man's blemishes, little darker
liver spots.  His hair also had faded and thinned, stained only by
residual traces of the fiery ginger it had once been.  But his prominent
ears stood out from his head, giving him an alert listening look, like a
desert fox, and his eyes had a fox's cunning glitter as they watched
Dirk Courtney's face.  Yes, Dirk Courtney agreed.  Most ideasaround here
are mine indeed.  That's why the net reserves of the Farmers Bank have
increased from one and a half to fifteen million pounds in the ten years
since I started contributing my ideas Ronny Pye went on staring at him,
regretting bitterly for the ten thousandth time in those ten years that
he had ever been tempted to sell control of the bank to this young
adventurer, this elegant buccaneer.

God knows, there had been occasion for doubt, for caution, and he had
hesitated long enough before accepting the fantastic offer that Dirk
Courtney had made.  He had known too much of the lad's history, how he
had left his home here in Ladyburg in unsavoury circumstances, estranged
from his father and family.

Then, years later, he had sauntered into Ronald Pye's office,
unannounced and unheralded, and made his offer.

He had seen at a glance that the boy had grown into a hard man, but the
offer had been too good to dismiss, and then immediately after, he had
begun to hear the dark rumours that followed the man as vultures follow
the lion.

He should have been warned, the fact that Dirk Courtney could offer six
hundred thousand pounds in cash for sixty percent of the Bank's shares
and support the offer with a Bank guarantee from Lloyds Bank of London
was, in itself, enough to give substance to the dark rumours.  How often
does an honest man make that kind of money in a few short years, he
asked himself.

In the end the money had tempted Ronny Pye, that and the chance to score
over an old enemy, General Sean Courtney.  He had delighted in the
prospect of setting up the estranged son, setting him up in almost
baronial circumstances in the very centre of Courtney country.  The
delight in doing so had swung the balance, spite and six hundred
thousand pounds cash money.

It had been a bad bargain.  I was against this from the beginning, he
said now.  My dear Pye, you are against every new idea, on principle.
Yet only a week ago you were swooning like a virgin bride over the
balance sheet of Ladyburg Estates, and Zululand sugar.  Dirk stood up
from the chair.  His full height was imposing, he smoothed his hair
lightly with both hands while his cigar was gripped between strong white
teeth, then he arranged the folds of his cravat, touching the pearl pin
before swinging away and striding to the far wall of the board room.

He drew down the rolled map of Zululand and north Natal that covered
half the wall, and stood back from it.

The boundary of every farm was marked in large-scale topography.  The
farms belonging to Ladyburg Estates had been carefully shaded in green
chalk.  They made an impressive sweep of colour from sea to mountains, a
great phalanx of land and natural wealth.  There it is now, gentlemen,
the scheme that you opposed so violently.  He smiled again.  It was too
rich for your watery blood.  The smile faded, and he scowled.  When he
scowled, the line of the wide mouth became bitter and the set of the
lustrous eyes altered, with a mean pinched expression.  The key to the
whole thing was here on the Umfolosi, the water, we had to have it or
none of it made sense.  One stupid, stubborn, uneducated old bastard, he
cut it off abruptly, and in a moment his smile was back, the voice tight
with excitement.  It is all ours now, the full south bank of the river,
and it's not going to end there!

His spread hands clammed down on the map, hooked like claws.  Here, he
said, and here, and here, his hands marched northwards greedily.

He swung away from the map, laughing, and cocked his big handsome head
at them.  Look at you, he laughed.  It's running down your legs, you're
so terrified, and all because I'm making you rich. Dennis Petersen spoke
now.  He was the same age as Ronny Pye, married to his sister, and, but
for that connection, he would never have been seated at the ormolu.

marble table, for he was the least significant of the three men.  His
features were indefinite and slightly blurred, his body in expensive
clothing was pudgy and shapeless while the colour of his eyes was
difficult to fathom.  What are we going to do?  he asked, and though his
hands were clasped in his lap, it seemed that he was actually wringing
them plaintively.  We?  Dirk asked kindly, and crossed to his chair. We,
my dear Dennis?  he patted the man's shoulder like a father, despite the
age difference.  We aren't going to do a thing.  You just go back to
your own office now, and I will tell you about it once it's over.
Listen, Dirk.  Dennis lifted his chin firmly.  No more of that, that
rough stuff, do you hear?  Then he saw Dirk's eyes and dropped his chin.
Please, he mumbled.

Dirk chuckled.  Off you go and do your sums, both of you, add up the
money.  Don't worry about a thing.  He helped them from their seats, a
hand on each shoulder, and shepherded them towards the door.  We have a
board meeting tomorrow at nine o'clock, Dennis, I will be discussing the
new extraction plant at Stanger.  I will want the figures, make sure I
have them.  Alone for a moment, Dirk Courtney's face changed and the
eyes narrowed.  He pressed out the stub of the cigar in the onyx ashtray
as he crossed to the door that led to the antechamber.  Hobday, he
called softly.  Come in here a moment, please. There are occasions in a
hunter's experience when a spoor begins hot and true and then fades.
Mark remembered a hunt like that which he and the old man had made up
near Chaka's Gate.  Dead spoor, gone away, he muttered aloud now, and
stood uncertainly in the main street of Ladyburg.  There seemed no way
that he might find the old man's grave.  No way that he could bring the
body back and rebury it beside Alice on Andersland.

Less important was the money that the old man had been paid for
Andersland.  Three thousand pounds.  It was a vast fortune in Mark's
eyes and it would be good to know what had happened to it.  With that
amount, he could afford land of his own somewhere.

Then Mark faced the issue he had avoided up until now and admitted that
there was just one more faint chance, but he felt his stomach tighten at
what he had to do.  With a physical effort he steeled himself and set
off steadily down the street towards the towering building of the
Ladyburg Farmers Bank.  He had not reached it before the church clock on
the spire at the end of the street sounded the hour, five clear chimes
that echoed across the valley, and a dozen bank employees came out in a
group through the front door, smiling and chatting gaily in the relief
of the day's work ended, while a uniformed guard began closing and
locking the solid mahogany doors.

Mark felt a sneaking sense of relief, and he turned away.

I'll come back tomorrow, he told himself firmly.

The boarding house behind the church offered dinner and a bed for seven
shillings and sixpence, and Mark thought about it for only a moment. The
sovereigns that he had from the old man's hoard might have to carry him
long and far.

He went on out to the bridge over the Baboon Stroom.

and climbed down on to the bank, moving upstream to find a place to cam
There was a fine site, with trees and firewood a quarter of a mile above
the bridge, but when Mark went down the bank to the water, he could
smell the stink of it before he touched the surface with the canteen; he
paused, squatting on his haunches.

There was a thick soapy scum thrown up along the edge, and it had coated
the stems of the reeds.  For the first time Mark realized that the reeds
were dead and brown, and that the water bubbled with sullenbeads of gas.
He scooped a handful and sniffed at it, then flicked it away with
disgust and stood up, wiping his hand on the seat of his pants.

There was a big yellow fish, at least four pounds in weight, its swollen
belly upwards and rotting opaque eyes bulging from its head as it
floated in the sluggish current, turning gently in the eddy at the edge
of the reeds.  Mark watched it with a feeling of disquiet, of
foreboding, as though that poisoned and rotting carcass had some special
significance in his life.  He shuddered softly and turned away, climbed
the bank again and shouldered his pack.

He made his way upstream, Pausing now and then to peer down into the
river-bed, until he was opposite the steel structure of the new sugar
mill; here the waters of the stream boiled and steamed with wisps of
pale gas that hung like mist in the stiff brown reeds.  Around the next
bend, he came upon the effluent pipe, a six-inch black iron pipe that
stuck out over the far side of the bank from which the hot, steaming
discharge poured in a continuous stream.

A change in the breeze carried the acrid chemical stench of it to where
Mark stood, and he coughed and turned away.

A hundred yards further upstream, the clear water chuckled through clean
stands of green reeds that bowed and swung gracefully on the breeze, and
Mark saw the deep waving shape of an eel in the pool beyond, and watched
the small black and pink crabs scurrying across the sugarwhite sand
below the surface.

He found another camp site on the first slope of the escarpment, beside
a waterfall and its slowly swirling pool.

In the trees above him, the ferns hung like soft green veils, and when
he stripped his clothing and went into the pool, the water was a cool
and refreshing delight.

He shaved with the old cut-throat, sitting naked on a mossy rock beside
the pool.  He dried himself on his shirt and then rinsed it out and hung
it beside the small bright fire to dry, and while he waited for the
canteen to boil he wandered, bare to the waist, on to the open slope and
looked down into the valley.

The sun was already touching the rim of the escarpment, and its low rays
were ruddy and warm rose.  They burnished the iron roofs of the town,
and tinted the column of smoke that rose from the chimney stack of the
sugar mill to a beautiful golden bronze.  The smoke rose tall into the
evening sky, for the breeze had dropped in that peculiar stillness and
hush of the African evening.

Movement caught his eye, and he blinked to clear his vision.

There was a hunting party in the open land beyond the town.  Even at
this distance, Mark could tell they were hunters.  Four horsemen moving
slowly in a group, one with a rifle or shotgun held against his hip, its
barrel pointing to the sky as he leaned forward intently in the saddle.

The other three were armed also; he could see the guns in the scabbards
at their knees, and they also had that intent air of suppressed
excitement, the air of the hunter.  Ahead of the group was a single
figure, a Zulu in ragged cast-off western clothing but he led the
horsemen in the characteristic attitude of the tracker, trotting in that
deceptively fast gait of the Zulu, head down, eyes on the ground,
carrying a stripped reed in one hand, the tracker's wand to part the
grass, or touch the spoor.

idly Mark wondered what they were hunting, so close to town, and on the
bank of that dying and poisoned river, for they were coming along the
same trail that Mark had followed to the escarpment.

The light was going swiftly now, the shining beacons of the iron roofs
winked out swiftly as the sun went below the crest, but in the last of
the light, Mark saw the leader of the group of horsemen rein in his
mount and straighten in the saddle.  He was a stocky figure, sitting
square on his mount.  The man looked up towards the escarpment where
Mark stood, then the light was gone and the group became a dark blob
against the darkening land.

Vaguely disturbed, and troubled by the day just past, by the cold
memories of the old man, by the sadness of that dying river, and at last
by that distant figure, Mark crouched over his fire, munching his stew
of tinned bully and then sipping his coffee.

When at last he pulled on his coat and rolled into his blanket close
beside the fire, he could not sleep.  The sense of disquiet seemed to
grow rather than abate, and he found himself wondering again what four
horsemen could find to hunt on the edge of a busy town.  Then he thought
again about the way that they had followed his own path along the river,
and the disquiet deepened, sleep receded.

Suddenly he remembered how the old man would never sleep beside his
cooking fire.  I learned that when we was a chasing the Boer.  A light
in the night brings things other than moths, lions, hyenas and men.  He
could almost hear the old man's voice saying it, and he rose
immediately, with the blanket still around his shoulders, and moved away
up the slope fifty yards until he found a hollow filled with dead
leaves.

Sleep came at last and the soft skirt of it was falling lightly across
his eyes when a Scops owl called in the forest near him; instantly he
was fully awake.  It was a familiar night sound, but this one had jarred
some deep chord in him.  The imitation had been clever, but it did not
deceive an ear so closely tuned to the sounds of the wild.

Tense and listening, Mark lifted his head slowly and peered down the
slope.  His fire was a puddle of pink embers and above him the shapes of
the trees were dark and fluffy against a crisp sky of white stars.

The owl called again down near the pool, and, at the same moment, Mark
heard something move stealthily near him in the darkness, something big
and heavy, the brush brush of footfalls in the dead leaves.  Then there
was silence again.

Mark strained his eyes and ears into the darkness, but it was
impenetrable under the trees.

Far below in the valley, a locomotive whistled three times, the sound
carrying clearly in the stillness, and then there was the huff and puff
of the train pulling out from the goods yard and settling into a steady
rhythmic beat of boiler and tracks.

Mark tried to put that sound beyond his hearing, trying to filter it out
so that he could discern the closer softer sounds in the night around
him.

Something moved down the slope, he heard the silky soft whisper of it
and then he saw movement, outlined against the glowing ashes of his
fire, a man's booted legs stepped out of the darkness and halted beside
the fire, standing completely still.

Nearer Mark, there was another movement, a stir of impatient feet in
dead leaves, and then, unmistakably, the metallic snick of gun-metal as
a safety-catch was slipped to the fire position.  The sound struck like
electricity along Mark's nerve ends, and his breath caught in his
throat.  It was very close, six feet away, and now he thought he could
make out the loom of the man against the stars.  He was standing almost
on top of Mark's bed in the hollow, staring down at the fire beside the
camp.

The man at the fire spoke now, softly, but his voice carried clearly.
The bastard has gone, he's not here.  He stooped to the pile of dry
firewood that Mark had cut and stacked.  He threw a piece on to the
embers, and sparks flew upwards in a fiery spiral and the branch flamed,
throwing out a circle of yellow light.

Then he exclaimed sharply, His pack is still here, and he hefted the
shotgun expectantly, glaring into the night.  Remember, there's a
hundred pounds on it.  The words and the way the man was handling the
shotgun made his intention clear beyond doubt.  Mark felt the warm flood
of adrenalin rush through his body, and he was poised and quivering with
suppressed energy, ready to burst into explosive movement in an instant.

The man near him moved again, and Mark heard the muted tap of metal on
metal, the sound of the man's breathing also, hoarse with tension, and
then suddenly and with devastating shock, bright white light split the
darkness.  A lantern beam swivelled and then fastened on Mark's
blanket-wrapped crouching f arm.

In the instant before he moved, Mark saw the shape of the man beyond the
dazzle of the light.  He carried the lantern in his right hand holding
it high, at the level of his head, and the rifle was in his left hand,
hanging at the trail.

He was completely unprepared to find Mark lying almost at his feet, and
his shout was wild.  He's here.  My God.  He tried to bring up the
rifle, but his right hand held the lantern.  Shoot!  Shoot, damn it"
another voice shouted, a voice somehow familiar, and beside Mark the man
dropped the lantern and began to swing up the rifle.  Mark launched
himself straight at him.

He used the man's own momentum, taking the upswing of the rifle; seizing
the muzzle of the barrel in one hand and the stock in the other, he
smashed the weapon into the man's face with the full weight and force of
his body behind it.  He heard gristle and bone crunch, while the solid
impact of the steel breach striking into the man's face was transmitted
through the rifle into his arms, jarring him to the shoulders.

The man went over backwards, with a cry that bubbled with the quick
burst of blood into his nose and mouth.

Mark bounded over him and ran at the slope.

Behind him there was a chorus of shouts and cries, and then the blain,
blain of a shotgun and the double glow of the muzzle flashes.  Mark
heard the heavy charges of shot slash into the leaves beside him, and
something burned his upper arm like the sting of a wild bee.

The light.  Get the lightVThere he is, don't let him get away.  A rifle
fired three times in quick succession, it sounded like a .  303
Lee-Enfield.  The bullet hit a rock and howled away into the sky,
another thumped into a tree trunk close beside him as he ran.

Mark fell heavily in the dark and felt his ankle go, the pain of it
exploded up his leg into his groin and lower belly.

He rolled on to his knees, and the beam of the lantern swept over, and
then fastened hungrily on him.  We've got him.

A fusillade of shots, and a triumphant chorus of shouts.

The shot and bullets shattered the air around him, one so close that the
whip of it deafened one ear and he threw himself forward at the slope.

The pain in his foot made Mark cry out.  It was white hot shooting agony
that burst from his ankle and broke like brilliant phosphorescent surf
against the roof of his skull, but he drove himself on, soaked with
sweat, swerving as he ran, sobbing and hobbling on the damaged leg.

They were spread out in the bush behind him, and it seemed that the
slope was tiring them quickly, men accustomed to riding horseback, for
the cries were becoming strained and breathless, edged with worry and
the first fear that their quarry might escape them.

Mark was trying to think between the bursts of agony with which each
step racked him.  He thought to drop into thick cover and lie until they
passed him, but they were too close for that, and they had a tracker
with them, a tracker who had brought them unerringly to his camp, even
in darkness.  To lie down now would be surrender and suicide, but he
could not go on much longer.  Already the pain was threatening to swamp
him, there was a sound in his head like great wings and his vision was
starting to break up and star.

He fell to his knees and vomited, gagging and choking on the acid gall
of it, and within seconds the voice of the pursuit was closer and more
urgent.  He dragged himself up, and the lantern beam caught him
squarely, a rifle bullet disrupted the air about his head so that he
staggered as he blundered onwards, using the screen of bush to avoid the
beam of light.  Quite suddenly he felt the ground tilt upwards under his
feet sharply.

He lost his footing again, but in the same movement rolled to his feet
and stumbled over a lip on to level ground where there was the sudden
sugary crunch of gravel under his feet.  Three stumbling paces and he
came down heavily, his feet knocked out from under him and as he went
down, steel smeared the skin from his outflung forearm.

He lay panting and blinded for long seconds and heard the hunters bay
like hounds down the slope.  The sound goaded him and he groped with
outstretched hands for purchase to push himself on to his feet once
more.

He found the cold smooth steel that had tripped him; it trembled like a
living thing under his hands.  It came to him then that he had climbed
the embankment of the railway line and fallen across the rails of the
permanent way.

He pushed himself to his knees, and now he heard the deep panting rush
in the night; suddenly the whole slope of the escarpment was lit by
reflected light that swung dramatically and brightened like daylight as
the locomotive he had heard leaving the goods yard in the valley came
roaring out of the deep cutting that skirted the steepest part of the
escarpment, before crossing the deep gorge of the river.

The long white beam of the lamp struck him like a solid thing and he
flung up his arm to shield his eyes and rolled off the rails, crouching
down on the gravel on the opposite side to that of his pursuers.

In the light of the locomotive lamp, Mark saw a stocky agile figure come
up the embankment at a run.  He ducked across the tracks, directly under
the roaring throbbing loco.

The dazzle of light prevented Mark seeing his face, yet there was
something familiar in the way the man moved and held his shoulders.

The engine came thundering down on Mark, and as it drew level a spurt of
steam from the driving pistons scalded him with its hot breath.  Then it
was past and there was just the dark blurred rush of the boxcars above
him.

Mark dragged himself upright, balancing on his good foot and struck the
streams of sweat from his eyes, peering upwards to judge his moment.

When it came, he almost missed it; his hands were slippery with sweat
and the railing was almost jerked from his grip even though the train
had lost much of its speed and power on the slope.

The strain in his shoulder shot an arrow of pain along his arm, and he
was torn off his feet, swinging against the side of the boxcar while he
grappled wildly for a grip with his other hand.

He found purchase and clung on to the side of the boxcar, his feet still
free but scrabbling for the footplates, and at that moment hands like
steel claws seized his injured ankle, the full weight of a heavy body
bore him down, racking him out against the side of the car.

Mark screamed with the unbearable white-hot pain of the grip on his
ankle, and it took all his strength and courage to maintain his double
grip on the rail.

His body was penduluming, as the man who held him was himself swung off
the ground and then came back to skid and run in the loose gravel of the
embankment, as though he were driving a dog-sledge.

Mark twisted his head back and judged the white blob of the man's face
and aimed the kick with his free foot, but it was an impossible target.
At that instant the sound of the locomotive altered, as it hit the steel
of the bridge where it crossed the deep gorge of the river.

The uprights of the bridge sprang out of the rushing corridor of
blackness; Mark heard the deadly hiss of the riveted steel girders flit
past his head, and at the same moment the grip on his leg was released.
He clung with his remaining strength and resolve to the railing of that
goods truck, while the train rocketed over the bridge and ploughed on
steadily up the slope, until it burst at last over the crest on to the
level ground of the plateau.  It picked up speed sharply, and Mark
dragged himself inch by agonized inch up the railing, until at last he
tumbled over the side of the open boxcar on to the load of sugar sacks
and lay face downwards, sobbing for each breath, while he rode the high
storm surf of pain from his leg.

The cold roused him at last.  His sweat-sodden coat was turned icy by
the rush of night air and he crawled painfully forward towards the
shelter of the high steel side of the car.  He checked quietly and found
with relief that his purse and notebook were still in his pocket.

Suddenly he was aware that he was not alone and fresh panic gripped him.

Who's that?  he croaked, recoiling quickly into a defensive attitude.

A voice answered quickly in deep Zulu.  I mean no harm, Nkosi, and Mark
felt a quick rush of relief.  A man crouched against the side of the
car, out of the wind, and it was clear that he was as alarmed by Mark's
presence as Mark had been by his.  I mean no harm, lord.  I am a poor
man without the money to pay to ride the steamer.  My father is sick and
dying in Tekweni, Durban town.  Peace, grunted Mark in the same
language.  I am a poor man also.  He dragged himself into shelter beside
the Zulu, and the movement twisted his ankle and he gasped at the fresh
pain.  Hau!  the black man's eyes caught the starlight as he peered at
Mark.  You are hurt.  My leg, Mark grunted, trying to ease it into a
more comfortable position, and the Zulu leaned forward and Mark felt his
gentle hands on the ankle.  You are without shoes?  The man was
surprised at Mark's torn and bloodied feet.  I was chased by bad men.
Ha, the Zulu nodded, and Mark saw in the starlight that he was a young
man.  The leg is bad.  I do not think the bone is broken, but it is bad.
He untied the small pack beside him and he took out some article of
clothing. Deliberately he began to tear the material into strips.  No,
Mark protested sharply.  Do not destroy your clothes for me.  He knew
how each article of western clothing, however ragged and threadbare, was
treasured.  It is an old shirt, said the Zulu simply and began to bind
up the swollen ankle skilfully.  When he had finished, it felt easier.

Wgi ya bone, I praise you, Mark told him, and then he shivered violently
as the delayed but icy fist of shock clamped down on him; he felt nausea
rise in his throat and he shivered again.

The Zulu took the blanket from around his own shoulders and placed it
carefully over Mark.  No.  I cannot take your blanket.  The blanket
smelled of smoke from a dung fire, and of the Zulu himself, the earthy
African tang.  I cannot take it.  You need it, said the Zulu firmly. You
are sick.  Very well, Mark muttered, as another shivering fit caught
him.  But it is a large blanket, big enough for two It is not fitting.
Come, said Mark roughly, and the Zulu hesitated a moment longer before
drawing closer and taking up a fold of the woollen blanket.

Shoulder to shoulder, they sat on into the night, and Mark found himself
dropping into a haze of exhaustion and pain, for the swollen ankle still
beat like a drum.  The Zulu beside him was silent, and Mark thought he
slept, but as the train slowed after two hours hard run across the
plateau, he whispered quietly, This is Sakabula halt.  It stops here for
to let the other train pass.  Mark remembered the desolate siding with
its double loop of line.  No buildings and only a signboard to identify
it.  He would have lapsed once more into half sleep, but something
warned him, a strange sense of danger which he had developed so acutely
in France.

He shrugged aside the blanket, and dragged himself up on his knees to
peer ahead.  The track came into the siding on a gentle curve, and the
silver rails glittered in the lamp of the locomotive.

Far ahead was the sign-post of the halt, stark white in the beam from
the locomotive, but there was something else.  Parked on the track
beside the halt was a dark vehicle, a heavy lorry, and its headlights
still burned.  In the puddle of yellow light Mark made out the dark
shapes of waiting men.  Alarm jarred his bowels and clutched at his
chest with a cold cramping fist.

A motor lorry from Ladyburg could not have reached here ahead of them,
but a telegraph message could have alerted I must go, Mark blurted, and
with stiff fingers he hooked a sovereign out of his money belt and
pressed it quickly into the Zulu's hand.  There is no call for -'the man
began, but Mark cut him off brusquely.  Stay in peace.  He dragged
himself to the side of the car furthest from the waiting men, and
lowered himself down the steel ladder until he hung just above the
tracks.

He waited for the locomotive to slow down, groaning and creaking and
sighing steam, and then he braced himself and dropped - trying to take
most of his weight on his good leg.

He collapsed forwards as he struck the ground; ducking his head, he
rolled on to his shoulders and, drawing up his knees, went down the
embankment like a rubber ball.

In the dry pale grass beside the line, he did not rise but dragged
himself on elbows and belly to a low dark Thorn bush, fifty yards from
the rails.  Slowly he worked himself under its low branches and lay face
down, gritting his teeth against the dull beat of his ankle.

The train had halted with its van level with Mark's hiding place; the
guard climbed down, flashing his lantern, while from the head of the
train a group of men, each one carrying a lantern, hurried back towards
him, searching the open trucks as they came.

Mark could see they were all armed, and their voices carried loudly as
they called explanations to the driver and fireman who leaned from the
cab of the locomotive.  What's the trouble? You've got a fugitive from
justice aboard.  Who are you?  We're special constables.  Who's the
fellow?  He robbed a bank -'He killed four men in LadyburgHe jumped your
train on the escarpment Don't take any chances, you fellows, the bastard
is a killer -They came swiftly down the train, talking loudly and
calling to each other to bolster their courage, and at the last moment
Mark remembered the Zulu.  He should have warned the man, but he had
been too concerned with his own danger.  He wanted to shout now, warn
him to run, but he could not bring himself to do it. The Zulu would be
all right, they would not shoot when they saw he was a black, they might
slap him around a little and throw him off The Zulu darted out from
between two of the boxcars from where he had climbed down on to the
coupling.  He was a dark flitting shape, and somebody yelled a warning.

Immediately there was a shot.

Mark saw the dust from the bullet fly in the lamplight, and the Zulu
swerved and ran directly out into the open grassland.  Half a dozen
shots ripped the night, the muzzle flashes were angry red blooms in the
night, but the Zulu ran on.

One of the men on the track dropped to his knee, and Mark saw his face
white and eager in the light of the torches.  He aimed deliberately, and
his rifle kicked up sharply.

The Zulu collapsed in the grass without a cry, and they raced forward in
an excited pack to gather around his body.  Oh, Jesus, it's only a
black.  There was confused angry discussion and argument for five
minutes, and then four of them took an arm and leg each and carried the
Zulu between them to the parked lorry.

The black man's head lolled back, almost sweeping the earth, his mouth
gaped open and the blood that dripped from it was black as tar in the
lamplight and his head swung loosely to the uneven stride of the men who
carried him.  They lifted him into the back of the lorry.

The north-bound train came thundering through the siding, its whistle
shrilling on a high piercing shriek, and then it was gone on its way to
Ladyburg.

The men climbed into the lorry and the engine fired, and it moved away
with its headlights sweeping sky and earth as it pitched over the bumpy
track.

The stationary train whistled mournfully and it began to roll forward,
rumbling slowly over the tracks.  Mark crawled out from his hiding-place
beneath the bush, and hopped and stumbled after it, catching it just
before its speed built up.

He crawled over the sugar bags into the lee of the steel side, and found
the Zulu had left his blanket.  As he wrapped it around his icy body, he
felt the guilt flood over him, guilt for the man's death, the man who
had been a friend then the guilt turned to anger.

Bitter corrosive anger that sustained him through the night as the train
rushed southwards.

Fordsburg is a squalid suburb of Johannesburg, three hundred miles from
the golden grassy hills of Zululand and the beautiful forested valley of
Ladyburg.  It is an area of mean cottages, tiny workers houses of
galvanized iron on timber frames, each with a bleak little garden.  In
some of the gardens there were brave and defiant shows of bright blooms,
barbeton daisies, carinas and flaming red poinsettia, but in most of
them the bare untended earth, patched with black-jack and khaki-bush,
told of the tenants indifference.

Over the narrow streets and crowded cottages, the mine dumps held
majestic sway, towering table-topped mountains of poisonous yellow earth
from which the gold had been extracted.  The cyanide process of
extraction ensured that the earth of the dumps was barren and sterile.
No plants grew upon them, and on windy days the yellow dust and grit
whipped over the grovelling cottages beneath them.

The dumps dominated the landscape, monument to the antlike endeavours of
man, symbols of his eternal greed for gold.  The mine headgears were
spidery steel structures against the pale cloudless blue of the highveld
winter sky.

The huge steel wheels on their heights spun endlessly, back and forth,
lowering the cages filled with men deep into the earth, and rising again
with the ore bins loaded with the gold-rich rock.

Mark made his way slowly down one of the narrow, dusty streets.  He
still limped slightly, and a cheap cardboard suitcase carried the few
possessions he had bought to replace those he had lost on the
escarpment.

The clothes he wore were an improvement on the shapeless demobilization
suit that the army had given him.  His flannels were neatly creased and
the blue blazer fitted his good shoulders and narrow flanks, the
open-necked white shirt was snowy clean and set off the smooth brown
skin of his neck and face.

He reached the cottage numbered fifty-five on the gate, and it was a
mirror image of those on each side and opposite.  He opened the gate and
went up the short flagged path, aware that somebody was watching him
from behind the lace curtain in the front room.

However, when he knocked on the front door it was only opened after a
delay of many minutes, and Mark blinked at the woman who stood there.

Her dark short hair was freshly combed, and the clothes she wore had
clearly been hastily put on in place of dowdier dress.  She was still
fastening the belt at her slim waist.  it was a dress of pale blue with
a design of yellow daisies, and it made her appear young and gay,
although Mark saw at once that she was at least ten years older than he
was.  Yes?  she asked, tempering the abrupt demand with a smile.  Does
Fergus MacDonald live here?  He saw now that she was good-looking, not
pretty, but fine-looking with good bones in her cheeks and dark
intelligent eyes.  Yes, this is Mr MacDonald's house.  There was a
foreign inflection in her voice that was intriguing.  I am Mrs
MacDonald.  Oh, he said, taken by surprise.  He had known Fergus was
married.  He had spoken about it often, but Mark had never really
thought about his wife before, not as a real flesh and blood woman, and
certainly not one like this.  I am an old friend of Fergus'from the
army.  Oh, I see, she hesitated.  My name's Mark, Mark Anders. Instantly
her attitude changed, the half smile bloomed and lit her whole face.

She gave a small gasp of pleasure.  Mark, of course, Mark.  She took his
arm impetuously and drew him over the threshold.  He has spoken of you
so often, I feel I know you so well.  Like a member of the family, like
a brother, she still had his arm, standing close to him, laughing up at
him.  Come in, Mark, come in.

I am Helena.  Fergus MacDonald sat at the head of the deal table in the
dingy kitchen.  The table was covered with sheets of newsprint instead
of a cloth and Fergus hunched over his plate, and scowled angrily as he
listened to Mark's account of his flight from Ladyburg.  The bastards,
they are the enemy, Mark. The new enemy.  ) His mouth was filled with
potato and heavily spiced boerewors, thick farmer's sausage, and he
spoke through it.  We are in another war, lad, and this time they are
worse than the bloody Hun.  More beer, Mark.  Helena leaned across to
fill his tumbler from the black quart bottle.  Thank you.  Mark watched
the foaming head rise in his glass, and he pondered Fergus' statement. I
don't understand, Fergus. I don't know who these men are, I don't know
why they tried to kill me. They are the bosses, lad.  That's who we are
fighting now.  The rich, the mine-owners, the bankers, all those who
oppress the working man. Mark took a long swallow of his beer, and
Helena smiled at him from across the table.  Fergus is right, Mark.  We
have to destroy them.  And she began to talk.  It was strange confusing
talk from a woman, and there was a fanatical light in her dark eyes.

The words had a compelling power in her clear articulate voice with its
lilting accent, and Mark watched the way she used her hands to emphasize
each point.  They were neat strong hands with gracefully tapered fingers
and short nails.  The nails were clean and trimmed but the first two
fingers of her right hand were stained pale yellow.  Mark wondered at
that, until suddenly Helena reached across and took a cigarette from the
packet at Fergus'elbow.

Still talking, she lit the cigarette from a match in her cupped hands,
and drew deeply before exhaling forcibly through pursed lips.  Mark had
never seen a woman smoke before, and he stared at her.  She shook her
head vehemently.

The history of the people's revolt is written in blood.

Look at France, see how the revolution sweeps forward in Russia.  The
short dark shining curls danced around her smooth pale cheeks, and she
pursed her lips again to drag at the cigarette, and in some strange
fashion Mark found the mannish act shocking, and exciting.

He felt his groin clenching, the tight swollen hardening of his flesh,
beyond his reason, far beyond his control.

His breathing caught with shock and embarrassment, and he leaned back
and slipped one hand into his trouser pocket, certain that both of them
must be aware of his shameful reaction, but instead Helena reached
across the table and seized his other wrist in a surprisingly powerful
grip.

We know our enemy, we know what must be done and how we must do it,
Mark.  Her fingers seemed to burn like heated iron into his flesh, he
felt dizzy with the force of it.  His voice was hoarse as he forced
himself to reply.  They are strong, Helena, powerful No, no, Mark, the
workers are strong, the enemy are weak, and smug.  They suspect nothing,
they wallow like hogs in the false security of their golden sovereigns,
but in reality they are few and unprepared.  They do not know their own
weakness, and as yet the workers do not realize their great strength. We
will teach them.  You're right, lass.  Fergus wiped the gravy from the
plate with a crust of bread and stuffed it into his mouth.  Listen to
her, Mark, we are building a new world, a brave and beautiful new world.
He belched loudly and pushed his plate away, leaving both elbows on the
table.  But first we have to tear down and destroy this rotten, unjust
and corrupt society.  There will be hard fighting, and we will need good
hard fighting men.  He laughed harshly and slapped Mark's shoulder.
They'll call for MacDonald and Anders again, lad, you hear me.  There is
nothing for us to lose, Mark.  Helena's cheeks were flushed.  Nothing
but our chains, and there is a whole world to win.  Karl Marx said that,
and it's one of the great truths of history.  Helena, are you, he
hesitated to use the word, are you and Fergus, well I mean, you aren't
Bolsheviks are you? That's what the bosses, and their minions, the
police, call us.  She laughed contemptuously.  They try to make us
criminals, already they fear us.  With reason, Mark, we will give them
reason.  No, lad, don't call us Bolsheviks.  We are members of the
communist party, dedicated to universal communism.

I'm the local party secretary and shop steward of the mineworkers union
for the boilermakers shop.  Have you read Karl Marx?  Helena demanded.
No.  Mark shook his head, dazed and shocked, but still sexually excited
by her to the edge of pain.  Fergus a Bolshevik?  A bomb-throwing
monster?  But he knew he was not.

He was an old and trusted comrade.  I will lend you my copy.  Come on,
lass, Fergus chuckled, and shook his head.  We are going too fast for
the lad.  He's got a right barmy look right now.  He leaned over and
placed an affectionate arm around Mark's shoulders, drawing him close.
Have you a place to stay, lad?  A job?  A place to go?  No.  Mark
flushed.  I haven't, Fergus.  Oh, yes you have, Helena cut in quickly. I
have fixed the bed in the other room, you'll stay there, Mark.  Oh, but
I couldn't -It's done, she said simply.  You'll stay, lad.  Fergus
squeezed him hard.  And we'll see about a job for you tomorrow, you're
book-learned.

You can read and write and figure, it will be easy to fix you.  I know
they need a clerk up at the pay office, and the paymaster is a comrade,
a member of the party.  I'll pay you for lodging.  Of course you will,
Fergus chuckled again, and filled his glass to the brim with beer.  It's
good to see you again, son and he raised his own glass.  Send down the
line for MacDonald and Anders, and warn the bastards we are coming!  He
took a long swallow, the pointed Adam's apple bobbing in his throat,
then wiped the froth from his upper lip with the back of his hand.

The regimental chaplain had called it the sin of Onan, while the rankers
had many more ribald terms for it, toss the caber or visit Mrs Hand and
her five daughters.  The chaplain had warned of the dire consequences
that it would bring, failing sight, and falling hair, a palsied shaking
hand and at last idiocy and the insane asylum.  Mark lay in the narrow
iron bed and stared with unseeing eyes at the faded pink rose-pattern
wallpaper of the tiny room.  It had the musty smell of being long
closed, and there was a wash-basin in an iron frame with an enamel basin
against the far wall.  A single unshaded bulb hung on a length of flex
from the ceiling, and the white plaster around it was fly-speckled; even
at the moment three drowsy flies sat on the flex in a stupor.  Mark
swivelled his attention to them, trying to put aside the waves of
temptation that flowed up through his body.

Light steps in the passage stopped opposite his bedroom door, and now
there was a tap on the woodwork.  Mark?  He sat up quickly, letting the
single thin blanket fall to

his waist.  May I come in?  Yes, he husked, and the door swung open.
Helena crossed to his bed.  She wore a gown of light pink shiny material
that buttoned down the front; the skirt opened at each step and there
was a glimpse of smooth white flesh above her knees.

She carried a slim book in one hand.  I said I would lend it to you, she
explained.  Read it, Mark.  She held out the volume.

The Communist Manifesto was the title, and Mark took it from her,
opening it at random.  He bowed his head over the open pages to cover
the confusion into which her near presence plunged him.  Thank you,
Helena.  He used her name for the first time, wanting her to leave and
yet hoping she would stay.

She leaned over him a little, looking at the open book, and the bodice
of her gown fell apart an inch.  Mark looked up, and saw the incredibly
silky sheen where the beginning of one white breast pressed against the
lace that edged the neck of the gown.  Swiftly he dropped his eyes
again, and they were both silent until Mark could stand it no longer,
and he looked up at her.  Helena, he began, and then stopped.  There was
a smile, a secret womanly smile on her lips, lips that were slightly
parted and moist in the harsh electric light.  The dark eyes were half
hooded but glowed again with that fierce fanatical light, and her bosom
beneath the pink satin rose and fell with quick soundless breathing.

He flushed a sultry red under the dark tan of his cheeks and he rolled
abruptly on to his side, drawing up his knees.

Helena straightened up slowly, still smiling.  Goodnight, Mark.  She
touched his shoulder, fire sprang afresh from her finger-tips and then
she turned and went slowly towards the door.  The slippery material of
the gown slid softly across the tight double rounds of her buttocks.
I'll leave the light on.  She looked back at him, and now the smile was
knowing. You'll want to read.  The Pay Office of Crown Deep Mines Ltd
was a long austere room where five other clerks worked at high desks set
in a line down one wall.  They were mostly men in advanced middle age,
two of them sufferers from phthisis, that dreaded disease of the miners
in which the rock dust from the drills settled in the lungs, building up
slowly until the lung turned to stone and gradually crippled the man.
Employment in the mine offices was a form of pension.  The other three
were grey and drab men, stooped from poring over their ledgers.  The
atmosphere in the office was quiet and joyless, as in some monastic
cloister.

Mark was given charge of the files and personnel R to Z, and the work
was dull and repetitive, soon becoming automatic as he calculated
overtime and leave pay, made deductions for rent and union fees and
struck his totals.  It was drudgery, not nearly enough to engage a
bright and active young brain, and the narrow confines of the office
were a cage for a spirit that was at home in the wide open sweep of sky
and veld and had known the cataclysmic universe of the battlefields of
France.

On the weekends, he escaped from his cage and rode on an old bicycle for
miles into the open veld, following dusty paths along the base of the
rocky kopjes on which grew the regal candelabra of giant aloes, their
blooms burning in bright scarlet against the clear pale blue of the
highveld sky.  He sought seclusion, wilderness, secret places far from
other men, but it seemed that always there were the borders.  of barbed
wire to limit his range; the grasslands had gone to the plough, the pale
dust devils swirled and danced over red earth from which the harvest had
been stripped, leaving the dried sparse stubble of maize stalks.

The great herds of game that once had covered the open grassland to the
full range of the eye were long gone, and now small scrub cattle,
multi-coloured and scrawny, grazed in mindless bovine herds tended by
almost naked black piccaninnies who paused to watch Mark pedalling by,
and greeted him with solemnity which turned to wideeyed pleasure when he
returned the greeting in their own language.

Once in a while Mark would start a small grey duiker from its lay and
send it bounding and bouncing away through the dry grass with small
sharp harris and ears erect, or else catch a glimpse of a springbuck
drifting elusive as smoke across the plain, lonely survivors of the long
rifles.

Then the delight of their wild presence stayed long with him, warming
him on the dark cold ride home.

He needed these times of quiet and solitude to complete the healing
process, not only of the Maxim bullet wounds in his back but of the
deeper wounds, soul damage caused by too early an exposure to war in all
its horror.

He needed this quietness also to evaluate the swift rush of events that
filled his evenings and nights in direct contrast with the grey drudgery
of his working days.

Mark was carried along by the fanatical energy of Fergus MacDonald and
Helena.  Fergus was the comrade who had shared with him experience that
most men never knew, the stark and terrible involvement of combat.  He
was also much older than Mark, a paternal figure, filling a deep need in
his life.  It was easy to suspend the critical faculties and believe;
not to think, but to follow blindly wherever Fergus bitter restless
energy led them.

There was excitement and a sense of commitment in those meetings with
men like him, men with an ideal and a sense of destiny.  The secret
meetings in locked rooms with armed guards at the doors, the atmosphere
quivering with the promise of forbidden things.  The cigarette-smoke
spiralling upwards until it filled the room with a thick blue haze, like
incense burning at some mystic rite; the faces shining with sweat and
quiet frenzy of the fanatic, as they listened to the speakers.

Harry Fisher, the Chairman of the Party, was a tall fierce man with a
heavy gut, the brawny shoulders and hairy muscular arms of a
boilermaker, an unkempt shock of coarse wiry black hair laced with
strands of silver and dark burning eyes.  We are the Party, the
praetorian guard of the proletariat, and we are not bound by law or the
ethical considerations of the bourgeois age.  The Party in itself is the
new law, the natural law of existence.  Afterwards he shook hands with
Mark, while Fergus stood by with paternal pride.  Fisher's grip was as
fierce as his stare.  You're a soldier, he nodded.  We will need you
again, comrade.  There is bloody work ahead.  The disquieting presence
of the man stayed to haunt Mark long afterwards, even when they rode
home in the crowded tramcar, the three of them squeezed into a double
seat so that Helena's thigh was pressed hard against his.

When she spoke to him, she leaned sideways, her lips almost touching his
cheek, and her breath smelling of liquorice and cigarettes, a smell that
mingled with the cheap flowery perfume she wore, and the underlying
musky warmth of her woman's body.

There were other meetings on the Friday evenings, great raucous shouting
gatherings where hundreds of white miners crowded into the huge
Fordsburg Trades Union Hall, most of them boozy with cheap brandy, loud
and inarticulate and spoiling for trouble.  They roared like the crowd
at a bull fight as the speakers harangued them; occasionally one of the
audience climbed on to his chair to sway there, shouting meaningless
confused slogans until his laughing comrades dragged him down.

One of the most popular speakers at these public meetings was Fergus
MacDonald, he had a dozen tricks to excite his audience, he probed their
secret fears and twisted the probe until they howled half in pain and
half in adulation.  You know what they are planning, the bosses, you
know what they are going to do? First they will fragment the trades A
thunderous ugly roar, that shook the windows in their frames, and Fergus
paused on the stage, sweeping his sparse sandy hair back off his
forehead and grinning down at them with his thin bitter mouth until the
sound subsided.

the trade that took you five years to learn, they will split it up and
now there will be three unskilled men to do your job, with only a year's
training to learn that fragment, and they will pay them a tenth of the
wage you draw.

A storming roar of No!  and Fergus flung it back at them.  Yes!  he
shouted.  Yes!  Yes!  And yes again.  That is what the bosses are going
to do.  But that's not all, they are going to use blacks in your jobs,
black men are going to take those jobs away from you, black men who will
work for a wage that you cannot live on.  They screamed now, frantic
with anger, a terrible anger which had no object on which to focus. What
about your kids, are you going to feed them on mealies, are your wives
going to wear limbo? That's what will happen, when the blacks take your
jobs!  No!  they roared.  No!  VWorkers of the world, Fergus shouted at
them, workers of the world unite, and keep our country white! The bellow
of applause, the rhythmic stamp of feet on the wooden floor lasted for
ten minutes, while Fergus strutted back and forth across the stage,
clasping his hands above his head like a prize-fighter.  When at last
the cheering faltered, he flung back his head and bellowed the opening
line of The Red Flag.

The entire hall came crashing to its feet, and stood at attention to
sing the revolutionary song: Then raise the scarlet standard high,
Within its shade we'll live or die.

Tho cowards flinch and traitors sneer, We'll keep the red flag flying
here, Mark walked home with the MacDonalds in the frosty night, their
breathing smoking like ostrich plumes in the lights of the street lamps.
Helena walked between the men, a small dainty figure in her black
overcoat with rabbit-fur collar and a knitted cap pulled down over her
head.

She had slipped a hand into the crook of the elbows of each of them, a
seemingly natural impartial gesture, but there was a disturbing pressure
of fingers on the hard muscle of Mark's upper arm, and her hip touched
his as she skipped occasionally to catch the longer stride of the men.
Listen, Fergus, what you were saying there in the hall doesn't make
sense, you know, Mark broke the silence, as they turned into the home
street.  You can't have it both ways, workers unite and keep it white.
Fergus chuckled appreciatively.  You're a bright lad, comrade Mark. But,
I'm serious, Fergus, it's not the way Harry FisherOf course not, lad.
Tonight I was shovelling up swill for the hogs.  We need them fighting
mad, we have things to tear down, bloody work to do.  He stopped and
turned to face Mark over the woman's head.  We need cannon fodder, lad,
and plenty of it.  So it won't be like that?  Mark asked. No, lad.  It
will be a beautiful brave new world.  All men equal, all men happy, no
bosses, a workers state.

Mark tried to control his pricking nagging doubts.

u keep talking of fighting, Fergus.  Do you mean that, literally?  I
mean, will it be a shooting war?  A shooting war, comrade, a bloody
shooting war.  just like the revolution in Russia, where comrade Lenin
has shown us the way.  We have to burn away the dross, we have to soak
this earth with the blood of the rulers and the bosses, we have to flood
it with the blood of their minions the petit bourgeois officer's class
of the police and military.  What will Mark almost said we but it would
not come to his lips.  He could not make that commitment.  What will you
fight with?  Fergus chuckled again, and winked slyly.  Mum's the word,
lad, but it's time you knew a little more.  He nodded.

Yes, tomorrow night, he decided.

On Saturday there was a bazaar being held in the Trades Hall, a Women's
Union fund-raising drive for building the new church.  Where the crazed
mob had screamed murder and bloody revolution the previous night, now
there were long trestle tables set out and the women hovered over their
displays of baked and fancily iced cakes, trays of tarts, preserved
fruit in jars and jams.

Mark bought a packet of tarts for a penny and he and Fergus munched them
as they wandered idly down the hall, stopping at the piles of
second-hand clothing while Fergus tried a maroon cardigan, and, after
careful deliberation, purchased it for half a crown.  They reached the
top of the hall, and stood beneath the raised stage.

Fergus surveyed the room casually and then took Mark's arm and led him
up the steps.  They crossed the stage quietly, and went in through a
door in the wings, into a maze of small union offices and storerooms,
all deserted now on a Saturday afternoon.

Fergus used a key from his watch-chain to unlock a low iron door, and
they stooped through it.  Fergus relocked behind him, and they went down
a narrow flight of steps that descended steeply.  There was a smell of
damp and earth, and Mark realized that they were descending to the
cellars.

Fergus tapped on the door at the bottom of the stairs, and after a
moment a single eye regarded them balefully through a peep hole.  All
right, comrade.  Fergus MacDonald, a committee member.  There was the
rattle of chains and the door opened.  A disgruntled, roughly dressed
man stood aside for them.  He was unshaven and sullen, and against the
wall of the tiny room was a table and chair, still spread with the
remains of a meal and the crumpled daily newspaper.

The man grunted, and Fergus led Mark across the room and through another
door into the cellars.

The floor was earthen and the arched columns were in raw unplastered
brick.  There was the stench of dust and rats, stale dank air in
confined space.  A single bulb lit the centre starkly, but left the
alcoves behind the arches in shadow.  Here, lad, this is what we are
going to use There were wooden cases stacked neatly to the height of a
man's head in the alcoves, and the stacks were draped with heavy
tarpaulin, obviously stolen from the railway yards for they were
stencilled SAR and H.

Fergus lifted the edge of one tarpaulin, and grinned that thin
humourless smile.  Still in the grease, lad.  The wooden cases were
branded with the distinctive arrow-head and W.  D.  of the British War
Department, and below that the inscription: 6 pieces.

Lee-Enfield Mark 1!  (CNVD).

Mark was stunned.  Good God, Fergus, there are hundreds of them.  That's
it, lad, and this is only one arsenal, There are others all along the
Rand.  He lifted another tarpaulin, walking on down the length of the
cellar.  The ammunition cases, with the quickrelease catches on the
detachable lids that were painted 1000 rounds .  303.  We have enough to
do the job.  Fergus squeezed Mark's arm, and led him on.

There were racks of rifles now, ready for instant use, blued steel
glistening with gun oil in the electric light.

Fergus picked out a single rifle and handed it to Mark.  This one has
got your name on it.  Mark took the weapon, and the feel of it in his
hands was terribly familiar.  It's the only one we've got, but the
moment I saw it, I thought of you.  When the time comes, you'll be using
it.  the P.  14 sniper's rifle had that special balance that felt just
right in his hands but made Mark sick in the stomach.

He handed it back to Fergus without a word, but the older man winked at
him before racking it again carefully.

Like a showman, Fergus had kept the best for last.  With a flourish he
whipped the canvas off the heavy weapon, with its thick, corrugated
water-jacketed barrel, that squatted on its steel tripod.  The Maxim
machine gun, in its various forms, had the dubious distinction of having
killed more human beings than any other single weapon that man
destructive genius had been able to devise.

This was one of that deadly family, the Vickers-Maxim

.  303 Mark IV.  B, and there were boxes stacked beside it.

Each containing a belt Of 250 rounds.  The gun could throw those at 2440
feet per second and at a Cycle rate Of 750

rounds a minute.  How about that, comrade?  You asked what we are going
to fight with, how will that do for a beginning?

In the silence Mark could hear faintly, but distinctly, the sound of
children's laughter from the hall above them.

Mark sat alone upon the highest crest of the low kopjes that stretched
into the west, black ironstone ridges breaking out of the flat dry earth
like the crested back of a crocodile surfacing from still lake water.

The memory of the hidden arsenal had stayed with him through the night,
keeping him from sleep, so that now his eyes felt gritty and his skin
stretched tight and dry across the bones of his cheeks.

Lack of sleep had left him with that remote feeling, a lightness of
thought, detached from reality, so now he sat in the bright sunlight
blinking like a day-flying owl, and looking like a stranger into his own
mind.

He felt a rising sense of dismay as he realized how idly he had drifted
along the path that had brought him here to the very brink of the abyss.
It had taken the feel of the P.  I 4 in his hands, and the laughter of
children to bring him up at the end of a rope.

All his training, all his deepest beliefs were centred on the sanctity
of law, on the order and responsibilities of society.  He had fought for
that, had spent all of his adult life fighting for that belief.  Now
suddenly he had drifted, out of apathy, to the camp of the enemy;
already he was numbered with the legions of the lawless, already they
were arming him to begin the work of destruction.  There was no question
now that it was merely empty rhetoric shouted at gatherings of drunken
labourers, he had seen the guns.  It would be cruel and without mercy.
He knew Harry Fisher, had recognized the forces that drove him.  He knew
Fergus MacDonald, the man had killed before and often; he would not
flick an eyelid when he killed again.

Mark groaned aloud, aghast at what he had let happen to himself.  He who
knew what war really was, he who had worn the king's uniform, and won
his medal for courage.

He felt the oily warmth of shame in his throat, a gagging sensation,
and, to arm himself against future weakness of this same kind, he tried
to find the reasons why he had been drawn in.

He realized now that he had been lost and alone, without family or home,
and Fergus MacDonald had been the only shelter in the cold.  Fergus the
older comrade of shared dangers, whom he had trusted without question.
Fergus the father figure, and he had followed again, grateful for the
guidance, not questioning the destination.

There had, of course, been Helena as well and the hold she had over him,
the tightest grip any human could have over another.  He had been, and
still was, totally obsessed with her.  She had awakened his long
suppressed and tightly controlled sexuality.  Now it was but a breath
away from bursting the wall he had built to dam it; when it burst, it
might be a force he could not control, and that thought terrified him
almost as much as the other.

He tried now to separate the woman from her womanhood, tried to see the
person beyond this devastating web she wove around his senses, and he
succeeded in as much that he realized that she was not a person he could
admire, not the mother he would choose for his children.  Also, she was
the wife of an old comrade who trusted him completely.

Now he felt he was ready to make the decision to leave, and to carry
that resolve through firmly.

He would leave Fordsburg immediately, leave Fergus MacDonald and his
dark, cataclysmic schemes.  He felt his spirits lighten instantly at the
prospect.  He would not miss him, nor that drab monastic pay office with
its daily penance o boredom and drudgery.  He felt the bright young
spirit of anticipation flame again.

He would leave Fordsburg on the next train, and Helena.  Immediately the
flame flickered and his spirit plunged.  There was a physical pain in
his groin at the prospect, and he felt the cracks open in the dam wall
of his passions.

It was dark when he left his bicycle in the garden shed, and he heard
voices raised jovially in the house and bursts of laughter.  Lights
blazed beyond the curtained kitchen windows and when he stepped into the
room there were four men at the table.  Helena crossed quickly and
hugged him impulsively, laughing, with high spots of colour in her
cheeks, before taking his hand and leading him to the table.  Welcome,
comrade.  Harry Fisher looked up at Mark with those disturbing eyes and
the shock of dark wiry hair hanging on to his forehead.  You are in time
to join the celebration.  Grab the lad a glass, Helena, laughed Fergus,
and she dropped his hand and hurried to the cupboard to fetch a glass
and fill it with black stout from the bottle.

Harry Fisher raised his own glass to Fergus.  Comrades, I give you the
new member of the Central Committee Fergus MacDonald.  Isn't it
wonderful, Mark?  Helena squeezed Mark's hand.  He's a good man, growled
Harry Fisher.  The appointment isn't too soon.  We need men with Comrade
MacDonald's guts.  The others nodded agreement over their stout glasses,
the two of them were both members of the local committee of the party;
Mark knew them well from the meetings.  Come, lad.  Fergus made room for
him at the table and he squeezed in beside him, drawing all their
attention.  And you, young Mark, Harry Fisher laid a powerful hairy hand
on his shoulder, we are going to issue your party card How about that,
lad!  Fergus winked and nudged Mark in the ribs.  Usually it takes two
years or more, we don't let the rabble into the party, but you've got
friends on the Central Committee now.  Mark was about to speak, to
refuse the honour he was being accorded.  Nobody had asked him, they had
taken it that as he was Fergus protege, he was for them.  Mark was about
to deny it, to tell them the decision he had made that day, when that
sense of danger warned him.  He had seen the guns, if he was not a
friend then he was an enemy with a fatal secret.  A secret that they
could not risk.  He had no doubts at all about these men, now.  If he
was an enemy, then they would see that he never passed that secret on to
another man.  But the moment for refusal had passed.  Comrade MacDonald,
I have a mission for you.  It is urgent, and vital.  Can you leave your
work for two weeks?  I've got a sick mother, Fergus chuckled.  When do
you want me to go, and what do you want me to do?  I want you to leave,
say Wednesday, that will give me time to give you your orders and for
you to make your arrangements.  Harry Fisher took a swallow of stout and
the froth stayed on his upper lip I'm sending you to visit all the local
committees, Capetown, Bloemfontein, Port Elizabeth, so that each of them
can be coordinated.  Mark felt a guilty lift of relief at the words,
there would be no confrontation with Fergus now.  He could merely slip
away while he was gone on his mission. Then he glanced up and was
startled by the gaze that Helena had fastened upon him.  She stared at
him with the fixed hungry expression of a leopard watching its prey from
cover in the last instant before its spring.

Now when their eyes met, she smiled again that secret knowing smile, and
the tip of her pink tongue dabbed at her slightly parted lips.

Mark's heart pounded to the point of physical pain and he dropped his
eyes hurriedly to his glass.  He was to be alone with Helena, and the
prospect filled him with dread and a surging passionate heat.

Mark carried Fergus cheap and badly battered suitcase down to the
station, and as they took the short cut across open veld, the thick
frost crunched like sugar under their feet, and sparkled in myriad
diamond points of light in the first rays of the sun.

At the station they waited with four other members of the party for the
southbound mail, and when at last it came, puffing hoarsely, shooting
steam high into the frosty air, it was thirty-five minutes late.
Thirty-five minutes late is almost early for the railways, Fergus
laughed, and shook hands with each of them in turn, slapping their
shoulders before scrambling up the steel ladder into the coach.  Mark
passed his suitcase up through the open window.  Look after Helena, lad,
and yourself.  Mark stood and watched the train run out southwards,
shrinking dramatically in size until the sound of it was a mere whisper
fading to nothingness. Then he turned and started up the hill towards
the mine just as the hooters began their mournful wailing howl that
echoed off the yellow mesas of the dumps, summoning the disorderly
columns of men to their appointed labours.  Mark walked with them, one
in a thousand, distinguished from the others neither in appearance nor
achievement. Once again he felt a sense of seething discontent, a vague
but growing knowledge that this was not all that was life, not all that
he was capable of doing with his youth and energy; and he looked
curiously at the men who hurried with him towards the iron gates at the
mine hooter's imperious summons.

All of them wore that closed withdrawn look, behind which Mark was
convinced lurked the same misgivings as now assaulted him.  Surely they
also felt the futility of the dull daily repetition, the young ones at
least must feel it.

The older and greyer must regret it; deep down they must mourn for the
long sunny days, now past, spent toiling in endless drudgery for another
man's coin.  They must mourn the fact that when they went, they would
leave no footprints, no ripple on the surface, no monument, except
perhaps a few sons to repeat the meaningless cycle, all of them
interchangeable, all of them dispensable.

He paused at the gates, standing aside while the stream of humanity
flowed past him, and slowly the sense of excitement built up in him, the
certainty that there was something, some special and worthwhile task for
him to perform.  Some special place that waited for him, and he knew he
must go on and find it.

He hurried forward, suddenly grateful to Fergus MacDonald for placing
this pressure on him, for forcing him to face himself, for breaking the
easy drifting course he had taken since his flight from Ladyburg.  You
are late, Anders.  The supervisor looked up from his ledgers severely,
and each of his juniors repeated the gesture, a long row of them with
the same narrow disapproving expressions.  What have you got to say?  I
merely called in to clean out my desk, said Mark smiling, the excitement
still on him.  And to throw in my time.

The disapproving expressions changed slowly to shock.

It was dusk when Mark opened the back gate of the cottage and went up
the short walk to the kitchen.  He had walked all day at random, driven
on restlessly by a new torrent of energy and exciting thoughts; he had
not realized how hungry he was until he saw the lights in the window and
smelled the faint aroma of cooking.

The kitchen was deserted, but Helena called through from the front.
Mark, is that you?  Before he could answer, she appeared in the kitchen
door, and leaned one hip against the jamb.  I thought you weren't coming
home tonight.  She wore the blue dress, and Mark knew now that it was
her best, reserved for special occasions, and she wore cosmetics,
something that Mark had never seen her do before.  There were spots of
rouge on her cheeks and her lips were painted, giving new lustre to her
usually sallow skin.  The short dark hair was newly washed, shiny in the
lamplight, and brushed back, caught over one ear with a tortoise-shell
clasp.

Mark stared at her.  Her legs were smooth and'sleek in silken stockings,
the feet neatly clad in small pumps.  Why are you staring, Mark?  You
are -'Mark's voice turned husky, and caught.  He cleared his throat. You
are very pretty tonight.  Thank you, sir.  She laughed, a low throaty
chuckle, and she did a slow pirouette, flaring the blue filmy skirt
above the silken legs.  I'm glad you like it.  Then she stopped beside
him and took his arm.  Her touch was a delicious shock, like diving into
a mountain pool.  Sit down, Mark.  She led him to the chair at the head
of the table.  Let me get you a nice beer.  She went to the ice box, and
while she pulled the cap on the bottle and poured, she ran on gaily.  I
found a goose at the butcher's, do you like roast goose?  Saliva poured
from under Mark's tongue.  I love it.  With roast potato and pumpkin
pie.  For that I would sell my soul.  Helena laughed delightedly, it
wasn't one of Mark's usual shy and reserved replies.  There was a sense
of excitement surrounding him like an aura this evening, echoing her own
excitement.

She brought the two glasses, and propped one hip on the table.  What
shall we drink to?  To freedom, he said without hesitation, and a good
tomorrow.  I like that, she said, and clinked his glass, leaning over
him so that the bodice of her dress was at the level of his eyes.  But
why only tomorrow, why can't the good times start right now this minute?
Mark laughed.  All right, here's to a good tonight and a good tomorrow.
Mark!  Helena pursed her lips in mock disapproval, and immediately he
blushed and laughed in confusion.  Oh no, I didn't mean, that sounded
dreadful.  I didn't I bet you say that to all the girls. Helena stood up
quickly.  She did not want to embarrass him and break the mood, so she
crossed to the stove.  It's ready, she announced, if you want to eat
now.  She sat opposite him, anticipating his appetite, buttering

the thick slices of bread with yellow farm butter and keeping his glass
fully charged.

Aren't you eating?  I'm not hungry.  It's good, you don't know what you
are missing.  Better than your other girls cooked for you?  she demanded
playfully, and Mark dropped his eyes to his plate and busily loaded his
fork.  There weren't any girls.  Oh, Mark, you don't expect me to
believe that!  A handsome young fellow like you, and those French girls.
I bet you drove them mad.  We were too busy, and besides, -he stopped.
Besides what!  she insisted, and he looked up at her, silent for a
moment, and then he began to talk.  It was suddenly so easy to talk to
her, and he was buoyed up with his new jubilant mood and relaxed with
the food and drink in his belly.  He talked to her as he had never
talked to another human being& and she answered him with the frankness
of another man.  Oh, Mark, that's nonsense.  Not every woman is sick,
it's only the street girls.  Yes, I know.  I didn't believe every girl,
but well, they are the only ones that a man can, he broke off.  And the
others get babies, he went on lamely.

She laughed and clapped her hands with delight.  Oh, my darling Mark.
It's not that easy, you know.  I have been married for nine years and
I've never had a baby.  Well, Mark hesitated.  Well, you are different.
I didn't mean you, when I said those things.  I meant other girls.  I'm
not sure if that's meant to be a compliment or an insult, she teased
again.  She had known he was a virgin, of course.  There was that
transparent shining innocence that glowed from him, his unpractised and
appealing awkwardness in the presence of women, that peculiar shyness
that would pass so soon but which now heightened her excitement, rousing
her in some perverse way.  She knew now why some men paid huge sums of
money to despoil innocence; she touched his bared forearm now,
delighting in the smooth hardness of young muscle, unable to keep her
hands off him.

Oh, it was a compliment, Mark answered her hurriedly.  Do you like me,
Mark?  Oh, yes.  I like you more than I've ever liked any other girlYou
see, Mark, she leaned closer to him, her voice sinking to a throaty
whisper.  I'm not sick, and I'm not going to have a baby, ever.  She
lifted her hand and touched his cheek.  You are a beautiful man, Mark. I
liked you from the first moment I saw you coming up the walk like a
stray puppy.  She stood up slowly and crossed to the kitchen door,
deliberately she turned the key and flipped up the light switch.  The
small room was dark, but for the shaft of light from the hallway.  Come,
Mark.  She took his hand and drew him to his feet.  We are going to bed
now.  At the door to Mark's bedroom she reached up on tiptoe and kissed
his cheek lightly, and then without another word she let his hand drop
and glided away from him.

Uncertainly Mark watched her go, wanting to call to her to stay, wanting
to ran after her, and yet relieved that she had gone, that the headlong
rush into the unknown had abruptly halted.  She reached the door of her
own bedroom and went through without looking back.

Torn by conflicting emotions, he turned away and went through into his
own room.  He undressed slowly, disappointment now stronger than relief,
and while he folded his clothing, he listened to her quiet movements in
the room beyond the thin wall.

He climbed at last into the narrow iron bed, and lay rigid until he had
heard the light switch click next door; then he sighed and picked up the
book from his bedside table; he had not yet read it through, but now the
dull political text might divert his emotions enough to allow him to
sleep.

The latch of his door snapped softly.  He had not heard her in the
passage, and she stepped into the room.  She wore the gown of slippery
peach-coloured satin and she had recombed her hair and retouched her
cheeks and lips.

Carefully, she closed the door and crossed the room with slow swaying
hips under the moving satin.

Neither of them spoke as she stopped by the side of his bed.

Have you read it, Mark?  she asked softly.

Not all of it.  He placed the book aside.  Well, this isn't the time to
finish it, she said, and deliberately opened the gown, slipped it from
her shoulders and dropped it over the back of the chair.

She was naked, and Mark gasped.  She was so smooth.

He had not expected that somehow, and he stared at her as she stood
close beside him.  Her skin had an olive creaminess, like old porcelain,
a sheen that caught the light and glowed.  Mark felt his whole body
rocked by the exquisite tension of arousal, and he tried feebly to
thrust it aside.  He tried to think of Fergus, of the trust that had
been placed in him.  Look after Helena, lad, and yourself Her breasts
were big for the slimness of her body, already they hung heavily, almost
overripe, drooping smooth and round with startlingly large nipples, rosy
brown and big as ripe grapes.  They swung weightily as she moved closer
to him, and he saw that there were sparse dark hairs curling from the
puckered aureole around the nipples.

There was hair also curling out in little wisps from under her arms,
dark glossy hair, and a huge wild bush of it below the smooth creamy
slightly bulging belly.

The hair excited him, so dark and crisp against the pale skin, and he
stared at it, transfixed.  All thoughts of honour and trust faded, he
felt the dam wall inside him creak and strain.

She reached out and touched his bare shoulder, and it convulsed his body
like a whip-lash.  Touch me, Mark, she whispered, and he reached out
slowly, hesitantly, like a man in a trance, and touched with one finger
the smooth ivory warmth of her hip, still staring fixedly at her.  Yes,
Mark.  That's right.  She took his wrist and slowly drew his hand
upwards, so that the tips of his fingers traced featherlike over her
flank and the outline of her ribs.  Here, Mark, she said, and here.  The
big dark nipples contracted at the touch of his fingers, changing shape,
thrusting out and hardening, swelling and darkening.  Mark could not
believe it was happening, that woman's flesh could react as swiftly and
dramatically as a man's.

He felt the dam break, and the flood came pouring through the breach.
Too long contained, too powerful and weighty to resist, it poured
through his mind and body, sweeping all restraint before it.

With a choking cry, he seized her around the waist with both arms, and
drew her fiercely to him, pressing his face into the smooth soft warmth
of her naked belly.  Oh, Mark!  she cried, and her voice was hoarse and
shaking with lust and triumph, as she twisted her fingers into the soft
brown hair and stooped over his head.

The days blurred and telescoped together, and the universe shut down to
a tiny cottage in a sordid street.  Only their bodies marked the passage
of time sleeping and waking to love until exhaustion overtook them and
they slept again to wake hungry, ravenous for both food and loving.

At first he was like a bull, charging with a mindless energy and
strength.  It frightened her, for she had not expected such strength
from that slim and graceful body.

She rode with his strength, little by little controlling and directing
it, changing its course, and then she began gently to teach.

Long afterwards, Mark would think back on those five incredible days and
realize his great good fortune.  So many young men must find their own
way into the uncharted realms of physical love-making, without guide,
accompanied usually by a partner making her own hesitant first journey
into the unknown.  Did you know that there is a tribe in South America,
Mark, that have a rule that every married woman must take one young
warrior of the tribe and teach him to do what we are doing? she asked,
as she knelt beside him in one of the intervals of quiet between the
storms.  What a shame, he smiled lazily.  I thought we were the first
two ever to think of it.  He reached out for the pack of Needlepoint
cigarettes on the bedside table and lit two of them.

Helena drew upon hers and her expression was fond and proud.  He had
changed so swiftly and radically in the last few days, and she was
responsible for that.  This new assurance, this budding strength of
purpose.  The shyness and reticence were fading.  He spoke now in a way
that he had never spoken before, calmly and with authority.

Swiftly he was becoming a full man, and she had had a hand in it.

Mark believed that each new delight was the ultimate one, but she proved
him wrong a dozen times.  There were things that, had he heard them
spoken of might have appalled andrevolted him, but when they happened
the way Helena made them happen, they left only wonder and a sense of
awe.  She taught him a vast new respect for his own body, as it came at
last fully alive, and he became aware of new broad reaches and depths of
his own mind.

For five days neither of them left the cottage; then on the sixth day
there was a letter brought by a uniformed postman on a bicycle and Mark,
who accepted it, recognized immediately Fergus MacDonald's cramped and
laboured.  hand.  Guilt hit him like a fist in the stomach;

the dream shattered like fragile crystal.

Helena sat at the newspaper-covered table in the kitchen with the now
soiled peach gown open to the waist and read the letter aloud, mocking
the writer with the inflection of her voice as he reported a string of
petty achievements, applause at party meetings where a dozen comrades
had gathered in a back room, messages of loyalty and dedication to bring
back to the Central Committee, commitment to the cause and promises of
action when the time to strike was ripe.

Helena mocked him, rolling her eyes and chuckling when he asked after
Mark, was he well and happy, was Helena looking after him properly.

She drew deeply on the stub of the cigarette and then dropped it into
the dregs of the coffee cup at her elbow, where it was extinguished with
a sharp hiss.  This simple action caused in Mark an unnatural reaction
of revulsion.

Suddenly he saw her clearly, the sallow skin wrinkled finely in the
corners of her eyes as her youth cracked away like old oilpaint; the
plum-coloured underlining of the eye sockets, the petulant quirk of her
lips and the waspish sting to her voice.

Abruptly, he was aware of the squalid room, with the greasy smell of
stale food and unwashed dishes, of the grubby and stained gown and the
pendulous droop of the big ivory-coloured breasts beneath the gown.

He stood up and left the room.

Mark, where are you going?  she called after him.  I'm going out for a
while.  He scrubbed himself in the stained enamel bath, running the
water as hot as he could bear it so that his body glowed bright pink as
he towelled himself down.

At the railway booking office he stood for nearly half an hour, reading
the long lists of closely printed timetables pasted to the wall.

Rhodesia.  He had heard they needed men on the new copper mines.  There
was still a wilderness up there, far horizons and the great wild game,
lakes and mountains and room to move.

He moved to the window of the booking-office and the clerk looked out at
him expectantly.  One second-class single to Durban, he said, surprising
himself.  He was going back to Natal, to Ladyburg. There was unfinished
business there, and answers to search for.

An unknown enemy to find and confront.

As he paid for the ticket with the old man's sovereigns, he had a vivid
mental picture of the old man on the stoep of Andersland, with his great
spiky whiskers and the old terai hat pulled low over his pale calm eyes.
Mark knew then that this had been only a respite, a hiatus, in which he
had found time to heal and gather courage for the task ahead.

He went back to collect his belongings.  There was not much to pack, and
he was in a consuming hurry now.

he swept his few spare shorts and clean socks into the cardboard
suitcase, he was suddenly aware of Helena's presence, and he turned
quickly.  She had bathed and dressed and she stood in the doorway
watching him, her expression too calm for the loneliness in her voice.

You are going.  It was a statement, not a question.  Yes, he answered
simply, turning to snap the catches on the case.  I'm coming with you.
No.  I'm going alone.  But, Mark, what about me?

I'm sorry, Helena.  I'm truly sorry.  But don't you see, I love you, her
voice rose in a low wall of despair.  I love you, Mark darling, you
can't go.

She spread her arms to block the doorway.

Please, Helena.  We both knew it was madness.  We both knew there was
nothing for us.  Don't make it ugly now, please let me go.  No.  She
covered her ears with both hands.  No, don't talk like that.  I love
you.  I love you.

Gently he tried to move her from the doorway.

I have to go.  My train, Suddenly she flew at him, vicious as a wounded
leopard.

He was unprepared, and her nails raked long bloody lines across his
face, narrowly missing his eyes.  You bastard, you selfish bastard, she
shrieked.  You're like all of them, and she struck again, but he caught
her wrists.  You're all the same, you take, you take He turned her,
wildly struggling, and tipped her back on to the bed.  Abruptly the
fight went out of her and she pressed her face into the pillow.  Her
sobs followed Mark as he ran down the passage, and out of the open front
door.

It was more than three hundred miles to the port of Durban on the coast,
and slowly the train huffed up the great barrier of the Drakensberg
Mountains, worming its way through the passes until at last it plunged
joyously over the escarpment and ran lightly down into the deep grassy
bowl of the eastern littoral, dropping less steeply as it neared the sea
and emerged at last into the lush semitropical hot-house of the
sea-board with its snowy white beaches and the warm blue waters of the
Mozambique current.

Mark had much time to think on the journey down, and he wasted most of
it in vain regrets.  Helena's cries and accusations echoed through his
mind while the cold grey stone of guilt lay heavily in the pit of his
stomach, whenever he thought of Fergus MacDonald.

Then, as they passed through the town of Pietermaritzburg and began the
last leg of the journey, Mark put aside guilt and regret, and began to
think ahead.

His first intention had been to return directly to Ladyburg, but now he
realized that this was folly.  There was an enemy t here, a murderous
enemy, a hidden enemy striking from cover, a rich enemy, a powerful
enemy, who could command a bunch of armed men who were ready to kill.

Mark thought then of those bloody attacks that he and Fergus had made in
France.  Always the first move had been to identify and mark the enemy,
locate where he was lying, find his stance and assess him.  How good was
he, was his technique rigid, or was he quick and changeable?  Was he
sloppy, so that the hunters could take risks, or were risks suicidal? We
got to try and guess the way the bastard's thinking, lad - was Fergus
first concern, before they planned the shoot.  I've got to find who he
is, Mark whispered aloud, and guess the way the bastard is thinking. One
thing at least was clear, a hundred pounds was too high a price in blood
money for such an insignificant person as Mark Anders; the only thing
that could possibly make him significant in anyway was his relation to
the old man and to Andersland. He had been seen at Andersland by both
the Hindu babu and the white foreman.  Then he had brazened into the
town asking questions, perusing documents.  Only then had they come
after him.  The land was the centre of the puzzle, and he had the names
of all the men who had any interest in the sale.

Mark lifted his suitcase down from the luggage rack and, holding it on
his lap, hunted for and found his notebook.

He read the names: DIRK COURTNEY, RONALD PYE, DENNIS PETERSEN, PIET
GREYLING and his son CORNELFUS.

His first concern must be to find out all he could about those men, find
out where each was lying, find his stance and assess him, decide which
of them was the sniper.

While he did this, he must keep his own head well down below the
parapet.  He must keep clear of enemy country, and enemy country was
Ladyburg.

His best base would be Durban city itself; it was big enough to absorb
him without comment, and, as the capitol of Natal, he would have many
sources of information there, libraries, government archives, newspaper
offices.

He began making a list of all possible sources in the back of the
notebook, and immediately found himself regretting bitterly that
Ladyburg itself was closed to him.  Records in the Lands Office and
Company Registers for the district were not duplicated in the capital.

Suddenly he had a thought.  Damn it, what was her name" Mark closed his
eyes, and he saw again the bright, friendly and cheerful face of the
little girl in the Companies office in Ladyburg.  Mark, that's a strong
romantic name, He could even hear her voice, but the train was sliding
into the platform before her name came to him again.

Marion!  and he scribbled it into the notebook.

He climbed down on to the platform, carrying his case, and joined the
jostling throng of travellers and welcomers.

Then he set out to find lodgings in the city.

A penny copy of the Natal Mercury led him through its small
advertisements to a rooming house in Point Road, down by the docks.  The
room was small, dark and smelled of those gargantuan cockroaches that
infest the city, swarming up from the sewers each evening in shiny black
hordes, but the rental was only a guinea a week, and he had the use of
the lavatory and shower room across.  the small enclosed yard.

That night he wrote a letter: Dear Marion, I don't suppose you remember
me, my name is Mark Anders, the same as Mark Antony!  I have thought of
you often since I was compelled to leave Ladyburg unexpectedly before I
had a chance to see you again Tactfully he avoided any mention of the
research work he wanted undertaken.  That could wait for the next
letter.

He had learned much about women recently, and he addressed the letter
simply to Miss Marion, Registrar's Office, Ladyburg.

Mark started the following morning at the City Library, walking up Smith
Street to the four-storied edifice of the Municipal Buildings.  It
looked like a palace flanked by the equally imposing buildings of the
Royal Hotel and the cathedral, with the garden square neatly laid out in
front of it, bright with spring blooms.

He had another inspiration as he approached the librarian's desk.  I'm
doing research for a book I intend writing Immediately the grey-haired
lady who presided over the dim halls and ceiling-high racks of books
softened her severe expression.  She was a book person, and book people
love other book people.  Mark had the key to one of the reading rooms
given him, and the back copies of all the Natal newspapers, going back
to the time of the first British occupation, were put at his disposal.

There was immediately a temptation for Mark, voracious reader that he
was, to lose himself in the fascination of history printed as urgent
headlines, for history had been one of Mark's favourite subjects both at
Ladyburg School and at University College.

He resisted the temptation and went at once to the drawers that
contained the copies of the Ladyburg Lantern and Recorder.  The first
copies were already yellowing with age and tore easily, so he handled
them with care.

The first mention of the name Courtney, leapt at him in thick black
headlines on one of the earliest copies from

1879.

Ladyburg Mounted Rifles massacred at Isandhlwana.

Colonel Waite Courtney and his men cut down to a man.

Blood-crazed Impis on the rampage.

Mark guessed that this must refer to the founder of the family in
Ladyburg; after that the name cropped up in nearly every issue, there
were many Courtneys and all of them lived in the Ladyburg district, but
the first mention of Dirk Courtney came in 1900.

Ladyburg welcomes one of its Favourite Sons.

Hero of the Anglo-Boer War Returns.

Colonel Sean Courtney purchases Lion Kop Ranch.

Ladyburg welcomes the return of one of her favourite Sons after an
absence of many years.  There are very few of us who are not acquainted
with the exploits of Colonel Sean Courtney, D.  S.  O D.  C.  M and all
will recall the major role he played in the establishment of the
prosperous gold-mining industry on the Witwatersrand.  .  .

A long recital of the man's deeds and reputation followed, and the
report ended, Colonel Courtney has purchased the ranch Lion Kop from the
Ladyburg Farmers Bank.  He intends making this his home and will plant
the land to timber.  Major Courtney is a widower and is accompanied by
his ten-year-old son, Dirk.

The ancient report shocked Mark.  He had not realized that Dirk Courtney
was the son of his old General.  The big, bearded, hook-nosed man he had
met that snowy night in France, the man whom he had immediately
respected and liked, no, more than liked.  The man whose vital force and
presence, together with his reputation, had roused in him an almost
religious awe.

His instant reaction was to wonder if the General himself was in any way
involved in the murderous attack he had survived on the escarpment; and
the thought disturbed him so that he left the library and went down to
the palmlined esplanade and found a bench overlooking the quiet
sheltered waters of the bay, with the great whale-backed mountain of the
bluff beyond.

He watched the shippin& as he pondered the tangled web that was centred
in Ladyburg, where the hidden spider sat.  He knew that his
investigations were going to take time.  The reading was a slow business
and it would be days before he could expect to have a reply to his
letter to Marion.

Later, in his dingy room, he counted the remaining sovereigns in his
money belt, and knew that living in the city they would not last him
long.

He needed a job.

The floor manager had the beer belly and flash clothing that seem always
to go with salesmen in the motor industry; Mark answered his questions
with extreme politeness and a false cheerfulness, but with despair below
the surface.

He had trudged the city for five days, from one faint prospect of work
to another.  Times are hard, almost every prospective employer told him
at the beginning of the interview, and we are looking for a man with
experience.  Mark had no time to pursue his quest at the library.  Now
he sat on the front edge of his chair waiting to thank the man and say
goodbye as soon as he was dismissed, but the man went on talking long
after he should have closed the interview.  He was talking about the
salesmen's commission, and how it was so generous that there was plenty
for two.

if you know what I mean.  The man winked and fitted a cigarette into his
ivory holder.

Yes, of course, Mark nodded vehemently, having absolutely no idea what
the man meant, but eager to please.  of course, I'd be looking after you
personally.  If we came to some sort of arrangement, right?  Right, Mark
agreed, and only then did he realize that the manager was soliciting a
kick-back off Mark's commission.  He was going to get the job.  Of
course, sir.  He wanted to leap up and dance. I'd like to think we were
equal partners.  Good.  Fifty percent of Mark's commission was more than
the manager had expected.  Start Monday, nine o'clock sharp, he said
quickly, and beamed at Mark.

Mark wrung his hand gratefully, but as he was leaving the little cubicle
of the office the manager called after him.  You do have a decent suit,
Anders, don't you?  Of course, Mark lied quickly. Wear it.  He found a
Hindu tailor at the Indian market who ran up a grey three-piece suit
overnight, and charged him thirty-two shillings.  You wear clothes
beautiful, sir.  Like a royal duke, the tailor told him, as he pointed
Mark at the fly-blown mirror in his fitting-room, standing behind him
and skillfully holding a fold of surplus material at the small of Mark's
back to give the front of the suit a fashionable drape.  You will be an
extremely first class advertisement for my humble skills.  You can drive
a car, of course? the manager, whose name was Dicky Lancome, asked him
casualty as they crossed the showroom floor to the glistening Cadillac.

Of course, Mark agreed.  Of course, Dicky agreed.  Otherwise you
wouldn't have applied for a job as a car salesman, would you?  Of course
not.  Hop in then, Dicky invited.  And whip us around the block.  Mark
reeled mentally, but his tongue was quick enough to rescue him.  I'd
prefer you to point out the special features first. I've never driven a
Cadillac before.  Which was for once the literal truth.  He had never
driven a Cadillac, or any other motor vehicle, before.  Righty ho, Dicky
agreed, and as they sped down the Marine Parade with Dicky whistling and
tipping his hat to the pretty girls on the sidewalk, Mark watched his
every action with wheel and pedal avidly.

Back at the showrooms in West Street, Dicky flicked casually through a
bunch of forms.  If you make a sale, you fill in one of these, and make
sure you get the money.  Then he pulled out his watch.  God, it's late.
I've got a desperately important lunch date, it was a little after
eleven o'clock, very important client.  Then he dropped his voice,
Blonde, actually.  SmasherVand he winked again.  See you later.  But
what about prices, and that sort of thing?  Mark called desperately
after him.  There is a pamphlet on my desk.  Gives you all that stuff.
To-to!  and Dicky disappeared through the back door.

Mark was circling the Cadillac uncertainly, utterly engrossed with the
pamphlet, muttering aloud as he tried to master the operating
instructions and identify the various component parts of the vehicle
from the line-drawing and numerated list, when there was a tap on his
arm.  Excuse me, young man, but are you the salesman?  Before him stood
an elderly couple, the man dressed in beautifully tailored dark cloth, a
carnation in his buttonhole and a cane in one hand.  We would like a
drive in the motor vehicle, before we decide, said the elegant lady
beside him, smiling at Mark in a motherly fashion through the light veil
that draped down over her eyes from the brimmed hat.  The hat was
decorated with artificial flowers, and her hair below the brim was
washed silver and neatly waved.

Mark felt waves of panic threaten to engulf him.  He looked about
desperately for an escape, but already the gentleman was handing his
wife into the front seat of the Cadillac.

Mark closed the doors on the couple, and ducked behind the machine for
one last brief perusal of the operating pamphlet.  Depress clutch pedal
with left foot, engage gear lever up and left, depress accelerator pedal
firmly with right foot, release clutch pedal, he muttered, stuffed the
pamphlet into his pocket and hurried to the driver's seat.

The gentleman sat forward in the centre of the back seat, both hands
resting on the head of his cane, grave and attentive as a judge.

His wife beamed kindly at Mark.  How old are you, young man?  Twenty,
ma'am, almost twenty-one.  Mark pressed the starter and the engine
growled, so she had to raise her voice.  My, she nodded, the same age as
my own son.  Mark gave her a pale and sickly grin, as he silently
repeated the instructions in his mind.

, _ accelerate firmly.  The engine beat rose to a deafening bellow, and
Mark clung to the driving-wheel until the knuckles of both hands
blanched with the pressure of his grip.

Do you live at home?  asked his passenger.  No, ma'am, Mark answered and
let out the clutch.  The back wheels screeched like a wounded stallion,
and a blue cloud blew out from behind as the entire machine seemed to
rear upwards, and then hurl itself, slewing wildly, towards the street
doors, leaving two long black rubber smears across the polished showroom
floor.

Mark fought the wheel and the Cadillac swayed and skidded, lined up with
the doors at the last possible moment and careered into the street,
moving sideways like a crab.  A team of horses drawing a passing coach
shied out of the path of the roaring machine, and behind Mark the
elderly gentleman managed to struggle up into a sitting position again
and find his cane.  Good acceleration!  Mark shouted above the roar of
the engine.  Excellent, agreed his passenger, his eyes popping in the
rear view mirror.

His wife adjusted her flowered hat that had come down over her eyes, and
shook her head sadly.  You young oys!  As soon as you leave home you
starve yourselves.  I could tell you are living on your own, you are as
thin as Mark took the intersection of Smith and Aliwal at the charge,
but halfway through it a heavily laden lorry lumbered across their front
and Mark spun the wheel nimbly.

The Cadillac changed direction ninety degrees and ducked into Aliwal on
two wheels.

as a rake, said the lady, holding firmly to the door handle with one
hand, and with the other to her hat.  You should come up to the house
one Sunday for a decent meal.  Thank you, ma'am, that's very kind.  When
Mark stopped the Cadillac against the pavement in front of the showrooms
at last, his hand was shaking so feverishly that he had to make a second
effort to earth the magneto.  He could feel the damp of nervous sweat
soaking through the jacket of his new suit, and he had not the strength
to let himself out of the cab.

Incredible, said the elderly gentleman in the back seat.  What control,
what mastery, I feel quite young again.  It was very nice, dear, his
wife agreed.  We'll take her, her husband decided impulsively, and Mark
could not believe he had heard right.  He had made his first sale.
Wouldn't it be nice if this young man would come to us as a chauffeur.
He is such an excellent driver.  No, ma'am, Mark nearly panicked again.
I couldn't think of leaving my job here, thank you all the same.  Jolly
good show, old man.  Dicky Lancome folded the two five-pound notes that
were his half-share of Mark's commission on the sale of the Cadillac.  I
can see a great future ahead for you.  Oh, I don't know, Mark demurred
modestly.  A great future, Dicky predicted sagely.  But just one thing,
old man, that suit, he shuddered gently, let me introduce you to my
tailor, now that you can afford it.  No offence, of course, but that
looks like you are on your way to a fancy-dress ball.  That evening
after close of business Mark hurried back to the library for the first
time in a week.  The librarian welcomed him with a severe expression
like a disapproving school ma'am. I thought we had seen the last of you,
that you had given up.  Oh no, by no means, Mark assured her, and again
she softened and handed him the key to the reading-room.

Mark had mapped out a family tree for the Courtneys in his notebook, for
it was confusing.  There was a brother to Sean, who was also a colonel
at the end of the Boer War, but also a holder of the Victoria Cross for
gallantry, a distinguished family indeed.  This brother, Colonel Garrick
Courtney, had gradually become a noted and then a famous author of
military history and of biographies of other successful soldiers,
beginning with his With Roberts to Pretoria and Buller, a Fighting
Soldier and going on to Battle for the Son2me and Kitchener.  A Life.
The books were all extensively and glowingly reviewed in the Lantern.
The author had a single son, Michael Courtney.  Prior to 1914, there
were references to this son's business activities as managing director
of the Courtney Saw Mills in the Ladyburg district, and his skills as an
athelete and horseman in many local meetings.  Then 1917, LADYBURG HERO
DECORATED.

Captain Michael Courtney, son of Colonel Garrick Courtney V.  C was
awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his exploits with the.  21 st
R.  F.  C.  Fighter Squadron in France.  Captain Courtney has been
credited with five kills of German aircraft, and was described by his
commanding officer as a courageous and dedicated officer of high flying
skills.  Hero, son of a hero.

Then again, within months, a front-page article outlined in a square of
heavy black type.

It is with great regret that we report the death in action of CAPTAIN
MICHAEL COURTNEY D.  F.  C.  It is believed that Captain Courtney was
shot down in flames behind enemy lines and that his executioner was none
other than the notorious Baron von Richthofen of bloody reputation.  The
Ladyburg Lantern extends its deepest and sincerest condolences to his
father and family.  A Rose plucked in full bloom.  The activities of
this branch of the family, its triumphs and tragedies were all reported
in detail, and it was the same with the Sean Courtney family for the
period from the turn of the century to May of 1910.

Sean Courtney's marriage to Mrs Ruth Friedman in I 903 was described in
loving detail, from the bride's dress to the icing on the cake.  One of
the flower girls was Miss Storm Friedman, aged four, who wore an exact
replica of her mother's dress.  She makes a pretty new sister for Master
Dirk Courtney.  Again the mention of the name that truly interested
Mark, and he noted it, for it was the last until May 1910.

Colonel Sean Courtney's achievements in politics and business and the
more serious fields of recreation filled page after page of subsequent
editions; his election to the legislative council of Natal, and later to
Prime Minister Louis Botha's Cabinet; he became leader of the South
Africa Party in Natal, and was a delegate to Whitehall in London, taking
his entire family with him, to negotiate the terms of Union.

Sean Courtney's business interests flourished and multiplied, new
sawmills, new plantations, elevation to new offices, the chairman of the
first Building Society in Southern Africa, director of Union Castle
Shipping Lines, head of the Government Commission on Natural Resources.

Chairman of the South African Turf Club, a one hundred and fifty foot
luxury yacht built for him by Thesens of Knysna, Commodore of the Royal
Natal Yacht Club, but no further mention of Dirk Courtney until May
1910.

The Ladyburg Lantern and Recorder's front page of the edition of 12th
May 1910.

The Ladyburg Lantern takes great pleasure inannouncing that its entire
paid up share capital has been acquired by Mr Dirk Courtney, who
recently returned to Ladyburg after an absence of some years.

Mr Courtney tells us that the intervening years have been spent in
travel, gaining both experience and capital.

Clearly they were not wasted, for immediately on his arrival home, Mr
Courtney purchased a controlling interest in the Ladyburg Farmers Bank
for a reputed one million pounds sterling in cash.

Ladyburg and all its inhabitants are sure to benefit enormously by the
vast energy, wealth and drive that Mr Dirk Courtney brings to the
district.  I intend taking a close day-to-day interest in all aspects of
my companies operations in Ladyburg, he said, when asked of his future
plans.  Progress, Growth, Prosperity for All, are my watchwords.  Mr
Dirk Courtney, The Ladyburg Lantern salutes you and welcomes you as a
notable ornament to our fair community.

After that, hardly an edition of The Lantern did not contain fawning
eulogies of Mr Dirk Courtney, while mention of his father and family was
reduced to an occasional small article in the inside pages.

To find news of Sean Courtney, Mark had to turn to the other Natal
newspapers.  He began with the Natal Mercury.

Ladyburg Mounted Rifles Sail for France General Courtney Takes his Men
to War once more.

That jolted Mark, he could remember the sea mist on the bay and the
ranks of khaki-clad figures climbing the gangways, each of them burdened
by kitbag and rifle.  The singing, and the cries of the women, paper
streamers and flower petals twisting and falling in gay and gaudy clouds
about them, and the sound of the fog horns reverberating mournfully from
the bluff.  It was so dear in his mind still.

How soon he was to follow them, after exaggerating his age to a
recruiting sergeant who did not inquire too closely.

Ladyburg Rifles Badly Mauled Attack fails at Delville Wood General
Courtney: I am proud of them.  Mark felt sudden stinging tears burn his
eyelids as he went slowly down the long casualty lists, pausing as he
recognized a name, remembering, remembering, lost again in those
terrible seas of mud and blood and suffering.

A hand touched his shoulder arousing him, and he straightened up from
the reading table, bewildered at his sudden return to the present.  We
are closing now, it's after nine o'clock, said the young assistant
librarian softly.  I'm afraid you will have to leave now.  Then she
peered more closely at him.  Are you all right?  Have you been crying?
No.  Quickly Mark groped for his handkerchief.  It's just the strain of
reading.  His landlady shouted down the stairs to him as he let himself
into the hall.  I've got a letter for you.  The letter looked as thick
as a complete works of William Shakespeare, but when he opened it there
were only twenty-two pages, beginning: My dear Mark, Of course I
remember you so clearly, and I have thought about you often, wondering
what ever had become of you,-so your welcome letter came as a marvelous
surprise Mark felt a guilty twinge at the unrestrained joy that her
letter voiced.

I realize that we know so little about each other.  You did not even
know my name!  !  Well, it is Marion Littlejohn silly name, isn't it?  I
wish I could change it (that's not a hint, silly!  ) and I was born in
Ladyburg (I'm not going to tell you when!  A lady never reveals her age!
) My father was a farmer, but he sold his farm five years ago, and now
he works as a forem in at the sugar mill.

The entire family history, Marion's schooling, the names and estates of
all her numerous relatives, Marion's hopes, dreams, aspirations, I'd
love to travel, wouldn't you?  Paris, London', were laid out in daunting
detail, much of it in parentheses and liberally punctuated with
exclamation and question marks.

Isn't it strange that our names are so similar, Mark and Marion?  It
does sound rather grand, doesn't it?

Mark had stirrings now of alarm, it seemed he had called the whirlwind
when he had merely whistled for a breeze, and yet there was an
infectious gaiety and warmth that came through to him strongly, and he
regretted that the girl's features were so hazy in his mind.  He
realized that he might easily pass her in the street without recognizing
her.

He replied that night, taking special care with his penmanship.  He
could not yet blatantly come to the true purpose of his letters, but
hinted vaguely that he was considering writing a book, but that it would
require much research in the Ladyburg archives, and that as yet he did
not have either the time nor the capital to make the journey, and he
concluded by wondering if she did not have a photograph of herself that
he might have.

Her reply must have been written and posted the same day as his letter
was received.  My dearest Mark -'He had been promoted from Dear Mark.

There was a photograph accompanying the twenty-five pages of closely
written text.  It was stiffly posed, a young girl in party clothes with
a fixed nervous smile on her face, staring into the camera as though it
were the muzzle of a loaded howitzer.  The focus was slightly misty, but
it was good enough to remind him what she looked like, and Mark felt a
huge swell of relief.

She was a little plump, but she had a sweet heart-shaped face with a
wide friendly mouth and well-spaced intelligent eyes, an alert and
lively look about her; and he knew already that she was educated and
reasonably well read and desperately eager to please.

On the back of the photograph he had received further promotion: To
darling Mark, With much love, Marion.

Under her name were three neat crosses.  The letter was bursting with
unbounded admiration for his success as a Cadillac salesman, and with
awe for his aspirations to be a writer.

She was anxious to be of help in his researches, he had only to let her
know what information he needed.  She herself had access to all the
Governmental and Municipal archives ('and I won't charge you a search
fee this time!  ), her elder sister worked in the editorial office of
the Ladyburg Lantern, and there was an excellent library in the Town
Hall building where Marion was well known and where she loved to browse,
please would he let her help?

One other thing, did he have a photograph of himself, she would love to
have a reminder of him.

For half a crown Mark had a photograph taken of himself at a beachfront
open-air studio, dressed in his new suit, and with a straw boater canted
at a rakish angle over one eye and a daredevil grin on his face.

My darling Mark, How handsome you are!  !  I have shown all my friends
and they are all quite envious.

She had some of the information he requested, and more would follow.

From Adams Booksellers in Smith Street, Mark purchased a bulky
leather-bound notebook, three enormous sheets of cardboard, and a
large-scale survey map of Natal and Zululand.  These he pinned up on the
walls of his room, where he could study them while lying in bed.

On one sheet he laid out the family trees of the Courtneys, the Pyes and
the Petersens, all three names associated with the purchase of
Andersland on the documents he had seen in Ladyburg Deeds Office.

On one other sheet he built up a pyramid of companies and holdings
controlled by the Ladyburg Farmers Bank, and on another he pyramided in
the same way the companies and properties of General Sean Courtney's
holding company, Natal Timber and Estates Ltd.

On the map he carefully shaded in the actual land holdings of the two
groups, red for General Courtney and blue for those controlled by his
son, Dirk Courtney Esquire.

It gave him new resolution and determination to continue his search when
he carefully shaded with blue the long irregular shape of Andersland,
with its convoluted boundary that followed the south bank of the river;
and when he had done so and wiped the crayon from his fingers, he was
left with the bitter lees of anger in his mouth, a reaffirmation of his
conviction that the old man would never have let it go, they would have
had to kill him first.

The anger was with him again whenever he filled in another section of
the map, or when he lay in bed each night, smoking a last cigarette and
studying the blue and red patchwork of Courtney holdings.  He smiled
grimly when he thought what Fergus MacDonald would say about such wealth
in the hands of a single father and son, and then he wrote in the
leather-bound notebook any new information that he had accumulated
during the day.

He would switch out the light then and lie long awake, and often, when
at last he slept, he dreamed of Chaka's Gate, of the great cliffs
guarding the river and the tumbled wilderness beyond the gates, that
concealed a lonely grave.

A grave unmarked, overgrown now with the lush restless vegetation of
Africa, or, perhaps, long ago dug open by hyena or the other scavengers.

One day, when Mark spent his customary evening's study in the library
reading-room, he turned first to the recent issues of the Ladyburg
Lantern, searching through those editions covering the week following
his flight from Ladyburg, and he almost missed the few lines on an
inside page.

Yesterday, the funeral service was held of Mr Jacob Henry Rossouw at the
Methodist Church in Pine Street.

Mr Rossouw fell to his death in the gorge of the Baboon Stroom below the
new railway bridge while hunting with a party of his friends.

Mr Rossouw was a bachelor employed by the Zululand Sugar Co.  Ltd.  The
funeral service was attended by the Chairman of the Company, Mr Dirk
Courtney, who made a short but moving tribute at the graveside, once
again illustrating his deep concern for even the humblest of the
employees of his many prosperous enterprises.  Greatrless shows itself
in small ways.  The date coincided neatly with his escape from the
valley.  The man might have been one of his hunters, perhaps the one who
had caught his damaged ankle as he hung from the goods truck.  If he
was, then the connection with Dirk Courtney was direct.  Slowly Mark was
twisting a rope together, but he needed a head for the noose.

Yet, in one direction, Mark felt easier.  There seemed to exist a deep
rift between father and son, between General Sean Courtney and Dirk.
None of their companies overlapped, none of their directorships
interlocked, and each pyramid of companies stood alone and separated.
This separation seemed to extend beyond finance or business, and Mark
had found no evidence of any contact between the two men at the social
level, in fact active hostility between them was indicated by the sudden
change in the Ladyburg Lantern's attitude to the father, once the son
took control of its editorial policy.

Yet he was not entirely convinced.  Fergus MacDonald had repeatedly
warned him of the perfidious cunning of the bosses, of all wealthy men.
They will go to any lengths to hide their guilt, Mark, no trick is too
low or despicable to cover the stains of honest workers blood on their
hands.  Perhaps Mark's first concern must be to establish beyond doubt
that he was hunting only one man.  Then, of course, the next move must
be to go back to Ladyburg, to try and provoke another attack, but this
time he would be ready for it and have some idea from which direction it
would come.  His mind went back to the way in which he and Fergus
MacDonald had used Cuthbert, the dummy, to draw fire and force the enemy
to reveal himself, and he grinned ruefully at the thought that this time
he must do Cuthbert's job himself.  He felt for the first time a fear he
had not known in France before a shoot, for he must go out against
something more formidable and ruthless than he had ever believed
possible before, and the time was fast approaching.

He was distracted then by another massive epistle from Ladyburg, one
that gave him honest cause for delaying direct action.

My dearest darling, What great news I have for you!  !  If the mountain
will not come to Mohammed, then he Jar she!  ) must go to the mountain.
My sister and her husband are going to Durban for four days holiday, and
they have asked me to join them.  We will arrive on the fourteenth, and
will be staying at the Marine Hotel on the Marine Parade won't we be
posh!

Mark surprised himself by the strength of his pleasure and anticipation.
He had not realized the affection that he had slowly accumulated at such
long remove for this willing and friendly creature.  He was surprised
again when he met her, both of them dressed with obvious pains and
attention to detail, both in an agony of shyness and restraint under the
surveillance of Marion's sister.

They sat on the hotel veranda and stiffly sipped tea, making small talk
with the sister while surreptitiously examining each other over the rim
of their cups.

Marion had lost weight, Mark saw immediately, but would never know that
the girl had almost starved herself to do so in anticipation of this
moment; and she was pretty, much prettier than he remembered or than her
photograph suggested.  More important was her transparent wholesomeness
and warmth.  Mark had been a lonely boy for most of his life, but more
particularly so in these last weeks, living in his small dingy room with
only the cockroaches and his plans for company.

Now he reacted to her like a traveller coming in out of the snow-storm
responds to the tavern fire.

The sister took her duties as chaperone seriously at first, but she was
only five or six years older than Mark, and perceptive enough to be
aware of the younger people's attraction for each other and to recognize
the essential decency of the boy.  She was also young enough and herself
so recently married as to have sympathy for them.  I would like to take
Marion for a drive, we wouldn't be gone very long.  Marion turned eyes
as soulful and pleading as those of a dying gazelle on her sister.  Oh
please, Lyn.  The Cadillac was a demonstration model, and Mark had
personally supervised while two of the Zulu employees at Natal Motors
had burnished its paintwork to a dazzle.  .

He drove down as far as the mouth of the Umgeni River, with Marion
sitting close and proud and pretty beside him.

Mark felt as good as he ever had in his life; dressed in fashionable
style, with gold in his pocket, a big shining automobile under him and a
pretty adoring girl beside him.

Adoring was the only word to describe Marion's attitude towards him. She
could hardly drag her eyes from his face for a moment, and she glowed
every time he glanced across at her.

She had never imagined herself beside such a handsome, sophisticated
beau.  Not even hex most romantic daydreams had ever included a shining
Cadillac, and a decorated war hero.

When he parked off the road and they picked a path through the densely
overgrown dunes down to the river mouth, she clung to his arm like a
drowning sailor.

The river was in spate from some upland rainstorm; half a mile wide and
muddy brown as coffee, it surged and swirled down to meet the green
thrust of the sea in a leaping ridge of white water.  Carried down on
the brown water were the debris of the flood, and the carcasses of
drowned beasts.

A dozen big black sharks were there to scavenge, pushing high up the
river, their dark triangular fins knifing and circling.

Mark and Marion sat side by side on a dune overlooking the estuary.  Oh,
sighed Marion, as though her heart would break, we've only got four days
together.  Four days is a long time, Mark laughed at her, I don't know
what we are going to do with it all They spent nearly every hour of it
together.  Dicky Lancome was most understandingwith his star salesman.
Just show your face here for a few minutes every morning, to keep the
boss happy, then you can slip off.  I'll hold the fort for you.  What
about the demonstration model?  Mark asked boldly.

I'll tell him you are making a sale to a rich sugar farmer.

Take it, old chap, but for God's sake, don't wrap it round a tree.  I
don't know how i'll ever repay you, Dicky, really I don't.  Don't worry,
old boy, we'll think of a way.  I won't ask again, it's just that this
girl is really special.  I understand.  Dicky patted his shoulder in a
paternal fashion.  Most important thing in life, a likely bit of
crumpet.  My heart goes out to you, old son.  I'll be cheering you on in
spirit every inch of the way.  It's not like that, Dicky, Mark denied,
blushing fiercely.  Of course not, it never is.  But enjoy it anyway,
and Dicky winked lasciviously.

Mark and Marion, she was right, it did sound rather grand, spent their
days wandering hand in hand through the city.  She was delighted by its
bustle and energy, enchanted by its sophistication, by its culture, its
museums and tropical gardens, by its playground beachfront with myriad
fairy lights, the open-air concerts in the gardens of the old fort, by
the big departmental stores in West Street, Stuttafords and Ansteys,
their windows packed with expensive imported merchandise, by the docks
with great merchant ships lining the wharf and the steam cranes huffing
and creaking above them, They watched the Indian fishermen running their
surfboats out from the glistening white beach, through the marching
lines of green surf to lay their long nets in a wide semi-circle out
into deep water.  Then Marion hitched up her skirts and Mark rolled his
trousers to the knee to help the half-naked fishermen draw in the long
lines, until at last a shimmering silver mound of fish lay on the boat,
still quivering and twitching and leaping in the sunlight.

They ate strawberry-flavoured ice-cream out of crisp yellow cones, and
they rode in an open rickshaw down the Marine Parade, drawn by a leaping
howling Zulu dressed in an incredible costume of feathers and beads and
horns.

One night they joined Dicky Lancome and a languid siren to whom he was
paying court, and the four of them ate grilled crayfish and danced to a
jazz band at the Oyster Box Hotel at Umhlanga Rocks, and came roaring
home in a Cadillac, tiddly and happy and singing, with Dicky driving
like Nuvorelli, rocketing the big car over the dusty rutted road, and
Mark and Marion cuddling blissfully in the back seat.

In the lobby of the hotel, under the watchful eye of the night clerk who
was poised to intercept Mark if he tried for the elevator, they
whispered goodnight to each other.  I have never been so happy in all my
life, she told him simply, and stood on tip-toe to kiss him full on the
lips.

Dicky Lancome had disappeared with both Cadillac and lady-friend,
probably to some dark and secluded parking place along the sea front,
and as Mark walked home alone through the deserted midnight streets, he
thought about Marion's words and found himself agreeing.  He could not
remember being so happy either, but then, he grinned ruefully, it hadn't
been a life crowded with wild happiness up to then.  To a pauper, a
shilling is a fortune.

It was their last day together, and the knowledge weighted their
pleasure with poignancy.  Mark left the Cadillac at the end of a narrow
track in the sugar cane fields and they climbed down to the long white
curve of snowy sand beach, guarded at each end by rocky headlands.

The sea was so clear that from the tall dunes they could see deep down
to the reefs and sculptured sand banks below the surface.  Farther out,
the water shaded to a deep indigo blue, that met at last a far horizon
piled with a mountainous range of cumulus clouds, purple, blue and
silver in the brilliant sunlight.

They walked down barefooted through the crunching sand, carrying the
picnic basket that Marion's hotel had prepared for them and a threadbare
grey blanket from Mark's bed, and it seemed that they were the only two
persons in the world.

They changed into swimming costumes, modestly separating to each side of
a dense dark green milk-wood bush, and then they ran laughing into the
warm clear water at the edge of the beach.

The thin black cotton of Marion's costume clung wetly to her body, so
that it seemed that she were naked, although clothed from mid thigh to
neck, and when she pulled the red rubber bathing cap from her head and
shook out the thick tresses of her hair, Mark found himself physically
roused by her for the first time.

somehow the pleasure he had taken in her up until then had been that of
friendship, and companionship.  Her patent adoration had filled some
void in his soul, and he had felt protective, almost brotherly towards
her.

She sensed instantly, with some feminine instinct, the change in him.
The laughter died on her lips, and her eyes went grave and there were
shades in them of fear or apprehension, but she turned to face him,
lifting her face to him, seeming to steel herself with a conscious act
of courage.

They lay side by side on the grey blanket, in the heavy shade of the
milk bush, and the midday was heavy and languorous with heat and the
murmur of insects.

The wet bathing-suits were cool against their hot skins, and when Mark
gently peeled hers away, her skin was damp beneath his fingers, and he
was surprised to find her body so different from Helena's.  Her skin was
clear milky white, tipped with palest pink, lightly sugared with white
beach sand, and the hair of her body was fine as silk, light golden
brown and soft as smoke.  Her body was soft also, with the gentle
yielding spring of woman's flesh, unlike the lean hard muscle of
Helena's, and it had a different feel to it, a plasticity that intrigued
and excited him.

only when she gasped, and bit her lip and then turned her face and hid
it against his neck did Mark realize suddenly, through the mists of his
own arousal, that all the skills Helena had taught him were not moving
Marion, as they were him.  Her body was rigid, and her face pale and
tensed.  Marion, are you all right?  It's all right, Mark.  You don't
like this?  It's the first time it's ever happened, We can stop.  No. We
don't have to.  No, Mark, go on.  It's what you want.  But you don't
want it.  I want what you want, Mark.  Go on.  It's for you.  "NoGo on,
Mark, please go on.  And now she looked at him and he saw her expression
was pitiful, her eyes swimming with bright tears and her lips quivering.
Oh, Marion, I'm sorry.  He recoiled from her, horrified by the misery he
saw reflected in her expression, but immediately she followed him
throwing both arms around his neck, lying half on top of him.  No, Mark,
don't be sorry.  I want you to be happy.  It won't make me happy, if you
don't want to.  Oh, Mark, don't say that.  Please don't say that, all I
want in the world is to make you happy.  She was brave and enduring,
holding him tightly over her, both arms locked around his neck, her body
rigid but spread compliantly, and for Mark the ordeal was almost as
painful; he suffered for her as he felt the tremble of locked nerves and
the small sounds of pain and tension that she tried to keep deep in her
throat.

Mercifully for both of them, it was swiftly ended, but still she clung
to him.  Was it good for you, Mark my darling?  Oh, yes, he assured her
vehemently.  It was wonderful.  I want so much to be good for you in
every way, my darling.  Always and in every way, I want to be good for
you.  It was the best thing in my life, he told her, and she stared into
his eyes for a moment, searching for assurance, and finding it because
she wanted it so terribly.  I'm so glad, darling, she whispered, and
drew his head down on to her damp warm bosom, so soft and pink and
comforting.  Holding him like that, she began to rock him gently, the
way a mother rocks her child.  I'm so glad, Mark, and it will be better
and better.  I'll learn, you see if I don't and I'll try so hard for
you, darling, always.  Driving home slowly in the dusk, she sat proudly
next to him on the wide leather seat, and there was a new air about her,
an air of confidence and achievement, as though she had grown from child
to matron in the space of a few short hours.

Mark felt a rush of deep affection for her.  He felt that he wanted to
protect her, to keep that goodness and sweetness from souring, to
protect her from unhappiness and wanton damage.  For a fleeting moment
he felt regret that she had not been able to feed that raging madness of
his body, and regret also that he had not been able to lead her through
the storm to the same peace.  Perhaps that would come, perhaps they
would find the way together, and if they didn't, well it wasn't that
important.  The important thing was the sense of duty he felt towards
this woman, she had given him everything of which she was capable, and
it was his duty now to give back in equal measure, to protect and
cherish her.  Marion, will you marry me?  he asked quietly, and she
began to cry softly, nodding her head vehemently through the tears,
unable to speak.

Marion's sister, Lynette, was married to a young lawyer from Ladyburg
and the four of them sat up late that night discussing the betrothal. Pa
won't give permission for you to marry before you are twenty-one, you
know how Peter and I had to wait.  Peter Botes, a serious young man,
nodded wisely and placed his finger tips together carefully.  He had
thin sandy hair, and was as pompous as a judge in scarlet.

It won't do any harm to wait a few years.  Years?  wailed Marion. You're
only nineteen, Peter reminded her.  And Mark will need to build up some
capital before he takes on the responsibility of a family.  I can go on
working, Marion came in hotly.  They all say that.  Peter waggled his
head sagely.  And then two months later there's a baby on the way.
Peter!  His wife rebuked him primly, but he went on calmly.  And now,
Mark, what about your prospects?  Marion's father will want to know.
Mark hadn't expected to present an account of his affairs, and on the
spur of the moment he could not be certain if his total worth was
forty-two pounds twelve shillings, or seven and sixpence.

He saw them off on the Ladyburg train the next morning, with a long
lingering embrace and a promise to write every day, while Marion swore
she would work at filling her bottom drawer, and at altering her
father's prejudice against early marriage.  Walking back from the
railway, Mark remembered, for no apparent reason, a spring morning in
France coming back out of the line to go into reserve, and his shoulders
went back and his step quickened and became springy and elastic once
more.  He was out of the line, and he had survived, that was as far as
he could think at that moment.

Dicky Lancome's polished elastic-sided boots were propped on the desk in
front of him and fastidiously crossed at the ankles.  He looked up from
his newspaper, a tea cup held in the other hand with little finger
extended delicately.  Hail the conquering hero comes, his weary weapon
slung over his shoulder.  Oh come on, Dicky!  weak at the knees,
bloodshot eye and fevered brow Any calls?  Mark asked seriously.  Ah,
the giant mind now turns to the more mundane aspects of life.  Play the
game, Dicky.  Mark riffled quickly through a small pile of messages that
awaited him.  A surfeit of love, a plethora of passion, an overdose of
crumpet, a genital hangover.  What's this?  I can't read your scrawl.
Mark averted his eyes, concentrating on his reading.  Mark my words,
Mark, that young lady has got the brood lust.  If you turn your back on
her for ten minutes, she will be up the nearest tree building a nest,
Cut it out, Dicky.  That's precisely what you should do, old boy, unless
you can face the prospect of her dropping your whelps all over the
scenery. Dicky shuddered theatrically.  Never ride in a saloon if you
can drive a sports model, old chap, which reminds me, he dropped the
newspaper, checked the watch from his waistcoat pocket, I have this
important client.  He inspected his glossy boots a moment, flicked them
lightly with the handkerchief from his breast pocket, stood up and
adjusted the strawbasher on his head and winked at Mark.  Her husband's
gone up country for a week.  Hold the fort, old boy, it's my turn now He
disappeared through the office door into the showroom, and then
reappeared instantly, an expression of horror on his face.  Oh God,
customers!  Get after them, Mark my boy, I'm taking the back door, and
he was gone, leaving only the faint perfume of brilliantine lingering on
the air.

Mark checked his tie in the sliver of broken mirror wedged in the frame
of the window, and adjusted his welcoming smile as he hurried to the
door, but at the threshold he stopped as though coming up at the end of
a chain.

He was listening with the stillness and concentration of a wild gazelle,
listening with every fibre and every quivering nerve end to a sound of
such aching and penetrating beauty that it seemed to freeze his heart.
It lasted only a few seconds, but the sound of it shimmered and thrilled
in the air for long seconds afterwards, and only then did Mark's heart
beat again, surging heavily against his rib cage.

The sound was the laughter of a girl.  it was as though the air around
Mark had thickened to honey, for it dragged heavily at his legs as he
started forward, and it required a physical effort to draw it down into
his lungs.

From the doorway he looked into the showroom.  In the centre of the wide
floor stood the latest demonstration model Cadillac, and beside it stood
a couple.

The man had his back to Mark, and left only the impression of massive
size, a towering figure dressed in dark cloth.  Beside him, the girl was
dainty, almost ethereal, she seemed to float, light and lovely as a
hummingbird on invisible wings.

The earth tilted beneath Mark's feet as he gazed at her.

Her head was thrown back to look up at the man.  Her throat was long and
smooth, balancing the small head with its huge dark eyes and the
laughing mouth, small white regular teeth beyond pink lips, a fine bold
brow, pale and wide above those haunting eyes, and all of it crowned by
a heart-stopping tumble of thick lustrous hair, hair so black that its
waves and falls seemed to be sculptured from freshly oiled ebony.

She laughed again, a lovely joyous ripple of sound, and she reached up
to touch the man's face.  Her hand was narrow, with long tapered
fingers, strong capable-looking hands, so that Mark realized that his
first impression had been wrong.

The girl was small only in comparison to the man, and her poise
heightened the illusion.  However, Mark saw now that she was tall, but
graceful as a papyrus stem in the wind, supple and slim, with tiny waist
and long legs beneath the light floating material of her skirt.

With her fingertips, she traced the jawline of the man; tilting her head
on its long swanlike neck, her beauty was almost unbearable, as her huge
eyes shone now with love, and the line of the lips was soft with love.
Oh Daddy, you are an old-fashioned, grumpy old bear.  She spun away from
him, lightly as a ballerina, and struck an exaggerated pose beside the
huge glistening machine, putting on a comic French accent.  Regarde! Mon
cher papa, c'est tres chic -The man growled.  I don't trust these fancy
new machines.  Give me a Rolls.  Rolls?  cried the girl, pouting
dramatically, they're so staid!  So biblical!  Darling Daddy, this is
the twentieth century, remember?  Then she drooped like a dying rose in
a vase.  How could I hold my head up among my friends if you force me to
ride in one of those great sombre coffins?  At that instant she noticed
Mark standing in the doorway of the sales office, and her entire mien
changed, the carriage of head and body, the expression of mouth and eye
flowing instantly from clown to lady.

Pater, she said softly, the voice cultivated and the eye cool as it
flicked over Mark, a steady encompassing sweep from his head to his
feet.  I think the sales person is here.  She turned away, and Mark felt
his heart convulse again at the way her hip swung and pushed beneath the
skirt and he saw for the first time the cheeky, challenging roll of her
small rounded backside as she walked slowly around the Cadillac, calm
and aloof, not glancing in his direction again.

Mark stared at her, with fascination, all his emotions in upheaval.  He
had never seen anything so beautiful, so completely captivating in all
his life.

The man had turned and was glaring at him angrily.  He seemed, as the
girl had teased him, to be biblical.  A gaunt and towering figure with
shoulders wide as the gallows tree and the big fierce head exaggerated
in size by the slightly twisted hooked nose and the dark thick bush of
beard, shot through with grey.  I know you, dammit!  he growled.  The
face had been burned almost black by twenty thousand suns, but there
were deep white creases in the corners of his eyes and the skin in a
line below the thick curls of his silvering hair was white also,
protected by the band of a hunter's hat or a uniform cap.

Mark roused himself, tearing his eyes off the girl, for the fresh shock
of recognition.  At the time he could only believe it was some monstrous
coincidence, but in the years that followed he would know differently.
The threads of their lives were plaited, and intertwined.  But in this
instant the shock, coming so close on the other, unsettled him and his
voice croaked.  Yes, General Courtney, I am, Don't tell me, goddammit,
the General cut in, his voice like the crack of a Mauser shooting from
cover, and Mark felt his spirit quail before the expression on his face;
it was the most formidable he had ever confronted.

I know, the name is right there!  he glowered at Mark.  I never forget a
face.  The tremendous force and presence of the man threatened to swamp
him.  It's a sign of old age, Pater, said the girl coolly, glancing over
her shoulder without smile or expression.  Don't you say that, girl, the
man rumbled like an active volcano.  Don't you, dare say that. He took a
threatening step towards Mark, the dark brow corrugated and the blue
eyes cutting into his soul like a surgeon's knives.  It's the eyes!
Those eyes.  Mark retreated a hurried step before the limping,
mountainous advance, not quite sure what to expect, but ready to believe
that Sean Courtney might at any moment lunge at him with the heavy ebony
cane he carried, so murderous seemed his anger.  General, Yes!  Sean
Courtney snapped his fingers with a crack like a breaking oak branch,
and the scowl smoothed away, the blue eyes crinkling into a smile of
such charisma, of such infectious and conspiratorial glee, that Mark had
to smile back at him.

Anders, he said.  Anders and MacDonald.  Martin?

Michael?  No, Mark Anders!  And he clenched his fist and struck his own
thigh.  Old, is it?  Girl, who said old?

Pater, you are a marvel.  She rolled her eyes, but Sean Courtney was
advancing on Mark, seizing his hand in a grip that made the bones creak
until he recovered himself and squeezed back, matching the big man's
grip.  It was the eyes, laughed Sean.  You've changed so much from that
day, that night - and the laughter dried, as he remembered the boy in
the stretcher, pale and moribund, smeared with mud and thick drying
blood, and heard again his own voice, He's dead!  He drove back the
image.  How are you now, my boy?  I'm fine, sir.  I didn't think you
were going to pull through. Sean peered closely at him.  I'll grant you
seem to have made it with all colours flying.  How many did you collect,
and where?  Two, sir, high in the back.  Honourable scars, my boy, we'll
compare notes one day.  And then he scowled again, horrendously.  You
got the gong, didn't you?  Yes, sir.  Good, you never know in this man's
army.  I wrote the citation that night, but you never know.  What did
they give you?  Sean smiled his relief.  The M.  M sir.  I got it at the
hospital in England.  Excellent.  That's good!  he nodded, and he let go
of Mark's hand, turning to the girl again.  Darling, this gentleman was
with me in France.  How nice.  She touched the design on the radiator of
the car with one finger, as she drifted past it, not glancing back at
them.  Do you think we might have a drive now, Pater?  Mark hurried to
the back door to hold it open.  I'll drive, she said, and waited for him
to jump to the driver's door.

The starter button is here, he explained.  Thank you, I know.  Sit in
the back, please.  She drove like a man very fast but skilfully, picking
a tight line into the corners and using the gearbox to brake, double
declutching with dancing feet on the pedals, and hitting the shift with
a quick sure hand, Beside her the General sat with the set to his
shoulders of a younger man.  You drive too fast, he growled, the
ferocious tone given the complete lie by the fond smile he turned on
her.  And you're an old fusspot, Daddy, she laughed again; the thrill of
it sang in Mark's ears as she hurled the big powerful machine into the
next bend.  I didn't beat you enough when you were young.  Well, it's
too late now.  She touched his cheek with her free hand.  Don't bank on
that, young lady, don't ever take bets on that.  Shaking his head in
mock despair, but with the adoration still glowing in his eyes, the
General heaved himself around in the seat and subjected Mark to another
dark penetrating scrutiny.  You don't turn out at the weekly parades.
No, sir.  It's an hour on Friday evenings, half an hour square-bashing
and then a lecture.  Yes, sir?  Good fun, really.  Tremendous spirit,
even though we have combined with the other peace-time regiments now.
Yes, sir.  I'm the Colonel-in-Chief, Sean chuckled.  They couldn't get
rid of me that easily.  No, sir.  We have a monthly shoot, good prizes,
and a barbecue all terwards.  is that so, sir?  We are sending a team to
shoot for the Africa Cup this year, all expenses paid.  Marvellous
opportunity for the lucky lads who get chosen.  I'm sure, General.  Sean
waited for more, but Mark was silent.  He could not meet the big man's
fierce, unrelenting gaze, and he shifted his eyes, catching as he did so
the girl's face reflected in the rear-view mirror.

She was watching him intently, with an unfathomable expression, contempt
perhaps, dry amusement, maybe, or something else, something much more
intriguing or dangerous.  For the split part of an instant, their eyes
met, and then her head turned away on the tall graceful column of her
neck.  The dark shining hair was brushed away from the nape, and there
at the juncture with pale skin, the hair was fine and silky, a tiny
whorl of it like a question mark at the back of her small sculptured
ear.

Mark had an almost insane desire to lean forward and press his lips to
it.  The thought struck like a physical blow in his groin, and he felt
the nerves along his spine racked out cruelly.  He realized suddenly
then, with a shock that made his senses tilt again, that he was in love
with her.  I want to win that cup, said the General softly, watching
him.  The regiment has never won it before.  I've rather had enough of
uniform and war, General. Mark forced his eyes back to meet the
General's.  But I do wish you good luck.  The chauffeur held the rear
door of the Rolls Silver Wraith open, and Sean Courtney lowered himself
into the seat beside his daughter.  He lifted his right hand in a brief,
almost military, salute at the young man on the pavement and the car
pulled smoothly away.

The instant they were alone, his daughter let out a girlish squeal of
delight and threw both arms around his neck, ruffling his beard and his
heart with her kisses.

, oh, Daddy, darling, you spoil me!  Yes, I do, don't I?

Irene will turn bright green and curl up like an anchovy.

I love you, my kind and beautiful Daddy.  Her father has never bought
her a Cadillac!  I like that lad, he's one of the bright ones.  The
sales person?  I hadn't really noticed.  She released her grip and and
sat back in the seat.  He sgot heart.  He was silent for a moment then,
remembering the snow falling silently across a shell-ravaged hill in
France.  He's got the guts and brightness for better things than selling
motor cars.  Then he grinned mischievously, looking young enough to be
her brother.  And I'd love to see Hamilton's face when we take the
Africa Cup away from him.  Beside him Storm Courtney was silent, her
hand still in the crook of her father's arm while she wondered what had
disturbed her about Mark Anders.  She decided it was his eyes, those
serene yellow eyes, calm but watchful, floating like golden moons.

involuntarily, Mark braked the big car almost to a standstill before the
white gates.  They were tall twin columns, plastered and white-washed
with the Zulu name in raised letters on each: EMOYENI, it was a lovely
haunting name, the place of the wind, and on the crest of the hills
above Durban town, it would indeed receive the cool blessing of the sea
breezes during the sweltering summer months.

The swinging portion of the gate was two racks of heavy cast-iron
spears, but they stood open now, and Mark crossed the iron grid which
would prevent hooved animals entering or escaping and started up the
gentle curve of the driveway, butter yellow flint pebbles carefully
raked and freshly watered, set on each side with deep beds of cannas
which were now in full bloom.  They had been arranged in banks of solid
colour, scarlet and yellow and white, dazzling in the bright sunshine,
and beyond them were lush lawns of deep tropical green, mown
carpet-smooth but studded with clumps of indigenous trees which had
obviously been spared for their size or beauty or unusual shape.

They were festooned with garlands of lianas the ubiquitous monkey rope
plants of Natal, and even as Mark watched, a small blue-grey vervet
monkey dropped lithely down one of the living ropes, and, with its back
arched like a cat and its long tail held high in mock alarm, bounded
across an open stretch of lawn until it reached the next clump of trees
where it shot to the highest branches and chattered insolently at the
slowly passing car.

Mark knew from his investigation that this was merely the Courtney town
house, the main family home was at Ladyburg, and he had not expected
anything like this splendour.  And yet why not, he grinned wryly, the
man had everything in the world, this was a mere pied-A-terre.

He twisted his head to look back.  The gates were out of sight behind
him now, and there was still no sign of the house ahead.  He was
surrounded by a fantasy landscape, half wild and yet lovingly groomed
and tended, and now he saw the reason for the animal grid at the main
gates.

Small herds of semi-domesticated game cropped at the short grass of the
lawn or stood and watched the passing car with mild curiosity.  He saw
graceful golden brown impala with snowy bellies and spindly back-curved
horns, a dainty blue duiker as big as a fox terrier with pricked-up ears
and bright button eyes; an eland bull with hanging dewlap, thick twisted
horns arming the short heavy head, and a barrel body heavy as a pedigree
Afrikander bull.

He crossed a low bridge over the narrow neck of an artificial lake.  The
blue water lotus blooms stood high above their huge round green leaves
that floated flat on the surface.  Their perfume was light and sweet and
nostalgic on the bright warm air, and the dark torpedo shapes of bass
hung suspended in the clear water below the sheltering lotusleaves.

On the edge of the lake, a black and white spur-winged goose spread its
wings, as wide as the reach of a man's arms, and pressed forward with
snakelike neck and pink wattled head, threatening flight at the
intrusion; then, thinking better of such effort, it furled the great
wings again and waggled its tail, satisfied with a single harsh honk of
protest as the Cadilac passed.

The roof of the house showed through the trees ahead now, and it was
tiled in candy pink, towered and turreted and ridged, like a Spanish
palace.  The last curve of the driveway brought Mark out into full view
of the building.

Before it lay an open expanse of blazing flowerbeds.  The colour was so
vibrant and so concentrated that it daunted the eye, and was relieved
only by the tall soft ostrich feathers of spray that poured high into
the air from the fountains set in the centre of four round ponds,
parapeted in stone.  The breeze blew soft wisps of spray like smoke
across the flowerbeds, wetting the blooms and enhancing the already
dazzling colour.

The house was two stories high, with random towers breaking the solid
silhouette and columns, twisted like candy sticks, ornamenting the
entrance and supporting the window lintels; it was painted white, and it
shone in the sunlight like a block of ice.

It should have given the impression of solid size and ostentatious
display, but the design was so cunning that it seemed light as a French
pastry, a gay and happy house, built in a spirit of fun and probably of
love.  A rich man's gift to a lovely woman, for the feminine touch was
everywhere evident, and the great masses of flowers, the fountains and
peacocks and marble statues seemed right, the only setting for such a
structure.

Slowly, awed and enchanted, Mark let the Cadillac roll down the last
curve of the driveway, and the light faint cries of female voices caught
his attention.

The tennis courts stood at the end of the lawns, and there were women at
play, their white dresses sparkling in the sun, their limbs flashing as
they ran and swerved and struck at the ball.  Their voices and laughter
were sweet and melodious in the warm hush of the tropical midmorning.

Mark left the car, and started across the lawn towards the courts. There
were other female figures, also whiteclad, that lolled in deck-chairs in
the shade of the banyan trees, watching the play and conversing
languidly as they sipped at long frosted glasses, waiting their turn on
the courts.

None of them noticed Mark until he was on the edge of their group.  Oh,
I say, girls.  One of them turned quickly in her chair, and appraised
Mark with eyes suddenly no longer bored, but clear blue and acquisitive.
A man!  We are in luck.  Instantly the other three changed, each
reacting differently: one exaggerating her indifferent and indolent loll
in the low chair, another tugging at her skirt with one hand and pushing
at her hair with the other, smiling brightly and sucking in her tummy.

They were all young and sleek as cats, glossy with youth and health and
that elusive but unmistakable aura of wealth and breeding.  And what is
your pleasure, sir?  asked the one with blue eyes.  She was the
prettiest of the four, with fine pale golden hair in a halo around the
small neat head and good white teeth as she smiled.

Mark felt discomforted under their stares, especially when the speaker
turned further in her chair, slowly uncrossed and crossed her legs,
managing to give Mark a flash of white silk panties under the short
skirt.  I am looking for Miss Storm Courtney.  God, said the smiler.
They all want Storm -why don't any of them ever want me?  Storm!  The
blonde called out to the court.

Storm Courtney was about to serve, but the call distracted her and she
glanced across.  She saw Mark and her expression did not change, her
attention switched back to the game.  She threw the ball high and swung
overhand at it, the stroke was fluid and controlled.  The racket twanged
sharply, and the movement threw her white cotton skirt high against the
back of her thighs.  Her legs were beautifully moulded, slim ankles and
gently swelling calves, knees marked only by symmetrical dimples.

She spun lightly and caught the return of the ball, a long lightly
tanned arm flashing in a full sweep and the ball leapt from the racket
in a white blur; again her skirt kicked up and Mark shifted slightly on
his feet, for the earth had tilted again.

She ran back to the baseline, short neat steps on those long narrow
feet, head thrown back to follow the high parabola of the lobbing ball
against the blue of the sky.  Her dark hair seemed to glow with the
metallic sheen of a sunbird's wing as she judged her stroke, and then
her whole body went into it, power uncoiling along those long beautiful
legs, driven up from tensed and rounded buttocks under the light cotton
skirt, through the narrow waist, along young hard back muscles and
exploding down through the swinging right arm.

The ball hummed like an arrow, flashed low across the net and kicked a
white puff of dust from the baseline.  Too good! wailed her opponent
despairingly, and Storm laughed, gay and triumphant, and came back to
the high fence to pick up the spare balls from the gutter.  Oh Storm,
there's a gentleman here to see you.  The blonde called again, and Storm
flipped up a ball with the tip of her racket and the side of her foot
bouncing it once on the turf of the court and then catching it in her
free hand.  Yes, Irene, she answered lightly.  I know.  He's only a
sales person.  Ask him to wait by the car until I'm ready to deal with
him. She had not looked at Mark again, and now she turned away.  Forty,
love, she called gaily, and ran back to the baseline.  Her voice had a
music and lilt that did nothing to sweeten the sudden flare of anger
which made Mark's jaw set grimly.  If you are a sales person, Irene
murmured, then you can sell me something some time.  But right now,
darling, I suggest you do what Storm says, otherwise we will all know
about it.  When Storm came to where he waited, she was flanked by the
other girls, like maids in waiting attending a princess, he thought, and
he felt his resentment fade as he watched her.  You could forgive
somebody like that, somebody so royal and lovely and heart-achingly
beautiful you could forgive them anything.

He stood attentive, waiting for her, and he realized then how tall she
was.  The top of that glossy head reached to his chin, almost.  Good
morning, Miss Courtney.  I have brought your new Cadillac, and all of us
at Natal Motors wish you much joy and enjoyment. It was a little speech
he always used when making a delivery, and he spoke it with all the
warmth and charm and sincerity which had made him in so few months the
star salesman of Natal Motors.  Where are the keys?  Storm Courtney
asked, and for the first time looked at him directly.  Mark realized
that her eyes were that dark, almost black, blue like the General's.

There was no question who her father was, She opened them a little
wider, and in the sunlight they were the colour of polished sapphires or
the blue of the Mozambique current, out in the deep water at noon.  They
are in the car, he answered, and his voice sounded strange in his own
ears, as though it came from a distance.  Get them, she said, and he
felt himself start to move, to hurry to her bidding. Then something like
that sense of danger he had known and developed in France warned him.

Her expression was neutral, completely unconcerned, as though she found
the effort of talking directly to him was wasted, just one of these
tiresome moments in an otherwise important march of events.  Yet the
warning was clear as the chime of a bell in his head, and only then he
saw something else move in her eyes, something dangerous and exciting
like the shape of a leopard hunting in the shadows.

A challenge, perhaps, a dare, and suddenly he knew clearly that no
daughter of Sean Courtney would be reared to such natural arrogance and
rudeness.  There was a reason, some design in her attitude.

He felt a lightness of mind, that kind of special madness which had
driven away fear of consequence so often in moments of peril or
desperate enterprise, and he grinned at her.  He did not have to force
the grin, it was natural and devilish and challenging.  Certainly, Miss
Courtney.  Of course I'll get them, just as soon as you say please.
There was an audible communal gasp from the girls around her, and they
stilled with awed delight, their eyes darting to Storm's face and then
back to Mark's.  Say please to the nice man, Stormy.  Irene used the
patronizing voice for instructing young children, and there was a
delighted burst of giggles from the others.

For one unholy instant something burned in the girl's dark blue eyes,
something fierce that was not anger.  Mark recognized the importance of
that flash; although he did not truly know the exact emotion it
betrayed, yet he knew it might affect him.  Then it was gone and in its
place was true unfeigned anger.  How dare you!  Storm's voice was low
and quivering, but her lips were suddenly frosty white as the blood
drained away.  The anger was too swift, too strong for the occasion, out
of all proportion to the mild exchange, and Mark felt a reckless
excitement that he had been able to reach her so deeply.  He kept the
grin mocking and taunting.  Hit him, darling, Irene teased, and for a
moment Mark thought she really might.  You keep your silly mouth shut,
Irene Leuchars.  Oh la la!  Irene gloated.  Temper!  Mark turned
casually away, and opened the driver's door of the Cadillac.  Where are
you going!  Back to town.  He started the engine, and looked out of the
window at her.  There was no doubt now that she was the most beautiful
creature he had ever seen.  Anger had rouged her cheeks, and the fine
dark hair at her temples was still damp from her play on the courts.  It
was plastered against the smooth skin in tiny curls.  That is my car!
They'll send somebody else up with it, Miss Courtney, I'm used to
dealing with ladies.

Again the wondering gasp and burst of giggles.  Oh, he's a darling!
Irene clapped her hands in applause, but Storm ignored her.  My father
will have you fired.  Yes, he probably will, he agreed.  Mark thought
about that solemnly for a moment, then he nodded and he let out the
clutch.  He looked back in the mirror as he took the first bend in the
driveway and they were still standing in a group staring after him in
their white dresses, like a group of marble statues.  Nymphs Startled by
Satyr, was a fitting title, he thought, and laughed with the reckless
mood still on him.  Jesus, Dicky Lancome whispered, clutching his brow
with horror.  What made you do it?  He shook his head slowly,
wonderingly.  She was damned rude.  Dicky dropped his hands and stared
at him aghast.  She was rude to you.  Oh my God, I don't think I can
stand much more.  Don't you realize that if she was rude to you, you
should be grateful?  Don't you know that there are thousands of peasants
like us who go through their entire lives without being insulted by Miss
Storm Courtney?  I was not going to take that, Mark explained
reasonably, but Dicky cut in.  Look, old bean, I've taught you all I
know, and you still know nothing.  Not only do you take it, but if Miss
Courtney expresses a desire to kick your fat stupid arse, the correct
reply is "Certainly, ma'am, but first let me don fresh bags lest I soil
your pretty foot!  " Mark laughed, the reckless mood still there but
fading, and Dicky's expression became more lugubrious.  That's right,
have yourself a good laugh.  Do you know what happened?  and before Mark
could answer he went on, A summons from on high, the ultimate, the
Chairman of the Board himself.  So the boss and I dash across town fear,
trepidation, cautious optimism, are we to be fired, promoted,
congratulated on the month's sale figures?  And there is the Board, the
full Board mind you, looking like a convention of undertakers who have
just been informed of the discovery of Pasteur's vaccine Dicky stopped,
the memory was too painful, and he sighed heavily.  You didn't really
tell her to say "please", did you?

Mark nodded.  You didn't really tell her she was not a lady?  Not
directly, Mark protested.  But I did imply it.  Dicky Lancome tried to
wipe his face off with one hand, starting at the hairline and drawing
the palm of his hand down slowly to his chin.  I've got to fire you, you
know that, don't you?

Mark nodded again.  Look, said Dicky.  I tried, Mark, I really did.  I
showed themyour sales figures, I told them you were young, impulsive, I
made a speech.  Thank you, Dicky.  At the end of the speech, they almost
fired me also.  You shouldn't have stuck your neck out for meAnyone
else, you could have picked on anyone else, old chap, you could have
punched the mayor, sent abusive letters to the king, but why in the name
of all holy things did you have to pick on a Courtney?  You know
something, Dicky?  and it was Dicky's turn silently to shake his head. I
loved it, I loved every moment of it. Dicky groaned aloud, as he took
out his silver cigarette case and offered it to Mark.  They lit their
cigarettes, and smoked in silence for a few moments.

So I am fired, then?  Mark asked at last.  That's what I have been
trying to tell you for the last ten minutes, Dicky agreed.

Mark began to clear out the drawers in his desk, then stopped and asked
impulsively.  Did the General, did General Courtney make the demand for
my head?  I have no idea, old chap, but sure as hell it was made.

Mark wanted to believe that it had not been the General.

It was too mean a gesture from such a big man.  He could imagine the
General bursting into the showroom, brandishing; a horse-whip.

The man who could take such revenge for a small flash of spirit, might
be capable of other things, like killing an old man for his land.

The thought sickened Mark, and he tried to thrust it aside.  Well, then,
I suppose I'd better be getting along.  I'm sorry, old bean.  Dicky
stood up and offered his hand, then looked embarrassed. You all right
for the filthy lucre?  I could let you have a tenner to tide you over.
Thanks, Dicky, but I'll be all right.  look, Dicky blurted out
impulsively.  Give it a month or so, time for the dust to settle, and
then if you haven't got yourself fixed, come and see me. I'll try and
sneak you in again through the back door, even if we have to write you
up on the paysheet under an assumed name.  Goodbye, Dick, and thanks for
everything.  I really mean that.  I'm going to miss you, old chap.  Keep
your head down below the parapet in future, won't you? The pawn shop was
in Soldiers Way, almost directly opposite the railway station.  The
front room was small and overcrowded with a vast array of valuables,
semi-valuables and rubbish left here by the needy over the years.

There was a melancholy about the racks of yellowing wedding dresses, in
the dusty glass cases of old wedding rings, engraved watches, cigarette
cases and silver drinking flasks, all given in love or respect, each
with its own sad story.  Two pounds, said the pawnbroker, after a single
glance at the suit.  It's only three months old, Mark said softly.  And
I paid fifteen.  The man shrugged and the steel-framed spectacles slid
down his nose.  Two pounds, he repeated, and pushed the spectacles up
with a thumb that looked grey and dusty as his stock.  All right, and
what about this?  He opened the small blue case, and showed the bronze
disc nestled in a nest of silk, pinned by its gay little ribbon of white
and red and blue.  The Military Medal for gallantry displayed by
non-commissioned officers and other ranks.  We get a lot of those, not
much call for them.  The man pursed thin lips.  Twelve pounds ten, he
said.  How long do you keep them before you sell them?  Mark asked,
suddenly reluctant to part with the scrap of metal and silk.  We keep em
a year.  The last ten days of constant search for employment had
depleted Mark's resources of cash and courage.

All right, he agreed.

The pawnbroker wrote the ticket, while Mark wandered into the back
reaches of the shop.  He found a bundle of old military haver-sacks and
selected one; then there was a rack of rifles, most of them ancient
Martinis and Mousers, veterans of the Boer war, but there was one among
them that stood out.  The woodwork was hardly marked, and the metal
shone smooth and oily, no scratches or pitting of rust, and Mark picked
the weapon off the rack and the shape and feel of it brought memories
crowding back.  He thrust them aside.  He would need a rifle where he
was going, and it was sensible to have one he knew so well.

Fate had put a P.  14 there for him, and damn the memories, he decided.

He slipped the bolt from the breech and held the barrel to the light
from the doorway, peering into the mouth of the breech.  The bore of the
barrel was unmarked, the rifling described its clean glistening spirals,
again without fouling or pitting.  Somebody had cared well for the
weapon.  How much?  he asked the pawnbroker, and the man's eyes turned
to lifeless pebbles behind his steel-rimmed spectacles.  That's a very
good rifle, he said, and I paid a lot of money for it.  There's a
hundred rounds of ammunition goes with it also. Mark found he had gone
soft in the city, his feet ached within the first five miles and the
straps of rifle and haversack cut painfully into his shoulders.

The first night he lay down beside the fire and slept as though he had
been clubbed.  In the morning he groaned at the effort of sitting
upright, the stiffness was in his legs and back and shoulders.

The first mile he hobbled like an old man, until his muscles began to
ease, and he was going well by the time he reached the rim of the
escarpment and started down into the coastal lowlands.

He kept well away from Andersland, crossing the river five miles
upstream.  His clothing and rifle and pack were balanced on his head as
he waded through a shallow place between white sandbanks, and he dried
naked in the sun, sprawled out like a lizard on a rock, before he
dressed again and headed north.

The third day, he settled into the long swinging hunter's stride, and
the pack rode lightly on his back.  The going was hard, the undulating
folds of the ground forced him to climb and then descend, taxing every
muscle, while the thick Thorn scrub made him weave constantly to find a
way through, wasting time and almost doubling the distance between point
and point.  Added to this, the grass was dried and seeding.  The seeds
were sharp as spears and worked easily through his woollen socks into
his flesh.  He had to stop every half hour or so to dig them out, but
still he made thirty miles that day.  In the gathering dusk he crossed
another of the countless ridges of higher ground.

The distant blue loom of Chaka's Gate almost blended with darkening
clouds of evening.

He camped there that night, sweeping a bed an the bare ground below an
acacia thorn tree and eating bully beef and maize porridge by the light
of the fire of acacia wood that burned with its characteristic bright
white flame and smell of incense.

General Sean Courtney stood at the heavy teak sideboard, with its tiers
of engraved glass mirrors and displays of silver plate.  in one hand he
held the ivory-handled carving fork and in the other the long Sheffield
knife.

He used the knife to illustrate the point he was making to the
guest-of-honour at his table.  I read it through in a single day, had to
stay up until after midnight.  Believe me, Jan, it's his best work yet.
The amount of research, quite extraordinary.  I look forward to reading
it, said the Prime Minister, nodding acknowledgement to the author of
the work under discussion.  It's still in manuscript.  I am not entirely
satisfied yet, there is still some tidying up to do.  Sean turned back
to the roast and, with a single practised stroke of the blade for each,
cut five thin slices of pink beef rimmed with a rind of rich yellow fat.

With the fork he lifted the meat on to the Rosenthal porcelain plate and
immediately a Zulu servant in a flowing white kanza.  robe and red
pillbox fez carried the plate to Sean's place at the head of the long
table.

Sean laid the carving-knife aside, wiped his hands on a linen cloth, and
then followed the servant to the table and took his seat.  We were
wondering if you might write a short foreword for the book, Sean said,
as he raised a cut crystal glass of glowing red wine to the Prime
Minister, and Jan Christiaan Smuts inclined his head on narrow shoulders
in an almost birdlike gesture.  He was a small man, and the hands laid
before him on the table were almost fragile; he had the mien of a
philosopher, or a scholar, which was not dispelled by the neat pointed
beard.

Yet it was hard to believe that he was small.  There was a vital force
and awesome presence about him that belled the high, rather thin voice
in which he replied, Few things would give me as much pleasure.  You do
me honour.  He seemed to bulk huge in his chair, such was the power of
character he commanded.  I am the one who is honoured, Colonel Garrick
Courtney replied gravely from across the table, bowing slightly - and
Sean watched his brother fondly.  Poor Garry, he thought, and then felt
a guilty stab.  Yet it seemed so natural to think of him in those terms.
He was frail and old now, bowed and grey and dried out, so that he
seemed smaller even than the little man opposite him.

Have you a title yet?  asked Jan Smuts.  I have thought to call it The
Young Eagles.  I hope you do not find that too melodramatic for a
history of the Royal Flying Corps.  By no means, Smuts contradicted him.
I think it excellent.  Poor Garry, Sean thought again.  Since Michael
had been shot down, the book filled the terrible gap that his son's
death had left; but it had not prevented him from growing old.  The book
was a memorial to Michael, of course, an act of great love, This book is
dedicated to Captain Michael Courtney D.  F.  C one of the Young Eagles
who will fly no more.  Sean felt the resuscitation of his own grief, and
he made a visible effort to suppress it.

His wife saw the effort, and caught his eye down the length of the
table.  How well she knew him after all these years, how perfectly she
could read his emotions, she thought, as she smiled her sympathy for
him, and saw him respond, the wide shoulders squaring up and heavy
bearded jaws firming as he smiled back at her.

Deftly she changed the mood.  General Smuts has promised to walk around
the gardens with me this afternoon, Garry, and advise me on planting out
the proteas he brought me from Table Mountain.  You are also such a
knowledgeable botanist.  Will you join us?  As I warned you, my dear
Ruth, said Jan Smuts in that ready, yet compelling voice, I do not give
much hope for their survival.  Perhaps the Leucadendrons, ventured
Garry, if we find a cool, dryish place?  Yes, agreed the General, and
immediately they fell into an animated discussion.  She had done it so
skilfully, that she seemed to have done nothing.

Sean paused in the doorway of his study and ran a long lingering gaze
over the room.  As always, he felt a glow of pleasure at re-entering
this sanctuary.

The glass doors opened now on to the massed banks of flowers, and the
smoking plumes of the fountain, yet the thick walls ensured that the
room remained cool even in the sleepy hush of midday.

He crossed to the desk of stinkwood, dark and massive and polished, so
that it shone even in the cool gloom, and he lowered himself into the
swivel chair, feeling the fine leather stretch and give under his
weight.

The day's mail was neatly arranged on a silver salver at his right hand,
and he sighed when he saw that, despite the careful screening by the
senior clerk down at the city Head Office, there were still not much
less than a hundred envelopes awaiting him.

He delayed the moment by swinging the chair slowly to look once again
about the room.  It was hard to believe it had been designed and
decorated by a woman, unless it was a woman who loved and understood her
man so well that she could anticipate his lightest whim and fancy.

Most of the books were bound in dark green leather, and stamped on their
spine in gold leaf with Sean's crest.  The exceptions were the three
ceiling-high shelves of first editions with African themes.  A dealer in
London, and another in Amsterdam had carte blanche instructions from
Sean to search for these treasures.  There were autographed first
editions by Stanley, Livingstone, Cornwallis Harris, Burchell, Munro and
almost every other African explorer or hunter who had ever published.

The dark panelled woodwork between the book shelves was studded with the
paintings of the early African artists; the Baines glowed like rich gems
in their flamboyant colours and naive, almost childlike, depiction of
animal and countryside.  One of these was set in an intricately carved
frame of Rhodesian redwood and engraved, To my friend David Livingstone,
from Thomas Baines.  These links with history and the past always warmed
Sean with pleasure, and he fell into a mild reverie.

The deep carpeting deadened her footsteps, but there was the light
perfume on the air that warned Sean of her presence, and he swung his
chair back to the desk.  She stood beside his chair, slim and straight
as a girl still.  I thought you were walking with Garry and Jan.  Ruth
smiled then, and seemed as young and beautiful as when he had first met
her so many years before. The cool gloom of the room disguised the
little lines at the corners of her eyes and the light streaking of
silver in the dark hair drawn back from her temples and caught with a
ribbon at the back of her neck.  They are waiting for me, but I slipped
away for a moment to make certain that you had all you wanted.  She
smiled down at him, and then selected a cigar from the silver humidor
and began to prepare it.  I will need an hour or two, he said, glancing
at the pile of mail.  What you really need, Sean, is an assistant.  She
cut the cigar carefully, and he grunted.  You can't trust any of these
young people - and she laughed lightly as she placed the cigar between
his lips.  You sound as old as the prophets.  She struck a Vesta and
waved it to clear the sulphur before she held it to the tip of the
cigar.  It's a sign of old age to mistrust the young.  With you beside
me, I'll be young for ever, he told her, still awkward with a compliment
after all these years and she felt her heart swell with her love,
knowing the effort it had required.

She stooped quickly and kissed his cheek, and with a speed and strength
that still astonished her, one of his thickly muscled arms whipped
around her waist and she was lifted into his lap.  You know what happens
to forward young ladies, don't you?  He grinned at her, his eyes
crinkling wickedly.  Sean, she protested, in mock horror.  The servants!
Our guests!  She struggled out of his embrace with the warmth and
wetness of his kiss still on her lips, together with the tickle of his
whiskers and the taste of his cigar, and rearranged her skirts and her
hair.  I'm a fool.  She shook her head sorrowfully.  I always trust you.
And then they smiled at each other, lost for a moment in their love.  My
guests, she remembered suddenly, a hand flying to her mouth.  May I set
the tea for four o'clock?  We'll have it down at the lake.  It's a
lovely day.  When she had gone, Sean wasted another minute staring after
her through the empty doorway into the gardens.

Then he sighed again, contentedly, and drew the silver salver of mail
towards him.

He worked quickly, but with care, pencilling his instructions at the
foot of each page and initialling them with a regal'S.  No!  but tell
them politely.  S.  C.  Let me have the previous year's figures of
purchase and delay the next shipment against bank guarantee.  S.  C. Why
did this come to me?  Send it to Barnes.  S.  C.  Agreed.  S.  C.  To
Atkinson for comment, please.  S.  C.  The subjects were as diverse as
the writers, politicians, financiers, supplicants, old friends,
chancers, beggars they were all there.

He flicked over a sealed envelope and stared at it for a moment, not
recognizing the name or the occasion.  Mark Anders Esq Natal Motors,
West Street, Durban.  It was written in the hand that was so bold and
flourishing that nobody could mistake it for any other but his own, and
he remembered sending the letter.

Somebody had written across the envelope, Left, no forwarding address,
return to sender.  Sean clamped the cigar in the corner of his mouth and
slit the flap with a Georgian silver paper-knife.  The card was embossed
with the regimental crest.

The Colonel-in-Chief and the officers of the Natal Mounted Rifles
request the pleasure of MARK ANDERS ESQ.

at a regimental reunion dinner to be held at the Old Fort.  .  .

Sean had written in the boy's name in the blank space, and at the end of
the card, Do try to come.  S.  C.  Now it was returned, and Sean
scowled.  As always, he was impatient and frustrated by even the
slightest check in his plans.  Angrily he tossed both card and envelope
at the wastepaper bin, and they both missed, fluttering to the carpet.

Surprisingly, even to himself, his mood had altered, and though he
worked on, he fumed and gruffed now over his correspondence and his
instructions became barbed.  The man is a fool or a rogue or both, under
no circumstances will I recommend him to a post of such importance,
despite the family connection!  S.  C.  After another hour, he had
finished and the room was hazed with cigar smoke. He lay back in the
chair and stretched voluptuously like an old lion, then glanced at the
wall clock.  It was five minutes short of four o'clock, and he stood up.

The offending card caught his eye again, and he stooped quickly and
picked it up, reading it again as he crossed the room, tapping the stiff
cardboard thoughtfully on the open palm of his hand as he limped out
heavily into the sunlight and across the wide lawns.

The gazebo was set on a constructed island in the centre of the lake
with a narrow causeway joining it to the lawns.

Sean's household and guests were gathered there already, sitting about
the table in the shade under the crazily contrived roof of the gazebo
with its intricate castiron work painted with carnival colours.  Already
a host of wild duck had gathered about the tiny island, quacking loudly
for pieces of biscuit and cake.

Storm Courtney saw her father coming across the lawns, and she let out
one small excited squeak, leapt from the tea table and flew down the
causeway to meet him before he reached the lake.

He lifted her easily, as though she were still a baby, and when he
kissed her, she inhaled the smell of him.  It was one of the lovely
smells of her existence, like the smell of rain on hot dry earth, or
horses, or the sea.  He had a special perfume like old polished leather.

When he lowered her, she took his arm and pressed close to him, matching
her light quickstep to his limp.  How was your lunch appointment?  he
asked, looking down on her shining lovely head, and she rolled her eyes
and then squinted ferociously.  He is a very presentable young man Sean
told her sternly.  An excellent young man.  Oh, Daddy, from you that
means he is a weak-minded bore.  Young lady, I would like to remind you
that he is a Rhodes scholar, and that his father is the Chief justice.
Oh, I know all that, but, Daddy, he just hasn't.  got zing!  Even Sean
looked for an instant nonplussed.  And what, may I ask, is "zing?  Zing
is indefinable, she told him seriously, but you've got zing!  You're the
zingiest man I know.  And with that statement Sean found all his
fatherly advice and disapproving words gone like migrating swallows, and
he grinned down at her, shaking his head.  You don't really believe that
I swallow all your soft soap, do you?  You'll never believe it, Daddy,
but Payne Bros, have got in twelve actual Patou Couture models, they're
absolutely exclusive, and Patou is all the rage now, Women in savage,
barbaric colours, driven mad by those Machiavellian scheming monsters of
Paris, growled Sean, and Storm giggled delightedly.  You are a scream,
Daddy, she told him. Irene's father has told her she may have one of
them, and Mr Leuchars is a mere tradesman!  Sean blinked to hear the
head of one of the largest import houses in the country so described. If
Charles Leuchars is a tradesman, what, pray, am I he asked curiously.
You are landed gentry, a Minister of the Crown, a General, a hero, and
the zingiest man in the world.  I see, he could not help but laugh, that
I have a position to uphold.  Ask Mr Payne to send the account to me.
She hugged him again, ecstatically, and then for the first time noticed
the card he still held in his hand.  Oh, she exclaimed.  An invitation!
Not for you, my girl, he warned her, but she had taken it from his hand,
and her face changed as she read the name.  Suddenly she was quiet and
subdued.  You are sending that to that, sales person.

He frowned again, his own mood altering also.  I sent it.

It was returned.  He has left, without a forwarding address.  General
Smuts is waiting to talk to you.  With an effort she recaptured the
smile and skipped beside him.  Let's hurry.  it's serious, old Sean.
They are organized, and there is no question but that they are seeking a
direct confrontation.  Jan Christiaan Smuts crumbled a biscuit between
his fingers, and tossed it to the ducks.  They squabbled noisily,
splashing in the clear water and chattering their broad flat bills as
they dipped for the scraps.

How many white workers will they lay off ?  Sean asked.  Two thousand,
to begin with, Smuts told him.  Probably four thousand, all in all.  But
the idea is to do it gradually, as the blacks are trained to replace
them.  Two thousand, Sean mused, and he could not help but imagine the
wives, and the children, the old mothers, the dependents.  Two thousand
wage-earners out of work represented much suffering and misery.  You
like it as little as I do. The shrewd little man had read his thoughts;
not for nothing did his opponents call him slim Jannie, or'clever
Jannie.  Two thousand unemployed is a serious business, he paused
significantly.  But we will find other employment.  We need men
desperately on the railways and on other projects like the Vaal-Harts
irrigation scheme.  They will not earn there the way they do in the
mines, Sean pointed out.  No, Jan Smuts drew out the negative
thoughtfully, but should we protect the income of two thousand miners,
at the cost of closing the mines themselves?

Surely it is not that critical?  Sean frowned quickly.  The Chairman of
the Chamber of Mines assures me that it is, and he has shown me figures
to support this view.  Sean shook his head, half in incredulity and half
in anguish.  He had been a mine-owneT himself once, and he knew the
problem of costs, and also the way that figures can be made to speak the
language their manipulators taught.  You know also, old Sean, you
especially, how many others depend for life on those gold mines.  It was
a hard probing statement, with a point like a stiletto. The previous
year, for the first time, the sales of timber pit-props from Sean's
sawmills to the gold mines of the Transvaal had exceeded two million
pounds sterling.  The little General knew it as welt as he did.  How
many men are employed by Natal Sawmills, old Sean, twenty thousand?
Twenty-four thousand, Sean answered shortly, one blond eyebrow lifted
quizzically, and the Prime Minister smiled softly before going on. There
are other considerations, old friend, that you and I have discussed
before.  On those occasions, it was you who told me that to succeed in
the long term, our nation must become a partnership of black man and
white, that our wealth must be shared according to a man's ability
rather than the colour of his skin, not so?  Yes, Sean agreed. It was I
who said we must make haste slowly in that direction, and now it is you
who hesitate and baulk.  I also told you that many small steps were
surer than a few wild leaps, made under duress, made only with an
assegai at your ribs.  I said, Jannie, that we should learn to bend so
that we might never have to break. Jannie Smuts turned his attention
back to the ducks, and they both watched them distractedly.  Come,
Jannie, Sean said at last.  You mentioned other reasons.  Those you have
given me so far are good but not deadly urgent and I know you are
politician enough to save the best until the end.  Jannie laughed
delightedly, almost a giggle, and leaned across to pat Sean's arm.  We
know each other too well.  We should, Sean smiled back at him.  We
fought each other hard enough. They both sobered at mention of those
terrible days of the civil war.  And we had the same tutor, God bless
him.  God bless him, echoed Jan Smuts, and they remembered for a moment
that colossus Louis Botha, warrior and statesman, architect of Union,
and first Prime Minister of the new nation.  Come, Sean insisted.  What
is your other reason?  It is quite simple.  We are about to decide who
governs.

The duly elected representatives of the people, or a small ruthless band
of adventurers who call themselves trade union leaders, representatives
of organized labour, or quite simply international communism.  You put
it hard.  It is hard, Sean.  It is very hard.  I have intelligence facts
that I shall lay before the first meeting of the Cabinet when Parliament
reconvenes.  However, I wanted to discuss these with you personally
before that meeting.  I need your support again, old Sean.  I need you
with me at that meeting.  Tell me, invited Sean.  Firstly, we know that
they are arming, with modern weapons, and that they are training and
organizing the Mineworkers into war commandos.  Jan Smuts spoke quickly
and urgently for nearly twenty minutes, and when he had finished he
looked at Sean.  Well, old friend, are you behind me? Bleakly Sean
looked out into the future, seeing with pain the land he loved once more
torn by the hatred and misery of civil war.  Then he sighed.  Yes, he
nodded heavily, I am with you, and my hand on it.  You and your
regiment?  Jan Smuts took the big bony hand.  As a Minister of the
Government and as a soldier?  Both, Sean agreed.  All the way.  Marion
Littlejohn read Mark's letter, sitting on the closed seat of the office
toilet, with the door locked, but her love transcended her surroundings,
discounted even the hiss and gurgle of water in the cistern suspended on
its rusty downpipe above her head.

She read the letter through twice, with eyes misty and a tender smile
tugging uncertainly at her lips, then she kissed his name on the final
page and carefully folded it back into its envelope, opened her bodice
and nestled the paper between her plump little breasts.  It made a
considerable lump there when she returned to the main office and the
supervisor looked out from his glass cubicle and made a show of
consulting his watch.  It was an acknowledged, if unwritten, rule in the
Registrar's office that calls of nature should be answered
expeditiously, and in no circumstances should the answer occupy more
than four minutes of a person's working day.

The rest of the day dragged painfully for Marion, and every few minutes,
she touched the lump in her bodice and smiled secretively.  When at last
the hour of release came, she hurried down Main Street and arrived
breathless just as Miss Lucy was closing the doors of her shop.  Oh, am
I in time? Come in, Marion dear, and how is your young man?  I had a
letter from him today, she :announced proudly, and Miss Lucy nodded her
silver curls and beamed through the silver steel frames of her
spectacles.  Yes, the postman told me. Ladyburg was not yet such a large
town that it could not take an intimate interest in the affairs of all
its sons and daughters.  How is he?  Marion prattled on, flushing and
shiny-eyed, as she inspected once again the four sets of Irish linen
sheets that Miss Lucy was holding for her.  They are beautiful, dear,
you can really be proud of them.  You'll have fine sons between them.
Marion blushed again.  How much do I still owe you, Miss Lucy?  Let's
see, dear, you've paid off two pounds and sixpence.  That leaves thirty
shillings balance.  Marion opened her purse and counted its contents
carefully, then after a mental struggle reached a decision and laid a
shiny golden half sovereign on the counter.  That leaves only a pound.
She hesitated, flushed again, then blurted out, Do you think I might
take one pair with me now?  I would like to begin the embroidery work.
Of course, child, Miss Lucy agreed immediately.  You have paid for three
already.  I'll open the packet Marion and her sister Lynette sat side by
side on the sofa.  Each of them had begun at one side of the sheet and
their heads were bent together over it, the embroidery needles flicking
in the lamplight as busily as their tongues.  Mark was most interested
in the articles I sent him on Mr Dirk Courtney and he says that he feels
Mr Courtney will have a prominent place in the book, Across the room,
Lyn's husband worked head down over a sheath of legal documents spread
on the table before him.

He had lately affected a briar pipe, and it gurgled softly with each
puff.  His hair was brilliantined and brushed down to a polish with a
ruler-straight parting of white scalp dividing it down the middle.  Oh,
Peter, Marion exclaimed suddenly, her hands stilling and her face
lighting.  I have just had a wonderful idea Peter Botes looked up from
his papers, a small frown of annoyance crinkling the serious white brow,
a man interrupted at his labour by the silly chatter of woman.  You do
so much work for Mr Courtney down at the bank.  You've even been up to
the big house, haven't you?

He even greets you on the streets, I've seen that.  Peter nodded
importantly, puffing at the pipe.  Yes, Mr Carter has often remarked
that Mr Courtney seems tolike me.  I think I will be handling the
account more and more in the future.  Oh, darling, won't you speak to Mr
Courtney and tell him that Mark is doing all this work for his book on
Ladyburg, and that he is ever so interested in Mr Courtney and his
family , oh, come now, Marion.  Peter waved the pipe airily.  You can't
expect a man like Mr Courtney -'You might find he is flattered to be in
Mark's book please dear.  I know Mr Courtney will listen to you.  You
might find he likes the idea, and it will reflect credit on you.  Peter
paused thoughtfully, weighing carefully the value of impressing the
womenfolk with his importance and influence against the dread prospect
of speaking on familiar terms with Mr Dirk Courtney.  The thought
appalled him.  Dirk Courtney terrified him and in his presence he
affected a fawning, self-effacing manner which was, he realized, part of
the reason why Dirk Courtney liked to workwithhim; of course, hewas
alsoapainstaking meticulous lawyer, but the main reason was his
respectful attitude, Mr Courtney liked respect from his underlings.
Please, Peter, Mark is going to so much trouble over this book.  We must
try and help him.  I was just telling Lynette that Mark has taken a
month's leave from his job to go on an expedition up to Chaka's Gate,
just to gather facts for the book.  He's gone to Chaka's Gate?  Peter
looked mystified, and removed the pipe from his mouth.  What on earth
for?

There is nothing up there but wilderness.  I'm not sure, admitted
Marion, and then quickly, but it's important for the book.  We must try
and help him.  What exactly do you want me to ask Mr Courtney?  Won't
you ask him to meet Mark, and sort of tell him his life story in his own
words.  Imagine how that would be in the book.  Peter swallowed once.
Marion, Mr Courtney is a busy man, he can't -'Oh please.  Marion jumped
up and crossed the room to kneel beside his chair.  Pretty please, for
my sake!  Well, he mumbled, I'll mention it to him.  Peter Botes stood
like a guardsman beside the head seat of the long ormolu table, bending
stiffly from the waist only when it was necessary to turn the page.

and here please, Mr Courtney.  The big man in the chair dashed a
careless signature across the foot of the document hardly glancing at it
and without interrupting his conversation with the other fashionably
dressed men further down the table.

There was a strong perfume hanging about Dirk Courtney, he wore it with
the panache of a cavalry officer's cloak, and Peter tried in vain to
identify it.  It must be terribly expensive, but it was the smell of
success, and he made a resolution to acquire a bottle of whatever it
was.

and here again, please, sir.  He noticed now at close range how Dirk
Courtney's hair was shining and cut longer at the temple, free of
brilliantine and allowed to curl into the sideburns.  Peter would wash
the brilliantine from his own hair tonight, he decided, and let it grow
out a little longer.  That is all, Mr Courtney. I'll have copies
delivered tomorrow.  Dirk Courtney nodded without glancing up at him,
and, pushing back his chair, he stood up.  Well, gentlemen, he addressed
the others at the table, we should not keep the ladies waiting and they
all laughed with that lustful, anticipatory laugh, their eyes gleaming
like those of caged lions at feeding time.

Peter had heard in detail of those parties that Dirk Courtney held out
at Great Longwood, his big house.  There was gaming for high stakes,
sometimes dog-fighting, two matched animals in a pit, ripping each other
to ribbons of dangling skin and flesh, sometimes cock-fighting, always
worne n, women brought in closed cars from Durban or Johannesburg.  Big
city women and Peter felt his body stir at the thought.  Introductions
to the parties were limited to men of importance or influence or wealth,
and during the weekend that the revels continued, the grounds were
guarded by Dirk Courtney's bully boys.

Peter dreamed sometimes of being invited to one of those parties, of
sitting across the green baize table from Dirk Courtney and casually
drawing towards him the multi-coloured pile of ivory chips without
removing the expensive cigar from his lips, or of sporting among the
rustling silks and smooth white limbs, he had heard of the dancers,
beautiful women who disrobed as they danced the Seven Veils, and ended
mother-naked while the men roared and groped.

Peter roused himself almost too late.  Dirk Courtney was across the
room, ushering his guests ahead of him, laughing and charming, flashing
white teeth from the swarthy handsome face, a servant standing ready
with his overcoat, chauffeurs waiting with the limousines in the street
below, about to depart into a realm about which Peter could only
speculate in disturbing erotic detail.

He hurried after him, stammering nervously.  Mr Courtney, I have a
personal request.  Come, Charles, Dick Courtney did not look at Peter,
but smilingly laid a friendly arm across one of his guest sshoulders.  I
trust you are in better luck than last time, I hate to take a friend's
money.  My wife's sister has a fiance, sir, Peter stumbled on
desperately.  He's writing a book about Ladyburg, and he would like to
include an account of your personal experience.  Alfred, will you ride
with Charles in the first car.  Dirk Courtney buttoned his coat, and
adjusted his hat, beginning to turn towards the door, just a slight
crease to is brow showing his annoyance at Peter's importunity.  He is a
local man, Peter was almost in tears of embarrassment, but he went on
doggedly, with a- good war record, you might remember his grandfather
John Anders A peculiar expression came over Dick Courtney's face, and he
turned slowly to look directly at Peter for the first time.  The
expression struck instant terror into him, Peter had never before seen
such burning malevolence, such merciless cruelty on a man's face before.
It was only for an instant, and then the big man smiled.  Such a smile
of charm and good fellowship that Peter felt dizzy with relief.

.  A book about me?  He took Peter's arm in a friendly grip above the
elbow.  Tell me more about this young man.

I presume he is young?  Oh yes, sir, quite young.  Gentlemen.  Dirk
Courtney smiled apologetically at his guests.  Can I ask you to go ahead
of me.  I will follow shortly.  Your rooms are prepared, and please do
not feel you have to await my arrival before sampling the entertainment.
Still holding Peter's arm, he led him courteously back into the huge
board room to a seat in one of the leather chairs by the fireplace. Now,
young Master Botes, how about a glass of brandy?  and Peter watched
bemused as he Poured it with his own hands, big strong hands, covered
with fine black hair across the back and with a diamond the size of a
ripe pea on the little finger.

With each step northwards, it seemed to Mark that the great bastions of
Chaka's Gate changed their aspect gradually, from silhouettes smoked
blue with distance until the details of the living rock came into focus.

The twin bluff s faced each other in almost mirror image, each towering
a thousand sheer feet but deeply divided by the gorge through which the
Bubezi River spilled out on to the coastal lowlands of Zululand and then
meandered down a hundred and twenty miles into a maze of swamp and
lagoon and mangrove forest, before finally escaping through the narrow
mouth of the tidal estuary.  The mouth sucked and breathed with the
tide, and the ebb blew a stain of discoloured water far out into the
electric blue of the Mozambique Current, a brown smear that contrasted
sharply with the vivid white rind of sandy beaches that stretched for a
thousand miles north and south.

if a man followed the course of the Bubezi up through the portals of
Chaka's Gate, as Mark and the old man had done so often before, he came
out into a wide basin of land below the main escarpment.  Here, among
the heavy forests, the Bubezi divided into its two tributaries, the
White Bubezi that dropped in a series of cataracts and falls down the
escarpment of the continental shield, and the Red Bubezi, which swung
away northwards following the line of the escarpment up through more
heavy forest and open grassy glades until at last it became the border
with the Portuguese colony of Mozambique.

In the flood seasons of high summer, this tributary carried down with it
the eroding laterite from deposits deep in Mozambique; turning to deep
bloody red, it pulsed like a living artery, and well earned its name,
the Red Bubezi.

Bubezi was the Zulu name for the lion, and indeed Mark had hunted and
killed his first lion on its banks, half a mile below the confluence of
the two tributaries.

It was almost noon, when at last Mark reached the river at the point
where it emerged from the gorge between the gates.  He reached for his
watch to check the time and then arrested the gesture.  Here time was
not measured by metal hands, but by the majestic swing of the sun and
the eternal round of the seasons.

He dropped his pack and propped the rifle against a tree trunk; the
gesture seemed symbolic.  With the weight from his shoulders, the dark
weight on his heart seemed to slip away also.

He looked up at the rock cliffs that filled half the sky above him, and
was lost in awe as he had been when he looked up at the arched stone
lattice-work of the Henry V11 chapel in Westminster Abbey.

The columns of rock, sculptured down the ages by wind and sun and water,
had that same ethereal grace, yet a freedom of line that was not
dictated by the strict rules of man's vision of beauty.  The cliffs were
painted with lichen growth, brilliant smears of red and yellow and
silvery grey.

In cracks and irregularities of rock grew stunted trees; hundreds of
feet above their peers, they were deformed and crippled by the
contingencies of nature as though by the careful skills of a host of
Japanese Banzai gardeners, and they twisted out at impossible angles
from the face of the cliff; holding out their branches as if in
supplication to the sun.

The rock below some narrow ledges was darkened by the stain of the urine
and faeces of the hydrax, the fluffy rock rabbits, which swarmed from
every crack and hole in the cliff.  Sitting in sleepy ranks, on the very
edge of the drop, sunning their fat little bodies and blinking down at
the tiny figure of the man in the depth of the gorge, Following the
floating wide-pinioned flight of a vulture, Mark watched it swing in
steeply, planing and volleying its great brown wings to meet the eddy of
the wind across the cliff face, reaching forward with its talons for a
purchase as it pulled up and dropped on to its nesting ledge a hundred
and fifty feet above the river, folding its wings neatly and then
crouching in that grotesque vulturine attitude with the bald scaly head
thrust forward, as it waddled sideways along the rim of its huge shaggy
nest of sticks and small branches built into the rockface.

From this angle Mark could not see the chicks in the nest, but clearly
he recognized the heaving motions of the bird as it began to regurgitate
its cropful of rotten carrion for its young.  Gradually a sense of peace
settled like a mantle over Mark, and he sat down, his back against the
rough hole of a fever tree, and slowly, without sense of urgency, he
selected and lit a cigarette, drawing the smoke with an unhurried breath
and then letting it trickle out through his nostrils, watching the pale
blue tendrils rise and swirl on the lazy air.

He thought perhaps that the nearest human being was forty miles distant,
the nearest white man almost a hundred, and the thought was strangely
comforting.

He wondered at the way in which all man's petty striving seemed
insignificant in this place, in this vast primeval world, and suddenly
he thought that if all men, even those who had known nothing but the
crowded ratlike scrambling of the cities, could be set down in this
place, even for a brief space of time, then they might return to their
lives cleansed and refreshed, their subsequent strivings might become
less vicious, more attuned to the eternal groundswell of nature.

Suddenly he grunted, his reverie shattered by the burning needle sting
in the soft of his neck below the ear, and he slapped at it with open
palm.  The small flying insect was stunned, its carapace too tough to be
crushed, even by a blow that heavy.  It fell spinning and buzzing into
Mark's lap, and he picked it up between thumb and forefinger, examining
it curiously, for it was many years since last he had seen one.

The tsetse fly is slightly larger than the house fly, but it has a
sleeker more streamlined body, with transparent wings veined in brown.
The saviour of Africa, the old man had called it once, and Mark repeated
the words aloud as he crushed it between his fingers.  It burst in a
bright liquid red explosion of the blood it had sucked from his neck. He
knew the bite would swell and turn angry red, all the subsequent bites
would react in the same way, until swiftly his body rebuilt its
immunity.  Within a week he would not even notice 4 their stings, and
the bite would cause less discomfort than that of a mosquito.  The
saviour of Africa, the old man had told him. This little bastard was all
that saved the whole country being overrun and over-grazed with domestic
animals.  , Cattle first, and after cattle the plough, and after the
plough the towns and the railway tracks.  The old man had chewed slowly,
like a ruminating bull in the light of the camp fire, his face shaded by
the spread of the terai hat.  One day they will find some way to kill
him, or something to cure the sleeping sickness, the nagana, that he
carries.  Then the Africa we know will have gone, lad.  He spat a long
honey-brown spirt of juice into the fire.  What will Africa be without
its lonely places and its game?  A man might as well go back and live in
London town.  Looking with new eyes and new understanding at the
majestic indigenous forest around him, Mark saw in his imagination what
it might have been like without its tiny brown-winged guardians; the
forests chopped out for firewood, and cleared for ox-drawn cultivation,
the open land grazed short and the hooves of the cattle opening the
ground cover to begin the running ulcers of erosion, the rivers browned
and sullied by the bleeding earth and by man's filth.

The game hunted out, for its meat and because it was in direct
competition to the domestic animals for grazing.

For the Zulu, cattle was wealth, had been for a thousand years, and
wherever cattle could thrive, they came with their herds.

Yet it was ironic that this wilderness had had another guardian, apart
from the winged legions, and that guardian had been a Zulu.  Chaka, the
great Zulu king, had come here long ago.  Nobody knew when, for the Zulu
does not measure time as a white man does, nor record his history in the
written word.

The old man had told Mark the story, speaking in Zulu which was fitting
for such a story, and his old Zulu gunbearer had listened and nodded
approvingly, or grunted a correction of fact; occasionally he spoke at
length embroidering a point in the legend.

in those days there had lived here in the basin a small tribe of hunters
and gatherers of wild honey, so they called themselves Inyosi, the bees.
They were a poor people but proud, and they resisted the mighty king and
his insatiable appetite for conquest and power.

Before his swarming impis, they had withdrawn into the natural fortress
of the northern bluff.  Remembering the story, Mark raised his eyes and
looked across the river at the sheer cliffs.

Twelve hundred men and women and children, they had climbed the only
narrow and dangerous path to the summit, the women carrying food upon
their heads, a long dark moving file against the rock wall, they had
gone up into their sanctuary.  And from the summit the Chief and his
warriors had shouted their defiance at the king.

Chaka had gone out alone and stood below the cliff, a tall and lithe
figure, terrible in the strength of his youth and majesty of his
presence.  Come down, oh chief, and receive the king's blessing and be a
chief still, under the sunshine of my love. The Chief had smiled and
called in jest to his warriors around him, I heard a baboon bark" Their
laughter rang against the rock cliffs.  The king turned and strode back
to where his impis squatted in long patient ranks, ten thousand strong.

in the night Chaka picked fifty men, calling each softly by name.  Those
of great heart and fearsome reputation.

And he had told them simply, When the moon is down, my children, we will
climb the cliff above the river, and he laughed that low deep laugh, the
sound of which so many had heard as their last sound on this earth.  For
did not that wise chief call us baboons -and the baboon climbs where no
man dares.  The old gunbearer had pointed out to Mark in daylight the
exact route that Chaka had taken to the top.  It needed binoculars to
trace the hairline cracks and the finger-wide ledges.

Mark shuddered now, retracing the route with his eyes, and he remembered
that Chaka had led that climb without ropes, in the pitch darkness after
the moon, and carrying his shield and his broad-bladed stabbing spear
strapped on his back.

Sixteen of his warriors had slipped and fallen during the climb, but
such was the mettle of the men that Chaka.  had chosen that not one of
them had uttered a sound during that terrible dark plunge, not a whisper
of sound to alert the Inyosi sentries until the final soft thud of flesh
on rock down below in the gorge.

In the dawn, while his impis diverted the Inyosi by skirmishing on the
pathway, Chaka had slipped over the rim of the cliff, regrouped his
remaining warriors and thirty-five against twelve hundred, carried the
summit with a single shattering charge, each stab of the great blades
crashing through a body from chest to spine, and the withdrawal sucking
the life blood out in a gushing burst of scarlet.  Ngidhla!  I have
eaten, roared the king and his men as they worked, and most of the
Inyosi threw themselves from the cliff top into the river below, rather
than face Chaka's wrath.  Those who hesitated to jump were assisted in
their decision.

Chaka lifted the chief of the Inyosi with both hands high above his
head, and held him easily as he struggled.  If I am a baboon, then you
are a sparrow" He roared with savage laughter.  Fly, little sparrow,
fly!

and he hurled the man far out into the void.

For once they spared not even the women nor the children, for among the
sixteen Zulus who had fallen from the cliff during the climb were those
whom Chaka loved.

The old gunbearer scratched in the debris of the scree face below the
cliff and showed Mark in the palms of his hand chips of old bone that
might have been human.

After his victory on the summit, Chaka.  had ordered a great hunt in the
basin of the two rivers.

Ten thousand warriors to drive the game, and the hunt had lasted four
days.  They said that the king alone with his own hands had slain two
hundred buffalo.  The sport had been such that afterwards he had made
the decree:This is a royal hunting ground, no man will hunt here again,
no mari but the king.  From the cliffs over which Chaka threw the
Inyosi, east to the mountain crests, south and north for as far as a man
may run in a day, and a night, and another day, this land is for the
king's hunt alone.  Let all men hear these words, tremble and obey.  He
had left a hundred men under one of his older indunas to police the
ground, under the title of keeper of the king's hunt, and Chaka returned
again and again, perhaps drawn to this well of peace to refresh and rest
his tortured soul with its burning crippling craving for power.  He had
hunted here, even in that period of dark madness while he mourned his
mother Nandi, the Sweet One.  He had hunted here nearly every year until
at last he had died beneath the assassin's blades wielded by his own
brothers.

Probably nearly a century later, the legislative council of Natal,
sitting in solemn conclave, hundreds of miles distant from the cliffs of
Chaka's Gate, had echoed his decree and proclaimed the area reserved
against hunting or despoliation, but they had not policed the Royal Hunt
as well as had the old Zulu King.  The poachers had been busy over the
years, with bow and arrow, with snare and pit, with spear and dog pack,
and with high-powered rifled weapons.

Perhaps soon, as the old man had predicted, they would find a cure for
the nagana or a means of eradicating tsetse fly.  A man-made law would
be repealed, and the land given over to the lowing, slow-moving herds of
cattle and to the silver-bright blade of the plough.  Mark felt a
physical sickness of the stomach at the prospect, and he rose and set
off along the scree slope to let the sickness pass.

The old man had always been a creature of habit, even to the clothes he
wore and his daily rituals of living.  He always camped at the same spot
when he travelled a familiar road or returned to a place he had visited
before.

Mark went directly to the old camp site above the river junction in the
elbow of the main river course, where flood waters had cut a steep high
bank and the elevated ground above it formed a plateau shaded by a grove
of sycamore fig trees, with stems thick as Nelson's column in Trafalgar
Square and the cool green shade below them murmurous with the sound of
insects and purple doves.

The hearth stones for the camp fire were still there, scattered a little
and blackened with soot.  Mark built them back into the correct shape.

There was plenty of firewood, dead and fallen trees and branches,
driftwood brought down by the floods and cast up on the high watermark
on the bank.

Mark drew clear water from the river, put the billy on to boil for tea,
and then, from the side pocket of the pack, brought out the sheath of
paper, held together by a clasp and already much ngere an a itt e
tattered, that Marion had sent him.  Transcript of the evidence from the
coroners inquiry into the death Of JOHN ANDERS ESQUIRE of the farm
ANDERSin the district Of LADYBURG.  LAND Mari on Littlejohn had typed it
out laboriously during her lunch hours, and her lack of skill with the
machine was evident in the many erasures and over-types.

Mark had read it so many times before that he could almost repeat the
entire text from memory, even the irrelevant remarks from the bench.

Mr Greyling (Snr): We was camped there by the Bubezi River, judge
Magistrate: I am not a judge, Sir.  The correct form of ddress to this
Court is Your Worship.

But now he began again at the beginning, searching carefully for some
small clue to what he was seeking that he might have overlooked in his
previous readings.

But always he came back to the same exchange.

Magistrate: Will the witness please refer to the deceased as'the
deceased'and not'the old man.

Mr Greyling JSnr): Sorry, your worship.  The deceased left camp early on
the Monday morning, he says like he's going to look for kudu along the
ridge.  It would be a little before lunchtime we hears a shot and my
boy, Cornelius, he says -'Sounds like the old man got one'- beg your
pardon, I mean the deceased.

Magistrate: You were still in camp at that time?

Mr Greyling (Sar): Yes, Your Worship, my boy and me, we was cutting and
hanging biltong, we didn't go out that day.

Mark could imagine the butchering of the game carcasses, the raw red
meat hacked into long strips, soaked in buckets of brine, and then
festooned on the branches of the trees, a scene of carnage he had
witnessed so often before.  When the meat had dried to black sticks,
like chewing tobacco, it was packed into jute sacks for later carriage
out on the pack donkeys.  The wet meat dried to a quarter of its weight,
and the resulting biltong was highly prized through Africa and commanded
such a high price as to make the poaching a lucrative trade.

Magistrate: When did you become concerned by the deceased's absence?

Mr Greyling: Well, he didn't come into camp that night.

But we weren't worried like.  Thought he might have been spooring up a
hit one, and slept up a tree.

Further on in the evidence was the statement: Mr Greyling (SnrJ: Well,
in the end we didn't find him until the fourth day.  It was the
assvogels, beg pardon, the vultures, that showed us where to look.

He had tried to climb the ridge at a bad place, we found where he had
slipped and the gun was still under him.  it must have been that shot we
heard, we buried him right there, you see he wasn't fit to carry, what
with the birds and the sun.  We put up a nice cross, carved it myself,
and I said the Christian words.

Mark refolded the transcript, and slipped it back into the pack.  The
tea was brewing and he sweetened it with thick condensed milk and brown
sugar.

Blowing on the mug to cool it, and sipping at the sweet liquid, he
pondered what he had gleaned.  A rocky ridge, a bad place, within sound
of gunshot of where he now sat, a cairn of stones, probably, and a
wooden cross, perhaps long ago consumed by termites.

He had a month, but he wondered if that was time enough.  On such slim
directions it was a search that could take years, if luck ran against
him.

Even if he was successful, he wasn't yet sure what he would do next. The
main concern that drove him on was merely to find where the old man lay.
After that he would know what to do.

He worked the ridges and the rocky ground on the south bank first.  For
ten days he climbed and descended the rugged rim of the basin, hard
going against the grain of the natural geological formations, and at the
end of that time he was lean as a greyhound, arms and face burned to the
colour of a new loaf by the sun and with a dark crisp pelt of beard
covering his jaw.  The legs of his pants were tattered by the coarse,
razor-edged grass and by the clumps of aptly named wait-a-bit thorns,
that grabbed at him to delay his progress.

There was a rich treasure of bird life in the basin, even in the heated
hush of midday, the air rang with their cries the fluting mournful
whistle of a wood dove or the high piping chant of a white-headed fish
eagle circling high overhead.  In the early morning and again in the
cool of the evening, the bush came alive with the jewelled flash of
feathers, the scarlet breast of the impossibly beautiful Narina Trogon,
named long ago for a Hottentot beauty by one of the old travellers, the
metallic flash of a suribird as it hovered over the pearly fragrant
flowers of a buffalo creeper, the little speckled woodpeckers tapping
furiously with heads capped in cardinal red, and, in the reeds by the
river, the ebony sheen of the long floating tail feathers of the
Sakabula bird.  All this helped to lighten the long weary hours of
Mark's search, and a hundred times a day he paused, enchanted, to watch
for a few precious moments.

However, of the larger animals he saw very little, although their sign
was there.  The big shiny pellets of kudu dung scattered along their
secret pathways through the forest, the dried faeces of a leopard furry
with baboon hair from its kill, the huge midden of a white rhinoceros, a
mountain of scattered dung accumulated over the years as this strange
animal returned to the same place daily to defecate.

Pausing beside the rhinoceros midden, Mark grinned as he remembered one
of the old man's stories, the one that explained why the rhinoceros was
so fearful of the porcupine and why he always scattered his own dung.

Once, long ago, he had borrowed from the porcupine a quill to sew up the
tear in his skin caused by a red-tipped mimosa Thorn.  When the job was
done the rhinoceros had held the quill between his teeth as he admired
his handiwork, but by accident he swallowed the quill.

Now, of course, he runs away to avoid having to face the porcupine's
recriminations, and he sifts each load that he drops, to try and recover
the missing quill.

The old man had a hundred yarns like that one to delight a small boy,
and Mark felt close to him again; his determination to find his grave
strengthened, as he shifted the rifle to his other shoulder and turned
once more to the rocky ridge of the high ground.

On the tenth day, he was resting in the deep shade at the edge of a
clearing of golden grass, when he had his first good sighting of larger
game.

A small herd of graceful pale brown impala, led by three impressively
homed rams, emerged from the far side of the clearing.  They fed
cautiously, every few seconds they froze into perfect stillness with
only the big scooplike ears moving as they listened for danger, and
their wet black noses snuffing silently.

Mark was out of meat, he had eaten the last of the bully the previous
day, and he had brought the rifle for just this moment, to relieve a
diet of mealie porridge, yet he found himself strangely reluctant to use
it now, a reluctance he had never known as a boy.  For the first time,
he looked with eyes that saw not just meat but rare and unusual beauty.

The three rams moved slowly across the clearing, passing a hundred paces
from where Mark sat silently, and then drifted away, pale shadows, into
the thorn scrub.  The does followed them, trotting to keep up, one with
a lamb stumbling on long gawky legs at her flank, and at the rear of the
troop was a half-grown doe.

one of her back legs was crippled, it was withered and stunted, swinging
free of the ground and the animal was having difficulty keeping up with
the herd.  it had lost condition badly, bone of rib and spine showed
clearly through a hide that lacked the gloss and shine of healthMark
swung up the P.  I 4 and the flat crack of the shot bounced from the
cliffs across the river, and startled a flock of white-faced duck into
whistling flight off the river.

Mark stooped over the doe as she lay in the grass and touched the long
curled lashes that fringed the dark swimming eye.

There was no reflex blink, and the check for life was routine only.  He
knew the shot had taken her in the centre of the heart, an instantaneous
kill.  Always make the check.  The old man's teachings again.  Percy
Young would tell you that himself if he could, but he was sitting there
on a dead lion he had just shot, having a quiet pipe, when it came to
life again.  That's why he isn't around to tell you himself.  Mark
rolled the carcass and squatted to examine the back limb.  The wire
noose had cut through the skin, through sinew and flesh, and had come up
hard against the bone as the animal struggled to break out of the snare.

Below the wire the leg had gangrened and the smell was nauseous,
summoning a black moving wad of flies.

Mark made the shallow gutting stroke, deflecting the blade upwards to
avoid puncturing the gut.  The belly opened like a purse.  He freed the
anus and vagina with the deft surgeon strokes, and lifted out bladder
and bowel and gut in one scoop.  He dissected the purple liver out of
the mass of viscera, cut away the gall bladder and tossed it aside.
Grilled over the coals, the liver would make a feast for his dinner.  He
cut away the rotten, stinking hind leg, and then he carefully wiped out
the stomach cavity with a handful of dry grass.  He cut flaps in the
skin of the neck.

Using the flaps of skin as handles, he hefted the whole carcass and
lugged it down to the camp by the river.  Cut and salted and dried, he
now had meat for the rest of his stay.  He hung the strips of meat high
in the sycamore fig to save them from the scavengers who would surely
visit the camp during his daily absences, and only when he had finished
the task, and he was crouching over his fire with the steaming mug in
his hand, did he think again of the snaring wire that had crippled the
impala doe.

He felt an indirect flash of anger at the person who had set that noose,
and then almost immediately he wondered why he should feel particular
anger at the trapper, when a dozen times he had come across the old
abandoned camps of white hunters.  Always there were the bones, and the
piles of rotting worm-riddled horns.

The trapper was clearly a black man, and his need was greater than that
of the others who came in to butcher and dry and sell.

Thinking about it, Mark felt a despondency slowly overwhelm him.  Even
in the few short years since he had first visited this wilderness, the
game had been reduced to but a small fraction of its original numbers.
Soon it would all be gone, as the old man had said, The great emptiness
is coming.  Mark sat at his fireside, and he felt deeply saddened at the
inevitable.  No creature would ever be allowed to compete with man, and
he remembered the old man again.  Some say the lion, others the leopard.
But believe me, my boy, when a man looks in the mirror, he sees the most
dangerous and merciless killer in all of nature.  The pit had been built
to resemble a sunken water reservoir. It was fifty feet across and ten
feet deep, perfectly circular, plastered and floored in smooth cement.

Although there were water pipes installed and its position on the first
slope of the escarpment above Ladyburg was perfectly chosen to provide
the correct fall to the big gabled house below, yet it had never held
water.

The circular walls were white-washed to gleaming purity, and the floor
was lightly spread with clean-washed river sand and neatly raked.

Pine trees had been planted to screen the reservoir.  A twelve-stranded
barbedwire fence enclosed the wholeplantation, and there were two guards
at the gate this evening, tough, silent men who checked the guests as
the cars brought them up from the big house.

There were forty-eight men and women in the excited, laughing stream
that flowed through the gate, and followed the path up among the pines
to where the pit was already starkly lit by the brilliant glare of the
Petromax lanterns suspended on poles above it.

Dirk Courtney led the revellers.  He wore black gaberdine riding
breeches and polished knee-length boots to protect his legs from
slashing fangs, and his white linen shirt was open almost to the navel,
exposing the hard bulging muscle of his chest and the coarse black body
hair which curled from the vee of the neck.  The sleeves of the shirt
were cut full to the wrist, and he rolled a long thin cheroot from one
corner of his mouth to the other without touching it, for his arms were
around the waists of the women who flanked him, young women with bold
eyes and laughing painted mouths.

The dogs heard them coming and bayed at them, leaping against the padded
bars of their cages, hysterical with excitement as they tried to reach
each other through the gaps, snarling and snapping and slavering while
the handlers attempted to shout them into silence.

The spectators lined the circular parapet of the pit, hanging over the
edge.  In the merciless light of the Petromax, the faces were laid bare,
every emotion, every stark detail of the blood lust and sadistic
anticipation was revealed the hectic colouring of the women's cheeks,
the feverish glitter of the men's eyes, the shrillness of their laughter
and the widely exaggerated gesturing.

During the early bouts, the small dark-haired girl beside Dirk screamed
and wriggled, holding her clenched fists to her open mouth, moaning and
gasping with fascinated, delighted horror.  Once she turned and buried
her face against Dirk's chest, pressing herbody, tremblingand
shuddering, against him.  Dirk laughed and held her around the waist. At
the kill she screamed with the rest of them and her back arched; then
Dirk half lifted her, as she sobbed breathlessly, and supported her to
the refreshment table where there was champagne in silver buckets and
sandwiches of brown bread and smoked salmon.

Charles came to where Dirk sat with the girl on his lap, feeding her
champagne from a crystal glass, surrounded by a dozen of his sycophants,
jovial and expansive, enjoying the rising sense of tension for the final
bout of the evening when he would match his own dog, Chaka, against
Charles'animal.  I feel bad, Dirk, Charles told him.  They have just
told me that your dog is giving almost ten poundsThat mongrel of yours
will need every pound, Charles, don't feel bad now, keep it for later,
when you'll really need it.  Dirk was suddenly bored with the girl, and
he pushed her casually from his lap, so that she almost lost her balance
and fell.  Piqued, she settled her skirts, pouted at Dirk and when she
realized he had already forgotten her existence, she flounced away.
Here.  Dirk indicated the chair beside him.  Do have a seat, Charles old
boy, and let's discuss your problem. The crowd drew closer around them,
listening eagerly to their banter, and braying slavishly at each sally.
My problem is that I should like a small wager on the bout, but it does
seem most unsporting to bet against a light dog, like yours.  Charles
grinned as he mopped his streaming red face with a silk handkerchief,
sweating heavily with champagne and excitement and the closeness of the
humid summer evening.  We all know that you make your living betting on
certainties.  Charles was a stock-broker from the Witwatersrand.
However, the expression of such noble sentiment does you great credit.
Dirk tapped his shoulder with the hilt of his dog-whip, a familiar
condescending gesture that made Charles'grin tighten wolfishly.

dy ou will accommodate me then?  he asked, nodding and winking at his
own henchmen in the press of listening men.  At even money?  Of course,
as much as you want.  My dog Kaiser, against your Chaka, to the death.
Even money, a wager of - Charles paused and looked to the ladies,
smoothing the crisp little mustache with its lacing of iron grey,
drawing out the moment.  One thousand pounds in gold.  The crowd gasped
and exclaimed, and some of the listeners applauded, a smattering of
handclaps.

No!  No!  Dirk Courtney held up both hands in protest.  Not a thousand!
and the listeners groaned, his own claque shocked and crestfallen at
this loss of prestige.

Oh dear, Charles murmured, too strong for your blood?

Name the wager then, old boy.  Let's have some real interest, say ten
thousand in gold.  Dirk tapped Charles shoulder again, and the man's
grin froze over.  The colour faded from the scarlet face, leaving it
blotched purple and puffy white.  The small acquisitive eyes darted
quickly around the circle of laughing applauding faces, as if seeking an
escape, and then slowly, reluctantly returned to Dirk's face.  He tried
to say something, but his voice squeaked and broke like a pubescent boy.
Ah, and what exactly does that mean?  Dirk inquired with elaborate
politeness. Charles would not trust his voice again, but he nodded
jerkily and tried to resurrect his cheeky grin, but it was crooked and
tense and hung awkwardly on his face.

Dirk carried the dog under his right arm, enjoying the hard rubbery feel
of the animal's compact body, carrying its fifty-pound weight easily, as
he dropped lightly down the steps to the floor of the pit.

Every muscle in the dog's body was strained to a fine tension, and Dirk
could feel the jump and flutter of nerves and sinew, every limb was
stiff and trembling, and the deep crackling snarls kept erupting up the
thick throat, shaking the whole body.

He set the dog down on the raked sand, with the leash twisted securely
around his left wrist, and as the dog's paws touched ground he lunged
forward, coming -up short against the leash so hard that Dirk was almost
pulled off his feet.  Hey, you bastard, he shouted, and pulled the
animal back.

Across the pit, Charles and his handler were bringing down Kaiser, and
it needed both their strength for he was a big dog, black as hell, and
touched with tan at the eyes and chest, a legacy of the Dobermann
Pinscher in his breeding.

Chaka saw him, his lunges and struggles became wilder and fiercer, and
the snarls sounded like thick canvas ripping in a hurricane.

The timekeeper called from the parapet, lifting his voice above the
excited buzz of the watchers.  Very well, gentlemen, hate them!  The two
owners set them at each other with cries ofSick him up, Kaiser!  and Get
him boy.  Kill!  Kill!  but held them double-handed on the leash,
driving them into a madness of frustration and anger.

on the short leash, the Dobermann weaved and ducked, leggy for a
fighting dog, with big shoulders dropping back to lower quarters.  He
had good teeth, however, and a threatening gape, enough to lock the
teeth into the killer grip at the throat.  He was fast too, swinging and
weaving against the leash, barking and thrusting with the long almost
snake-like neck.

Chaka did not bark, but the thick barrel of his chest vibrated to the
deep rolling snarls and he stood foursquare on his short legs.  He was
heavy and low in silhouette, Staffordshire bull terrier blood carefully
crossed with mastiff, and his coat was coarse and brindled gold on
black.

The head was short and thick, like that of a viper, and when he snarled,
his upper lip lifted back in deep creases revealing the long ivory
yellow fangs and the dark pink gums.  He watched the other dog with
yellow leopard eyes.

Bate them!  Bate them!  yelled the crowd above, and the owners worked
the leashes like jockeys pushing for the post, pointing the animals at
each other and driving them on.

Dirk slipped a small steel implement from his pocket, and dropped on his
knee beside his dog.  Instantly the animal swung on him with gaping jaws
but the heavy muzzle caged his fangs.  His saliva was beginning to
froth, and it splattered the spotless linen of Dirk's shirt.

Dirk reached behind the dog and stabbed the short spur of steel into his
flesh, a shallow goading wound at the root of his testicles, just enough
to break the skin and draw a drop of blood, the animal snarled on a
newer higher note, stashing sideways, and Dirk goaded him again, driving
him further and further into the black fighting rage.  Now at last he
barked, a series of almost maniacal surges of sound from his straining
throat.  Ready to slip, shouted Dirk, struggling to manage his animal.

Ready hereF Charles panted across the pit, his feet sliding in the sand
as Kaiser reared chest high.  Slip them!  yelled the timekeeper, and at
the same instant, both men slipped muzzle and leash and studded collars,
leaving both animals free, and unprotected.

Charles turned and scrambled hurriedly out of the pit, but Dirk waited
extra seconds, not wanting to miss the moment when they came together.

The Doberman showed his speed across the pit, meeting Chaka in his own
ground, bounding in on those long legs, leaning forward so the sloping
back was flattened in his run.

He went for the head, slashing open the skin below the eye, in a clean
sabre-stroke of white teeth, but not holding.

Chaka.  did not go for a hold either, but turned at the the instant of
impact; using his shoulder and the massive strength of his squat frame,
he hit the bigger dog off-balance, breaking his charge, so that he spun
away and would have gone over but the white-washed wall caught him, and
saved him, for Chaka.  had turned neatly to catch him as he fell.

Now, however, Kaiser was up and with a quick shift of weight he was in
balance again, and he cut for the face mask, missing as the small
brindled dog ducked, catching only the short cropped ear and splitting
it, so that blood flew in black droplets to splatter the sand.

Again Chaka bit with the shoulder, blood streaming from cheek to ear, as
he put his weight into the charge.

The bigger dog reared out, declining to meet shoulder with shoulder and
as he came over he went for a hold, but the crowd screamed as they saw
his mistake.  Drop it!  Drop it!  howled Charles, his face purple as an
over-ripe plum, for his dog had got into that thick loose skin padded
with fat between the shoulder, and he growled as he worried it.  Work
him, Chaka.  Work him!  bowled Dirk, balancing easily on the narrow
parapet above them.  Now's your chance, boy. Locked into his grip the
Dobermann was holding too high, his neck and head up and off -balance.
As he worried the hold, it gave and pulled like rubber, not affording
purchase or leverage to throw his weight across and bring down the
brindled terrier.

The smaller dog seemed not even to feel the grip, although a small
artery had ruptured, sending a fine spurt of blood dancing into the
lantern light like a pink flamingo's feather. Drop it, screamed Charles
again in agony, wringing his hands, sweat dripping from his chin.  Belly
him!  Belly him!  exhorted Dirk, and his dog twisted under the big dog's
chest, forcing him higher so that his front paws were off the ground,
and he hit him in the belly, gaping wide and then plunging his yellow
eye teeth full into the bare, shiny dark skin below the ribs.

The Dobermann screamed and dropped his shoulder hold, twisting out
violently so that Chaka's fangs tore out of his belly hold, ripping out
a flap of stomach-lining through which wet purple entrails bulged
immediately but he beat the terrier's try for the throat, jaw clashing
into open snarling jaw, and teeth cracked together, before they spun off
and circled.

Both heads were masks of blood now, eyelids blinking rapidly, the
eyeballs smeared with flying blood from wound and bite, the fur of the
faces plastered with black blood, blood filling the mouths and turning
the exposed teeth pink, trickling from the corners of the jaw, staining
the froth of saliva bright rose red.

Twice more they came together, each charge initiated by the smaller
squatter Chaka, but each time the Dobermann avoided the solid contact of
chest to chest for which Chaka's instincts dictated that he must keep
trying.

Instead, Chaka received two more slashes deeply through F the brindled
skin, into the flesh, down to white bone, so that when his next charge
carried him to the wall he left a broad thick smear of red across the
white-wash before turning to attack again.

The Dobermann was humped up from the belly wound, arching his back to
the agony of it, but fast and lithe still, not trying for another hold
since that fool's hold at the shoulder, but cutting hard and deep and
keeping off his opponent like a skilled boxer.

Chaka was losing too much blood now, and as he circled again he lolled
his tongue for the first time, frothy saliva discoloured with blood
dripping from it, and Dirk swore aloud at this sign of weakness and
imminent collapse.

Big Kaiser attacked again now, cutting in sharply as though for the
throat and then turning in a low dark streak for another weakening flank
cut.  As he hit, Chaka turned into him steeply, and snapped at his lean
belly again, reaching low and with fortune taking a hold on the bulging
entrails that showed in the open flap of the wound.

Instantly the terrier went stiff on his forelegs, and hunched his neck,
bringing his chin down on to his chest to hold the grip.  The
Dobermann's charge carried him on and his entrails were pulled out of
him, a long thick glistening ribbon in the lantern light, and the women
screamed, high with anguished delight, while the men roared.

Chaka crossed the bigger dog's rump now, still holding his guts and
tangled his back legs in the slippery rubbery pink tubes that hung out
of the stomach cavity, so that he stumbled off-balance, and the terrier
lunged forward, hitting him solidly with the chest, knocking him into
the air so he dropped onto his back, screaming and kicking.

Chaka's follow-up was so instinctive, so natural to his breed, that it
was swift as the flash of a striking adder and he had his killing hold,
locked deep and hard into the throat, bearing down with the solid bone
of his jaws, snuffling and working his head on the short hunched neck
until his long eye teeth met in the Dobermann's windpipe.

Dirk Courtney jumped down lightly from the parapet, his laugh was
pitched unnaturally high and his face was darkened to a congested sullen
red as he whipped off his do& and turned the carcass of the Dobermann
with the toe of his boot.  A fair kill?  he laughed up at Charles, and
the man glowered down at him a moment before shrugging acknowledgement
of defeat and turning away.

Dicky Lancome sat with the voice-piece of the telephone set on the desk
in front of him and the ear-piece held loosely to his cheek, trapped
there by a hunched shoulder while he trimmed his finger-nails with a
gold-plated penknife.

what can I say, old girl, except that I am desolate, but then Aunty
Hortense was rich as that fellow that turned everything to gold, that's
right Midas, or was it Croesus, I just cannot give her funeral a miss,
you do understand?

You don't?  and he sighed dramatically, as he returned the penknife to
his waistcoat pocket and began to thumb through the address book for the
other girl's number.  No, old girl, how can you say that?  Are you
certain?  Must have been my sister It was almost noon on Saturday
morning and Dicky had the premises of Natal Motors to himself.  He was
making his domestic arrangements for the weekend on the firm's telephone
account before locking up, and finding some wisdom in the admonition
against changing mounts in midstream.

At that moment he was distracted by the crack of footsteps on the
marbled floor of the showroom, and he swivelled his chair f or a glimpse
through the door of his cubicle.

There was no mistaking the tall figure that strode through the street
doors, the wide shoulders and thrusting bearded jaw, the dark glint of
eyes like those of an old eagle.  Oh, Lord preserve us, Dicky breathed,
his guilty conscience delivering a heavy jolt into his belly.  General
Courtney, and he let the ear-piece of the telephone drop and dangle on
its cord, while he slid forward stealthily from his chair and crawled
into shelter below his desk, knees drawn up to his chin.

He could imagine exactly why General Courtney was calling.  He had come
to discuss the insult to his daughter in person, and Dicky Lancome had
heard enough about the General's temper to want to avoid joining this
discussion.

Now he listened like a night animal for the stalk of the leopard,
cocking his head for the sound of further footsteps and bating his
breath to a shallow cautious trickle, in order not to disclose his
hiding-place.

The ear-piece of the telephone still dangled on its cord, and now it
emitted the high-pitched distorted voice of an irate female.  Without
leaving the cover of the desk, he reached out to try and muffle the
ear-piece, but it dangled tantalizing inches beyond his finger-tips.
Dicky Lancome, I know you are there, squawked the tinny voice, and Dick
wriggled forward another inch.

A hand, in size not unlike that of a bull gorilla, entered Dicky's field
of vision, closed on the ear-piece, and placed it in Dicky's
outstretched fingers.

Please allow me, said a deep gravelly voice from somewhere above the
desk.  Thank you, sir, whispered Dicky, trying not to draw too much
attention to himself even at this stage.  For want of anything better to
do, he listened respectfully to the earpiece.  It is no good pretending
not to be listening, said the female voice.  I know all about you and
that blonde hussy, I expect you need this, said the deep voice from on
high, and the hand passed the mouthpiece of the telephone down into his
hiding-place.  Thank you, sir, Dicky whispered again, uncertain as to
which emotion dominated him at that moment, humiliation or trepidation.

He cleared his throat and spoke into the telephone.

'Darling, I have to go now, he croaked.  I have an extremely important
client in the shop.  He hoped that the touch of flattery might sweeten
the coming encounter.  He broke the connection and crawled out
unwillingly on his hands and knees.  General Courtney!  He dusted
himself down and smoothed his hair, assembled his dignity and salesman's
smile.  We are honoured.  I hope I did not interrupt you in anything
important?  Only the sapphire twinkle in the heavily browed eyes
betrayed the General's amusement.  By no means, Dicky assured him, I was
, he looked around wildly for inspiration, I was merely meditating.  Ah!
Sean Courtney nodded.  That explains it.  How can I be of service to
you, General?  Dicky went on hurriedly.  I wanted to find out about a
young salesman of yours Mark Anders.

Dicky's heart was struck by black frost again.  Don't worry, General, I
fired him myself, Dicky blurted out. But I tore a terrible strip off him
first.  You can be sure of that.  He saw the General's dark beetling
brows come together and the forehead crease like an eroded desert
landscape, and Dicky nearly panicked.  He won't get another job in this
town, count on it, General.  I have put the word out, the black mark,
He's properly queered around here, he is.  What on earth are you talking
about, man?  the General rumbled, like an uneasy volcano.  One word from
you, sir, was enough. Dicky found that the palms of his hands were cold
and slippery with sweat.  From me?  The rumble rose to a roar and Dicky
felt like a peasant, looking fearfully up the slopes of Vesuvius.

What did I have to do with it?  Your daughter, choked Dicky, after what
he did to your daughter.  My daughter?  The huge voice subsided to
something that was close to a whisper, but was too cold and intense.

It was a fiercer sound than the roar that preceded it.  He molested my
daughter?  Oh God no, General, Dicky moaned weakly.  No employee of ours
would raise a finger to Miss Storm.  What happened?  Tell me exactly. He
was insolent to your daughter, I thought you knew?  Insolent?  What did
he say?  He told her she did not conduct herself like a lady.  She must
have told you?  Dicky gulped, and the General's fearsome expression
melted.  He looked stunned and bemused.  Good God.  He said that to
Storm?  What else?  He told her to use the word "please" when giving
orders.  Dicky couldn't meet the man's eyes and he lowered his head. I'm
sorry, sir.  There was a strangled growling sound from the General, and
Dicky stepped back quickly, ready to defend himself.

It took him seconds to realize that the General was struggling with his
mirth, gales of laughter that shook his chest and when at last he let it
corner he threw back his head and opened his mouth wide.

Weak with relief, Dicky essayed a restrained and cautious chuckle, in
sympathy with the General.  It's not funny, man, roared Sean Courtney,
and instantly Dicky scowled.  You are much to blame, how can you condemn
a man on the whim of a child?  It took Dicky a moment to realize that
the child in question was the gorgeous, head-strong, darling of Natal
society.  I understood that the order came from you, I stammered Dicky.
From me!  The laughter stopped abruptly, and the General mopped at his
eyes.  You thought I would smash a man because he was man enough to
stand up to my daughter's tantrums?  You thought that of me?  Yes, said
Dicky miserably, and then quickly, No, and then hopelessly, I didn't
know, sir.  Sean Courtney took an envelope from his inside pocket, and
looked at it thoughtfully for a moment.  Anders believed, as you did,
that I was responsible for his dismissal?  he asked soberly now.  Yes,
sir.  He did.  Can you contact him?  Will you see him again?  Dicky
hesitated, and then steeled himself and took a breath.  I promised him
his job back at the end of the month, after we had gone through the
motions of dismissal, General.

Like you, I didn't think the crime deserved the punishment.  And Sean
Courtney looked at him with a new light in his eye, and a grin lifting
the corner of his mouth and one

eyebrow.  When you see Mark Anders again, tell him of our conversation,
and give him this envelope.  Dicky took the envelope, and as the General
turned away, he heard him mutter darkly, And now for Mademoiselle Storm.
Dicky Lancome felt a comradely pang of sympathy for that young lady.

It was almost noon on a Saturday morning and Ronald Pye sat in the back
seat of the limousine, stiffly as an undertaker in his hearse, and his
expression was as lugubrious.  He wore a three-piece suit of dark grey
cloth and a high starched collar with stiff wings; gold-rimmed
spectacles glittered on his thin beaky nose.

The chauffeur swung off the main Ladyburg road into the long straight
avenue that led up to the glistening white buildings of Great Longwood
on the lower slopes of the escarpment.  The avenue was lined with Cycads
that were at least two hundred years old, thick-stemmed palm-like plants
each with a golden fruit the size of hogshead, like a monstrous pine
cone, nestled in the centre of the graceful fronds.  Dirk Courtney's
gardeners had scoured the countryside for a hundred miles in each
direction to find them, and had lifted them, matched them for size and
replanted them here.

The driveway had been smoothed and watered to keep down the dust, and
parked in front of the house were twenty or thirty expensive motor cars.
Wait for me, said Ronald Pye.  I won't be long, and as he alighted, he
glanced up at the elegant facade. It was an exact copy of the historic
home of Simon van der Stel, the first Governor of the Cape of Good Hope,
which still stood at Constantia.  Dir Courtney had his architects
measure and copy faithfully every room, every arch and gable.  The cost
must have been forbidding.

In the hall, Ronny Pye paused and looked about him impatiently, for
there was nobody to welcome him, although he had been specifically
invited, perhaps summoned was a better word, for noon.

The house was alive; there were women's voices and the tinkling bells of
their laughter from deep in the interior, while closer at hand the
deeper growl of men punctuated by bursts of harsh laughter and voices
raised to that reckless, raucous pitch induced by heavy drinking.

The house smelled of perfume and cigar smoke and stale alcohol, and
Ronny Pye saw empty crystal glasses standing carelessly on the priceless
rosewood hall table, leaving rings of damp on the polished surface, and
an abandoned pair of pearly rose women's silk carni-knickers were draped
suggestively over the door handle that led to the drawingroom.

While he still hesitated, the door across the hall opened and a young
woman entered.  She had the dazed, detached air of a sleep-walker,
gliding silently into the room on neatly slippered feet.  Ronny Pye saw
that she was a young girl, not much more than a child, although her
cosmetics had run and smeared.  Dark rings of mascara gave her a haunted
consumptive look, and her lipstick was spread so that her mouth looked
like a bruised and overblown rose.

Except for the slippers on her small feet, she was stark naked and her
breasts were immature and tender, with pale unformed nipples, and
snarled dishevelled tresses of pale blonde hair hung on to her
shoulders.

Still with slow, drugged movements, she took the knickers from the door
handle, and stepped into them.  As she pulled them to her waist she saw
Ronny Pye standing by the main door, and she grinned at him, a lo sided
depraved whore's smile on the smeared and inflamed lips.  Another one?
All right, come along then, love.  She took a step in his direction,
tottered suddenly and turned away to grab at the table for support, the
painted doll's face suddenly white and translucent as alabaster, then
slowly she doubled over and vomited on the thick silken expanse of woven
Quin carpet.

With an exclamation of disgust, Ronny Pye turned away, and crossed to
the doors that led into the drawing-room.

Nobody looked up as he entered, although there were twenty people or
more in the room.  They were gathered intently about a solid round
gaming-table of ebony with ivory and mosaic inlay.  The tabletop was
scattered with poker chips, brightly coloured ivory counters, and four
men sat at the table, each holding a fan of cards to his chest, watching
the figure at the head of the table.  The tension crackled in the room
like static electricity.

He was not surprised to see that one of the men at the table was his
brother-in-law.  He knew that Dennis Petersen regularly attended the
soirees at Great Longwood, and he thought briefly of his pliant dutiful
sister and wondered if she knew.  The man has drawn us all in, Ronny
thought bitterly, glancing at Dennis and noticing his bleary, inflamed
eyes, the nervous drawn white face.  At least I have withstood this,
this final filthy degradation. Whatever other evils he has led me into,
I have kept this little shred of my self respect.  Well, gentlemen, I
have bad news to impart, I'm afraid, Dirk Courtney smiled urbanely.  The
ladies are with me, and he spread his cards face up on the green baize.
The four queens in their fanciful costume stared up with wooden
expressions, and the other players peered at them for a moment, and then
one at a time, with expressions of disgust, discarded their own hands.

Dennis Petersen was the last to concede defeat, and his face was
stricken, his hand shook.  And then with a sound that was almost a sob,
he let his cards flutter from his fingers, pushed back his chair and
blundered towards the door.

Halfway there, he stopped suddenly as he recognized the gaunt forbidding
figure of his brother-in-law.  He stared at him for a moment, the lips
still trembling, blinking his bloodshot eyes; then he shook his head as
though doubting his senses.  You here?  Oh yes, Dirk called from the
table where he was gathering and stacking the ivory chips.  Did I forget
to mention that I had invited Ronald?  Forgive me, he told the other
players, I will be back in a short while.  He stood from the table,
brushed away the clinging hands of one of the women, and came to take
the elbows of Ronald Pye and his brother-in-law in a friendly grip, and
to guide them out of the drawing-room, down the long flagged passage to
his study.

Even at midday, the room was cool and dark, thick stone walls and heavy
velvet drapes, dark wooden panelling and deep Persian and Oriental
carpeting, sombre smoky-looking oil paintings on the panelling, one of
which Ronald Pye knew was a Reynolds, and another a Turner, heavy chunky
furniture, with coverings of chocolate-coloured leather, it was a room
which always depressed Ronald Pye.  He always thought of it as the
centre of the web in which he and his family had slowly entangled
themselves.

Dennis Petersen slumped into one of the leather chairs, and after a
moment's hesitation, Ronald Pye took the one facing him and sat there
stiffly, disapprovingly.

Dirk Courtney splashed single malt whisky into the glasses that were set
out on a silver tray on the corner of the big mahogany desk, and made a
silent offer to Ronald Pye, who shook his head primly.

instead, he carried a glass of the glowing amber liquor to Dennis who
accepted it with trembling hands, gulped a mouthful and then blurted
thickly, Why did you do it, Dirk?  You promised that nobody would know I
was here, and you invited-'he glanced across at the grim countenance of
his brother-in-law.

Dirk chuckled.  I always keep my promises, just as long as it pays me to
do so.  He lifted his own glass.  But between the three of us there
should be no secrets.  Let's drink to that.  When Dirk lowered his
glass, Ronald Pye asked, Why did you invite me here today?  We have a
number of problems to discuss, the first of which is dear Dennis here.
As a poker player, he makes a fine blacksmith.  How much?  Ronald Pye
asked quietly.  Tell him, Dennis, Dirk invited him, and they waited
while he studied the remaining liquor in his glass.

Well?  said Ronald Pye again.  Don't be shy, Dennis, the old cocky
diamond, Dirk encouraged him.  Dennis mumbled a figure without looking
up.

Ronald Pye shifted his weight in the leather chair, and his mouth
quivered.  It's a gambling debt.  We repudiate itShall I ask one or two
of the young ladies who are my guests here to go down and give your
sister a first-hand account of some of the other little tricks Dennis
has been up to?  Did you know that Dennis likes to have them kneel
over-'Dirk, you wouldn't, bleated Dennis.  You're not going to do that-
and he sank his face into his hands.  You will have a cheque tomorrow,
said Ronald Pye softly.  Thank you, Ronny, it really is a pleasure to do
business with you.  Is that all?  Oh no, Dirk gritmed at him.  By no
means.  He carried the crystal decanter across to Dennis and recharged
his glass. We have another little money matter to discuss.

He filled his own glass with whisky and held it to the light.

Bank business, he said, but Ronny Pye cut in swiftly.  I think you
should know that I am about to retire from the Bank.  I have received an
offer for my remaining shares, I am negotiating for a vineyard down in
the Cape.  I will be leaving Ladyburg and taking my family with me.  No,
Dirk shook his head, smiling lightly.  You and I are together for ever.
We have a bond that is unbreakable.

I want you with me always, somebody I can trust, perhaps the only person
in the world I can trust.  We share so many secrets, old friend.
Including murder.  They both froze at the word, and slowly colour
drained from Ronald Pye's face.  John Anders and his boy, Dirk reminded
them, and they both broke in together.  The boy got away-'He's still
alive.  Not for much longer, Dirk assured them.  My man is on the way to
him now. This time tomorrow there will be no further trouble from him.
You can't do it, Dennis Petersen shook his head vehemently.  Why, in
God's name?  Let it be.  Ronald Pye was begging now, suddenly all the
stiffness going out of his bearing.  Let the boy alone, we have
enough-No.  He has not left us alone, Dirk explained reasonably.  He has
been actively gathering information on all of us and all our activities.
By a stroke of fortune I have learned where he is and he is alone, in a
lonely place They were silent now, and while he waited for them to think
it out, Dirk flicked the stub of his cheroot on to the fireplace and lit
another.  What more do you want from us, now?  Ronald asked at last. Ah,
so at last we can discuss the matter in a businesslike fashion?  Dirk
propped himself on the edge of the desk and picked up an antique
duelling pistol that he used as a paper weight.  He spun in on his
finger as he talked.  I am short of liquid funds for the expansion
programme that I began five years ago.  There has been a decline in
sugar prices, a reduction in the Bank's investment flow, but you know
all this, of course.  Ronald Pye nodded cautiously.  We have already
agreed to adapt the land purchases to our cash flow, for the next few
years at least.  We will be patient.  I am not a patient man, Ronny.  We
are short two hundred thousand a year over the next three years.  We
have agreed to cut down, Ronald Pye went on, but Dirk was not listening.
He twirled the pistol, aimed at the eye of the portrait above the
fireplace and snapped the hammer on the empty cap.  Two hundred thousand
a year for three years is six hundred thousands of sterling, Dirk mused
aloud, and lowered the pistol.  Which is by chance exactly the amount
paid by me to you for your shares, some ten years ago.  No, said Ronald
Pye, with an edge of panic in his voice.  That's mine, that's my
personal capital, it has nothing to do with the Bank.  You've done very
nicely with it too, Dirk congratulated him.  Those Crown Deep shares did
you proud, an excellent buy.  By my latest calculations, your personal
net worth is not much less than eight hundred thousand.  In trust for my
family, my daughter and my grandchildren, said Ronny, his voice edged
with desperation.

I need that money now, Dirk spoke reasonably.  What about your own
personal resources?  Ronald Pye demanded desperately.  Stretched to
their limit, my dear Ronald, all of it invested in land and sugar.  You
could borrow on-job, but why should I borrow from strangers, when a dear
and trusted friend will make the loan to the Ladyburg Farmers Bank. What
finer security than that offered by that venerable institution?  A loan,
dear Ronald, merely a loan.  No.  Ronald Pye came to his feet.  That
money is not mine.  it belongs to my family.  He turned to his
brotherin-law.  Come.  I will take you home.  Smiling that charming,
sparkling smile, Dirk aimed the duelling pistol between Dennis
Petersen's eyes.  Stay where you are, Dennis, he said, and snapped the
hammer again.  It's all right, said Ronald Pye to Dennis.  We can break
away now.  If you stick with me.  Ronald was panting a little, and
sweating like a runner.  If he accuses us of murder, he accuses himself
also.  We can prove that we were not the planners, not the ones who gave
the orders.  I think he is bluffing.  It's a chance we will have to take
to be rid of him.  He turned to face Dirk now, and there was the steel
of defiance in his eyes.  To be rid of this monster.

Let him do his worst, and he damns himself as much as he does us.  How
well conceived a notion!  Dirk laughed delightedly.  And I do really
believe that you are foolish enough to mean what you say.  Come, Dennis.
Let him do his worst.  Without another glance at either of them, Ronald
Pye stalked to the door.  Which of your grandchildren do you cherish
most, Ronny, Natalie or Victoria?  Dirk asked, still laughing.

Or, I imagine, it's the little boy, what's his name?  Damn!

I should know the brat's name, I am his godfather.  He chuckled again,
then snapped his fingers as he remembered.  Damn me, of course, Ronald,
like his granddaddy.

Little Ronald.  Ronald Pye had turned at the door and was staring across
the room at him.  Dirk grinned back at him, as though at some delicious
joke.  Little Ronald, he grinned, and aimed the pistol at an imaginary
figure in the centre of the open carpet, a diminutive figure it seemed,
no higher than a man's knee.  Good bye, little Ronald, he murmured, and
clicked the hammer.  Goodbye, little Natalie.  He swung the pistol to
another invisible figure and snapped the action.  Goodbye, little
Victoria.  The pistol clicked again, the metallic sound shockingly loud
in the silent room.  You wouldn't- Dennis voice was strangled, you
ouldn't-I need the money very badly, Dirk told him.  But you wouldn't do
that-'You keep telling me what I wouldn't do.  Since when have you been
such a ffne judge of my behaviour?  Not the children? pleaded Dennis.

I've done it before, Dirk pointed out.  Yes, but not children, not
little children.  Ronald Pye stood at the door still.  He seemed to have
aged ten years in the last few seconds, his shoulders had sagged and his
face was grey and deeply lined, the flesh seemed to have fallen in
around his eyes, sagging into loose folds.  Before you leave, Ronny, let
me tell you a story you have been desperate to hear for twelve years.  I
know you have spent much time and money trying to find out already.
Return to your chair, please.  Listen to my story and then you are free
to go, if you still want to do so. Ronald Pye's hand fell away from the
door handle, and he shambled back and dropped into the leather chair as
though his limbs did not belong to him.

Dirk filled a spare glass with whisky and placed it on the arm of his
chair, within easy reach, and Ronny did not protest.

It's the story of how a nineteen-year-old boy made himself a million
pounds in cash, and used it to buy a bank.

When you have heard it, I want you to ask yourself if there is anything
that boy would not do.  Dirk stood up and began to pace up and down the
thick carpeting between their chairs like a caged feline animal, lithe
and graceful, but sinister also, and cruel; and he began to speak in
that soft purring voice that wove a hypnotic web about them, and their
heads swung to follow his regular measured pacing.  Shall we call the
boy Dirk, it's a good name, a tough name for a lad who was thrown out by
a tyrannical father and set out to get the things he wanted his own way,
a boy who learned quickly and was frightened of nothing, a boy who by
his nineteenth birthday was first mate of a beatenup old coal-burning
tramp steamer running dubious cargos to the bad spots of the Orient.  A
boy who could run a ship single-handed and whip work out of a crew of
niggers with a rope end, while the skipper wallowed in gin in his cabin.
He paused beside the desk, refilled his glass with whisky and asked his
audience, Does the story grip you so far?  You are drunk, said Ronald
Pye.  I am never drunk, Dirk contradicted him, and resumed his pacing.

We will call the steamer L'Oiseau de Nuit, "The Bird of Night", though,
in all truth, it's an unlikely name for a stinking old cow of a boat.
Her skipper was Le Doux, the sweet one, again a mild misnomer, and Dirk
chuckled reminiscently, and sipped at his glass.  This merry crew
discharged a midnight cargo in the Yellow River late in the summer of ag
and next day put into the port of Mang Su for a more legitimate return
cargo of tea and silks.  From the roadstead, they could see that the
outskirts of the town was in flames, and they could hear the crackle of
small arms fire.  The basin was empty of shipping, just a few sampans
and one or two small junks, and the fearcrazed population of the city
was crowding the wharf, screaming for a berth to safety.  Hundreds of
them plunged into the basin and swam out to where "The Bird of Night"
was hovering.  The mate let two of them come aboard and then turned the
hoses on the others, driving them off, while he learned what was
happening.  Dirk paused, remembering how the pressure of the solid jets
of water had driven the swimmers under the filthy yellow surface of the
basin, and how the others had wailed and tried to swim back.  He grinned
and roused himself.  The Communistwar-lord, HanWang, wasattacking the
port and had promised the rich merchants an amusing death in the bamboo
cages.  Now the mate knew just how rich the merchants of Liang Su really
were. After consulting the captain, the mate brought "The Bird of Night"
alongside the wharf, clearing it of the peasant scum with steam hoses
and a few pistol shots, and he led an armed party of lascars into the
city to the guild house where the Chinese tea merchants were gathered,
paralysed with terror and already resigned to their fate.  Another
whisky, Ronny? Ronald Pye shook his head, his eyes had not left Dirk's
face since the tale began, and now Dirk smiled at him.  The mate set the
passage money so high that only the very richest could afford to pay it,
two thousand sovereign a head, but still ninety-six of them came aboard
"The Bird of Night", each staggering under the load of his possessions.

Even the children carried their own weight, boxes and bales and sacks,
and while we are on the subject of children, there were forty-eight of
them in the party, all boys of course, for no sane Chinaman would waste
two thousand pounds on a girl child.  The little boys ranged from babes
to striplings, some of them of an age with your little Ronald.  Dirk
paused to let it register, then, It was a close run, for as the last of
them came aboard, the mate cast off from the wharf and Han Wang's
bandits burst out of the city and hacked and bayoneted their way on to
the wharf.  Their rifle-fire spattered the upper works, and swept "The
Bird of Night's" decks, sending her newly boarded passengers screaming
down into the empty holds, but she made a clear run of it out of the
river and by dark was pushing out into a quiet tropical sea.  Le Doux,
the captain, could not believe his fortune almost two hundred thousand
sovereigns in gold, in four tea chests in his cabin, and he promised
young Dirk a thousand for himself.  But Dirk knew the value of his
captain's promises. Nevertheless, he suggested a further avenue of
profit.  Old Le Doux had been a hard man before the drink got to him. He
had run slaves out of Africa, opium out of India, but he was soft now,
and he was horrified by what his young mate suggested.  He blasphemed by
praying to God and he wept.  "Les pauvres petits, " he slobbered, and
poured gin down his throat until after midnight he collapsed into that
stupor that Dirk knew would last for forty eight hours.  The mate went
up on to the bridge and sounded the ship's siren, shouting to his
passengers that there was a government gunboat overtaking them, and
driving them from the open deck back into the holds.  They went like
sheep, clutching their possessions.  The mate and his Iascars battened
down the hatches, closing them.  up tight and solid.  Can you guess the
rest of it?  he asked.  A guinea for the correct solution.

Ronald Pye licked his dry grey lips, and shook his head.  No?  Dirk
teased him.  The easiest guinea you ever missed, why, it was simple. The
mate opened the seacocks and flooded the holds.  He watched them
curiously, anticipating their reactions.  Neither of his listeners could
speak, and as Dirk went on, there was a small change in his telling of
it.  He no longer spoke in the third person.

Now it was we, and Of course, we couldn't flood to the top, even in that
low sea she might have foundered, and rolled on her back.

There must have been a small airspace under the hatch, and they held the
children up there.  I could hear them through the four-inch timbers of
the hatch.  For almost half an hour they kept up their howling and
screaming until the air went bad and the roll and slosh of the watergot
them, and when at last it was all over and we opened the hatches, we
found that they had torn the woodwork of the underside of the covers
with their fingers, ripped and splintered it like a cage full of
monkeys.

Dirk turned to the empty chair nearest the fireplace and sank into it.
He swilled the whisky in his right hand and then swallowed it.  He threw
the crystal glass into the empty fireplace and it exploded into diamond
fragments.

They were all silent, staring at the glass splinters.  Why?  whispered
Dennis huskily at last.  In God's name, why did you kill them?  Dirk did
not look at him, he was lost in the past, reliving a high tide in his
life.  Then he roused himself and went on, We pumped out the hold, and I
had the lascars carry all the sodden sacks and bales and boxes up into
the saloon.

God, Ronny, you should have been there.  It was a sight to drive a man
like you mad with greed.  I piled it all up on the saloon table.  It was
a treasure that had taken fifty cunning men a lifetime to accumulate.
There was gold in coin and bar, diamonds like the end of your thumb,
rubies to choke a camel, emeralds, well, the merchants of Liang Su were
some of the richest in China.  Together with the passage money, the loot
came to just over a million in sterling-'And the captain, Le Doux, his
share?  Ronald Pye asked, even in his horror his accountant's mind was
working.  The captain? Dirk shook his head and smiled that light, boyish
smile.  Poor Le Doux, he must have fallen overboard that night.

Drunk as he was, he would not have been able to swim, and the sharks
were bad out there in the China Sea.  God knows that with the water full
of dead Chinese, there was enough to attract them.  No, there was only
one share, not counting a token to the lascars.  Two hundred pounds for
each of them was a fortune beyond their wildest dreams of avarice.  That
left a million pounds for a night's work.  A million before the age of
twenty.  That's the most terrible story I've ever heard.  Ronald Pye's
voice shook like the hand that raised the glass to his lips.  Remember
it when next you have naughty thoughts of leaving Ladyburg, Dirk
counselled him, and leaned across to pat his shoulder. We are comrades,
unto death, he said.

For Mark the allotted days were running out swiftly.

Soon he must leave the valley and return to the world of men, and a
quiet desperation came over him.  He had searched the south bank and the
steep ground above it, now he crossed to the north bank and started
there all over again.

Here, for the first time, he had warning that he was not the only human
being in the valley.  The first day he came across a line of snares laid
along the game trials that led down to drinking-places on the river. The
wire used was the same as that he had found on the gangrened leg of the
crippled impala doe, eighteen-gauge galvanized mild steel wire, probably
cut from some unsuspecting farmer's fence.

Mark found sixteen snares that day and tore each out, bundled the wire
and hurled it into one of the deeper pools of the river.

TWO days later, he came across a log deadfall, so cunningly devised and
so skilfully set that it had crushed a full-grown otter.  Mark used a
branch to lever the log clear and drew out the carcass.  He stroked the
soft, lustrous chocolate fur and felt again the stirring of his anger.
Quite unreasonably, he was developing a strange proprietary feeling for
the animals of this valley, and a growing hatred for anyone who hunted
or molested them.

Now his attention was divided almost equally between his search for his
grandfather's grave and for further signs of the illegal trapper.  Yet
it was almost another week before he had direct sign of the mysterious
hunter.

He was crossing the river each morning in the dawn to work the north
bank.  It might have been easier to abandon the camp under the fig
trees, but sentiment kept him there.

It was the old man's camp, their old camp together, and in any case he
enjoyed the daily crossing and the journey through the swampland formed
in the crotch of the two rivers.  Although it was only the very edge of
this watery world that he moved through, yet he recognized it as the
very heart of this wilderness, an endless well of precious water and
even more precious life, the last secure refuge of so many creatures of
the valley.

He found daily evidence of the big game on the muddy paths through the
towering stands of reed and papyrus, which closed overhead to form a
cool gloomy tunnel of living green stems.  There were Cape buffalo, and
twice he heard them crashing away through the papyrus without a glimpse
of them.  There were hippopotamus and crocodile but they spent the days
deep in the dark reed-fringed lakelets and mysterious lily-covered
pools.  At night he often woke and huddled in his blanket to listen to
their harsh grunting bellows resounding through the swampland.

One noonday, sitting on a low promontory of rocky wooded ground that
thrust into the swamp, he watched a white rhinoceros bring its calf out
of the sheltering reeds to feed on the edge of the bush.

She was a huge old female, her pale grey hide scarred and scratched,
folded and wrinkled over the massive prehistoric body that weighed at
least four tons, and she fussed over the calf anxiously, guiding it with
her long slightly curved nose horn; the calf was hornless and fat as a
piglet.

Watching the pair, Mark realized suddenly how deeply this place had
touched his life, and the possessive love he was developing for it was
reaffirmed.

Here he lived as though he was the first man in all the earth, and it
touched some deep atavistic need in his spirit.

It was on that same day that he came upon recent signs of the other
human presence beyond Chaka's Gate.

He was following one of the faint game paths that skirted another ridge,
one of those that joined the main run of ground into the slopes of the
escarpment, when he came upon the spoor.

It was barefooted, the flat-arched and broad soles of feet that had
never been constricted by leather footwear.  Mark went down on his knees
to examine it carefully.  Too big for a woman, he knew at once.

The stride told him the man was tall.  The gait was slightly toe-in and
the weight was carried on the ball of the foot, the way an athlete
walks.  There was no scuff or drag of toe on the forward swing, a high
lift and a controlled transfer of weight, strong& quick, alert man,
moving fast and silently.

The spoor was so fresh that at the damp patch where the man had paused
to urinate, the butterflies still fluttered in a brilliant cloud for the
moisture and salt.  Mark was very close behind him, and he felt the
hunter's thrill as, without hesitation, he picked up and started to run
the spoor.

He was closing quickly.  The man he was following was unaware.  He had
paused to cut a green twig from a wild loquat branch, probably to use as
a tooth pick, and the shavings were still wet and bleeding.

Then there was the place where the man had paused, turned back on his
own spoor a single pace, paused again, almost certainly to listen, then
turned abruptly off the path; within ten more paces the spoor ended, as
though the man had launched into flight, or been lifted into the sky by
a fiery chariot.  His disappearance was almost magical, and though Mark
worked for another hour, casting and circling, he found no further sign.

He sat down and lit a cigarette, and found he was sweaty and
disgruntled.  Although he had used all his bushcraft to come up with his
quarry, he had been made to look like an infant.  The man had become
aware of Mark following, probably from a thousand yards off, and he had
jinked and covered his spoor, throwing the pursuit with such casual ease
that it was a positive insult.

As he sat, Mark felt his ill-humour harden and become positive hard
anger.  I'll get you yet, he promised the mysterious stranger aloud, and
it did not even occur to him what he might do, if he ever did come up
with his quarry.  All that he knew was that he had been challenged, and
he had taken up the challenge.

The man had the cunning of, Mark sought for a simile, a properly
disparaging simile, and then grinned as he found a suitable one.  The
man had the cunning of a jackal, but he was Zulu so Mark used the Zulu
word Pungushe.

I will be watching for you, Pungushe.  I'll catch you yet, little
jackal.  His mood improved with the insult, and as he crushed out his
cigarette, he found himself anticipating the contest of bush skills
between himself and Pungushe.

Now whenever Mark moved part of his attention was alert for the familiar
footprints in the soft earthy places or for the glimpse of movement and
the figure of a man among trees.  Three times more he cut the spoor, but
each time it was cold and wind-eroded, not worth following.

The days passed in majestic circle of sky and mountain, of sun and river
and swamp, so that time seemed without end until he counted on his
fingers and realized that his month was almost run.  Then he felt the
dread of leaving, a sinking of the spirits such as a child feels when
moment of return to school comes at the end of an idyllic summer
holiday.

That night he returned to the camp below the fig tree with the last of
the light, and set his rifle against the stem of the tree.  He stood a
moment, stretching aching muscles and savouring the coming pleasure of
hot coffee and a cheerful fire, when suddenly he stooped and then
dropped to one knee to examine the earth, soft and fluffy with leaf
mould.

Even in the bad light, there was no mistaking the print of broad bare
feet.  Quickly, Mark looked up and searched the darkening bush about
him, feeling an uneasy chill at the knowledge that he might be observed
at this very moment.  Satisfied at last that he was alone he backtracked
the spoor, and found that the mysterious stranger had searched his camp,
had found the pack in the -tree and examined its contents, then returned
them carefully, each item to its exact place and replaced the pack in
the tree.

Had Mark not seen the spoor in the earth he would never have suspected
that his pack had been touched.

It left him disquieted and ill at ease to know that the man he had
tracked and followed had been tracking and probably watching him just as
carefully, and with considerably greater success rewarding his efforts.

Mark slept badly that night, troubled by weird dreams in which he
followed a dark figure that tap-tapped with a staff on the rocky
dangerous path ahead of him, drawing slowly away from Mark without
looking back, while Mark tried desperately to call to him to wait, but
no sound came from his straining throat.

In the morning he slept late, and rose dull and heavyheaded to look up
into a sky filled with slowly moving cumbersome ranges of dark bruised
cumulus cloud that rolled in on the south-east wind from off the ocean.
He knew soon it would rain, and that he should be going.  His time had
run, but in the end he promised himself a few last days, for the old
man's sake and his own.

It rained that morning before noon, a mere taste of what was to come,
but still a quick cold grey drenching downpour that caught Mark without
shelter.  Even though the sun poured through a gap in the clouds
immediately afterwards, Mark found that the cold of the rain seemed to
have penetrated his bones, and he shivered like a man with palsy in his
sodden clothing.

only when the shivering persisted long after his clothes had dried, did
Mark realize that it was exactly twenty-two days since his first night
under the fig tree, and his first exposure to the river mosquitoes.

Another violent shivering fit caught him, and he realized that his life
probably depended now on the bottle of quinine tablets in the pack high
in the branches of the fig tree, and on whether he could reach it before
the malaria struck with all its malignance.

it was four miles back to camp and he took a short route through thick
Thorn and over a rocky ridge, to intersect the path again on the far
side.

By the time he cut the path, he was feeling dizzy and light-headed, and
he had to rest a moment.  The cigarette he lit tasted bitter and stale,
and as he ground the stub under his heel he saw the other spoor in the
path.  In this place it had been protected from the short downpour of
rain by the dense spreading branches of a mahoba hobo tree.  it overlaid
his own outward spoor, moving in the same direction as he had, but the
thing that shocked him was that the feet that had followed his had been
booted, and shod with hob-nails.  They were the narrower elongated feet
of a white man.  There seemed in that moment of sickness on the
threshold of malaria to be something monstrously sinister in those
booted tracks.

Another quick fit of shivering caught Mark, and then passed, leaving him
momentarily clear-headed and with the illusion of strength, but when he
stood to go on, his legs were still leaden.  He had gone another five
hundred yards back towards the river when a day-flighting owl called on
the ridge behind him, at the point where he had just crossed.

Mark stopped abruptly, and tilted his head to listen.  A tsetse fly bite
at the back of his neck began to itch furiously, but he stood completely
still as he listened.

The call of the owl was answered by a mate, the fluting hoot-hoot,
skilfully imitated, but without the natural resonance.  The second call
had come from out on Mark's right, and a new chill that was not malaria
rippled up his spine as he remembered the hooting owls on the escarpment
above Ladyburg on that night so many months ago.

He began to hurry now, dragging his heavy almost disembodied legs along
the winding path.  He found that he was panting before he had gone
another hundred yards, and that waves of physical nausea flowed upwards
from the pit of his belly, gagging in his throat as the fever tightened
its grip on him.

k His vision began to break up, starring and cracking like shattered
mosaic work, irregular patches of darkness edged in bright iridescent
colours, with occasional flashes of true vision, as though he looked out
through gaps in the mosaic.

He struggled on desperately, expecting at any moment now to feel the
spongy swamp grass under his feet and to enter the dark protective
tunnels of papyrus which he knew so well, and which would screen him and
direct him back to the old camp.

An owl hooted again, much closer this time and from a completely
unexpected direction.  Confused, and now frightened, Mark sank down at
the base of a knob-thorn tree to rest and gather his reserves.  His
heart was pounding against his ribs, and the nausea was so powerful as
almost to force him to retch, but he rode it for a moment longer and
miraculously his vision opened as though a dark curtain had been drawn
aside, and he realized immediately that in his fever blindness he had
lost the path.  He had no idea where he was now, or the direction in
which he was facing.

Desperately he tried to relate the angle of the sun, or slope of the
ground, or find some recognizable landmark, but the branches of the
knob-thorn spread overhead and all around him the bush closed in,
limiting his vision to about fifty paces.

He dragged himself to his feet and turned up the rocky slope, hoping to
reach high ground, and behind him an owl hooted, a mournful, funereal
sound.

He was blind and shaking again when he fell, and he knew he had torn his
shin for he could feel the slow warm trickle of blood down his ankle,
but it seemed unrelated to his present circumstances, and when he lifted
his hand to his face, it was shaking so violently that he could not wipe
the icy sweat from his eyes.

Out on his left, the owl called again, and his teeth chattered in his
head so that the sound was magnified painfully in his ears.

Mark rolled over and peered blindly in the direction of the hooting owl,
trying to force back the darkness, blinking the sweat that stung like
salt in his eyes.

it was like looking down a long dark tunnel to light at the end, or
through the wrong end of a telescope.

Something moved on a field of golden brown grass, and he tried to force
his eyes to serve him, but his vision wavered and burned.

There was movement, that was all he was sure of, then silent meteors of
light, yellow and red and green, exploded across his mind, and cleared,
and suddenly his vision was stark and brilliant, he could see with
unnatural almost terrifying clarity.

A man was crossing his flank, a big man, with a head round and heavy as
a cannon ball.  He had a wrestler's shoulders, and a thick bovine neck.
Mark could not see his face.  it was turned away from him, yet there was
something dreadfully familiar about him.

He wore a bandolier over his shoulder, over the khaki shirt with
military-style button-down pockets, and his breeches were tucked into
scuffed brown riding-boots.  He carried a rifle at high port across his
chest, and he moved with a hunter's cautious, exaggerated tread.  Mark's
vision began to spin and disintegrate again.

He blundered to his feet, dragging himself up the stem of the knob-Thorn
and one of the sharp curved thorns stabbed deeply into the ball of his
thumb; the pain was irrelevant and he began to run.

Behind him there was a shout, the view-halloo of the hunter, and Mark's
instinct of survival was just strong enough to direct his feet.  He
swung away abruptly, changing direction, and he heard the bullet a split
second before the sound of the shot.  It cracked in the air beside his
head like a gigantic bull-whip, and after it, the secondary brittle
snapping bark of the shot.  Mauser, he thought, and was transported
instantly to another time in another land.

Some time-keeping instinct in his head began counting the split instants
of combat, tolling them off even in his blindness and sickness, so that
without looking back he knew when his hunter had reloaded and taken his
next aim.  Mark jinked again in his stumbling, unseeing run and again
the shot cracked the air beside him, and Mark unslung the P.  14 from
his shoulder and ran on.

Suddenly he was into trees, and beside him a slab of bark exploded from
a trunk, torn.  loose by the next Mauser bullet in a spray of flying
fragments and sap, leaving a white wet wound in the tree.  But Mark had
reached the ridge, and the instant he dropped over it, he turned at
right angles, doubled up from the waist and dogged away, seeking
desperately in the gloom for a secure stance from which to defend
himself.

Suddenly he was deafened by a sound as though the heavens had cracked
open, and the sun had fallen upon him sound and light so immense and
close that he thought for an instant that a Mauser bullet had shattered
his brain.  He dropped instinctively to his knees.

It was only in the silence that followed that he realized lightning had
struck the ironstone ridge close beside him, and the electric stench of
it filled the air around him, the rumbling echo of thunder still
muttered over the blue wall of the escarpment and the huge bruised
masses of cloud had tumbled down out of the endless blue vault of the
sky to press close against the earth.

The wind came immediately, cold and swiftly rushing, thrashing the
branches of the trees above him, and when Mark dragged himself to his
feet again, it billowed his shirt and ruffled his hair, inducing another
fit of violent shivering.  It seemed the sweat on his face had been
turned instantly to hoar-frost; in the rush of the wind, an owl hooted
somewhere close at hand, and it began to rain again.

In the rain ahead of Mark, there was the gaunt, tortured shape of a dead
tree.  To his fever-distorted eyes it had the shape of an angry.
warlock, with threatening arms and twisted frame, but it offered a
stance, the best he could hope for at this exposed moment.

For a few blessed moments, the darkness behind his eyes lightened and
his vision opened to a limited grey circle.

He realized that he had doubled back and come up against the river.  The
dead tree against which he stood was on the very brink of the sheer high
bank.  The river had undercut its roots, killing it, and in time would
suck it into the flood and carry it away downstream.

At Mark's back, the river was already high and swift and brown with rain
water, cutting off any retreat.  He was cornered against the bank while
the hunters closed in on him.  He knew there were more than one, the owl
calls had been signals, just as they had on the escarpment of Ladyburg.

Mark realized that perhaps his only hope was to separate them, and lead
them unsuspecting on to his stance, but it must be quick, before the
fever tightened its hold on his sense.

He cupped one hand to his mouth and imitated the sad, mournful call of
the Scops owl.  he leaned back against the tree and held the rifle low
across one hip.  Off on the right his call was answered.  Mark did not
move.  He stood frozen against the tree trunk, only his eyes swivelled
to the sound and his forehead creased in his effort to see clearly. Long
minutes drew out, and then the owl hoot came, even closer at hand.

The rain came now on the wind, driving in at a steep angle, ice-white
lances of slanting rain, tearing at the bush and open grassland beneath
it, hammering into Mark's face with sharp needles that stung his
eyelids, and yet cleared his vision again so that he could see into the
swirling white veils of water.  Carefully Mark cupped his mouth and
hooted the owl call, bringing his man closer.  Where are you?  a voice
called softly.  Rene, where are you?  Mark swivelled his eyes to the
sound.  A human figure loomed out of the sodden trees, half obscured by
the sheets of falling rain.  I heard your shots, did you get him?  He
was coming towards Mark, a tall lean man with a very dark brown
sunscorched face, deeply lined and wrinkled around the eyes, with a
short scraggy growth of grizzled hair covering his jowls.

He carried a Lee-Metford rifle at the trail in one hand, and a rubber
ex-army gas-cape draped over his shoulders, wet and shiny with rain, a
man past the prime of -his life, with the dull, unintelligent eyes and
the coarse almost brutal features of a Russian peasant.  The face of one
who would kill a man with as little compunction as he would slit a hog's
throat.

He had seen Mark against the dead tree trunk, but the swirling rain and
the bad light showed him just the dark uncertain shape, and the call of
the owl had lulled him.  Rene?  he called again, and then stopped, for
the first time uncertain, and he squinted into the teeming rain with
those flat expressionless eyes. Then he swore angrily, and tried to
bring up the Lee-Metford, swinging it across his belly and wipping the
safety-catch across with one calloused thumb.  It's him!  He recognized
Mark, and the dismay was clear to see on his face.  No, Mark warned him
urgently, but the rifle barrel was coming up swiftly, and Mark had heard
the metallic snick of the safety-catch and knew that in an instant the
man would shoot him down.

He fired with the P.  14 still held low across his hip, the man was that
close, and the shot crashed out with shocking loudness.

The man was lifted off his feet, thrown backwards With the Lee-Metford
spinning from his hands, hitting the rocky ground with his shoulder
blades, his heels kicking and drumming wildly on the earth and his
eyelids fluttering like the wings of trapped butterflies.

The blood that streamed from his chest soaked into the sodden material
of his shirt and was diluted immediately to a paler rose pink by the
hammering raindrops.

With a final spasm, which arched his back, the man subsided and lay
completely still.  He seemed to have shrunk in size, looking old and
frail, and his lower jaw hung open, revealing the pink rubber gums of a
set of tobacco-stained false teeth.  The rain beat into the open staring
eyes, and Mark felt a familiar sense of dismay.  The cold familiar guilt
of having inflicted death on another human being.  He had an irrational
desire to go to the man, to give him succour, though he was far past any
human help, to try to explain to him, to justify himself.  The impulse
was fever-born and carried on wings of rising delirium; he was at the
point now where there was no clear dividing line between fantasy and
reality.  You shouldn't have, he blurted, you shouldn't have tried, I
warned you, I warned, He stepped out from the shelter of the dead tree
trunk, forgetting the other man, the man that his senses should have
warned him was the most dangerous of the two hunters.

He stood over the man he had killed, swaying on his feet, holding the
rifle at high port across his chest.

Hobday had missed with his first three shots, but the range had been two
hundred or more and it was up-hill shooting, with intervening bush and
tree and shrub, snap shooting at a running, jinking target, worse than
jumpshooting for kudu in thick cat bush, a slim swift human shape.  He
had fired the second and third shots in despair, hoping for a lucky hit
before his quarry reached the crest of the ridge and disappeared.

Now he could follow only cautiously, for he had seen the rifle strapped
on the boy's back, and he might be lying up on the ridge, waiting his
chance for a clear shot.  He used all the cover there was, and at last
the sheets of falling rain, to reach the rocky crest, at any moment
expecting retaliatory fire, for he had shown his own hand clearly.  He
knew the boy was a trained soldier.  He was dangerous and Hobday moved
with care.

His relief when he reached the crest was immense, and he lay there on
his belly in the wet grass with the reloaded Mauser in front peering
down the reverse slope for a sign of his quarry.

He heard the owl hoot out on his left, and frowned irritably.  Stupid
old bastard!  he grunted.  Pissing himself with fright still.  His
partner needed constant reassurance, his old nerves too frayed for this
work, and he used no judgement in timing his contact calls.  The damned
fool!

He must have heard the shots and known the critical stage of the hunt
was on, yet here he was, calling again, like a child whistling in the
dark for courage.

He brushed the man from his thoughts and concentrated on searching the
rain-swept slope, until he froze with disbelief.  The owl call had been
answered, from his left, just below the crest.

Hobday came up on his feet.  Crouching low, he worked swiftly along the
crest.

He saw solid movement in the grey, wind-whipped scrub and dropped into a
marksman's squat, drawing swift aim on the indistinct target, blinking
the rain out of his eyes, waiting for a clean shot and then grunting
with disappointment as he recognized his own partner, bowed under the
glistening wet gas-cape, moving heavily as a pregnant woman in the gloom
beneath the rain cloud and dense overhead branches.

The man paused to cup his hand over his mouth and call the mournful owl
hoot again, and the bearded hunter grinned.  Decoy duck, he whispered
aloud, the stupid old dog!  and he felt no compunction that he was going
to let his ally draw fire for him.  He watched him carefully, keeping
well down on the skyline, the silhouette of his head and shoulders
broken by the low bush under which he crouched.

The old man in the gas-cape called again, and then waited listening with
his head cocked.  The reply called him on, and he hurried forward into
the wind and the rain, drawn on to his fate.  Hobday grinned as he
watched.  One share was better than two, he thought, and wiped the
clinging raindrops off the rear sight of the Mauser with his thumb.

Suddenly the old man checked and began to swing up the rifle he carried,
but the shot crashed out and he went down abruptly in the grass.  Hobday
swore softly, bitterly, he had missed the moment, had not been able to
place the spot from which the shot had been fired.  Now he waited with a
finger on the trigger, screwing up his eyes against the rain, less
certain of himself, feeling a new awe and respect for his quarry, and
the first tingle of fear.  It had been a good kill, that one, leading
the old man right in close, calling him up as though he were a hungry
leopard coming to the bleat of a duiker horn.

Then suddenly the bearded hunter's doubts were dispelled, and for an
instant he could hardly believe his fortune.  just when he had been
steeling himself for a dangerous and long-dravTn-out duel, his quarry
stepped out into the open from the cover of a twisted dead tree trunk on
the bank of the river, a childlike, ridiculously artless act an almost
suicidal act, so ingenuous that for a moment he feared some trap.

The young man stood for a moment over the corpse of the man he had
killed.  Even at this range, it seemed as though he swayed on his feet,
his face very pale in the weak grey light but the khaki of his shirt
standing out clearly against the back lighting from the surface of the
river.

it needed no fancy shooting, the range was less than a hundred and fifty
yards and for an instant Hobday held his aim in the centre of the boy's
chest, then he squeezed off the shot with exaggerated care, knowing that
it was a heart shot.  As the rifle pounded back into his shoulder and
the brittle crack of the Mauser stung his eardrums, he watched the boy
hurled backwards by the shock of the strike and heard the bullet impact
with a jarring solid thud.

Mark never even heard the Mauser shot for the bullet came ahead of the
sound.  There was only the massive shock in the upper part of his body,
and then he was hurled backwards with a violence that drove the air from
his lungs.

The earth opened behind him, and as he fell, there was the sensation of
being engulfed in a swirling vortex of blackness, and he knew for just a
fleeting moment of time that he was dead.

Then the icy plunge into the swirling brown current of the river caught
him and shocked him back from the edge of blackness.  The water engulfed
his head and he had the strength to kick away from the muddy bottom.  As
his head broke the surface, he dragged precious air into his crushed
burning lungs and realized that he held the P.  14 in both hands still.

The wooden stock of the rifle was directly in front of his eyes, and he
saw where the Mauser bullet had smashed into the wood and then flattened
against the solid steel of the breech block.

The bullet was squashed to a misshapen lump, like a pellet of wet clay
hurled against a brick wall.  The rifle had stopped it dead, but the
tremendous energy of impact had driven the P.  14 into his chest,
expelling the air from both lungs and hurling him backwards over the
bank.

With enormous relief, Mark let the rifle drop into the muddy bottom
below him, and was swept away by the current into a swirling nightmare
of malaria and rain and raging brown water.  Slowly the darkness
overwhelmed him, and his last conscious thought was the irony of being
saved from death by rifle shot to be immediately drowned like an
unwanted kitten.

The water came up over his mouth again, he felt it burn in his lungs and
then he was gone into nothingness.

There can be few terrors like those of a mind tortured by malaria f
ever, a mind trapped in an endless nightmare from which there is no
escape, never experiencing the relief of waking in the sweat of terror
and knowing it was only delirium.

The nightmares of malaria are beyond the creation of the healthy brain,
they are unremitting and they are compounded by a consuming thirst.  The
thirst as the body burns its strength and fluid in the heat of the
conflict, a cycle of attack no less terrible for its regular familiar
stages: icy chills that begin the cycle, followed by burning Saharan
fevers that rocket the body heat to temperatures so high that they can
damage the brain, and that are followed by the great sweat, when body
fluid streams from every pore of the victim's body, desiccating him and
leaving him without the strength to lift head or hand while he awaits
the next round of the cycle to begin, the next bout of icy shivering
chill.

There were semi-lucid moments for Mark between the periods of heat and
cold and nameless terror.  Once, when the thirst burned so that every
cell of his body shrieked for moisture and his mouth was dry and
swollen, it seemed that strong cool hands lifted his head and bitter
liquid, bitter but cold and wonderful, flooded his mouth and ran like
honey down his throat.  At other times in the cold, he pulled his own
grey woollen blanket close around his shoulders and the smell of it was
familiar and well-beloved - the smell of woodsmoke and cigarette and his
own body smell.  Often he heard the rain and crash-rumble of thunder,
but always he was dry, and then all sound faded and he was swept away on
the next cycle of the fever.

He knew it was seventy-two hours after the first chilling onslaught that
he came once again fully conscious.  The malaria is that predictable in
its cycle that he knew when it was to within a few hours.

it was late afternoon and Mark lay wrapped in his blanket on a mattress
of fresh-cut grass and aromatic leaves.  It was still raining, a steady
grey relentless downpouring from the low pregnant cloud-banks that
seemed to press against the tree-tops, but Mark was dry.

Above him was a low roof of rock, a roof that had been blackened over
the millennium by the wood fires of others who had sought shelter in
this shallow cave; the opening of the shelter faced north-west, away
from the prevailing rain-bearing winds, and just catching the last
glimmerings of light from where the sun was sinking behind the thick
cloud-cover.

Mark lifted himself with enormous effort on one elbow and looked about
him, bemused.  Propped against the rock wall near his head was his pack.
He stared at it for a long time, puzzled and completely bewildered.  His
last coherent memory had been of engulfing icy waters.  Closer at hand
was a round-bellied beer pot of dark fire-baked clay, and he reached for
it immediately, his hands shaking not only from weakness but from the
driving need of his thirst.

The liquid was bitter and medicinal, tasting of herbs and sulphur, but
he drank it with panting grateful gulps until his belly bulged and
ached.

He lowered the pot then and discovered beside it a bowl of stiff cold
maize porridge, salted and flavoured with some wild herb that tasted
like sage.  He ate half of it and then fell asleep, but this time into a
deep healing sleep.

When he awoke again, the rain had stopped and the sun was near its
zenith, burning down through the gaps and soaring valleys of the
towering cloud ranges.

It required an effort, but Mark rose and staggered to the opening of the
rock shelter.  He looked down into the flooded bed of the Bubezi River,
a roaring red-brown torrent in which huge trees swirled and tumbled on
their way to the sea, their bared roots lifted like the crooked
arthritic fingers of dying beggars.

Mark peered to the north and realized that the whole basin of swamp and
bush had been flooded, the papyrus beds were submerged completely under
a dull silver sheet of water that dazzled like a vast mirror, even the
big trees on the lower ground were covered to their upper branches, and
the higher ridges of ground and the low kopies were islands in the
watery waste.

Mark was still too weak to stay long on his feet, and he staggered back
to his bed of cut grass.  Before he slept again he pondered the attack,
and the disquieting problem of how the assassins had known he was here
at Chaka's Gate; somehow it was all bound up with Andersland and the
death of the old man in the wilderness here.  He was still pondering it
all when sleep overtook him.

When he awoke, it was morning again, and during the night somebody had
replenished the beer pot with the bitter liquid and the food bowl with
stiff porridge and a few fragments of some roast flesh, that tasted like
chicken but was probably iguana lizard.

The waters had fallen dramatically, the papyrus beds were visible with
their long stems flattened and the fluffy heads wadded down by the
flood, and the trees were exposed, the lower ground drying out; the
Bubezi River in the deep gorge below Mark's shelter had regained some
semblance of sanity.

Mark was suddenly aware of his own nudity, and of the stink of fever and
body wastes that clung to him.  He went down to the water's edge, a long
slow journey during which he had to pause often to regain his strength
and for the dizziness to stop singing in his ears.

He bathed away the smell and the filth and examined the dark purple
bruise where the Mauser bullet had smashed the P.  14 into his chest.
Then he dried in the fierce glare of the noon sun.  It warmed the last
chills of the fever from his body, and he climbed back up to the shelter
with a spring and lightness in his step.

in the morning he found that the beer pot and food bowl had disappeared,
and he sensed somehow that the gesture was deliberate and carried the
message that, as far as his mysterious benefactor was concerned, he was
able to fend for himself again, and that he had begun to outlive his
welcome.

Mark gathered his possessions, finding that all his clothing had been
dried out and stuffed into the canvas pack.

His bandolier of ammunition was there also and the bonehandled hunting
knife was in its sheath, but his food Supply was down to one can of
baked beans.

He opened it and ate half, saved the rest for his dinner left the pack
in the back of the shelter, and set out for the far side of the basin.

It took him almost two hours to find the killing ground, and he
recognized it at last only by the dead tree with its twisted arthritic
limbs.  The ground here was lower than he had imagined, and had been
swept by the flood waters, the grass was flattened against the earth, as
though brilliantined and combed down, some of the weaker trees had been
uprooted and swept away and, in the lower branches of the larger
stronger trees, the flood debris clung to mark the high-water level.

Mark searched for some evidence of the fight, but there was none, no
body nor abandoned rifle, it was as though it had never been.  .  . Mark
began to doubt his own memory until he slipped his hand into the front
of his shirt and fingered the tender bruising.

He searched down the track of the waters, following the direction of the
swept grass for half a mile.  When he saw vultures sitting in the trees
and squabbling noisily in the scrub, he hurried forward, but it was only
a rhino calf, too young to have swum against the flood, drowned and
already beginning to putrefy.

Mark walked back to the dead tree and sat down to smoke the last
cigarette in his tin, relishing every draw, stubbing it out
half-finished and carefully returning the butt to the flat tin with its
picture of the black cat, and the trade mark Craven A.

He was about to stand when something sparkled in the sunlight at his
feet, and he dug it out of the still damp earth with his finger.

It was a brass cartridge case, and when he sniffed at it, there was
still the faint trace of burned cordite.  Stamped into the base was the
lettering Mauser Fabriken.  9 mm and he turned it thoughtfully between
his: fingers.

The correct thing was to report the whole affair to the nearest police
station, but twice already he had learned the folly of calling attention
to himself while some remorseless enemy hunted him from cover.

Mark stood up and went down the gentle slope to the edge of the swamp
pools.  A moment longer he examined the brass cartridge case, then he
hurled it far out into the black water.

At the rock shelter he hefted his pack on to his shoulders, bouncing
from the knees to settle the straps.  Then, as he crossed to the
entrance, he saw the footprints in the fine cold ash dust of the fire.
Broad, bare-footed, he recognized them instantly.

On an impulse he slipped the sheathed hunting knife off his belt, and
laid it carefully exposed in an offertory position at the base of the
shelter wall; then, with a stub of charcoal from the dead fire, he
traced two ancient symbols on the rock above it, the symbols that old
David had told him stood for The -bowed-slave-who-bears-gifts.  He hoped
Pungushe, the poacher, would come again to the rock shelter and that he
could interpret the symbols and accept the gift.

On the slope of the south butt of Chaka's Gate, Mark paused again and
looked back into the great sweep of wilderness, and he spoke aloud,
softly, because he knew that if the old man were listening, he would
hear, no matter how low the voice.  All he had learned and experienced
here had hardened his resolve to come to the truth and to unravel the
mystery and answer the questions that still hid the facts of the old
man's death.  I'll come again, some day.  Then he turned away towards
the south, lengthening his stride and swinging into the gait just short
of a trot that the Zulus call Winza umhlabathi- or eat the earth
greedily.

The suit felt unfamiliar and confining on his body, and the starched
collar was like a slave's ring about Mark's throat, the pavement hard
and unyielding to his tread and the clank of the trams and the honk and
growl and clash of train and automobile were almost deafening after the
great silences of the bush, and yet there was excitement and stimulation
in the hurrying tide of human beings that swirled around him, strident
and colourful and alive.

The tropical hot-house of Durban town encouraged all growth of life, and
the diversity of human beings that thronged her streets never failed to
intrigue Mark; the Hindu women in their shimmering saris of gaudy silk
with jewels in their pierced nostrils and golden sandals on their feet;
the Zulus, moon-faced and tall, their wives with the conical ochre
headdresses of mud and plaited hair that they wore for a lifetime,
bare-breasted under their cloaks, big stately breasts fruitful and full
as those of the earth mother, to which their infants clung like fat
little leeches, and the short leather aprons high on their strong glossy
dark thighs swinging as they walked; the men in loincloths muscled and
dignified, or wearing the cast-off rags of Western clothing with the
same jaunty panache and self-conscious assurance that the mayor wore his
robes of office; the white women, remote and cool and unhurried,
followed by a servant as they shopped or encapsuled in their speeding
vehicles; their men in dark suits and the starched collars better suited
to the climes of their native north, many of them yellowed with fever
and fat with rich foods as they hurried about their affairs, their faces
set in that small perpetual frown, each creating for himself an
isolation of the spirit in the press of human bodies.

It was strange to be back in the city.  Half of Mark's soul hated it
while the other half welcomed it, and he hurried to find the human
company for which he had sometimes hungered these long weeks just past.
Good God, my dear old sport. Dicky Lancome, with a red carnation in his
button-hole, hurried to meet him across the showroom floor.  I am
delighted to have you back.  I was expecting you weeks ago.  Business
has been deadly slow, the girls have been ugly, tiresome and
uncooperative; the weather absolutely frightful, you have missed
nothing, old son, absolutely nothing.  He held Mark off at arm's length
and surveyed him with a fond and brotherly eye.  My God, you look as
though you've been on the Riviera, brown as a pork sausage but not as
fat.  God, I do declare you've lost weight again -'and he patted his own
waistcoat which was straining its buttons around the growing bulge of
his belly.  I must go on a diet, which reminds me, lunch-time!  You will
be my guest, old boy, I insist, I absolutely insist.  Dicky began his
diet with a plate piled high with steaming rice, coloured to light gold
and flavoured with saffron; over this was poured rich, chunky mutton
curry, redolent with Hindu herbs and garnished with mango chutney,
ground coconuts, grated Bombay Duck and half a dozen other sauces, and
as the turbaned Indian waiter offered him the silver tray of salads, he
loaded his side plate enthusiastically without interrupting his
questioning.

God, I envy you, old boy.  Often promised myself that.

One man against the wilderness, pioneer stuff, hunting and fishing for
the pot.  He waved the waiter away and lifted a quart stein of lager
beer to salute Mark.  Cheers, old boy, tell me all about it.  Dicky was
silent at last, although he did the curry full justice, while Mark told
him about it, about the beauty and the solitude, about the busliveld
dawn and the starry silent nights, and he sighed occasionally and shook
his head wistfully.  Wish I could do it, old boy.  You could, Mark
pointed out, and Dicky looked startled.  It's out there now.  It won't
go away.  But what about my job, old boy?  Can't just drop everything
and walk away.  Do you enjoy your job that much?  Mark asked softly.
Does peddling motorcars feed your soul?  Hey!  Dicky began to look
uncomfortable.  It's not a case of enjoying it.  I mean nobody really
enjoys having to work, do they?  I mean it's just something one does,
you know.  One is lucky to find something one can do reasonably well
where one can earn an honest coin, and one does I wonder, Mark mused.
Tell me, Dicky, what is most important, the coin or the good feeling
down there in your guts?  Dicky stared at him, his lower jaw sagging
slightly, exposing a mouthful of half-masticated rice.  Out there, I
felt clean and tall, Mark went on, fiddling with his beer stein.  There
were no bosses, no clients, no hustling for a commission.  I don't know,
Dicky, out there I felt important.  Important?  Dicky swallowed the
unchewed curry noisily.  Important?

Hey now, old boy, they're selling rakes like you and me on the street
corners at ninepence a bunch.  He washed down the rice with a swallow of
beer, and then patted the froth from his upper lip with the crisp white
handkerchief from his breast pocket.  Take an old dog's advice, when you
say your prayers at night give thanks that you are a good motorcar
salesman, and that you have found that out.  just do it, old son, and
don't think about it, or it will break your heart.  He spoke with an air
of finality that declared the subject closed, and stooped to open his
brief case on the floor beside his chair.  Here, I've something for you.
There were a dozen thick letters in Marion Littlejohn's neat feminine
hand, all in blue envelopes, a colour which she had explained in
previous letters indicated undying love; there was also an account for a
disputed twelve and sixpence which his tailor insisted Mark had
underpaid; and there was another envelope of marbled paper, pale beige
and watered expensively, with Mark's name blazoned across it in a
peremptory, arrogant hand, and no address.

Mark singled it out and turned it over to examine the crest, thickly
crusted in heavy embossing that stood out on the flap.

Dicky watched him open it and then leaned forward to read it
unashamedly, but Mark saved him the effort and flipped it across to him.

Regimental dinner, he explained.  You'll just make it, Dicky pointed
out.  Friday the 16th.  Then his voice changed, imitating a regiment
sergeant-major.  Two oh hundred hours sharpish.  Dress formal and R.  S.
bloody V.  P.  Take your dressing from the right, you lucky brighter,
your guinea has been paid by your Colonel-in-Chief, Lord Muck-a-Muck
General Courtney his exalted self.  Off you go, my boy, drink his
champagne and steal a handful of cigars.  Up the workers!  say!  I think
I'll give it a miss, murmured Mark, and placed Marion's letters in his
inside pocket, to prevent Dicky reading those also.  You've gone
bush-crazy, the sun touched you, old boy, Dicky declared solemnly. Think
of those three hundred potential owners of Cadillacs sitting around one
table, pissed to the wide, and smoking free cigars.  Captive audience.
Whip around the table and peddle them a Cadillac each while they are
still stunned by the speeches.  Were you in France?  Mark asked.  Not
France.  Dicky's expression changed.  Palestine, Gallipoli and suchlike
sunny climes.  The memory darkened his eyes. Then you'll know why I
don't feel like going up to the old fort to celebrate the experience,
Mark told him, and Dicky Lancome studied him across the loaded table. He
had made himself a judge of character, of men and their workings.  He
had to be a good judge to be a good salesman, so he was surprised that
he had not recognized the change in Mark sooner.  Looking at him now,
Dicky knew that he had acquired something, some new reserve of strength
and resolution the likes of which few men gathered about them in a
lifetime.  Suddenly he felt a humility in Mark's presence, and although
it was tinged with envy, the envy was without rancour.  Here was a man
who was going somewhere, to a place where he would never be able to
follow, a path that needed a man with a lion's liver to tread.  He
wanted to reach across the table and shake Mark's hand and wish him well
on the journey, but instead he spoke quietly, dropping the usual light
and cavalier facade.  I wish you'd think about it, Mark.  General
Courtney came to see me himself, and he went on to tell him of the
visit, of Sean Courtney's anger when he had heard that Mark had been
discharged at his daughter's behest.  He asked for you to be there
especially, Mark, and he really meant it.  Mark showed his invitation at
the gates, and was passed through the massive stone outer
fortifications, There were fairy lights strung in the trees along the
pathway that led through the gardens of the old fort, giving the evening
a frivolous carnival feeling at odds with the usual atmosphere this
bastion had known from the earliest British occupation, through siege
and war with Dutch and Zulu; many of the Empire's warriors who had
paused here on their occasions.

There were other guests ahead of and behind him on the pathway, but Mark
avoided them, feeling self-conscious in the dinner-jacket he had hired
from the pawnbroker when he retrieved his decorations.  The garment had
the venerable greenish tinge of age, and was ventilated in places by the
ravages of moths.  It was too tight across the shoulders and too full in
the belly, and it exposed too much cuff and sock, but when he had
pointed this out to the pawnbroker, the man had asked him to finger the
pure silk lining and had reduced the hire fee to five shillings.

Miserably he joined the file of other dinner-jacketed figures on the
steps of the drillhall and when his turn came, he stepped up to the
reception!  Then, So!  said General Sean Courtney.  You came.  The
craggy features were suddenly boyish, as he took Mark's hand in a grip
that felt like tortoise-shell, cool and hard and calloused.  He stood at
the head of the reception line like a tower, broad and powerful,
resplendent in immaculately cut black and crisp starched white with a
gaudy block of silk ribbons and enamel crosses and orders across his
chest.  With a twitch of an imperial eyebrow, he summoned one of his
staff.  This is Mr Mark Anders, he said.  You remember the old firm of
Anders and MacDonald, 1 st brigade?  Indeed, sir.  The officer looked at
Mark with quick interest, his eye dropping from his face to the silk
ribbons on his lapel and back to his face.  Look after him, said General
Courtney, and then to Mark, Get yourself a drink, son, and I'll talk to
you later.  He released Mark's hand and turned to the next in line, but
such was the magnetism and charm of the big man that after the brief
contact and the few gruff words, Mark was no longer the gawky stranger,
callow and awkward in cast-off clothes, but an honoured guest, worthy of
special attention.

The subaltern took his charge seriously and led Mark into the dense
crowd of black-clad mates, all of them still subdued and self-conscious
in their unaccustomed finery, standing in stiff knots, although the
waiters moved among them bearing silver trays laden with the regiment's
hospitality. Whisky, is it?  asked the subaltern, and picked a glass
from one of the trays.  All liquid refreshment tonight is with the
General's compliments, and took another glass for himself.  Cheers!  Now
let's see, 1 st brigade -'and he looked around.  You must remember
Hooper, or Dennison?  He remembered them and others, dozens of them,
some were vaguely familiar features, just shades at the edge of his
memory, but others he knew well, had liked, or disliked, and even hated.
With some he had shared food, or passed a cigarette butt back and forth,
with others he had shared moments of terror or exquisite boredom; the
good ones, the workers, the cowards and the shirkers and the bullies
were all there, and the whisky came endlessly on silver trays.

They remembered him also, men he had never seen in his life came up to
him.  You remember me, I was section leader at D'Arcy Wood when you and
MacDonald -'And others, Are you the Anders, I thought you'd be older
somehow, your glass is empty, and the whisky kept coming on the silver
trays, and Mark felt tall and clever, for men listened when he talked,
and witty, for men laughed when he jested.

They sat at a table that stretched the full length of the hall and was
covered with a damask cloth of dazzling white; the regimental silver
blinked like heliographs in the candlelight, and now it was champagne
cascading into crystal glass in showers of golden bubbles.  All around,
the comradely uproar of laughter and of raised voices, and each time
Mark lowered his glass, there was a turbaned figure at his side and a
dark hand poising the green bottle over his glass.

He sagged back in his chair with his thumbs hooked in his armpits and a
black cigar sticking a foot out of his mouth, Hear!  Hearing!  and Quite
righting!  the after dinner speakers, as owlish and wise as the best of
them, exchanging knowledgeable nods of agreement with his neighbours,
while the ruby port smouldered in his glass.

When the General rose from his centre seat at the cross piece of the
table, there was an audible stir in the company which had become heavy
and almost somnolent with port and long meandering speeches.  They
grinned at each other now in anticipation, and though Mark had never
heard Sean Courtney speak, he sensed the interest and recharged
enthusiasm and he sat up in his chair.

The General did not disappoint them, he started with a story that left
them stunned for a moment, gasping for breath, before they could bellow
with laughter.  Then he went at them in a relaxed easy manner that
seemed casual and natural, but using words like a master swordsman using
a rapier, a jest, an oath, a solid piece of good sense, something they
wanted to hear, followed immediately by something that disturbed them,
singling out individuals for praise or gentle censure.  Third this year
in the national polo championships, gentlemen, an honour which the
regiment carried easily last year, but a certain gentleman seated at
this board has chosen to ride for the sugar planters now, a decision
which it is his God-given right to make, and which I am certain not one
of us here would condemn, and Sean Courtney paused, grinning evilly and
smoothing his whiskers, while the entire company booed raucously and
hammered the table with their dessert spoons.  The victim flushed to
vivid scarlet and squirmed in the cacophony.  However, good news and
great expectations for the Africa Cup this year.  By dint of adroit
sleuthing, it has been discovered that dwelling in our very midst, and
the next moment the entire hall was slapping palm to palm, a great
thunder of sound, and heads were craning down to Mark's end of the
table, while the General nodded and beamed at him, and when Mark slumped
down quickly in his seat and tried to make his lanky frame fold like a
carpenter's ruler, Sean Courtney called, Stand up, son, let them get a
look at you. Mark rose uncertainly and bobbed his head left and right,
and not until later did it occur to him that he had been skilfully
manoeuvred into accepting their applause, that in doing so, he was
committed.  It was the first time he witnessed from a front-row seat the
General handling the destiny of a man and achieving his object without
apparent effort.

He was pondering this, a little muzzily, as he steered for the safe base
of the next lamp post.  It would, of course, have been wiser and safer
to accept the offer made to him by one of the rickshaw drivers at the
gates of the fort, when he had reeled out into the street two hours
after midnight.

However, his recent unemployment and extravagant expenditure on fancy
clothing had left him no choice as to his means of transport.  He faced
now a walk of some three miles in the dark, and his progress was erratic
enough to make it a long journey.

He reached the lamp post and braced himself just as a black Rolls-Royce
stopped beside him and the back door swung open.

Get in!  said the General, and as Mark tumbled ungracefully into the
soft leather seat, an iron grip steadied him.  You are not a drinking
man.  It was a statement, not a question, and Mark had to agree.  No,
sir.  You've got a choice, said the General.  Learn, or leave it alone
completely.  Sean had waited for almost half an hour, the Rolls parked
under the banyan trees, for Mark to appear through the gates, and he had
been on the point of abandoning the evening and giving his driver the
order to return to Emoyeni when Mark had tottered out into the street,
brushed away the importunate rickshaw drivers and set off like a crab
along the pavement, travelling further sideways than forward.

The Rolls had crept silently along behind him with the headlights dark,
and Sean Courtney had watched with a benevolent smile the young man's
erratic progress.  He felt a gentle indulgence for the lad and for
himself, for the odd little quirks and whims with which he still
surprised himself occasionally.  At sixty-two years of age, a man should
know himself, know every strength and be able to exploit it, know every
weakness, and have built a secure buttress against it.

Yet here he was, for no good reason that he could fathom, becoming more
and more emotionally involved with a young stranger.  Spending time and
thought for he was not sure what end.

Perhaps the boy reminded him of himself at the same age, and now he
thought about it, he did detect beneath the warm glow of champagne in
his belly the nostalgia for that troubled time of doubt and shining
ambition when a boy stood on the threshold of manhood.

Perhaps it was that he admired, no, cherished was a better word,
cherished special quality in any animal.  A fine horse, a good do& a
young man, that excellence that horsemen might call blood, or a
dog-handler class.  He had detected it in Mark Anders, and as even a
blood horse might be damaged by bad handling or a class dog spoiled, so
a young man who had the same quality needed advice and direction and
opportunity to develop his full capability.  There was too much
mediocrity and too much dross in this world, Sean thought, so that when
he found class, he was drawn strongly to it.

Or perhaps again, and suddenly he felt that terrible black wave of
mourning sweep over him, or perhaps it is simply that I do not have a
son.

There had been three sons: one had died before he had lived, still-born
in the great wilderness beyond the Limpopo River.

Another had been borne by a woman who was not his wife and the son had
called another man father.

Here Sean felt the melancholy deepen, laden with guilt; but this son was
dead also, burned to a charred black mass in the flimsy machine of wood
and canvas in which he had flown the sky.  The words of Garry's
dedication to his new book were clear in Sean's mind.  This book is
dedicated to Captain Michael Courtney, D.  F.  C one of the Young Eagles
who will fly no more.  Michael had been Sean's natural son, made in the
belly of his brother's wife.

The third son lived still, but he was a son in name only and Sean would
have changed that name had it been within his power.  Those ugly
incidents that preceded Dirk Courtney's departure from Ladyburg so many
years before, among them casual arson and careless murder, were nothing
compared to the evil deeds he had perpetrated since his return.  Those
close to him knew better than to speak the name Dirk Courtney in his
hearing.  Now he felt the melancholy change to the old anger, and to
forestall it, he leaned forward in his seat and tapped the chauffeur's
shoulder.

Pull up beside him, he said, pointing to Mark Anders.

What you need is fresh air, Sean Courtney told Mark.  It will sober you
up or make you puke, either of which is desirable.  And by the time the
Rolls parked at the foot of West Street pier, Mark had, by dint of
enormous mental effort, regained control of his eyes.  At first, every
time he peered at the General beside him, he had the nauseous certainty
that there was a third eye growing in the centre of his forehead, and
that he had multiple ears on each side of his head, like ripples on the
surface of a pond.

Mark's voice had at first been as uncontrolled, and he had listened with
mild disbelief to the odd blurred sounds with which his lips had replied
to the General's questions and comments.  But when he frowned with the
effort, and spoke with exaggerated slowness and articulation, it sounded
vaguely intelligible.

However, it was only when they walked side by side down through the
loose sand to the edge of the sea where the outgoing tide had left the
sand hard and wet and smooth, that he began to listen to what the
General was saying and it wasn't tea-party talk.

He was talking of power, and powerful men, he was talking of endeavour
and reward, and though his voice was rumbling and relaxed, yet it was
like the purr of an old lion who has just killed, and would kill again.

Somehow Mark sensed that what he was hearing was of great value, and he
hated himself for the alcohol in his veins that slowed his mind and
haltered his tongue.  He fought it off actively.

They walked down along the glistening strip of wet smooth sand, that was
polished yellow by the sinking glow of the late moon; the sea smelt of
salt and iodine, a crisp antiseptic smelt, and the little breeze chilled
him so that he shivered even in his dinner jacket.  But soon his brain
was keeping pace with that of the burly figure that limped beside him,
and slowly a sense of excitement built up within him as he heard things
said that he had only sensed deep in some secret place of his soul,
ideas that he recognized but that he had believed were his alone.

His tongue lost its drag and blur and he felt suddenly bright as a
blade, and light as the swallow that drinks in flight as it skims the
water.

He remembered how he had at one time suspected that this man might have
been responsible in some way for the loss of Andersland, and the old
man's death.  But now those suspicions smacked almost of blasphemy, and
he thrust them aside to throw all his mind into the discussion in which
he found himself so deeply involved.

He never did suspect until long afterwards how important that single
night's talk would be in his life, and if he had known perhaps his
tongue would have seized up solid in his mouth and his brain refused to
keep pace, for he was undergoing a rigorous examination.  Ideas thrown
at Mark seemingly at random were for him to pick up and carry forward or
toreject and leave lying.  Every question raked conscience and bared his
principles, and gradually, skilfully he was forced to commit himself on
every subject from religion to politics, from patriotism to morals. Once
or twice the General chuckled, You're a radical, did you know that?  But
I suppose I was at your age, we all want to change the world.  Now tell
me what do you think about, and the next question was not related to the
one that preceded it.  There are ten million black men in this country,
and a million whites.  How do you think they are going to be able to
live together for the next thousand years?  Mark gulped at the enormity
of the question, and then began to talk.

The moon paled away in the coming of the dawn, and Mark walked on into
an enchanted world of flaming ideas and amazing visions.  Though he
could not know it, his excitement was shared.  Louis Botha, the old
warrior and statesman, had said to Sean once, Even the best of us gets
old and tired, Sean, and when that happens, a man should have somebody
to whom he can pass the torch, and let him carry it on.  With a
suddenness that took them both by surprise, the night was passed, and
the sky flamed with gold and pink.

They stood side by side, and watched the rim of the sun rise from the
dark green sea and climb swiftly into the sky.  I have needed an
assistant for many years now.  My wife hounds me, Sean chuckled at the
hyperbole, and I have promised her I will find one, but I need somebody
quick and bright and trustworthy.  They are hard to find.  Sean's cigar
was long dead and horribly chewed.  He took it from his mouth and
examined it with mild disapproval before tossing it into the creeping
wavelets at his feet.  It would be a hell of a job, no regular hours, no
set duties, and, God knows, I'd hate to work for me, because I am a
cantankerous, unsympathetic old bastard.  But on the other hand one
thing I'd guarantee, whoever took the job wouldn't die of boredom, and
he'd get to learn a thing or two He turned now, thrusting his head
forward and staring into Mark's face.  The wind had ruffled his beardand
he had long ago stripped off his black tie and thrust it into a pocket.
The golden rays of the rising sun caught his eyes and they were a
peculiarly beautiful shade of blue.

Do you want the job?  he demanded.

Yes, sir, Mark answered instantly, dazzled by the prospect of an endless
association with this incredible man.

You haven't asked about the money?  growled Sean.  Oh, the money isn't
important.  Sean cocked a beetling black eyebrow over the amused blue
twinkle of his eye.  The money is always important.  The next time Mark
entered the gates of Emoyeni was to enter a new life, an existence
beyond any he had ever imagined; and yet, in all the overpowering new
experience, even in the whirl of having to adjust to new ideas, to the
daunting procession of visitors and endless new tasks, there was one
moment that Mark dreaded constantly.  This was his next meeting with
Miss Storm Courtney.

However, he would never know if it had not been carefully arranged by
General Courtney, but Storm was not at Emoyeni on Mark's first day, nor
during the days that followed, although the memory of her presence
seemed every-where in the portraits and photographs in every room,
especially the full-length oil in the library where Mark spent much of
his time.  She was dressed in a fulllength ivory-coloured dress, seated
at the grand piano in the main drawing-room, and the artist had managed
to capture a little of her beauty and spirit.  Mark found the
tantalizing scrutiny which the portrait directed at him disconcerting.

Quickly a relationship was established between Mark and the General, and
during the first few days, the last of Sean's misgivings were set at
rest.  It was seldom that the close proximity of another human being
over an extended period of time did not begin to irritate Sean, and yet
with this youngster he found himself seeking his company.  His first
ideas had been that Mark should be taught to deal with day-to-day
correspondence and all the other timeconsuming trivia, leaving Sean a
little more leisure and time to devote to the important areas of
business and politics.

Now he would drift through into the library at odd times to discuss an
idea with Mark, enjoying seeing it through younger and fresher eyes.  Or
he might dismiss his chauffeur and have Mark drive the Rolls out to one
of the sawmills, or to a board meeting in the city, sitting up front
beside him on the journey and reminiscing about those days in France, or
going further back to the time before Mark was born, enjoying Mark's
engrossing interest in talks of gold-prospecting and ivory-hunting in
the great wilderness beyond the Limpopo River in the north.  There will
be an interesting debate in the Assembly today, Mark.  I am going to
give that bastard Hendricks hell on the Railway budget.  Drive me down,
and you can listen from the visitors'gallery.  Those letters can wait
until tomorrow. There's been a breakdown at the Umvoti Sawmill, we'll
take the shotguns and on the way back try and pick up a couple of
guineafowl.  Drillhall at eight o'clock tonight, Mark.  If you aren't
doing anything important, which was a command, no matter how delicate
the phrasing, and Mark found himself sucked gently back into the ranks
of the peace-time regiment. He found it different from France, for he
now had powerful patronage.  You are no use to me as third rank marker.
You're getting to know the way I work, son, and I want you at hand even
when we are playing at soldiers.

Besides, and here Sean grinned that evil, knowing grin, you need a
little time for range practice.  At the next turn-out, still not
accustomed to the speed with which things happened in the world ruled by
Sean Courtneyo Mark found himself in the full fig of Second Lieutenant,
including Sam Browne cross-strap and shining single pips an his
shoulders.  He had expected antagonism, or at least condescension from
his brother officers, but found that when he was placed in command of
range drill, he was received with universal enthusiasm.

In the household Mark's standing was not at first clear.

He was awed by the mistress of Ernoyeni, by her mature beauty and cool
efficiency.  She was remote but courteous for the first two weeks or so,
referring to him as Mr Anders, and any request was preceded by a
meticulous please and followed by an equally punctilious thank you.

When the General and Mark were at Emoyeni for the midday meal, Mark was
served by one of the servants from a silver tray in the library, and in
the evenings, after he had taken his leave from the General, he climbed
on the elderly Abel Square Four motorcycle he had acquired, and
clattered off down the hill into the sweltering basin of the city to his
verminous lodgings in Point Road.

Ruth Courtney was watching Mark with an even shrewder eye than her
husband had used.  Had he in any way fallen short of her standards, she
would have had no compunction in immediately bringing all her influence
to bear on Sean for his dismissal.

One morning while Mark was at work in the library, Ruth came in from the
garden with an armful of cut flowers.  Don't let me disturb you.  She
began to arrange the flowers in the silver bowl on the central table.
For the first few minutes she worked in silence, and then in a natural
and friendly manner, she began to chat to Mark, quietly drawing from him
the details of his domestic arrangements where he slept and ate, and who
did his laundry, and secretly she was appalled.  You must bring your
laundry up here, to be done with the household washing.  That's very
kind of you, Mrs Courtney. I don't want to be a nuisance.  Oh nonsense,
there are two dhobi wallahs with nothing else to do but wash and iron.
Even Ruth Courtney, one of the first ladies of Natal, still a renowned
beauty as a matron well past forty years of age, was not immune to
Mark's unstudied appeal.  To his natural charm was added the beneficial
effect his coming had upon her own man.

Sean seemed younger, more lighthearted in these last weeks and watching
it, she realized that it was not only the burden of routine work that
had been lifted from him.

The boy was giving him back a little of that spirit of youth, that
freshness of thought, that energy and enthusiasm for the things of life
that had gone slightly stale and seemed no longer quite worth the
effort.

It was their custom to spend the hour before bed in Ruth's boudoir, Sean
lounging in a quilted dressing-gown, watching her brush out her hair and
cream her face, smoking his last cigar, discussing the day's events
while he enjoyed her still slim lithe body under the thin silk of her
nightdress, feeling the slow awakening of his own body in anticipation
of the moment when she would turn from watching him in the mirror and
rise, holding out one hand to him, and lead him through into the
bedroom, to the huge four-poster bed under the draped and tasselled
velvet canopy.

Three or four times in the weeks since Mark's arrival in the household,
Sean had made a remark so radical, so unlike his usual old-fashioned
conservative self, that Ruth had dropped the silver hairbrush into her
lap and turned to stare at him.

Each time he had laughed self-consciously and held up a hand to prevent
her teasing.  All right, I know what you're going to say, but I was
discussing it with young Mark.  He would chuckle again.  That boy talks
a lot of good sense.  Then one evening after Mark had been with them
just over a month, they had sat in companionable silence for a while
when Sean said suddenly, Young Mark, doesn't he remind you of Michael? I
hadn't noticed, no, I don't think so.  Oh, I don't mean in looks.  It's
just something about the way he thinks.  Ruth felt the old crushing
regret welling up within her like a cold dark tide.  She had never given
Sean a son.  It was the only true regret, the only shadow on all their
sunlit years together.  Her shoulders sagged now, as though under the
burden of her regret, and she looked at herself in the mirror, seeing
the guilt of her inadequacy in her own eyes.

Sean had not noticed, had gone on blithely, Well, I can hardly wait
until February.  It's going to break Hamilton's heart to hand over that
big silver mug.  Mark's changed the whole spirit of the team, They know
they can win now, with him shooting number one.  She had listened
quietly, hating herself for not being able to give him what he had
wanted so badly, and she glanced down at the little carved statue of the
God Thor on her dressing-table.  It had stood there all these years
since Sean had given it to her, a talisman of fertility.  Storm had been
conceived in the height of a raging electrical thunderstorm, and had
been named for it.  He had joked that it needed thunder and had given
her the little godlet.  A fat lot of help you were, she thought
bitterly, and looked up at her own body under the silk in the mirror. So
good to look at, and so damned useless!  She did not usually curse, it
was a measure of her distress.  Lovely as it was, her body would not
bear another child.  All it was good for now was to give him pleasure.
She stood up abruptly, her nightly ritual incomplete, and she crossed to
where he sat and removed the cigar from his lips, crushing it out
deliberately in the big glass ashtray.

Surprised, he looked up at her, about to ask a question, but the words
never reached his lips.  Her eyelids were half hooded, they drooped
languorously, and her lips pouted slightly to reveal the white small
teeth, and there were spots of hectic colour on her high beautifully
moulded cheek-bones.

Sean knew this expression and the mood it heralded.  He felt his heart
lurch and then begin to pound like an animal in the cage of his ribs.
Usually their loving was a thing of depth and mutual compassion, a thing
grown strong and good over the years, a complete blending of two
persons, symbolic of their lives together, but once in a rare while,
Ruth would droop her eyelids and pout that way with the colour in her
cheeks, and what followed was so wild and wanton and uncontrolled that
it reminded him of some devastating natural phenomenon.

She pushed one slim pale hand into his gown, and long nails raked
lightly across his stomach so that his skin was instantly tingling and
alive, and she leaned forward and with the other hand twined her fingers
into his beard and twisted his face up to her and kissed him-in full on
the lips, thrusting a sharp pink tongue deep into his mouth, Sean let
out a growl, and seized her, trying to draw her down into his lap and at
the same time pulling open the bodice of her nightdress so that her
small pointed breasts fell free, but she was quick and strong, twisting
out of his grip, the ivory and pink sheen of her skin glowing through
the transparent silk of her gown and her bared breasts joggling
delightfully as she flew on long shapely legs into the bedroom, her
laughter mocking and goading and inviting.

The following morning, Ruth cut an armful of crimson and white
carnations and carried them into the library where young Mark Anders was
at work.  He stood up immediately and as she replied to his greetin& she
studied his face.  She had not truly realized how handsome he was, and
she saw now that it was a face that would age well.

There was a good bone structure and a proud strong nose.

He was one of those lucky ones who would improve with the addition of a
few wrinkles and lines around the eyes, and a little silver in the hair.
That was a long way off, however, now it was the eyes that demanded
attention.

Yes, she thought, looking into his eyes.  Sean is right.

He has the same strength and goodness that Michael had.  She watched him
surreptitiously as she worked at her flower arrangement, deliberately
picking the words as she began to chat to him, and when she had
completed the flower bowl, she stood back to admire her work and spoke
without looking at him.  Why don't you join us for lunch on the terrace,
Mark?  and the use of his name was deliberate, both of them very
conscious of it as it was spoken.  Unless you'd prefer to continue
eating here.  Sean glanced up from his newspaper as Mark came out on to
the terrace, but his expression did not change as Ruth waved Mark to the
seat opposite him and he immediately plunged back into the paper and
angrily read out the editorial to them, mocking the writer by his tone
and emphasis before crumpling the news sheet and dropping it beside his
chair.  That man's a raving bloody idiot, they should lock him up.

Well sir, Mark began delicately.

Ruth sighed a silent breath of relief for she had not consulted Sean on
the new luncheon arrangements, but the two of them were instantly in
deep discussion, and when the main course was served, Sean growled, Take
care of the chicken, Mark, and I'll handle the duck, so that the two of
them were carving and arguing at the same time, like members of the same
family, and she covered her smile with her table napkin as Sean
ungraciously conceded a debating point to his junior.  I'm not saying
you are right, of course, but if you are, then how do you account for
the fact that And he was attacking again from a different direction, and
Ruth turned to listen as Mark adroitly defended himself again; as she
listened, she began to appreciate a little more why Sean had chosen him.

It was over the coffee that Mark learned at last what had become of
Storm Courtney.

Sean suddenly turned to Ruth.  Was there a letter from Storm this
morning?  When she shook her head he went on, That damned uppity little
missy must learn a few manners, there hasn't been a letter in nearly two
weeks.

just where are they supposed to be now?  Rome, said Ruth.  Rome! grunted
Sean.  With a bunch of Latin lovers pinching her backside. Sean! Ruth
reprimanded him primly.  Beg your pardon.  He looked a little abashed,
and then grinned wickedly.  But she's probably putting it in the correct
position for pinching right at this moment, if I know her. That night
when Mark sat down to write to Marion Littlejohn, he realized how the
mere mention of Storm Courtney's name had altered his whole attitude to
the girl he was supposed to marry.  Under the enormous workload which
Sean Courtney had dropped casually on his shoulders, Mark's letter to
Marion was no longer a daily ritual, and at times there were weeks
between them.

On the other hand, her letters to him never faltered in regularity and
warmth, but he found that it was not really the pressure of work that
made him keep deferring their next meeting.  He sat now chewing the end
of his pen until the wood splintered, seeking words and inspiration,
finding it difficult to write down flowery expressions of undying love
on every page; each empty page was as daunting as a Saharan crossin& yet
it had to be filled.  We will be travelling to Johannesburg next weekend
to compete in the annual shooting match for the Africa Cup, he wrote,
and then pondered how to get a little more mileage out of that
intelligence.  It should be good for at least a page.

Marion Littlejohn belonged to a life that he had left behind him when he
passed through the gates of Ernoyeni.

He faced this fact at last, but was none the less dismayed by the sense
of guilt the knowledge brought him, and he tried to deny it and continue
with the letter but images kept intruding themselves, and the main of
these was a picture of Storm Courtney, gay and sleek, glitteringly
beautiful and as unobtainable as the stars.

The Africa Cup stood almost as high as a man's chest on a base of
polished ebony.  The Ernoyem houseboys had polished it for three days
before they had achieved the lustre that General Courtney found
acceptable, and now the cup formed the centre-piece of the buffet table,
elevated on a pyramid of yellow roses.

The buffet was set in the antechamber to the main ballroom, and both
rooms overflowed with the hundreds of guests that Sean Courtney had
invited to celebrate his triumph.  He had even invited Colonel Hamilton
of the Cape Town Highlanders to bring his senior officers by Union
Castle liner, travelling first class, as the General's guests to attend
the ball.

Hamilton had refused by means of a polite thank-you note, four lines
long; without counting the address and the closing salutation.  The cup
had been in the Cape Town Castle since it had been presented by Queen
Victoria in the first year of the Boer War, and Hamilton's mortification
added not a little to Sean Courtney's expansive mood.

For Mark it had been the busiest period he had known since coming to
Emoyeni.  Ruth Courtney had come to place more and more trust in Mark,
and under her supervision he had done much of the work of preparing the
invitations and handling the logistics of food and liquor.

Now she had him dancing with all of the ugly girls who would otherwise
have sat disconsolately along the wall, and at the end of each dance,
the General summoned him with an imperious wave of his cigar above the
heads of his guests to the buffet table where he had taken up a
permanent stance close to the cup.  Councillor, I want you to meet my
new assistant Mark this is Councillor Evans.  That's right, Pussy, this
is the young fellow who clinched it for us.  And while Mark stood,
colouring with embarrassment, the General repeated for the fifth or
sixth time that evening a shot by shot account of the final day's
competition when the two leading regiments had tied in the team events,
and the judges had asked for an individual re-shoot to break the
deadlock.  A cross wind gusting up to twenty or thirty miles an hour,
and the first shoot at two hundred yards Mark marvelled at the intense
pleasure this trinket gave the General.  A man whose fortune was almost
beyond calculation, whose land could be measured by the hundred square
miles, who owned priceless paintings and antique books, jewellery and
precious stones, houses and horses and yachts, but none of them at this
moment as prized as this glittering trifle.  Well, I was marking myself,
the General had taken enough of his own good whisky to begin acting out
his story, and he made the gesture of crouching down in the bunker and
looking up at the targets, and I don't mind telling you that it was the
worst hour of my life.

Mark smiled in agreement.  The Highlander marksman had matched him shot
for shot.  Each of them signalled as a bulls-eye by the flags of the
markers.  They both shot possibles at two hundred yards, and then again
at five hundred yards, it was only at the thousand-yard targets that
young Mark's uncanny ability to judge the crosswind, By this time,
Sean's audience was cow-eyed with boredom, and there were still ten
rounds of deliberate and another ten of rapid fire to hear about.  Mark
sensed panic signals across the ballroom and he looked up.

Ruth Courtney was beside the main doors of the ballroom and with her was
the Zulu butler.  A man with warrior blood in his veins and the usual
bearing of a chief, now he was grey with some emotion close to fear and
his expression was pitiable as he spoke rapidly to his mistress.

Ruth touched his arm in a gesture of comfort and dismissal, and then
turned to wait for Mark.

As he hurried to her across the empty dance floor he could not help but
notice again how much mother resembled daughter.  Ruth Courtney still
had the figure of an athletic young woman, kept slim and firm and
graceful by hard riding and long walking, and only when he was close to
her were the small lines and tiny blemishes in her smooth ivory skin
apparent.  Her hair was dressed high on her head, scorning the
fashionable shorter cut, and her gown had a simple elegance that showed
off the lines of her body and the small shapely breasts.  One of her
guests reached her before Mark did, and she was relaxed and smiling
while Mark hovered close at hand until she excused herself and Mark
hurried to her.  Mark.  Her worry showed only in her eyes as she looked
up at him towering above her, but her smile was light and steady.  There
is going to be trouble.  We have an unwelcome visitor.  What do you want
me to do?  He is in the entrance hall now.  Please, take him through to
the General's study, and stay with him until I can warn my husband and
send him to you.  Will you do that?  Of course.  She smiled her thanks,
and then as Mark turned away she stopped him with a touch.  Mark, try to
stay with them.  I don't want them to be alone together.  I'm not sure
what might happen.  Then her reserve cracked.  In God's name why did he
have to come here, and tonight when, She stopped herself then, and the
smile firmed on her lips, steady and composed, but they both knew that
she had been going to say, Tonight when Sean has been drinking.  Mark
now knew the General well enough to share her concern.  When Sean
Courtney was drinking, he was capable of anything, from genial and
expansive bonhomie to dark, violent and undirected rage.  I'll do what I
can, he agreed, and then, Tell me, who is it?

Ruth bit her lower lip, the strain and worry clear on her face for a
moment before she checked herself, and her expression was neutral when
she replied.  It's his son, Dirk, Dirk Courtney.  Mark's own shock
showed so clearly that she frowned at him.

What's wrong Mark?  Do you know him?

Mark recovered quickly.  No.  I have heard of him, but I don't know him.
There is bad blood, Mark.  Very bad.  Be careful She left him and
drifted quietly away across the floor, nodding to a dowager, stopping to
exchange a word and a smile, and then drifting on to where Sean Courtney
still held court in the buffet room.

Mark paused in the long gallery, and looked at himself in one of the
tall gilt-framed mirrors.  his face looked pale and strained, and when
he smoothed his hair, his fingers were trembling slightly.

Suddenly he realized that he was afraid; dread was like a heavy weight
in his bowels, and his breathing was cramped and painful.

He was afraid of the man he was going to meet, The man that he had
stalked so long and painstakingly, and who he had come to know so well
in his imagination.

in his mind he had built up an awesome figure, a diabolic figure
wielding great and malignant power, and now he was consumed by dread at
the prospect of meeting him face to face.

He went on down the gallery, his footsteps deadened by the thick pile of
the carpet, his eyes not seeing the art treasures that adorned the
panelled walls, for a sense of imminent danger blinded him to all else.

At the head of the marble staircase, he paused and leaned out with one
hand on the balustrade to look down into the entrance hall.

A man stood alone in the centre of the black and white checkered marble
floor.  He wore a black overcoat, with a short cape hanging from the
shoulders, a garment which enhanced his size.

His hands were clasped behind his back, and he balanced on the balls of
his feet with head and jaw thrust forward aggressively, an attitude so
like that of his father that Mark blinked in disbelief.  His bare head
was a magnificent profusion of dark curls which were shot by the
overhead candelabra with sparkling chestnut highlights.

Mark started down the wide staircase and the man lifted his head and
looked at him.

Mark was struck instantly by the man's fine looks, and then immediately
afterwards by his resemblance to the General.  He had the same powerful
jaw, and the shape of his head, the set of his eyes and the lines of his
mouth were identical, yet the son was infinitely more handsome than the
father.

It was the noble head of a Michelangelo statue, the beauty of his David
and the magnificent strength of his Moses, yet for all his beauty he was
human, not the implacable monster of Mark's imagining, and the
unreasonable fear released its grip on Mark's chest, and he could smile
a small welcoming smile as he came down the steps.

Dirk watched him without blinking or moving, and it was only when Mark
reached the checkered marble floor that he realized how tall the man
was.  He towered three inches over Mark, and yet his body was so well
proportioned that its height did not seem excessive.  Mr Courtney?  Mark
asked, and the man inclined his head slightly without bothering to
reply.  The diamond that clasped the white silk cravat at his throat
flashed sullenly.  Who are you, boy?  Dirk Courtney asked, and his voice
had the depth and timbre to match his frame.  I am the General's
personal assistant.  Mark did not let the disparaging form of address
ruffle his polite smile, though he knew that Dirk Courtney was his
senior by less than ten years.  Dirk Courtney ran an unhurried glance
from his head to his shoes, taking in the cut of Mark's evening dress
and every other detail in one casual sweep before dismissing him as
unimportant.  Where is my father?  He turned to adjust his cravat in the
nearest mirror.  Does he know I've been waiting here for almost twenty
minutes?  The General is entertaining, but he will see you presently. In
the meantime, will you care to wait in the General's study?  if you will
follow me.  Dirk Courtney stood in the middle of the study floor and
looked about him.  The old boy is keeping grand style these days.  He
smiled with a flash of startlingly white teeth and then crossed to one
of the studded leather armchairs by the stone fireplace.  Get me a
brandy and soda, boy.  Mark swung open the dummy-fronted bookcase,
selected a Courvoisier Cognac from the orderly ranks of bottles, poured
some into a goblet, squirting soda on top of it, and carried it to Dirk
Courtney.

He sipped the drink and nodded, sprawling in the big leather chair with
the insolent grace of a resting leopard, and then once again he surveyed
the room.  His gaze, checking at each of the paintings, at each of the
items of value which decorated the room, was calculating and thoughtful,
and he asked his next question carelessly, not really interested in the
answer.  What did you say your name was?  Mark stepped sideways, so that
his view of the man's face was uninterrupted, and he watched carefully
as he replied.  My name is Anders, Mark Anders.  For a second the name
had no effect, then it struck Dirk and a remarkable transformation
passed over his features.

Watching it happen, Mark's fear was regenerated in full strength.

When he had been a lad, the old man had snared a marauding leopard in a
heavy steel spring-tooth trap, and when they had walked up to the site
the following morning, the leopard had charged them, coming up short
against the heavy retaining chain within three feet of Mark and with its
eyes almost on a level with his own.  He had never forgotten the
terrible blazing malevolence in those eyes.

Now he was seeing the same expression, an emotion so murderous and
unspeakably evil that he drew back involuntarily.

It lasted only an instant, but it seemed that the entire face changed,
from extravagant beauty to grotesque ugliness and back to beauty in the
time it takes to draw breath.

Dirk's voice, when he spoke, was measured and controlled, the eyes
veiled and the expression of polite indifference.  Anders? I've heard
the name before He thought for a moment as though trying to place it,
and then dismissed it as unimportant, his attention returning to the
Thomas Baines painting above the fireplace, but in that instant Mark had
learned with complete certainty that the vague, unformed suspicions he
had harboured so long were based on hard cold fact.  He knew now beyond
any doubt that something evil had happened, that the sale of Andersland
and the old man's death and burial in an unmarked grave were the result
of deliberate planning, and that the men who had hunted him on the
Ladyburg escarpment and again in the wilderness beyond Chaka's Gate were
all part of a design engineered by this man.

He knew that at last he had identified his adversary, yet to hunt him
down and bring him to retribution was to be a task that might be beyond
his capability, for the adversary seemed invincible in his strength and
power.

He turned away to tidy the pile of documents on the General's desk, not
trusting himself to look again at his enemy, lest he betray himself
completely.

Already he had exposed himself dangerously, but it had been necessary,
an opportunity too heaven-sent to allow to pass.  in exchange for
exposing himself he had forced his enemy to do the same, he had forced
him into the open, and he counted himself the winner in the exchange.

There was another factor now that had made his exposure less than
suicidal.  Whereas before he had been friendless and alone, now he was
protected by his mere association with Sean Courtney.

If they had succeeded that night on the Ladyburg escarpment or again at
Chaka's Gate, it would be the unimportant passing of a rootless vagrant;
now his death or disappearance would rouse the immediate attention of
General Courtney, and he doubted if even Dirk Courtney could afford that
risk.

Mark looked up quickly from the papers, and Dirk Courtney was watching
him again, but now his expression was neutral and his eyes were hooded
and guarded.  He began to speak, but checked himself as they heard the
heavy dragging tread in the passage and they both turned expectantly to
the door as it was flung open.

Sean Courtney seemed to fill the entire doorway, the top of the great
shaggy head almost touching the lintel and the shoulders wide as the
cross-trees of a gallows as he leaned both hands on the head of his cane
and glared into the room.

His eyes went immediately to the tall elegant figure that rose from the
leather armchair, the craggy sun-browaed features darkening with blood
as he recognized him.

The two men confronted each other silently, and Mark found himself a
fascinated spectator, as he followed intuitively the play of emotions,
the reawakening of the memory of ancient wrongs, and of the elemental
love and affection of son for father and father for son that had long
ago been strangled and buried, but were now exhumed like some loathsome
rotting corpse, more horrible for once having lived and been strong.
Hello, Father, Dirk Courtney spoke first, and at the sound of his voice,
the rigidity went out of Sean's shoulders, and the anger out of his eyes
to be replaced by a sense of sadness, of regret for something that once
had value but was lost beyond hope, so his question sounded like a sigh.

Why do you come here?  Can we speak alone, without strangers?  Mark left
the desk and crossed to the door, but Sean stopped him with a hand on
the shoulder.  There are no strangers here.  Stay, Mark.  it was the
kindest thing that anybody had ever said to Mark Anders, and the
strength of the affection he felt for Sean Courtney at that moment was
greater than he had ever felt for another human being.

Dirk Courtney shrugged, and smiled for the first time, a light faintly
mocking smile.  You were always too trusting, Father. Sean nodded as he
crossed heavily to the chair behind his desk.  Yes, and who should
remember that better than you.  Dirk's smile faded.  I came here hoping
that we might forget, that we might look for forgiveness from each
other.  Forgiveness?  Sean asked, looking up quickly.  You will grant me
forgiveness, for what?  You bred me, Father.  I am what you made me-Sean
shook his head, denying it, and would have spoken, but Dirk stopped him.
You believe I have wronged you, but I know that you have wronged me.

Sean scowled.  You talk in Circles.  Come to the point.

What do you want that brings you uninvited to this house?  I am your
son.  It is unnatural that we should be parted.  Dirk was eloquent and
convincing, holding out his hands in a gesture of supplication, moving
closer to the massive figure at the desk.  I believe I have the right to
your consideration - he broke off and glanced at Mark.  God damn it,
can't I speak to you without this gawking audience?  Sean hesitated a
moment, was on the point of asking Mark to leave, and then remembered
the promise he had made to Ruth only minutes before.  Don't let him be
alone with you for a moment, Sean.  Promise me you will keep Mark with
you.  I don't trust him, not at all.  He is evil, Sean, and he brings
trouble and unhappiness, I can smell it on him.  Don't be alone with
him.  No.  He shook his head.  If you have something to say, get it over
with.  If not, go, and leave us in peace here.  All right, no more
sentiment, Dirk nodded, and the role of the supplicant dropped from him.
He turned and began to stride up and down the study floor, hands thrust
deep into the pockets of his overcoat.  I'll talk business, and get it
over with.  You hate me now, but when we have worked together, when I
have shared with you the boldest and most imaginative venture this land
has ever known, then we will talk again of sentiment.

Sean was silent.  As a business man now and as a son later.  Do you
agree?  I hear you, said Sean, and Dirk began to talk.

Even Mark could not but stand in admiration of Dirk Courtney's
eloquence, and the winning and persuasive manner in which he used his
fine deep voice and his magnificent good looks; but these were
theatrical tricks, well rehearsed and stagey.

What was spontaneous was the burning, almost fanatical glow of
commitment to his own ideas which radiated from him as he talked and
gestured.  it was easy to believe him, for he so clearly believed
himself.

Using his hands and his voice, he conjured up before his father a vast
empire, endless expanses of rich land, thousands upon thousands o square
miles, a treasure the like of which few men had ever conceived, planted
to cotton and sugar and maize, watered by a gigantic dam that would hold
back an inland sea of sweet, fresh water it was a dream quite
breathtaking in its scope and sweep.  I have half of the land already,
Dirk paused and cupped his hands with fingers stiff and grasping as the
talons of an eagle, here in my hands.  It's mine.  No longer a dream.
And the rest of it?  Sean asked reluctantly, swept along on the torrent
against his will.  It's there, untouched, ripe, ready. Dirk paused
dramatically.  It is as though nature had designed it all for just this
purpose.  The foundations of the dam are there, built by God as though
as a blessing.  So?  Sean grunted sceptically.  Now you are an
instrument of God's will, are you?  And where is this empire he has
promised you?  I own all the land south of the Unikorno River, that is
the half I have already.  He stopped in front of the mahogany desk and
leaned forward with his hands onthepolished wood, thrusting a face that
glowed with the aura of a religious fanatic towards Sean Courtney.  We
will build a dam between the cliffs of Chaka's Gate and dam the whole of
the Bubezi Valley, a lake one hundred and sixty miles long and a hundred
wide, and we'll open the land between there and the Umkomo River and add
it to the land I already own in the south.  Two million acres of arable
and irrigated land!  Think of that!  Mark stared at Dirk Courtney,
utterly appalled by what he had just heard, and then his gaze switched
to Sean Courtney, appealingly, wanting to hear him reject the whole
monstrous idea.

That's tsetse belt, said Sean Courtney at last.  Father, in Germany
three men, Dressel, Kothe and Rochl, have just perfected and tested a
drug called Germanin.  It's a complete cure for tsetse-borne
sleeping-sickness.  It's so secret still that only a handful of men know
about it, Dirk told him eagerly, and then went on, Then we will wipe out
the tsetse fly in the whole valley.  How?  Sean asked, and his genuine
interest was evident.  From the air.  Flying machines spraying pythagra
extract, or other insect-killers.  It was a staggering concept, and Sean
was silent a moment before he asked reluctantly, Has it been done
before?  No Dirk smiled at him.  But we will do it!  You've thought it
out, Sean lay back in his chair and groped absently in the humidor for a
cigar, except for one little detail.  The Bubezi Valley is a proclaimed
area, has been since the time of Chaka, and most of the other ground
between the Bubezi and Nkomo Rivers is either tribal trust land, Crown
land or forestry reserve.  Dirk Courtney lifted a finger at Mark.  Get
me another brandy, boy.  Mark glanced at the General.  Sean nodded
slightly, and there was silence again while Mark poured the brandy and
brought the glass to Dirk.  You trust him?  Dirk asked his father again,
indicating Mark with his head as he accepted the glass.  Get on with it,
man, snapped Sean irritably, not bothering to answer the question.  Dirk
saluted his father with the cut-glass tumber and smiled knowingly.  You
make the laws, Father, you and your friends in the Cabinet and in the
Provincial Assembly, and you can change them.  That's your end of the
bargain.  Sean had drawn a swelling chestful of cigar smoke as Dirk
spoke, and now he let it trickle out so that his head was wreathed in
drifting blue smoke as he replied.  Let's get this clear.  You put up
the money and I force through Parliament legislation repealing the
proclamation of these lands we need between Nkomo and the Bubezi Rivers?
And the Bubezi Valley, Dirk cut in.  And the Bubezi Valley.  Then I
arrange that some front company gets control of that land, even if it's
only on a thousand year ground rental?  Dirk nodded. Yes, that's it.
What about the cost of the dam and the new railroad to the dam, have you
got that type of capital?  Mark could hardly believe what he was
hearing, that Sean Courtney was haggling over the assets of the nation,
treasures that had been entrusted to him as a high representative of the
people.  He wanted to shout out, to lash out at them as they schemed.
The deep affection he had felt moments before turned slowly to a deep
sense of outrage and betrayal.  Nobody has that type of capital, Dirk
told him.  I've had my people work out a rough estimate, and there will
be little change left out of four million pounds.  No individual has
that sort of money.  So? Sean asked, the wreaths of cigar smoke drifted
away from his head and it seemed to Mark that he had aged suddenly.  His
face was grey and haggard, the deep-set eyes turned by a trick of the
light into the dark empty eyesockets of a skull.  The Government will
build them for us, and Dirk chuckled richly, as he resumed his pacing.
Or rather, they'll build dam and railway for the nation.  To open up
valuable natural resources.  Dirk chuckled again.  And imagine the
prestige of the man that shepherds these measures through Parliament,
the man who brings progress and civilization into the wilderness.  He
picked up the brandy glass and tossed off half the contents.  It would
all be named after him, the Sean Courtney Dam perhaps?  It sounds
impressive.  A fitting monument, Father.  Dirk lifted the glass to his
father.  But what of the tribal lands, Dirk?  Sean used his son's name
for the first time, Mark noticed, and glanced sharply at him.

We'll move the blacks out, Dirk told him casually.  Find a place for
them in the hills.  And the game reserves?  Good God, are we going to
let a few wild animals stand in the way of a hundred million pounds?  He
shook the handsome head of curls in mock dismay.  Before we flood the
valley, you can take a hunting safari there.  You always did enjoy the
hunt, didn't you?  I remember you telling me about the big elephant
hunts in the old days.  Yes, Sean nodded heavily.  I killed a lot of
elephants.  o, Father, we are agreed then?  Dirk stopped once more
before Sean, and there was for the first time an anxious air, a small
frown of worry puckering his bold high forehead.  Do we work together?
Sean was silent for seconds longer, staring at the blotter on his
desk-top, then he raised his head slowly and he looked sick and very
old.  What you have told me, the sheer size of it all has taken me
completely by surprise.  He spoke carefully, measuring each word.  It's
big and it's going to take guts, Dirk agreed. But you have never been
frightened before, Father.  You told me once, if you want something, go
out and get it for one thing is sure as all hell, nobody is going to
bring it to you.  "I am older now, Dirk, and a man grows tired, loses
the strength of his youth. You're as strong as a bull.  I want time to
think about it.  How long? Dirk demanded.  Until, Sean faltered, and
thought a moment, until after the next parliamentary sessions.  I will
need to speak to people, examine the feasibility of the whole idea. It's
too long, Dirk scowled, and suddenly the face was no more beautiful, the
eyes changed, coming together into a mean ferrety look.  It's the time I
needAll right, I Dirk agreed, and thrust the scowl aside, smiling down
at the massive seated figure. He began the gesture of putting out his
right hand, but Sean did not look up and instead he thrust the hand back
into his overcoat pocket.  I am neglecting my guests, said Sean softly.
You must excuse me now.  Mark will see you out.  You will let me know?
Dirk demanded.  Yes, said Sean heavily, still not looking up.  I will
let you know.  Mark led Dirk Courtney down to the front doors, and he
felt feverish with anger and hatred for him.  They walked in silence,
side by side, and Mark fought the wild, dark and violent impulses that
kept sweeping over him.  He hated him for having tarnished the man he
had respected and worshipped, for having smeared him with his own filth.

He hated him for the old man and for Andersland, and for the dreadful
but unknown deeds he had ordered, and he hated him for what he was about
to do to that beloved land beyond Chaka's Gate.

At the front doors, Dirk Courtney took his hat from the table and
adjusted it over his eyes as he studied Mark carefully.  I am a good
friend to have, he said softly.  My father trusts you, and I am sure he
confides in you.  You would find me grateful and generous, and I am sure
that, since you overheard our conversation, you will know what small
items of information might interest me.  Mark stared at him.  His lips
felt numb and cold, and his whole body trembled with the effort it took
to control himself.  He did not trust his own voice to speak.

Dirk Courtney turned away abruptly, not bothering with his reply and he
strode lightly down the front steps into the night.

Mark stared after him long after he disappeared.  There was the
crackling snarl of a powerful engine, the crunch of gravel under
spinning wheels, and the twin beams of headlights swept the garden, and
were gone.

Mark's feet kept pace with the furious rush of his anger, and he was
almost running when he reached the General's study.  Without knocking,
he pushed open the door.

Words threatened to explode out of him, bitter condemnation, accusation
and rejection, and he looked to the General's desk, but it was empty.

He was going to warn the General that he would use any means to expose
the foul bargain that had been proposed that evenin& he was going to
voice his disillusion, his horror that Sean Courtney had even listened
to it, let alone given it serious thought and the half-promise of his
support.

The General stood at the window, his back to the room and the wide
square shoulders slumped.  He seemed to have shrunk in size.  General,
Mark's voice was harsh, strident with his anger and determination, I am
leaving now, and I won't be coming back. But before I go, I want to tell
you that I will fight you and your son -Sean Courtney turned into the
room, his shoulders still drooped and his head held at a listening
angle, like that of a blind man, and Mark's voice trailed away, his fury
evaporating.  Mark?  Sean Courtney asked, as though he had forgotten his
existence, and Mark stared at him, not believing what he was seeing, for
Sean Courtney was weeping.

Bright tears had swamped and blinded his eyes and streamed down the
lined and sun-scared cheeks, clinging in fat bright droplets to the
coarse curls of his beard.  It was one of the most distressing sights
Mark had ever witnessed, so harrowing that he wanted to turn away from
in it but could not.  Get me a drink, son.  Sean Courtney crossed
heavily towards his desk and one of his tears fell to the starched snowy
front of his dress shirt, leaving a wet mark on the material.

Mark turned away, and made a show of selecting a glass and pouring
whisky from the heavy decanter.  He drew the simple act out and when he
turned back Sean Courtney was at his desk.

He held a crumpled white handkerchief in his hand that had damp patches
on it, but although his cheeks were dry now, the rims of his eyelids
were pink and inflamed and the marvelous sparkling blue clarity of his
eyes was dulled with swimming liquid.  Thank you, Mark, he said as he
set the glass on the desk in front of him.  Sean did not touch the glass
but stared at it, and when he spoke his voice was low and husky.  I
brought him into the world with my own hands, there was no doctor, I
caught him in my own hands still wet and warm and slippery, and I was
proud.  I carried him on my shoulder, and taught him to talk and ride
and shoot. There are no words to explain what a man feels for his
first-born son, Sean sighed, a broken gusty sound.  I mourned for him
once before, I mourned him as though he was dead, and that was many
years ago.  He drank a little of the whisky and then went on softly, so
softly that Mark could hardly hear the words.  Now he comes back and
forces me to mourn him again, all over again.  I am sorry, General.  I
thought, I believed that you were going to, bargain with him.  That
thought dishonours me.  Sean did not raise his voice nor his eyes. Leave
me now, please Mark.  We'll talk about this again at some other time. At
the door Mark looked back, but the General was not aware of his
presence.  His eyes were still misty, and seemed to stare at a far
horizon.  Mark closed the door very softly.

Despite Sean Courtney's promise to discuss Dirk Courtney's proposition
again, long weeks went by without even the mention of his name. However,
though the life at Ernoyeni seemed to continue in its busy round, yet
there were times when Mark entered the panelled and booklined study to
find the General brooding darkly at his desk, beak-nosed and morbid as
some roosting bird of prey, and he withdrew quietly, respecting his
melancholy, knowing he was still in mourning.  Mark realized it would
take time before he was ready to talk.

During this period there were small changes in Mark's own circumstances.
One night, long after midnight, Sean Courtney had entered his
dressing-room, to find the lights were still on in the bedroom and Ruth
propped on her pillows and reading.  You shouldn't have waited up for
me, he told her severely.  I could have slept on the couch, I prefer you
here.  She closed the book.

What are you reading?  She showed him the title.  D.  H.  Lawrence's new
novel, Women in Love.  Sean grinned as he unbuttoned his shirt.  Did he
teach you anything?  Not yet, but I'm still hoping.  She smiled at him,
and he thought how young and lovely she looked in her lace nightdress.
And you?  Did you finish your speech?  Yes.  He sat to remove his boots.
It's a masterpiece I'm going to tear the bastards to pieces.  I heard
Mark's motorcycle leaving a few minutes ago.

You kept him here until midnightHe was helping me look up some figures
and searching Hansard for me.  It's awfully late.  He's young, grunted
Sean.  And dan-ined well paid for it.  He picked up his boots and
stumped through into the dressing-room, the limp more noticeable now
that he was in his stockinged feet.  And I haven't heard him complain
yet.  He came back in his night-shirt and slipped into bed beside her.
If you are going to keep the poor boy to these hours, it's not fair to
send him back to town every nightWhat do you suggest?  he asked, as he
wound his gold hunter and then placed it on the bedside table.

I could turn the gate-keeper's cottage into a flat for him.

It wouldn't need much, even though it's been deserted for years.  Good
idea, Sean agreed casually.  Keep him onthepremises so I can really get
some work out of him.  You're a hard man, General Courtney.  He rolled
over and kissed her lingeringly, then whispered in her ear.  I am glad
you noticed.  She giggled like a bride and whispered back, I didn't mean
that.  Let's see if we can teach you something that Mr Lawrence could
not, he suggested.

The cottage, once it was repainted and furnished with discards from the
big house, was by Mark's standards palatial, and marvellously free of
vermin and cockroaches.

It was less than half a mile from the main house, and his hours became
as irregular as those of his master, his position became more trusted
and naturally integrated into the household.  His duties came to cover
the entire spectrum from speech-wTiting and researching, answering all
correspondence that was not important enough for the General's own hand,
operating the household accounts, to merely sitting quietly sometimes
when Sean Courtney needed somebody to talk to, and acting as a sounding
board for arguments and ideas.

Yet there was still time for his old love of reading.  There were
thousands of volumes that made up the library at Emoyeni and Mark took
an armful of them down to the cottage each evening and readuntil the
earlyhours, devouring with omnivorous appetite history, biography,
satire, political treatise, Zone Grey, Kipling and Rider Haggard.

Then suddenly there was a new spirit of excitement and upheaval in
Emoyeni as the next session of Parliament approached.  This meant that
the household must uproot itself, and move almost a thousand miles to
Cape Town.

Lightly Ruth Courtney referred to this annual political migration as the
Great Trek, but the description was justified, for it meant moving the
family, fifteen of the senior servants, three automobiles, a dozen
horses, all the clothing, silver, glassware, papers, books and other
incidentals that would be necessary to sustain in the correct style a
busy social and political season of many months, while General Courtney
and his peers conducted the affairs of the nation.  It meant also
closing Emoyeni and opening the house in Newlands, below the squat bulk
of Table Mountain.

In the middle of all this frantic activity, Storm Courtney arrived home
from the grand tour of the British Isles and the Continent on which she
and Irene Leuchars had been chaperoned by Irene's mother.  In her last
letter to Ruth Courtney, Mrs Leuchars had admitted herself to be both
physically and mentally exhausted.  You will never know, y dear, the
terrible weight of responsibility I have been under.  We have been
followed across half the world by droves of eager young men, Americans,
Italians, Frenchmen, Counts, Barons, sons of industrialists, and even
the son of the dictator of a South American Republic.  The strain was
such that at one period I could bear it no longer and locked both girls
in their room.  It was only later that I discovered they had escaped by
means of a fire escape and danced until the following morning at some
disreputable bofte de nuit in Montparnasse.  With the tact of a loving
wife, Ruth refrained from showing the letter to Sean Courtney and so he
prepared to welcome his daughter with all the enthusiasm of a doting
father, unclouded by awareness of her recent escapades.

mark was for once left out of the family preparations and he watched
from the library window when Sean handed his wife into the Rolls.  He
was dressed like a suitor in crisply starched fly-away collar, a gay
silk cravat, dark blue suit with white carnation in the button-hole and
a beaver tilted jauntily over one eye; his beard was trimmed and shamed
and there was a merry anticipatory sparkle in his eyes, and he twirled
his cane lightly as he went round to his own seat.

The Rolls purred away, almost two hours ahead of the time when the
mailship was scheduled to berth at No.  1 wharf.  It was followed at a
respectful distance by the second Rolls which would be needed for the
conveyance of Storm Courtney's baggage.

Mark lunched alone in the study and then worked on, but his
concentration was broken by the imminent arrival of the returning
cavalcade, and when it came, he hurried to the windows.

He caught only a glimpse of Storm as she left the car and danced up the
front steps hand in hand with her mother.

They were followed immediately by the General, his cane snapping a
staccato beat off the marble as he hurried to match their swiftness; on
his face he wore an expression that tried to remain severe and stern but
kept breaking into a wide beaming grin.

Mark heard the laughter and the excited murmur of the servants assembled
to greet her in the entrance hall, and Storm's voice giving a new sweet
tilt to the cadence of the Zulu language as she went to each of them in
turn.

Mark returned to his open books, but did not look down at them.  Instead
he was savouring that one glimpse he had of Storm.

She had grown somehow lovelier, he had not believed it possible, but it
had happened.  It was as though the divine essence of young womanhood
had been distilled in her, all the gaiety and grace, all the warmth and
smoothness, the texture of skin and silken hair, the perfect moulding of
limb and the delicate sculpturing of feature, the musical lilt of her
voice, clear as the ring of crystal, the dancing grace of her movements,
the very carriage of the small perfect head on bare brown shoulders.

Mark sat bemused, acutely aware of the way in which the whole huge house
had changed its mood since she entered it, had become charged with her
spirit, as though it had been waiting for this moment.

Mark had excused himself from dinner that evening, not wanting to
intrude on the family's first evening together.

He intended going down to the drill-hall for the weekly muster, and
afterwards he would dine with some of the other young bachelor officers.
At four o'clock, he left the house through a side entrance and went down
to the cottage to bath and change into his uniform.

He was thundering out of the gates of Emoyeni on the Ariel Square Four
when he remembered that the General had asked for the Railway report to
be left on his desk.  In the distraction of Storm's arrival, he had
forgotten it, and now he swung the heavy machine into a tight turn and
tore back up the driveway.

In the paved kitchen yard he pulled the motorcycle up on its stand, and
went in through the back door.

He was standing at the library table with the report in his hands,
glancing through it quickly to check his own notations, when suddenly
the latch on the door clicked.

He laid aside the report and turned just as the door swung open.

This close, Storm Courtney was lovelier still.  She was three quick
light paces into the room before she realized she was not alone, and she
paused, startled, poised with the grace of a gazelle on the point of
flight.

One hand flew to her mouth, and her fingers were delicately tapered with
long nails that gleamed like pink mother of pearl.  She touched her lips
with the tip of one finger; the lip trembled slightly, wet and smooth
and glistening, and her eyes were huge and a dark fearful blue.  She
looked like a little girl, frightened and alone.

.  Mark wanted to reassure her, to protect her from her own distress, to
say something to comfort her, but he found he could not move or speak.

He need not have worried, her distress lasted only a fleeting beat of
time, just long enough for her to realize that the source of her alarm
was a tall young man, dashing in the dress uniform he wore, a uniform
that set off the slim graceful body, a uniform emblazoned with badges of
courage and of responsibility.

Subtly, with barely a shadow of movement, her whole poise changed.  The
finger on her lip now touched one cheek with an arch gesture, and the
trembling lip stilled and parted slightly into a thoughtful pout.  The
huge eyes, no longer fearful, almost disappeared behind drooping lids,
and then examined Mark critically, lifting her chin to look up into his
face.

Her stance changed also, one hip thrusting forward an inch, the twin
mounds of her breasts lifting and pressing boldly against the gossamer
silk of her bodice.  The tender taunting line of her lips was enough to
make Mark's breath catch in his throat.  Hello, she said.  Her voice,
although low and throaty, bounced the word off Mark's heart, drawing it
out into two syllables that seemed to hang in the air seconds later.
Good evening, Miss Courtney, he answered her, surprised that his voice
came out level and assured.  It was the voice that triggered her memory,
and the blue eyes flew wide as she stared at him.  Slowly her surprise
turned to angry outrage.  The eyes snapped sparks and two bright scarlet
blotches of crimson burned suddenly on the smooth, almost waxy
perfection of her cheeks.  You?  she asked incredulously.  Here?  I'm
afraid so, he agreed, and her consternation was so comical that he
grinned at her, his own misgivings evaporating.  Suddenly he felt
relaxed and at his ease.  What are you doing in this house?  She drew
herself up to her full height, and her manner became frostily dignified.
The full effect was spoiled by the fact that she had to look up at him,
and that her cheeks still burned with agitation.  I am your father's
personal assistant now, and he smiled again.  However, I am sure you
will soon become reconciled to my presence.  We will see about that, she
snapped.  I shall speak to my father.  Oh, I was led to understand that
you and the General had already discussed my employment, or rather my
unemployment.  I, said Storm, and then closed her mouth firmly, the
colour spreading from her cheeks down her throat as she remembered with
sudden acute discomfort the whole episode.  The humiliation was still so
intense that she felt herself wilting like a rose on a summer's day, and
a small choke of self-pity constricted the back of her throat.  it was
enough that it had happened, that instead of her father's unquestioning
support, something she had been accustomed to since her first childhood
memories, he had told her angrily that she had acted like a spoiled
child, that she had shamed him by misusing his power and influence, and
that the shame had been made more intense by the way she had used it
without his knowledge, by sneaking behind his back, as he put it.

She had been frightened, as she always was by his anger, but not
seriously disturbed.  It was almost ten years since he had last lifted a
hand to her.  A true lady shows consideration to all around her, no
matter what their colour or creed or station.  She had heard it often
before, and now her fear was turning to irritation.  Oh, la-di-da,
Pater!  I'm not a child any more! she flounced.  He was insolent, and
anyone who is insolent to me will damned well pay for it.  You have made
two statements there, the General noted with deceptive calm, and both of
them need correction.  If you are insolent, then you will get back
insolence and you are a child still. He rose from his chair behind the
desk, and he was huge, like a forest oak, like a mountain.  One other
little thing, ladies do not swear, and you are going to be a lady when
you grow up.  Even if I have to beat it into you.  As he took her wrist,
she suddenly realized with a sense of incredulous dismay what was about
to happen.  It had not happened since she was fourteen years of age, and
she had believed it would never happen again.

She tried to pull away, but his strength was enormous, and as he lifted
her easily under one arm and carried her to the leather couch, she let
out her first squeal of fear and outrage.  It changed swiftly to real
anguished howls as he positioned her carefully across his lap and swept
her skirts up over her head.  Her pantaloons were of blue crdpe de Chine
with little pink roses decorating the target area, and his palm, horny
and hard, snapped over the tight double bulge of her buttocks with a
sharp rubbery crack.  He kept it up until the howling and kicking
subsided into heartracking sobs, and then he lowered her skirts and told
her quietly, If I knew where to find him, I'd send you to apologize to
that young man.  Storm remembered that threat, and felt a moment of
panic.  She knew her father was still quite capable of making her
apologize even now, and she nearly turned and rushed out of the library.
It required a supreme effort once more to draw herself up and lIfft her
chin defiantly.  You are right, she said coldly.  The hiring and firing
of my father's servants is not a subject with which I should concern
myself.  Now, if you would kindly stand aside, Of course, forgive me.
Still smiling, Mark bowed extravagantly and made way for her to pass.

She tossed her head and swished her skirts as she passed him and, in her
agitation, went to the wrong shelves.  it was some little time before
she realized that she was studying intently a row of bound copies of
ten-year-old parliamentary white papers, but she would not admit her
mistake and humiliate herself further.

Furiously she pondered her next sally, picking and discarding half a
dozen disparaging remarks before settling on, I would be obliged if in
future you would address me only when it is absolutely necessary, and
right at this moment I should like to be alone.  She spoke without
interrupting her perusal of the white papers.

There was no reply, and she turned haughtily.  Did you hear what I said?
Then she paused.

She was alone, he had gone silently and she had not even heard the click
of the latch.

He had not waited to be dismissed, and Storm felt quite dizzy with
anger.  Now a whole parade of brilliant and biting insults came readily
to her lips, and frustration spiced her anger.

She had to do something to vent it, and she looked around for something
to break, and then remembered, just in time, that it was Sean Courtney's
library, and everything in it was treasured.  So instead, she racked her
brain for its foulest oath.  Bloody Hell!  She stamped her foot, and it
was entirely inadequate.  Suddenly she remembered her father's
favourite.  The bastard, she added, rolling it thunderously around her
tongue as Sean did, and immediately she felt better.

She said it again and her anger subsided, leaving an extraordinary new
sensation.

There was a disturbing heat in that mysterious area between navel and
knees.  Flustered and alarmed, she hurried out into the garden.  The
short glowing tropical dusk gave the familiar lawns and trees an unreal
stagelike appearance, and she found herself almost running over the
spungy turf, as though to escape from her own sensations.

She stopped beside the lake, and her breathing was quick and shallow,
not entirely from her exertions.  She leaned on the railing of the
bridge and in the rosy light of sunset her reflection was perfectly
mirrored in the still pearly waters.

Now that the disturbing new sensation had passed, she found herself
regretting that she had fled from it.  Something like that was what she
had hoped for when She found herself thinking again of that awkward and
embarrassing episode in Monte Carlo; goaded on by Irene Leuchars, teased
and tempted, she had been made to feel inadequate because she lacked the
experience of men that Irene boasted of.  Chiefly to spite Irene, and to
defend herself against her jibes, she had slipped away from the Casino
with the young Italian Count and made no protest when he parked the
Bugatti among the pine trees on the highlevel road above Cap Ferrat.

She had hoped for something wild and beautiful, something to bring the
moon crashing out of the sky and to make choirs of angels sing.

It had been quick, painful and messy, and neither she nor the Count had
spoken to each other on the winding road down to Nice, except to mutter
goodbye on the pavement outside the Negresco Hotel.  She had not seen
him again.

Why she thought of this now she could not understand, and she thrust the
memory aside without effort.  It was replaced almost instantly with a
picture of a tall young man in a handsome uniform, of a cool mocking
smile and calm penetrating gaze.  Immediately she was aware of the
warmth and glow in her lower belly again, and this time she did not
attempt to fly from it, but continued leaning on the bridge, smiling at
her darkening image in the water.  You look like a smug old pussy cat,
she whispered, and chuckled softly.

Sean Courtney rode like a Boer, with long stirrups, sitting well back in
the saddle with legs thrust out straight in front of him and the reins
held loosely in his left hand, the black quirt of hippo-hide dangling
from its thong on his wrist so that the point touched the ground.  His
favourite mount was a big rawboned stallion of almost eighteen hands
with a white blaze and an ugly unpredictable nature that only the
General could fathom; but even he had to use an occasional light cut
with the quirt to remind the beast of his social obligations.

Mark had an English seat, or, as the General put it, rode like a monkey
on a broomstick, and he added darkly, After only a hundred miles or so
perched up like that, your backside will be so hot you could cook your
dinner on it.

We rode a thousand miles in two weeks when we were chasing General
Leroux.  They rode almost daily together, when even the huge rooms of
Emoyeni became confining, and the General started to fret at the caging
of his big body; then he would shout for the horses.

There were thousands of acres of open ground still backing the big urban
estates, and then beyond that there were hundreds of miles of red dirt
roads crisscrossing the sugarcane fields.

As they rode, the day's work was continued, with only the occasional
interruption for a half mile of hard galloping to charge the blood, and
then the General would rein in again and they would amble on over the
gently undulating hills, knee to knee.  Mark carried a small
leather-bound notebook in his inside pocket to make notes of what he
must write up on their return, but most of it he carried in his head.

The week before the departure to Cape Town had been filled with the
implementation of details and of broad policies, the winding up of the
domestic business of the provincial legislative council before beginning
on the national business of Parliament, and, deep in this discussion,
their daily ride had carried them further than they had ridden together
before.

When at last the General reined in, they had reached the crest of a
hill, and the view before them spread down to the sea, and away to the
far silhouette of the great whalebacked mountain above Durban harbour.
Directly below them, a fresh scar had been torn in the earth, like a
bold knife stroke through the green carpet of vegetation, into the red
fleshy earth.

The steel tracks of the permanent way had reached this far, and as they
sat the fidgeting horses, the loco came buffing up to the railhead,
pushing the track carrier ahead of it under its heavy load of steel.

Neither of them spoke, as the tracks were dumped with a faint clattering
roar, and the tiny antlike figures of the tracklaying gang swarmed over
them, manhandling them on to the orderly parallel rows of timber
sleepers.  The tap of the swinging hammers began then, a quick rhythmic
beat as the fishplates were spiked into place.  A mile a day, said Sean
softly, and Mark saw from his expression that he was thinking once again
of another railroad far to the north, and all that it betokened.  Cecil
Rhodes dreamed of a railway from Cairo to Cape Town and I believed once
that it was a grand dream.  He shook his beard heavily.  God knows,
perhaps we were both wrong.  He turned the stallion's head away and they
walked back down the hill in silence except for the jingle of harness
and the clip of hooves.  They were both thinking of Dirk Courtney, but
it was another ten minutes before Sean spoke.  Do you know the Bubezi
Valley, beyond Chaka's Gate?

Yes, said Mark.  Tell me, Sean ordered, and then went on, It is fifty
years since I was last there.  During the war with the old Zulu king
Cetewayo, we chased the remains of his impis up there, and hunted them
along the river.  I was there only a few months ago.  just before I came
to you.  Sean turned in the saddle, and his black brows came together
sharply.

What were you doing there?  he demanded harshly.

For an instant Mark was about to blurt out all his suspicions, of Dirk
Courtney, of the fate that had overtaken the old man, of his pilgrimage
to find the grave and to fathom the mystery beyond Chaka's Gate.
Something warned him that to do so would be to alienate Sean Courtney
completely.

He knew enough about him now to realize that although he might accuse
and even reject his own son, he would not listen to nor tolerate those
accusations from someone outside the family, particularly if those
accusations were without substance or proof.  Mark put the temptation
aside and instead he explained quietly, My grandfather and I went there
often when I was a child.  I needed to go back, for the silence and the
beauty, for the peace.  Yes, The General understood immediately.  What's
the game like there now?  Thin, Mark answered.  It's been, shot out,
trapped and hunted.  It's thin and very wild.  Buffalo?  Yes, there are
some in the swamps.  I think they graze out into the bush in the night
but I never saw them.  In I goi old Selous wrote that the Cape buffalo
was extinct.  That was after the rinderpest plague.  My God, Mark, when
I was your age there were herds of ten and twenty thousand together, the
plains along the Limpopo were black with them, and he began to reminisce
again.  It might have been boring, an old man's musty memories, but he
told it so vividly that Mark was carried along, fascinated by the tales
of a land where a man could ride With his wagons for six months without
meeting another white man.

It was with a sick little slide of regret, of something irretrievably
lost that he heard the General say, It's all gone now.  The railway line
is right through to the copperbelt in Northern Rhodesia.  Rhodes Column
has taken the land between the Zambesi and the Limpopo.

Where I camped and hunted, there are towns and mines, and they are
ploughing up the old elephant grounds.  He shook his head again.  We
thought it would never end, and now it's almost gone.  He was silent and
sad again for a while.  My grandchildren may never see an elephant or
hear the roar of a lion.  My grandfather said that when Africa lost its
game, he would go back and live in old London town.  That's how I feel,
Sean agreed.  It's strange but perhaps Dirk has done something of great
value for Africa and for mankind.  The name seemed to choke in his
throat, as though it was an effort to enunciate it, and Mark was silent,
respecting that effort.  He has made me think of all this as never
before.  One of the things that we are going to do during this session
of Parliament, Mark, is to make sure that the sanctuary in the Bubezi
Valley is ratified, and we are going to get funds to administer it
properly, to make sure that nobody, ever, turns it into a sugar cane or
cotton field, or floods it beneath the waters of a dam.  As he spoke,
Mark listened with a soaring sense of destiny and commitment.  It was as
though he had waited all his life to hear these words.

The General went on, working out what was needed in money and men,
deciding where he would lobby for support, which others in the Cabinet
could be relied on, the form which the legislation must take, and Mark
made a note of each point as it came up, his pencil hurrying to keep
pace with the General's random and eclectic thoughts.

Suddenly, in full intellectual flight, the General broke off and laughed
aloud.  It's true, you know, Mark.  There is nobody so virtuous as a
reformed whore.  We were the great robber barons, Rhodes and Robertson,
Bailey and Barnato, Duff Charleywood and Sean Courtney.  We seized the
land and then ripped the gold out of the earth, we hunted where we
pleased, and burned the finest timber for our camp fires, every man with
a rifle in his hand and shoes on his feet was a king, prepared to fight
anybody, Boer, Briton or Zulu, for the right of plunder.  He shook his
head and groped in his pockets before he found his cigars.  He laughed
no longer, but frowned as he lit the cigar.  The big stallion seemed to
sense his mood, and he crabbed and bucked awkwardly.  Sean rode him
easily and quirted him lightly across the flank.  Behave yourself!  he
growled, and then when he quieted Sean went on, The day that I met my
first wife, only thirty-two years ago, I hunted with her father and her
brother.  We rode down a herd of elephant and between the three of us we
shot and killed forty-three of them.  We cut out the tusks and left the
carcasses lying.

That's over one hundred and sixty tons of flesh.  Again he shook his
head, Only now am I coming to realize the enormity of what we did. There
were other things, during the Zulu wars, during the war with Kruger,
during Bombata's rebellion in 19o6.  Things I don't even like to
remember.  And now perhaps it's too late to make amends.  Perhaps also
it's just the way of growing old that a man regrets the passing of the
old ways He initiates change when he is young and then mourns that
change when he grows old.  Mark was silent, not daring to say a word
that might break the mood.  He knew that what he was hearing was so
important that he could then only guess at the depths of it.  We must
try, Mark, we must try.  Yes, sir.  We will, Mark agreed, and something
in his tone made the General glance across at him, mildly surprised.
This really means something to you.  He nodded, confirming his
statement. Yes, I can see that.  Strange, a young fellow like you!  When
I was your age all I ever thought about was a quick sovereign and a
likely piece of - He caught himself before he finished, and coughed to
clear his throat.  Well, sir, you must remember that I had my full share
of destruction at an earlier age than you did.  The greatest destruction
the world has ever known.  The General's face darkened as he remembered
what they had shared together in France.  When you've seen how easy it
is to tear down, it makes the preservation seem worth while.  Mark
chuckled ruefully.  Perhaps I was born too late.  No, said the General
softly.  I think you were born just in time, and he might have gone on,
but high and clear on the heat-hushed air came the musical cry of a
girl's voice, and instantly the General's head went up and his
expression lightened.

Storm Courtney came at the gallop.  She rode with the same light lithe
grace which marked all she did.  She rode astride, and she wore
knee-high boots with baggy gaucho pants tucked into the tops, a
hand-embroidered waistcoat in vivid colours over a shirt of white satin
with wide sleeves, and a black wide-brimmed vaquero hat hung on her back
from a thong around her throat.

She reined in beside her father, laughing and flushed, tossing the hair
out of her face, and leaning out of the saddle to kiss him, not even
glancing at Mark, and he touched his reins and dropped back tactfully.

We've been looking for you all over, Pater, she cried.  We went as far
as the river, what made you come this way?  Coming up more sedately
behind Storm on a bay mare was the blonde girl whom Markremembered from
that fateful day at the tennis courts.  She was more conventionally
dressed than Storm in dove-grey riding breeches and tailored jacket, and
the wind ruffled the pale silken gold of her cropped hair.

While she made her greetings to the General, her eyes kept swivelling in
Mark's direction and he searched for her name and remembered she had
been called Irene, and realized she must be the girl who had been
Storm's companion on the grand continental tour.  A pretty, bright
little thing with a gay brittle style and calculating eyes.  Good
afternoon, Miss Leuchars.  Oh la!  She smiled archly at him now.  Have
we met? Somehow her mare was kneed away from the leading pair, and
dropped back beside Mark's mount.  Briefly, yes, we have, Mark admitted,
and suddenly the china-blue eyes flew wide and the girl covered her
mouth with a gloved hand.  You are the one - then she squealed softly
with delight, and mimicked him, Just as soon as you say please!

Storm Courtney had not looked round, and she was paying exaggerated
attention to her father, but Mark watched her small perfect ears turn
pink, and she tossed her head again, but this time with an aggressive,
angry motion.

I think we might forget that, Mark murmured.  Forget it?  chirruped
Irene.  I'll never forget it.  It was absolutely classic.  She leaned
over and placed a bold hand on Mark's forearm.  At that moment Storm
could contain herself no longer; she swivelled in the saddle and was
about to speak to Irene, when she saw the hand on Mark's arm.

For a moment Storm's expression was ferocious, and the dark blue eyes
snapped with electric sparkle.  Irene held her gaze undaunted, making
her own paler blue eyes wide and artless, and deliberately,
challengingly, she let her hand linger, squeezing lightly on Mark's
sleeve.

The understanding between the two girls was instantaneous.  They had
played the game before, but this time intuitively Irene realized that
she had never been in a stronger position to inflict punishment.  She
had never seen such a swift and utterly malevolent reaction from Storm
and they knew each other intimately.  This time she had Missy Storm in a
vice, and she was going to squeeze and squeeze.

She edged her mare in until her knee touched Mark's, and she turned away
from Storm, deliberately looking up at the rider beside her.  I hadn't
realized you were so tall, she murmured.  How tall are you?  Six foot
two.  Mark only dimly realized that something mysterious, which promised
him many awkward moments, was afoot.  Oh, I do think height gives a man
presence.  Storm was now laughing gaily with her father, and trying to
listen to the conversation behind her at the same time.

Anger clawed her cruelly and she clutched the riding-crop until her
fingers ached.  She was not quite sure what had affected her this way,
but she would have delighted in lashing the crop across Irene's silly
simpering face.

It was certainly not that she felt anything for Mark Anders.  He was,
after all, merely a hired servant at Emoyeni.  He could make an idiot of
himself over Irene Leuchars and she would not even glance aside at any
other time or place.  It was just that there were some things that were
not done, the dignity of her position, of her father, and family, yes,
that was it, she realized.  It was an insult that Irene Leuchars, as a
guest in the Courtney home, should make herself free, should flaunt
herself, should make it so blatant that she would like to lead Mark
Anders along the well-travelled pathway to her steamy, she could not
continue the thought, for the vivid mental image of that pale,
deceptively fragile-looking body of Irene's spread out, languid and
naked, and Mark about to, another wave of anger made her sway in the
saddle, and she dropped the riding crop she carried and turned quickly.
Oh Mark, I've dropped my crop.  Won't you be a dear and fetch it for me?
Mark was taken aback, not only by the endearment, but also by the
stunning smile and warmth of Storm's voice.

He almost fell from the saddle in his haste, and when he came alongside
Storm to hand the crop back to her, she detained him with a smile of
thanks, and a question.  Mark, won't you help me label my cases?  it's
only a few days and we'll all be leaving for Cape Town.  I'm so looking
forward to it, Irene agreed as she pushed her mare up on Mark's other
side, and Storm smiled sweetly at her.  It should be fun, she agreed.  I
love Cape Town.  Grand fun, Irene laughed gaily, and Storm regretted
bitterly the invitation that would make her a guest for four months in
the Courtney's Cape Town home.  Before Storm could find a cutting
rejoinder, Irene leaned across to Mark.

Come on, then, she said, and turned her mare aside.

Where are you going?  Storm demanded.  Mark is taking me down to the
river to show me the monument where Dick King crossed on his way to
fetch the English troops from Grahamstown.  oh, Irene darling, Storm
dabbed at her eye with the tail of her scarf.  I seem to have something
in my eye.  Won't you see to it?  No, don't wait for us, Mark.  Go on
ahead with the General.  I know he needs you still.  And she turned her
small perfect head to Irene for her ministrations.

With patent relief, Mark spurred ahead to catch up with the General, and
Irene told Storm in honeyed tones, There's nothing in your eye, darling,
except a touch of green.  You bitch, hissed Storm.  Darling, I don't
know what you mean.  The Dunottar Castle trembled under the thrust of
her engines and ran southwards over a starlit sea that seemed to be
sculpted from wet black obsidian, each crest marched with such weighty
dignity as to seem solid and unmoving.

It was only when the ship put her sharp prow into them that they burst
into creaming white, and hissed back along the speeding hull.

The General paused and looked at the southern sky, to where the great
cross burned among its myriad cohorts, and Orion the hunter brandished
his sword.  That's the way the sky should be, he nodded his approval.  I
could never get used to the northern skies.  It was as though the
universe had disintegrated, and the grand designs of nature had been
plunged into anarchy.  They went to the rail and paused there to watch
the moon rise out of the dark sea, and as it pushed its golden dome
clear of the horizon, the General pulled out the gold hunter watch from
his waistcoat pocket and grunted.

Twenty-one minutes past midnight, the moon is punctual this morning.
Mark smiled at the little joke.  Yet he knew that it was part of the
General's daily ritual to consult his almanac for sunrise and moonrise,
and the moon phases.

The mAn's energy was formidable.

They had worked until just a few minutes previously and had been at it
since midmorning.  Mark felt muzzy and woolly headed with mental effort
and the pungent incense of the General's cigars which had filled the
suite.  I think we over-did it a little today, my boy, Sean Courtney
admitted, as though he had read the thought.  But I did want to be up to
date before we dock in Table Bay.

Thank you, Mark.  Now why don't you go down and join the dancing?  From
the boat deck, Mark looked down on to the swirling orderly confusion of
dancing couples in the break of the promenade deck.  The ship's band was
belting out a Strauss waltz and the dancers spun wildly, the women's
skirts flahng open like the petals of exotic blooms and their laughing
cries a sweet and musical counterpoint to the stirring strains of the
waltz.

Mark picked Storm Courtney out of the press, her particular grace making
it easy to distinguish her, she lay back in the circle of her partner's
arms and spun dizzily, the light catching the dark sparkle of her hair
and glowing on the waxy golden perfection of her bare shoulders.

Mark lit a cigarette, and leaned on the rail, watching her.  It was
strange that he had seldom felt lonely in the great silences and space
of the wilderness, and here, surrounded by music and gaiety and the
laughter of young people, he knew deep loneliness.

The General's suggestion that he go down and join the dancing had been
unwittingly cruel.  He would have been out of place there among the rich
young clique who had known each other since childhood, a close-knit
elite that jealousy closed ranks against any intruder, especially one
that did not possess the necessary qualifications of wealth and social
standing.

He imagined going down and asking Storm Courtney for a waltz, her
humiliation at being accosted by her father's secretary, the nudging and
the snide exchanges, the patronizing questions.  Do you actually type
letters, old boy?  And he felt himself flushing angrily at the mere
thought of it.

Yet he lingered by the rail for another half hour, delighting in each
glimpse of Storm, and hating each of her partners with a stony
implacable hatred; and when at last he went down to his cabin, he could
not sleep.  He wrote a letter to Marion Littlejohn, and found himself as
warmly disposed towards her as he had been in months.  Her gentled
sincerity, and the genuineness of her affection for him were suddenly
very precious assets.  On the pages he recalled the visit she had made
to Durban just before his departure.  The General had been understanding
and they had had many hours together during the two days.  She had been
awed by his new position, and impressed by his surroundings.  However,
their one further attempt at physical intimacy, even though it had been
made in the urity and privacy of Mark's cottage, had been, if anything,
less successful than the first.  There had been no opportunity, nor had
Mark had the heart to break off their engagement, and in the end Mark
had put her on the train to Ladyburg with relief, but now loneliness and
distance had enhanced her memory. He wrote with real affection and
sincerity, but when he had sealed the envelope, he found that he still
had no desire for sleep.

He had found a copy of Jock of the Bushveld in the ship's library and
was rereading the adventures of man and dog, and the nostalgic and vivid
descriptions of African bush and animals with such pleasure, that his
loneliness was forgotten.  There was a light tap on the door of his
cabin.  Oh Mark, do let me hide in here for a moment.  Irene Leuchars
pushed quickly past him before he could protest, and she ordered,
Quickly, lock the door. Her tone made him obey immediately, but when he
turned back to her he had immediate misgivings.

She had been drinking.  The flush of her cheeks was not all rouge, the
glitter in her eyes was feverish, and when she laughed it was
unnaturally high.

What's the trouble?  he asked.

Oh God, darling, I have had the most dreadful time.

That Charlie Eastman is absolutely hounding me.  I swear I'm terrified
to go back to my cabin.  I'll talk to him, Mark offered, but she stopped
him quickly.  Oh, don't make a scene.  He's not worth it.  She flicked
the tail of the ostrich feather boa over her shoulder.  I'll just sit
here for a while, if you don't mind.  Her dress was made of layers of
filmy material that floated in a cloud about her as she moved, and her
shoulders were bare, the bodice cut so low that her breasts bulged out,
very round and smooth and white and deeply divided.  Do you mind?  she
demanded, very aware of the direction of his eyes, and he lifted them
quickly to her face.  She made a move of impatience as she waited for
his reply.

Her lipstick was startling crimson and glossy, so her lips had a full
ripe look.

He knew he must get her out of his cabin.  He knew that he was in
danger.  He knew how vulnerable he was, how powerful her family, and he
guessed how shallow and callous she could be.  But he was lonely,
achingly grindingly lonely.  You can stay, of course, he told her, and
she drooped her eyelids and ran a sharp pink tongue across the painted
lips.

Have you got a drink, darling?  No, I'm sorry.  Don't be, don't ever be
sorry.  She swayed against him and he could smell the liquor on her
breath, but it was not offensive and, with her perfume, blended into a
spicy fragrance.  Look, she told him, holding up the silver evening bag
she carried.  The "It" girl with every home comfort, and she took a
small silver jewelled flask from the bag.  Every comfort known to man,
she repeated, and parted her lips in a lewd but intensely provocative
pout.  Come and I'll give you a little sample.  Her voice dropped to a
husky whisper, and then she laughed and swirled away in a waltzing turn,
humming a bar of the Blue Danube and the gossamer of her skirts floated
about her thighs.

Clad in silk, her limbs gleamed in the soft light and when she dropped
carelessly on to Mark's bunk, her skirts ballooned and then settled so
high that he could see that the black elastic suspender-belt that held
her stocking tops

was decorated with embroidered butterflies.  The butterflies were
spangled with brilliant colour and in exotic contrast to the pale soft
skin of her inner thighs.  Come, Markie, come and have a little itsy
bitsy drinkie.  She patted the bunk beside her and then wriggled her
bottom across to make room for him.  The skirts rucked up higher and
exposed the wedge of her panties between her thighs.  The material was
so sheer that he could see the pale red-gold curls trapped and flattened
by the silk.

Mark felt something crack inside him.  For another moment, he tried to
reckon consequence, to force himself back on to the course that was both
moral and safe, but he new that in reality the decision was made when he
had allowed her to stay.  Come, Mark.  she held the flask like bait, and
the light reflected off it in silver splinters that she played into his
eyes.  The crack opened, and like a bursting dam, all restraint was
swept aside.  She recognized the moment and her eyes flared with triumph
and she welcomed him to the bed with a little animal squeal, and with
slim pale arms that wrapped about his neck with startling strength.

She was small and strong quick and demanding, and as skilled as Helena
MacDonald, but she was different, so very different.

Her youth gave her flesh a sweetness and freshness, her skin an
unblemished lustre, a luscious plasticity that was made more startling
by her pale pigmentation.

When she slipped the strap off one shoulder and popped one of her glossy
breasts out of the top of her bodice, offering it to Mark with a sound
in her throat which was like the purr of a cat, he gasped aloud.  It was
white as porcelain and had the same sheen, too large for the slim
fragile body but hard and firm and springy to his touch.

The nipple was tiny, set like a small jewel in the perfect coin of its
aureole, so pale and delicate pink when he remembered Helena, dark and
puckered and sprinkled with sparse black hair.  Wait, Mark.  Wait, she
chuckled breathlessly, and stood quickly to drop the boa and dress to
the cabin floor in one quick movement, and then to slip the sheer
underwear to her ankles and kick it carelessly aside.  She lifted her
hands above her head and twirled slowly in front of him.

Yes?  she asked.  Yes, he agreed.  Oh very much yes Her body was
hairless and smooth except for that pale red mist that hazed the fat
mound at the base of her belly, and her breasts rode high and arrogant.

She came back to him, kneeling over him.  There, she whispered.  There's
a good boy, she crooned, but her hands were busy, unbuckling,
unbuttoning, questing, finding, and then it was her turn to gasp.

Oh, Mark, you clever boy, all by yourself too!  No, he laughed.  I had a
little help, And you are going to get a lot more, she promised, and
dropped her soft, fluffy golden head over him.  He thought that her
mouth was as red and voracious as one of those low-tide rock-pool
anemones that he had fed with such delight as a child, watching it
softly enfold each tidbit, sucking it in deeply.  Oh God, he croaked,
for her mouth was hot, hotter and deeper than any sea animal could ever
be.

Irene Leuchars carried her shoes in one hand and the feather boa hung
over her other arm and trailed on the floor behind her.  Her hair stood
out in a soft pale halo around her head, and her eyes were underlined by
dark blue smudges of sleeplessness, while the outline of her mouth was
smudged and blurred, her lips puffed and inflamed.  God!  she whispered,
I'm still tiddly, and she giggled, and lurched unsteadily to the roll of
the ship.  Then she pulled up the strap which had slipped from her
shoulder.

Behind her in the long passageway, there was a clatter of china and she
glanced back, startled.  One of the whitejacketed stewards was pushing a
trolley of cups and pots towards her.  The morning ritual of tea and
biscuits was beginning and she had not realized the hour.

Irene hurried away, turning the corner from the steward's sly and
knowing grin, and she reached the door of Storm Courtney's cabin without
another encounter.

She hammered on the door with the heel of one shoe, but it was a full
five minutes before the door swung open and Storm looked out at her, a
gown wrapped around her shoulders and her big dark eyes owlish from
sleep.  Irene, are you crazy?  she asked.  It's still night!  Then she
saw Irene's attire and smelled the rich perfume of her breath.  Where on
earth have you been? Irene pushed the door open and almost tripped over
the threshold.  You're drunk!  accused Storm resignedly, closing the
door behind her.  No.  Irene shook her head.  It isn't liquor, it's
ecstasy.  Where have you been?  Storm asked again.  I thought you were
in bed hours ago.  I have flown to the moon, intoned Irene dramatically.
I have run barefooted through the stars, I have soared on eagles'wings
above the mountain peaks.  Storm laughed, coming fully awake now, as
beautiful even in deshabilIg as Irene would never be, so graceful and
lovely that Irene hated her again.  She savoured the moment, drawing out
the pleasure of anticipation.  Where have you been, you mad bad woman?
Storm started to catch the spirit of the moment. Tell all!  Through the
gates of paradise, to the land of never-never on the continent of always
-'Irene's smile became sharp, spiteful and venomous, in short, darling,
Mark Anders has been bouncing me like a rubber ball!  And the expression
on Storm Courtney's face gave her the most intense satisfaction she had
known in her life.  On the third day of January, the Chamber of Mines
deliberately tore up the Agreement that it had come to with your Union
to maintain the status quo.  It tore that agreement to a thousand pieces
and flung them in the faces of the workers.  Fergus MacDonald spoke with
a controlled icy fury that carried to every corner of the great hall,
and it stilled even the rowdies in the back seats who had brought their
bottles in brown paper packets. Now they listened with intensity, Big
Harry Fisher, sitting beside him on the dais, turned his head slowly to
assess the man, peering at him under beetling eyebrows and with the
bulldog folds of his face hanging mournfully.  He marvelled again at how
Fergus MacDonald changed when he stood to speak.

Usually he cut a nondescript figure with the small bulge of a paunch
beginning to distort the spare frame, the cheap and ill-fitting suit
shiny at the elbows and seat with wear, the collar of the frayed shirt
damed, and grease spots on the drab necktie.  His hair was thinning,
starting up in wispy spikes around the neck, pushing back from the brow
and with a pink bare patch in the crown.  His face had that grey tone
from the embedded filth of the machine shops, but when he stood under
the red flag and the emblem of the Amalgamated Mineworkers Union on the
raised dais facing the packed hall, he grew in stature, a physical
phenomenon that was quite extraordinary.  He seemed younger and there
was a fierce and smouldering passion which stripped away his shoddy
dress and armoured him with presence.  Brothers!  He raised his voice
now.  When the mines reopened after the Christmas recess, two thousand
of our members were discharged, thrown out into the street, discarded
like worn-out pairs of old boots The hall hummed, the warning sound of a
beehive on a hot summer's day, but the stillness of thousands of bodies
pressed closely together was more menacing than any movement.  Brothers!
Fergus moved his hands in a slow hypnotic movement.  Brothers! Beginning
at the end of this month, and for every month after that, another six
hundred men will be, he paused again and then spat the official word at
them, retrenched.  They seemed to reel with the word, the whole
concourse stunned as though by a physical blow, and the silence drew
out, until a voice at the back yelled wildly, No, brothers.  No!  They
roared then, a sound like the surf on a stormy day when it breaks upon a
rocky shore.

Fergus let them roar, and he hooked his thumbs into his rumpled
waistcoat and watched them, gloating in the feeling of exultation, the
euphoria of power.  He judged the strength of their reaction, and the
moment it began to falter he raised both hands, and almost immediately
the silence fell upon the hall again.  Brothers!  Do you know that the
wages of a black man are two shillings and two pence a day?  Only a
black man can live on that wage!  He let it sink in a moment, but not
too long before he went on, asking a reasonable question, Who will take
the place of two thousand of our brothers who are now out of work?  Who
will replace the six hundred that will join them at the end of this
month, and the next and the next?  Who will take your job, he was
picking out individuals, pointing at them with an accuser's finger, and
yours, and yours?  Who will take the food from your children's mouths?
He waited theatrically for an answer, cocking his head, smiling at them
while his eyes smouldered.  Brothers! I tell you who it will be.  Two
and tuppenny black kaffirs, that's who it will be!

They came upon their feet, a bench here and there crashing over
backwards and their voices were a blood-roar of anger, clenched fists
thrust out in fury.  No, brothers.  No!  Their booted feet stamped in
unison and they chanted, their fists punching into empty air.

Fergus MacDonald sat down abruptly and Harry Fisher congratulated him
silently, squeezing his shoulder in a bear's paw before lumbering to his
feet.  Your executive has recommended that all members of our Union come
out on general strike.  I put it to you now, brothers, all those in
favour, he bellowed, and his voice was drowned in a thousand others.
Out, brothers!  We're out!  Out! Out!  Fergus leaned forward in his seat
and looked down the length of the trestle table.

Helena's dark head was bowed over the minute book, but she sensed his
gaze and looked up.  Her expression glowed with a fanatic's ecstasy, and
there was open adoration in her eyes that he saw only at moments like
this.

Harry Fisher had told him once, For all women, poweristhe ultimate
aphrodisiac.  No matter how puny in body, no matter what he looks like-
power makes a man irresistible.  In the thunder of thousands of voices,
the pounding feet and the heady roar of power, Fergus was on his feet
again.  The mine-owners, the bosses have challenged us, they have
scorned your executive, they have stated-publicly that we are too
faint-hearted to rally the workers and come out on general strike! Well,
brothers, we are going to show them.  The lion's voice of the crowd rose
again and he silenced it only after another minute.  First, we are going
to drive on the scabs, there are going to be no strikebreakers.  When
the sound subsided he went on, Slim Jannie Smuts has talked of force to
beat a strike, he has an army, but we are going to have one also.  I
think the bosses have forgotten that we fought their bloody war for them
in France and East Africa, at Tabora and Delville Wood.

The names sobered them and they were listening again.  Last time we
fought for them, but this time we are fighting for ourselves.  Each one
of you will report to his area commander, you will be armed into 2hting
commandos, each man will know his job, and each man will know what is at
stake.  We will beat them, brothers, the bloody bosses and their greedy
grasping minions.  We will fight them and beat them!  They are organized
into military-style commandos, said the Prime Minister softly, breaking
the crisp brown roll of bread with fingers that were surprisingly small,
neat and capable as a woman's.  Of course, we know that George Mason
wanted to form labour commandos in 194- It was the main reason I had him
deported.  The other guests at the luncheon table were silent.  The
deportation of Mason was not an episode that reflected credit on Jannie
Smuts.

But this is a different animal we are dealing with now.

Nearly all the younger members of the unions are trained veterans.  Five
hundred of them paraded outside the Trade Union Hall in Fordsburg last
Saturday.  He turned and smiled that impish, irresistible smile at his
hostess.  My dear Ruth, you must forgive my bad manners.  This talk
detracts from the delicious meal you have provided.  The table was set
under the oak trees on lawns so vivid green that Ruth always thought of
them as English green.

The house itself had the solid imposing bulk of Georgian England, so
different from the frivolous fairy castle at Emoyeni; the illusion of
old England was spoiled only by the soaring cliffs of grey rock that
rose as a backdrop to the scene.  The sheer slopes of Table Mountain
were softened by the pine trees that clung precariously for footholds on
each ledge and in each tiny pocket of soil.

Ruth smiled at him, In this house, General, you may do as you wish.
Thank you, my dear.  The smile flickered off his face and the merry
twinkle of the pale blue eyes changed to the glint of swords, as he
turned back to his listeners.  They are seeking confrontation,
gentlemen, it's a blatant test of our power and resolution.  Ruth caught
Mark's eye at the foot of the table and he rose to refill the glasses
with cold pale wine tinged with a touch of green, dry and crisp and
refreshing, but as he moved down the board, pausing beside each guest,
three Cabinet ministers, a visiting British Earl, the Secretary of the
Chamber of Mines, he was listening avidly.  We can only hope you put it
too highly, Prime Minister, Sean Courtney intervened gruffly.  They have
only broomsticks with which to drill, and bicycles on which to ride into
battle.  .

And while they laughed, Mark paused behind Sean's chair with the bottle
forgotten in his hand.  He was remembering the cellars below the Trade
Union Hall in Fordsburg, the racks of modern rifles, the gleaming P.  I
4 reserved for him and the sinister squatting Vickers machine gun.

When he returned to the present, the conversation had moved on.

Sean Courtney was assuring the company that militant action by the
unions was unlikely, and that in the worst circumstances, the army was
geared to immediate call-up.

Mark had a small office adjoining the General's study.  It had
previously been a linen room, but was just large enough to accommodate a
desk and several shelves of files.

The General had ordered a large window knocked through one wall to give
it air and light, and now, with his ankles crossed and propped on the
desk-top, Mark was staring thoughtfully out of the window.  The view
across lawns and through oaks encompassed a sweep of Rhodes Avenue,
named after that asthmatic old adventurer who had seized an empire in
land and diamonds, and ended up Prime Minister of the first Cape
Parliament, before suffocating from his weak lungs and heavy conscience.
The Cape home of the Courtneys was named Somerset Lodge after Lord
Charles, the nineteenth-century governor, and the great houses on the
opposite side of Rhodes Avenue perpetuated the colonial tradition,
Newlands House and Hiddingh House, gracious edifices in spacious
grounds.

Looking out at them through the new window, Mark was comparing them with
the miners cottages in Fordsburg Dip.  He had not thought of Fergus and
Helena in many months, but the conversation at lunch had brought them
back forcibly, and he felt himself torn by sharply contradictory
loyalties.

He had lived in both worlds now, and seen how each opposed the other. He
was trying to think without emotion, but always a single image intruded,
the cruel shape of weapons in orderly racks, deep in a dark cellar, and
the slick smell of gun oil in his throat.

He lit another cigarette, delaying the decision.  Through the solid teak
door, the sound of voices from the General's study was muted, the higher
clearer tones of the Prime Minister, bird-like almost, set against the
rumbling of Sean's replies.

The Prime Minister had stayed on after the other luncheon guests had
left, as he often did, but Mark wished that he would leave now, thus
deferring the decision with which he was wrestling.

He had been trusted by a comrade, somebody who had shared mortal danger
with him, and then had unstintingly shared the hospitality of his home,
had trusted him like a brother, had not hesitated to give him access to
the direst knowledge, had not hesitated to leave him alone with his
wife.  Mark had betrayed half of that trust, and he stirred restlessly
in his seat as he remembered those wicked stolen days and nights with
Helena.  Now must he betray the rest of the trust that Fergus MacDonald
had placed in him?

Once more the image of racked weapons passed before his eyes, they faded
only slowly to be replaced with a vivid shocking picture of a face.

it was the face of a marble angel, smooth and white and strangely
beautiful, with blue eyes in pale blue sockets, a burst of pale golden
curls escaping from under the rim of the steel helmet on to the smooth
pale forehead Mark dropped his feet from the desk with a crash, fighting
away the memory of the young German sniper, forcing it from his mind,
and coming to his feet abruptly.

He found that his hands were shaking and he crushed out the cigarette
and turned to the door.  His knock was over-loud and demanding, and the
voice from beyond was gruff with irritation.  Come in.  He stepped
through.  What do you want, Mark, you know I don't - Sean Courtney cut
himself short and the tone of his voice changed to concern as he saw
Mark's face.  What is it, my boy? I have to tell you something, sir, he
blurted.

They listened with complete attention as he described his involvement
with the executive of the Communist Party, and then broke off to steel
himself for the final betrayal.  These men were my friends, sir, they
treated me as a comrade. You must understand why I am telling you this,
please.  Go on, Mark, Sean Courtney nodded, and the Prime Minister had
drawn back in his chair, still and quiet and unobtrusive, sensing the
struggle of conscience in which the young man was involved.  I came to
believe that much of what they were striving for was good and just,
opportunity and a share of life for every man, but I could not accept
the methods they had chosen to bring these about.  What do you mean,
Mark?  They are planning war, a class war, sir.  You have proof of that?
Sean's voice did not rise, and he asked the question carefully.  Yes.  I
have.  Mark drew a deep breath before he went on.  I have seen the
rifles and machine guns they have ready for the day.  The Prime Minister
shifted in his chair and then was still again, but now he was leaning
forward to listen.  Go on, Sean nodded, and Mark told them in detail,
stating the unadorned facts, reporting exactly what he had seen and
where, accurately estimating the numbers and types of every weapon, and
finally ending, MacDonald led me to believe that this was only one
arsenal, and that there were others, many others, on the Witwatersrand.
Nobody spoke for many seconds, and then the Prime Minister stood up and
went to the telephone on Sean's desk.  He wound the crank handle, and
the whirr-whirr was loud and obtrusive in the silent room.  This is the
Prime Minister, General Smuts, speaking.  I want a maximum priority
connection with Commissioner Truter, the Chief of the South African
Police in Johannesburg!  he said, and then listened, is expression bleak
and his eyes sparkling angrily.  Get me the Exchange Supervisor he
snapped and then turned to Sean, still holding the earpiece.  The line
is down, Floods in the Karroo, he explained, indefinite delay.  Then he
turned his attention back to the telephone and spoke quietly for many
minutes with the Supervisor, before cradling the earpiece.  They will
make the connection as soon as possible.  He returned to his seat by the
window and spoke across the room.  You have done the right thing, young
man.  I hope so, Mark answered quietly, and the doubts were obvious,
shadows in his eyes and the strains of misery in his voice.  I'm proud
of you, Mark, Sean Courtney agreed.  Once again you have done your duty.
Will you excuse me now, please gentlemen? Mark asked, and without
waiting for a reply, crossed to the door of his own office.

The two men stared at the closed teak door long after it had closed, and
it was the Prime Minister who spoke first.  A remarkable young man, he
mused aloud.  Compassion and a sense of duty.  He has qualities that
could carry him to great heights, qualities for which one day we may be
grateful, Sean nodded.  I sensed them at our first meeting, so strongly
that I sought him out.  We will need him, and others like him in the
years ahead, old Sean, Jannie Smuts stated and then switched his
attention.  Truter will have a search warrant issued immediately, and
with God's help we will crush the head of the snake before it has a
chance to strike.  We know about this man MacDonald, and of course we
have been watching Fisher for years.  Mark had walked for hours,
escaping from the tiny box of his office.  He had been driven by his
conscience and his fears, striding out under the oaks, following narrow
lanes, crossing the little stone bridge over the Liesbeeck stream,
torturing himself with thoughts of Judas.  They hang traitors in
Pretoria, he thought suddenly, and he imaged Fergus MacDonald standing
on the trap in the barnlike room while the hangman pinioned his arms and
ankles.  He shuddered miserably and stopped walking, with his hands
thrust deeply into his pockets and shoulders hunched, and he looked up
to find himself standing outside the Post Office.

Afterwards he realized that it had probably been his destination all
along, but now it seemed an omen.  He did not hesitate a moment, but
hurried into the office and found a pile of telegram forms on the desk.
The nib of the pen was faulty and it sphittered the pale watery ink, and
stained his fingers.

MACDONALD 5 5 LOVERS WALK FORDSBURG.

THEY KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE GOT IN THE CELLAR GET RID of IT.

He did not sign it.

The Post Office clerk assured him that if he paid the sevenpence for
urgent rating, the message would have priority as soon as the northern
lines were reinstated.

Mark wandered back into the street, feeling sick and depleted by the
crisis of conscience, not certain that he had done the right thing in
either circumstance, and he wondered just how futile was his hope that
he might have forced Fergus MacDonald to throw that deadly cargo down
some disused mine shaft before death and revolution was turned loose
upon the land.

It was almost dark as Fergus MacDonald wheeled his bicycle into the shed
and paused in the small back yard to slip the clips off the cuffs of his
trousers, before going on to the kitchen door.

The smell of cooking cabbage filled the small room with a steamy moist
cloud that made him pause and blink.

Helena was sitting at the kitchen table and she hardly glanced up as he
entered.  A cigarette dangled from her lips with an inch of grey ash
clinging hopelessly to the end of it.

She still wore the grubby dressing-gown she had worn at breakfast, and
it was clear that she had neither bathed nor changed since then.  Her
hair had grown longer and now dangled in oily black snakes to her
cheeks.  She had grown heavier in the last months, the line of her jaw
blurring with a padding of fat and the hair on her upper lip darker and
denser, breasts bulging and drooping heavily in the open front of the
gown.  Hello then, love.  Fergus shrugged out of his jacket and dropped
it across the back of a kitchen chair.  She turned the page of the
pamphlet she was reading, squinting at the curl of blue smoke that
drifted across her eyes.

Fergus opened a black bottle of porter and the gas hissed fiercely.
Anything happened today?  Something for you, she nodded at the kitchen
dresser, and the cigarette ash dropped down the front of her gown,
settling in fine grey flakes.

Carrying the bottle, Fergus crossed to the dresser and fingered the buff
envelope.  One of your popsies, Helena chuckled at the unlikeliness of
her sally, and Fergus frowned and tore open the envelope.

He stared at the message for long uncomprehending seconds before he
swore bitterly.  Jesus Christ!  He slammed the bottle down on the
kitchen table with a crash.

Even this late in the evening, there were small groups on each street
corner.  They had that disconsolate andbored air of men with too little
to fill their days, even the commando drilling and the nightly meetings
were beginning to pall.  As Fergus MacDonald pedalled furiously through
the darkening streets, his first alarm and fright turned to fierce
exultation.

The time was right, they were as ready as they would ever be, if time
drifted on without decisive action from either side, the long boring
days of strike inactivity would erode their determination.  What had
seemed like disaster merely minutes before, he now saw was a heaven-sent
opportunity.  Let them come, we will be ready for them, he thought, and
braked alongside a group of four loungers on the pavement outside the
public bar of the Grand Fordsburg Hotel. Get a message to all area
commanders, they are to assemble at the Trade Hall immediately.  It's an
emergency.  Brothers, hurry.  They scattered quickly, and he pedalled on
up the rising ground of the dip, calling out his warning as he went.

In the Trade Union offices, there were still a dozen or so members; most
of them were eating sandwiches and drinking Thermos tea, while a few
worked on the issue of strike relief coupons to Union families, but the
relaxed atmosphere changed as Fergus burst in.  All right, comrades,
it's beginning.  The ZARPS are on their way.  It was classic police
tactics. They came in the first light of dawn.  The advance guard rode
down into the dip of land between Fordsburg and the railway crossing,
where the Johannesburg road ran down between sleazy cottages and
overgrown plots of open ground, thick with weeds and mounds of rotting
refuse.

There was a heavy ground-mist in the dip, and the nine troopers on
police chargers waded through it, as though fording the sluggish waters
of a river crossing.

They had muted harness and muffled accoutrements, so that it was in
ghostly silence that they breasted the softly swirling mists.  The light
was not yet strong enough to pickZuid Afrikaanse Republiek Polisie, used
as a derogatory term, out their badges and burnished buttons, it was
only the dark silhouette of their helmets that identified them.

Fifty yards behind the leading troopers followed the two police
carriages.  High four-wheelers with barred windows to bold prisoners,
and beside each one of them marched ten constables.  They carried their
rifles at the slope, and were stepping out sharply to keep up with the
carriages.

As they entered the dip, the mist engulfed them, chesthigh, so that
their disembodied trunks bobbed in the white soft surface.  They looked
like strange dark sea-animals, and the mist muted the tramp of their
boots.

Fergus MacDonald's scouts had picked them up before they reached the
railway crossing and for three miles had been pacing them, slipping back
unseen ahead of the advance, runners reporting every few minutes to the
cottage where Fergus had established his advance headquarters.  All
right, Fergus snapped, as another of the dark figures ducked through the
hedge of the sanitary lane behind the cottage and mumbled his report
through the open window.  They are all coming in on the main road.  Pull
the other pickets out and get them here right away.

The man grunted an acknowledgement and was gone.

Fergus had his pickets on every possible approach to the town centre.
The police might have split into a number of columns, but it seemed his
precautions were unnecessary.

Secure in the certainty of complete surprise and in overwhelming force,
they were not bothering with diversion or flanking manoeuvres.

Twenty-nine troopers, Fergus calculated, together with the four drivers,
was indeed a formidable force.  More than sufficient, if it had not been
for the warning from some unknown ally.

Fergus hurried through into the front parlour of the cottage.  The
family had been moved out before midnight, all the cottages along the
road had been cleared.  The grumpy squalling children in pyjamas carried
on the shoulders of their fathers, the women with white frightened faces
in the lamplight, bundling a few precious possessions with them as they
hurried away.

Now the cottages seemed deserted, no lights showed, and the only sound
was the mournful howling of a mongrel dog down in the dip.  Yet in each
cottage, at the windows that faced on to the road, silent men waited.

Fergus spoke to one of them in a whisper and he pointed down into the
misty hollow, then spat and worked a round into the breech of the
Lee-Enfield rifle which was propped on the windowsill.

The rifle bolt made a small metallic clash that lit a sparkle of memory
and made the hair rise on Fergus neck.

It was all so familiar, the silence, the mist and the night fraught with
the menace of coming violence.  Only on my order, Fergus warned him
softly.  Easy now, lads.  Let them come right in the front door before
we slam it on their heads.  He could see the leading horsemen now, half
a mile away but coming on fast in the strengthening light.  it wasn't
shooting light yet, but the sky beyond the dark hills of the mine dumps
was turning to that pale gull's-egg blue that promised shooting light
within minutes.

Fergus looked back at the road.  The mist was an added bonus.  He had
not counted on that, but often when you did not call for fortune, she
came a-knocking.  The mist would persist until the first rays of the
morning sun warmed and dispersed it, another half hour at least.  You
all know, your orders.  Fergus raised his voice and they glanced at him,
distracted for only a moment from their weapons and the oncoming enemy.

I They were all good men, veterans, blooded, as the sanguine generals of
France would have it.  It flashed through Fergus'mind once again how
ironical it was that men who had been trained to fight by the bosses
were now about to tear down the structure which the bosses had trained
them to defend.  We will tear down and rebuild, he thought, with
exultation tingling in his blood.  We will destroy them with their own
weapons, strangle them with their own dirty loot, he stopped himself,
and pulled the dark grey cloth down over his eyes and turned up the
collar of his coat.  Good luck to all of us, brothers, he called softly,
and slipped out through the front door.  That old bugger has got guts,
acknowledged one of the soldiers at the window.  You're right, he ain't
afraid of nothing, agreed another, as they watched him dodge under the
cover of the hedge and run forward until he reached the ditch beside the
road, and jumped down into it.

There were a dozen men lying there below the lip, and as he dropped
beside them, one of them handed him a pickhandle.

rYou strung that wire good and tight?  Fergus asked, and the man
grunted.  Tighter than a monkey's arsehole, the man grinned wolfishly at
him, his teeth glinting in the first soft light of morning. And I
checked the pegs meself, they'll hold against a charging elephant.
Right, brothers, Fergus told them.  With me when I give the word.  And
he lifted himself until he could see over the low blanket of mist.  The
troopers'helmets bobbed in the mist as they came on up the slope, and
now he could make out the sparkle of brass cap badges and see the dark
sticklike barrels of their carbines rising above each right shoulder.

Fergus had paced out the ranges himself and marked them with pieces of
rag tied to the telephone posts on the verge.

As they came up to the one-fifty-yard mark Fergus stood up from the
ditch, and stepped into the middle of the road.

He held his pick-handle above his head and shouted, Halt!  Stay where
you are!

His men rose out of the mist behind him and moved swiftly into position
like a well-drilled team; dark, ominous figures standing shoulder to
shoulder, blocking the road from verge to verge, holding their
pick-handles ready across their hips, faces hidden by caps and collars.

The officer in the centre of the squadron of horsemen raised a hand to
halt them and they bunched up and sat stolidly while the officer rose in
his stirrups.  Who are you? Strikers'Council, Fergus shouted back, and
we'll have no scabs, black-legs or strike-breakers on this property!  I
am under orders from the Commissioner of Police, empowered by a warrant
of the Supreme Court. The officer was a heavily built man, with a proud
erect seat on his horse, and a dark waxed mustache with points that
stuck out on each side of his face.  You're strike-breakers!  Fergus
yelled. And you'll not set a foot on this property.  Stand aside! warned
the officer.  The light was good enough now for Fergus to see that he
wore the insignia of a Captain, and that his face was ruddy from sun and
beer, his eyebrows thick and dark and beetling under the brim of his
helmet.  You are obstructing the police.  We will charge if we have to.
Charge and be damned, puppets of imperialism, running dogs of
capitalism, Troop, extend order, called the Captain, and the ranks
opened for the second file to come up into a solid line.

They sat on the restless horses, knee to knee.  Strike-breakers!  yelled
Fergus.  Your hands will be stained with the blood of innocent workers
this day"Batons!  called the Captain sternly, and the troopers drew the
long oaken clubs from the scabbards at their knees and held them in the
right hand, like cavalry sabres.  History will remember this atrocity,
screamed Fergus, the blood of the lamb, Walk, march!  Forward!  The line
of dark horsemen waded forward through the mist as it swirled about
their bootedlegs.  Gallop, charge!  sang out the Captain, and the riders
swung forward in their saddles, the batons extended along the horses
necks, and they plunged forward; now the hooves drummed low thunder as
they came down upon the line of standing figures.

The Captain was leading by a length in the centre of the line, and he
went on to the wires first.

Fergus men had driven the steel jumper bars deep into the verge,
pounding them in with nine-pound hammers, until only two feet of their
six-foot length protruded, and they had strung the barbed wire across
the road, treble strands pulled up rigid with the fencing strainers.

It cut the forelegs out from under the leading charger, the bone broke
with a brittle snap, startlingly loud in the dawn, and the horse
dropped, going over on to its shoulder still at full gallop.

An instant later the following wave of horsemen went on to the wire, and
were cut down as though by a scythe, only three of them managing to
wheel away in time.  The cries of the men, and the screaming of the
horses, mingled with the exultant yells of Fergus' band as they ran
forward, swinging their pick-handles, One of the horses was up,
riderless, its stirrups flapping, but it was pinned on its haunches, the
broken forelegs flapping and spinning as it pawed in anguish at the air,
its squeals high and pitiful above the cries of fallen men.

Fergus pulled the revolver out of the waist -band of his trousers,
dodged around the crazed screaming animals and pulled the police Captain
to his knees.

He had hit the ground with his shoulder and the side of his face.  The
shoulder was smashed, sagging down at a grotesque angle and the arm
hanging twisted and lifeless.

The flesh had been shaved from his face, ripped off by stone and gravel,
so that the bone of his jaw was exposed in the mangled flesh.  Get up,
you bastard, snarled Fergus, thrusting the pistol into the officer's
face, grinding the muzzle into the lacerated wound.  Get up you bloody
black-leg.  We'll learn you a lesson.  The three troopers who had
escaped the wire had their mounts under control, and had circled to pick
up their downed comrades, calling to them by name.  Grab a stirrup,
Heintjie! Come on, Paul.  Get up!  Horses and men, milling and shouting
and screaming in the mist, a savage confused conflict, above which
Fergus raised his voice.  Stop them, don't let the bastards get away,
and his men swung the pick-handles, dodging forward under the police
batons to thrust and hack at the horsemen, but they were not quick
enough.

With men hanging from each stirrup leather, the horsemen reared and
wheeled away, leaving only the badly hurt officer and another inert body
lying among the wires and the terribly mutilated animals, while the
police escort was doubling forward up the road in two columns.

Fergus saw them and fumed impatiently, trying to force his captive to
his feet, but the man was hardly capable of sitting unaided.

The twenty constables stopped at fifty yards and one rank knelt, while
the others fell in behind them, rifles at the ready.  The command
carried clearly.  One round.  Warning fireV The volley of musketry
crashed out.  Aimed purposely high, it hissed and cracked over the heads
of the strikers, and they scattered into the ditch.

For one moment, Fergus hesitated and then he pointed the pistol into the
air and fired three shots in rapid succession.  It was the agreed
signal, and instantly a storm of rifle fire crashed from the silent
cottages along the road, the muzzle flashes of the hidden rifles dull
angry red in the dawn.  The fire swept the road.

Fergus hesitated a second only and then he lowered the pistol.  It was a
Webley .  45 5, a British officer's sidearm.  The police Captain saw his
intention in his eyes, the merciless glare of the stooping eagle, and he
mumbled a plea through his mangled lips, trying to lift hands to protect
his face.

The pistol shot was lost in the storm of rifle fire from the cottages,
and the answering police fire as they fell back in confusion into the
dip.

The heavy lead bullet smashed into the Captain's open pleading mouth,
knocking the two front teeth out of his upper jaw, and then it plunged
on into his throat and exited through the back of his skull in a scarlet
burst of blood and bone chips, clubbing him down into the dirt of the
roadway while Fergus turned and darted away under the cover of the
hedge.

Only at Fordsburg were the police raids repelled, for at the other
centres there had been no warning, and the strikers had not taken even
the most elementary precautions of placing sentries.

At the Trades Hall in Johannesburg, almost the entire leadership of the
strike was assembled, meeting with the other unions who had not yet come
out, but were considering sympathetic action.  There were
representatives of the Boilermakers Society, the Building and Allied
Trades, the Typographical Union and half a dozen others, together with
the most dynamic and forceful of the strikers.  Harry Fisher was there,
Andrews and Ben Caddy, and all the others.

The police were into the building while they were deep in dialectic,
debating the strategy of the class struggle, and the first warning they
had was the thunderous charge of booted feet on the wooden staircase.

Harry Fisher was at the head of the conference table, slumped down in
his chair with his tangled wiry hair hanging on to his forehead and his
thumbs hooked in his braces, his sleeves rolled up around the thick
hairy arms.

He was the only one to move.  He leaned across the table and grabbed the
rubber stamp of the High Council of Action and thrust it into his
pocket.

As the rifle butts smashed in the lock of the Council Chamber, he leapt
to his feet and thrust his shoulder into the shuttered casement.  It
burst open and, with surprising nimbleness for such a big man, he
slipped through it.

The facade of the Trades Hall was heavily encrusted with fancy cast-iron
grille work, and it gave him handholds.  Like a bull gorilla, he swarmed
up on to the third floor ledge and worked his way to the corner.

Below him he heard the crash of overturning furniture, the loud
challenges of the arresting officers and the outraged cries of the
labour leaders.

With his back pressed to the wall and his hands spread out to balance
himself, Harry Fisher peered around the corner into the main street.  It
swarmed with uniformed police, and more squads were marching up briskly.
An officer was directing men to the side alleys to surround the
building, and Harry Fisher drew back quickly and looked around him for
escape.

It was senseless to re-enter another window, for the whole building was
noisy with the tramp of feet and shouted orders.

Fifteen feet below him was the roof of a bottle store and general
dealer's shop, but the alleyway between was ten feet wide and the roof
of galvanized corrugated iron.

If he jumped, the noise he would make on landing would bring police
running from all directions, yet he could not stay where he was.  Within
minutes the building would be surrounded.

He eched sideways to the nearest downpipe and began to climb.  He
reached the overhang of the roof and had to lean out to get a grip on
the rim of the guttering, then he kicked his feet clear and hung from
his arms.  The drop of fifty feet below him sucked at his heels, and the
guttering creaked and sagged perceptively under his weight, but he drew
himself up on his arms, wheezing and straining until he could hook one
elbow over the gutter and wriggle the rest of his body up and over the
edge.

Still panting from the effort, he crawled slowly round the steeply
gabled roof and peered down into the main street, just as the police
began hustling the strike leaders out of the front doors.

Fifty helmeted constables with sloped rifles had formed a hollow square
in the road, and the strikers were pushed into it; some of them
bare-headed and in their shirtsleeves.

Already a crowd was forming on the sidewalks, and every minute it
swelled, as the news was shouted from door to door and the curious
hurried from every alleyway.

Harry Fisher counted the prisoners as they were brought out and the
total was twenty before the mood of the crowd began changing.  That's
it, comrades, Harry Fisher grunted, and wished he could have been down
there to lead them.  They surged angrily up to the police lines, calling
to the prisoners and hissing and booing the officer who ordered them,
through a speaking trumpet, to disperse.

Mounted police wheeled into line, pushing the crowd back and as the last
prisoner was led out, the escort stepped out, maintaining its rigid
box-formation which enclosed the dejected huddle of strikers, Somebody
began to sing the Red Flag, but the voices that joined in were thin and
tuneless, and the escort moved off towards the fort, carrying away not
only most of the strike leadership but all of its moderate faction,
those who had so far counselled against violence, against criminal
activity and bloody revolution.

Harry Fisher watched them go with a rising sense of triumph.  In one
stroke he had been given a band of martyrs for the cause and had all
serious opposition to his extreme views swept away.  He had also in his
hip pocket the seal of the Action Committee.  He smiled a thin,
humourless grin and settled down on the canted roof-top to wait for
nightfall.

Mark Anders carried the General's heavy crocodile-skin brief case down
the steps to the Rolls and placed it on the seat beside the chauffeur
while he gave him his instructions.  To Groote Schuur first, and then to
the City Club for lunch.  He stood back as the General came out of the
house and paused on the top step to kiss his wife as though he were
about to leave on a crusade to far places.  He smothered her in a vast
bear-hug and when he released her, he whispered something in her ear
that made her bridle and slap his shoulder.  Off with you, sir, she told
him primly, and Sean Courtney came down the steps looking mightily
pleased with himself, and grinned at Mark.  The Prime Minister is making
a statement to the House today, Mark.  I'll want to see you directly
afterwards Very well, sir, Mark returned the grin.  I'll look for you in
the visitors gallery as soon as he's finished, and give you the nod.
Then we'll meet inthe lobby and I'll see you up to my office.  Mark
helped him into the back seat of the Rolls while he was speaking.  He
was always clumsy and awkward when moving sideways on to the bad le&
nevertheless he resented the helping hand fiercely, hating any weakness
in himself even more than he disliked it in others, and he shrugged
Mark's hand away the moment he was comfortably seated.

Mark ignored the gesture and went on levelly, Your notes for the Cabinet
meeting are in the first folder, he indicated the crocodile bag on the
front seat beside the chauffeur, and you are lunching at the Club with
Sir Herbert.  The House sits at 215 and you have three questions from
Opposition members, even Hertzog himself has one for you.  Sean growled
like an old lion hated by the pack.  That bastard!  I have your replies
clipped to your Order Paper.  I checked with Erasmus and then I added a
few little touches of my own, so please have a look at them before you
stand up, you may not approve.  I hope you stuck it to them hard!  Of
course, Mark smiled again.  rWith both barrels.  Good boy, Sean nodded.
Tell him to drive on.  Mark watched the Rolls go down the driveway,
check at the gates and then swing out into Rhodes Avenue, before he
turned back into the house.

Instead of going down the passageway to his own office, Mark paused in
the hall and glanced guiltily about him.

Ruth Courtney had gone back into the domestic depths of the kitchen area
and there were no servants in sight.

Mark took the stairs three at a time, swung through the gallery and down
to the solid teak door at the end.

He did not knock but turned the handle and went in, closing the door
behind him quietly.

The stench of turpentine was a solid shock that made his eyes water for
a few seconds until they adjusted.

Mark knew that he was quite safe.  Storm Courtney never emerged before
midmorning from that sacrosanct area beyond the double doors that were
painted with gold cherubim and flying doves.  Since arriving in Cape
Town, Storm Courtney had kept such hours that even her father had
grumbled and huffed.

Mark found himself lying awake at night, just as he was sure the General
did, listening for the crunch of wheels on the gravel drive, straining
his ears for the faint sounds of gay voices and mentally judging the
length and passion of each farewell, troubled by feelings to which he
could not place a name.

His relations with Storm had retrogressed drastically.  In Natal there
had been the beginnings of a relaxed acceptance and undertones of
warmth.  It had begun with a smile and a friendly word from Storm, then
he had escorted her on the daily ride, driven with her to South Beach to
swim in the warm surf and sat in the sun arguing religion with her
instead.  Storm was going through a fashionable period of spiritualism
and Mark had felt it his duty to dissuade her.

From religion, the next step had been when Storm had announced, I need a
partner to practise a new dance with.  Mark had wound the gramophone,
changed the needles and danced to Storm's instruction.  You really are
quite good, you know, she had told him magnanimously, smiling up at him,
light and graceful in his arms as they spun around the empty ballroom of
Emoyeni.  You would make a crippled blacksmith look good job la!  she
laughed.  You are the gallant, Mr Anders!  This had all changed
abruptly.  Since they had arrived in Cape Town she had neither smiled
nor spoken directly to him, and Irene Leuchars, who was to have been a
house guest of Storm's for four months, stayed only one night, and then
caught the next mail ship.

Her name had not been mentioned again, and Storm's hostility to Mark had
been so intense that she could hardly bear to be in the same room with
him.

Now Mark felt like a thief in her studio, but he had not been able to
resist the temptation to steal a glimpse of the progress she had made on
her latest canvas.

Full-length windows had been put into the north wall for the light, and
they looked out on the mountain.  Storm's easel stood in the centre of
the bare uncarpeted floor, and the only other items of furniture were
the artist's stool, a carpenter's table cluttered with paint pots and a
chair on the raised model's dais.

Framed canvases in all sizes and shapes were stacked against the walls,
most of them still blank.  At one stage, during the period of
friendliness, she had even asked Mark to help with the timber framework.
He felt a pang when he remembered; she was a ruthless supervisor,
checking every lo.  mt and tack with a perfectionist's meticulous care.

The canvas was almost completed, and he wondered when she had found time
to do so much work in the last few days, and realized that he had
misjudged her.  She had been working in the mornings when he had
believed she was lying abed, but now he became absorbed by the picture.

He stood before it with his hands thrust into his pockets and felt a
glow of pleasure spread slowly through his body.

It was a picture of trees, a forest glade with sunlight playing on earth
and rock and two figures, a woman in a white dress, stooping to gather
wild flowers, while a man sat aside, sprawled against a tree trunk and
watching her.

Mark was aware that it was a great advance on anything she had painted
before, for although it was a simple picture, it evoked in him an
emotion so strong that he felt it choke in his throat.  He was awed by
the peculiar talent which could have produced this work.

He marvelled at how she had taken reality and refined it, captured its
essence and made of it an important occasion.

Mark thought how it was possible for an untrained eye to pick out
special talent in any field, just as a person who had never watched epee
used before would recognize a great swordsman after the first exchange;
now Mark, who knew nothing of painting, was moved by the discovery of
real beauty.

The latch clicked behind him, and he spun to face it.

She was well into the studio before she saw him.  She stopped abruptly
and her expression changed, Her whole body stiffened and her breathing
sounded stifled.  What are you doing here?  He had no answer for her,
but the mood of the picture was still on him.  I think that you will be
a great artist one day.  She faltered, taken completely off balance by
the compliment and its obvious sincerity, and her eyes slipped away to
the picture.  All the antagonism, all the haughtiness drained from her.

Suddenly she was just a very young girl in a baggy smock, smeared and
daubed with oil paint, and with a wash of pleased and modest colour
spreading over her cheeks.

He had never seen her like this, so artless, so open and vulnerable.  It
was as though for a moment she had unveiled the secret compartments of
her soul to allow him to see where she kept her real treasures.  Thank
you, Mark, she said softly, and she was no longer the glittering
butterfly, the spoiled flighty little rich girl, but a creature of
substance and warmth.

The rush of his own feelings must have been as obvious he had almost suc
combed to the desire he felt to take her in his arms and hold her hard,
for she stepped back a pace, looking flustered and uncertain of herself,
as though she had read his intention.  And yet you won't slide out of it
that easily.  The curtains were drawn hastily across the secret places,
and the old familiar ring was in her voice.  This is my private place,
even my father wouldn't dare come in here, without my permission first
obtained.  The change was extraordinary.  It was like a superb actress
slipping into a familiar role, she even stamped her foot, a gesture that
he found suddenly insupportable.

it won't happen again, he assured her brusquely, and he stepped to the
doorway, passing her closely.  He was so angry he felt himself
trembling.  Mark!  She stopped him imperiously, but it was with an
effort he forced himself to turn back; his whole body felt rigid, and
his lips were numb and stiff with anger.  My father asks permission to
come in here, she told him, and then she smiled, a slightly tremulous
but utterly enchanting thing.  Couldn't you just do the same?  She had
him off balance, his anger not fully aroused before she assuaged it with
that smile, he felt the rigidity melting out of his body, but she had
turned to the bench and was clattering her pots busily and she spoke
without looking up.  Close the door as you leave, she instructed, a
princess tossing an order to a serf.  His anger, not yet fully assuaged,
flared again brightly and he strode to the door with his heels clashing
on the bare boards and he was about to slam it with all of his strength,
and hope that it smashed off its hinges, when she stopped him again.

, mark!

He stopped, but could not bring himself to answer.  I will be coming
down to Parliament with you this afternoon.  We will leave directly
after lunch, I want to hear General Smuts speech, my father says it will
be important.  He thought that if he tried to answer her, his lips might
tear, they felt as stiff and brittle as parchment.  Oh dear, she
murmured.  I had completely forgotten when addressing Mark Anders
Esquire, one must always say please!  She crossed her hands demurely in
front of her, hung her head in a caricature of contrition and made those
dark blue eyes huge and soulful.  Please may I ride to Parliament with
you today? I would be ever so grateful, I really would.  And now you can
slam the door.  You should be on the stage, you're wasted as a painter,
he told her, but he closed the door with studied deliberation and she
waited to hear the latch click before she dropped into the model's
chair, and began to shake with laughter, hugging herself delightedly.

Gradually the laughter dried up, but she was still smiling as she
selected a blank canvas from the stock and placed it on the easel.

Working with charcoal, she blocked in the shape of his head, and it was
right at the first attempt.  The eyes, she whispered, his eyes are the
key.  And she smiled again as they appeared miraculously out of the
blank canvas, surprised that she had them fixed perfectly in her mind.
She began to hum softly as she worked, completely absorbed.

The Assembly Chamber of Parliament House was a high square hall, tiered
with the galleries for Press and visitors.

It was panelled in dark carved indigenous wood, and the canopy above the
Speaker's chair was ornately worked in the same wood.

Softly muted green carpeting set off the richer green leather of the
members benches, and every seat was filled, the galleries crowded, but
the silence that gripped that concourse was of extraordinary intensity,
a cathedral hush into which the high piping voice of the Prime Minister
carried clearly.  He made a slight but graceful figure as he stood in
his seat below the Speaker's dais.  The entire Witwatersrand complex is
passing slowly into the hands of the red commandos, He used his hands
expressively, and Mark leaned forward to obtain a better view. The
movement brought his outer leg against Storm Courtney's, and he was
aware of the warmth of her thigh against his during the rest of the
speech.  Three members of the police have been killed in a brutal attack
at Fordsburg, and two others have been critically injured in clashes
with strikers commandos.  These groups are armed with modern pattern
military firearms, and they are marching freely through the istreets in
quasi-military formations, committing acts of outrage on innocent
members of the public, on public officers going about their duties, on
all who cross their paths.  They have interfered with public services,
transport, power and communication, and have attacked and occupied
police stations.  Sean Courtney, who had been slumped in his front bench
seat with one hand covering his eyes, lifted his head and said Shame! in
a sonorous voice; it was his third-whisky voice, and Mark could not help
but grin as he guessed that the club lunch had fortified him for the
session.  Shame indeed, Smuts agreed.  Now the strikers have gathered
about them all the feckless and dissolute elements in the community,
their mood has become ugly and threatening.  Legitimate strike action
has given way to a reign of terror and criminal violence.  Yet the most
disturbing aspect of this terrible business is that the management of
this labour dispute, or should I say, the stagemanaging of the strike -
has passed into the hands of the most reckless and lawless men, and
these men seek nothing less than the overthrow of civilized government,
and a rule of Bolshevik anarchy.  Never!  boomed Sean, and the cry was
taken up across the assembly.  This house, and the whole nation is faced
by the prospect of bloodshed and violence on a scale which none of us
expected or believed possible.

The silence was unbroken now as Smuts went on carefully.  If any blame
attaches to this Government, it is that we have been too patient and
shown too much forbearance for the miners grievances, we have allowed
them too much latitude, too much expression of their demands.  This was
because we have always been aware of the temper of the nation, and the
rights of individuals and groups to free expression.  Quite right too,
Sean agreed, and, Hear!  Hear!

answered, Haar!  HoorVacross the floor.  Now however, we have been
forced to reckon the cost of further forbearance, and we have found it
unacceptable.  He paused and bowed his head for a moment, and when he
lifted it again, his expression was bleak and cold.  Therefore a state
of martial law now exists throughout the Union of South Africa. The
silence persisted for many seconds, and then a roar of comment and
question and interjection filled the house.

Even the galleries buzzed with confusion and speculation, and the Press
reporters jostled and fought each other at the exit doors in the race to
reach a telephone.

Martial law was the weapon of last resort, and had only been used once
before, during the 1916 rebellion, when De Wet had raised his commandos
again and ridden against Botha and Smuts.  Now there were cries of
protest and anger from the Opposition benches, Hertzog shaking his fist
and his pince-nez glinting, while the government members were also on
their feet voicing their support.  The Speaker's vain cries of Order!
Order!  were almost drowned in the uproar.

Sean Courtney was signalling to Mark in the gallery, and he acknowledged
and helped Storm to her feet, shielding her through the excited press of
bodies as they left the gallery and went down the passage to the
staircase.

The General was waiting for them at the visitors entrance.  He was
scowling and dark-faced with concern, a measure of his agitation was the
perfunctory kiss he dropped on Storm's uplifted face before turning to
Mark.  A pretty business, my boy.  He seized his elbow.  Come on, let's
go where we can talk, and he led them to the members entrance, and up
the stairs under the portraits of stern-faced Chief justices to his own
office.

Immediately the door was closed, he waved Storm away to one of the
chairs, and told Mark, The regiment was called out at ten o'clock this
morning.  I managed to get Scott on the telephone at his home, and he's
got it in hand.  He's a good man.  They will be fully mobilized by now,
and there is a special train being made up.  They will entrain and leave
for the Witwatersrand at eleven o'clock tonight, in full battle order.
What about us?  Mark demanded.  Suddenly he was a soldier again and he
dropped neatly into the role.  His place was with the regiment.  We'll
join there.  We leave tonight.  We are going up in convoy with the Prime
Minister, and we'll travel all night - you will drive one of the cars.
Sean was at his desk now, beginning to pack his briefcase.  How long
will it take us?  It's a thousand miles, sir, Mark pointed out.  I know
that, damn it, snapped Sean.  How long? Sean had never liked nor
understood the internal combustion engine, and his dislike showed in his
ignorance of their speed and capability whereas he could finely judge a
journey by wagon or horseback.  We won't be there before tomorrow
evening, it's a hell of a road.  Bloody motorcars, Sean growled.  The
regiment will be there before us by rail.  They've only three hundred
miles to go.  Mark felt obliged to come to the defence of the car, and
Sean grunted.  I want you to get on  -)me now.  Have my wife pack my
campaign bag and get your duffle together.  We'll leave immediately I
get home.  He turned to Storm.  Go along with Mark, now, Missy.  I'm
going to be busy here for a while.  Mark strapped up his bag, and
reflected how his worldly possessions had multiplied since he had joined
the Courtney household.

There had been a time when he could carry everything he owned in his
pockets, the thought was broken by a knock on the door.  Come in, he
called, expecting a servant. Only Ruth Courtney ever came down this end
of the house on her weekly inspection, a determined crusade against dust
and cockroaches.  Please take it down to the car, he said in Zulu,
adjusting his uniform cap in the mirror above the wash-basin.

All on my own?  Storm asked sweetly in the same language, and he turned
startled.  You shouldn't be here.  Why not, am I in danger of violation
and ravishment?  She had closed the door and leaned against it, her
hands behind her back, but her eyes bold and teasing.  It would be
safer, I should imagine, to attempt to ravish a swarm of hornets.  That
was merely boorish, coarse and insulting, she said.  You really are
improving immensely.  And she looked at the strapped case on the bed.  I
was going to offer to help you pack, most men are hopeless at that.  But
I see you've managed.  Is there anything else I can do for you?  I am
sure I could think of something, he said with a solemn expression, but
something in the tone of his voice made her smile and caution him.  Not
too much improvement in one day, please.  She crossed to the bed and
bounced on it experimentally.  God!

Who filled it with bricks?  No wonder Irene Leuchars went home!  The
poor darling must have sprained her back!  Her expression was innocent,
but her gaze raked him and Mark felt himself blushing furiously.
Suddenly, much that had puzzled him was clear, and as he turned back to
the mirror, he wondered how she had found out about Irene.  For
something to do, he tipped the brim of his cap.  Beautiful, she agreed.
Are you going up there to brutalize those poor strikers, or to bounce on
their wives also?  And before he could give expression to the shock he
felt she went on, Funnily enough, I didn't really come down here to
fight with you.  I once had another old tomcat and I was really very
fond of him, but he got run over by a car.

Have you got a cigarette, Mark?  You don't smoke.  He had found it
difficult to keep up with the conversation.  I know, but I have decided
to learn.  it's so suave, don't you think?  Suave was the fashionable
word at that moment.

She held the cigarette with an exaggerated vampish pose after he had lit
it.  How do I look?  Bloody awful, he said, and she batted her eyes and
took a tentative draw, held it for a moment and then started to cough.
Here, give it to me.  He took it away from her, and it tasted of her
mouth.  He felt the ache in his body, the terrible wanting, mingled now
with a strange tenderness he had never felt before.  She seemed, for
once, so tender and young.

Will it be dangerous?  she asked, suddenly serious.  I don't think so,
we'll be just like policemen.  They are killing policemen.  She stood up
and walked to the window.  The view is dreadful, unless you like
dustbins.  I'd complain, if I were you.  She turned back to face him.
I've never seen a man off to war before.  What should I say? I don't
know.  Nobody ever saw me off before.  What did your mother say? I never
knew my mother.  Oh Mark.  I'm sorry.  I didn't mean to -'Her voice
trailed off, and he was shocked to see that her eyes were brimming with
tears.  It doesn't matter he assured her quickly, and she turned back to
the window.  Actually, you can just see the top of Devil's Peak, if you
twist your head.  Her voice was thick and nasal, and it was many seconds
before she turned back.  Well, we're both new to this, so we'll just
have to help each other.  I suppose you should say, "Come back soon.
"'Yes, I suppose I should, and then what do I do?  You kiss me.  It was
out before he had thought about it, and he was stunned by his own
audacity.

She stood very still, rooted by the words, and when she began to move,
it was with the slow deliberation of a sleepwalker, and her eyes were
huge and unblinking.  She came across the room.

She stopped in front of him, and, as she lifted her arms, she came up on
her toes.

The air about her was filled with her fragrance, and her arms were slim
and strong about his neck, but it was the softness and the warmth of her
lips that amazed him.

Her body swayed against him, and seemed to melt with his own, and the
long artistic fingers slowly caressed the nape of his neck.

He passed an arm around her waist, and was again amazed at how narrow
and slim it was; but the muscles of her back were firm and pliant as she
arched it, pushing forward with her hips.

He heard her gasp as she felt him, and a slow voluptuous shudder shook
her.  For long moments she lingered, her hips pressed to his and her
breasts flattened against his tunic.

He stooped over her, his hands beginning to move up the hard resilient
little back, his mouth forcing hers open so the soft lips parted like
the fleshy red petals of an exotic blooming orchid.

She shuddered again, but then the sound in her throat turned into a
panicky moan of protest and she twisted out of his arms, though he tried
desperately to hold her.  But she was strong and supple and determined.

At the door, she stopped to stare at him.  She was trembling, her eyes
were wide and dark, as though she had truly only seen him for the first
time.  Oh la!  Who was talking about swarms of hornets!  she mocked, but
her voice was gusty and unsteady.

She twisted the door open, and tried to smile, but it was a poor
lopsided thing, and she did not yet have control of her breathing.  I'm
not so sure of that "Come back soon" any more.  She held the door open
to give herself courage, and her next smile was more convincing.  Don't
get run over, you old tomcat, and she slipped out into the passageway.
Her receding footsteps were light and dancing in the silence of the big
house, and Mark's own legs were suddenly so weak that he sat down
heavily on his bed.

Mark drove fast, concentrating all his attention on the twisting
treacherous road through the mountains, driving the big heavily laden
Rolls down the path of its own glaring brass-bound headlights, up Baines
Kloof where the mountain fell away on his left hand sheer into the
valley, past Worcester with its orderly vineyards standing in dark lines
in the moonlight, before the final ascent up the Hex River Mountains to
the rim of the flat compacted shield of the African interior.

They came out over the top, and the vast land stretched away ahead of
them, the dry treeless karroo, where the flat-topped kopjes made
strangely symmetrical shapes against the cold starry sky.

Now at last, Mark could relax in the studded leather driver's seat,
driving instinctively, the road pouring endlessly towards him, pale and
straight out of the darkness, and he could tune his ears to the voice of
the two men in the rear seat.  What they don't understand, old Sean, is
that if we do not employ every black man who offers himself for work no,
more than that, if we don't actively recruit all the native labour we
can get hold of, it will result not-only in fewer jobs for white men,
but, in the long run, it will mean, finally, no jobs at all for the
white men of Africa.  A jackal, small and furry as a puppy, lolloped
into the path of the headlights with its ears erect, and Mark steered
carefully to miss it, his own ears cocked for Sean's reply.

They think only of today.  His voice was deep and grave.  We must plan
for ten years from now, for thirty, fifty years ahead, for a nation firm
and undivided.  We cannot afford once again to have Afrikander against
Briton, or worse, we dare not have white against black.  It is not
enough that we are forced to live together, we must learn to work
together.  Slowly, slowly, old Sean, the Prime Minister chuckled.  Don't
let dreams run away with reality.  I don't deal in dreams, Jannie.  You
should know that.  If we don't want to be torn to pieces by our own
people, we must give all of them, black, white and brown, a place and a
share.  They ran on hard into the endless land, and the light of a
lonely farm house on a dark ridge emphasized how vast and empty it was.
Those who clamour so loudly for less work and more pay may find that
what benefit they get now will have to be paid for at a thousand percent
interest some day in the future.  A payment in misery and hunger and
suffering, Sean Courtney was speaking again.  If we are to steer off the
reef of national disaster, then men will have to learn to work again,
and to take seriously once more the demands of a disciplined and orderly
society.  Have you ever wondered, Sean, at how many people these days
depend for their livelihood on nothing else but finding areas of dispute
between the employers and the employed, between labour and management?
Sean nodded, taking it up where Smuts left off. As though the two were
not shackled to each other with bonds that nothing can break.  They
travel the same road, to the same goal, bound together irretrievably by
destiny.  When one stumbles, he brings the other down on bloody knees,
when one falls the other comes down with him Slowly, as the stars made
their circuit of grandeur across the heavens, the talk in the back seat,
of the Rolls dwindled into silence.

Mark glanced in the mirror and saw that Sean Courtney was asleep, a
travelling rug about his shoulders and his black beard on his chest.

His snores were low and regular and deep, and Mark felt a rush of
feeling for the big man.  It was a fine mixture of respect and awe, of
pride and affection.  I suppose that is what you would feel, if you had
a father, he thought, and then, embarrassed by the strength and
presumption of his feeling, he once again concentrated all his attention
on the road.

The night wind had sifted the sky with fine dust, and the dawn was a
thing of unbelievable splendour.  From horizon to horizon, and right
across the vaulted domes of the heavens, vibrant colour throbbed and
glowed and flamed, until at last the sun thrust clear of the horizon. We
won't stop in Bloemfontein or any of the big towns, Mark.  We don't want
anybody to see the Prime Minister.

Sean leaned across the back of the seat.  We'll need petrol, General.
Pick one of the roadside pumps, Sean instructed.  Try and find one with
no telephone lines.  It was a tiny iron-roofed general dealer's store
set back from the road under two scraggy eucalyptus blue gum trees.
There was no other building in sight, and the open empty veld stretched
dry and sun-scared to the circle of the horizon.  The plaster walls of
the store were cracked and in need of whitewash, plastered with
advertisement boards for Bovril and Joko tea.  The windows were
shuttered and the door locked, but there were no telephone lines running
from the solitary building to join those that followed the road, and a
single red-painted petrol pump stood at rigid attention in the dusty
yard below the stoep.

Mark blew a long continuous blast on the Rolls' horn, and while he was
doing so, the Prime Minister's black Cadillac that was following turned
off the main road and parked behind them.  The driver and the three
members of the ministerial staff climbed out and stretched their stiff
muscles.

When the proprietor of the store emerged at last, unshaven, red-eyed,
but cheerfully doing up his breeches, he spoke no English.  Mark asked
in Afrikaans, Can you fill up both cars?  While the storekeeper swung
the handle of the pump back and forth, and the fuel rose alternatively
into the two one-gallon glass bowls on the top of the pump, his wife
came out from the store with a tray of steaming coffee mugs and a
platter of crisp golden freshly baked rusks.

They ate and drank gratefully, and were ready to go on again within
twenty minutes.

The storekeeper stood in the yard, scratching the stubble of his beard
and watched the twin columns of red dust billowing into the northern
sky.  His wife came out on to the stoep and he turned to squint up at
her.  Do you know who that was? he asked, and she shook her head.

That was Clever Jannie, and his English gun-men.

Didn't you see the uniform the young one wore?  He spat into the red
dirt, and his phlegm balled and rolled, Khaki!

Damned khaki!  He ripped the word out bitterly, and went around the side
of the building to the little lean-to stable.

He was clinching the girth on the old sway-backed grey mare, when she
followed him into the stall.  It's none of our business, Hendrick.  Let
it stand.  None of our business?  he demanded indignantly.  Didn't I
fight khaki in the English war, didn't I fight it again in 1916 when we
rode with old De Wet, isn't my brother a rock-breaker on the Simmer and
Jack mine, and isn't that where Clever Jannie is going with his hangmen?
He swung up on the mare and put his heels to her.  She jumped away, and
he pointed her at the ridge.  It was eight miles to the railway siding,
and there was a telegraph in the ganger's cottage; the ganger was a
cousin of his.  The Railway Workers Union was out in sympathy with the
miners now.  The Action Committee would have the news in Johannesburg by
lunch time that Clever Jannie was on his way.

While Mark Anders drank coffee at the wayside store, Fergus MacDonald
lay under the hedge at the bottom of a garden ablaze with crimson cannas
in orderly beds, and peered through a pair of binoculars down the slope
at the Newlands Police Station.  They had sand-bagged the windows and
doors.

The lady of the house had sat onher veranda the previous evening,
drinking coffee and counting forty-seven police constables arriving by
motor lorry to reinforce the station.

Her son was a shift boss on the Simmer and Jack.  Whoever commanded the
police at Newlands was no soldier, Fergus decided, and grinned that
wolfish wicked grin.

He had seen the dead ground instantly, any soldier would have picked it
up at a glance.  Pass the word for the Mills bombs, he muttered to the
striker beside him, and the man crawled away.

Fergus swung the glasses up along the road where it started to climb the
kopies, and grunted with satisfaction.

The telephone wires had been cut, along with the power lines.  He could
see the loose ends dangling from the poles.

The police station was isolated.

The striker crawled back to Fergus side, dragging a heavy rucksack.  He
had a tooth missing from his upper jaw, and he grinned gap-toothed at
Fergus.  Give them hell, comrade. Fergus face was blackened with soot
and his eyelashes were singed away. They had burned the Fordsburg Police
Station a little before midnight.  I want covering fire, on my whistle.
You'll get it, never fear.  Fergus opened the rucksack and glanced at
the steel globes, with their deeply segmented squares for fragmentation,
then he slung the strap over his shoulder and adjusted the burden to
hang comfortably on his flank.  Look after it well.  He handed his
Lee-Enfield rifle to the gap-toothed striker. We'll need it again today.
He crawled away down the shallow drainage ditch that led to a concrete
culvert which crossed under the road, The culvert was lined with
circular tubes of rusty corrugated iron, and Fergus wriggled through it
carefully, emerging on the far side of the road.

Lying on his side, he raised himself slightly to peer over the edge of
the drainage ditch.  The police station was a hundred and fifty yards
away.  The blue light over the front door, with the white lettered
POLICE, was dead, and the flag hung limply on its pole in the still
windless morning.

it was fifty yards to the slope of dead ground under the eastern windows
of the brick building, and Fergus could see the rifle barrels of the
defenders poked through the gaps in the sand-bags.

He pulled the silver whistle from his back pocket by its lanyard, and
came up on his knees like a sprinter on the blocks.

He drew a deep breath and blew a long shrill ringing blast on the
whistle.  Immediately a storm of rifle fire crashed out from the hedges
and ditches that surrounded the station.

The blue lamp shattered into flying fragments, and red brick dust popped
off the walls like dyed cotton pods.

Fergus came out of the ditch at a run.  A bullet kicked dust and stone
chips stung his ankles, and another jerked like an impatient hand at the
tail of his coat, then he was into the dead ground and out of their
field of fire.

He still ran doubled over, however, until he reached the police station.
Then he flattened himself against the wall between two of the
sand-bagged windows while he struggled with his breathing.

A rifle barrel protruded from the left-hand window as it blazed away up
the slope of the kopje.  Fergus opened the rucksack and took out a
grenade with his left hand.  He pulled the pin with his teeth, while he
groped for the Webley .  45 5 revolver stuck into the belt of his
trousers.

He locked one arm over the barrel of the police rifle, dragging it
harmlessly aside, then he stepped into the window, and, still holding
the rifle, looked through the narrow hole in the sand-bags.

A young, beardless face stared back at him, the eyes wide with
amazement, the mouth hanging open slightly and the police helmet pulled
down low over his eyes.

Fergus shot him in the bridge of the nose, between the startled staring
eyes, and the head was smashed backwards out of view.

Fergus hurled the grenade through the gap and ducked down.  The
explosion in the confined space was vicious and ear-numbing, Fergus
bobbed up and tossed in another grenade.

Glass and smoke blew from the windows, and from within there were the
screams and cries of the trapped police constables, the groans and
gasping walls of the wounded.

Fergus threw in a third grenade, and screamed, Chew on that you bloody
strike-breakers.  The bomb exploded, shattering out a panel from the
front door, and smoke billowed from all windows.

Inside a single voice started screaming.  Stop it!  Oh God, stop it!  We
surrender!  Come out with your hands in the air, you bastards!

A police sergeant staggered out of the shattered doorway.

He held one hand above his head, the other hung at his side in a torn
and blood-soaked sleeve.

The last call that went out from Newlands Police Station before the
strikers cut the lines was a call for help.  The relieving column coming
over the ridge from Johannesburg in a convoy of three trucks got as far
as the Hotel in Main Street where it was halted by rifle fire, and the
moment it stopped, strikers ran out into the roadway behind it and set
all the trucks ablaze with petrol bombs.

The police abandoned their vehicles and raced for cover in a cottage
beside the road.  It was a strong defensive position and they looked set
to hold out against even the most determined attacks, but they left
three dead constables lying in the road beside the burning trucks, and
another two of their number lying near them, so badly wounded they could
only cry out for succour.

A white flag waved from across the road, and the police commander
stepped out on to the veranda of the cottage.

What do you want?  he called across.

Fergus MacDonald walked out into the road, still waving the flag, a
slight unwar-like figure in shabby suit and cloth cap.  You can't leave
these men out here, he shouted back, pointing at the bodies.

The commander came out with twenty un-armed police into the road to
carry away the dead and wounded, and while they worked, strikers under
Fergus, orders slipped in through the back of the cottages.

Suddenly Fergus whipped the Webley out from under his coat and pressed
it to the commander's head.  Tell your men to put their hands up, or
I'll blow your bloody brains all over the road.  In the cottage, Fergus'
men knocked the weapons out of the hands of the police, and in the
roadway armed strikers were among them.

You were under a flag of truce, protested the commander bitterly.  We
aren't playing games, you bloody black-leg!  snarled Fergus.  We're
fighting for a new world.  The commander opened his mouth to protest
again and Fergus swung the revolver sideways, slashing the barrel into
his face, snapping out the front teeth from his upper jaw, and crushing
the lip into a red wet smear.  The man dropped to his knees, and Fergus
strode among his men.  We'll siege the Brixton ridge now, and after that
Johannesburg.  By tonight, we'll have the red flag flying on every
public building in town.  Onward, comrades, nothing will stop us now.
The Transvaal Scottish detrained at Dunswart Station that same morning
to march in and seize the mining town of Benoni, which was under full
control of the Action Committee's commandos, but the strikers were
waiting for them.

The advancing troops were caught in flank and rear by the cross-fire
from hundreds of prepared positions, and fought hard all that day to
extricate themselves, but it was late afternoon when, still under
sniping fire, they were able to retrain at Dunswart.

They carried with them three dead officers and nine dead other rankers.
Another thirty were suffering from gunshot wounds, from which many would
later die.

From one end to the other of the Witwatersrand, the strikers were on the
rampage.  The Action Committee controlled that great complex of mining
towns and mining properties that follows the sweep of the gold-bearing
reef across the bleak African veld, sixty miles from Krugersdorp to
Ventersdorp, with the city of Johannesburg at its centre.

it is the richest gold-bearing formation yet discovered by man, a
glittering treasure house, the foundation stone of the prosperity of a
nation, and now the strikers carried the red flag across it at will, and
at every point the force of law and order reeled back.

Every police commander was loath to initiate fire, and every constable
loath to act upon the order when it did come.  They were firing upon
friends, countrymen, brothers.

In the cellars of the Fordsburg Trade Union Hall they were holding a
kangaroo court; a traitor was on trial for his life.

Harry Fisher's huge bulk was clad now in a military style bushjacket,
with buttoned patch-pockets, over which he wore a bandolier of
ammunition.  On his right arm was a plain band of red cloth, but his
unkempt black hair was uncovered, and his eyes were fierce.

His desk was a packing case, and Helena MacDonald stood behind his
stool.  She had cropped her hair as short as a man's, and she wore
breeches tucked into her boots, and the red irmband on her tunic.  Her
face was pale and gaunt, her eyes in deep plum-coloured sockets were
invisible in the bad light, but her body was tensed with the nervous
energy of a leashed greyhound with the smell of the hare in its
nostrils.

The accused was a storekeeper of the town, with pale watery eyes behind
the steel-rimmed spectacles which he blinked rapidly as he watched his
accuser.  He asked to be connected with police headquarters in Marshall
Square!  Just a minute, Helena interrupted.  You are on the local
telephone exchange, is that right?  Yes, that's right.  I am Exchange
Supervisor!  The woman looked like a schoolteacher, iron-haired, neatly
dressed, unsmiling.  Go on.  I thought I'd better listen in, you know,
see what he was up to.  The storekeeper was wringing white bony hands,
and chewing nervously on his lower lip.  He looked at least sixty years
old with the pale silver fluff of hair standing up comically from his
bald pink pate.  Well, when he started giving them the details of what
was happening here, I broke the connection.  What exactly did he say?
Fisher demanded.  He said that there was a machine gun here.  He said
that?  Fisher's expression was thunderous.  He transferred his glare to
the storekeeper, and the man quailed.

My boy is in the police, he's my only boy, he whispered, and then
blinked back the tears from the pale eyes.  That's as good as a
confession, said Helena coldly, and Fisher glanced over his shoulder at
her and nodded.

Take him out and shoot him, he said.

The light delivery van bumped along the overgrown track and stopped
beside the old abandoned No.  1 shaft on the Crown Mine's property.  It
had not been used for twelve years, and concrete machinery slabs and the
collar of the shaft were thick with rank grass that grew out of the
cracks in the concrete and covered the rusted machinery.

Two men dragged the storekeeper to the dilapidated barbed-wire fence
that protected the dark black hole of the shaft.  No.  1 shaft was
fifteen hundred feet deep, but had flooded back to the five-hundred-foot
level.  The warning notices on the barbed-wire fence were embellished
with the skull and cross-bones device.

Helena MacDonald stayed at the wheel of the delivery van.  She lit a
cigarette and stared ahead, waiting without visible emotion for the
executioner's shot.

The minutes passed, while the cigarette burned down between her fingers,
and she snapped impatiently when one of the armed strikers came to the
side window of the van.  What's keeping you?  Begging your pardon,
missus, neither of us can do it.  What do you mean?  Helena demanded.
Well, the man dropped his eyes.  Old Cohen's been selling me my
groceries for ten years now. He always gives the kids a candy bar when
they go in -With an impatient exclamation, Helena opened the van door
and stepped out.  Give me your revolver, she said, and as she strode to
where the second striker guarded the old storekeeper she checked the
load and spun the chamber of the pistol.

Cohen started to smile, a mild ingratiating smile as he peered at her
face myopically, then he saw her expression and the pistol in her hand.

He dropped to his knees, and he began to urinate in terrified spurts
down the front of his baggy grey flannel trousers.

When Helena parked the van in the street behind the market buildings,
she was aware immediately of a new charge of excitement in the air.  The
men at the sandbagged windows called out to her, Your old man's back,
missus.  He's down in the cellar with the boss!  Fergus looked up from
the large-scale map of the East Rand over which he and Harry Fisher were
poring.  She hardly recognized him.

He was sooty and grimed as a chimney sweep, and his eyelashes had been
burned away, giving him a bland startled look.  His eyes were bloodshot
and there were little wet beads of dirty mucus in the corners.

Hello, luv, he grinned wearily at her.  What are you doing here,
comrade?  she demanded.  You are supposed to be at Brixton ridge.

Harry Fisher intervened, Fergus has taken the ridge.

He's done fine work, really fine work.  But now we have been granted a
stroke of really good fortune What is it?  Helena demanded.  Slim jannie
Smuts is on his way from Cape Town.  That's bad news, Helena
contradicted coolly.  He's coming by road, and he's got no escort with
him, Harry Fisher explained.  Like a lover, right into our arms, grinned
Fergus, and spread his own arms wide.  There were dark splotches of
dried blood on his sleeves.

The Prime Minister's aide-de-camp had spelled Mark at the wheel of the
Rolls on the long stretch northwards from Bloemfontein.  Mark had been
able to sleep, hunched up on the front seat, oblivious of the lurching
and shaking over the bad stretches of road, so that he woke refreshed
when Sean Courtney stopped the little convoy on a deserted hilltop
fifteen miles south of the built-up complex of mines and towns of the
Witwatersrand.

it was late afternoon and the lowering sun turned the banks of low false
cloud in the north to a sombre purple hue.  It was not cloud but the
discharge from the hundreds of chimneys of the power stations and
refineries, of the coal-burning locomotives and the open fires of tens
of thousands of African labourers in their locations, and of burning
buildings and vehicles.

Mark wrinkled his nose as he smelled the acrid taint of the city fouling
the clean dry air of the highveld.

The entire party took the opportunity to stretch cramped muscles and to
relieve other physical needs.  Mark noted wryly that nice social
distinctions were observed when those members of the party who had
general officer's rank and Cabinet Minister's status used the screened
side of the Puked cars, while the lesser members stood out in the open
road.

While they went about their business, there was an argument in progress.
Sean was advocating caution and a round-about approach through the
suburbs and outlying areas of Johannesburg.  We should cut across to
Standerton and come in on the Natal road, the rebels are holding all the
southern suburbs. They'll not be expecting us, old Sean.  We'll go
through fast and be at Marshall Square before they know what's happened,
jannie Smuts decided. I can't afford the extra two hours it will take us
to circle around. And Sean growled at him, You always were too damned
hot-headed, Jannie. Good God, you were the one who rode into the Cape
with a hundred and fifty men in your commando to capture Cape Town from
the whole British army. Gave them the fright of their lives, the Prime
Minister chuckled as he came around the back of the Rolls, buttoning his
trousers, and Sean, following him, went on with relish, That's right,
but when you tried the same tricks on Lettow von Vorbeck in German East
Africa, you were the one who got the fright.  He roasted your arse for
you.  Mark winced at Sean's choice of words, and the Prime Minister's
party looked to heaven and earth, anywhere except at their master's
suddenly unsmiling countenance.  We are going into Johannesburg on the
Booysens Road, said Jannie Smuts coldly.

You'll be no damned good to us dead, grumbled Sean.  That's enough, old
Sean.  We'll do it my way.  All right, Sean agreed lugubriously.  But
you'll ride in the second car.  The Cadillac will lead with your pennant
flying.  He turned to the Prime Minister's driver, Flat out, you
understand, stop for nothing.  Yes, sir.  Have you gentlemen got your
music with you?  he demanded, and all of them showed him the sidearms
they carried.  Mark, Sean turned to him.  Get the Mannlicher off the
roof. Mark unstrapped the leather case from the luggage rack and
assembled the 9.  3 mm sporting rifle, the only effective weapon they
had been able to find at short notice in Somerset House before leaving.
He loaded the magazine and handed the weapon to Sean, then slipped two
yellow packets of Eley Kynoch ammunition into his own pockets.

Good boy, Sean grunted, and peered at him closely.  How are you feeling?
Did you get some sleep?  I'm fine, sir.  Take the wheel.  Darkness fell
swiftly, smearing the silhouettes of the blue gum trees along the low
crests of the rolling open ground, crowding in the circle of their
vision.

There were the flickering pinpoints of open cooking fires from a few of
the native shacks among the hills, but these were the only signs of
life.  The road was deserted, and even when they began to speed past the
first brick-built buildings, there were no lights, and the stillness was
unnatural and disquieting.  The main power station has shut down.  The
coal-miners were limiting supply to fifty tons a day for essential
services, but now they've stopped even that, the Prime Minister mused
aloud, and neither of them answered him.

Mark followed the twinkling red rear-lights of the Cadillac, and the
darkness pressed closer.  He switched on the main beams of his
headlights, and suddenly they were into the narrow streets of Booysens,
the southernmost suburb of Johannesburg.

The miners cottages crowded the road like living and menacing presences.
On the left, against the last faint glimmer of the day, Mark could make
out the skeletal shape of the steel headgear at Crown Mines'main
haulage, and ahead, the low table-like hillocks of the mine dumps gave
him a nostalgic twinge.

He thought suddenly of Fergus MacDonald, and Helena, and glanced once
again to his left, lifting his eyes from the road for a moment.

just beyond the Crown Deep headgear, not more than a mile away, was the
cottage on Lover's Walk where she had taught him he was a man.

The memory was too wrapped around with pain and guilt, and he thrust it
aside and turned his full attention back to the road just as the first
rifle shots sparkled from the darkened cottage windows on the right side
of the road ahead.

Instantly, he was judging the angle and field of the enemy fire,
noticing how they had chosen the curve of the road where the vehicles
must slow.  Good, he thought dispassionately, applauding the choice, and
he hit the gear lever of the Rolls, double declutching into a lower gear
to build up revolutions for the turn.

Get down!  he shouted at his illustrious passengers.

Ahead the Cadillac swerved wildly at the volley and then recovered, and
went roaring into the turn.  Six or seven rifles, Mark estimated, and
then saw the high hedge and the open pavement below the cottage windows.
He would give them a changing closing target, he decided, and used the
power and rush of the Rolls to broadside up on to the pavement, under
the cover of the hedge.

Foliage brushed with a light rushing whisper against the side of the
roaring vehicle and behind him a service revolver hanged lustily as Sean
Courtney fired through the open window.

Mark hit the brakes and fanned the back of the Rolls through the turn,
bounded off the pavement and let her sway out across the road, to
further confuse the riflemen in the cottages.  Then he tramped down hard
on the accelerator, guided her through the turn and went howling down
into the dark deserted commercial area of Booysens, leaving the
stupefied riflemen staring into the deserted bend, and listening to the
receding note of the Rolls-Royce engine.

Only two miles and they would be through the danger area, over the ridge
and into Johannesburg proper.

Ahead of him, the Cadillac was running through the area of shops and
warehouses and small factories, its headlights blazing harshly on the
buildings that lined the road, carving a tunnel of light down their
avenue to safety.

in the back seat of the Rolls, the two Generals had not taken Mark's
advice to seek cover, and were both sitting bolt upright, discussing the
situation objectively in cool measured tones.  That was quick thinking,
Smuts said.  They weren't expecting that turn.  He's a good lad, Sean
agreed.  But you are wasting your time with that pistol.  Gives me
something to do, Sean explained, as he reloaded the chambers of his
revolver.  You should have ridden with my commando, old Sean, I would
have taught you to save ammunition.  Smuts sought revenge for Sean's
earlier remarks.

The headlights of the Cadillac tipped slightly upwards as it charged
through the dip and reached the first rising ground.  They all saw the
road-block at the same moment.

It was flung up crudely across the road, oil drums, baulks of timber,
iron bedsteads, sand-bags and household furniture obviously dragged from
the cottages.

Sean swore loudly and with ferocity.  I can turn now, Mark shouted.  But
they'll get us when we slow down, and we'll have to go back through the
ambush.  Watch the Cadillac, Sean shouted back.

The heavy black machine had not hesitated, and it roared up the slope at
the barricade, picking the spot which seemed weakest.  He's going to
open a breach!  Follow him, Mark.  The Cadillac smashed into the
road-block, and tables and chairs flew high into the night.  Even above
the roar of wind and engine, Mark could hear the tlearing crashing
impact, and then the Cadillac was through and going on up the ridge, but
its speed was bleeding away and a white cloud of steam plumed from the
torn radiator.

However, they had forged a breach in the barricade and Mark steered for
it, bumping over a mangled mass of timber and then accelerating away up
the slope, gaining rapidly on the leading vehicle.

The Cadillac was losing speed, clearly suffering a mortal injury.

Shall I stop for them?  Mark demanded.  No, said Sean.  We have to get
the Prime Minister, Yes, said Smuts.  We can't leave them.  Make up your
bloody minds, yelled Mark, and there was a stunned disbelieving silence
in the back, and Mark began to brake for the pick up.

The machine gun opened from the scrubby bush at the base of the nearest
mine dump.  The tracer flailed the night, brilliant white fire sweeping
down the road in a blinding storm, the high ripping tearing sound was
unmistakable and Mark and Sean exclaimed together in appalled disbelief.
Vickers! The Prime Minister's green and golden pennant on the bonnet of
the Cadillac drew the deadly sheet of fire, and in the horrified
micro-seconds that Mark watched, he saw the car begin to break up.  The
windshield and side windows blew away in a sparkling cloud of glass
fragments, the figures of the three occupants were plucked to pieces
like chickens caught in the blades of a threshing-machine.

The Cadillac slewed off the road and crashed headlong into the blank
wall of a timber warehouse on the edge of the road, and still the
relentless stream of Vickers fire -tore into the carcass, punching neat
black holes into the metalwork, holes that were rimmed with bare metal
that sparkled in the headlights of the Rolls like newly minted silver
dollars.

It would only be seconds before the gunner swivelled his Vickers on to
the Rolls, Mark realized, and he searched the road ahead for a bolthole.

Between the timber warehouse and the next building was a narrow
alleyway, barely wide enough to admit the Rolls.  Mark swung out to make
a hay-cart turn for the alley, and the gunner guessed his intention, but
was stiff and low on his traverse as he swung the Vickers on to the
Rolls.

The sheet of bullets ripped the surface of the road, a boiling teeming
play of dust and tarmac that ran down under the side of the car.

Before the gunner could correct his aim, the petrol tank of the ruined
Cadillac exploded in a woofing clap of sound and a vivid rolling cloud
of scarlet flame and dense black smoke.

Under its cover Mark steered for the alleyway, and slammed the Rolls
into it although she was suddenly heavy on the steering, and thumping
brutally in her front end.

Fifty feet down, the alley was blocked with a heavy haulage trailer,
piled high with newly sawn timber baulks - and Mark skidded to a halt,
and jumped out.

He saw that for the moment they were covered by the corner of the
warehouse from the Vickers, but the timber trailer cut off their escape
down the alley and it would be only minutes before the strikers realized
their predicament and moved the Vickers to enfiltrade the alleyway and
shoot them to pieces.  One glance showed him that machine-gun fire had
shredded the off -side leading wheel.  Mark jerked open the rear door
and snatched the Mannhcher from Sean, and paused only a moment to snap
at the two Generals.  Get the wheel changed.  I'll try and hold them
off.  Then he was sprinting back down the alleyway.  I shall have to
insist that in future, when he gives me an order, he calls me sir, Sean
said with thin humour, and turned to Smuts.  Have you ever changed a
wheel, Jannie? Don't be stupid, old Sean.  I'm a horse soldier, and your
superior officer, Smuts smiled back at him, with his golden beard
looking like a refined Viking in the reflected headlights.  Bloody hell!
grunted Sean.  You can work the jack.  Mark reached the corner of the
warehouse and crouched againstit, checking the load of the Mannlicher
before glancing around.

The Cadillac burned like a huge pyre, and the stink of burning rubber
and oil and human flesh was choking.  The body of the driver still sat
at the wheel, but the smoky red flames rushed and drummed about him so
that his head was blackening and charring, and his body twisted and
writhed in a slow macabre ballet of death.

There was a wind that Mark had not noticed before, a fitful inconstant
wind that gusted and puffed down the ridge, rolling thick clouds of the
stinking black smoke across the road and then changing strength and
direction so that for a few seconds the smoke pall once again poured
straight upwards into the night sky.

Over all blazed the flickering orange wash of the flames, uncertain
light which magnified shadow and offered false perspective.

Mark realized that he had to get across the road into the scrub and
eroded ground below the mine dump before he could get a chance at the
Vickers gunner.  He had to cross fifty open yards before he reached the
ground where he could turn the clumsiness and relative immobility of the
Vickers to his own account.  He waited for the wind.

He saw it coming, rustling the grass tops in the firelight and rolling a
dirty ball of newspaper down the road, then it picked up the smoke and
wafted it in a stinking black pall across the open roadway.

Mark launched himself from the corner of the warehouse and had run
twenty paces before he realized that the wind had tricked him.  It was
merely a gust, passing in seconds and leaving the night still and silent
when it had gone, silent except for the snapping, crackling flames of
the burning Cadillac.

He was halfway across as the smoke opened again, and the cold weight of
dread in his belly seemed to spread down into his legs and slow them as
he ran like a man in shackles; but the battle clock in his head was
running clearly, tolling off the seconds, judging finely the instant
that the Vickers gunner up on the dump spotted his shadowy running
figure, judging the time it took for him to swing and resight the heavy
weapon.  Now!  he thought, and rolled forward from the waist without
checking his speed, going on to his shoulder and somersaulting, ducking
under the solid blast of machinegun fire that came at the exact second
he had expected it.

The momentum of his fall carried him up on to his feet again, and he
knew he had seconds before the unsighted gunner picked him up again.  He
plunged onwards and lances of pain shot through the old bullet wounds in
his back, wounds which he had not felt in over a year; the pain was in
anticipation, as well as from the wrench of his fall.

The bank of red earth on the far side of the road seemed to loom far off
while instinct warned him that the Vickers was on to him again.  He
launched himself feet first, like a baseball player sliding for the
plate, and at the same instant the stream of Vickers bullets tore a
leaping sheet of dust off the lip of the bank, and the ricochets
screamed like frustrated banshees and wailed away into the night.

Mark lay under the bank for many seconds with his face cradled in the
crook of his arm, sobbing for breath while the pain in his old wounds
receded and his heart picked up its normal rhythm.  When he lifted his
head again, his expression was bleak and his anger was cold and bright
and functional.

Fergus MacDonald swore softly with both hands on the firing handles of
the Vickers, his forefingers still holding the automatic safety-catch
open and his thumbs poised over the firing button.  He kept the weapon
swinging in short rhythmic traverses back and forth as he peered down
the slope, but he was swearing, monotonous profanity in a low tight
whisper.

The man beside him was kneeling, ready to feed the belt to the gun, and
now he whispered hoarsely, I think you got him.  The hell I did, hissed
Fergus, and jerked the gun across as something in shadow caught his eye
down on the road.

He fired a short holding burst, and then muttered.  Right, let's pull
out.  Damn it, comrade, we've got them - protested the loader.

You bloody fool, didn't you see him?  Fergus asked.  Didn't you see the
way he crossed the road, don't you realize we've got a real ripe one on
our hands?  Whoever he is, he's a killer.  Are we going to let one
bastard chase us You're so right, snapped Fergus.  When it's that bucko
down there, I'm not going to risk this gun.  It's worth a hundred
trained men, he patted the square steel breech block.  We came here to
kill Clever Jannie, and he's down there, cooking in his fancy motorcar.
Now, let's get the hell out of here, and he started the complicated
process of unloading the Vickers, cranking it once to clear the chamber
of its live round and then cranking again to clear the round in the feed
block.  Tell the boys to cover us when we pull back, he grunted, as he
extracted the ammunition belt from the breech pawls, and then started
uncoupling the Vickers from its tripod.  Come on, work quickly, he
snapped at his loader.  That bastard is on his way, I can feel him
breathing down my neck already.  There were eight strikers on the slope
of the dump, Fergus and two for the Vickers, with five riflemen spread
out around the gun to support and cover.  Right, let's go.  Fergus
carried the thick-jacketed barrel over one shoulder and a heavy case of
ammunition in his left hand; his number two wrestled with the ungainly
fifty-pounds weight of metal tripod and the number three carried the
five-gallon can of cooling water and the second case of ammunition.  We
are pulling out, Fergus called to his riflemen, look lively, that's a
dangerous bastard coming after us!  They ran in a group, bowed under
their burdens, feet slipping in the loose white cyanided sand of the
dump.

The shot was from the left, Fergus had not expected that, and it was
impossibly high on the dump.  The bastard must have grown wings and
flown to get there, Fergus thought.

The report was a heavy booming clap, some sort of sporting rifle, and
behind him the number three made a strange grunting sound as though his
lungs had been forcibly emptied by a heavy blow.  Fergus glanced back
and saw him down, a dark untidy shape on the white sand.  Good Christ,
gasped Fergus.  It had to be flukey shooting at that range, and in this
impossible light, just the early stars and the ruddy glow of the burning
Cadillac.

The rifle boom boomed again, and he heard one of his riflemen scream and
then thrash about wildly in the undergrowth.

Fergus knew he had judged his adversary fairly, he was a killer.  They
were all running now, shouting and firing wildly as they scattered tack
under the tee of the dump, and Fergus ran with them, only one thought in
his mind, he must get his precious Vickers safely away.  It The sweat
had soaked through his jacket between the shoulders, and had run down
from under his cap so that he was blinded, and unable to speak when at
last he tumbled into the cover of a deep donga and sat against the earth
of the bank, with the machine gun cradled in his arms like an infant.

one after another his riflemen reached the donga and fell thankfully
into cover.

How many were there?  gasped one of them.  I don't know, panted another,
must have been a dozen ZARPS, at least.  They got Alfie.  And they got
Henry also, I saw five of them.

Fergus had recovered his breath enough to speak now.  There was one,
only one, but a good one.  Did we get Slim Jannie?  Yes, said Fergus
grimly.  We got him all right.  He was in the first car, I saw his flag
and I saw him cooking.  We can go home now.  It was a little before
eleven o'clock when the solitary Rolls-Royce was halted at the gates of
police headquarters on Marshall Square by the suspicious sentries, but
when the occupants were recognized, half a dozen high-ranking police and
military officers hurried down the steps to welcome them.

The Prime Minister went directly to the large visitors drawing-room on
the first floor which had been transformed into the headquarters of the
military administration, empowered and entrusted by the declaration of
martial law with the Government of the nation.  The relief on the faces
of the assembled officers was undisguised.

The situation was a mess, but Smuts was here at last and now they could
expect order and direction and sanity to emerge from the chaos.

He listened to their reports quietly, tugging at his little goatee
beard, his expression becoming more grim as the full extent of the
situation was explained.

He was silent a little longer, brooding over the map, and then he looked
up at General van Deventer, an old comrade in arms during two wars, a
man who had ridden with him on that historic commando into the Cape in
igoi and Who had fought beside him against the wily old German, Lettow
von Vorbeck, in German East Africa.  Jacobus, he said, you command the
East Rand.  Van Deventer whispered an acknowledgement, his vocal chords
damaged by a British bullet in or, Sean, you have the west. I want the
Brixton ridge under our control by noon tomorrow.  Then, as an
afterthought, Have your lads arrived from Natal yet?  I hope so, said
Sean Courtney.  So do I, Smuts smiled thinly.  You will have a merry
time taking the ridge single-handed.  The smile flickered off his face.
I want your battle plans presented by breakfast time, gentlemen.  I
don't have to remind you that, as always, the watchword is speed.  We
have to cauterize this ulcer and bind it up swiftly.  in early autumn,
the highveld sun has a peculiar brilliance, pouring down through an
atmosphere thinned by altitude out of a sky of purest gayest blue.

It was weather for picnicking and for lovers in quiet gardens, but on
14th March 1922 it was not calm, but a stillness of a menacing and
ominous intensity which hung over the city of Johannesburg and its
satellite towns.

In just two days van Deventer had swept through the East Rand, stunning
the strikers with his Boer Commando tactics, rolling up all resistance
in Benoni and Dunswart, recapturing Brakpan and the mine, while the
Brits column under his command drove through the Madder and Geduld mines
and linked with van Deventer at Springs.  In two days, they had crushed
the revolt on the East Rand, and thousands of strikers came in under the
white flag to be marched away to captivity and eventual trial.

But Fordsburg was the heart and the Brixton ridge which commanded it was
the key to the revolt.

Now at last, Sean Courtney had the ridge, but it had been two days of
hard and bitter fighting.  With artillery and air support, they had
swept the rocky kopjes, the school buildings, brickfields, the cemetery,
the public buildings and the cottages, each of which the strikers had
turned into a strongpoint; and in the night they had carried in the dead
of both sides, and buried them in the Milner Park cemetery, each with
his own comrades, soldier with soldier and striker with striker.

Now Sean was ready for the thrust to the heart, and below them the iron
roofs of Fordsburg blinked in the fine clear sunlight.  Here he comes
now, said Mark Anders, and they all lifted their binoculars and searched
for the tiny fleck of black in the immense tall sky.

The DH.  9 sailed in sedately, banking slowly in from the south and
levelling for the run over the cowering cottages of Fordsburg.

Through the lens of his glasses, Mark could make out the head and
shoulders of the navigator in the forward cockpit as he hoisted each
stack of pamphlets on to the edge of the cockpit, cut the strings and
then pushed them over the side.  They flurried out in a white storm
behind the slow-moving machine, caught in the slipstream, spreading and
spinning and drifting like flocks of white doves.

A push of the breeze spread some of the papers towards the ridge, and
Mark caught one out of the air and glanced at the crude printing on
cheap thick paper.

MARTIAL LAW NOTICE Women and children and all persons well disposed
towards the Government are advised to leave before 11 a.  m.  today that
part of Fordsburg and vicinity where the authority of the Government is
defied and where military operations are about to take place.  No
immunity from punishment or arrest is guaranteed to any person coming in
under this notice who has broken the law.

SEAN COURTNEY CONTROL OFFICER It was clumsy syntax.  Mark wondered who
had composed it as he crumpled the notice and dropped it into the grass
at his feet.  What if the pickets won't let them come out, sir? he asked
quietly.

I don't pay you to be my conscience, young man, Sean growled warningly,
and they stood on in silence for a minute.  Then Sean sighed and took
the cigars from his breast pocket and offered one to Mark as a
conciliatory gesture.  What can I do, Mark?  Must I send my lads into
those streets without artillery support?  He bit the tip off his cigar
and spat it into the grass.  Whose lives are more important, the
strikers and their families or men who trust me and honour me with their
loyalty?  It's much easier to fight people you hate, Mark said softly,
and Sean glanced at him sharply.  Where did you read that?  he demanded,
and Mark shook his head.

At least there are no blacks caught up in this, he said.

Mark had personally been in charge of sending disguised black policemen
through the lines to warn all tribesmen to evacuate the area.  Poor
blighters, Sean agreed.  I wonder what they make of this white men's
madness.  Mark strode to the edge of the shallow cliff, ignoring the
danger of sniping fire from the buildings below, and glassed the town
carefully.  Suddenly he exclaimed with relief, They're coming outV Far
below where they stood, the first tiny figures straggled out of the
entrance of the Vrededorp subway.  The women carried infants and dragged
reluctant children at arm's length. Some were burdened with their
personal treasures, others brought their pets, canaries in wire cages,
dogs on leashes.  The first small groups and individuals became a
trickle and then a sorry, toiling stream, pushing laden bicycles and
hand carts, or simply carrying all the possessions they could lift. Send
a platoon down to guide them, and give them a hand, Sean ordered
quietly, and brooded heavily with his beard on his chest.  I'm glad to
see the women out of it, he growled.  But I'm sad for what it means.

The men are going to fight, Mark said.  Yes, Sean nodded.  They're going
to fight.  I had hoped we had had enough slaughter, but they are going
to make a bitter ending to a tragic tale.  He crushed the stub of his
cigar under his heel.  All right, Mark.  Go down and tell Molyneux that
it's on.  Eleven hundred hours we'll open the barrage.  Good luck, son
Mark saluted, and Sean Courtney left him and limped back from the crest
to join General Smuts and his staff who had come out to watch the final
sweep of the battle.

The first shrapnel bursts clanged across the sky, and burst in bright
gleaming cotton pods of smoke above the roofs of Fordsburg, cracking the
sky and the waiting silence, with startling violence.

The y were fired by the horse artillery batteries on the ridge, and
immediately the other batteries on Sauer Street joined in.

For twenty minutes, the din was appalling and the brilliant air was
sullied by the rising mist of smoke and dust.

Mark stood in the hastily dug trench and peered over the parapet.  There
was something so dreadfully familiar in this moment.  He had lived it
fifty times before, but now he felt his nerves screwing down too tightly
and the heavy indigestible lump of fear in his guts nauseated him.

He wanted to duck down below the parapet, cover his head to protect his
ears from the great metallic harrimerblows of sound, and stay there.

It required an immense effort of will to stand where he was and to keep
his expression calm and disinterested but the men of A Company lined the
trench on each side of him and, to distract himself, he began to plan
his route through the outskirts of the town.

There would be road-blocks at every corner, and every cottage would be
held.  The artillery barrage would not have affected the strikers under
cover, for it was limited to shrapnel bursts.  Sean Courtney was
concerned with the safety of over a hundred police and military
personnel who had been captured by the strikers and were being held
somewhere in the town.  No high explosive, was the order, and Mark knew
his company would be cut to ribbons on the open streets.

He was going to take them through the kitchen yards and down the
sanitary lanes to their final objective, the Trades Hall on Commercial
and Central Streets.

He checked his watch again, and there were four minutes to go.

All right, Sergeant, he said quietly.

The order passed quickly down the trench and the men came to their feet,
crouching below the parapet.  Like old times, sir, the Sergeant said
affably, and Mark glanced at him.  He seemed actually to be enjoying
this moment, and Mark found himself hating the man for it.  Let's go, he
said abruptly, as the minute hand of his watch touched the black
hair-line division, and the Sergeant blew his whistle shrilly.

Mark put one hand on the parapet and leapt nimbly over the top.

He started to run forward, and from the cottages ahead of him came the
harsh crackling of musketry.  Suddenly, he realized he was no longer
afraid.

He was little more than a youth, with smooth.  pink cheeks and the
lightest golden fluff of a mustache on his upper lip.

They shoved him down the last few steps into the cellars, and he lost
his footing and fell.  Another yellow belly, called the escort, a
strapping bearded fellow with a rifle slung on his shoulder and the red
band around his upper arm.  Caught him trying to sneak out of the
subway.  The boy scrambled to his feet.  He had skinned his knees in his
fall and he was close to tears as Harry Fisher towered above him.  He
carried a long black sjambok in his right hand, a vicious tapered whip
of cured hippo-hide.

A traitor, bellowed Fisher.  In the last days of continuous planning and
fighting, the strain had started to show.

His eyes had taken on a wild fanatical glare, his movements were jerky
and exaggerated, and his voice ragged and overloud.  No, comrade, I
swear I'm no traitor, the youth bleated pitifully.  A coward, then,
shouted Fisher, and caught the front of the boy's shirt in one big hairy
fist and ripped it open to the waist.

I didn't have a rifle, protested the boy.  There'll be rifles for all
later, when the first comrades die.  The lash of the sjambok split the
smooth white skin of the boy's back like a razor stroke, and the blood
rose in a vivid bright line as he fell to his knees.

Harry Fisher stood over him and swung the siambok until there were no
more screams or groans, and the only sound in the cellar was the hiss
and splat of the lash, then he stood back panting and sweating.  Take
him out so the comrades can see what happens to traitors and cowards.  A
striker took each of the boy's arms and as they dragged him up the
steps, the flesh of his back hung in ribbons and tatters and the blood
ran down over his belt and soaked into the gabardine of his breeches.

Mark dropped cat-footed over the back wall into the tiny paved yard.
Cases of empty beer bottles were piled high along the side walls, and
the smell of stale liquor was fruity and heady in the noon heat.

He had reached the bottle store in Mint Road less than an hour after the
starting time of the drive, and the route he had led his men, through
the backyards and over the roof-tops, had been more successful than he
had dared hope.

They had avoided the road-blocks and twice had outflanked groups of
strikers dug in to strong positions, surprising them completely, and
scattering them with a single volley.

Mark ran across the yard and kicked in the back door of the bottle
store, and in the same movement flattened himself against the wall,
clear of the gaping doorway and any striker fire from the interior of
the building.

The Sergeant and a dozen men followed him over the wall, and spread out
to cover the doorway and barred windows.  He nodded at Mark, and Mark
dived through the doorway sideways with the rifle on his hip, and his
eyes screwed up against the gloom after the bright sunlight outside.

The store was deserted, the shutters bolted down over the front windows
and the shelves of bottles untouched by looters, in testimony of the
strikers discipline.  The tiers of bottles stood neatly in their gaily
coloured labels, glinting in the dusky light.

The last time Mark had been in here was to buy a dozen bottles of porter
for Helena MacDonald, but he pushed the thought aside and went to the
shuttered windows just as the Sergeant and his squad burst in through
the back door.

The shutters had been pierced by random shrapnel and rifle fire, and
Mark used one aperture as a peephole.

Fifty yards across the road was the Trades Hall, and the complex of
trenches and defences that the strikers had thrown up around the square.

Even the public lavatories had been turned into a blockhouse, but all
the defenders attention was directed into the streets across the square.

They lined the parapets and were firing frantically at the kilted
running figures of the Transvaal Scottish racing towards the Square from
the station side.

The strikers were dressed in a strange assortment of garb, from greasy
working overalls and quasi-military safari jackets, caps and slouch hats
and beavers, to Sunday suits, waistcoats and ties.  But all of them wore
bandoliers of ammunition draped from their shoulders, and their backs
were exposed to Mark's attack.

A volley through the bottle-store windows would have done terrible
execution among them, and already the Sergeant was directing his men to
each of the windows in a fierce and gleeful croak of anticipation.  I
could order up a machine gun, Mark thought, and something in him shied
away from the mental image of a Vickers firing into that exposed and
unsuspecting group.  if only I hated them.  As he watched, first one and
then others of the strikers at the barricades crouched down hopelessly
from the withering fire the Highlanders were now pouring on to them. Fix
bayonets, Mark called to the men, and the steel scraped from the metal
scabbards in the sombre gloom of the store.  A stray bullet splintered
the shutter above Mark's head and burst a bottle of Scotch whisky on the
shelves behind him.  The smell of the spirit was sharp and unpleasant,
and Mark called again, on my order, break open the windows and doors,
and we'll show them steel. The shutters crashed back, the main doors
flew open, and Mark led his company in a howling racing line across the
road.  Before they reached the first line of sand-bags, the strikers
began throwing down their rifles and jumping up with their hands lifted
above their heads.

Across the square, the Highlanders poured into the Street cheering and
shouting and raced for the barricades; Mark felt a surge of relief that
he had taken the risk of going with the bayonet, rather than ordering
his men to shoot down the exposed strikers.

As his men ran into the square, knocking the weapons out of their hands
and pushing the strikers into sullen groups, Mark was racing up the
front steps of the Trades Hall.

He paused on the top step, shouted, Stand back inside and fired three
rifle bullets into the brass lock.

Harry Fisher leaned against the wall and peered out of the sand-bagged
window into the milling yelling chaos of the square.

The madness of unbearable despair shook the huge frame, and he breathed
like a wounded bull when it stands to take the matador's final thrust.
He watched his men throw down their arms, saw them herded like cattle,
with their hands held high, stumbling on weary careless feet, their
faces grey with fatigue and sullen in defeat.

He groaned, a low hollow sound of emotional agony stretched to its
furthest limits, and the thick shoulders sagged.  He seemed to be
shrinking in size.  The great unkempt head lowered, the blazing vision
dimmed in his eyes as he watched the young lieutenant in barathea
battledress race up the stairs below him, and heard the rifle shots
shatter the lock.

He shambled across to his desk and slumped down into the chair facing
the closed door, and his hand was shaking as he drew the service
revolver from his belt and cocked the hammer.  He laid the weapon
carefully on the desk in front of him.

He cocked his head and listened to the shouted orders and the trampling
confusion in the square below for a minute, then he heard the rush of
booted feet up the wooden staircase beyond the door.

He lifted the revolver from the desk, and leaned both elbows on the
desk-top to steady himself.

Mark burst in through the main doors of the hall and stopped in surprise
and confusion.  The floor was covered with prostrate bodies, it seemed
there must be hundreds of them.

As he stared, a Captain of Highlanders and half a dozen men burst in
behind him.  They stopped also.  Good God, panted the Captain, and then
suddenly Mark realized that the bodies were all uniformed, police khaki,
hunting green kilts, barathea.  They have slaughtered their prisoners
Mark thought with nightmare horror, staring at the mass of bodies, then
suddenly a head lifted cautiously and another.  Oh thank God, breathed
the Captain beside Mark, as the prisoners began scrambling to their
feet, their faces shining with relief, a single voice immediately
becoming a hubbub of nervous gaiety.

They surged for the door, some to embrace their liberators and others
merely to run out into the sunlight.

Mark avoided a big police Sergeant with rumpled uniform and three days
growth of beard, ducked under his arms and ran for the staircase.

He took the stairs three at a time, and paused on the landing.  The
doors to five offices on this floor were standing open, the sixth was
closed.  He moved swiftly down the corridor, checking each of the rooms.

Cupboards and desks had been ransacked, and the floors were ankle-deep
in paper, chairs overturned, drawers pulled from desks and dumped into
the litter of paper.

The sixth door at the end of the passage was the only one closed.  It
was the office of the local Union chairman, Mark knew, Fergus
MacDonald's office.  The man for whom he was searching, driven by some
lingering loyalty, by the dictates of shared comradeship and friendship
to find him now, and to give him what help and protection he could.

Mark slipped the safety-catch on the rifle as he approached the door. He
reached for the handle, and once again that sense of danger warned him.
For a moment he stood with his fingers almost touching the brass lock,
then he stepped quietly out of the line of the doorway, reaching
sideways he rattled the handle softly and then turned it.

The door was unlocked, and the latch snicked and he pushed the door
open.  Nothing happened, and Mark grunted with relief and stepped
through the doorway.

Harry Fisher sat at the desk facing him, a huge menacing figure,
crouching over the desk with the big tousled head lowered on massive
shapeless shoulders and the revolver held in both hands, pointing
directly at Mark's chest.

Mark knew that to move was death.  He could see the rounded leaden noses
of the bullets in the loaded chambers of the cylinder and the hammer
fully cocked, and he stood frozen.

It is not defeat, Harry Fisher spoke with a strangled hoarse voice that
Mark did not recognize.  We are the dragon's teeth.  Wherever you bury
one of us, a thousand warriors will spring up.  It's over, Harry, Mark
spoke carefully, trying to distract him, for he knew he could not lift
the rifle and fire in the time Harry Fisher could pull the trigger.

No.  Fisher shook the coarse tangled locks of his head.  It is only just
beginning.  Mark did not realize what he was doing, until Harry Fisher
had reversed the pistol and thrust the muzzle into his own mouth.  The
explosion was muffled, and Harry Fisher's head was stretched out of
shape, as though it were a rubber ball struck by a bat.

The back of his skull erupted, and a loose mass of bright scarlet and
custard yellow splattered the wall behind him.

The impact of the bullet hurled his body backwards and his chair toppled
and crashed over.

The stench of burned powder hung in the room on filmy wisps of gunsmoke,
and Harry Fisher's booted heels kicked and tapped a jerky, uneven little
dance on the bare wooden floor.  Where is Fergus MacDonald?  Mark asked
the question a hundred times of the files of captured strikers.  They
stared back at him, angry, bitter, some of them still truculent and
defiant, but not one of them even deigned to answer.

Mark took three of his men, under the pretext of a mopping-up patrol,
down to Lover's Walk as far as the cottage.

The front door was unlocked, and the beds in the front room were unmade.
Mark felt a strange repugnance of mind, balanced by a plucking of lust
at his loins, when he saw Helena's crpe de Chine dressing-gown thrown
across the chair, and a crumpled pair of cotton panties dropped
carelessly on the floor beside it.

He turned away quickly, and went through the rest of the house.  The
dirty dishes in the kitchen had already grown a green fuzz of mould, and
the air was stale and disused.  Nobody had been in these rooms for days.

A scrap of paper lay on the floor beside the coal-black stove.  Mark
picked it up and saw the familiar hammer and sickle device on the
pamphlet.  He screwed it up and hurled it against the wall.  His men
were waiting for him on the stoep.

The strikers had dynamited the railway lines at Braamfontein station,
and at the Church Street level-crossing, so the regiment could not
entrain at Fordsburg.  Most of the roads were blocked with rubble and
the detritus of the final struggle, but most dangerous was the
possibility of stubborn strikers still hiding out in the buildings that
lined the road through the dip to Johannesburg.

Sean Courtney decided to move his men out up the slope to the open
ground of the Crown Deep property.

They marched out of Fordsburg in the darkness, before good shooting
light.  It had been a long uncomfortable night, and nobody had slept
much.  Weariness made their packs leaden to carry and shackled their
legs.  There was less than a mile to go, however.

The motor transport was drawn up in the open ground near the headgear of
Crown Mine's main haulage, a towering structure, shaped like the Eiffel
Tower, steel girders riveted and herring-boned for strength, rising a
hundred feet to the huge wheels of the winching equipment.  When the
shift was in, these wheels spun back and forth, back and forth, lowering
the cages filled with men and equipment, hundreds of feet into the
living earth, and raising the millions of tons of gold-bearing rock out
of the depths.

Now the great wheels stood motionless, they had been dead for three
months now, and the buildings clustered about the tower were gloomy and
deserted.

The transport was an assortment of trucks and commercial vans,
commandeered under martial law, gravel lorries from the quarries, mining
vehicles, even a bakery van, but it was clear that there was not enough
to take out six hundred men.

As Mark came up, marching on the flank of A Company, there were half a
dozen officers in discussion at the head of the convoy.  Mark recognized
the familiar bearded figure of General Courtney standing head and
shoulders above the others, and his voice was raised in an angry growl.
I want all these men moved before noon.  They've done fine work, they
deserve hot food and a place, At that moment he saw Mark, and frowned
heavily, waving him over and beginning to speak before he had arrived.
Where the hell have you been?  With the company I sent you to take a
message, and expected you back.

You know damned well I didn't mean you to get into the fighting.  You
are on my staff, sir!  Mark was tired and irritable, still emotionally
disturbed by all that he had seen and done that day, and he was in no
mood for one of the General's tantrums.

His rebellious expression was unmistakable.  Sir, he began, and Sean
shouted at him, And don't take that tone to me, young man!  An uncaring,
completely irresponsible dark rage descended on Mark.  He didn't give a
damn for the consequences and he leaned forward, pale with fury, and
opened his mouth.

The regiment was bunched up now, halted in the open roadway, neat
symmetrical blocks of khaki, six hundred men in ranks three deep.

The shouted orders of the N.  C.  O.  s halted each section, one after
the other, and stood them at the easy position.

From the top of the steel headgear, they made an unforgettable sight in
the rich yellow light of early morning.  Ready, luv, whispered Fergus
MacDonald, and Helena nodded silently.  Reality had long faded and been
replaced by this floating dreamlike state.  Her shoulders were raw where
the carrying straps of the heavy ammunition boxes had bitten into the
flesh, but there was no pain, just a blunting numbness of body.  Her
hands seemed bloated, and clumsy, the nails broken off raggedly and
rinded with black half -moons of dirt, and the harsh canvas of the
ammunition belts between her fingers felt smooth as silk, the brass
cartridge cases cool, so that she felt like pressing them to her dried
cracked lips.

Why was Fergus staring at her that way, she wondered with a prickle of
irritation that did not last, once again the dreamy floating sensation.
You can go down now, Fergus said quietly. You don't have to stay.  He
looked like a very old man, his face shrivelled and falling in upon
itself.  The stubble of beard on his lined and haggard cheeks was
silvery as diamond chips, but the skin was stained by smoke and dirt and
sweat.

Only the eyes below the peak of the cloth cap still burned with the dark
fanatic flames.

Helena shook her head.  She wanted him to stop talking, the sound
intruded, and she turned her head away.

The men below stood shoulder to shoulder in their orderly ranks.  The
low sun threw long narrow shadows from their feet across the red dust of
the roadway.

A second longer Fergus stared at her.  She was a pale, wasted stranger,
the bones pushing through the smooth drawn flesh of her face, the scarf
wound like a gypsy around her head, covering the black cropped hair. All
right then, he murmured, and tapped the breech of the Vickers, once,
twice, training it slightly left.

There was a group of officers near the head of the column.  One of them
was a big powerful man with a dark beard.  The sunlight sparkled on his
shoulder-tabs, Fergus lowered his head and looked through the rear sight
of the Vickers.

There was a younger slimmer officer with the other, and Fergus blinked
twice rapidly, as something stirred deep in his memory.

He hooked his fingers into the automatic safety-bar and lifted it,
priming the gun, and he brought his thumbs on to the firing button.

He blinked again.  The face of the young officer moved something in him,
he felt a softening and blurring of his determination and he rejected it
violently and thrust down on the button with both thumbs.

The weapon juddered on its tripod, and the long belt was sucked greedily
into the breech, Helena's small pale hands guiding it carefully, and the
empty brass cases spewed out from under the gun, tinkling and ringing
and bouncing off the steel girders of the headgear.

The sound was a deafening tearing roar that seemed to fill Helena's head
and beat against her eyes, like the frantic wings of a trapped bird.

Even the most skilled marksman must guard against the tendency to ride
up on a downhill shot.  The angle from the top of the headgear was acute
and the soft yellowish early light further confused Fergus aim.  His
first burst carried high, shoulder-high instead of belly-high, which is
the killing line for machine-gun fire.

The first bullets struck before Mark heard the gun.  One of them hit
Sean Courtney high up in the big bulky body.

It flung him forward, chest to chest with Mark, and both of them went
down, sprawling in the roadway.

Fergus tapped the breech block, dropping his aim a fraction on to the
belly line, and traversed in a long unhurried sweep along the ranks of
standing soldiers, cutting them with the scythe of the Vickers in the
eternal seconds that they still stood in stunned paralysis.

The stream of tracer hosed them, and washed them into crazy heaps, piled
them on each other, dead and wounded together, their screams high and
thin in the rushing hurricane of Vickers fire.

Sean rolled half off Mark, and his face was contorted, angry and
outraged, as he tried to struggle on to his knees, but his one arm was
dangling.  His blood splattered them both and he flopped helplessly.

Mark wriggled out from under him, and looked up at the headgear.  He saw
the tracer flickering like fire-flies and darting into the crowded
roadway on the triumphant fluttering roar of the gun.  Even in his own
confusion and despair, he saw that the gunner had picked a good stance.

He would be hard to come at.

Then he looked down the road and a cold fist clenched on his guts as he
saw the bloody execution.  The ranks had broken, men running and
stumbling for what little cover the vehicles and ditches offered, but
the road was still filled.

They lay in wind-rows and piles, they crawled and cried and twisted in
the dust which their blood was turning to chocolate-red mud, and the gun
swivelled and came back, flickering tracer into the carnage, chopping up
the road surface into a spray of dust and leaping gravel, running
viciously over the piles of wounded, coming back to where they lay.

Mark twisted up into a crouch, and slipped an arm under the General's
chest.  The weight of the man was enormous, but Mark found strength that
he had not known before, goaded on by the fluttering rushing roar of the
Vickers.

Sean Courtney heaved himself up like a bull caught in quicksand, and
Mark got him on to his feet.

Bearing half his weight, Mark steadied him and kept him from falling. He
weaved drunkenly, hunched over, bleeding badly, breathing noisily
through his mouth, and Mark forced him into an ungainly crouching run.

The gun swept their heels, kicking and smashing into the back of a young
lieutenant who was creeping towards the ditch, dragging both useless
legs behind him.  He dropped face down and lay still.

They reached the drainage ditch and tumbled into it.  It was less than
eighteen inches deep, not enough to cover the General fully, even when
he lay flat on his belly, and the Vickers was still hunting.

After that first long slicing traverse, it was firing short accurate
bursts at selected targets, more deadly than random-fire, keeping the
gun from overheating and preventing a stoppage, conserving ammunition.
Mark, weighing it all, realized that there was an old soldier up there
in the tower.  Where are you hit?  he demanded, but Sean struck his
hands away irritably, twisting his head to peer up into the tall steel
headgear.  Can you get him, Mark?  he grunted, and pressed his fingers
into his shoulder, where the blood welled up thick and dark as molasses.
Not from here, Mark answered quickly.  It had taken him seconds to
assess the shoot.  He's holed up tight.  Merciful Jesus!  My poor boys.
He's built himself a nest.  Mark studied the steelwork.

The platform below the winch wheels was covered with heavy timber,
fitted loosely into the framework of steel.

The gunner had pulled these up and built himself four walls of wood,
perhaps two feet thick.  Mark could see the light glimmering through the
open gaps in the floor boards, and make out the shape and size of the
fortified nest.  He can hold us here all day!  Sean looked down at the
piles of khaki bodies in the roadway, and they both knew many of the
wounded would bleed to death in that time.

Nobody dared go out to them.

The gun came back, ripping a flail across the earth near their heads and
they ducked their faces to the ground, pressing their bodies into the
shallow ditch.

The ground sloped down very gradually towards the steel tower, only when
you lay at ground level like this was the gradient apparent.  Somebody
will have to get under him, or behind him, Mark spoke quickly, thinking
it out.

It's open ground all the way, Sean grunted.

On the opposite side of the road fifty yards away, a narrow-gauge
railway ran down the short open grassy slope to the foot of the tower.
It was used to truck the waste material from the shaft-head to the rock
dump, half a mile away.

Almost opposite where they lay, half a dozen of the steel cocoa pans had
been abandoned at the beginning of the strike.  They were small
four-wheeled tip-trucks, coupled to each other in a line, each of them
heaped high with big chunks of blue rock.

Mark realized he was still wearing his pack and he shrugged out of the
straps as he planned his stalk, judging angles and range as he groped
for the field-dressing and handed it to Sean.  Use this.  Sean tore open
the package and wadded the cotton dressing into the front of his tunic.
His fingers were sticky with his own blood.

Mark's P-14 rifle lay in the road where he had dropped it, but there
were five clips of ammunition in the pouches on his webbing belt.  Try
and give me some covering fire when I start to go up, he said, and
watched the tower for the next burst of tracer.  You'll never get there,
said Sean.  We'll bring up a thirteen-pounder and shoot the bastard out
of there.  That will take until noon, it will be too late for them.  He
glanced at the wounded in the road, and at that moment a stream of
brilliant white tracer flew from the tower, aimed at the far end of the
column, and Mark was up and running hard, stooping to gather the rifle
at full run, crossing the road in a dozen flying strides, stumbling in
the rough ground beyond, catching his balance and sprinting on.

That stumble had cost him a tenth of a second, the margin of life and
death perhaps, while the gunner high up in the tower spotted him,
swivelled the gun and lined up.

The steel cocoa pans were just ahead, fifteen paces, but he wasn't going
to make it, the warning flared in his brain, and he dropped into the
short grass and rolled sideways, just as the storm of Vickers fire
filled the air about him with the lash of a hundred bullwhips.

Mark kept rolling, like a log, and the gun gouged a furrow out of the
dry stony earth inches from his shoulder.

He came up against the wheels of the cocoa pan with a force that bruised
his hip and made him cry out involuntarily.  Vickers bullets hammered
and clanged against the steel body of the truck and howled off in
ricochet, but Mark was under cover now.

Mark, are you all right?  the General's bull-bellow carried across the
road.  Give me covering fire.  You heard him, lads, shouted the General,
and one or two rifles began firing spasmodically from the ditches, and
from behind the stranded motor lorries.

Mark dragged himself on to his knees, and quickly checked the rifle,
brushing the sights with his thumb to make certain they were cleaned of
dirt and undamaged in the fall.

Then he worked his way to the coupling of the cocoa pan and threw the
release toggle.  The brake wheel was stiff and required both his hands
to unwind it.  The brake chocks squeaked softly as they disengaged, but
the slope of the ground was so gentle that the truck did not move until
Mark put his shoulder to it.

He strained with all his weight before the steel wheels made a single
reluctant revolution, then gravity took her and the cocoa pan began to
roll.  Give the bastard hell!  Sean Courtney yelled, as he realized
suddenly what Mark was going to do, and Mark grinned without mirth at
that characteristic exhortation, and he trotted along, doubled up behind
the heavily-laden steel truck.

A terrible tearing, hammering storm of Vickers broke over the slowly
rolling truck, and instinctively Mark ducked lower and steadied himself
against the metal side.

He realized that as he came closer to the tower, so the gunner's angle
would change until he was shooting almost directly down on top of Mark,
then the side of the truck would give him no cover, but he was
committed.  Nothing would stop the slowly accelerating rush of the cocoa
pan down the slope, it had the weight of ten tons of rock behind it and
its speed was gathering.  Soon he would not be able to keep up with it,
already he was running, and the Vickers roared again, the bullets
screeching and wailing furiously off the steel body.

Twisting as he ran, he slung the rifle on one shoulder and reached up to
hook both hands over the side of the truck.  He was pulled instantly off
his feet, and they dangled without foothold, in danger of being caught
up in the spinrung steel wheels.  He drew his knees up under his chin,
hanging all his weight on his arms and taking the intolerable strain in
his belly muscles as the truck flew down into the stretching octopus
shadow of the headgear.

Still hanging on his arms, Mark flung his head back and looked up.  The
tower was fore shortened by perspective, and it crouched over him like
some menacing monster, stark against the mellow morning sky, crude black
steel and timber baulks pyramiding into the heavens.  At its zenith,
Mark could see the pale mirrortike face of the gunner, and the thick
water-jacketed barrel of the Vickers trained down at its maximum
depression.

The gun flamed, and bullets rang the steel near his head like a great
bell.  They churned into the blue rock, disintegrating into chips of
buzzing metal and shattering the rock into vicious splinters and pellets
that cut at his hands so that he screwed his eyes shut and clung
helplessly.

Such was the speed of the truck now that he was under fire for only
seconds, and the gunner's aim could not follow it, as it raced down on
to the concrete loading bank, and slammed into the buffers.  The force
of the impact was brutal and Mark was hurled from his perch, the
rifle-strap snapped and the weapon sailed away, and Mark turned in the
air and hit the sloping concrete ramp on his side with a crash that
jarred his teeth in his head.  The rough concrete ripped away the thick
barathea cloth from his hip and leg and shoulder, and scared the flesh
beneath with gravel burn.

He came up at last against a stack of yellow-painted oildrums, and his
first concern was to roll on to his back and stare upwards.

He was under the headgear now, protected from the gunner by the legs and
intricate steel girders of the tower itself, and he pulled himself to
his feet, dreading the give and crippling drag of broken bone.  But
though his body felt crushed and bruised, he could still move, and he
hobbled to where his rifle lay.

The strap was broken, and the butt was cracked and splintered, and as he
lifted it, it snapped into two pieces.

He could not fire from the shoulder.

The foresight had been knocked off, and the broken metal had a sugary
grey crystalline look.  He could not aim the weapon.  He would have to
get close, very close.

There was a deep bright scar in the steel of the breech.

He muttered a prayer, Please God!  as he tried to work the bolt open. It
was jammed solid and he struggled with it fruitlessly for precious
seconds.  All right, he thought grimly.  No butt to hold to the
shoulder, no foresight with which to aim, and only the one cartridge in
the breech, it's going to be interesting.  He looked around him quickly.

Beneath the steel tower, the two square openings to the main shaft were
set into the concrete collar, protected by screens of steel mesh.  The
one cage stood at the surface station, doors open, ready for the next
shift.  The other was at the bottom station, a thousand feet below
ground level.

They had stood that way for months now.  On the far side was the small
service elevator which would take maintenance teams the hundred feet to
the summit of the tower in half a minute.  However, there was no power
on the shaft head, and the elevator was useless.

The only other way up was the emergency ladder.  This was an open steel
stairway that spiralled up around the central shaft, protected only by a
low handrail of inch piping.

High above Mark's head the Vickers fired again, and Mark heard a scream
of agony out there on the roadway.  it hastened him, and he limped to
the stairway.

The steel-mesh gate was open, the padlock shattered, and Mark knew by
what route the sniper had reached his roost.

He stepped on to the stairway and began to climb, following the coils up
the casing round and round, and up and up.

Always at his right hand, the open black mouth of the shaft gaped, an
obscene dark orifice in the earth's surface, dropping straight and sheer
into the very bowels, a thousand dark terrifying feet.

Mark tried to ignore it, dragging his bruised and aching body up by the
handrail, carrying the broken weapon in his other hand, and strained his
neck backwards for the first glimpse of the gunner above.

The Vickers fired again, and Mark glanced sideways.  He was high enough
now to see into the road, one of the trucks was burning, a tall dragon's
breath of smoke and sullen flame pouring into the sky, and the drab
khaki bodies were still strewn in the open, death's discarded toys.

Even as he watched, the Vickers fire thrashed over them, mangling
already dead flesh, and Mark's anger became cold and bright as a
dagger's blade.  Keep firing, luv, Fergus croaked in that husky
stranger's voice.  Short bursts.  Count to twenty slowly, and then a
touch on the button.  I want him to think that I am still up here.  He
pulled the Webley from his belt, and crawled on his belly towards the
head of the steep staircase.  Don't leave me, Fergus.  It'll be all
right, he tried to grin, but his face was grey and crumpled.  Just you
keep firing.  I'm going down to meet him halfway. He'll not expect that.
I don't want to die alone, she breathed.  Stay with me.  I'll be back,
luv.  Don't fuss yourself, and he slid on his belly into the opening of
the staircase.

She felt like a child again, in one of those terrible dark nightmares,
trapped and enmeshed in her own fate, and she wanted to cry out.  The
sound reached her lips but died there as a low blubbering moan.

A rifle bullet chunked into the barricade of timber beside her.  They
were shooting from down below.  She could not pick them out, for they
were hidden in the ditches and the irregularities of the ground,
screened by long purple shadows, and her eyes were blurred with tears
and with exhaustion; yet she found the last few grains of her strength
and crawled to the gun.

She squatted behind it and her hands were almost too small to reach the
firing button.  She pressed the barrel downwards, and forced her
blearing vision to focus, marvelling at the little toy figures in the
field of the sight.  The gun juddered in her hands like a living
creature.  A short burst, she whispered to herself, repeating Fergus
instructions, and lifted her thumbs from the firing button.  One, two,
three, she began to count to the next burst.

Mark paused at the next burst of firing and stood for a moment staring
up.  He was over halfway to the top, and now he could make out the floor
of the service platform below the winch wheels, the platform on which
the Vickers was sited.

There were narrow cracks in the woodwork through which bright lines of
open sky showed clearly, and as he watched he saw one of the lines of
light interrupted by a dark movement beyond.  It was that flicker of
movement that caught his attention, and he realized that he was looking
at the body of the person who served the gun.  He must be squatting
directly over one of the narrow joints in the floor of the platform, and
his movements blocked out part of that bright line of light.

A bullet through the gap would cripple and pin him, but he glanced at
the broken weapon in his hand and knew that he would have to get closer,
much closer.

He began to run upwards and though he tried to keep his weight lightly
on the balls of his feet, the hobnails in his boots rang on the steel
stairs.

Fergus MacDonald heard them and checked his own run, shrinking into the
protective lee of one of the steel girders.  One man only, he muttered.
But coming up fast He dropped on one knee and peered down through the
gaps between the stairs, hoping for sight of the man who he was hunting.
The steps overlapped each other like fanned playing-cards, and the
lateral supports of the tower formed an impenetrable steel forest below
him.

The only way he could hope for a glimpse was to hang out over the
handrail and look down the central shaft-well.

The idea of that thousand-foot black hole repelled him, and he had
formed an estimate of his opponent high enough to guess that the reward
for putting his head over the side would be a bullet between the eyes.

He edged into a better position where he could cover the next spiral of
staircase below him.  I'll let him come up to me, he decided, and braced
his arm against the girder at the level of his chin, and laid the Webley
over the crook of his elbow to give the heavy pistol support.  He knew
that over ten paces it was wildly inaccurate, but the dead rest would
give him at least one fair shot.

He cocked his head slightly to listen to the clatter of booted feet on
steel, and he judged that the man was very close.  One more spiral of
the stair would bring him into shot.  Carefully, he thumbed back the
hammer of the Webley and looked down over the slotted rear-sight.

Above them, the Vickers fired again, and Mark paused to catch his breath
and check the situation of the gunner, and to his dismay he realized
that he had climbed too high in the tower.

He had changed the angle of sight, and could no longer see through the
cracks in the timber platform.  He had to retreat carefully down the
staircase before once again the bright lines of light opened in the dark
underbelly of timber.

A vague blur of movement reassured him that the gunner had not changed
his position.  He was still squatting over the joint, but the shot was
almost impossible.

He was shooting directly upwards, awkward even in the best conditions,
but now he had no butt to steady the rifle and no foresight, he was
shooting into a single dark mass of timber and had to guess the position
of the crack because the gunner's body obscured the light from the far
side.  The crack itself was only two inches wide, and if he missed by a
smallest fraction the bullet would bury itself harmlessly in the thick
timber.

He tried not to think that there would be only one shot, the jammed
breach made that certain.

He put his hip to the guardrail and leaned out over the open shaft,
squinted upwards trying to set the target in his mind as he lifted the
broken rifle in an easy natural movement.  He knew that he had to make
the shot entirely by instinct.  He had no chance if he hesitated or
tried to hold his aim steadily on the target.

He swept up the shattered weapon and at the moment the long barrel
aligned, he pressed the trigger.

In the flash and thunder of the shot a tiny white splinter of wood
jumped from the edge of the crack.  The bullet had touched wood and Mark
felt an instant of utter dismay.

Then the body that had obscured the light was jerked abruptly aside, and
the crack was a single uninterrupted line again, and on the platform
somebody screamed.

Helena MacDonald had just reached the count of twenty again, and was
aiming at a gathering of men she could see grouping beyond one of the
lorries.  She squatted low over the gun and was on the point of jamming
her thumbs down on the firing button, when the bullet came up through
the floor timbers.

It had touched one of the hard mahogany baulks, just enough to split the
casing of the bullet and alter its shape, mushrooming it slightly, so
that it did not enter her body through a neat round puncture.

It tore a ragged entry into the soft flesh at the juncture of her
slightly spread thighs and plunged upwards through her lower abdomen,
striking and shattering the thick bony girdle of her pelvis, glancing
off the bone with still enough impetus to bruise and weaken the lower
branch of the descending aorta, the great artery that runs down from the
heart, before going on to embed itself in the muscles high in the left
side of her back.

it lifted Helena into the air, and hurled her across the platform on to
her face.  Oh God, oh God, help me!  Fergus!  Fergus!  I don't want to
die alone, she screamed, and the sound carried clearly to the two men in
the steel tower below her.

Mark recognized the voice instantly.  It did not need the name to
confirm it.

His mind shied at the enormity of what he had done.

The broken rifle almost slipped from his hands, but he saved it and
caught at the handrail for support.

Helena cried again, a sound without words, it was exactly that strange
wild cry that she had uttered at the zenith of one of their wildest
flights of passion together, and for an instant Mark remembered her face
shining and triumphant, the dark eyes burning and the open red mouth and
the soft pink petal of her tongue aflutter.

Mark started to run, hurling himself upwards.

The screams caught Fergus like a flight of arrows in the heart.  A
piercing, physical agony, he dropped the pistol to his side and stood
irresolute staring upwards, not knowing what had happened, except that
Helena was dying.  He had heard the death scream too often to have any
doubt about that.  What he was listening to was mortal agony, and he
could not force his body to begin the climb upwards, to the horror he
knew waited him there.

While he hesitated, Mark came around the angle of the staircase and
Fergus was not ready for him.  The pistol was at his side, and he fell
back and tried to bring it up, to fire at point-blank range into the
chest of the uniformed figure.

Mark was as off balance as he was.  He had not expected to run into
another enemy, but he saw the pistol and swung the broken rifle at
Fergus'head.

Fergus ducked, and the Webley fired wide, the bullet flew inches past
Mark's temple and the report slammed against his eardrum and made him
flinch his head.  The rifle struck the girder behind Fergus and was
jerked from Mark's grip, then they came together chest to chest.  Mark
seized the wrist of his pistol hand and held with all his strength.

Neither of them had recognized the other.  Fergus had aged into a grey
caricature of himself and his eyes were shaded by the cloth cap.  Mark
was in unfamiliar uniform, dusty and bloodied, and he had changed also,
youth had become man.

Mark was taller, but they were matched in weight and Fergus was endowed
with the terrible fighting rage of the berserker which gave him
superhuman strength.

He drove Mark back against the guardrail, and bowed his back out over
the open shaft, but Mark still had his pistol wrist, and the weapon was
pointed up over his head.

Fergus was sobbing wildly, driving with all the wiry uncanny strength of
a body tempered by hard physical work, and fired now by the strength of
anger and sorrow and despair.

Mark felt his feet slip, the hob-nails of his boots skidding on the
steel steps and he went over further, feeling the mesmeric suck of a
thousand feet of open space plucking at his back.

Above them, Helena screamed again, and the sound drove like a needle
into the base of Fergus brain, he shuddered, and his body convulsed in
one great rigid spasm that Mark could not hope to hold.  He Vent
backwards over the guardrail, but still he had his grip on Fergus gun
hand and his other arm he had wound about his shoulders.

They slid into the void, locked together in a horrible parody of a
lovers embrace, but as they started to fall, Mark hooked both legs over
the rail, like a trapeze artiste, and jerked to a halt, hanging upside
down into the shaft.

Fergus was somersaulted over him by the force of his own thrust; as he
turned in the air, the cloth cap flew from his head and he was torn from
the arm that Mark had around his shoulder.

He came up with a jerk that almost tore Mark's shoulder from its socket,
for some animal instinct had kept Mark's grip locked on the pistol hand,
and he dangled from that precarious hold.

The two of them pendulurned out over the black emptiness of the shaft,
Mark's legs hooked over the rail, hanging at full stretch, with
Fergus'body the next link in the chain.

Fergus head was thrown back, staring up at Mark, and with the cap gone,
his lank sandy hair fell back from his face and Mark felt fresh shock
loosen his grip.

Fergus!  he croaked, but the madman's eyes that stared back at him were
devoid of recognition.  Try and get a grip, Mark pleaded, swinging
Fergus towards the staircase.  Grab the rail.  He knew he could not hold
many seconds longer, the fall had wrenched and weakened his arm, and the
blood was rushing to his head in this inverted position, he could feel
his face swelling and sufflusing and the pounding ache in his temples,
while the black and hungry mouth of the shaft sickened him; with his
other hand he groped and got a second hold on Fergus' wrist.

Fergus twisted in his grip, but instead of going for the rail he reached
upwards and took the pistol from his own hand, transferring it to his
free hand.  No, Mark shouted at him. Fergus, it's me!  It's me, Mark!
But Fergus was far past all reason, as he juggled with the Webley,
getting a firing grip on the hilt with his left hand.  Kill them, he
muttered.  Kill all the scabs.  He lifted the barrel to aim upwards at
Mark, dangling over the drop, twisting slowly in that double retaining
grip.  No, Fergus!  screamed Mark, and the muzzle of the revolver
pointed into his face.  At that range, it would tear half his head away,
and he saw Fergus forefinger tighten on the trigger, the knuckle
whitening under pressure.

He opened his hands and Fergus wrist slipped from his fingers.

He spun away, falling swiftly, and the revolver never fired but Fergus
began to scream a high thin wall.

Still hanging upside down Mark watched Fergus body, limbs spread and
turning like the spokes of a wheel, as it dropped away, shrinking
rapidly in size, and the despairing wailing cry receding with it,
dwindling away to a small pale speck, like a dust mote which was
swallowed abruptly into the dark mouth of the shaft far below and the
wailing cry with it.

In the silence afterwards, Mark hung batlike, blinking the sweat out of
his eyes and for many seconds unable to find strength to move.  Then
from the platform above him came a long shuddering moan and it roused
him.

Forcing his bruised body to respond, he managed to get a grip on the
guardrail and drag himself up, until he tumbled on to the staircase, and
started up it on rubbery legs.

Helena had dragged herself to the pile of timber, leaving a dark wet
smear across the platform.  The khaki breeches she wore were sodden with
blood and it oozed from her still to form a spreading puddle in which
she sat.

She lay back against the timber next to the tripoded Vickers in an
attitude of utter weariness, and her eyes were closed.

Helena, Mark called her, and she opened her eyes.

Mark, she whispered, but she did not seem surprised.

It was almost as though she expected him.  Her face was completely
drained of all colour, the lips seemed rimmd with frost, and her skin
had an icy sheen to it.  Why did you leave me?  she asked.

Hesitantly, he crossed to her.  He knelt beside her, looked down at her
lower body and felt the scalding flood of vomit rise into his throat.  I
truly loved you, her voice was so light, breathing soft as the dawn wind
in the desert, and you went away.  He put out his hand to touch her
legs, to spread them and examine the wound, but he could not bring
himself to do it.  You won't go away again, Mark?  she asked, and he
could hardly catch the words.  I knew you'd come back to me.  I won't go
away again, he promised, not recognizing his own voice, and the smile
flickered on her icy lips.  Hold me, please Mark.  I don't want to die
alone.  Awkwardly, he put an arm around her shoulders and her head
lolled sideways against him.

Did you ever love me, Mark, even a little bit?

Yes, I loved you, he told her, and the lie came easily.

Suddenly there was a hissing spurt of brighter redder blood from between
her thighs as the damaged artery erupted.

She stiffened, her eyes flew wide open, and then her body seemed to melt
against him and her head dropped back.

Her eyes were still wide open and dark as a midnight sky.  As he stared
at it, slowly her face changed.  It seemed to melt like white candle wax
held too close to the flame, it ran and wavered and reformed, and now it
was the face of a marble angel, smooth and white and strangely
beautiful, the face of a dead boy in a land far away, and the fabric of
Mark's mind pulled and tore.

He began to scream, but no sound came from his throat the scream was
deep down in his soul, and his face was without expression, his eyes dry
of tears.

They found him like that an hour later.  When the first soldiers climbed
cautiously up the iron staircase to the top of the steel tower, he was
sitting quietly, holding the woman's dead body in his arms.

Well, said Sean Courtney, they've hanged Taffy Long!

He folded the newspaper with an angry gesture and dropped it on to the
paving beside his chair.

In the dark shiny foliage of the loquat tree that spread above them, the
little white-eyes pinkled and twittered as they probed the blossoms with
sharp busy beaks and their wings fluttered like moths about the candle.

Nobody at the breakfast table spoke.  All of them knew how Sean had
fought for leniency for those strikers on whom the death sentence had
been passed.  He had used all his influence and power, but it had not
availed against the vindictive and vengeful who wanted full measure of
retribution for all the horrors of the revolt.  Sean brooded now at the
head of the table, hunched in his chair with his beard on his chest,
staring out over the Ladyburg valley.

His arm was still supported by the linen sling; it had not healed
cleanly and the bullet wound was still open and draining.  The doctors
were anxious about it, but Sean had told them, Leopard, and bullet and
shrapnel and knife, I've had them all before.  Don't twist a gut for me.
Old meat heals slowly, but it heals hard.  Ruth Courtney watching him
now was not worried about the wounds of the flesh.  It was the wounds of
the mind that concerned her.

Both the men of her household had come back deeply marked by the lash of
guilt and sorrow.  She was not sure what had happened during those dark
days, for neither man had spoken about it, but the horror of it still
stalked even here at Lion Kop, even in the bright soft days, on these
lovely dreaming hills where she had brought them to heal and rest.

This was the special place, the centre and fortress of their lives,
where Sean had brought her as his bride.  They owned other great houses,
but this was home, and she had brought Sean here now after the strife
and the turmoil.  But the guilt and the horror had come with them.
Madness, muttered Sean. Utter raving madness.  How they cannot see it, I
do not know.  He shook his head, and was silent a moment.  Then he
sighed.  We hang them now and make them live for ever.  They'll haunt
and hound us all our days. You tried, dear, said Ruth softly.  Trying
isn't enough, he growled.  In the long run, all that counts is
succeeding.  Oh Pater, they killed hundreds of people, Storm burst out,
shaking her shining head at him, with angry colour in her cheeks.  They
even tried to kill you!  Mark had not spoken since the meal began, but
now he lifted his head and looked at Storm across the table.  She
checked the other words that sprang to her lips as she saw his
expression.

He had changed so much since he had come home.  It was as though he had
aged a hundred years.  Though there was no new line or mark on his face,
yet he seemed to have shed all his youth and taken upon himself the full
burden of knowledge and earthly experience.

When he looked at her like that she felt like a child.  It was not a
feeling she relished.  She wanted to pierce this new armour of
remoteness that invested him.  They're just common murderers, she said,
addressing the words not to her father.  We are all murderers, Mark
answered quietly, and though his face was still remote, the knife
clattered against his plate as he put it down.  Will you excuse me,
please, Mrs Courtney -'he turned to Ruth and she frowned quickly.  Oh
Mark, you've not touched your food. I'm riding into the village this
morning.  You ate no dinner last night. I want the mail to catch the
noon train.  He folded his napkin, rose quickly and strode away across
the lawn and Ruth watched the tall, graceful figure go with a helpless
shrug before turning to Sean.  He's wound up so tight, like a watch
spring about to snap, she said.  rWhat's happening to him, Sean?  Sean
shook his head.  It's something that nobody understands, he explained.
We had so much of it in the trenches.  It's as though a man can stand
just so much pressure, and then something breaks inside him.  We called
it shellshock, for want of a better name, but it's not just the
shelling, he paused.  I have never told you about Mark before, about why
I picked him, about how and when I first met him, and he told it to
them.  Sitting in the cool green shade of the loquat tree, he told them
of the mud and the fear and the horror of France.  It's not just for a
single time, or a day or a week, but it goes on for what becomes an
eternity.  But it is worse for a man who has special talents.  We, the
Generals, have to use them ruthlessly. Mark was one of those, And he
told them how they had used Mark like a hunting dog, and his two women
listened intently, all of them bound up in the life of the young man who
had gradually come to mean so much to each of them.  A man gathers
horror and fear like a ship gathers weed. It's below the waterline, you
cannot see it, but it is there.  Mark carries that burden, and at
Fordsburg something happened that brought him close to the
breaking-point.  He is on the very edge of it now. What can we do for
him?  asked Ruth softly, watching his face, happy for him that he had a
son at last, for she had long known that was what Sean saw in Mark.  She
loved her husband enough not to resent that it was not her own womb that
had given him what he so desperately wanted, glad only that he had it at
last, and that she could share it with him.

Sean shook his head.  I don't know.  And Storm made an angry hissing
sound.  They both looked at her.

Sean felt that soft warmth spreading through his chest, a feeling of awe
that this lovely child could be part of him.

Storm looked so smooth and fragile, yet he knew she had the strength of
braided whipcord.  He knew also that though she had the innocence of a
newly opened bloom, yet she could sting like a serpent; she had the
brightness and beauty that dazzled, and yet below that were depths that
mystified and awed him; and when her moods changed so swiftly, like this
unaccountable spurt of anger, he was enchanted by her, under her fairy
spell.

He frowned heavily now to hide his feelings.

Yes, Missy, what is it now?  he grumped at her.  He's going away, she
said, and Sean blinked at her, swaying back in his chair.

What are you talking about?  he demanded.  Mark.  He's going away.  How
do you know that?  Something deep inside of Sean cringed at the prospect
of losing another son.  I know, I just know, she said, and came to her
feet with a flash of long sleek limbs, like a gazelle rising in alarm
from its grassy bed.  She stood over him.  You didn't think he would be
your lap dog for ever?  she asked, a biting scorn in her tone that at
another time would have brought from him a sharp retort.  Now he stared
at her speechless.

Then suddenly she was gone, crossing the lawn in the sunlight that
gilded her loose dark hair with stark white light and struck through the
flimsy stuff of her dress, .  revealing her long slim body in a stark
dark silhouette, surrounding her with a shimmering halo of light, that
made her seem like some lovely unearthly vision.  Don't you see that
it's better you cry a little now, than cry for the rest of your life?
Mark asked gently, trying not to let her see how the tears had eroded
his resolve.  Won't you ever come back?  Marion Littlejohn was not one
of those women who cried well. Her little round face seemed to smear and
lose its shape like unfired clay, and her eyes swelled and puffed
pinkly.  Marion, I don't even know where I am going.  How can I know if
I'm coming back?  I don't understand, Mark, I truly don't understand.
She twisted the damp linen handkerchief in her hands, and she sniffed
wetly.  We were so happy.  I did everything I knew to make you happy,
even thatIt's not you, Marion, Mark assured her hurriedly.  He did not
want to be reminded of that which Marion always referred to as that.  it
was as though she had loaned him a treasure which had to be returned
with interest at usurious rates.  Didn't I make you happy, Mark?  I
tried so hard.  Marion, I keep trying to tell you.  You are a fine,
pretty girl, you're kind and good and the nicest person I know.  Then
why don't you want to marry me?  Her voice rose into a wall, and Mark
glanced with alarm down the length of the porch.  He knew that sisters
and brothers-in-law were probably straining their hearing for snatches
of the conversation.  It's that I don't want to marry anybody She made a
low moaning sound and then blew her nose loudly on the inadequate scrap
of sodden linen.  Mark took his own handkerchief from his inside pocket,
and she accepted it gratefully.

I don't want to marry anybody, not yet, he repeated.  Not yet, she
seized the words.  But some day?  Some day, he agreed.  When I have
discovered what it is I want out of my life and how I am going to get
it.  I will wait for you.  She tried to smile, a brave watery pink
smile.  I'll wait for you, Mark.  No!  Mark felt alarm flare through
every nerve of his body.  It had taken all his courage to tell her, and
now it seemed that he had achieved nothing.  God knows how long it will
be, Marion.  There will be dozens of other men - you're a kind sweet
loving person, I'll wait for you, she repeated firmly, her features
regaining their usual pleasant shape, and her shoulders losing their
dejected droop.

Please, Marion.  It's not fair on you, Mark tried desperately to
dissuade her, realizing that he had failed dismally.

But she gave one last hearty sniff and swallowed what was left of her
misery, as though it were a jagged piece of stone.

Then she smiled at him, blinking the last tears from her

eyes.  Oh, it doesn't matter.  I am a very patient person.  You'll see,
she told him comfortably.  You don't understand, Mark shrugged with
helpless frustration.  Oh, I do understand, Mark, she smiled again, but
now it was the indulgent smile of a mother for a naughty child.  When
you are ready, you come back here to me.  She stood up and smoothed down
the sensible skirts.  Now come along, they are waiting lunch for us.
Storm had taken great care choosing her position.  She had wanted to
catch the play of afternoon light and the run of the clouds across the
escarpment, and yet to be able to see into the gorge, for the white
plume of falling spray to be the focus of the painting.

She wanted also to be able to see down along the Ladyburg road, and yet
not be overlooked by a casual observer.

She placed her easel on the lip of a small saucer of folded ground near
the eastern boundary peg of Lion Kop, positioning both easel and herself
with an artist's eye for aesthetic detail.  But when she posed on the
lip of the saucer, with the palette cradled in the crook of her left arm
and the brush in the other, she lifted her chin and looked up at the
powerful sweep of land and forest and sky, at the way the light was
working and at the golden-tinged turquoise of the sky, and immediately
she was intrigued.

The pose was no longer theatrical, and she began to work, tilting her
head to appraise a colour mix, moving about the canvas in a slow ritual,
like a temple maid making the sacrifice, so completely absorbed that
when she heard the faint putter of Mark's motorcycle, it did not
penetrate into the silken cocoon of concentration she had woven about
herself.

Although her original intention in coming to this place had been to
way-lay him, now he was almost past before she was aware of him, and she
paused with the brush held high in one hand, caught in the soft golden
light of late afternoon, a much more striking picture than she could
have composed with studied care.

The dusty strip of road snaked five hundred feet below here she stood,
making its first big loop on to the slope of the escarpment, and, as he
came into the bend, Mark's eyes were drawn naturally to the small
delicate figure on the slope.

There were clouds along the summit of the escarpment, and the late sun
burned through the gaps, cutting long shimmering beams across the
valley, and one of these fell full on Storm.

She stood completely still, staring down the slope at him, making no
gesture of recognition or welcome.

He pulled the big machine into the side of the road, and sat astraddle,
pushing the goggles on to his forehead.

Still she did not move, and they stared at each other.

Mark made a move at last as though to restart the machine, and Storm
felt a shock of deprivation, although it did not show either on her face
nor in the stillness of her body.

She exerted all her will, trying consciously to reach him with mind, and
he paused and looked up at her again.  Come!  she willed him, and with
an impatient, almost defiant gesture, he pulled the goggles off his head
and stripped the gloves off his hands. - serenely, she turned back to
the painting, a small secret smile playing like light across her softly
parted lips and she did not watch him climbing up through the yellow
knee-high grass.

She heard his breathing behind her, and she smelled him.  He had a
special smell that she had learned to know, a floury smell a little like
a suckling puppy or freshly polished leather.  It made her skin feel hot
and sensitized, and put a painful little catch in her breathing.  That's
beautiful, he said, and his voice felt like the touch of fingers along
the nape of her neck.  She felt the fine soft hair there rise, and the
Hush of blood spread warmly down her chest and turn her nipples into
hard little pebbles.  They ached with something which was not pain,
something more obsessive.  She wanted him to touch her there, and at the
thought she felt her legs tremble under her and the muscles cramped
deeply in the wedge of her thighs.  It's truly beautiful, he said again,
and he was so close she could feel his breath stir the fine hair of her
neck, and another thrill ran down her spine, this time it was like a
claw cutting through her flesh and she clenched her buttocks to ride the
shock of it as though she was astride a mettlesome horse.

She stared at the painting, and she saw that he was right.

It was beautiful, even though it was half-finished.  She could see the
rest of it in her mind, and it was beautiful and right, but she wanted
the touch of his hands now.

it was as though the painting had heightened her emotional response,
opened some last forbidden door and now she wanted his touch with a
terribly deep physical ache.

She turned to him, and he was so close and tall that she felt her
breathing catch again, and she looked up into his face.  Touch me, she
willed him.  Touch me, she commanded silently, but his hands hung at his
side and she could not fathom his eyes.

She could not stand still a moment longer, and she stirred her hips in a
slow voluptuous gesture, something was melting and burning deep in her
lower body.

Touch me, she tried to force him silently to her will.  Touch me there
where it hurts so fiercely.  But he did not heed her, would not respond
to all her silent pleas, and suddenly she was angry.

She wanted to lash out at him, to strike him across that solemn handsome
face, she had a mental image of ripping his shirt away and sinking her
nails deep into the smoothly muscled chest.  She stared now at the vee
of his open shirt, at the coils of dark hair, and his skin had an oiled
gloss gilded by the sun to warm golden brown.

Her anger flared and focused.  He had aroused these surging emotions
which she could neither understand nor control, these heady terrifying
waves of physical arousal, and she wanted to punish him for it, to make
him suffer, to have him mauled by his desires as she was; at the same
instant in time, she wanted to take that splendid proud head of his and
hold it to her bosom like a mother holds her child, she wanted to
cherish, and gentle and love him, and claw and ravage and hurt him, and
she was confused and giddy and angry and puzzled, but most of all she
was racing high on a wave of physical excitement that turned her
birdlike and quick and vital.  I suppose you've been bouncing about on
that fat little trollop of yours, she almost snarled it at him.
Immediately the hurt and shock showed in his eyes, and she was pleased
and savagely triumphant, but also aching with contrition, wanting to
fall at his feet and plead for forgiveness, or to lash out with her
nails and raise deep bleeding lines across that smooth brown dearly
beloved face.  Wouldn't it have been wonderful if the providence that
gave you your beauty and your talent had thought to make you a nice
person at the same time, he said quietly, almost sadly.  Instead of a
vicious spoiled little brat She gasped with the delicious profane shock
of it, the insult gave her cause to discard the last vestige of control.

Now she could loose the rein and use lash and spur without restraint. Oh
you swine!  she flew at him, going for his eyes, knowing he was too
quick and strong for her, but forcing violent physical contact on him,
forcing him to seize her, and when he held her powerless by both arms,
she flung her body against his, driving him back a pace, and she saw the
surprise on his face.  He had not expected such strength.

She turned against him, her body fined and tuned and hardened by
physical exercise on the courts and in the saddle, forcing him off
balance, and, as he shifted his weight from foot to foot, she hooked one
ankle with hers and threw her weight in the opposite direction.

They fell together, tumbling backwards into the grassy saucer of ground,
and he released her wrists, using both hands to break their fall and
cushion her shock as she landed on her back.

instantly she was at him with both hands, and her nails stung his neck.
He grunted and she saw the first flare of real anger in his eyes.  It
delighted her, and when he seized her wrist, she twisted and bit him in
the hard sinewy muscle of his forearm.  Hard enough to break the skin,
and leave a double crescent of small neat teeth-marks.

He gasped and his anger mounted as he rolled over her, pinning her lower
body with one leg as he fought to hold her flying flailing hands She
bucked under him, her skirts had pulled up to her waist, one slim smooth
thigh thrusting up, natural, untutored, cunning, into his groin, not
hard enough to injure him, but enough to make him suddenly conscious of
his own arousal.

As he realized what was happening, his grip of her arms slackened and he
tried desperately to disengage, but one of her arms slid around his neck
and the silken warmth of her cheek was pressed to his.

His hands acted without command, running down the deep groove in the
centre of her arched back, following the small hard knuckles of her
spine to the rounded divide of her buttocks, felt through the glossy
slipperiness of silken underwear.

Her breathing rasped hoarsely as sandpaper, and she shifted her head and
her mouth joined his, arching her back and lifting her lower body to let
her silk underwear come away freely in his hands.

The waxen fork of her body rose out of the bright disordered petals of
her skirts like the stamen of some wondrously exotic orchid; its flowing
perfection interrupted only by the deep finely sculptured pit in the
centre of the perfect plain of her belly, and below that the shockingly
abrupt explosion of dark smoky curls, a fat deep wedge that changed
shape as she relaxed in a slow voluptuous movement.  Oh Mark, she
breathed.  Oh Mark, I can't stand it Her anger had all evaporated, she
was soft and breathless, slowly entwining, warm and gentle and loving,
but the sound of her voice woke him suddenly to reality.  He realized
the betrayal of the trust placed in him by Sean Courtney, the abuse of a
privileged position, and he pulled away from her, appalled at his own
treachery.  I must be mad, he gasped with horror, and tried to roll away
from her.  Her response was instantaneous, the instinctive reaction of a
deprived lioness, that uncanny ability to go from soft purring repose to
dangerous blazing anger in the smallest part of a second.

Her open hand cracked across his face, in an explosion of brilliant
Catherine wheels of colour that starred his vision, and she screamed at
him.  What kind of a man are you?  She tried to strike him again, but he
was ready for her and they rolled together chest to chest in the grass.
You're a nothing, and you'll stay like that because you haven't the guts
and the strength to be anything else, she hissed at him, and the words
hurt a thousand times worse than the blow.  His own anger flared to
match hers and he came up over her.  Damn you!  How dare you say that!

She shouted back at him.  At least I dare, you wouldn't dare, But she
broke off then as she felt it happen, then she cried out again but in a
different voice.  Oh Go!  Her whole body racked as she locked him to
her, enfolding and holding him while she purred and murmured with a
voice gone low and husky arid victorious.  Oh Mark, oh darling, darling
Mark.  Sean Courtney sat his horse with the slumping comfortable seat of
the African horseman.  Long stirrups and legs thrust forward, sitting
well back on his mount, sjambok trailing from his left hand and reins
held low on the pommel of the saddle.

In the shade of the leadwood tree, his stallion stood with the patience
of a trained gun horse, its weight braced on three legs and the fourth
cocked at rest, neck stretched against the reins as it reached to crop
the fine sweet grass that covered the upper slopes of the escarpment,
its teeth making a harsh tearing sound with each mouthful.

Sean looked out across the spreading forests and grassland below him,
and realized how much it had all changed since he had ran across it
barefooted with his hunting dogs and throwing sticks s asmall boisterous
child.

Four or five miles away, nestled against the protective wall of the
escarpment, was the homestead of Tbeunis Kraal, where he had been born
in the old brass bedstead in the front room, both he and Garrick, his
twin brother, in the course of a single sweltering summer morning, a
double birthing that had killed the mother he had never known.  Garrick
lived there still, and at last he had found peace and pride among his
books and his papers.  Sean smiled with affection and sympathy, tinged
with ancient guilt, what might his brother have been if one leg had not
been shattered by the careless shotgun that Sean had fired?

He thrust the thought aside, and instead turned in the saddle to survey
his own domain.

The thousands upon thousands of acres that he had planted to timber and
which had given him the foundation of his fortune.  From where he sat he
could see the sawmills and timber yards adjoining the railway yards down
in the town, and once again he felt the warm contentment of a life not
thrown to waste, the glow of achievement and endeavour rewarded.  He
smiled and lit one of the long dark cheroots, striking the match off his
boot, adjusting easily to the shifting balance of the horse under him.

A moment longer he indulged this rare moment of selfgratification,
almost as though to avoid thinking of the most pressing of his problems.

Then he let his eyes drift away across the spreading rooftops of
Ladyburg to that new ungainly structure of steel and galvanized sheet
iron that rose tall enough to dwarf any other structure in the valley,
even the massive fourstorey block of the new Ladyburg Farmers Bank.

The sugar refinery was like some heathen idol, ugly and voracious,
crouching at the edge of the neat blocks of planted sugar which
stretched away beyond the limit of the eye, carpeting the low rolling
hills with waving, moving green that rolled in the wind like the waves
of the ocean, planted to feed that eternally hungry structure.

The frown puckered the skin between Sean's eyes at the bridge of his big
beaky nose.  Where he counted his land in thousands of acres, the man
who had once been his son counted his in tens of thousands.

The horse sensed his change of mood and gathered itself, nodding its
head extravagantly and skittering a little in the shade, ready to run.
Easy, boy, Sean growled at him, and gentled him with a hand on his
shoulder.

He waited now for that man, having come early to the rendezvous as was
always his way.  He liked to be there first and let the other man come
to him.  It was an old trick, to let the other seem the interloper in
established territory, while the waiting man had time to consider and
arrange his thoughts, and to study the other as he approached.

He had chosen the place and the time with care.  He had not been able to
sanction the tough of Dirk Courtney riding on to his land again, and
enter his home.  The aura of evil that hung around the man was
contagious, and he did not want that evil to sully the inner sanctum of
his life which was the homestead of Lion Kop.  He did not even want him
on his land, so he had chosen the one small section of boundary where
his land actually bordered on that of Dirk Courtney.  It was the only
half-mile of any land of Sean's along which he had strung barbed wire.

As a cattleman and horseman, he had an aversion to barbed wire, but
still he had strung it between his land and that of Dirk Courtney, and
when Dirk had written asking him for this meeting, he had chosen this
place where there would be a fence between them.

He had chosen the late afternoon with intent also.  The low sun would be
behind him and shining into the other man's eyes as he came up the slope
of the escarpment.

Now Sean drew the watch from his waistcoat and saw it was one minute
before four, the appointed time.  He looked down into the valley, and
scowled.  The slope below him was deserted, and he could follow the full
length of the road into town beyond that.  Since he had seen young Mark
puttering past on his motorcycle half an hour before, the road also had
been deserted.

He looked beyond the town to the flash of the white walls of the grand
mansion that Dirk Courtney had bult when first he returned to the
valley.  Great Longwood, a pretentious name for a pretentious building.

Sean did not like to look at it.  To him it seemed that the same aura of
evil shimmered about it, even in the daylight an almost palpable thing,
and he had heard the stories they had been repeated to him with glee by
the gossipmongers, about what happened up there under the cover of
night.

He believed those stories, or he knew with the deep instinct which had
once been love, the man who had once been his son.

He looked again at the watch in his hand, and scowled at it.  It was
four o'clock.  He shook the watch and held it to his ear.  It ticked
stolidly, and he slipped it back into his pocket and gathered the reins.
He wasn't coming, and Sean felt a sneaking coward's relief, because he
found any meeting with Dirk Courtney draining and exhausting.  Good
afternoon, Father, The voice startled him, so that he gripped the horse
with his knees and jerked the reins.

The stallion pranced and circled, tossing his head.

Dirk sat easily on a golden red bay.  He had come down out of the
nearest edge of the forest, walking his mount carefully and silently
over the thick mattress of fallen leaves.  You're late, growled Sean.  I
was just leaving.  Dirk must have circled out, climbing the escarpment
below the falls on to Lion Kop, avoiding the fence and riding up through
the plantations to come to the rendezvous from the opposite direction.
Probably he had been sitting among the trees watching Sean for the last
half hour.  What did you want to speak to me about?  He must never again
underestimate this man.  Sean had done so many times before, each time
at terrible cost.  I think you know, Dirk smiled at him, and Sean was
reminded of some beautiful glossy and deadly dangerous animal.  He sat
his horse with a casual grace, at rest but in complete control, and he
was dressed in a hunting-jacket of finely woven thorn-proof tweed, with
a yellow silk cravat at the throat; his long powerful legs were encased
in polished chocolate leather.  Remind me, invited Sean, consciously
hardening himself against the fatal mesmeric charm that the man could
project at will.

oh come now, I know you have been busy thrashing the sweating unwashed
hordes back into their places.  I read with pride of your efforts,
Father.  Your butcher's bill at Fordsburg was almost as fearsome as when
you put down Bombata's rebellion back in 19o6.  Magnificent stuff-'Get
on with it.  Sean found himself hating again.  Dirk Courtney had a high
skill at finding weakness or guilt, and exploiting it mercilessly.  When
he spoke like this of the manner in which Sean had been forced to
discharge his duty, it shamed him more painfully than ever.  Of course
it was necessary to get the mines operating again.  You do sell most of
your timber to the gold mines, I have the exact sales figures somewhere.
Dirk laughed lightly.  His teeth were perfect and white, and the
sunlight played in the shining curls of his big handsome head,
backlighting him and making his looks more theatrically magnificent.
Good on you, dear Papa.  You always had a keen eye for the main chance.
No future in letting a bunch of wild-eyed reds put us all out of
business.  Even I am utterly dependent on the gold mines in the long
run.  Sean could not bring himself to answer, his anger was choking him.
He felt dirtied and ashamed.  It's one of the many things for which I'm
indebted to you, Dirk went on, watching him carefully, smiling and
urbane and deadly.  I am your heir, I have inherited from you the
ability to recognize opportunity and to seize it.  Do you recall
teaching me how to take a snake, how to pin it and hold it with thumb
and forefinger at the back of the neck?

Sean remembered the incident suddenly and vividly.

The fearlessness of the child had frightened him even then.  I see you
do remember.  The smile faded from Dirk's face, the lightness of his
manner was gone with it.  So much, so many little things, do you
remember when we were lost after the lions stampeded the horses in the
night?  Sean had forgotten that also.  Hunting in Mopani country, the
child's first overnight away from the security and safety of the wagons.
A little adventure that had turned into nightmare, one horse killed by
the lions and the other gone, and a fifty-mile walk back through dry
sandveld and thick trackless bush.  You showed me how to find water. The
puddle in the hollow tree, I can still taste the stink of it.  The
bushmen wells in the sand, sucking it up with a hollow straw.  It all
came back, though Sean tried to shut his mind against it.  They had gone
wrong on the third day, mistaking one small dry stony river bed f or
another and wandering away into the wilderness to a lingering death.  I
remember you made a sling from your cartridge belt, and carried me on
your hip.  When the child's strength had gone, Sean had carried him,
mile after mile, day after day in the thick dragging sand.  When finally
his own great strength had been expended also, he had crouched down over
the child, shielding him from the sun with his shadow, and had worked
his swollen tongue painfully for each drop of saliva to inject into
Dirk's cracked and blackening mouth, keeping him alive just long enough.
When Mbejane came at last, you wept The stampeded horse had reached the
wagons with the lion claw-marks slashed deeply across its rump.  The old
Zulu gunbearer, himself sick with malaria, had saddled the grey and
taken a pack horse on the lead rein. He had back-tracked the loose horse
to the lion camp, and then picked up the spoor of man and child,
following them for four days along a cold wind-spoiled spoor.

When he reached them, they were huddled together in the sand, under the
sun, waiting for death.

, it was the only time in my life I ever saw you cry, Dirk said softly.
But did you ever think how often you made me weep?  Sean did not want to
listen longer.  He did not want to be further reminded of that lovely,
headstrong, wild and beloved child who he had reared as mother and
father together, yet Dirk's quiet insidious voice held him captive in a
web of memory from which he could not escape.  Will you ever know how I
worshipped you?  How my whole life was based on you, how I mimicked
every action, how I tried to become you?

Sean shook his head, trying to deny it, to reject it.  Yes, I tried to
become you.  Perhaps I succeeded No.  Sean's voice was strangled and
thick.

Perhaps that's why you rejected me, Dirk told him.  You saw in me the
mirror-image of yourself, and you could not bring yourself to accept
that.  So you turned me away, and left me to weep.  No.  God, no, that's
not true.  It was not that way at all.

Dirk swung his horse in until his leg touched Sean's.  Father, we are
the same person, we are one, won't you admit that I am you, just as
surely as I fell from your loins, just as surely as you trained and
moulded me?  Dirk, Sean started, but there were no words now, his whole
existence had been touched and shaken to its very core.  Don't you
realize that every thing I have ever done was for you?  Not only as a
child, but as a youth and a man.  Did you never think why I came back
here to Ladyburg, when I could have gone to any other place in the
world, London, Paris, New York, it was all open to me.  Yet I came back
here.  Why, Father, why did I do that?

Sean shook his head, unable to answer, staring at this beautiful
stranger, with his vital strength and his compelling disturbing
presence.  I came back because you were here.  They were both silent
then, holding each other's eyes in a struggle of wills and a turmoil of
conflicting emotions.

Sean felt his resolve weakening, felt himself sliding slowly under the
spell that Dirk was weaving about him.  He heeled his horse, forcing it
to wheel and break the physical contact of their legs, but Dirk went on
remorselessly.  As a sign of my love, of this love that has been strong
enough to stand against all your abuse, against the denials you have
made, against every blow you have dealt it, as a sign of that, I come to
you now, and I hold out my hand to you.  Be my father again, and let me
be your son.  Let us put our fortunes together and build an empire.
There is a land here, a whole land, ripe and ready for us to take Dirk
reached out across the space between the horses with his right hand,
palm upwards, fingers outstretched.  Take my hand on it, Father, he
urged.  Nothing will stop us.  Together we will sweep the world from our
path, together we will become gods.  Dirk, Sean found his voice, as he
fought himself out of the coils in which he had been trapped.  I have
known many men, and not one of them was all good nor completely evil.
They were all combinations of those two elements, good and evil, that
is, until I came to know you.  You are the only man who was totally
evil, evil unrelieved by the slightest shading of good. When at last I
was forced to face that fact, then I turned my back on you.  Father.
Don't call me that.  You are not mine, and you never will be again.
There is a great fortune, one of the great fortunes of the worldNo, Sean
shook his head.  It is not there for either you or me.  It belongs to a
people, to many peoples, Zulu, and Englishman and Afrikander, not to me,
but especially not to You.  When I came to see you last, you gave me
cause to believe, Dirk began to protest.  I gave you no cause, I made no
promise. I told you everything, all my plans.  Yes, said Sean.  I wanted
to hear it, I wanted to know every detail, not so that I could help you,
but so that I could stand in your way.  Sean paused for emphasis, and
then leaned across so his face was close to Dirk's and he could look
into his eyes.  You will never get the land beyond the Bubezi River.  I
swear that to you, he said it quietly, but with a force that made every
word ring like a cathedral bell.

Dirk recoiled, and the high colour drained away from his face.  I
rejected you because you are evil.  I will fight you with all my
strength, with my life itself.  Dirk's features changed, the line of the
mouth and the set of the jaw altered, the slant and tilt of the eyes
became wolfish.  You deceive yourself, Father.  You and I are one.  If I
am evil, then you are the source and fountain and father of that evil.
Don't spout noble words to me, don't strike postures.  I know you,
remember.  I know you perfectly as I know myself.  He laughed again, but
not the bright easy laughter of before.  It was a cruel thin sound and
the shape of the mouth did not lose its hard line.  You rejected me for
that Jewish whore of yours, and the bastard slut you spawned on her soft
white belly.  Sean bellowed, a low dull roar of anger, and the stallion
reared under him, coming up high on his hindquarters and cutting at the
air, and the bay mare swung away in alarm, milling and trampling as Dirk
sawed at its mouth with the curb.  You say you will fight me with your
life, Dirk shouted at his father.  It may just come to that!  I warn
you.  He brought the horse under control, barging in on the stallion so
he could shout again.  No man stands in my way.  I will destroy you, as
I have destroyed the others who have tried it.  I will destroy you and
your Jewish whore.  Sean swung back-handed with the sjambok, a polo cut,
using the wrist so the thin black lash of hippo-hide fluted like the
wing of a flighting goose.  He aimed at the face, at the snarling
vicious wolf's head of the man who once had been his son.

Dirk threw up his arm and caught the stroke, it split the woven tweed of
his sleeve like a sword cut and bright blood sprang to stain the
luxurious cloth, as he kneed the bay away in a wide prancing circle.

He held the wound, pressing the lips of the cut together while he glared
at Sean, his face contorted with utter malevolence. I'll kill you for
that, he said softly, and then he swung the bay away and put her into a
dead gallop, straight at the five-stranded, barbed fence.

The bay went up and stretched at the jump, flying free of earth and then
landing again on the far side, neatly gathered and fully in hand,
reached out again into a run, a superb piece of horsemanship.

Sean walked the stallion, fighting the temptation to lash him into a
gallop, following the path over the high ground, a path now almost
indiscernible, long overgrown.  Only a man who knew it well, who had
been along it often before, would know it as a path.

There was nothing left of the huts of Mbejane's kraal, except the
outline of building stones, white circles in the grass.  They had burned
the huts, of course, as is the Zulu custom when a chief is dead.

The wall of the cattle kraal was still intact, the stone carefully and
lovingly selected, each piece fitted into the shoulder-high structure.

Sean dismounted and tethered the stallion at the gateway.  He saw that
his hands were still shaking, as though in high fever, and he felt sick
to the gut, the aftermath of that wild storm of emotion.

He found his seat on the stone wall, the same flat rock that seemed
moulded to his buttocks, and he lit a cheroot.

The fragrant smoke calmed the flutter of his heart, and soothed the
tremble in his hands.

He looked down at the floor of the kraal.  A Zulu chief is buried in the
centre of his cattle kraal, sitting upright facing the rising sun, with
his induna's ring still on his head, wrapped in the wet skin of a
freshly killed ox, the symbol of his wealth, and with his food pot and
his beer pot and his snuff box, his shield and his spears at his side,
in readiness for the journey.  Hello, old friend, said Sean softly.  We
reared him, you and I.  Yet he killed you.  I do not know how, nor can I
prove it, but I know he killed you, and now he's vowed to kill me also.
And his voice quivered.  Well, smiled Sean.  If you have to make an
appointment to speak with me, it must be some business of dire
consequence.  Through the merry twinkle of his eye, he was examining
Mark with a shrewd assessing gaze.  Storm had been right, of course. The
lad had been gathering himself to make the break.  To go off somewhere
on his own, like a wounded animal perhaps, or a cub lion leaving the
pride at full growth?  Which was it, Sean wondered, and how great a
wrench would the parting make on the youngster?  Yes, sir, you could say
that, Mark agreed, but he could not meet Sean's eyes for once.  The
usually bright and candid eyes slid past Sean's and went to the books on
the shelves, went on to the windows and the sweeping sunlit view across
the tops of the plantations and the valley below.  He examined it as
though he had never seen it before.  Come on in then.  Sean swivelled
his chair away from the desk, and took the steel-rimmed spectacles off
his nose and waved with them at the armchair below the window.  Thank
you, sir. While he crossed to the chair, Sean rose and went -to the
stinkwood cabinet.  If it's something that important, we'd best take a
dram to steel ourselves, like going over the top.  He smiled again. It's
not yet noon, Mark pointed out.  That's a rule you taught me yourself.
The man who makes the rules is allowed to change them, said Sean,
pouring two huge measures of golden brown spirit, and spurting soda from
the siphon.  That's a rule I've just this moment made, and he laughed, a
fat contented chuckle, before he went on, Well, my boy, as it so
happens, you have chosen a good day for it.  He carried one glass to
Mark, and returned to his desk.  I also have dire an d important
business to discuss.  He took a swallow from his glass, smacked his lips
in evident relish, and then wiped his moustaches on the back of his
hand.  As the elder, will it be in order if we discuss my business
first?

Of course, sir.  Mark looked relieved and sipped cautiously at his
glass, while Sean beamed at him with illconcealed self-satisfaction.

Sean had conceived of a scheme so devious and tailored so fittingly to
his need, that he was a little in awe of the divine inspiration which
had fostered it.  He did not want to lose this young man, and yet he
knew that the surest way of doing so was trying to hold him too close.
While we were in Cape Town I had two long discussions with the Prime
Minister, he began, and since then we have exchanged lengthy
correspondence.  The upshot of all this is that General Smuts has formed
a separate portfolio, and placed it under my ministry.  It is simply the
portfolio of National Parks. There is still legislation to see through
Parliament, of course, we will need money and new powers but I am going
ahead right away with a survey and assessment of all proclaimed areas,
and we will act on that to develop and protect - He went on talking for
almost fifteen minutes, reading from the Prime Minister's letters and
memoranda explaining and expanding, going over the discussions,
detailing the planning, while Mark sat forward in his chair, the glass
at his side forgotten, listening with a rising sense of destiny at work,
hardly daring to IJ breathe as he drank in the great concept that was
unfolded for him.

Sean was excited by his own vision, and he sprang up from the desk and
paced the yellow wood floor, gesturing, using hands and arms to drive
home each point, then stopping suddenly in full flight and turning to
stand over Mark.  General Smuts was impressed with you, that night at
Booysens, and before that.  He stopped again, and Mark was so engrossed
that he did not see the cunning expression on Sean's face.  I had no
trouble persuading him that you were the man for the job.  What job?
Mark demanded eagerly.  The first area I am concentrating on is Chaka's
Gate and the Bubezi valley.  Somebody has to go in there and do a
survey, so that when we go to Parliament, we know what we are talking
about.  You know the area well The great silences and peace of the
wilderness rushed back to Mark, and he felt himself craving them like a
drunkard.  Of course, once the Bill is through Parliament, I will need a
warden to implement the act.  Mark sank slowly back in his chair.
Suddenly the search was over.  Like a tall ship that has made its
offing, he felt himself come about and settle on true course with the
wind standing fair for a fine passage.  Now what was it you wanted to
talk to me about?

Sean asked genially.  Nothing, said Mark softly.  Nothing at all.  And
his face was shining like that of a religious convert at the moment of
revelation.

Mark Anders had been a stranger to happiness, true happiness, since his
childhood.  He was like an inriocent discovering strong liquor for the
first time, and he was almost entirely unequipped to deal with it, It
induced in him a state of euphoria, a giddy elation that transported him
to levels of human experience whose existence he had not previously
guessed at.

Sean Courtney had engaged a new secretary to take over Mark's duties
from him.  He was a prematurely bald, unsmiling little man, who affected
a shiny black alpaca jacket, an old-fashioned celluloid butterfly
collar, a green eye-shade and cuff -protectors.  He was silent, intense
and totally efficient, and nobody at Lion Kop dreamed of calling him
anything but Mr Smothers.

Mark was to stay on for a further month to instruct Mr Smothers in his
new duties, and at the same time Mark was to set his own affairs in
order and make the preparations for his move to Chaka's Gate.

Mr Smothers inhuman efficiency was such that within a week Mark found
himself relieved almost completely of his previous duties, and with time
to gloat over his new happiness.

Only now that it had been given to him did he realize how those tall
stone portals of Chaka's Gate had thrown their shadows across his life,
how they had become for him the central towers of his existence, and he
longed to be there already, in the silence and the beauty and the peace,
building something that would last for ever.

He realized how the recent whirlpool of emotion and action had driven
from his mind the duty he had set himself, to find the grave of old
Grandfather Anders, and fathom the mystery of his death.  It was all now
before him, and his life had purpose and direction.

But, this was only the foundation and base of his happiness, from which
he could launch himself into the towering heady heights of his love.

True enchantment had sprung from that incredible moment in the grassy
saucer on the slopes of the Ladyburg escarpment.

his love, which he had borne secretly, a burden cold and heavy as a
stone, had in a single magical instant burst open, flowering like a seed
into a growth of such vigour and colour and beauty and excitement, that
he could not yet grasp it all.

He and Storm cherished it so dearly that no other must even guess at its
existence.  They made elaborate plans and pacts, weaved marvellously
involved subterfuges about themselves to protect this wondrous treasure
of theirs.

They neither spoke to each other, nor even looked at the other in the
presence of a third party and the restraint taxed each of them so that
the moment they were alone together they fell ravenously each upon the
other.

When they were not alone together, they spent most of their time
planning and scheming how to be so.

They wrote each other flaming notes which were passed under the table in
the presence of Sean and Ruth and should have scared the fingers that
touched them.  They developed codes and signs, they found secret places,
and they took hideous chances.  Danger spiced their already piquant
banquet of love and delight, and they were both insatiable.

At first, they rode to hidden places in the forest along separate and
convoluted pathways and galloped the last mile, arriving breathless and
laughing, embracing, still in the saddle while the horses stamped and
snorted.  The first time they were still locked together when they
tumbled from the saddles to the forest bed of dead leaves and ferns, and
they left their horses loose.  It had been a long walk home, especially
as they clung to each other like drunkards, laughing and giggling all
the way.  Luckily their horses had found a field of lucerne before they
reached the homestead, and their riderless return had not alerted the
grooms.  Their secret remained intact, and after that they wasted a few
seconds of their precious time together while Mark hobbled the horses.

Soon it was not enough to have only a stolen hour in the day and they
met in Storm's studio.  Mark climbed the banyan tree, crawling out along
the branch, while Storm held the window open and squealed softly with
horror when his foot slipped, or hissed a warning when a servant passed,
then clapped her hands and flung her arms around his neck as he came in
over the sill.

The studio was furnished with a single wooden chair, the floor was bare
and hard, and the danger of sudden intrusion too great for even them to
ignore.  However, they were undaunted and inventive, and they found
almost immediately that Mark was strong enough and she was light enough
and that all things are possible.

Once Mark became unsteady at the scorching noonday of their loving and
backed her into one of her own unfinished masterpieces.  Afterwards, she
knelt on the wooden chair holding her skirts to her waist and elevated
her perfect little round stern while Mark removed the smudges of burnt
umber and prussian blue with a rag moistened with turpentine.  Storm was
shaking so violently with suppressed laughter that Mark's task was much
complicated.

She was also blushing so furiously that even her bottom glowed a divine
ethereal pink, and for ever afterwards, the smell of turpentine acted on
Mark as a powerful aphrodisiac.

On another terrifying occasion, there was the heavy tramp, and the
unmistakable limping drag in the passageway beyond the studio door, and
they were frozen and ashen-faced, unable to breathe as they listened to
its approach.

The peremptory knock on the door almost panicked her and she stared into
Mark's face with huge terrified eyes.

He took control instantly, realizing just how terrible was the danger.
Sean Courtney, faced with the sight of somebody actually tupping his ewe
lamb, was fully capable of destroying both them and himself.

The knock came again, impatient, demanding, and Mark whispered quickly
as they adjusted their clothing with frantic hands.  She responded
bravely, though her voice caught and quavered.  One moment, Daddy.  Mark
seized her paint-stained smock and slipped it over her head, grabbed a
brush from the pot and put it in her right hand, squeezed her shoulders
to brace her, and then pushed her gently towards the door.

There was just enough space between the wall and a canvas for him to
crawl in and crouch, trying to still his breathing, while he listened to
Storm shoot the door-bolt and greet her father.  Locking the door now,
Missy?  Sean growled at her, throwing a suspicious glance around the
bare studio.  Intruding, am I? PNever, Pater, not you!  And they were
into the room, Storm following meekly, while Sean gave critical
judgement of her work.  There isn't a tree on Wagon Hill.  I'm not
taking photographs, Daddy.  There should be a tree there.  It balances
the composition.  Don't you see?  She had recovered like a champion and
Mark loved her to the point of pain.

Mark was emboldened enough to take a cautious glance around the edge of
the canvas, and the first thing he saw was a five-guinea pair of
cami-knickers in sheer oyster silk, the wide legs cuffed with ivory
cambrai lace, lying crumpled and abandoned on the studio floor where
Storm had dropped them earlier.

He felt a cold sheen of sweat break out afresh across his brow; on the
bare floor, the lovely silk was as conspicuous as a battle ensign.  He
tried to reach that blatantly sinful little pile, but it was beyond his
finger-tips.

Storm was hanging on to her father's arm, probably because her legs were
too weak to support her, and she saw what Mark's desperate arm and
groping hand protruding from behind the canvas was trying to reach.  Her
panic flooded back again at high spring tide.

She gabbled meaningless replies to her father's questions and tried to
lead him towards the door, but it was like trying to divert a bull
elephant from his set purpose.  Inexorably Sean bore down upon the
discarded knickers and the canvas where Mark cowered.

At his next step, the silk wrapped itself around the toe of his boot.
The material was so filmy and light that he did not notice it, and he
limped on happily, one foot draped in an exotic piece of feminine
underwear, while two young people watched in abject terror the knickers,
slow circuit of the room.

At the door, Storm flung her arms around his neck and kissed him,
managing to anchor the knickers with the toe of her shoe, and then
propelling her father into the passage with indecent despatch and
slamming the door behind him.

Weak with terror and laughter, they clung together in the middle of the
studio, and Mark was so chastened that, when he regained his voice, he
told her sternly, We are not going to take any more chances, do you
understand?  Yes, master, she agreed demurely, but with a wicked sparkle
in her eye.  Mark was awakened a few minutes after midnight with a wet
pointed tongue probing deeply into his ear and he would have let out a
great shout but a strong little hand was pressed firmly across his
mouth, Are you mad?  he whispered, as he saw her bending over him in the
moonlight from the open window, and realized that she had made the
journey across the full length of the house, down cavernous passageways
and creaking staircases, in pitch darkness and clad only in a gossamer
pair of pyjamas.  Yes, she laughed at him.  I'm mad, completely
wonderfully insane, a magnificent noble rage of the mind.  He was only
half awake or he would not have asked the next question.  What are you
doing here?  I have come to ravish you, she said, as she slipped into
the bed beside him.  My feet are cold, she announced regally.  Warm them
for me.  For God's sake, don't make so much noise, he pleaded, which was
a ridiculous request in the circumstances, for only minutes later they
were both raising such a chorus of cries that should have woken the
entire household.

Long afterwards, she murmured in that special purry feline voice of hers
that he had come to know so well.

You really are an amazingly talented man, Mr Anders.

Where ever did you learn to be so utterly depraved?  And then she
chuckled sleepily, If you tell me, I shall probably claw your eyes out
of your head.  You mustn't come here again.  Why not?  It's so much
better in bed.  What will your father do if he finds out?  He'll murder
you, she said comfortably.  But what on earth has that got to do with
it?

one of the ancillary benefits which accrued to Storm from this
relationship was that she had at last a fine male figure model for her
work, something which she had always needed but had never found the
courage even to ask her father to give her.  She knew exactly what his
reaction would be.

Mark was not gushing with enthusiasm for the idea either, and it took
all her wheedling and cooing to have him disrobe in cold blood.  She had
picked one -of their secret places in the forest for her figure studio,
and Mark perched self-consciously on a fallen log.

Relax, she pleaded.  Think beautiful thoughts.  I feel such an ass, he
protested, wearing only a pair of striped cotton underpants, at which he
had drawn the line, despite her entreaties.  Anyway, there's nothing
under there you could paint on canvas, he pointed out.  But that's not
the point, you're supposed to be an ancient Greek, and who ever saw an
Olympic athleteNo, Mark cut her short.  They stay on.  That's final. She
sighed at the intransigence of men, and applied herself to her paints
and canvas.  Slowly he did relax, and even began to enjoy the freedom
and the feel of the sunlight and cue air on his skin.

He enjoyed watching her work also, the little frown of total
concentration, the half-closed eyes, the porcelain white teeth nibbling
thoughtfully at her lower lip, the almost dancing ritual of movement she
performed around the canvas, and while he watched her he fantasized a
future in which they walked hand in hand through the garden wilderness
beyond Chaka's Gate.  A future bright with happiness, and radiant with
shared labour and achievement, and he began to tell her about it,
letting his thoughts find expression in words, that Storm did not hear.
Her ears were closed, her whole existence transferred into eyes and
hands, seeing only colour and form, sensitive only to mood.

She saw the awkwardness and rigidity of his body flowLng into a pose of
natural grace such as she could never have composed; she saw the rapture
dawning on his features, and she nodded and murmured agreement softly,
not wanting to spoil it or break the mood; her fingers racing to capture
the moment, all her mind and art concentrated on that single task; her
own rapture rising to complement and buoy his even higher, seemingly
bound close and fast by the silken traces of love and common purpose,
but in reality as far from each other as earth is from moon.  I'll be
studying the ground for the exact place to site the homestead, he told
her, and it will take a full year to see it all in every season.  Good
water in the dry, but safe from flood in the rains.  The cool sea breeze
in summer and protected from the cold weather in winter.  Oh yes, she
murmured, that's marvelous.  But she was looking at his eyes.  If only I
can capture that fleck of light that makes them shine so.  she thought,
and dabbed a touch of blue to the white to mix the shade.  Two rooms to
start.  One to sleep and one to live.  Of course a wide veranda looking
out across the valley.  That's wonderful, she exulted softly, as she
touched the eye with the tip of the brush and it came instantly alive,
gazing back at her from the canvas with an expression that squeezed her
heart.  I'll quarry the stone from the cliff, but away from the river so
there'll be no scar to spoil it, and we'll cut the thatch from the edge
of the swamp, and the roof poles from the forest.  The sun had swung to
the west and it filtered down through the forest roof with a cool
greenish light that touched the smooth hard muscles of his arm and the
sculptured marble of his back, and she saw that he was beautiful.  We
can build on slowly, as we need new rooms.  I'll design it that way.
When the children come, we can change the living room to a nursery and
add a new wing.  He could almost smell the aromatic shavings of the
watels poles, and the sweet perfume of new cut thatch, and in his mind
he saw the bright new roof mellowing and darkening in the weather, feel
the cool of the high deep rooms at midday, and hear the crackle of the
fiercely burning mien osa thorn in the stone fireplace on the cold and
starry nights.  We'll be happy, Storm, I promise you that.  They were
the only words she heard, and she lifted her head and looked at him.

all, Oh!  yes.  We'll be happy, she echoed, and they smiled at each
other in total misunderstanding.

When Sean had told Ruth Courtney that Mark was leaving, her dismay had
alarmed him.  Sean had not realized that he had taken such a place in
her affections also.

Oh, no, Sean, she had protested.  It's not as bad as it might have been,
he assured her quickly.  We'll not lose him altogether, it's just that
he'll be on a longer rein, that's all.  He'll still be working for me,
but now only in my official capacity.  And he explained it all to her.
She was silent for a long time when he had finished, considering it from
every angle before she gave her opinion.  He'll be good at that, I
think, she nodded at last.  But I had rather got used to having him
around us.  I'll miss him.  Sean grunted what could have been agreement,
not able to make such a sentimental admission outright.  Well, Ruth went
on immediately, her whole attitude becoming businesslike, I'll have to
get on with it, which meant that Mark Anders was to be fitted out for
his move to Chaka's Gate by one of the world's leading experts.  She had
sent her man on campaign or on safari so often, that she knew exactly
what was necessary, the absolute bare necessity for survival and comfort
in the African bush.  She knew that anything more than that would not be
used, bundles of luxuries would come home untouched, or be abandoned
along the way.  Yet everything she selected was of the finest quality,
for she raided Sean's campaign bag blatantly, justifying each theft with
the firm utterance, Sean won't be using that again.  The sleeping roll
needed darning, and she made the repair a little work of art.  Then she
applied herself to the one luxury the pack would contain, books.  This
choice she and Mark discussed at length, for weight and space made it
essential that each book must be able to withstand numerous rereadings.
They had a wide selection from which to make their choice, hundreds of
battered old volumes, stained by rain and mud, spilled tea and, in more
than one case, by splotches of dried blood, and faded by sunlight and
age, all of them having been carried great distances in Sean's old
canvas book-bag.

Macaulay and Gibbon, Kipling and Tennyson, Shakescase and even a small
leather-bound Bible were given a place, after being carefully screened
by the selection committee, and Mark, whose previous camping equipment
had been limited to a blanket, a pot and a spoon, felt as though he had
been given a permanent suite at the Dorchester.

Sean provided the other essentials for the expedition.

The 9.  3 Marmlicher in its leather case and two mules.

They were big rangy animals, both hard workers and of equitable temper,
both salted by having been deliberately exposed to the bite of the
tsetse fly and surviving the onslaught of the disease that resulted.
They had cost Sean dearly for this immunity, but then the nagana had an
almost ninety percent mortality rate.  Salted animals were essential. It
would have been less trouble and had the same end result to shoot them
between the eyes, rather than take unsalted animals into the fly belt
beyond Chaka's Gate.

Each day, Sean set aside an hour or so to discuss with Mark the objects
and the priorities of the expedition.  They drew up a list, which was
added to daily and, as it grew, so did Sean Courtney's enthusiasm.  More
than once he broke off to shake his head and grumble.  You lucky
brighter, what I wouldn't give to be your age again, and to be going
back into the bush.  You could come and visit me, Mark smiled.

I might just do that, Sean agreed, and then resettled his spectacles on
his nose to bring up the next point for discussion.

The first of Mark's tasks was to compile an estimate of what species of
wild animal still existed in the proclaimed area, and how many of each
there were.  Clearly this was of the utmost importance to any attempt at
protection and conservation.  All would depend on there being sufficient
wild-life surviving to make their efforts worthwhile.  It may already be
too late in the afternoon, Sean pointed out.

No.  Mark would not even listen to the suggestion.  There is game there.
Just enough to give us a chance.  I'm sure of it Next important was for
him to contact the people living in the area of Chaka's Gate, the Zulus
grazing cattle along the edge of the tsetse fly belt, the native hunters
and gatherers living within the belt, each wandering group, each
village, each headman, each chief, and hold discussions with them;
gauging the attitude of the Zulu peoples to the stricter administration
of the proclaimed area, and warning them that what for many years they
and their ancestors had looked upon as commonage and tribal
hunting-ground was under new control.  Men were no longer free to cut
timber and thatch, to gather and hunt at will.

Mark's intimate knowledge of the Zulu language would serve him well
here.

He was to build temporary accomodation for himself, and conduct a survey
to choose the final site for a permanent warden's post.  There were
fifty other tasks less important, but no less demanding.

It was a programme to excite and intrigue Mark, and make him want to
begin, and as the day drew nearer, only one cloud lay dark and heavy on
the splendid horizon ahead of him.  He would be parting from Storm, but
he consoled himself with the sure knowledge that it would not be for
long.  He was going ahead into Eden to prepare a place for his Eve.

As Storm watched him sleep flat on his back, spread like a crucifix on
the forest floor, without even the cotton underpants between him and
nature, the possessive smile of a mother watching over the child at her
breast warmed and softened Storm's lips.

She was naked also, her clothing scattered around them like the petals
of an overblown rose, thrown there by the storm winds of passions which
were now spent and quiescent.  She sat over him cross-legged on the
corner of the plaid rug, and she studied his face, wondering at how
young he looked in sleep, feeling a choking of tenderness in her throat,
and the soft melting after-glow of loving deep in her body where he had
been.

She leaned over him, and her breasts swung forward with a new
weightiness, the tips darker and wrinkled like small pinky brown
raisins.  She dipped her shoulders and let the nipples brush lightly
across his face, and smiled again as he screwed up his nose and pursed
his lips in his sleep, snorting as if to blow away a bothersome fly.

He came awake suddenly and as he reached for her, she squealed softly
and plucked her breasts away from him, slapping at his hands.  Unhand
me, sir, this instant!  she commanded, and he caught her and pulled her
down on to his chest, so that she could hear his heart beating under her
ear.

She snuggled down, making throaty little sounds of comfort.  He sighed
deeply, and his chest swelled and expanded under her cheek and she heard
the air rush into his lungs.

Mark?  she said.  I'm here.  You're not going.  You know that, don't
you?  The air in his lungs stayed there as he held his breath, and the
hand that was stroking lightly up from the small of her back to the nape
of her neck stilled.  She could feel the tension in his fingers.

They stayed like that for many seconds and then he let the air out of
his lungs with an explosive grunt.  What do you mean?  he asked.  Where
am I not going?  This place up there in the bush, she said.  Chaka's
Gate?  Yes.  You're not going.  Why not?  Because I forbid it.

He sat up abruptly, joggling her roughly off his chest.

They sat facing each other, and he was staring at her with such an
expression that she ran her fingers through her hair and then folded her
arms across her breasts, covering them protectively.  Storm, what on
earth are you talking about?  he demanded.

I don't want you to waste any more time, she told him.  You must start
making your way now, if you're ever going to amount to anything.  This
is my way, our way, he said, bewildered.  We agreed on it.  I will go up
there to Chaka's Gate and build our home.  Home!  She was truly
appalled.  Up there in the bush me in a grass hut?  Mark, are You out of
your mind!  I thought -'What you're going to do is start making some
money, she told him fiercely, and, picking up her blouse, she pulled it
over her head, and as her tousled head emerged she went on, and forget
about little boys games.  I'll be making money.  His expression was
stiff, and becoming hostile.

What money?  she asked, just as frostily.  I'll have a salary.  A
salary!  She flung back her head and gave a high peal of scornful
laughter.  A salary, forsooth!  How much?  I don't know, he admitted. It
isn't really all that important.  You're a child, Mark.  Do you know
that?  A salary, twenty pounds a week?  Can you really and truly imagine
me living on your salary?  She gave the word a world of contempt.  Do
you know who earns salaries?  Mr Smothers earns a salary, she was on her
feet now, hopping furiously on one leg as she drew on her knickers.
Daddy's foremen at the saw-mills earn salaries.  The servants that wait
on the table, the stable-grooms earn salaries.  She was pulling up her
riding breeches, and with them all her dignity.  Real men don't earn
salaries, Mark.  Her voice was high and shrill.  You know what real men
do, don't you?  He was buttoning the fly of his breeches also, forced to
follow her example, and he shook his head silently.  Real men pay
salaries, not take them, she said.  Do you know that when my father was
your age he was already a millionaire!  Mark was never able to fathom
what it was that triggered him, perhaps the mention of Sean at that
particular moment, but suddenly he lost his temper.  He felt it like a
hot red fog behind his eyes.

I'm not your bloody father, he shouted.  Don't you swear at my father,
she shouted back.  He's five times the man you'll ever be.  They were
both panting and flushed, clothing rumpled, half-clad, with wild hair
and wilder eyes glaring at each other like animals, speechless with hurt
and anger.

Storm made the effort.  She swallowed painfully, and held out her hands
palms upwards.  Listen, Mark.  I've got it all planned.  If you went
into timber, selling to the mines, Daddy would give you the agency and
we could live in Johannesburg.  But Mark's anger was still on him, and
his voice was rough and scaly with it.

Thank you, he said.  Then I could spend my life grubbing money for you
to buy those ridiculous clothes, and Don't you insult me, Mark Anders,
she blazed.

Try me, Mark told her.  And that's what I'm going to be the rest of my
life.  If you loved me, you'd respect that.  And if you loved me, you
wouldn't want me to live in a grass hut.  I love you, he shouted her
down.  But you'll be my wife and you'll do what I decide.  Don't
challenge me, Mark Anders.  I warn you.  Don't ever do that!  I'll be
your husband, he began, but she snatched up her boots and ran to her
horse, stooping to loose the hobble and then flinging herself on to its
back bare-footed and looked down at him.  She was breathless with anger,
but she struggled to make her voice icy and cutting.  Don't take any
bets on thad!  And she dragged the horse's head around and kicked him
into a run.  Where is Missy?  Sean demanded as he unfolded his napkin
and tucked the corner into his waistcoat, glancing at Storm's empty
place at the table.  She's not feeling very well, dear, Ruth told him,
as she began serving the soup, ladling it out of the fat-bellied tureen
in a cloud of fragrant steam.  I allowed her to have her dinner sent up
to her room.  What's wrong with her?  Sean looked up with concern
creasing his forehead.  It's nothing serious, said Ruth firmly, closing
the door on further discussion.  Sean stared at her for a moment, and
then understanding dawned.  Oh!  he said.  The functions of the female
body had always been shrouded for Sean Courtney in deepest mystery, and
awakened in him an abiding awe.  Oh!  he said again, and leaned forward
to blow noisily on a spoonful of soup to cover his embarrassment, and
the niggling resentment that his beloved child was a child no longer.

Across the table, Mark applied himself to his spoon with equal
determination, but with an empty aching feeling below his ribs.  Where
is Missy tonight?  Sean asked, with what was for him a certain
diffidence.  Still not well, "She telephoned Irene Leuchars this
morning.  Apparently the Leuchars are having a huge party tonight and
she wanted to go.  She left after lunch.  She's driving herself back to
Durban in the Cadillac.  Where will she stay?  Sean demanded.

Vith the Leuchars, naturally.  She should have asked me, Sean frowned.
You were down at the saw-mills all day, dear.  The decision had to be
made immediately, or she would have missed the party.  I knew you
wouldn't mind.  Sean minded everything that took his daughter away from
him, but he could not say so now.  I thought she hated Irene Leuchars,
he complained.

That was last month, said Ruth.

I thought she was sick, Sean persisted.  That was last night.  When is
she coming home?  She may stay in town for the race-meeting at Greyville
on Saturday.  Mark Anders listened with the empty space in his chest
turning to a great bottomless void.  Storm had gone back to join that
close group of rich, indolent and privileged young people, to their
endless games and their eternal round of extravagant partying, and on
Saturday Mark was leaving with two mules for the wilderness beyond
Chaka's Gate.

Mark would never fathom how Dirk Courtney knew.

To him it seemed further evidence of the man's power, the tentacles of
his influence that reached into every corner and crevice.

I understand you are to make the survey for the Government, to decide
whether it's worth developing the proclaimed area beyond Chaka's Gate?
he asked Mark.

Mark could still hardly believe the fact that he stood unarmed and
completely unprotected here at Great Longwood.  His skin tingled with
warning of deadly danger, his nerves were drawn like bow-strings, and he
walked with exaggerated care, one hand clenched in the hip-pocket of his
breeches.

Beside him, Dirk Courtney was tall and courteous and affable.  When he
turned to make that statement, he smiled a warm spread of the wide and
handsome mouth and he laid a hand on Mark's upper arm.  A light but
friendly touch, which shocked Mark as though a mamba had kissed him with
its little flickering black tongue.  How does he know it?  Mark stared
at him, his feet slowing, so that he pulled gently away from Dirk's
touch.

If Dirk noticed the withdrawal, it did not show in his smile, and he let
his hand fall naturally to his side and took the flat silver
cigarette-case from his jacket pocket.  Try one, he murmured.  They are
made especially for me.  Mark tasted the incense of the sweetish Turkish
tobacco, using the act of lighting the cigarette to cover his
uncertainty and surprise.  Only Sean Courtney and his close family knew,
and of course the Prime Minister's office, the Prime Minister's office,
if that was it, as it seemed it must be, then Dirk Courtney's tentacles
stretched far indeed.  Your silence I must take as confirmation, Dirk
told him, as they came down the paved alleyway between two lines of
whitewashed loose boxes.  From over the halfdoors, the horses stretched
out their necks to Dirk and he paused now and then to caress a velvety
muzzle with surprisingly gentle fingers, and to murmur an endearment.
You are a very silent young man.  Dirk smiled that warm endearing smile
again.  I like a man who can keep his own counsel, and respect the
privacy of others.  He turned to confront Mark, forcing him to meet his
eyes.

Dirk reminded Mark of some glossy cat, one of the big predators, not the
tabby domestic variety.  The leopard, golden and beautiful and cruel. He
wondered at his own courage, or foolhardiness, in coming here right into
the leopard's lair.  A year ago it might have been suicidal to put
himself in this man's hands.  Even now, without Sean Courtney's
protection, he would never have dared, Yet although it was logical to
believe that nobody, not even Dirk Courtney, would dare touch him, now
that he was Sean Courtney's protege with all that that implied, yet
prickles of apprehension nettled his spine as he looked into those
leopard's eyes.

Dirk took his elbow, not giving him opportunity to avoid the touch, and
led him through a gateway to the stud pens.

The two pens were enclosed with ten-foot high pole fences, carefully
padded to prevent damage to the expensive animals that would be confined
here.  The earth within the rectangular enclosures was ankle-deep with
fresh sawdust, and though one was empty, there was a group of four
grooms busy in the nearest pen.

Two of them had the mare on a double lead rein.  She was a young animal,
a deep red bay in colour, and she had the beautiful balanced head of the
Arab, wide nostrils which promised great heart and stamina, and strong
but delicate bones.

Dirk Courtney placed a booted foot on the bottom rail of the pen, and
leaned forward to look at her with a gloating pride.  She cost me a
thousand guineas, he said, and it was a bargain. The two other grooms
had the stallion in check.  An old, heavily built animal, with grey
dappling his muzzle.  He wore a girdle, strapped under his belly, and up
between the hindlegs, a cage like an old-fashioned chastity belt of
woven light chain that was called the teaser.  It would prevent him
effectively covering the mare.

The grooms gave him rein to approach the mare, but the instant she felt
his gentle nuzzling touch under her tail, she put her head down and
lashed out with both back legs, a murderous hissing cut of hooves that
flew within inches of the stallion's head.

He snorted and backed away.  Then, undeterred, he closed with her once
more, reaching out to touch her flank, running his nose with a gentle
]over's touch across the glossy hide, but the mare made her skin shudder
wildly, as though she were beset by bees, and she let out a screaming
whinny of outrage at the importunate touch on her maidenly virtue.  One
of the grooms was dragged down on his knees as she flashed at the
stallion with terrible yellow teeth, catching him in the neck and
ripping open his old dappled hide in a shallow bloody cut before they
pulled her off.  Poor old beggar, murmured Mark, although the injury was
superficial; it was the indignity of the whole business that aroused
Mark's sympathy.  The old stallion must endure the kicks and bites,
until at last the temperamental filly was wooed and willing.  Then he
would be led away, his work done.  Never waste sympathy for the losers
in this world, Dirk advised him.  There are too many of them In the
sawdust-covered arena, the filly lifted her tail, the long glossy hairs
forming a soft waving Plume, and she urinated a sharp spurt that was
evidence of her arousal.

The stallion circled her, -rolling back his upper lip, exposing his
teeth, and his shoulder muscles spasmed violently as he nodded his head
vigorously and reached out to her again.

She stood quietly now, with her tail still raised, and trembled at the
soft loving touch of his muzzle, ready at last to accept him.  All
right, Dirk shouted.  Take him out.  But it required the strength of
both grooms to drag his head around and lead him out of the tall gate
that Dirk swung open.  Strangely enough, I don't believe that you are
one of this life's losers, Dirk told Mark easily, as they waited by the
gate.  That is why you are here at this moment.  I only trouble myself
with a certain type of man.  Men with either talent, or strength or
vision, or all of those virtues.  I believe you may be of that type.
Mark knew then that all this had been carefully arranged, the meeting
with Peter Botes, Marion Littlejohn's brother-in-law, outside the post
office in Ladyburg, the urgent summons to Dirk Courtney's estate he had
delivered, so there was no opportunity to report to Sean Courtney and
discuss the invitation, and now this erotic show of mating horses, all
of it planned to confuse and unsettle Mark, to keep him unbalanced.  I
think you are more like this, Dirk went on, as the grooms led in the
stud stallion, an animal too valued to risk damaging by putting to an
unwilling female, a tall horse, black as a rook's wing, high-stepping
and proud, kicking the soft sawdust with polished hooves, and then
coming up hard and trembling on stiff legs as he smelt the waiting mare,
and the great black root grew out of his belly, long as a man's arm and
as thick, arrogant, and with a flaring head that pulsed with a life of
its own and beat impatiently against the stallion's chest.  The losers
toil, and the winners take the spoil, said Dirk, as the huge beast
reared up over the mare.  One of the grooms darted forward to guide him,
and the mare hunched her back to receive the long gliding penetration.
The winners and the losers, he repeated, watching the stallion work with
glistening bulging quarters, and Dirk's handsome face was flushed with
high colour, and his hands gripped the poles of the fence until the
knuckles blanched like marble.

When at last the stallion dropped back off the mare on to four legs,
Dirk sighed, took Mark's elbow again and led him away.  You were present
when I spoke with my father of my dream.

I was there, Mark agreed.  Oh good, Dirk laughed genially.  You have a
voice, I was beginning to doubt it, But my information is that you have
a good brain also Mark glanced at him sharply and Dirk assured him,
Naturally, I have made it my business to find out all about you.  You
know certain details of my plans, I must be in a position to protect
myself.  They skirted the ornamental pond, below the homestead, the
surface covered with flat lily pads and the smell of their blooms light
and sugary in the afternoon heat, and they went on through the formal
rose garden, neither of them speaking again until they had entered the
high-ceilinged and overfurnished study; Dirk had closed the wooden
shutters against the heat, making the room cool and gloomy, and somehow
forbidding.

He waved Mark to a chair across from the fireplace and went to the table
on which stood a silver tray of bottles and crystal.  Drink?  he asked,
and Mark shook his head and watched Dirk pour from a black bottle.  You
know my dream, Dirk spoke, still concentrating on his task.  What did
you think of it?

It's a large concept, Mark said cautiously.  Large?  Dirk laughed.  It's
not the word I would have chosen.  He saluted Mark with the glass and
sipped at it, watching him over the rim.  Strange how the fates work,
Dirk thought, watching the slim graceful figure.  Twice I tried to be
rid of the nuisance he could have caused me.  If I had succeeded, I
would not be able to use him now.  He hitched one leg over the corner of
his desk and set the glass aside carefully to leave both hands free, and
he gesticulated as he talked.  We are talking of opening a whole new
frontier, a huge step forward for our nation, work for tens of thousands
of people, new towns, new harbours, railways, progress.  He spread his
hands, a gesture of growth and limitless opportunity.  That one
wonderful word that describes it all, progress!  And anybody who tries
to stop that is worse than a fool, he's a criminal, a traitor to his
country, and should be treated as one.  He should be brushed mercilessly
aside, by any means that comes to hand.  He paused now and glowered at
Mark.  The threat was barely concealed, and Mark stirred restlessly in
his chair.  On the other hand, Dirk smiled suddenly, like a flooding
beam of sunlight bursting through the grey overcast of a storm sky.
Every man who works towards the fulfilment of this huge concept will be
fully entitled to a share of the rewards.  What do you want from me?
Mark asked, and the abrupt question caught Dirk with his hands poised
and the next flight of oratory on his lips.  He let the hands drop to
his sides, and watched Mark's face expectantly, as though there was
something still to come. And what are the rewards you speak of?  Mark
went on, and Dirk laughed delightedly, those were the words for which he
had been waiting, each man has a coin for which he will work.

You know what I want from you, he said.

Yes, I think I do, Mark agreed.

Tell me what I want, Dirk laughed again.  You want a report that
recommends that the development of the Chaka's Gate proclaimed area as a
National Park is not practical.  You said it, not me.  Dirk picked up
his glass again and lifted it to Mark.  But, none the less, I'll drink
to it And the rewards?  Mark went on.  The satisfaction of knowing that
you are doing your patriotic duty for the peoples of this nation, Dirk
told him solemnly.  I had all the satisfaction I need for a lifetime in
France, Mark said softly.  But I found out you can't eat or drink it,
and Dirk laughed delightedly.  That really is choice, I must remember
it.  Are you certain you won't have a drink?  Mark smiled for the first
time.  Yes, I'll change my mind.  Whisky?  Please.  Dirk stood up and
went to the silver tray, and he realized that he felt a sneaking relief.
If it had proved that this man had no price, as he had started to
believe possible, it would have destroyed one of the headstones on which
he had based his whole philosophy of life.  But it was all right again
now.  The man had a price, and he felt a sudden contempt and scorn, it
would be money, and a paltry sum at that.

There was nothing different about this fellow.

He turned back to Mark.  Here is something you can drink.  He gave him
the crystal glass.  Now let's discuss something you can eat.

He went back to the desk, slid open one of the drawers, and took out of
it a brown manilla envelope, sealed with red wax.

He laid it on the desk-top, and picked up his own glass.

That contains an earnest of my good will, he said.  How earnest?  One
thousand pounds, Dirk said.  Enough to buy a mountain of bread.  One of
your companies bought a farm from my grandfather, Mark spoke carefully.
He had promised that farm to me, and he died without leaving any of the
money.  Dirk's expression had closed suddenly and his eyes were wary and
watchful.  For a moment he played with the idea of feigning ignorance,
but already he had admitted he had investigated Mark thoroughly.  Yes,
he nodded.  I know about that.  The old man wasted it all away.  The
price of that farm was three thousand pounds, Mark went on.  I feel that
I am still owed that money.  Dirk dropped his hand into the drawer
again, and brought out two identical sealed envelopes.  He laid them
carefully on top of the first envelope.  By a strange coincidence, he
said.  I just happen to have that exact amount with me.  A paltry sum
indeed, he smiled his contempt.  What had made him suspect that there
was something unusual about this man, he wondered.  In the desk drawer
were seven other identical manilla envelopes, each containing one
hundred ten pound notes.  He had been prepared to go that high for the
report -no, he corrected himself, I would have been prepared to go
further, much further.  Come, he smiled.  Here it is.  And he watched
Mark Anders rise from the chair and cross the room, pick up the
envelopes and slip them into his pocket.

Sean Courtney's beard bristled like the quills on the back of an angry
porcupine, and his face turned slowly to the colour of a badly fired
brick.  Good God!  he growled, as he stared at the three envelopes on
his desk top.  The seals had been carefully split and the contents
arranged in three purple blue fans of crisp treasury bills.  You took
his money?  Yes, sir, Mark agreed, standing in front of the desk like a
wayward pupil before the head pedagogue.  Then you have the brass to
come to me with it?  Sean made a gesture as though to sweep the piles of
bills on to the floor.  Take the filthy stuff away from me.  Your first
lesson, General.  The money is always important, Mark said quietly. Yes,
but what must I do with this?  As patron of the Society for the
Protection of African Wildlife, your duty would be to send the donor a
letter of acceptance and thanks for his generous donation What on earth
are you talking about?  Sean stared at him.  What society is this?  I
have just formed it, sir, and elected you patron.  I am sure we will be
able to draw up a suitable memorandum of objects and rules of
membership, but what it boils down to is a campaign to make people aware
of what we are going to do, to gather public support, Mark spoke
rapidly, pouring it all out, and Sean listened with the brick colour of
his face slowly returning to normal, and a slow but delighted grin
pulling his beard out of shape.  We'll use this money for advertisements
in the press to make people aware of their heritage, Mark raced on,
ideas tumbling out of him, and immediately spawning new ideas, while
Sean listened, his grin becoming a spasmodic chuckle that shook his
shoulders, and then finally a great peal of laughter, that went on for
many minutes.  Enough!  at last he bellowed delightedly. Sit down, Mark,
that's enough for now.  And he groped for a handkerchief to mop his eyes
and blow the great hooked beak of a nose like a trumpet, while he
recovered his self-control.  It's indecent, he chortled.  Positively
sacrilegious!  You have no respect for money at all.  It's un-natural.
Oh, yes, I have, but money is only a means, not an end, sir, Mark
laughed also, for the General's mirth was contagious.  my God, Mark. You
are a prize, you really are.  Where ever did I find you?  He gave one
last chuckle, and then grew serious.  He drew a clean sheet of paper
from the sidedrawer and began to make notes. As though I haven't enough
work already, he growled.  Now let's draw up a list of objects for this
bloody society of yours.  They worked for nearly three hours, and Ruth
Courtney had to come and call them to the dinner table.  In a minute,
dear, Sean told her, and placed a paperweight on the thick pile of notes
he had made; he was about to rise when he frowned at Mark.

'You have chosen a dangerous enemy for yourself, young man, he warned
him.

Yes, I know, Mark nodded soberly.

You say that with feeling.  He stared at Mark questioningly.  Mark
hesitated a moment and then he began.  You know my grandfather, John
Anders, you spoke of him once before.  Sean nodded, and sank back into
the padded leather chair.  He had land, eight thousand acres, he called
it Andersland Sean nodded again, and Mark went on carefully, telling it
all without embellishment, stating the facts, and when he had to guess
or make conjecture, stating that it was so.

Again Ruth came to call them to dinner, just when Mark was describing
the night on the escarpment when the gunmen had come to his camp.  She
was about to insist they come before the meal spoiled, but then she saw
their faces and came silently to stand behind Sean's chair and listen,
her face becoming paler and more set.

He told them about Chaka's Gate how he had searched for his
grandfather's grave and the men who had come to hunt him, and when he
had finished the story they were all silent, until at last Sean roused
himself, sighed, a gusty, sorrowful sound, before he spoke.  Why didn't
you report this? Report what?  Who would have believed me?  You could
have gone to the police.  I have not a shred of evidence that points to
Dirk Courtney, except my own absolute certainty.  And he dropped his
eyes.  It's such a wild, unlikely story that I was afraid to tell even
you, until this moment.  Yes, Sean nodded.  I can see that.  Even now I
don't want to believe it is true.  I'm sorry, said Mark simply.  I know
it's true, but I don't want to believe it.  Sean shook his head, and
lowered his chin on to his chest.  Ruth, standing behind him, placed a
comforting hand on his shoulder.  Oh God, how much more must I suffer
for him?

he whispered, then lifted his head again.  You will be in even greater
danger now, Mark.  I don't think so, General.  I am under your
protection, and he knows itGod grant that is enough, Sean muttered, but
what can we do against him?  How can we stop this, Sean paused, seeking
the word, and then hissed it savagely, this monster.  There is no
evidence, Mark said.  Nothing to use against him.  He has been too
clever for that by far There is evidence, said Sean with complete
certainty.  If all this is true, then there is evidence, somewhere.
Trojan the mule's broad back felt like a barrel under Mark, and the sun
beat through his shirt so that his sweat rose in dark damp patches
between his shoulder blades and at his armpits, as he jogged down the
bank of the Bubezi with Spartan, the second heavily burdened mule,
following him on a lead rein.

In the river bed on one of the sugary white sandbanks, he let the mules
wade in knee-deep and begin to drink, sucking up the clear water noisily
so that he could feel the animal's belly swelling between his knees.

He pushed his hat on to the back of his head and wiped away the drops
from his brow with one thumb as he looked up at the portals of Chaka's
Gate.  They seemed to fall out of the sky like cascades of stone, sheer
and eternal, so vast and solid that they dwarfed the land and the river
at their feet.

The double pannier on the back of the lead mule was the less onerous of
the burdens that he had brought with him from the teeming reaches of
civilization.  He had brought also a load of guilt and remorse, the
sorrow of a lost love, and the galling of duty left unperformed.  But
now, beneath the cliffs of Chaka's Gate, he felt his burden lightening,
and his shoulders gathering strength.

Something indefinable seemed to reach out to him from across the Bubezi
River, a feeling of destiny running its appointed course, or more a
sense of home -coming.  Yes, he thought, with sudden joy, I am coming
home at last.

Abruptly Mark was in a hurry.  He pulled up Trojan's reluctant head,
with water still pouring from his loose rubbery lips, and kicked him
forward into the swirling green eddy of the river, slipping from the
saddle to swim beside him when he lost his footing.

As the big soup-plate hooves touched bottom, he threw his leg back
across the saddle and rode up the far bank, his breeches clinging to his
thighs and his sodden shirt streaming water.

Suddenly, for the first time in a week, and for no good reason, he
laughed, a light unstrained burst of laughter that hung about Men like a
shimmering halo long afterwards.

The sound was so low, and the hooves of Trojan the grey mule were
plugging into the soft earth along the river with a rhythmic chuffing
sound, so that Mark was not sure of what he had heard.

He reined Trojan to a stop and listened.  The silence was so complete
that it seemed to hiss like static, and when a wood dove gave its
melodious and melancholy whistle a mile along the river, it seemed close
enough to touch.

Mark shook his head, and flicked the reins.  At the first hoof fall, the
sound came again, and this time there was no mistaking it.  The hair
down the nape of Mark's neck prickled, and he straightened quickly out
of his comfortable saddle slouch.  He had heard that sound only once
before, but in circumstances that made certain he would never forget it.

It was close, very close, coming from the patch of thick green riverine
bush between him and the river, a tangled thicket of wild loquat and
hanging lianas, typical cover for the animal that had called.

It was a weird unearthly sound, a fluid sound, almost like liquor poured
from the neck of a stone jug, and only one who had heard it before would
recognize the distress and warning call of a fully grown leopard.

Mark swung the mule away, and set him lumbering up the rising ground
until he reached the spreading shade of a leadwood, where he tethered
him and loosened his girth.

Then he slipped the Marmlicher out of its scabbard, and quickly checked
the loaded magazine, the fat brass cartridges with their copper-jacketed
noses were still bright and slick with wax, and he snapped the bolt
closed.

He carried the rifle casually in his left hand, for he had no intention
at all of using it.  Instead he was aware of a pleasurable glow of
excitement and anticipation.  In the two months of hard riding and
walking since his return to Chaka's Gate, this was the first chance he
had been given of sighting a leopard.

There were many leopard along the Bubezi, he had seen their sign almost
daily, and heard them sawing and coughing in the night.  Always the
leopard and the kudu are the last to give way before man and his
civilization.  Their superior cunning and natural stealth protect them
long after the other species have succumbed, Now he had a chance at a
sighting.  The patch of riverine bush though dense, was small, and he
longed for a sighting, even if just a flash of yellow in deep shade,
something concrete, a firm entry in his logbook, another species to add
to the growing list of his head count, He circled out cautiously, his
eyes flickering from the thick green wall of bush to soft ground at his
feet, checking for spoor as well as for actual sight of the yellow cat.

just above the steep river bank he stopped abruptly, and stared down
before going on to one knee to touch the earth.

They weren't leopard tracks, but others he had grown to know and
recognize.  There was no special distinguishing characteristic, no
missing toes, no scarring or deformity, but Mark's trained eye
recognized the shape and size, the slight spraying toe-in way the man
walked, the length of his stride and a toe-heavy impression, that of a
quick alert tread.  The distress call of the animal in the thicket made
sense now.  Pungushe, said Mark quietly.  The jackal at work again.  The
tracks were doubled, entering the thicket and returning.  The inward
tracks seemed deeper, less extended, as though the man carried a burden,
but the outward tracks were lighter, the man walked freely.

Slowly, Mark edged in towards the thicket, following the man's prints.
Pausing for long minutes to examine the undergrowth carefully every few
paces, or squatting down to give himself better vision along the ground
under the hanging hanas and branches.

Now that he knew what he was going to find, the pleasurable glow of
excitement had given way to the chill of anger

and the cold knowledge of mortal danger.

Something white caught his eye in the gloomy depths of the thicket.  He
stared at it moments before he saw the white, bleeding pith of a tree
trunk, where it had been ripped by the claws of an anguished beast, long
raking marks deep through the dark woody bark.  His anger slid in his
belly like an uncoiling serpent.

He moved sideways and slowly forward, the rifle held ready now, low
across his hips, three paces before he stopped again.

On the edge of the thicket there was an area of flattened grass and
scrub; the soft black leaf-mould earth had been churned and disturbed,
something heavy had been dragged back and forth, and there was a fleck
of wet red lit by a single beam of falling sunlight that might have been
the petal of a wild flower, or a drop of blood.

He heard another sound then, the clink of metal on metal, link on link,
steel chain moved stealthily in the dark depths of the thicket and it
sighted him.  He knew where the animal was lying now, and he moved out
sideways, crabbing step after step, slipping the safety-catch of the
rifle, and holding it at high port across his chest.

White again, unnatural white, a round blob of it against dark foliage
and he froze staring at it.  Long seconds passed before he realized that
it was the raw wood of a cut log, a short fork-shaped log as thick as a
young girl's waist, so freshly cut that the gum was still bleeding from
it in sticky wine-coloured drops.  He saw also the twist of stolen
fencing wire that held the chain to the log.  The log was the anchor, a
sliding drag weight which would hold the trapped animal without giving
it a solid pull against which to pit itself and tear itself free.

The chain clinked again.

The leopard was within twenty paces of him.  He knew exactly where it
was but he could not see it, and as he stared, his mind was racing,
remembering everything he had heard about the animal, the old man's
stories.  You won't see him until he comes, and even then he will only
be a yellow flash of light, like a sunbeam.  He won't warn you with a
grunt, not like a lion.  He comes absolutely silently, and he won't chew
your arm or grab you in the shoulder.  He'll go for your head.  He knows
all about two-legged animals, he feeds mostly on baboon, so he knows
where your head is. He'll take the top off your skull quicker than you
open your breakfast egg, and for good measure his back legs will be busy
on your belly.

You've seen a cat lie on his back and hook with his back legs when you
scratch his belly.  He'll cat you the same way, but he'll strip your
guts out of you just like a chicken, and he'll do it so quickly that if
there are four of you in the hunting-party he'll kill three of them
before the fourth man gets his gun to his shoulder.  Mark stood
absolutely still and waited.  He could not see the animal, but he could
feel it, could feel its eyes, they stung his skin like the feet of
poisonous crawling insects, and he remembered the shiny marble white
scar tissue that Sean Courtney had shown him once in one of those mellow
moments after the fourth whisky, pulling up his shirt and flexing
muscle, so the cicatrice bulged with the gloss of satin.  Leopard" he
had said.  Devil cat, the worst bastard in all the bush.  He felt his
feet pulling back slowly, and the dead leaves rustled.  He could walk
away and leave it, come back when the vultures told im the anima was
dead or too weak to be a danger.  Then he imagined the terror and
anguish of the animal, and suddenly it was not the animal, but his
animal, his charge, his sacred charge, and he stepped forward.

The chain clinked again and the leopard came.  It came with a terrible
silent rush, and in the blurring streaming charge, only the eyes blazed,
they blazed yellow with hatred and fear and agony.  The chain flailed
out behind it, spinning and snapping, and as Mark brought the rifle up
the last six inches to his shoulder he saw the trap hanging on its
fore-leg like a sinister grey metallic crab.  The heavy steel trap
slowed the charge just that fraction.

Time seemed to pass with a dreamlike slowness, each microsecond falling
heavily as drops of thick oil, so that he saw that the leopard's foreleg
above the grip of the steel jaws was eaten through.  He felt his stomach
turn over as he realized that the frenzied animal had gnawed through its
own bone and flesh and sinew in its desperate try for freedom.  The leg
was held by only a thread of bloody ragged skin, and that last thread
snapped at the heavy jerk of the steeltrap.

The leopard was free, mad with pain and fear, as it launched itself at
Mark's head.

The muzzle of the Marmlicher almost touched the broad flat forehead; he
was so close that he could see the long white whiskers bristling from
the puckered snarling lips like grass stalks stiff with the morning
frost, and the yellow fangs behind wet black lips, the furry pink tongue
arched across the open throat, and the eyes.  The terrible hating yellow
eyes.

Mark fired and the bullet clubbed the skull open, the yellow eyes
blinked tightly at the jarring shock, and the head was wrenched
backwards, twisted on the snakelike neck, while the lithe body lost its
grace and lightness and turned heavy and shapeless in mid-air.

It fell like a sack at Mark's feet, and tiny droplets of brilliant red
blood spattered the scuffed toe cap of Mark's boot, and glittered there
like cut rubies.

Mark touched the open staring eye, but the fierce yellow light was
fading and there was no blinking reflex of the eyelids with their long
beautiful fans of dark lashes.  The leopard was dead, and Mark sat down
heavily in the leafmould beside the carcass and groped for his cigarette
tin.

The hand that held the match shook so violently that the flame fluttered
like a moth's wing.  He shook out the flame, threw the match away, and
then stroked his open palm across the soft thick fur, the amber gold
dabbed with the distinctive rosettes of black, as though touched by the
five bunched fingertips of an angel's right hand.  Pungushe, you
bastard!  he whispered again.  The animal had died for that golden
dappled hide, for the few silver shillings that it would bring when sold
in the village market, at a country railway halt, or on the side of a
dusty road.  A death in unspeakable agony and terror to make a rug, or a
coat for a lady.  Mark stroked the glowing fur again, and felt his own
fear give way to anger for the man who had saved his life once, and who
he had hunted these two months.

He stood up and went to the steel trap, lying at the end of its chain.
The severed leg was still held between the relentless jaws, and Mark
squatted to examine it.  The trap was the type they call a Slag Yster, a
killing iron, and the spikes of the jaws had been carefully filed to
bite but not sever.  It weighed at least thirty pounds and it would take
a thick branch to lever those jaws open, and reset the mechanism.

The steel was dark and sooty where the poacher had scorched it with a
torch of dry grass to kill the man-smell on the metal.  Lying at the
edge of the thicket was the half decomposed carcass of a baboon, the
odiferous bait which had been irresistible to the big yellow cat.

Mark reloaded the Mannlicher, and his anger was so intense that he would
have shot down the man who had done this thing, if he had come across
him in that moment, despite the fact that he owed him his life.

He walked back up the slope and unsaddled Trojan, hobbled him with the
leather straps, and hung his saddlebags in the branches of the leadwood
out of the way of a questing hyena or badger.

Then he went back and picked up the poacher's spoor at the edge of the
thicket.  He knew it would be useless to follow on the mule.  The
poacher would be alerted at a mile range by that big clumsy animal, but
he had a chance on foot.

The spoor was fresh and the poacher's camp would be close, he would not
stray far from such a valuable asset as his steel trap.  Mark had a very
good chance.

He would be cagey, of course, sly and cunning, for he would know that it
was now forbidden to hunt in the valley.  Mark had visited each village,
spoken with each tribal headman and drank his beer while he explained to
him the new order.

The poacher knew that he was outside the law.  Mark had followed his
spoor so often, and the precautions Pungushe took, the elaborate ruses
to throw any pursuit, made it clear that he was in guilt, but now Mark
had a good chance at him.

The spoor crossed the river half a mile down-stream, and then started to
zigzag back and forth among the scrub and forest and brush as the
poacher visited his trap line.

The leopard trap was clearly the centre of his line, but he was noosing
for small game, using light galvanized baling wire, probably purchased
for a few shillings at a country general dealer's store.  He was also
using copper telegraph wire, probably obtained by blatantly scaling a
telegraph pole in some lonely place.

He was trapping for jackal, baiting with offal, and he was trapping
indiscriminately at salt licks and mud wallows, any place that might
attract small game.

Following the trap line diligently, Mark sprang every wire noose and
ripped it out.  He closed rapidly with his quarry, but it was three
hours before he found the poacher's camp.

Itw as under the swollen, bloated reptilian grey branches of a baobab
tree.  The tree was old and rotten, its huge trunk cleaved by a deep
hollow, a cave that the poacher had used to shield his small smokeless
cooking fire.  The fire was dead now, carefully smothered with sand, but
the smell of dead smoke led Mark to it.  The ashes were cold.

Tucked away in the deepest recess of the hollow tree were two bundles
tied with plaited bark string.  One bundle held a greasy grey blanket, a
carved wooden head-rest, a small black three-legged pot and a pouch of
impala skin which contained two or three pounds of yellow maize and
strips of dried meat.  The poacher travelled light, and moved fast.

The other bundle contained fifteen jackal skins, sundried and crackling
stiff, beautiful furs of silver and black and red, and two leopard
skins, a big dark golden torn and a smaller half -grown female.

Mark relit the fire and threw the blanket, the head-rest and the bag
upon it, deriving a thin vindictive satisfaction as they smouldered and
blackened.  He smashed the iron pot with a rock and then he slung the
roll of dried skins on his shoulder and started back.

It was almost dark when he got back to the leopard thicket beside the
river.

He dropped the heavy bundle of dried skin, which by this time felt like
a hundredweight sack of coal on his shoulder and he stared
uncomprehendingly at the leopard's carcass.

It swarmed with big green metallic shiny flies.  They were laying their
eggs on the dead flesh, like bunches of white boiled rice, but what
astonished Mark was that the carcass was naked.  It had been expertly
stripped of its golden fur, and now it was a raw pink, laced with yellow
fat and the white tracery of muscle ligaments.  The head was bare, the
mask stripped away so that dull startled eyes started out of the skull
like marbles, and tufts of black hair sprang from the open ear holes,
the fangs were exposed in a fixed yellow grin.

Quickly Mark ran to the anchor log.  The chain and trap were gone.

It was fully a minute before the next logical step occurred to him.  He
ran up the slope to the leadwood tree.

Trojan was gone.  The hobbling straps had been cut with a razor-sharp
blade and laid out neatly under the leadwood tree.

Trojan, unexpectedly relieved of his hobble, had reacted gratefully in a
fully predictable manner.  He had set off, arrow-straight through the
forest, back home to his rude stable, his nightly ration of grain, and
the congenial company of his old buddy Spartan.

it was a fifteen-mile walk back to main camp, and it would be dark in
fifteen minutes.

The saddle-bags had been taken down from the tree, and the contents
meticulously picked over.  What Pungushe had rejected, he had folded and
stacked neatly on a flat rock.  He clearly did not think much of William
Shakespeare, his tragedies had been put aside, and he had left Mark his
chamois hunting-jacket, a last minute gift from Ruth Courtney.

He had taken the gentleman's sleeping bag, which had once belonged to
General Courtney, with its built-in ground sheet and genuine eider
filling, twenty-five guineas worth from Harrods of London, good exchange
for a threadbare greasy blanket and wooden head-rest.

He had taken the cooking pot, pannikin and cutlery, the salt and flour
and bully beef, but had left a single tin of beans.

He had taken the clean shirt and khaki trousers, but had left the spare
woollen socks and rubbeT-Soled boots.

Perhaps it was chance that the boots pointed downstream to Mark's camp,
or was it mockery?  A can of beans and boots to carry Mark home.

Through the red mists of his humiliation and mounting rage, Mark
glimpsed suddenly a whimsical sense of humour at work.  The man had been
watching him.  Mark was sure of that now, his selection from the
saddle-bags echoed too faithfully what Mark had burned of his.

In his imagination, Mark heard the deep bell of Zulu laughter, and he
snatched up the Mannlicher and picked up Pungushe's outgoing spoor.

He followed it for only a hundred yards and then stopped.

Pungushe was heavily laden with trap, wet skin, and booty, but he had
hit the Zulu's stride Minza umhlabathi, and he was eating ground to the
north at a pace which Mark knew was pointless to try and imitate.

He walked back to the leadwood tree and sank down beside the trunk.  His
rage turned to acute discomfort at the thought of the fifteen-mile walk
home, carrying the saddle-bags, and the roll of dried skins, for honour
dictated he did not abandon his meagre spoils.

Suddenly he began to laugh, a helpless, hopeless shaking of his
shoulders, and he laughed until tears ran down his cheeks and his belly
ached.  Pungushe, I'll get even for this, he promised weakly, through
his laughter.

It rained after midnight, a quick hard downpour, just enough to soak
Mark and to bow the grass with clinging drops.

Then a small chill wind came nagging like an old wife, and the wet grass
soaked his boots until they squelched and chafed with each step, and his
cigarettes had disintegrated into a yellow porridge of mangled tobacco
and limp rice paper, and the roll of skin and the saddle and the bags
cut into his shoulders, and he did not laugh again that night.

in the pre-dawn, the cliffs of Chaka's Gate were purple and milky
smooth, flaming suddenly with the sun's ardent kiss in vivid rose and
bronze, but Mark plodded on under his burden, tired beyond any
appreciation of beauty, beyond feeling or even caring, until he came out
of the forest on to the bank of the Bubezi River and stopped in
midstride.

He sniffed in total disbelief, and was immediately assailed by the
demands of his body, the quick flood of saliva from under his tongue and
the cramping of his empty belly.  it was the most beautiful odour he had
ever smelled, bacon frying and eggs in the pan, slowly gelling and
firming in the sizzling fat.  He knew it was only a figment of his
exhaustion, for he had eaten his last bacon six weeks before.

Then his ears played tricks also, he heard the ring of an axe-blade on
wood and the faint melody of Zulu voices, and he lifted his head and
stared ahead through the forest into his old camp below the wild figs.

There was a cone of pristine white canvas, an officer's bell tent,
recently pitched beside his own rudely thatched lean-to shelter.  The
camp fire had been built up, and Hlubi, the old Zulu cook, was busy with
his pans over it, while, beyond the flames, in a collapsible canvas camp
chair, sitting comfortably, was the burly figure of General Courtney,
watching his breakfast cook with a critical eye.

He looked up and saw Mark, bedraggled and dirty as an urchin at the edge
of the camp, and his grin was wide and boyish.  Hlubi, he said in Zulu.
Another four eggs and a pound of bacon.  Sean Courtney's vast energy and
enthusiasm were the beacon flames that made the next week one of the
memorable interludes in Mark's life.  He would always remember him as he
was in those days, belly-laughing at Mark's Lair Ur woe and frustration
with Pungushe, and then still chuckling, calling to his servants and
repeating the story to them, with his own comments and embellishments,
until they rocked and reeled with mirth and old fat Hlubi overturned a
pan of eggs, his great paunch bouncing like a ball and his cannon-ball
of a head, with its hoar-frosting of pure white wool, rolling
uncontrollably from side to side.

Mark, half-starved on a diet of bully and beans, gorged himself on the
miraculous food that flowed from Hlubi's spade-sized, pink palmed hands.
He was amazed at the style in which Sean Courtney braved the hardships
of the African bush, from his full sized hip-bath to the portable
kerosene-burning ice-box that delivered endless streams of frothing cold
beer against the stunning heat of midday.  Why travel in steerage, when
you can go first class?  Sean asked, and winked at Mark as he spread a
large-scale map of northern Zululand on the camp table.  Now, what have
you got to tell me?  Their discussions lasted late into each night, with
a Petromax hissing in the tree overhead and the jackals yipping and
piping along the river, and in the days they rode the ground.  Sean
Courtney up on Spartan, so clearly enjoying every moment of it, with the
vitality of a man half his age, keeping going without a check even in
the numbing heat of noon, inspecting the site that Mark had chosen for
the main camp, arguing as to where the Bubezi bridge should be built,
following the road through the forest where Mark had blazed the trees,
exulting at the sight of a big black nyala ram with his heavy mane and
ghostly stripes, as it raced away panic-stricken by the approach of man,
sitting in his hip-bath under the fig trees, up to his waist in creaming
white suds, with a cigar in his mouth and a long glass of beer in his
hand, bellowing for Hlubi to top up with boiling water from the big
kettle when his bath cooled.  Big and scarred and hairy, and Mark
realized then what a wide space this man had filled in his life.

As the day drew closer when he must leave again, Sean's mood changed,
and in the evenings he brooded over the list of animals that Mark had
compiled.Fifty zebra, he read Mark's estimate, and poured the last few
inches of whisky from the pinch-bottle into his glass.  On the Sabi
River in 98 a single herd crossed in front of my wagons.  It took forty
minutes at the gallop to go by, and the leaders were over the horizon
when the tail passed us.  There were thirty thousand animals in that one
herd."No elephant?  he asked, looking up from the list, and when Mark
shook his head, he went on softly, We thought it would last for ever. In
9 9 when I rode into Pretoria from the north, I had ten tons of ivory on
board.  Ten tons, twenty thousand pounds of ivory.  No lions there?  and
again Mark shook his head.I don't think so, General.  I've seen no sign
of them, nor heard them in the night, but when I was a boy I shot one
near here.  I was with my grandfather.  Yes, Sean nodded.  When you were
a boy, but, what about your son, Mark?  Will he ever see a lion in the
wild?  Mark did not answer, and Sean grunted, No lions on the Bubezi
River, God! What have we done to this land?  He stared into the fire.  I
wonder if it was mere chance that you and I met, Mark.  You have opened
my eyes and conscience.  It was I, and men like me, that did this, He
shook that great shaggy head and groped in the sidepocket of his baggy
hunting-jacket, and produced a leatherbound pocket-size book, a thick
little volume, well-thumbed and shiny with the grease of grubby hands.

Mark did not recognize it for a moment, but when he did, he was
startled.I did not know you read the Book, he exclaimed, and Sean
glanced up at him from under beetling brows.I read it, he said gruffly.
The older I get, the more I read it.  There is a lot of solace here.
But, sir, Mark persisted, you never go to church.  This time Sean
frowned as though he resented the prying questions.  I live my religion,
he said.  I don't go singing about it on Sunday, and drop it for the
rest of the week, like some I know.  His tone was final, forbidding
further discussion, and he turned his attention to the battered volume.

He had marked his place with a pressed wild flower, and the Bible fell
open at the right page.

I found it last night, he told Mark, as he propped the steel-rimmed
spectacles on his nose.  It seemed like an omen, and I marked it to read
to you.  Matthew x.  He cleared his throat and read slowly: Are not two
sparrows sold for a farthing?

And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.  When
he had finished, he tucked the Bible away in his pocket, and they were
both silent, thinking about it and watching the shapes in the ashes of
the fire.

Then perhaps he will help us to save the sparrow from its fall, here at
Chaka's Gate, said Sean, and he leaned forward to take a burning twig
from the fire.  He lit a fresh cigar with it and puffed deeply,
savouring the taste of wood smoke and tobacco before speaking again.  It
is just unfortunate that it all comes at a time like this.  It will be
the end of the next year before we can make an official move to have the
proclamation ratified and budget for full development here.  Mark was
instantly alert, and his voice sharp as he demanded, Next year?  I'm
afraid so.  But why so long?  The grim reality of politics, son, Sean
growled.  We have just received a shattering blow, and all else must
wait while we play the game of power.  What has happened?  Mark asked
with real concern now.  I haven't read a newspaper in two months.  I
wish I were that lucky.  Sean smiled without humour. There was a
by-election in a little place up in the Transvaal.  It's a seat that has
always been ours, a good safe seat, in the hands of a respected
backbencher of great loyalty and little intellect.  He had a heart
attack in the diningroom of the House, expiring between the soup and the
fish.

We went to our safe little constituency to elect a new member, here Sean
paused, and his expression went bleak, and we got the trouncing of our
lives.  A fifteen percent swing to the Hertzog Party.  They fought us on
our handling of the strike last year, and it was a disaster.  I didn't
know.  I'm sorry.  If that swing, fifteen percent, carries for the whole
country, then we will be in opposition after the next election.

Everything else is of no significance.  General Smuts has decided to go
to the country next year in March, and we will be fighting for our
existence.  Until then, we cannot introduce this type of legislation, or
ask for funds.  Mark felt cold despair spread out to numb his very
fingertips.  What happens here?  he asked.  In the meantime must we stop
what I am doing?  Do we just leave it?  Another year of poaching and
hunting, another year without protection or development?  Sean shook his
head.  I've had my people studying the existing proclamation.  We have
powers there that we can enforce, but no money to do it.  You can't do
anythingwithout money, said Mark miserably.  Ah, so at last a little
respect for the power of money Sean shot him a thin smile across the
fire, and then went on seriously.  I've decided to finance the
development and running of the proclaimed area until I get a budget
allocation for it.

I'll foot the bill from my own pocket.  Perhaps I'll get reimbursed from
the budget later, but if I don't, he shrugged, I reckon I owe that much
at least.  I've had a pretty good run.  It won't need much, Mark rushed
in eagerly but Sean quieted him irritably.  You'll get the same salary
as before, and we'll make a start on the main camp.  I'm going to give
you four men to do the work, he went on, speaking quietly.  We'll have
to make do without a bridge across the river, and only a wagon track for
our first road, but it'll be a start, and let's just hope like hell we
win our election.  on the last day at breakfast, Sean laid a folder in
front of Mark.  I talked Caldwell, the man who did the drawings for Jock
of the Bushveld, into designing the layout, he smiled, as Mark opened
the folder.  I wanted you to get the best for your three thousand
pounds. in the folder was a mock-up of the full-page Press announcement
which would launch the Friends of African Wildlife, .

The margin contained magnificent line-drawings of wild animals, and
under the heavy typed announcement was set out the objects of the
Society, and an eloquent plea for support and membership.  I had my
lawyers draft the articles and draw up the wording.  We'll run it in
every newspaper in the country.

The Society's address is the Head Office of Courtney Holdings and I have
taken on a full-time clerk to handle all the paper work.  I've also got
a young journalist to edit the Society's newspaper.  He's full of ideas
and caught up in the whole thing.  With luck, we'll get huge public
support behind us.  It's going to cost more than three thousand pounds.
Mark was torn between delight, and concern for the size to which his
simple idea had grown.  Yes, Sean laughed.  It's going to cost more than
three thousand pounds, which reminds me.  I sent Dirk Courtney a receipt
for his money, and a life membership of the Society! The joke carried
them over the awkwardness of the last moments before departure.

Sean's bearers disappeared among the trees, carrying head loads of
equipment to where the motor lorry had been left on the nearest road
twenty miles beyond the cliffs of Chaka's Gate, and Sean lingered
regretfully.  I'm sad to go, he admitted.  It's been a good time, but I
feel stronger now, ready to face whatever the bastards have got to throw
at me.  He looked about him, taking farewell of river and mountain and
wilderness.  There is magic here.  He nodded.  Look after it well, son,
and he held out his hand.  .

It was Mark's last opportunity to ask the question which he had tried to
ask a dozen times already, but each time Sean had turned it aside, or
simply ignored it.  But now he had to have an answer, and he took Sean's
big gnarled bony fist in a grip that would not be denied.  You haven't
told me how Storm is, sir.  How is she?  Is she well?  How is her
painting?  he blurted.

It seemed even then that Sean would not be drawn.  He stiffened angrily,
made as if to pull his hand away, and then the anger faded before it
reached his eyes.  For a moment there showed in the deep-set eyes a dark
unfathomable grief, and his grip tightened on Mark's hand like a
steeltrap.  Storm was married a month ago.  But I have not seen her
since you left Lion Kop, he said, and he dropped Mark's hand.  Without
another word, he turned and walked away.

For the first time he went slowly and heavily, swaying against the drag
of his bad leg, shuffling like an old man a very tired old man.

Mark wanted to run after him, but his own heart was breaking and his
legs would not carry him.

He stood forlornly and watched Sean Courtney limp away into the trees.

The Natal Number Two came in along the line, his pony's hooves kicking
up little spurts of white markinglime like a machine gun traversing, and
he caught the ball two feet before it dribbled out of play.

He leaned low out- of the saddle and took it backhanded under his pony's
neck, a full-blooded stroke that finished with the mallet high above his
head, and the ball rose in a floating arc, a white blur against the
stark blue of summer sky.

From the club house veranda, and the deck-chairs beneath the coloured
umbrellas, applause splattered above the drum of hooves, and then rose
into a swelling hum as they saw that Derek Hunt had anticipated.

He was coming down in a hard canter with Saladin not yet asked to
extend.  Saladin was a big pony, with a mean and ugly head that he
cocked to watch the flight of the white ball, his over-large nostrils
flaring so the shiny red us membrane flashed like a flag.  The eye that
muco watched the ball rolled in the gaunt skull, giving the horse a wild
and half -crazed air.  He was of that raggedy roan and grey that no
amount of currying would ever brighten into a gloss, and his hooves
looked like those of a cart-horse.

He had to lift them high in the ungainly action that was quickly
carrying him ahead of the hard-running Argentinian pony at his shoulder.

Derek sat him as though he were an armchair, idly penduluming his stick
from his wrist, his pith helmet hard down over his ears and strapped up
tightly under the chin.  His belly bulged out over the belt of his
breeches, his arms were long and thick as those of a chimpanzee, covered
in a thick fuzz of ginger hair.  The skin was heavily freckled and had a
raw red look between the freckles, as though it had been scalded with
boiling water.  His face was the same raw painful looking red, tinged by
the purplish glaze of the very heavy drinker, and he was sweating.

The sweat glistened like early dew on his face and dripped from his
chin.  His short-sleeved cotton singlet looked as though he had been
caught in a tropical downpour.  It clung to the thick bearlike
shoulders, and was stretched so tightly over his bulging paunch and so
transparent with wetness, that you could see the deep dark pit of his
belly button from the sidelines.

At each jar, as Saladin's hooves struck the hard-baked earth, Derek
Hunt's great backside in the tight-fitting white breeches quivered like
a jelly in the saddle.

Two Argentinian ponies were cutting across field to cover, their
handsomeriders olive-skinned and dashing as cavalry officers,
ridingwithhuge verge and excited Spanish cries, and Derek grinned under
his bristling ginger mustache, as the ball started its long plummeting
curve back to earth.  Christ, drawled one of the members on the club
house steps. The ugliest horse in Christendom.  And he raised his pink
gin to salute Saladin.  And the ugliest four-goal handicapper in the
entire world on his back, agreed the masher beside him.  Poor bloody
dagoes should turn to stone just looking at them.  Saladin and the
Argentinian Number One arrived at the drop of the ball at exactly the
same moment.  The Argentinian rose in the saddle to trap the fall, his
white teeth sparkling under the trim black pencil-line of his mustache,
the smooth darkly tanned muscles of his arm bulging as he prepared to go
on to the forehand drive, his sleekly beautiful pony wheeling into line
for the shot, nimble and quick as a ferret.

Then an extraordinary thing happened.  Derek Hunt sat fat-gutted and
heavy in the saddle and nobody could see the touch of rein and heel that
made Saladin switch his quarters.  The Argentinian pony cannoned off him
as though she had hit a granite kopje, and the rider went over her head,
going in an instant from balanced perfection to sprawling windmilling
confusion, falling heavily in a cloud of red dust, and rolling to his
knees to scream hysterical protest to the umpire and the skies.

Derek leaned slightly and there was the tap of mallet against bamboo
root, a gentle almost self-err acing little tap, and the ball dropped
meekly ahead of Saladin's slugging, hammering head.

It bounced once, twice, and then came up obediently for the next light
tap that kept it hopping down the field.  The Argentinian Number Four
swept in from the right, with all the smooth-running grace of a charging
lioness, and the roar of the crowd carried across the open field,
spurring him on to make the challenge.  He shouted a wild Spanish oath,
his eyes flashing with excitement.

Smoothly, Derek changed the mallet from his right hand to his left, and
tapped the bouncing white ball on to his off-side, forcing the
Argentinian to increase the angle of his interception.

The instant he was drawn, Derek cropped hard, lofting the ball in an
easy lob high over the Argentinianis head.

He said, Ha!  but not loudly, and touched Saladin with his heels.  The
big ugly roan stretched out his neck and extended, with Derek moving now
to help him push.

They ran past the Argentinian as though he had indeed turned to stone,
they left him floundering in their wake and picked up the ball beyond
him.  Tap!  Tap!  And tap again, he ran it down through the exact centre
of the stubby goal-posts and then turned and trotted back to the pony
lines.

Chuckling so that his belly bounced, Derek swung one leg forward over
Saladin's neck and slid down to the ground, letting him go free to the
grooms.  I'll take Satan for the next chukka, he shouted in that beery
throaty voice.

Storm Courtney saw him coming, and knew what was going to happen.  She
tried to rise, but she was slow and clumsy, the child in her womb
anchored her like a stone.  One for the poor, what!  shouted Derek, and
caught her with one long, ginger-fuzzed, boiled red arm.

The sweat on his face was icy cold and smeared down her own cheek, and
he smelled of sour beer and horse.  He kissed her with an open mouth, in
front of Irene Leuchars and the four other girls, and their husbands,
and all the grinning grooms, and the members on the veranda.

She thought desperately that she was going to be ill.  The acid vomit
rose into her throat, and she thought she was going to throw up in front
of them all.  IDerek, my condition!  she whispered desperately, but he
held her under his one arm as he took the bottle of beer that one of the
white-jacketed club servants brought on a silver tray, and, scorning the
glass, he drank straight from the bottle.

She struggled to be free, but he held her easily with immense and
careless strength, and he belched, a ripping explosion of gas.  One for
the poor, he shouted again, and they all laughed, like courtiers at the
king's jest.  Good old Derek.  Law unto himself, old Derek.

He dropped the empty bottle.  Keep it until I get back, wifey!  he
laughed, and took one of her swollen breasts in his huge raw-knuckled,
red-boiled hand and squeezed it painfully.  She felt cold and trembly
and weak with humiliation and hatred.

She had missed a month many times before, so Storm did not begin to
worry until the second blank came up on her pocket diary.  She had been
about to tell Mark then, but that had been the time they had parted.
Still, she had expected it all to resolve itself, but as the weeks
passed, the enormity of it all began to reach her in her gold and ivory
castle.  This sort of thing happened to other girls, common working
girls, ordinary girls, it did not happen to Storm Courtney.  There were
special rules for young ladies like Storm.

When it was certain, beyond all doubt, the first person she thought of
was Mark Anders.  As the panic caught at her heart with fiery little
barbs, she wanted to rush to him and throw her arms about his neck. Then
that stubborn and completely uncontrollable pride of the Courtneys
smothered the impulse.  He must come to her.  She had decided, he must
come on her terms, and she could not bring herself to change the rules
she had laid down.  Though still, even in her distress, her chest felt
tight and her legs shaky and weak, whenever she thought of Mark.

She had wept, silently in the night, when she had first left Mark, and
now she wept again.  She longed for him even more now with his child
growing in the secret depths of her body.  But that perverse and
distorted pride would not release its bulldog hold on her, would not
allow her even to let him know of her predicament.  Don't challenge me,
Mark Anders, she had warned him, and he had done it.  She hated him, and
loved him for that.

But now she could not bend.

The next person she thought of was her mother.  She and Ruth Courtney
had always been close, she had always been able to rely on her mother's
loyalty and shrewdly practical hard sense.  Then she was stopped dead by
the knowledge that if Ruth were told, then her father would know within
hours.  Ruth Courtney kept nothing from Sean, or he from her.

Storm's soul quailed at the thought of what would happen once her father
knew that she carried a bastard.

The immense indulgent love he had for her, would make his anger and
retribution more terrible.

She knew also Mark would be destroyed by it.  Her father was too strong,
too persistent and single-minded for her to believe she would be able to
keep Mark's name from him.

He would squeeze it out of her.

She knew of her father's affection for Mark Anders, it had been apparent
for anyone to see, but that affection would not have been sufficient to
save either of them.

Sean Courtney's attitude to his daughter was bound by iron laws of
conduct, the old-fashioned view of the father that left no latitude for
manoeuvre.  Mark Anders had contravened those iron laws and Sean would
destroy him, despite the fact he had come to love him, and in doing so,
he would destroy a part of himself.  He would reject and drive out his
own daughter, even though it left him ruined and broken with grief.

So, for her father's sake and for Mark Anders sake, she could not go for
comfort and help to her mother.

She went instead to Irene Leuchars, who listened to Storm's hesitant
explanations with rising glee and anticipation.  But you silly darling,
didn't you take precautions?  Storm shook her head glumly, not quite
certain what Irene meant by precautions, but certain only that she
hadn't taken them.  Who was it, darling?  was the next question, and
Storm shook her head again, this time fiercely.  Oh dear, Irene rolled
her eyes.  That many candidates for the daddy?  You are a dark horse,
Storm darling.  Can't one, well, can't one actually do something?

Storm asked miserably.  You mean an abortion, darling?  Irene asked
brutally, and smiled a sly spiteful smile when Storm nodded.

He was a tall pale man, very grey and stooped, with a reedy voice and
hands so white as to be almost transparent.

Storm could see the blue veins and the fragile ivory bones through the
skin.  She tried not to think of those pale transparent hands as they
pried and probed, but they were cold and cruelly painful.

Afterwards, he had washed those pale hands at the kitchen sink of his
small grey apartment with such exaggerated care that Storm had felt her
pain and embarrassment enhanced by a sense of affront.  The cleansing
seemed to be a personal insult.  I imagine you indulge in a great deal
of physical activity horse-riding, tennis?  he asked primly, and when
Storm nodded he made a little sucking and glucking sound of disapproval.
The female body was not designed for such endeavour.  You are very
narrow, and your musculature is highly developed.  Furthermore, you are
at least ten weeks pregnant.  At last he had finished washing, and now
he began to dry his hands on a threadbare, but clinically white towel.
Can you help me?  Storm demanded irritably, and he shook his pale grey
head slowly from side to side.  If you had come a little earlier, and he
spread the white transparent hands in a helpless gesture.

They had drawn up a list of names, she and Irene, and each of the men on
the list had two things in common.

They were in love, or had professed to be in love with Storm, and they
were all men of fortune.

There were six names on the list, and Storm had written cards to two of
them and received vague replies, polite good wishes, and no definite
suggestion for a meeting.

The third man on the list she had contrived to meet at the Umgeni
Country Club.  She could still wear tennis clothes, and the pregnancy
had given her skin a new bloom and lustre, her breasts a fuller
ripeness.

She had chatted lightly, flirtatiously, with him, confident and poised,
giving him encouragement he had never received from her before.  She had
not noticed the sly, gloating look in his eyes, until he leaned close to
her and asked confidentially, Should you be playing tennis, now?  She
had only been able to keep herself from breaking down until she reached
the Cadillac parked in the lot behind the courts.  She was weeping when
she drove out through the gates, and she had to park in the dunes above
the ocean.

After the first storm of humiliation had passed, she could think
clearly.

It had been Irene Leuchars, of course.  She must have been blind and
stupid not to realize it sooner.  Everybody, every single person, would
know by now, Irene would have seen to that.

Loneliness and desolation overwhelmed her.

Derek Hunt had not been on the list of six, not because he was not rich,
not because he had never shown interest in Storm.

Derek Hunt had shown interest in most pretty girls.  He had even married
two of them, and both of them had divorced him in separate blazes of
notoriety, not before they had, between them, presented him with seven
offspring.

Derek Hunt's reputation was every bit as vast and flamboyant as his
fortune.  Look old girl, he had told Storm reasonably.  You and I have
both got a problem.  I want you, have always wanted you.  Can't sleep at
night, strewth!  and his ginger whiskers twitched lasciviously.  And you
need me.  The word's out about you, old girl, Mark of the beast,
condemnation of society, and all that rot, I'm afraid.

Your loss, my gain.  I've never given a stuff for the condemnation of
society.  I've got seven little bastards already.

Another one won't make any difference.  What about it, then?  One for
the poor, what?  They had driven up to Swaziland, and Derek had been
able to get a special licence, lying about her age.

There had been nobody she knew at the ceremony, only five of Derek's
cronies, and she had not told her father, nor her mother, nor Mark
Anders.

She heard him coming home, like a Le Mans Grand Prix winner, a long
cortege of motor cars roaring up the driveway, then the squeal of
brakes, the cannonade of slamming doors, the loud comradely shouts and
the snatches of wild song.

Derek's voice, louder and hoarser than the rest.  Caramba, me heartiest
Whipped your pants off on the field, going to drink you blind now.  This
way, the pride of the Argentine - the stamping and shouting, as they
trooped up the front staircase.

Storm lay flat on her back and stared at the plaster cupids on the
ceiling.  She wanted to run, this senseless panicky urge to get up and
run.  But there was no place to run to.

She had spoken to her mother three times since the wedding, and each
time had been agony for both of them.  If only you had told us.  Daddy
might have been able to understand, to forgive, Oh darling, if you only
knew the plans he used to make for your wedding. He was so proud of you,
and then not to be at your wedding.  Not even invited, Give him time,
please, Storm.  I am trying for you.

Believe me darling, I think it might have been better, if it was anybody
in the world but Derek Hunt.  You know what Daddy thinks of him.  There
was nowhere to run, and she lay quietly, dreading, until at last the
heavy unsteady boots came clumping up the staircase, and the door was
thrown open.

He had not changed, and he still wore riding-boots.  The backside of his
breeches was brown with dubbin from the saddle, and the crotch drooped
almost to his knees, like a baby's soiled napkin; the sweat had dried in
salty white circles on the cotton singlet.  Wake up, old girl.  Time for
every good man and true to perform his duty.  He let his clothing lie
where it fell.

His bulging belly was fish white, and fuzzed with ginger curls.  The
heavy shoulders were pitted and scarred purple with the old cicatrices
of myriad carbuncles and small boils, and he was massively virile, thick
and hard and callous as the branch of a pine tree.  One for the poor,
what?  he chuckled hoarsely, as he came to the bed.

Suddenly and clearly, she had an image of Mark Andersslim and graceful
body, with the clean shape of young muscle, as he sat in the dappled
sunlight of the glade.

She remembered with a terrible pang of loss the lovely head with the
fine strong lines of mouth and brow, and the serene poet's eyes.

As the bed dipped beneath the solid weight of her husband, she wanted to
scream with despair and the knowledge of coming pain.

For breakfast Derek Hunt liked a little Black Velvet, mixing the
Guinness stout and champagne in a special crystal punch bowl.  He always
used a Bollinger Vintage

1911 and drank it out of a pewter tankard.

He believed in a substantial breakfast, and this morning it was
scrambled eggs, Scotch kippers, devilled kidneys, mushrooms and a large
well-done fillet steak, all of it on the same plate.

Although his eyes were watery and pink-rimmed with the previous night's
revelry, and his face blazed crimson as the rising sun, he was cheerful
and loudly friendly, guffawing at his own jokes, and leaning across the
table to prod her with a thick red thumb like a boiled langouste to
emphasize a point.

She waited until he had picked up the bowl and tilted the last of the
Black Velvet into his tankard, and then she said quietly, Derek, I want
a divorce.  The grin did not leave his face, and he watched the last
drops fall into the tankard.  Damn stuff evaporates, or the dish has got
a hole in it, he wheezed, and then chuckled merrily.  Get it?  A hole in
it!  Good, what?  Did you hear what I said?  Aren't you going to answer?
Needs no answer, old girl.  Bargain is a bargain, you've got a name for
your bastard, I've still got my share coming.  You've had that, as many
times as you could wish, Storm answered quietly, with a whole world of
resignation in her voice.  Won't you let me go now?  Good God!  Derek
stared at her over the rim of his tankard, his mustache bristling and
the pink eyes wide with genuine amazement.  You don't think I was really
interested in the crumpet, do you?  Can get that anywhere, all of it
looks the same in the dark.  He snorted with real laughter now.  Good
God, old girl, you didn't really think I fancied your lily-white titties
that much?  Why?  she asked.  Ten million good reasons, old girl.  He
gulped a mouthful of scrambled eggs and kidney, and every single one of
them in General Sean Courtney's bank account.  She stared at him.
Daddy's money?  Right first time, he grinned.  Up you go to the head of
the class.  I But-but -she made fluttery little gestures of in
comprehension with both hands.  I don't understand.  You are so rich
yourself.  Was, old girl, used to be, past tense.  And he let out
another delighted guffaw.  Two loving wives, two unsympathetic divorce
judges, seven brats, forty polo ponies, friends with big right hands,
rocks that shouldn't have been where the road was going& a mine with no
diamonds, a building that fell down, a dam that burst, a reef that
pinched out, cattle that got sick and myopic lawyers who don't read the
small print, that's the way the money goes, pop goes the weasel!  I
don't believe it.  She was aghast.  Would never joke about that, he
grinned.  Never joke about money, one of my principles.  Probably my
only principle.  And he prodded her.  My only principle, get it?

Skunked, absolutely flatters, I assure you.  Daddy is the last resort,
old girl, you'll have to speak to him, I'm afraid.

Last resort, what?  One for the poor, don't you know?  There was no
answer to the front door and Mark almost turned away and went back into
the village, feeling a touch of relief and a lightening of heart that he
recognized as cowardice.  So instead, he jumped down off the veranda and
went around the side of the house.

The stiff collar and tie chafed his throat and the jacket felt unnatural
and constricting, so that he shrugged his shoulders and ran a finger
around inside his collar as he came into the kitchen yard of the
cottage.  It was five months since last he had worn clothes or trodden
on a paved sidewalk, even the sound of women's voices was unfamiliar. He
paused and listened to them.

Marion Littlejohn was in the kitchen with her sister, and their merry
prattle had a lilt and cadence to which he listened with new ears and
fresh pleasure.

The chatter ceased abruptly at his knock, and Marion came to the door.

She wore a gaily striped apron, and her bare arms were floury to the
elbows.  She had her hair up in a ribbon but tendrils of it had come
down in little wisps on to her neck and forehead.

The kitchen was filled with the smell of baking bread, and her cheeks
were rosy from the heat of the oven.  Mark, she said calmly.  How nice,
and tried to push the curl of hair off her forehead, leaving a smudge of
white flour on the bridge of her nose.  It was a strangely appealing
gesture, and Mark felt his heart swell.  Come in.  She stood aside, and
held the door open for him.

Her sister greeted Mark frostily, much more aware of the jilting than
Marion herself.  Doesn't he look well?  Marion asked, and they both
looked Mark over carefully, as he stood in the centre of the kitchen
floor.  He's too thin, her sister judged him waspishly, and began
untying her apron-strings.  Perhaps, Marion agreed comfortably, he just
needs the proper food.  And she smiled and nodded as she saw how brown
and lean he was, but she recognized also, with eyes as fond as a
mother's, the growing weight of maturity in his features.  She saw also
the sorrow and the loneliness, and she wanted to take him in her arms
and hold his head against her bosom.  There is some lovely butter-milk,
she said instead. Sit down, here where I can see you.  While she poured
from the jug, her sister hung the apron behind the door and without
looking at Mark said primly, We need more eggs.  I'll go into the
village When they were alone, Marion picked up the roller, and stood
over the table, leaning and dipping as the pastry spread and rolled out
paper thin.  Tell me what you have been doing, she invited, and he
began, hesitantly at first, but with blossoming sureness and enthusiasm,
to tell her about Chaka's Gate, about the work and the life he had found
there.

'That's nice.  She punctuated his glowing account every few minutes, her
mind running busily ahead, already making lists and planning supplies,
adapting pragmatically to the contingencies of a life lived far from the
comforts of civilization, where even the small comforts become luxuries,
a glass of fresh milk, a light in the night, all of it has to be planned
for and carefully arranged.

Characteristically she felt neither excitement nor dismay at the
prospect.  She was of pioneer stock.  Where a man goes, the woman
follows.  It was merely work that must be done.  The site for the
homestead is up in the first fold of the hills, but you can see right
down the valley, and the cliffs of Chaka's Gate are right above it. It's
beautiful, especially in the evenings. I'm sure it is.  I have designed
the house so it can be added on to, a room at a time.  To begin with
there will only be two rooms -'Two rooms will be enough to begin with,
she agreed, frowning thoughtfully.  But we'll need a separate room for
the children.  He broke off and stared at her, not quite certain that he
had heard correctly.  She paused with the rolling-pin held in both hands
and smiled at him.  Well, that's why you came here today, isn't it?  she
asked sweetly.

He dropped his eyes from hers and nodded.  Yes.  He sounded bemused.  I
suppose it is.  She lost her aplomb only briefly during the ceremony,
and that was when she saw General Sean Courtney sitting in the front pew
with his wife beside him, Sean in morning suit and with a diamond pin in
his cravat, Ruth cool and elegant in a huge wagon-wheel sized hat, the
brim thick with white roses.  He came!  Marion whispered ecstatically,
and could not restrain the triumphant glance she threw to her own
friends and relatives, like a lady tossing a coin to a beggar.

Her social standing had rocketed to dizzying heights.

Afterwards the General had kissed her tenderly on each cheek, before
turning to Mark.  You've picked the prettiest girl in the village, my
boy.  And she had glowed with pleasure, pink and happy and truly as
lovely as she had ever been in her life.

With the help of the four Zulu labourers Sean had given him, Mark had
opened a rough track in as far as the Bubezi River.  He brought his
bride to Chaka's Gate on the pillion of the motorcycle, with the
side-car piled high with part of her dowry.

Far behind them, the Zulus led Trojan and Spartan under heavy packs, the
rest of Marion's baggage.

In the early morning the mist lay dense along the river, still and flat
as the surface of a lake, touched to shades of delicate pink and mauve
by the fresh new light of coming day.

The great headlands of Chaka's Gate rose sheer out of the mist, dark and
mysterious, each wreathed in laurels of golden cloud.

Mark had chosen the hour of return so that she might have the best of it
for her first glimpse of her new home.

He pulled the cycle and side-car off the narrow, stony track and
switched off the motor.

In the silence they sat and watched the sun strike upon the crests of
the cliffs, burning like the beacons that the mariner looks for in the
watery deserts of the ocean, the lights that beckon him on to his
landfall and the quiet anchorage.  It's very nice, dear, she murmured.
Now show me where the house will be.  She worked with the Zulus, muddy
to the elbows as they puddled the clay for the unburned Kimberley
bricks, joshing them in their own language and bullying them cheerfully
to effort beyond the usual pace of Africa.

She worked behind the mules, handling the traces, dragging up the logs
from the valley, her sleeves rolled high on brown smooth arms and a
scarf knotted around her head.

She worked over the clay oven, bringing out the fat golden brown loaves
on the blade of a long handled spade, and watched with deep contentment
as Mark wiped up the last of the stew with the crust.  Was that good,
then, dear?  In the evenings she sat close to the lantern, with her head
bowed over the sewing in her lap, and nodded brightly as he told her of
the day's adventures, each little triumph and disappointment.  What a
shame, dear.  Or, How nice for you, dear. He took her, one bright,
cloudless day, up the ancient pathway to the crest of Chaka's Gate.
Holding her hand as he led her over the narrow places, where the river
flowed six hundred sheer feet below their feet. She tucked her skirts
into her bloomers, took a firm hold on the basket she carried and never
faltered once on the long climb.

On the summit, he showed her the tumbled stone walls and overgrown caves
of the old tribesmen who had defied Chaka, and he told her the story of
the old king's climb, pointing out the fearsome path up which he had led
his warriors, and finally he described the massacre and pictured for her
the rain of human bodies hurled down into the river below.  How
interesting, dear, she murmured, as she spread a cloth from the basket
she had carried.  I brought scones and some of that apricot jam you like
so much.  Something caught Mark's eye, unusual movement far down in the
valley below, and he reached for his binoculars.  In the golden grass at
the edge of the tall reed beds they looked like a line of fat black bugs
on a clean sheet.

He knew what they were immediately, and with a surging uplift of
excitement he counted them.  Eighteen!  he shouted aloud. It's a new
herd, What is it, dear?  She looked up from the scone she was spreading
with jam.  It's a new herd of buffalo, he exulted.  They must have come
in from the north.  It's beginning to work already.  In the field of the
binoculars he saw one of the great bovine animals emerge into a clearing
in the long grass.

He could see not only its wide black back, but the heavy head and
spreading ears beneath the mournfully drooping horns.  The sunlight
caught the bosses of the polished black horns so that they glittered
like gunmetal.

He felt an enormous proprietary pride.  They were his own.  The first to
come into the sanctuary he was building for them.  Look.  He offered her
the binoculars, and she wiped her hands carefully and pointed the
glasses over the cliff.  There on the edge of the swamp.  He pointed,
with the pride and joy shining on his face.

I can see them, she agreed smiling happily for him.  How nice, dear.
Then she swung the binoculars in a wide sweep across the river to where
the roof of the homestead showed above the trees.  Doesn't it look so
nice with its new thatch?  she said proudly.  I just can't wait to move
in.  The following day they moved up from the shack of crude thatch and
canvas at the old camp under the sycamore fig trees, and a pair of
swallows moved in with them.

The swiftly darting birds began to build their neat nest with little
shiny globs of mud under the eaves of the new yellow thatch against the
crisply whitewashed wall of Kimberley brick.

That's the best of all possible luck, Mark laughed.  They make such a
mess, said Marion doubtfully, but that night, for the first time ever,
she initiated their lovemaking; rolling comfortably on to her back in
the doublebed, drawing up her nightdress to her waist, and spreading her
warm womanly thighs.  It's all right, if you want to, dear.  And because
she was kind and loved him so, he was as quick and as considerate as he
could be.  Was that good, then, dear?  It was wonderful, he told her,
and he had a sudden vivid image of a lovely vital woman, with a body
that was lithe and swift and, and his guilt was brutal like a fist below
the heart.  He tried to thrust the image away, but it ran ahead of him
through his dreams, laughing and dancing and teasing, so that in the
morning there were dark blue smears beneath his eyes and he felt fretful
and restless.  I'm going up the valley on patrol.  He did not look up
from his coffee.

You only came back last Friday.  She was surprised.

I want to look for those buffalo again, he said.  Very well, dear.  I'll
pack your bag, how long will you be gone, I'll put in your sweater and
the jacket, it's cool in the evenings, it's a good thing I baked
yesterday -'she prattled on cheerfully, and he had a sudden terrible
urge to shout at her to be silent.  It will give me a chance to plant
out the garden.  It will be nice to have fresh vegetables again, and I
haven't written a letter for ages.  They'll be wondering about us at
home.  He rose from the table and went out to saddle Trojan.

The flogging explosion of heavy wings roused Mark from his reverie and
he straightened in the saddle just as a dozen of the big birds rose from
the edge of the reed-beds.

They were those dirty buff-coloured vultures, powering upwards as they
were disturbed by Mark's approach, and undergoing that almost magical
transformation from gross ugliness into beautiful planing flight.

Mark tethered Trojan and slipped the Marinlicher from its scabbard as a
precaution.  He felt a tickle of excitement, hopes high that he had come
upon a kill by one of the big predatory cats.  Perhaps even a lion, one
of the animals for which he still searched the valley in vain.

The buffalo lay at the edge of the damp soft ground, half hidden by the
reeds and it was so freshly dead that the vultures had not yet managed
to penetrate the thick black hide, nor to spoil the sign which was
deeply trodden and torn into the damp earth.  They had only gouged out
the uppermost eye and, with their beaks, scratched the softer skin
around the bull's anus, for that was always their access point to a big
thick-skinned carcass.

The buffalo was a big mature bull, the great boss of his horns grown
solidly together across the crown of his skull, a huge head of horn,
forty-eight inches from tip to tip.  He was big in the body also, bigger
than a prize Hereford stud bull, and he was bald across the shoulders,
the scarred grey hide scabbed with dried mud and bunches of bush ticks.

Mark thrust his hand into the crease of skin between the back legs and
felt the residual body warmth.  He's been dead less than three hours, he
decided, and squatted down beside the huge body to determine the cause
of death.  The bull seemed unmarked until Mark managed to roll him over,
exerting all his strength and using the stiffly out-thrust limbs to move
the ton and a half of dead weight.

He saw immediately the death wounds, one was behind the shoulder,
through the ribs, and Mark's hunter's eye saw instantly that it was a
heart-stroke, a wide-lipped wound, driven home deeply; the clotted heart
blood that poured from it had jellied on the damp earth.

If there was any doubt at all as to the cause of that injury, it was
dispelled instantly when he looked to the second wound.  This was a
frontal stroke, at the base of the neck, angled in skilfully between
bone, to reach the heart again, and the weapon had not been withdrawn,
it was still plunged in to the hilt and the shaft was snapped short
where the bull had fallen upon it.

Mark grasped the broken shaft, placed one booted foot against the bull's
shoulder and grunted with the effort it required to withdraw the blade
against the reluctant suck of clinging flesh.

He examined it with interest.  It was one of those broadbladed stabbing
spears, the assegai which had been designed by the old king Chaka
himself.  Mark remembered Sean Courtney reminiscing about the Zulu wars,
Isandhlwana, and Morma Gorge.  They can put one of those assegais into a
man's chest and send the point two feet out between his shoulder blades,
and when they clear the blade, the withdrawal seems to suck a man as
white as though he had his life blood pumped out of him by a machine.
Sean had paused for a moment to stare into the camp fire.  As they
clear, they shout "Ngidhla! " -I have eaten!  Once you have heard it,
you'll not forget it.  Forty years later, the memory still makes the
hair come up on the back of my neck.  Now still holding the short heavy
assegai, Mark remembered that Chaka himself had hunted the buffalo with
a similar weapon.  A casual diversion between campaigns and as Mark
glanced from the blade to the great black beast, he felt his anger
tempered with reluctant admiration. His anger was for the wanton
destruction of one of his precious animals, and his admiration was for
the special type of courage that had done the deed.

Thinking of the man, Mark realized that there must have been special
circumstances for that man to abandon such a valuable, skilfully and
lovingly wrought weapon together with the prize he had risked his life
to hunt.

Mark began to back-track the sign in the soft black earth, and he found
where the bull had come up one of the tunnellike pathways through the
reeds after drinking.  He found where the huntsman had waited in thick
cover beside the path, and his bare footprints were unmistakable.

Pungushe!  exclaimed Mark.

Pungushe had lain upwind and, as the bull passed, he had put the steel
behind his shoulder, deeply into the heart.

The bull had leapt forward, crashing into a ponderous gallop as Pungushe
cleared his point, and the blood had sprayed from the wide wound as
though the standing reeds had been hosed by a careless gardener.

The buffalo is one of the few wild animals which will turn and actively
hunt its tormentor.  Although the bull was dead on his feet, spurting
blood with every lunging stride, he had swung wide into the wind to take
Pungushe's scent and when he had it, he had steadied into that terrible
crabbing, nose up, wide-homed, relentless charge that only death itself
will stop.

Pungushe had stood to meet him as he came thundering down through the
reeds, and he had picked the point at the base of the neck for his
second stroke and put the steel in cleanly to the heart, but the bull
had hit him also, before blundering on a dozen paces and falling to his
knees with that characteristic death bellow.

Mark found where Pungushe had fallen, his body marks etched clearly in
the soft clay.

Mark followed where he had dragged himself out of the edge of the reed
beds and shakily regained his feet.

Slowly Pungushe had turned northwards, but his stride was cramped, he
was heeling heavily, not up on his toes, not extended into his normal
gait.

He stopped once where he had left his steel-jawed spring trap, and he
hid it in an ant bear hole and kicked sand over it, obviously too sick
and weak to carry it or to cache the valuable trap more securely.  Mark
retrieved the trap and, as he tied it on to Trojan's saddle, he wondered
briefly to how many of his animals it had dealt hideous death.

A mile further on, Pungushe pausW to gather leaves from one of the
little turpentine bushes, a medicinal shrub, and then he had gone on
slowly, not using the rocky ridges, not covering or back-tracking as he
usually did.

At the sandy crossing of one of the steep narrow dry water courses,
Pungushe had dropped on one knee, and had used both hands to push
himself upright.

Mark stared at the sign for there was blood now for the first time,
black droplets that had formed little pellets of loose sand, and in his
anger and jubilation, Mark felt a prick of real concern.

The man was hard hit, and he had once saved Mark's life.  Mark could
still remember the blessed taste of the bitter medicine in the black
baked pot cutting through the terrible thirsts of malaria.

He had been leading Trojan up to this point, to keep down, to show a low
silhouette, so as not to telegraph heavy hoof -beats ahead to his
quarry.

Now he swung up into the saddle, and kicked the mule into a plunging
sway-backed canter.

Pungushe was down.  He had gone down heavily at last, dropping to the
sandy earth.  He had crawled off the game path, under a low bush out of
the sun, and he had pulled the light kaross of monkey-skins over his
head, the way a man settles down to sleep, or to die.

He lay so still that Mark thought he was indeed dead.

He slipped down off Trojan's back and went up cautiously to the
prostrate body.  The flies were buzzing and swarming gleefully over the
bloody bundle of green turpentine leaves that were bound with strips of
bark around the man's flank and across the small of his back.

Mark imagined clearly how he had received that wound, Pungushe standing
to meet the charging buffalo, going for the neck with the short
heavy-bladed assegai, putting the steel in cleanly and then jumping
clear, but the bull pivoting hard on his stubby front legs and hooking
with the massive bossed and wickedly curved horns, Pungushe had taken
the hook low in the side, far back behind the hip-bone of the pelvis.
The shock would have hurled him clear, giving him time to crawl away
while the bull staggered on, fighting the deep steel in his chest, until
at last he had gone down on his fore-legs with that last defiant death
bellow, Mark shuddered in the harsh sunlight at the wound that bundle of
leaves covered, and went down on one knee to brush the flies away.

Now for the first time, he became aware of the man's physique.  The
kaross covered his head and shoulders only, the great chest was exposed.
A loin-cloth of softly tanned leather embroidered with blue beads was
drawn up between his legs, leaving free the solid bulge of his buttocks,
and the sinewy thews of his thighs and the flat hard plain of the belly.

Each separate muscle was clearly defined, and the ropey veins below the
surface of the skin were like bunches of serpents, testimony to the
man's tremendous physical development and fitness.  The skin itself was
lighter than that of the average Zulu.  It had the smooth dark buttery
colour and lustre of a woman's skin, but tight dark curls covered the
chest.

I baited for a jackal, Mark thought wonderingly, and I caught myself a
lion, a big old black-maned lion.  And now he felt real concern that
Pungushe was dead.  For such a splendid animal, death was a shabby
bargain.

Then he saw the gentle, almost imperceptible rise and fall of the deep
muscled chest, and he reached out and touched the shoulder through the
kaross.

The man stirred, and then painfully lifted himself on one elbow, letting
the kaross fall back, and he looked at Mark.  the full noon of his
strength and pride He was a man in and dignity, perhaps forty years of
age, with just the first frosts of wisdom touching the short cap of dark
wool at his temples.

The agony did not show in his face, the broad forehead was smooth as
polished amber, the mouth was in repose, and the eyes were dark and
fierce and proud.  It was the handsome moon face of the high-bred Zulu.
Sakubona, Pungushe, said Mark.  I see you, 0 jackal.  The man looked at
him for a moment, thinking about the name and the style of greeting, the
language and the accent in which it was spoken.  The calm expression did
not change, no smile nor snarl on the thick sculptured lips, only a new
light in the dark eyes.  Sakubona, Jamela.  I see you, O Seeker.  His
voice was deep and low, yet it rang on the still air with the timbre of
a bronze gong, and then he went on immediately, Sakubona, Ngaga.  Mark
blinked.  It had never occurred to him that the jackal might think of
him by a name every bit as derogatory.  Ngaga is the pangolin, the scaly
ant-eater, a small creature that resembles an armadillo, a nocturnal
creature, which if caught out in daylight, scurries around like a bent
and wizened old man pausing to peer shortsightedly at any small object
in its path, then hurrying on again.

The two names Jamela and Ngaga used together described with embarrassing
clarity somebody who ran in small circles, peering at everything and yet
blindly seeing nothing.

Suddenly Mark saw himself through the eyes of a hidden observer, riding
a seemingly pointless patrol through the valley, dismounting to peer at
anything that caught his interest, then riding on again, just like an
ngaga.  It was not a flattering thought.

He felt with sudden discomfort that despite Pungushe's wounds, and
Mark's position of superiority, so far he had had the worst of the
exchange.  It seems that ngaga has at last found what he seeks, he
_pointed out grimly, and went to the mule for his blanket roll.

Under the bloody bunch of leaves there was a deep dark hole where the
point of the buffalo horn had driven in.  It might have gone in as far
as the kidneys, in which case the man was as good as dead.  Mark thrust
the thought aside, and swabbed out the wound as gently as he could with
a solution of acriflavine.

His spare shirt was snowy white and still crisp from Marion's meticulous
laundering and ironing.  He ripped off the sleeves, folded the body into
a wad and placed it over the gaping hole, binding it up with the torn
sleeves.

Pungushe said nothing as he worked, made no protest nor showed any
distress as Mark lifted him into a sitting position to work more easily.
But when Mark ripped the shirt he murmured regretfully, It is a good
shirt.  There was once a young and handsome ngaga who might have died
from the fever, Mark reminded him, but a scavenging old jackal carried
him to a safe place and gave him drink and food.  Ah, Pungushe nodded.
But he was not such a stupid jackal as to tear a good shirt.  The ngaga
is much concerned that the jackal is in good health, so that he will be
able to labour mightily at the breaking of rocks and other manly tasks
when he is an honoured guest at the kraal of King Georgey.  Mark ended
that subject, and repacked his blanket roll.  Can you make water, O
jackal?  It is necessary to see how deep the buffalo has speared you.
The urine was tinged pinky brown, but there were no strings of bright
blood.  It seemed that the kidneys may merely have been badly bruised,
and that the thick pad of iron muscle across the Zulu's back had
absorbed much of the brutal driving thrust.  Mark found himself praying
silently that it was so, although he could not imagine why he was so
concerned.

Working quickly, he cut two long straight saplings, and plaited a drag
litter from strips of wet bark.  Then he padded the litter with his own
blankets and Pungushe's kaross, before hitching it up to Trojan.

He helped the big Zulu into the litter, surprised to find how tall he
was, and how hard was the arm he placed around Mark's shoulder to
support himself.

With Pungushe flat in the litter, he led the mule back along the game
trail, and the ends of two saplings left a long snaking drag mark in the
soft earth.

It was almost dark when they passed the scene of the buffalo hunt.
Looking across the reed banks, Mark Could make out the obscene black
shapes of the vultures in the trees, waiting their turn at the carcass.
Why did you kill my buffalo? he asked, not certain that Pungushe was
still conscious.  All men know the new laws.  I have travelled to every
village, I have spoken with every induna, every chief, all men have
heard.  All men know the penalty for hunting in this valley.  If he was
your buffalo, why did he not carry the mark of your iron?  Surely it is
the custom of the Abelungu, the white men, to burn their mark upon their
cattle?  Pungushe asked from the litter, without a smile nor with any
trace of mockery, yet mockery Mark knew it was.  He felt his anger stir.
This place was declared sacred, even by the old king, Chaka.  No, said
Pungushe.  It was declared a royal hunt, and, his voice took a sterner
ring, I am Zulu, of the royal blood.

I hunt here by my birthright, it is a man's thing to do.  No man has the
right to hunt here.  Then what of the white men who have come here with
their isibamu, their rifles, these past hundred seasons?

asked Pungushe.  They are evil-doers, even as you are.  Then why were
they not taken to be guests at the kraal of King Georgey, as I am so
honoured?  They will be in future, Mark assured him.  Ho!  said
Pungushe, and this time his voice was thick with contempt and mockery.
When I catch them, they will go also, Mark repeated doggedly, but the
Zulu made a weary gesture of dismissal with one expressive pink-palmed
hand, a hand that said clearly that there were many laws, some for rich,
some for poor, some for white and some for black.  They were silent
again until after dark when Mark had camped for the night, and put
Trojan to graze on a head-rope.

As he squatted over the fire, cooking the evening meal for both of them,
Pungushe spoke again from his litter in the darkness beyond the
firelight.  For whom do you keep the silwane, the wild animals of the
valley?  Will King George come here to hunt? Nobody will ever hunt here
again, no king nor common man.  Then why do you keep the silwane?
Because if we do not, then the day will dawn when there will be no more
left in this land.  No buffalo, no lion, no kudu, nothing.  A great
emptiness.  Pungushe was silent for the time it took Mark to spoon a
slop of maize porridge and bully beef into the lid of the pannikin and
take it to the Zulu.  Eat, he commanded, and sat crosslegged opposite
him with his own plate in his lap.

What you say is true, Pungushe spoke thoughtfully.  When I was a child,
of your age, Mark noted the barb but let it pass, there were elephant in
this valley, great bulls with teeth as long as a throwing-spear, and
there were many lions, herds of buffalo like the great king's cattle, he
broke off.  They have gone, soon what is left will go also.  Is that a
good thing?  Mark asked.  It is neither a good thing nor a bad thing.
Pungushe shrugged and began to eat.  It is merely the way of the world,
and there is little profit in pondering it.  They finished eating in
silence and Mark cleared the plates and brought coffee, which Pungushe
waved away.  Drink it, snapped Mark.  You must have it to cleanse the
blood from your water.  He gave Pungushe one of his cigarettes, and the
Zulu carefully broke off the brown cork tip before putting it between
his lips.  He wrinkled his broad flat nose at the insipid taste, for he
was accustomed to the ropey black native tobacco, but he would not
belittle a man's hospitality by making comment.

When it is all gone, when the great emptiness comes here to this valley,
what will become of you, O jackal?

Mark asked.  I do not understand your question.  You are a man of the
silwane.  You are a great hunter.

Your life is yoked to the silwane, as the herdsman is yoked to his
cattle.  What will become of you, O mighty hunter, when all your cattle
are gone?  Mark realized that he had reached the Zulu.  He saw his
nostrils flare, and something burn up brightly within him, but he waited
while Pungushe considered the proposition at great length and in every
detail.  I will go to Igoldi, said Pungushe at last.  I will go to the
gold mines, and become rich.  They will put you to work deep in the
earth, where you cannot see the sun nor feel the wind, and you will
break rocks, just as you go now to do at the kraal of King Georgey.

Mark saw the repugnance flit across the Zulu's face.  I will go to
Tekweni, Pungushe changed his mind.  I will go to Durban and become a
man of much consequence.  In Tekweni you will breathe the smoke of the
cane mills into your lungs, and when the fat babu overseer speaks to
you, you will reply, yehbo, Nkosi, yes, master!  This time the
repugnance on the Zulu's face was deeper still and he smoked his
cigarette down to a tiny sliver of paper and ash which he pinched out
between thumb and forefinger.

Jarnela, he said sternly.  You speak words that trouble a man.  Mark
knew well that the big Zulu's injury was- more serious than his stoic
acceptance of it would indicate.  It was womanly to show pain.

It would be a long time before he was ready to make the journey by
side-car over the rough tracks and rutted dusty roads to the police
station and magistrate's court at Ladyburg.

mark put him into the small lean-to tool-shed that he had built on the
far wall of the mule stables.  it was dry and cool, and had a sturdy
door with a Yale padlock.  He used blankets from Marion's chest and the
mattress she had been saving for the children's room, despite her
protests.  But he's a native, dear!  Every evening, he took the
prisoner's meal down to him in the pannikin, inspected the wound and
dressed it afresh.

Then while he waited for Pungushe to eat, he sat on the top step in the
doorway to the shed and they smoked a cigarette while they talked.  If
the valley belongs now to King Georgey, how is it that you build your
house here, plant your gardens and graze your mules?  I am the king's
man, Mark explained.  You are an induna? Pungushe paused with a spoon of
food halfway to his mouth, and stared at Mark incredulously.  You are
one of the king's counsellors?  I am the keeper of the royal hunt.  Mark
used the old Zulu title, and Purigushe shook his head sadly.  My
father's father was once the keeper of the royal hunt but he was a man
of great consequence, with two dozen wives, a man who had fought in a
dozen wars and killed so many enemies that his shield was as thick with
oxtails as there is grass on the hills in springtime.  The oxtail was
the decoration which the king grants a warrior to adorn his shield when
he has distinguished himself in battle.

Pungushe finished his meal and added simply, 'King Chaka knew better
than to send a child to do man's work.  The next evening Mark saw that
the wound was healing cleanly and swiftly.  The man's tremendous fitness
and strength were responsible for that.  He was able to sit crosslegged
now, and there was a new jauntiness in the way he held his head.  It
would be sooner than Mark had thought that Pungushe would be fit enough
to make the journey to Ladyburg, and Mark felt an odd sinking feeling of
regret.  King Georgey is doubtlessly a great, wise and all-seeing king,
Pungushe opened the evening's debate.  Why then does he wait until
sundown to begin work that should have been started at dawn?  If he
wanted to avoid the great emptiness in this valley, his father should
have begun the work.  The king's affairs are many, in far countries.  He
must rely on indunas to advise him who are not as wise or allseeing,
Mark explained.  The Abelungu, the white men, are like greedy children,
grabbing up handfuls of food they cannot eat.

Instead they smear it over their faces.  There are greedy and ignorant
black men also, Mark pointed out.  Some who even kill leopards with
steel traps for their fur.  To sell to the greedy white men, to dress
their ignorant women, Pungushe agreed, and that makes the score deuce,
Mark thought as he gathered up the empty pannikins.

The next evening Pungushe seemed sad, as at the time of leave-taking.

You have given.  me much on which I must think heavI ily, he said.  You
will have much time to do so, Mark agreed.  In between the breaking of
rocks.  And Pungushe ignored the reference.  There is weight in your
words, for one who is still young enough to be herding the cattle, he
qualified the compliment.  Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings,
Mark translated into Zulu and Pungushe nodded solemnly, and in the
morning he was gone.

He had opened the thatch at the back of the roof, and wriggled through
the small hole.  He had taken his kaross and left Marion's blankets
neatly folded on the mattress.

He had tried for the steel spring-trap, but Mark had locked it in the
kitchen, so he had left it and gone northwards in the night.

Mark was furious for so misjudging his prisoner's recovery, and he
muttered darkly as he plunged along after him on Trojan.  This time I'm
going to shoot the bastard on sight, he promised, and realized at that
moment that Pungushe had backtracked on him.  He had to dismount and
laboriously unravel the confused trail.

Half an hour later, Pungushe led him into the river, and it was well
after noon when he at last found where the Zulu had left the water,
stepping lightly on a fallen log.

He finally lost the cold spoor in the rocky ground on the far rim of the
valley, and it was almost midnight when he rode weaffly back to the
thatched cottage.  Marion had his dinner ready and ten gallons of hot
bath water bubbling on the fire.

Six weeks later, Pungushe returned to the valley.  Mark sat astounded on
the stoep of the cottage, and watched him come.

He walked with the long gliding stride that showed he was fully
recovered from his wound.  He wore the beaded loin-cloth and the
jackal-skin cloak over his shoulders.  He carried two of the
short-shafted stabbing assegai, with the broad steel blades, and his
wives followed at a respectable distance behind him.

There were three of them.  They were bare-breasted, with the tall clay
headdress of the Zulu matron.  The senior was of the same age as her
husband, but her dugs were flat and empty as leather pouches and she had
lost her front teeth.

The youngest wife was a child still in her teens, a pretty plump little
thingwith jolly melon breasts, and a fat brown infant on her hip.

Every wife carried an enormous bundle on her head, balancing it easily
without use of hands, and they were followed by a gaggle of naked and
half -naked children.  Like their mothers, the little girls each carried
a headload, the size of it directly proportional to the age and stature
of the bearer.  The smallest, perhaps four years of age, carried a beer
gourd the size of a grapefruit, echoing faithfully the straight erect
carriage and swaying buttocks of her seniors.

Mark counted seven sons and six daughters.

I see you, Jamela.  Pungushe paused below the stoep.  I see you also,
Pungushe, Mark acknowledged cautiously, and the Zulu squatted down
comfortably on the lowest step.  His wives settled down at the edge of
Marion's garden, politely out of earshot.  The youngest wife gave one of
her fat breasts to the infant and he suckled lustily.  It will rain
tomorrow, said Pungushe.  Unless the wind goes into the north.  In which
case it will not rain again until the full moon.  That is so, Mark
agreed.  Rain now would be good for the grazing.  It will bring the
silwane down from the Portuguese territory beyond the Pongola.

Mark's astonishment had now given way to lively curiosity.  There is
talk in the villages, common word among all the people that has only
recently come to my ears, Pungushe went on airily.  It is said that
Jamela, the new keeper of the royal hunt of King Georgey, is a mighty
warrior who has slain great multitudes of the king's enemies in the war
beyond the sea.  The jackal paused and then went on, Albeit, he is still
unbearded and green as the first flush of the spring-time grass.  Is
that the word?  Mark inquired politely.  It is said that King Georgey
has granted Jamela a black oxtail to wear on his shield.  A black oxtail
is the highest honour, and might loosely be considered the equivalent of
a M.  M.  I am also a warrior, Pungushe pointed out.  I fought with
Bombata at the gorge, and afterwards the soldiers came and took away my
cattle.  This is how I became a man of silwane, and a mighty hunter.  We
are brothers of the spear, Mark conceded.  But now I will make ready my
isi-A-du-du, my motorcycle, so that we may ride to Ladyburg and speak
with the magistrate there of matters of great interest to all of us.
Jamela!  The Zulu shook his head grievingly, like a father with an
obtuse son.  You aspire to be a man of the silwane, you aspire to fill
the great emptiness, and yet who will there be to teach you, who will
open your eyes to see and your ears to hear, if I am in the kraal of
King Georgey breaking his rocks?  You have come to help me?  Mark asked.
You and your beautiful fat wives, your brave sons and nubile daughters?
It is even so.  This is a noble thought, Mark conceded.  I am Zulu of
royal blood, Pungushe agreed.  Also my fine steel trap was stolen from
me, even as my cattle were stolen thus making me a poor man once more. I
see, Mark nodded.  It remains only for me to put out of my mind the
business of leopard skins and dead buffalo?  It is even so.  Doubtless I
will also find it in my heart, to pay you for this help and advice. That
also is so.  What size is the coin in which you will be paid?  Pungushe
shrugged with disinterest.  I am royal Zulu, not a Hindu trader,
haggling in the market-place.  The coin will be just and fair, he paused
delicately, always bearing in mind the multitude of my beautiful wives,
my many brave sons and the host of nubile daughters.  All of whom have
unbelievable appetites.  Mark had to remain silent, not trusting himself
to speak until he controlled the violent urge to burst out laughing.

He spoke again, solemnly, but with laughter rippling his belly muscles.
in what style will you address me, Pungushe?  When I speak, will you
answer "Yeh ho, Nkosi, Yes, Master.  "?  Pungushe stirred restlessly,
and an expression flitted across the broad smooth features like a
fastidious eater who has just discovered a large fat worm on his plate.
I will call you Tamela, he said.  And when you speak as you have just
spoken, I will answer "Jamela, that is a great stupidity.  "In what
style will I address you?  Mark inquired politely, fighting his mirth.
You will call me Pungushe.  For the jackal is the cleverest and most
cunning of all the silwane, and it is necessary for you to be reminded
of this from time to time.  Then something happened that Mark had not
seen before.  Pungushe smiled.  It was like the break-through of the sun
on a grey overcast day.  His teeth were big and perfect and white, and
the smile stretched so wide that it seemed his face might tear.

Mark could no longer contain it.  He laughed out loud, beginning with a
strangled chuckle.  Hearing it, Pungushe laughed also, a great ringing
bell of laughter.

The two of them laughed so long and hard, that the wives fell silent and
watched in amazement, and Marion came out on to the stoep.  What is it,
dear?  He could not answer her, and she went away shaking her head at
the craziness of men.

At last they both fell silent, exhausted with mirth, and Mark gave
Pungushe a cigarette from which he carefully broke the corked tip.  They
smoked in silence for nearly a minute, then suddenly without warning
Mark let out another uncontrolled guffaw, and it started them off again.

The cords of sinew stood out on Pungushe's neck, like columns of carved
ebony, and his mouth was a deep pink cavern lined with perfect white
teeth.  He laughed until the tears ran down his face and dripped from
his chin, and when he lost his breath, he let out a great whistling
snort like a bull hippo breaking surface, and he wiped the tears away
with his thumb and said, Ee, bee!  and slapped his thigh like a pistol
shot, between each fresh paroxysm of laughter.

Mark ended it by reaching out his shaking right hand, and Pungushe took
it in a reverse grip, panting and heaving still.

Pungushe, I am your man, Mark sobbed.  And I, Jamela, am yours.  There
were four men sitting in a semi-circle around the wall of the hotel
suite.  They were all dressed in such fashion that it seemed a uniform.
The dark high-buttoned suits, the glazed celluloid collars and sober
neckties.

Although their ages were spread over thirty years, although one of them
was bald with grey wisps around his ears and another had a fiery red
bush of hair, although one wore a prim gold pince-nez pinched on to a
thin aquiline nose while another had the open far-seeing gaze of the
farmer, yet all of them had those solid hewn Calvinistic faces,
indomitable, unrelenting and strong as granite.

Dirk Courtney spoke to them in the young language Which had only
recently received recognition as a separate entity from its parent
Dutch, and had been given the name of Afrikaans.

He spoke it with an elegance and precision that softened the reserve in
their expressions, and eased the set of jaw and the stiffness in their
backs.  It's a jingo area, Dirk told them. There is a Union Jack flying
on every roof-top.  It's a rich constituency, landowners, professional
men, your party has no appeal there.  He was talking of the
parliamentary constituency of Ladyburg. In the last elections you did
not even present a candidate, nobody fool enough to lose his deposit,
and the Smuts party returned General Courtney unopposed, The eldest of
his listeners nodded over his gold pincenez, inviting him to continue.
If you are to fight the Ladyburg seat, you will need a candidate with a
different approach, an English speaker, a man of property, somebody with
whom the voters can identify It was a beautiful performance.  Dirk
Courtney, handsome, debonair, articulate in either language, striding
back and forth across the carpeted lounge, holding all their attention,
stopping dramatically to make a point with a graceful gesture of strong
brown hands, then striding on again.  He talked for half an hour, and he
was watching his audience, noting the reaction of each, judging their
weaknesses, their strengths.

At the end of that half hour, he had decided that all four of them were
dedicated, completely committed to their political faith.  They stirred
only at appeals to patriotism, to national interest, at reference to the
aspirations of their people.  So, Dirk Courtney thought comfortably.
It's cheaper to buy honest men.  Rogues cost good bright gold, while
honest men can he had with a few find words and noble sentiments.  Give
me an honest man every time.  One of the older men leaned forward and
asked quietly, General Courtney has had the seat since 1910.  He is a
member of the Smuts Cabinet, a war hero, and a man of huge popular
appeal.  He is also your father.  Do you think the voters will take the
young dog when they can have the sire?  Dirk answered: I am prepared not
only to risk my deposit if I achieve the National Party nomination, but
I am confident enough of my eventual success to make a substantial
earnest of my serious intentions to the campaign funds of the party.  He
named a sum of money that made them exchange quick glances of surprise.

In exchange for all this?  the elder politician asked.  Nothing that is
not in the best interest of the nation, and of my constituency, Dirk
told them soberly, and he pulled down the map that hung on the far wall
facing them.

Again he began to speak, but now with the contagious fervour of the
zealot.  In burning words, he built up a vision of ploughed fields
stretching to the horizon, and sweet clean water running deep in endless
irrigation furrows.

The listeners were all men who had farmed and ploughed the rich but
hostile soil of Africa, and all of them had searched blue and cloudless
skies with hopeless eyes for the rain clouds that never came.  The image
of deeply turned furrows and slaking water was irresistible.

of course, we will have to repeal the proclamation on the Bubezi Valley,
Dirk said it glibly, and not one of them showed shock or concern at the
statement.  Already they could see the inland sea of sweet limpid water
ruffling in the breeze.

If we win at this election, the eldest politician began.  No, Menheer,
Dirk interrupted gently, when we win.  The man smiled for the first
time.  When we win, he agreed.

Dirk Courtney stood high on the platform, with thumbs hooked into his
waistcoat.  When he smiled and tilted that noble lion head with the
shining mane of curls, the women in the audience that packed the church
hall rustled like flowers in the breeze.  The Butcher, said Dirk
Courtney, and his voice rang with a depth and resonance that thrilled
them all, man and woman, young and old.  The Butcher of Fordsburg, his
hands red with blood of our countrymen.  The applause began with the men
that Dirk Courtney had in the audience, but it spread quickly.  I rode
with Sean Courtney against Bornbata -'one man was on his feet, near the
back of the hall. I went to France with him, he was shouting to be heard
above the applause.  And where were you, Mr Dirk Courtney, when the
drums were beating?  The smile never left Dirk's face, but two little
spots of hectic colour rose in his cheeks.  Ah!  He faced the man across
the craning heads of the audience.  One of the gallant General's gunmen.
How many women did you shoot down at Fordsburg?  That doesn't answer my
question, the man shouted back, and Dirk caught the eye of one of the
two big men who had risen and were closing in quietly on the questioner.
Four thousand casualties, so*id Dirk.  The Government would like to hide
that fact from you, but four thousand men, women and children -The two
big men had closed in on their quarry, and Dirk Courtney drew all eyes
with a broad theatrical gesture.  A Government that has that contempt
for the life, property and freedom of its people. There was a brief
scuffle, a yelp of pain and the man was hustled out of the side door
into the night.

The newspapers started picking it up almost immediately, the same
editorials which had ranted against theRed Cabal and the Bolshevik
threat, which had praised Smuts"direct and timely action, were now
remembering ia high-handed and brutal solution.

Across the nation, begun by Dirk Courtney and picked up by all the
Hertzogites, the balance of public feeling was swinging back, like a
pendulum, or the curved blade of the executioner's axe.

Dirk Courtney spoke in the Town Hall of Durban, to three thousand, in
the Church Hall of Ladyburg to three hundred.  He spoke at every country
church in the constituency, at little crossroad general-dealer shops
where a dozen voters assembled for an evening's entertainment, but
always the Press was represented, Dirk Courtney worked slowly
northwards, during the day visiting all his land holdings, each of his
new cane mills, and each evening he spoke to the little assemblies of
voters.  Always he was vibrant and compelling, handsome and articulate,
and he painted a picture for them of a land crossed with railways and
fine roads, of prosperous towns, and busy markets.  They listened
avidly.  There are two, said Pungushe.  One is an old lion.  I know him
well.  He stayed last year in Portuguese territory along the north bank
of the Usutu River.  He was alone then, but now he has found a mate.
Where did they cross?  Mark asked.  They crossed below Ndumu, and came
south between the swamp and the river.  The lion was five years old, and
very cunning, a lean torn, tall at the shoulder and with a short ruff of
reddish mane.  There was an ugly bald scar across his forehead, and he
favoured his right foreleg where a piece of hammered pot-leg fired from
a Tower musket two years previously had lodged against the shoulder
joint.  He had been hunted by man almost without remission since he was
a cub, and he was getting old now, and tired.

He crossed the river in the dark, swimming his lioness ahead of him,
going south from the hunters who had assembled to drive the bush along
the river the next morning.  He could hear the drums still beating, and
smell'the smoke of their fires.  He could hear also the yapping clamour
of the dog packs.  They had assembled, two or three hundred tribesmen
with their hunting dogs and a dozen Portuguese half-breeds with
breech-loading rifles, for the lions had killed two trek oxen on the
outskirts of one of the river villages.  In the morning the hunt would
begin, and the lion took his mate south.

She was also a big animal, and though she was still very young and not
as experienced, yet she was quick and strong, and she learned from him
each day.  Her hide was still clean and unscarred by claw or Thorn.
Across the back she was a sleek olive tan shading down to a lovely
buttery yellow at the throat and fluffy cream on the belly.

She still had traces of her kitten spots dappling her quarters, but the
night they swam the Usutu, she came into season for the first time.

On the south bank, they shook the water from their bodies, with fierce
shuddering spasms, and then the lion snuffed at her, drumming softly in
his throat and then lifting his snout to the bright white stars, his
back arching reflexively at the tantalizing musk of her pate
blood-tinged oestrous discharge.

She led him half a mile up one of the thickly wooded tributary valleys,
and then she crept into the heart of the thicket of tangled bush, a
stronghold guarded by the fierce two-inch, wickedly hooked thorns,
tipped in red as though they had already drawn blood.

Here in the dawn, he covered her for the first time.  She crouched low
against the earth, hissing and crackling with angry snarls, while he
came over her, biting at her ears and neck, forcing her to submit.
Afterwards, she lay close against him, licking at his ears, nuzzling his
throat and belly, turning half away from him and nudging him
flirtatiously with her hind quarters, until he rose and she crouched
down submissively and snarled at him while he mounted her briefly once
again.

They mated twenty-three times that day, and in the night they left the
Thorn thicket and wandered southwards again.

A half hour before the set of the moon, they reached the edge of the
ploughed land, and the lion stopped and growled softly at the smell of
man and cattle.

Tentatively he reached out one paw and tested the freshly turned earth,
then he drew his leg back and made a little troubled mewing sound of
indecision.  The lioness brushed herself lovingly against him, but he
turned aside and led her along the edge of the ploughed land.  Will they
reach the valley, Pungushe?  Mark asked, leaning out of the saddle to
speak to the Zulu as he trotted at Trojan's shoulder.

Pungushe spoke easily, despite the fact he had run without rest for
nearly three hours.  They must cross almost half a day's march of land
where men are working, where the ploughs of the new sugar-growers are
busy.  Besides, Jamela, they know nothing of your valley, and the mad
Ngaga who would welcome them.  Mark straightened in the saddle and rode
on grimly.  He knew that this pair, this mating pair, would be his last
chance to have lions in his valley.  Yet there was twenty miles of
danger to cross such as these animals, coming out of the wilderness of
Portuguese Mozambique, would never have experienced before, ploughlands,
declared cattle area, where lions were vermin.  An area devoid of wild
prey, but heavily populated with domestic animals.  An area where the
cry of Lion would send fifty men running eagerly for a rifle, fifty
white men competing fiercely for the trophy, hating the big predatory
cats with a blind unthinking hatred, welcoming what was probably their
only chance at one of them, safe in the knowledge that they were fair
game, unprotected by law in the cattle areas.

The lions came to the camp downwind, and they lay flat in the short
grass in the darkness at the edge of the camp.

They listened to the drowsy voices of the men at the fire, and smelled
the myriad strange smells, of tobacco smoke, of cooking maize meal and
the sour tang of Zulu beer, and they lay very flat and tense against the
earth, only their round black-tipped ears cocked and their nostrils
flaring and sucking the air.

The oxen were kraaled with a low circular enclosure of felled Thorn
trees, arranged with their trunks inward and the bushy thorny tangle
outwards.  The smell of the cattle was strong and tempting.

There were seventy-two oxen in the kraal, two full spans.  They belonged
to Ladyburg Sugar Company and they were ploughing the new lands east of
Chaka's Gate, after the labour teams had stumped out the standing timber
and burned it in long windows.

The lion waited, patient, but alert and tensed and silent, while the
silver moon went down below the trees and the men's voices dwindled into
silence.  He waited while the fires died down into puddles of dull ruddy
ash.  Then he rose silently.

The lioness did not move, except that the great muscles in her chest and
limbs swelled, rigid with tension, and her ears cocked fractionally
forward.

The lion circled cautiously upwind of the camp.  There was a soft cool
wash of breeze coming steadily out of the east and he used it skilfully.

The oxen caught the whiff of lion as he moved into the wind, and he
heard them coming up, rising in that awkward plunging leap from where
they had settled.

Horns clashed together as they swung into a tight group facing upwind,
and one of them let out a soft mournful lowing.  Immediately it was
taken up, and their low bellows woke the -men at the fires.  Somebody
shouted, and threw a log on the fire.  A torrent of sparks rose into the
dark branches of the mimosa and the log caught, lighting the camp with a
yellow leaping dancing light.  The ploughmen and the lead boys were
gathered fearfully around the fire, still with skin karosses draped
around their shoulders, owl-eyed with sleep and alarm.

The lion slipped like a shadow, dark and flat against the earth towards
the kraal, and the cattle bunched and bellowed wildly at the sharp rank
cat smell.

Against the thorny windward side of the kraal, the lion crouched, arched
his back and ejected a stream of urine.

The pungent, biting ammoniac stink was too much for the mass of cattle.
In a single solid bunch, they swung away downwind and charged the thorny
wall of the temporary kraal, crashing through it without check, and they
thundered free, quickly spreading, losing the solid formation and
scattering away into the night.

The lioness was ready for them, and she streaked in across the flank of
the panicking plunging formation, selecting a single victim, a heavy
young beast.  She drove him onwards, chivvying him like a sheep dog,
crossing and recrossing his frantic driving quarters, running him far
from the fires and the ploughmen before coming snaking up alongside and
hooking expertly at one of his powerfully driving forelegs, and the
curved yellow claws biting in just above the hock until they grated
against the bone.  Then she went back on her own bunched quarters and
dragged the leg to cross the other.

The ox dropped as though he had been shot through the brain, and he
somersaulted haunch over head, and slid against the earth on his back,
all four legs kicking to the starry sky.

In a rubbery flash of supple speed, the cat closed, judging finely the
massive hooves that could have crushed her skull and the wide straight
horns which could have impaled her rib to rib.

She bit in hard at the base of the skull, driving the long ivory yellow
eye teeth into the first and second vertebrae, they crunched sharply
like a walnut in the jaws of the cracker.

When the lion came padding hurriedly out of the night, she had already
opened the belly cavity of the ox and her whole head was red and toffee
sticky with blood as she went for liver and spleen and kidneys.

She flattened her ears against her bloody skull and snarled murderously
at him, but he put his shoulder to her flank and pushed her aside, she
snarled again and he cuffed her with a lordly paw and began to feed in
the hole she had made.

She glared at him for a second, then her ears came erect and she began
to lick his shoulder with long pink voluptuous strokes, purring with a
deep soft rattle in her throat, pressing her long sleek body against
him.  The lion tried to ignore her and fed with snuffling grunts and wet
tearing ripping sounds.

But she became bolder, the eternal female taking advantage of her new
highly attractive condition, liberties which before would have brought
swift and stern disciplinary action.

Desperately the lion tried to restrain her by placing a huge paw on her
head, claws carefully retracted, and gulped furiously, trying to eat the
entire ox before she could join in, but she wriggled out from under the
paw and licked his ear.  He growled halfheartedly, flickered the ear.
She inched forward and licked his eyes, so he had to close them tightly,
furrowing his brow and trying to feed blind, but finally he surrendered
to the inevitable and allowed her to force her head into the bloody
crater.

Side by side, purring and growling softly, they fed.

There were eighteen of them, gathered on the wide mosquito-screened
veranda of the foreman's cottage under the hissing Petromax lamps.  The
brandy bottle had been out since sundown, and most of the men were
red-faced and bright-eyed as they listened to Dirk Courtney.  There will
be schools and hospitals within a twenty mile ride of everybody, he
promised, and the women looked up from their knitting.  They knew what
it was like to raise a young family out here.  This is the beginning
only, he promised the men.  And those of you who were first in will be
the first to profit.  Once I am in Parliament, you'll have a strong
voice speaking up for you.  You'll see improvement here you couldn't
imagine possible, and quickly.  You're a rich man, Mr.  Courtney, one of
them said.  He was a small trader, not directly employed by Ladyburg
Sugar, but sufficiently reliant on it to phrase his question with
respect.  One of the bosses. How come you speak out for the working man?
I'm rich because I worked hard, but I know that without you men, I won't
be rich much longer.  We are linked together like a team.

They nodded and murmured and Dirk went on quickly.  One thing I promise
you, When I can hire a white man at a-decent wage, I won't push in
coolie or nigger labour!  They cheered him then, and filled their
glasses to toast him.  Your present Government, the Smuts men, tried
that on the gold mines.  Two and tuppence a day for black men, and white
men out on the street.  When the workers protested, they sent the bloody
Butcher of Fordsburg, a man who I am ashamed to call my father, There
was an urgent hammering on the kitchen door, and the foreman excused
himself quietly and hurried out.

He was back within a minute and whispered to Dirk Courtney.  Dirk
grinned and nodded, and turned back to his audience.  Well, gentlemen, a
fine bit of sport in the offing, a lion has killed one of my oxen, down
on the new Buli block.

The plough boy has just come in to report it.  It happened only an hour
ago so we will have an excellent sporting chance at him.  May I move
closure of this meeting, and we'll meet here again at, he glanced at his
watch, at five o'clock tomorrow morning, every man with a horse and
rifle!

Mark and Pungushe slept, each under a single blanket, on the sunbaked
earth, with Trojan cropping the scraggy dry yellow grass nearby.  There
was a cold little breeze out of the east, and they woke in the total
dark of not-yet dawn and sat over the fire drinking coffee and smoking
silently until Pungushe could take the spoor again.

From the back of Trojan it was still too dark to see the ground, but
Pungushe ran confidently ahead, forcing the mule into a reluctant
lumbering trot to keep pace.

At the edge of the ploughed land, he had to cast, but he cut the lion
spoor on its new track almost immediately.

They went off again, with the sunrise outlining the upper branches of
the trees, turning them black and spiky against the ruddy gold.

The soft amber rays were without warmth, and threw long distorted
shadows of mule and men on the hard red earth.

Mark marvelled once again that the Zulu could run a spoor in this light
over such ground, where he could see no mark or sign of the lions
passing.

There was a single gun shot, so faint that Mark thought he might have
imagined it, but Pungushe stopped instantly and signalled him to rein in
the mule.

They stood and listened intently, and suddenly there was a distant
popping fusillade, ten, eleven rifle-shots and then silence again.

Pungushe turned and looked at Mark expressionlessly.

The silence was complete, even the morning bird chorus was stilled by
the gunfire for a moment.  Then as the silence persisted, a troop of
little brown francolin started chirruping again on the edge of the
ploughed lands.  Go on!  Mark nodded to Pungushe, trying to keep his
face as expressionless, but his voice shook with outrage.

They were too late.  The last lions south of the Usutu were dead.  He
felt sick with helpless anger.

They did not notice Mark until he was right up to them.

They were too excited, too intent on their work.

There were eight white men, all heavily armed and dressed in rough
hunting clothes, with two Zulu grooms holding the horses.

In a trampled opening among the mimosa trees lay the half-eaten carcass
of a red and wite ox.  However, this was not what was engaging their
attention.  They were grouped in a tight circle beyond the ox, and their
voices were raucous, raised in rough jest and cheerful oath.

Mark dismounted and handed the reins to Pungushe.  He walked slowly
towards the group, dreading what he would find, but he stopped again as
one of the men looked up and saw him.  He recognized Mark instantly. Ah,
warden!  Dirk Courtney laughed, tossing that splendid head of glossy
curls.  We are doing your job for you.  The laughter was sly and
spiteful, the malice so apparent that Mark knew he was thinking of the
bribe that Mark had accepted and then turned against him.  Here is one
that you can cross off your report, Dirk chuckled again, and gestured
for his men to stand aside.

The circle opened and Mark stepped into the opening.  The men around him
were still red-faced and garrulous, and he could smell the stale liquor
on them.  Gentlemen, may I present the newly appointed warden of Chaka's
Gate proclaimed area.  Dirk stood opposite him, across the circle, with
one hand thrust carelessly into the pocket of his chamois-leather
jacket, a hand-made double barrelled . 450 elephant rifle by Gibbs of
London tucked into the crook of his elbow.

The lion lay on its side with legs extended.  He was an old, scarred
torn, so lean and rangy that each rib showed clearly through the short
tan hair.  There were four bullet-holes in the body, the one behind the
shoulder would have raked both lungs, but another heavy bullet had
shattered the skull.  The mouth hung open slackly and a little
blood-stained saliva still oozed out on to the lolling pink tongue.
Congratulations, gentlemen, Mark nodded, and only Dirk Courtney caught
the irony in his voice.  Yes, he agreed.  The sooner we clear this area
and make it safe for settlement the better for all.  There was a hearty
chorus of agreement and one of them produced a brown bottle from his
back pocket, and passed it from hand to hand, each in turn pointing its
base briefly heavenwards, then exclaiming appreciatively and smacking
their lips. What about the lioness?  Mark asked quietly, refusing his
turn at the bottle.  Don't worry about her, one of them assured him.
She's down already.  I hit her clean in the shoulder.  We are just
giving her a chance to stiffen up, before we go after her to finish her
off.  And he drew his sheath knife and began to skin out the carcass of
the lion, while his comrades passed loud comment and advice.

Mark walked back to Pungushe who squatted patiently at Trojan's head.
The lioness is wounded, but has run.  I have seen the spoor, Pungushe
nodded, and pointed it out with his eyes, not moving his head.  How bad
is she hit?  I do not know yet.  I must see how she settles to run
before judging.  Take the spoor, said Mark.  Let us go quietly, without
alerting these mighty hunters.  They drifted away from the clearing,
leading the mule casually, Mark following a dozen paces behind the Zulu.

Five hundred yards further on, Pungushe stopped and spoke quietly.  She
is hit in the right shoulder or leg, but I do not think the bone has
gone, for she touches with every second pace.

She goes well on three legs, and at first there was a little blood, but
it dries quickly.  Perhaps she bleeds inside!  Mark asked.

If that is so, we will find her within a short while dead, Pungushe
shrugged.  All right.  Mark swung up into the saddle.  Let us go
swiftly, that we may outrun these others, none of them will be able to
follow across such hard ground.

He was too late.  Anders!  Dirk Courtney shouted, riding up at the head
of his band.  What the hell do you think you are doing?  My job, Mark
answered.  I'm following a wounded beast.  We are coming with you.  Mark
glanced at Pungushe, and a silent accord flashed between them, then he
turned back to the group.  You all realize the danger involved?  These
animals have probably been hunted before, and my tracker thinks the
lioness is only lightly hit.  There was a little sobering and
hesitation, but all eight of them rode on after Pungushe. He went hard,
loping away, minza umhlabathi, stretching the horses into an easy canter
and after the first hour Dirk Courtney swore bad-temperedly.  I don't
see any blood.  The blood has dried, Mark told him.  The wound has
closed.  The contents of the brown bottle were long ago exhausred.  Red
faces were sweating heavily in the rising heat, eyes were bloodshot and
high good humour turning to headaches and woolly tongues; none of them
had remembered to bring a water bottle.

Two of them turned back.

An hour later Dirk Courtney snarled suspiciously, This bloody nigger is
giving us a bum run.  Tell him I'll take the horse-whip to him.  The
lioness is going stronglyI don't believe it.  I can't see any spoor.
Pungushe stopped abruptly, motioned them to stay and went forward
cautiously into a low thicket of waterbessie scrub.  I've had a guts
full of this, muttered one of the hunters miserably.

The too.  I've got work to do.  Three more of them turned back, and
those that remained sat their restless horses until Pungushe emerged
from the thicket and beckoned them forward.

In the heart of the thicket, impressed deeply into the soft mound of a
mole heap he showed them the umnistakable pad of a lioness.  It headed
relentlessly southward.  All right, Dirk Courtney acknowledged.  He's
still on the spoor.  Tell him to keep going.  An hour after noon, the
lioness led them on to a low unbroken cap of solid grey granite, and
Pungushe sat down wearily.  His muscles shone in the sunlight with
sweat, as though they had been oiled.  He looked up at Mark on the mule
and shrugged with an expressive gesture of helplessness.  Dead spoor,
said Mark.  Gone away.  Dirk Courtney pulled up his horse's head with a
cruel jerk of the curb, and snapped at Mark'Anders.  I want to speak to
you.  He trotted away out of earshot of the group, and Mark followed
him.

They stopped and faced each other, and Dirk's mouth was twisted into a
pinched and bitter line.  This is the second time you have been clever
at my expense, he started grimly.  You could have had me as an ally, but
instead you had my father send me a receipt for my gift Now you and your
savage have pulled another trick.  I don't know how you did it, but it's
the last time it will happen.  He stared at Mark, and the slant of the
eyes altered, once again that mad malevolent light burned in their
depths.  A powerful friend I would have been, but a much more powerful
enemy I am now.  So far only my father's protection has saved you.  That
will change.  No man stands in my way, I swear that to you.

He wheeled his horse, put spurs to it and galloped away.

The other two disconsolate hunters trailed away after him.

Mark rode back to Pungushe, and they drank from the water-bottle and
smoked a little before Mark asked, Where is the lioness?  We left her
spoor two hours back.  Mark glanced sharply at him, and Pungushe stood
up and walked to another mole heap at the edge of the granite.

He squatted beside it, and with a roll of his open palm outlined the
fleshy pad of a lion paw, then he bunched his knuckles and rolled them
for the toe marks.

Miraculously, the spoor of a full-grown lion appeared in the soft earth,
and Pungushe looked up at Mark's startled unbelieving expression and let
out one of those whistling hippo-snorts of laughter, rocking back on his
heels delightedly.  For two hours we followed the Tokoloshe, "

he hooted.

I cannot see her, said Mark, carefully glassing the shallow wooded
valley below them.  Oh!  Jamela, who cannot see.  Where is she,
Pungushe?  Do you see the forked tree, beyond the three round rocks -'A
step at a time he directed Mark's gaze, until suddenly he made out just
the two dark round blobs of her ears above the short yellow grass, about
six hundred yards from where they sat.  She was lying close in under the
spread of a thorn thicket, and even as he watched, she lowered her head
and the ears vanished.  Now that she is alone, she wishes to return to
the place she knows well, beyond the Usutu.  That is why she moves
always that way, when the pain of the wound allows Before they had come
up with her, they had found three places where she had lain to rest, and
at one such place there had been a smear of blood and a dozen yellow
hairs A Tokoloshe is a mythical creature from Zulu magical legend.

glued into the clot.  Pungushe had inspected the hairs, minutely; by
colour and texture he could tell from which part of the lioness body
they had come.  High in the right shoulder, and if she was bleeding
inside she would be down already.  But she is in great pain, for she
walks short.  The wound has stiffened.  She cannot go far.  Now Mark
swung the glasses towards the west, and longingly stared through them at
the blue misty loom of the cliffs of Chaka's Gate, half a dozen miles
away.  So close, he murmured, so close.  But the exhausted cat was
dragging herself painfully away from sanctuary, back towards the
ploughed lands, towards cattle and men and the dog packs.

Instinctively he turned in that direction now, swinging the binoculars
in a long slow traverse across the north and east.

From the low ridge he had a good field of sight, across miles of light
forest to the open chocolate expanse of ploughed land.

Something moved in the field of the binoculars and he blinked his eyes
and refocused carefully.  Three horsemen were coming slowly in their
direction, and even at this range Mark could see the dogs running ahead
of them.

Quickly he looked back at the leading rider.  There was no mistaking
that arrogantly erect figure.  Dirk Courtney had not given up the hunt.
He had merely returned to assemble a hunting-pack, and now the dogs were
coming down fast on the smell of the wounded cat.

Mark laid a hand on the hard muscle of Pungushe's shoulder, and with his
free hand he pointed.  The Zulu stood up and stared for a full minute at
the oncoming horsemen, then he began to speak quickly.

Jamela, I will try to call the lioness, and lead her Mark started to ask
a question, but Pungushe stopped him harshly.  Can you pull the dogs
away, or stop them?  Mark thought for a moment, then nodded.  Give me
your snuff, Pungushe.  He took the snuff horn that hung on a thong
around his neck and handed it to Mark without question.  Go, said Mark.
Call my lioness for me.  Pungushe slipped away down the ridge and left
Mark to hurry to Trojan.

There were three sticks of black dried meat left in Mark's food bag.  He
found two flat stones and pounded the dry meat into a fine powder
between them, glancing up every few seconds to see the huntsmen coming
on rapidly.

Once the meat was powdered he scooped it into his pannikin and added an
ounce of native snuff from the horn, mixin the two powders with his
fingers as he ran back down the ridge to intersect the lioness trail at
the point they had left it.

When he reached the shoulder of the ridge where the wounded cat had
skirted a rocky outcrop, he knelt and made three neat piles of the mixed
powder directly in the path of the oncoming dogs.

The dried meat would be irresistible when they reached it, the dogs
would sniff at it greedily.

He could hear them already, baying excitedly, coming on swiftly, leading
the hunters at a canter.  As he ran back up the ridge to where Trojan
stood, Mark smiled bleakly.

A hound with a good suck of fiery native snuff up his nose wasn't going
to smell anything else for at least twelve hours.

The lioness lay on her side, with her mouth open.  She panted for air,
and her chest pumped like a blacksmith's bellows, and her eyes were
tightly closed.

The bullet had been fired from her right quarter.  It was a soft lead
slug from a .  45 5 Martini Hendry and it had taken her high in the
shoulder, but far forward, cutting in through the heavy muscle and
grazing the big joint of the shoulder, lacerating sinew and shattering
that extraordinary small floating bone, found only in the shoulder of a
lion, the lucky bone so prized as a hunter's talisman.

The bullet had missed the artery as it plunged into the neck and lodged
there beneath the skin, a lump the size of the top joint of a man's
thumb.

The flies swarmed joyously into the mouth of the wound, and she lifted
her head and snapped at them, and then mewing softly at the agony that
movement had caused, she began to lick the bullet hole carefully, the
long tongue rasping roughly against her hide, curling pink and dextrous
as it cleansed the fresh little trickle of watery blood that had sprung
from it.  Then she sank back wearily and closed her eyes again.

Pungushe was aware of the wind in the same way as the helmsman of a tall
ship is, for it was as important to him as it is to a mariner.  He knew
exactly at each moment of the day its force and direction, anticipated
any change before it occurred and he did not have to carry an ash bag
nor wet a finger, the knowledge was instinctive.

Now he moved carefully into a downwind position from the wounded animal.
It did not occur to him to thank any providence for the constant
easterly breeze that put him fairly between the cat and the near
boundary of Chaka's Gate.

Silent as the cloud shadow moves across the earth, he moved in on the
cat, judging the extreme limit of her acute hearing before kneeling
facing where she lay three hundred yards away.

He filled and deflated his lungs rapidly a dozen times, the great
muscled chest swelling and subsiding as he built up reserves of oxygen
in his blood.  Then he caught a full breath and stretched out his neck
at a peculiar angle, cupping his hands to his gaping mouth to act as a
sounding board.

From the depths of the straining chest issued a low drumming rattle,
that rose and sank to a natural rhythm and ended with an abrupt little
cough.

The lioness'head came up in a single flash of movement, her ears erect,
her eyes alight with yellow lights, for in her pain and fear and
confusion she had heard the old lion calling to her, that low,
far-carrying assembly call with which he had directed her hunting so
often, and which he had used to bring her to him when separated in thick
bush.

The pain of rising was almost too much for her, the wound had stiffened
and her neck and shoulder and chest were crushed under a granite boulder
of agony, but at that moment she heard for the first time the distant
yelping chorus of the dog pack.  She and the old lion had been hunted by
dogs before, and the sound gave her strength.

She came up and stood for a moment on three legs, favouring the right
fore, panting heavily and then she went forward, whining softly at the
pain, carrying the bad leg high, lunging for balance at each stride.

Mark watched from the ridge, saw the yellow cat start to move again,
hobbling slowly westwards at last.  Far ahead of her, keeping out of
sight, the big Zulu trotted, pausing whenever she faltered to kneel and
repeat the assembly call of a dominant male lion, and each time the
lioness answered him with eager little mewling grunts and hobbled after
him, westward towards the dreaming blue hills that guarded the Bubezi
valley.

Mark had heard the old hunters stories before; old man Anders had always
claimed that his gunbearer, who had been killed by an elephant on the
Sabi River in 84, could call lions.  However, Mark had never seen it
done, and secretly had put the story into the category of the
picturesque but apocryphal.

Now he saw it happening, and still wanted to doubt it.

He watched fascinated from his grandstand upon the ridge, and only a
change in the clamour of the dog pack made him swing his binoculars back
towards the east.

At the rocky shoulder of the ridge, where he had set his bait of
powdered biltong and snuff, the pack milled confusedly.  There were
eight or nine dogs, a mongrel pack of terriers and boer hounds and
ridgebacks.

The determined hunting chorus had disintegrated into a cacophony of
whines and yelps, while Dirk Courtney over rode them, standing in his
stirrups to lay about them furiously with the horse-whip.

Mark took Trojan's reins and led him down off the ridge, using what
little cover there was, but confident that the huntsmen were too
involved with their own problems to look ahead and see him.

When he reached the place beside the Thorn thicket where the lioness had
last lain, he cut a branch with his clasp knife, and used it like a
broom to brush away any sign the cat had left.

He followed slowly westwards towards Chaka's Gate, pausing every few
minutes to listen for the drumming lion call, watching the ground as he
moved, and using the branch to brush away all lion sign, covering for
his lioness, until in the dusk they climbed a low saddle through the
hills and in slow, drawn-out procession, went down to the Bubezi River.

Pungushe made his last call in darkness, and then ran out in a wide
circle, leaving the lioness within a hundred yards of the river, knowing
how she would be burned up by the heat of the wound and crazed for
water.

He found Mark by the glow of his cigarette.  Get up, said Mark, and gave
him an arm.  Pungushe did not argue.  He had run almost without a pause
since before dawn, and he swung up behind Mark.

They rode home, two up on Trojan's broad sway back, and neither of them
spoke until they saw the lantern light in the cottage window.

Jamela, said Pungushe.  I feel the way I did the day my first son was
born.  And there was a tone of wonder in his voice.  I did not believe a
man could feel thus for a devil that kills cattle and men.  Lying in the
darkness, with Marion beside him in the double bed, Mark told her about
it.  Trying to convey the wonder and the sense of achievement.  He told
her what Pungushe had said, and stumbled for words to describe his own
feelings, to come haltingly at last into silence.  That's very nice,
dear.  When are you going into town again?  I want to buy some curtains
for the kitchen.  I thought a checked gingham would look pretty, what do
you think, dear?  The lioness gave birth to her cubs in the thick jessie
bushes that choked one of the narrow tributary valleys which came down
off the escarpment.

There were six cubs, but they were almost three weeks old when Mark
first saw them.  He and Pungushe lay belly down on the edge of the cliff
that overlooked the valley when she led them back from the river in the
dawn.  The cubs followed her in an untidy straggle spread over a hundred
yards.

The sinew in her right fore had healed crooked and slightly shorter,
which gave her a heaviness in her gait, a roll like a sailor's, as she
came up the draw.  One of the cubs, more persistent than the rest was
trying to suckle from her pendulant, heavy, multiple dugs as she walked.

He kept making clumsy flying leaps at them as they swung above his head,
mostly he fell on his head and got trodden on by his mother's back feet,
but once he succeeded and hung like a fat brown tick on one nipple.  The
lioness whirled about and cuffed him left and right, then began to lick
him with a tongue that wrapped around his head entirely and knocked him
on his back again.

One of the other cubs was stalking his siblings, crouching in ambush
behind a single blade of grass, with flattened ears and viciously
slitted eyes.  When he leapt out on his brothers and sisters and they
totally ignored his warlike manoeuvres, he covered his embarrassment by
turning back and sniffing the grass blade with such attention that it
seemed this had been his original intention.

Three of the others were hunting butterflies.  There had been a new
hatching of colotis lone.  On white and purple wings they fluttered
close to the earth and the cubs reared on their hind legs and boxed at
them with more gusto than skill, over-balancing at the end of each
attack and collapsing in a fluffy tangle of outsized paws.

The sixth cub was hunting the tails of the butterflyhunters.  Every time
they slashed their little tufted tails in the feverish excitement of the
chase, he pounced upon them with savage growls and they were forced to
turn and defend themselves against the sting of his needle-sharp baby
teeth.

The progress of the family from river to jessie thicket was a long drawn
out series of unseemly brawls, which the lioness finally broke up.  She
turned back and gave that drumming cough which promised imminent
retribution if not obeyed instantly.  The cubs abandoned their play,
formed an Indian file and trotted after the lioness into the shelter of
the jessie.  I would like to know how many females there are in the
litter, Mark whispered, grinning fondly like a new father as he watched
them go.  If you wish, Jamela, I will go down and look under their
tails, Pungushe offered solemnly.  And you will treat my widows
generously.  Mark chuckled and led the way back down the side of the
hill.

They had almost reached the tree where Mark had left Trojan, when
something caught his eyes.  He turned aside and kicked hopefully at the
little heap of stones, before he realized that they had not been erected
by human hands, but had been pushed up by the surface roots of a siringa
tree.

He gave a grunt of disappointment and turned away.

Pungushe watched him speculatively, but made no comment.

He had seen Mark perform that strange little ritual a hundred times
before, whenever an unusual rock or pile caught his attention.

It had become a custom that every few evenings Mark would wander across
from the thatched cottage at main camp, half a mile to where Pungushe's
wives had erected the cluster of huts that was the family home.

Each hut was shaped in the perfect cone of a beehive, long whippy
saplings bent in to form the framework and the thatch bound in place by
the plaited string of bark stripped from the saplings.

The earth between the huts was smoothed and brushed, and Pungushe's
carved wooden stool set before the low doorway of his personal sleeping
hut.  After Mark's fourth visit another, newly carved stool appeared
beside it.

Though it was never spoken of, it was immediately apparent that this had
been reserved exclusively for Mark's visits.

Once Mark was seated, one of the wives would bring him a bowl to wash
his hands.  The water had been carried laboriously all the way from the
river, and Mark merely damped his fingertips so that it would not be
wasted.

Then the youngest wife knelt in front of him, smiling shyly, and offered
with both hands a pot of the delicious sour utshwala, the Zulu millet
beer, thick as gruel and mildly alcoholic.

Only when Mark had swallowed the first mouthful would Pungushe look up
and greet him.  I see you, Jamela.  Then they could talk in the relaxed
desultory fashion of men totally at ease in each other's company. Today,
when we came down off the hill after watching the lions, you turned off
the path and kicked at some stones.  It was for this strange custom I
named you, this endless seeking, this looking and never finding Pungushe
would never ask the direct question, it would have been the grossest bad
manners to ask outright what r Mark was looking for; only a child or an
umlungu, a white man, would be so callow.  It had taken him many months
to ask the question, and now he framed it in the form of a statement.

Mark took anotherpull athis beerpot and offered Pungushe his cigarette
case.  The Zulu declined with an open hand, and instead began to roll
his own smoke, coarse tarry black tobacco in a thick roll of brown
paper, the size of a Havana cigar.  Watching his hands Mark replied:My
father and my mother died of the white sore throat, diphtheria, when I
was a child, and an old man became both father and mother to me.  He
started to answer the question in as devious a manner as it had been
asked, and Pungushe listened, nodding and smoking quietly.  So this man,
my grandfather whom I loved, is buried somewhere in this valley.  It is
his grave I seek, he ended i simply, and realized suddenly that Pungushe
was staring at him with a peculiar sombre expression.

What is it?  Mark asked.  When did this happen?  Six seasons ago.  Would
this old man have camped beneath the wild figs?  Pungushe pointed down
the valley.  Where first you camped?  Yes, Mark agreed.  He always
camped there.  He felt the surge of something in his chest,
foreknowledge of something momentous about to happen.  There was a man,
said Pungushe, who wore a hat, a hat under which an impi could have
camped, and he made a circle of his arms, exaggerating only a little the
size of a double terai brim, and who had a beard, shaped thus like the
wings of a white egret, An image of the old man's forked beard, snowy
and stained only around the mouth with tobacco juice, leapt in Mark's
mind.  An old man who walked like the secretary bird when it hunts for
locusts in the grass.  The long thin legs, the stooped arthritic
shoulders, the measured stride, the description was perfect.  Pungushe!
Mark exploded with excitement.  You know him" Nothing moves in this
valley, no bird flies, no baboon barks, but the jackal hears and sees.
Mark stared at him, appalled at his own oversight.  Of course Pungushe
knew everything.  Pungashe the silent watcher, why in God's name had he
not thought to ask him before?  He followed this path" Pungushe walked
ahead of Mark, and with the natural skill of the born actor he mimicked
John Anders, the halting gait, and stooped shoulders of an old man.  If
Mark half closed his eyes, he could see his grandfather as he had seen
him so many times before.  Here he turned off the path, Pungushe left
the game trail and started up one of the narrow dried-out watercourses.
Their feet crunched in the sugary sand. Half a mile further, Pungushe
stopped and pointed at one of the shiny water-polished black boulders.
Here he sat and set his rifle aside.  He lit his pipe and smoked.
Pungushe turned and scrambled up the steep bank of the water-course.
While the old man smoked, the fourth man came up the valley.  He came as
a hunter, silently, following the easy spoor of the old man.  He used
the Zulu word of respect for an elder, ixhegu.  Wait, Pungushe, Mark
frowned.  You say the fourth man?  I am confused.  Count the men for me.

They squatted down on the bank and Pungushe took a little snuff, offered
the horn to Mark who refused, then sniffed the red powder out of his
palm, closing one nostril at a time with his thumb.  He screwed his eyes
closed and sneezed deliciously before going on.

There was the old man, your grandfather, ixl2egu.  That is one.  Then
there was another old man.  Without hair on his head nor on his chin.
That is two, Mark agreed.  Then there was a young man with very black
hair, a man who laughed all the time and walked with the noise of a
buffalo herd.  Yes.  That is three.  These three came together to the
valley.  They hunted together and camped together below the wild figs.
Pungushe must be describing the Greylings, the father and son who had
made the sworn deposition to the Ladyburg magistrate.

That was as he had expected, but now he asked, What of the fourth man,
Pungushe?  The fourth man followed them secretly and ixhegu, your
grandfather, did not know of him.  He had always the manner of the
hunter of men, watching from cover and moving silently.  But once when
your grandfather, ixhegu, had left camp to hunt alone for birds along
the river, this secret man came to the camp below the wild figs and all
three of them spoke together, quietly but with closed faces and wary
eyes of men who discuss affairs of deadly moment.  Then the silent man
left them again and went to hide in the bush before ixhegu returned.

$you saw all this, Pungushe?  Mark asked.  What I did not see, I read in
the spoor.  Now I understand about the fourth man.  Tell me what
happened that dayIxhegu was sitting there, smoking his pipe, Pungushe
pointed down into the water-course.  And the silent one came and stood
here, even where we now sit, and he looked down at your grandfather
without speaking, holding his isibamu, his rifle, thus.  What did ixhegu
do then?  Mark asked.  He felt nauseous with the horror of it.  He
looked up and asked a question in a loud voice, as a man does when he is
afraid, but the silent one did not reply.  Then?  I am sorry, jamela,
knowing that ixhegu was of your blood, the telling o it gives me pain.
Go on, said Mark.  Then the silent one fired once with his rifle, and
ixhegu fell face down in the sand.  He was dead?  Mark asked, and
Pungushe was silent a moment.  He was not dead.  He was shot here, in
the belly.  He moved, he cried out.  The silent one fired again?  Mark
felt the acid bite of vomit in the back of his throat.

Pungushe shook his head.  What did he do?  He sat down on the bank, here
where we sit, and he smoked silently, watching the old man ixhegu lying
down there in the sand, until he died.  How long did he take to die?
Mark asked in a choked, angry voice.

Pungushe swept a segment of the sky to indicate two hours of the sun's
course.  At the end ixhegu was calling out in Zulu as well as his own
language.  What did he say, Pungushe?  He asked for water, and he called
to God and to a woman who might have been his mother or his wife.  Then
he died.  Mark thought about it with surges of nausea alternating with
flashes of bitter hating anger, and racking grief.  He tried to imagine
why the killer had let his victim die so slowly, and it was many minutes
before he remembered that the story must have already been arranged that
the old man was to die in a hunting accident.  No man accidentally
shoots himself twice.  The body was to have only one gunshot wound.

But, the stomach was always the most agonizing wound.  Mark remembered
how the got -wounded screamed in the trenches as they were being carried
back by the stretcher-bearers.

grieve with you, jarnela.

mark roused himself at Pungushe's words.  What happened after ixhegu
died?  The other two men, the old bald one and the young loud one, came
from the camp.  All three of them talked here, beside the body.  They
talked for a long time, with shouting and red angry faces, and they
waved their hands thus, and thus.  Pungushe imitated men in heated
argument.  One pointed here, another pointed there, but in the end the
silent one spoke and the other two listened.  Where did they take him?
First they opened his pockets, and took from them some papers and a
pouch.  They argued again, and the silent one took the papers and put
them back in the dead man's pockets, Mark realized the wisdom of this.
An honest man does not rob the corpse of an accident victim.  Then they
carried him up the bank, and this way, Pungushe stood and led Mark four
hundred yards into the forest, below the first steep gradient of the
escarpment.  Here they found a deep ant-bear hole, and they pushed the
old man's body down into it.  Here?  Mark asked.  There was short rank
grass and no sign of a cairn nor a mound.  I see nothing.  They
collected rocks from the cliff there and placed them in the hole on top
of the body, so that the hyena would not dig it out.  Then they covered
the rocks with earth, and they smoothed it with a tree branch.

Mark went down on one knee and inspected the ground.  Yes, he exclaimed.
There was a very shallow depression in the earth, as though it had
subsided a little over an excavation.

Mark drew his sheath-knife and blazed four of the nearest trees, making
it easier to return to this place, and he built a small pyramid of rocks
on the depressed saucer of earth.

When he had finished, he asked Pungushe, Why did you not tell anybody of
this before?  Why did you not go to the police in Ladyburg?

jamela, the madness of white men does not concern me.

Also it is a very long journey to Ladyburg, to the policeman who would
say, Ho, kaffir, and what were you doing in the Bubezi Valley to see
such strange events?  Pungushe shook his head.  No, jamela, sometimes it
better for a man to be blind and deaf.  Tell me truly, Pungusbe.  If you
saw these men again, would you remember them?  All white men have faces
like boiled yams, red, lumpy and without shape.  Then Pungushe
remembered his manners.  Except you, jamela, who are not so ugly as all
thatThank you, Pungushe.  So you would not know them again?  The old
bald one and the young loud one I might know Pungushe furrowed his brow
in thought.

And the silent one?  Mark asked.  Ho.  Pungushe's brow cleared.  Does
one forget what a leopard looks like?  Does one forget the killer of
men?  The silent one I would remember at any time and in any place.
Good!  Mark nodded.  Go back home now, Pungushe.  He waited until the
big Zulu was out of sight among the trees, then Mark went down on his
knees and removed his hat.  Well, Pops, he said, I'm not very good at
this.  But I know you'd have liked to have the words said.  His voice
was so hoarse and low that he had to clear his throat loudly before he
went on.

The house on Lion Kop was shuttered, and the furniture all under white
dust sheets, but the head servant met Mark in the kitchen yard.  Nkosi
has gone to Tekweni.  He left two weeks ago.

He gave Mark a breakfast of grilled bacon and fried eggs.

Then Mark went out and mounted his motorcycle again.

It was a long hard run down to the coast, and Mark had plenty of time to
think as the dusty miles spun away under the wheels of the Ariel Square
Four.

He had left Chaka's Gate within hours of finding the old man's grave,
going instinctively to one man for advice and guidance.

He had wanted Marion to come with him, at least as far as Ladyburg where
she could have stayed with her sister.

However Marion had refused to leave her home or her garden, and Mark had
felt secure in the knowledge that Pungushe would be sleeping in the
toolshed behind the stables to guard the homestead in Mark's absence.

Mark had waded the river and trudged up the slope below to the beginning
of the track where he kept the motorcycle in its thatched shelter.

It had been a slow, bumpy journey in the dark, and he had reached Lion
Kop in the dawn to find Sean Courtney had moved his household to Durban.

Mark rode through the gates of Emoyeni in the late afternoon, and it was
like coming home again.

Ruth Courtney was in the rose garden, but she dropped the basket of cut
flowers and lifted her skirts to her knees as she ran to meet him, the
wide-brimmed straw hat flying from her head and hanging by its ribbon
around her throat and her delighted spontaneous laughter ringing like a
young girl's.  Oh Mark, we've missed you so.  She took him in a motherly
embrace, kissing both his cheeks.  How brown and hard you look, and
you've filled out beautifully.  She held him at arm's length and felt
his biceps in mock admiration before embracing him again.  The General
will be delighted to see you.  She took Mark's arm and led him towards
the house.  He hasn't been well, Mark, but seeing you again will be a
tonic to him.  Mark stopped involuntarily in the doorway and felt the
shock dry the saliva under his tongue.

General Sean Courtney was an old man.  He sat at the bay windows of the
bedroom suite.  He wore a plaid dressing-gown and a mohair rug was
tucked around his legs.

On the table beside him was a pile of files and reports, Parliamentary
White Papers and a sheath of letters, all the documentation of his life
that Mark remembered so well, but the General had fallen asleep, and the
metal-rimmed spectacles had slid down on to the tip of his nose.  He
snored softly, his lips fluttering at each breath.  His face seemed to
have wasted so that the bones of cheek and brow stood out gauntly.  His
eyes receded into deep plum purple cavities, and his skin had a greyish
lifeless tinge to it.

But the truly shocking thing was the colour of his beard and the once
thick bush of his hair.  On Sean Courtney the late snows were falling.
His beard had turned into a silver cascade, and his hair was as white
and as thin as the fine sun-bleached grasses of the Kalahari desert.

Ruth crossed to his chair and lifted the spectacles off his nose, then
gently, with a loving wife's concern, she touched his shoulder.  Sean,
darling.  There is somebody here to see you.

He woke the way an old man wakes, blinking and mumbling, with small
inconclusive movements of his hands.

Then he saw Mark and his expression firmed, suddenly there was a little
of the old sparkle in the dark eyes and the warmth in his smile.  My
boy!  he said, lifting his hands, and Mark stepped forward quite
naturally.  Then for the first time they embraced like father and son,
and afterwards Sean beamed at him fondly.  I was beginning to believe we
had lost you for ever to the ways of the wild.  Then he looked up at
Ruth beside his chair.  In celebration I think we can advance the hour a
little, my dear.  Won't you have Joseph bring up the tray?  Sean, you
know what the doctor said yesterday.  But Sean snorted with disgust. For
fifty years, man and boy, my stomach has got used to its evening dash of
John Haig pinch bottle.  Lack of it will kill me more swiftly and surely
than Doctor Henderson and all his pills and potions and blatant
quackeries.  He placed one arm about her waist and squeezed her
winningly.  There's a bonnie girl!  When Ruth had gone, smiling and
shaking her head disapprovingly, Sean waved Mark to the chair opposite
him.  What does the doctor say is wrong with you, sir?  Doctor!  Sean
blew through his lips.  The older I get, the less faith I have in the
whole sorry bunch.  He reached for the cigar box.  They even wanted me
to stop these.  What on earth is the use of living, if you have to give
up all the processes of life -I ask you.  He lit the cigar with a
flourish and drew on it with relish.  I'll tell you what's wrong with
me, son. Too many years of running hard, of fighting and riding and
working. That's all it is.  Now I'm having a nice little rest, and in a
week or so I'll be chipper and fly as I ever was.  Ruth brought the
silver tray and they sat until it was dark, talking and laughing.  Mark
told them of the life at Chaka's Gate, about each little triumph,
describing the cottage and the work done on the roads; he told them of
the buffalo and the lioness and the cubs, and Sean told him of the
progress made by their Wildlife Society.

It's disappointing, Mark, nothing like I had hoped for.

It's extraordinary just how little people care about things that don't
affect their daily lives directly.  I never expected instant success.
How can people care about something they have never seen?  Once we have
made the wilderness accessible, once people can have the experience,
like seeing these cubs, it will begin then.  Yes, Sean agreed
thoughtfully.  That's what the true object of the Society is.  To
educate them.  They talked on while darkness fell and Ruth closed the
shutters and drew the curtains.  Mark waited for an opportunity to speak
of the true reason for his coming to Emoyeni, but he was uncertain of
how it might affect a man who was already sick.

At last he could wait no longer.  He drew a deep breath, hoped for
grace, and told it quickly and without trimmings, repeating Pungushe's
story exactly and describing what he had seen himself.

When he finished, Sean was silent for a long time, staring into his
glass.  At last he roused himself and began asking questions, shrewd
cutting questions that showed his mind was as quick and crisp as it had
been before.

Have you opened the grave?  and Mark shook his head.  Good, said Sean
and went on.  This Zulu, Pungushe, was the only witness.  How reliable
is he?  They discussed it for another half hour, before Sean asked the
one question he had obviously been avoiding.

You think Dirk Courtney is responsible for this?

Yes, Mark nodded.  What proof is there?  He is the only one who could
have profited by my grandfather's murder, and the style is his.  I asked
what proof there is, Mark.  There is none, he admitted, and Sean was
silent again while he weighed it all.  Mark, I understand just how you
feel, and I think you know how I feel.  However, there is nothing we can
do now that will have any effect, beyond alerting the murderer, whoever
he is.  He leaned forward in his chair and stretched out a hand to grip
Mark's forearm in a gesture of comfort.  All we have now is the
unsupported testimony of a Zulu poacher who speaks no English.  A good
lawyer would eat him without spitting out the bones, and Dirk Courtney
would have the best lawyer, even if we could trace this mysterious
"Silent One" to him and get him into court.  We need more than this,
Mark.  I know, Mark nodded.  But I thought we might be able to trace the
Greyling father and son.  They went to Rhodesia, I believe.  The foreman
at Ladyburg railway station told me that.  Yes, I'll get somebody on to
that.  My lawyers will know a good investigator.  He made a note on the
pad at his side.  But in the meantime, we can only wait.  They talked
on, but it was clear that the discussion had tired Sean Courtney, and
grey and blue shadows etched the lines and wrinkles on his face.  He
settled down a little deeper in his chair, his beard lowered on to his
chest and suddenly he had fallen asleep again.  He sagged slowly
sideways, the crystal glass fell from his hand to the carpet with a soft
thud and splattered a few drops of whisky, and he snored a soft single
snort.

Ruth picked up the glass, arranged the rug carefully around his
shoulders and signalled Mark to follow her.

In the passage she chatted brightly.  I have told Joseph to make up your
bed in the blue room, and there is a good hot bath waiting.  There will
be only the two of us for dinner, Mark.  The General will have a tray in
his room.  They had reached the door of the library and Mark could be
silent no longer.  He caught Ruth's arm.  Mrs Courtney, he pleaded. What
is it?  What is wrong with him?  The bright smile faded slowly, and she
swayed slightly on her feet.  Now for the first time he noticed how the
few strands of white .  had turned to deep iron grey wings at her
temples.  He saw also the little lines and creases around her eyes, and
the deeper furrows of worry across her brow.  His heart is broken, she
said simply, and then she was weeping.  No hysterical sobs or wild cries
of grief, but a slow deep welling up of tears that was more harrowing,
more poignant than any theatrical display.  They have broken his heart,
she repeated, and swayed again, so that Mark caught and steadied her.

She clung to him, her face pressed to his shoulder.  First the
estrangement from Dirk and then Michael's death, she whispered.  He
never let it show, but they destroyed some part of him.  Now the whole
world has turned against him.  The people to whom he has devoted his
life in peace and war.  The newspapers call him the Butcher of
Fordsburg, Dirk Courtney has whipped them upon him like a pack of wild
dogs.  He led her into the library and made her sit on the low buttoned
sofa while he knelt beside her and found a crumpled handkerchief in his
jacket pocket.  on top of it all, there is Storm.  The way she ran off
and married that man.  He was a horrible man, Mark.  He even came here
asking for money, and there was a terrible scene.

That's when Sean had his first attack, that night.  Then finally there
was further shame, further heartbreak when Storm was divorced.  It was
all too much, even for a man like Sean.

Mark stared at her.  Storm is divorced?  he asked softly.

Yes, Ruth nodded, and then her expression lightened.  Oh Mark, I know
you and Storm were becoming such good friends.  I am sure she is fond of
you.  Can't you go to her?  it might be the cure for which we all pray.
Umhlanga Rocks was one of those little seaside villages that were
scattered along the sandy coast line on each side of the main port of
Durban.  Mark crossed the low bridge over the Umgeni River, and headed
north.

The road cut through the thick jungly coastal bush, dense as an
equatorial forest, and hung with ropes of hanas from which the little
blue vervet monkeys swung and chattered.

The road ran parallel with the white beaches, but at the twelfth
milestone Mark reached the turn-off and went directly down to the coast.

The village was clustered around the iron-roofed Oyster Box Hotel where
Mark and Dicky Lancome had danced and dined with Marion and that other
nameless girl so long ago.

The only other buildings were twenty or thirty cottages set in large
gardens, over-run by the rampant jungle, and overlooking the sea with
its rowdy frothing surf and rocky points jutting out from the smooth
white beaches.

Ruth had given him accurate directions andMark parked the motorcycle on
the narrow dusty lane and followed the pathway that wound without
apparent direction through a wild garden of purple bougainvillaea and
brilliant poinsettia.

The cottage was small, and the bougainvillaea had climbed up the pillars
of the veranda and spread in brilliant, almost blinding display across
the thatched roof.

Mark knew at once that he had the right place, for Storm's Cadillac was
parked in the open under the trees.

It looked neglected and in careless disrepair.  The tread was worn from
the tyres, there was a long deep scratch down one side.  A side window
was cracked, and the paintwork was dull with dust and splattered with
the dung of the fruit bats hanging in the tree above.

Mark stopped and stared at the Cadillac for a full minute.

The Storm he had known would have stamped her foot and screamed for her
father if anybody had tried to make her ride in that.

Mark climbed the veranda steps, and paused to look about him.  It was a
peaceful and lovely spot, such as an artist might choose, but in its
remoteness and its neglected and untrimmed profusion hardly suitable for
one of the elegant young ornaments of society.

Mark knocked on the front door, and heard somebody moving about inside
for some minutes before the door was opened.

Storm was more beautiful by far than he had remembered.  Her hair was
long and bleached at the ends by salt water and sun.  Her feet were
bare, her arms and legs were tanned and slim and supple as ever, but it
was her face that had changed.

Although she wore no cosmetics, the skin had the shine of vibrant youth
like the lustre inside a sea shell, and her eyes were clear and bright
with health, yet there were new depths to them, the petulant set of her
mouth had softened, her arrogance had become dignity.

in that moment as they stared at each other he knew that she had indeed
grown from girl to woman in the time since he had last seen her.  And he
sensed that the process had been agonizing, but that from it all was
emerging a new value, a new strength, and the love which had been in him
all this time spread out to fill his soul.  Storm, he said, and her eyes
opened wide as she stared at him.  You!  Her voice was a little cry of
pain, and she tried to drag the door closed.

Mark jumped forward and held it.  Storm, I must speak with you.

She tugged desperately at the door handle.  Go away, Mark.  Please go
away.  All the new dignity and poise seemed to crumble and she looked at
him with the wide frightened eyes of a child waking from nightmare.

At last she knew that she could not force the door against his strength,
and she turned away and walked slowly back into the house.  You
shouldn't have come, she said miserably, and the child seemed to sense
the changed air.  It squalled.  Oh hush, baby, Storm called softly, but
her voice goaded it into a fresh outburst, and she crossed the room on
bare feet with the long veil of hair hanging down her back.

The room was starkly furnished, the cement floor bare and cool, no rugs
to soften them, but along the walls were stacked her canvases, many of
them blank, but others half-finished, or completed, and the familiar
evocative smell of turpentine was heavy and pungent.

The child lay belly down on a kaross of monkey skins laid out on the
cement floor.  Legs and arms were spread in that froglike baby attitude,
and except for a towelling napkin around the hips, it was naked and
suntanned.  The head was thrown back angrily, and the face flushed with
the force of its yells.

Mark stepped into the room, and stared with sickly fascination at the
child.  He knew nothing of babies, but he could see that this was a
sturdy and aggressively healthy small animal.  The limbs were strong,
kicking and working with a violent swimming motion, and the back was
broad and robust.  Hush now, darling, cooed Storm, she knelt beside him,
and lifted him under the armpits.  The napkin slid down to the child's
knees and there was no doubting that he was a boy.  His tiny penis stuck
out at half mast, like a white finger with its little floppy chef's cap
of loose wrinkled skin.

Mark found himself hating this Other man's child, with a sudden
frightening hatred.  Yet he went forward involuntarily to where Storm
knelt with the baby in her lap.

Mother's touch had quelled the shouts of anger, and now the boy was
smacking his lips and making little anticipatory hunger grants and
pawing demandingly at Storm's bosom.

The child had a fine golden cap of hair, through which Mark could see
the perfect round of his skull and the little blue veins under the
almost translucent skin.  Now that the furious crimson tide of anger had
receded from his face, Mark saw how beautiful was the child, as
beautiful as the mother, and he hated it, he hated it with a bitter
sickening feeling in his stomach, and a corrosive taste in his mouth.

He moved closer, watching Storm wipe a dribble of saliva from the
child's chin and hoist up his napkin to his waist.

The child became aware of a stranger.  He started and lifted his head to
stare at Mark, and there was something hauntingly familiar in that face.
The eyes that looked at him had looked at him before, he knew them so
well.  You should not have come, said Storm, busy with her baby, not
able to lift her eyes to him. Oh God, Mark, why did you come?  Mark went
down on one knee and stared into the child's face, and it reached out
towards him with a pair of plump hands, dimpled and pink and damp with
spit, What is his name? Mark asked.  Where had he seen those eyes?
involuntarily, he extended his forefinger and the child grabbed it with
a fat little chuckle and tried to stuff it into his mouth.

john, Storm.  answered, still not looking at him.

John was my grandfather's name, Mark said huskily.  Yes, whispered
Storm.  You told me.  The words meant nothing for a moment, all he was
aware of was that the hatred he felt for this little scrap of humanity
slowly faded.  In its place there grew something else.

Then suddenly he knew where he had seen those eyes.

Storm?  he asked.

Now she lifted her head, and stared into his face.  When she replied she
was half proud and half defiant.

Yes!  she said, and nodded once.

He reached for her clumsily.  They knelt facing each other on the
monkey-skin kaross, and they embraced fiercely, the child held awkwardly
between them, gurgling and hiccuping and drooling merrily as it chewed
Mark's finger with greedy toothless gums.  Oh God, Mark, what have I
done to us?  whispered Storm brokenly.

Baby John woke them in the silvery slippery-grey light of before dawn.
Mark was grateful to him, for he did not want to miss a minute of that
coming day.  He watched Storm light the candle and then work over the
cradle.

She made small soothing sounds as she changed the baby, and the
candlelight glowed on the sweet clean lines of her naked back.  Dark
silky hair hung over her shoulders, and he saw that childbirth had not
thickened her waist, it still had the flared graceful line, like the
neck of a wine bottle above the tight round double, bulge-, of her
buttocks.

At last she turned and carried the baby to the bed, smiling at Mark as
he lifted the blankets for her.  Breakfast time, she explained.  Will
excuse us, please?  She sat cross-legged in the bed, and she took one of
her nipples between thumb and forefinger and directed it into the open
questing mouth.

Mark drew as close as he could and placed one arm around Storm's
shoulders.  He watched with total fascination.  Her breasts were big
now, and heavy, jutting out into rounded cones.  There was a pale blue
dappling of active veins deep below the skin, and the nipples were'the
colour of almost ripe mulberries, with the same rough shiny texture. The
child's tugging induced a sympathetic blue-white drop of milk to well,
from the tip of her other breast.  It glistened likeke a pearl in the
candlelight.

John fed with tightly closed eyes and piglet grunts and snuffles.  The
milk ran from the corners of his mouth, and after the first pangs of his
hunger were appeased, Storm had to prod him to keep him from falling
asleep again.

At each prod, his jaw worked-busily for a minute or so, and then the
level of activity slowly declined until the next prod.

Storm changed him from one breast to the other and laid her own cheek
gratefully against the hard lean muscle of Mark's chest.  I think I am
happy, she murmured.  But I've been unhappy for so long that I am not
quite sure.  John lay in a puddle of sea water two inches deep.  He was
stark naked and brown all over to prove this was no unusual state.  He
slapped at the water with both hands, and it splashed into his face so
that he gasped and blinked his eyes and licked his lips, uncertain
whether to be angry or to cry.  Instead he repeated the experiment with
exactly the same consequences, and he spluttered sand and sea water.
Poor little devil, Storm watched him.  He has inherited the Courtney
pride and stubbornness.  He won't give up until he drowns himself.  She
lifted him from the puddle and there was instantly such a howl of
protest that she had to return him hurriedly.  I am sure if you went to
the General, with John, Mark persevered.  You don't really understand us
Courtneys.  Storm sat back and began to plait her hair over one
shoulder.  We don't forget or forgive that easily.  Storm, won't you try
it?  Please go to him.  I know exactly how he is, Mark.  Better than
you, better than Daddy knows himself, I know him so well as I do myself,
because we are one person.  I am he, and he is me.

If I go to him now, having done what I did, having insulted him, having
destroyed all the dreams he wove about me if I go now, when I am
destitute of pride and honour, if I go as a beggar, he will despise me
for ever.  No, Storm, you are wrong.  On this I am never wron& Mark
darling.  He would not want to despise me, just as he does not want to
hate me now, but he would not be able to help himself.  He is Sean
Courtney, and he is trapped in the steel jaws of his own honour.  He is
a sick man, you must give him the chance.  No, Mark.  It would kill him.
I know that, and it would destroy me.  For both our sakes, I dare not go
to him now.  You don't know how much he cares for you.  Oh I do, Mark. I
also know how much I care for him and one day, when I am proud again, I
will go to him.  I promise you that.  When I know he can be proud of me,
I will take him that as a gift.  Oh damn you and your stiff cruel pride,
you nearly destroyed us with it also.  Come, Mark, she stood up. Take
John's other hand.

They walked the child between them along the firm sand at the edge of
the surf.  He hung on their hands, leaning forward to watch his own feet
appear and disappear magically below him, and he let out great shouts of
triumph at his accomplishment.

The day was bright and clean, and the gulls caught the wind and rode
above them on smoky white wings, answering the child's shouts with their
own harsh cries.  Oh, I had so many fine clothes and fancy friends.
Storm watched the gulls.  I sold the clothes and lost the friends, and
found how little any of it really meant to me.  Look at the gulls!  she
said, head thrown back.  See the sunlight through the spread feathers. I
was so busy that I never had time to see clearly before.  I never saw
myself, not, those around me.  But now I am learning to look.  I saw
that in your painting, Mark said, and lifted John to his chest,
delighting in the hot restless little body.  You are painting different
subjects.  I want to be a great artist.  I think you will be.  That
Courtney stubbornness again.  We don't always get what we want, she told
him, and the spent surf came sliding up the beach and creamed around
their ankles.

The child slept face down on the monkey-skin kaross, exhausted with sun
and sea and play, his belly bulging with food.

Storm worked at the easel under the window with narrowed eyes and cocked
head.

You are my favourite model, she said.  That's just because I'm so cheap
And she laughed lightly.

With what I pay you, I could be rich, she pointed out.  You know what
they call ladies who do it for money?

Mark asked lazily and relapsed into silence, giving himself up to the
full pleasure of watching her and they were silent for nearly an hour,
silent but close and Spiritually in tune.

Mark spoke at last.  I know what you mean by seeing more clearly now.
That one, he pointed at one of the larger canvases against the wall,
that's probably the best thing you've ever done.  I hated to sell it,
the man who bought it is coming tomorrow.  You've sold some of your
paintings?  he was startled.  How do you think John and I live?  I don't
know.  He hadn't thought about that.  I supposed your husband.  Her
expression changed, darkening swiftly.  I want nothing from him.  And
she tossed her head so that the braid of hair flicked like the tail of
an angry lioness.  I want nothing from him, and his friends, and my
loving friends, all those nice loyal people who stay away from me in
droves now that I am the scarlet divorcee.  I've learned a lot since
last I saw you, and especially I have learned about that kind of person.
They are rich, Mark pointed out.  You once told me how important that
is.  The dark anger went out of her, and she drooped a little, the brush
falling to her side.  Oh Mark, please don't be bitter with me. I don't
think I could stand that.  He felt something tear in his chest, and he
rose swiftly and went to her, picked her up with a swing of his
shoulders and carried her high, through the curtained doorway into the
small cool dark bedroom.

It was strange, but their love-making was never the same, always there
were new wonders, new accords of desire, the discovery of some little
things that excited them both beyond all relation to its apparent
significance.

Repetition could not weary nor dull the appetite they had for each
other, and even as that appetite was totally satiated, so the endless
well of their mutual desire began to fill again.

It would start again immediately with the lazy touch of fingers as they
lay curled together like sleepy puppies, the sweat of their loving
cooling on their skin, raising little goose bumps around the dark rosy
aureoles of her nipples.

A finger drawn lightly down his cheek, rasping on the sandpaper of his
beard, and then pushing lightly between his lips, making him turn his
head for another gentle kiss, a mere touch of lips and the mingling of
their breath so that he could smell that peculiar perfume of passion
from her mouth, a smell like newly dug truffles, a mushroorny exciting
smell.

She saw the new spark of interest in his eyes and drew softly away to
chuckle at him, a throaty sensuous sound, and she drew one sharp
finger-nail swiftly down his spine so that little sparks of fire flew
along his nerves and his back arched.

I am going to claw you because you deserve it, you randy old tomcat. She
made a growly sound in her throat and curled her nails into a lion's
claw, drawing it lightly across his shoulder, and then hard down his
belly, so that her nails left red lines against the skin.

She studied the red lines, with her lips parted and the tip of her pink
tongue touching her small white teeth.  The nipples of her breast
swelled as she watched, growing like new buds, as though they were about
to burst.  She saw the direction of his eyes, and she put her hand
behind his head, drawing him-in down gently, pulling back her shoulder
so that the heavy rounded bosom was offered like a sacrifice.

Mark took some of the big scaly crayfish from the lowtide pools, and
they smelled of kelp and iodine, thumping their tails furiously in his
grip, snapping their legs and bubbling at the small mouths with their
multiple mandibles.

Mark rose, streaming salt water, from the depths of the pool and handed
them up to Storm, who squealed with excitement on the rocky edge of the
pool and took them gingerly, using her straw hat as a glove against the
spiky carapace and waving legs.

Mark built a fire in a scooped fireplace in the sand, while Storm held
John on her lap and fed him through a discreetly unbuttoned blouse,
offering advice and ribald comment as he worked.

Mark threw wet seaweed over the coals, put the crayfish on top of that
and covered them with another layer of seaweed, topping it off with a
final layer of sand, and while they waited for the crayfish to cook and
John to finish his noisy guzzling, they drank wine and watched the
setting sun turn the sea clouds into a brilliant display.  God, Nature's
an old ham.  If I painted like that, they'd say I had no sense of
colour, and I could go work for a chocolate company painting boxes.
Afterwards, Storm lay John in the apple basket that served as a portable
cradle and they ate crayfish, pulling the long luscious sticks of white
meat from the horny legs and washing it down with the tart white Cape
wine.

In the darkness the stars were stark pricks of brilliant white, and the
su boomed in long soft phosphorescent lines.  It's so wonderfully
romantic.  Storm watched it, sitting hugging her knees, and then turned
her head and smiled wickedly.  And you can take that as a hint, if you
want to On the rug together she said, Do you know what some people do?
No what do some people do?  Mark seemed more interested in what he was
doing than the actions of the nameless somebodies.  You don't expect me
just to say it out like that. Why not?  It's rude.  All right, so
whisper it.  So she whispered it, but she was giggling so much that he
was not sure he had heard right.

She repeated it, and he had heard right.  He was truly stunned, so that
he found himself blushing in the dark.  That's terrible, he answered
huskily.  You would never do that!  However, he was over the first
shock, and the idea intrigued him.  of course not, she whispered, and
then after a silence, Unless of course you want to.  There was another
long silence during which Storm made some investigations.  If I'm any
judge, and I should be by now, you want to, she stated flatly, Long
afterwards, naked in the dark, they swam together out beyond the first
line of breakers. The water was warm as fresh milk and they trod water
to kiss with wet salty lips.

On the beach Mark built up the fire and they sat close to it, cuddled
together in the yellow light of the flames, and they drank the rest of
the wine.  Mark, she said at last, and there was a sadness in her voice
that he had never heard before.  You have been with us two days now,
which is two days too much.  Tomorrow I want you to go.  Go early before
John and I are awake, so we don't have to watch you.  Her words struck
like a lash so that he writhed at the sting.  He turned to her with a
stricken face in the firelight.

What are you saying?  You and John are mine.  We belong together the
three of us, always.  You didn't understand a word of what I was saying,
did you?  she asked softly.  You didn't understand when I said I must
rebuild my pride, refashion my honour?  I love you, Storm.  I have
always loved you.  You are married to somebody else, Mark.  That doesn't
mean anything, he pleaded.  Oh yes, it does.  She shook her head.  And
you know it does.  I will leave Marion.  Divorce, Mark?  Yes.  He was
desperate.  I'll ask her for a divorce.  That way we can both be truly
proud.  That will be a fine way for me to go to my father.  Think how
proud we will make him.  His daughter, and the son he never had, for
that's the way he thinks of you, both of them divorced.

Think of baby John.  How high he will hold his head.  Think of us, what
a noble life we can build on the misery of the girl who was your wife.
Looking into her eyes in the firelight, he saw that her pride was iron
and her stubbornness was as steel.

Mark dressed quietly in the dark, and when he was ready he groped his
way to the cradle and kissed his son.  The child made a little
whimpering sound in his sleep, and he smelt warm and milky, like a
new-born kitten.

He thought that Storm was sleeping also as he stooped over her, but then
he realized that she was lying rigidly with her face pressed into the
pillow to stifle the harsh silent sobs that convulsed her.

She did not lift her face to him and he kissed her hair and her neck,
then he straightened up and walked out into the dark.  The motorcycle
started at the first kick and he wheeled it out into the lane.

Storm lay in the dark and listened to the sound of the engine die away
into the night, and afterwards there was only the lonely mournful sound
of the surf and the clink of the tree frogs outside the window.

Mark sat on the carved wooden stool in the sunset, in front of
Pungushe's hut, and he asked for the first time something that had been
in his mind since their first meeting.  Pungushe, tell me of the time
when the Jackal pulled the Ngaga from the flooding river.  And the Zulu
shrugged.  What is there to tell? I found you caught in the branches of
a flooded tree on the edge of the river, and if I had sense, I would
have walked away, for you were clearly a very dead Ngaga and the brown
water was washing over your head.  Did you see how it was that I fell
into the river?  There was a pause, while Pungushe steeled himself to
admit ignorance.  It seemed to me that you had been blinded with fever
and fallen into the river.  You did not see the man I killed, nor the
man that fired at me with a rifle? Pungushe covered his amazement nobly,
but shook his head.  A little time before I found you in the river I
heard the sound of guns, four, perhaps five shots, from up the valley.
This must have been you and the one who hunted you, but I saw no man and
the rain washed away all sign, before the next morning.  The flood
waters would have washed the dead man away and the crocodiles eaten him.
They were silent again while the beer pot passed between them.

Did you see the man who fired at you?  Pungushe asked.  Yes, said Mark.
But my eyes were weak with fever, and as you say, it was raining.  I did
not see him clearly.  Hobday stood within the hall, against the wall,
out of the crush of excited bodies.  He stood like a rock, solid and
immovable, his head lowered on the thick wrestler's neck.

His eyes were hooded, as though he were able like a great bird of prey
to draw an opaque nictitating membrane across them.  Only his jaw made
an almost imperceptible chewing motion, grinding the big flat teeth
together so that the muscle in the points of his jaw bulged slightly.

He was watching Dirk Courtney across the crowded hall, the way a
faithful mastiff watches its master.

Tall and urbane, Dirk Courtney had a warm double handshake for each of
those who crowded forward to assure him of support and to wish him luck.
His gaze was straight and calm, but it kept flicking back to the long
counting tables.

They were trestle tables that had done duty at a thousand church
socials, and as many weddings.

Now the scrutineers sat along them, and the last ballot boxes from the
outlying areas were carried in through the front doors of the Ladyburg
Church Hall.

The sprawling shape of the constituency of Ladyburg meant that some of
the boxes had come in sixty miles, and although the voting had closed
the previous evening, it was now an hour before noon and no result had
yet been announced.

Mark crossed slowly towards where General Sean Courtney sat, pushing his
way gently through the throng that lined the roped-off area around the
counting tables.

Mark and Marion had come in from Chaka's Gate three days before,
especially to assist at the elections.  There were never enough helpers,
and Marion had been completely at home, cutting sandwiches and
dispensing coffee, working with twenty other women under Ruth Courtney's
supervision in the kitchens behind the hall.

Mark had scoured the village district with other party organizers.  Like
a press gang, they had hunted down missing or recalcitrant voters and
brought them into the ballot stations.

It had been hard work, and then none of them had slept much the previous
night.  The dancing and barbecue had lasted until four in the morning,
and after that the anticipation of the announcement of the result had
kept most of them from sleep.

For Mark it all had a special significance.  He knew now with complete
certainty, that if Dirk Courtney was returned as the member of
Parliament for Ladyburg, then his dreams for Chaka's Gate were doomed.

As the voters had come in during the day, their hopes had see-sawed up
and down.  Often it seemed that the end of the hall where Dirk
Courtney's organizers sat under huge posters of their candidate was as
crowded as Sean Courtney's end of the hall was deserted.

When this happened, Marion's brother-in-law, Peter Botes, removed his
pipe from his mouth and smirked comfortably at Mark across the length of
the hall.  He had become an enthusiastic supporter of Dirk Courtney's,
and his circumstances had altered remarkably in the last six months.  He
had opened offices of his own on the first floor of the Ladyburg Farmers
Bank.  He drove a new Packard and had moved from the cottage to a fine
rambling house in three acres of garden and orchard, where he had
insisted that Marion and Mark dine with him the previous night.  The
evening star sets, the morning star rises, my dear Mark.  The wise man
recognizes that, he had sermonized as he carved the roast.  General
Courtney's star has not set yet, said Mark stubbornly.  Not yet, agreed
Peter.  But when it does, you will need new friends.  Powerful friends.
You can always rely on us, said Marion's sister kindly.  You don't
always have to live out there in the bush. You don't understand, Mark
interrupted quietly.  My life's work is out there, in the bush.  Oh, I
wouldn't bank on that.  Peter heaped slices of roast beef onto Mark's
plate.  There are going to be changes in the Ladyburg district when Mr
Dirk Courtney takes over.  Big changes! Besides, it isn't fair on poor
Marion.  No woman wants to live out there.  Oh, I am quite happy
wherever Mark wants to go, Marion murmured.  Don't worry, Peter assured
them.  We'll look after you.

And he patted Mark's shoulder in a brotherly fashion.  Mr Dirk Courtney
thinks the world of Peter said his wife proudly.

Now as Mark crossed the hall towards General Sean Courtney, he felt the
heavy doughy feeling of dread in his guts.  He did not want to bear the
tidings he had for the General, yet he knew it was better that they came
gently from a friend, rather than in gloating triumph from an enemy.

He paused to watch Sean Courtney from a distance, feeling both pity and
anger.  Sean had rallied strongly since those low days at Emoyeni.  His
shoulders had regained some of that wide rakish set, and his face had
filled out.

Some of the gaunt shadows had smoothed away, and he had been in the sun
again.  The skin was tanned brown against the silver of his beard and
his hair.

Yet he was seated now.  The strain of the last few days had taxed him
sorely.  He sat erect on a hard-backed chair, both hands resting on the
silver head of his cane.  With him were many of his old friends who had
gathered to give him support, and he listened seriously to his brother
Garrick who sat in the chair beside him, nodding his agreement.

Mark did not want to go to him, he wanted to delay the moment, but then
there was a stir across the hall.  Mark saw Peter Botes scurrying across
to where Dirk Courtney stood, and his face was bright scarlet with
excitement.  He spoke rapidly, gesticulating widely, and Dirk Courtney
leaned forward to listen eagerly.

Mark could not delay a moment longer.  He hurried forward and Sean saw
him coming.  Well, my boy, come and sit a while.  They tell me the
voting is extremely close so far, but we'll have the result before noon.
Then he saw Mark's face.  What is it?  he demanded harshly.

Mark stooped over him, his mouth almost touching the General's ear, and
his voice croaked in his own ears.  It's just come in on the telegraph,
General.  We have lost Johannesburg Central, Doornfontein and Jeppe,
They were all solid safe Smuts seats, they had been South Africa Party
since Union in 19 10, and now they were gone. It was a-disaster, a
stunning catastrophe.  Sean gripped Mark's forearm as if to take
strength from him, and his hand shook in a gentle palsy.

Across the hall they heard the wild gloating cheers start ringing out,
and Mark had to hurry.  That's not all, sir.  General Smuts himself has
lost his seat.  The nation had rejected them, the coalition of the
Labour and the National Party under Hertzog were sweeping; into power.
My God, muttered Sean.  It's come.  I didn't believe it possible.

Still gripping Mark's arm, he pulled himself to his feet.  Help me out
to the car, my boy.  I don't think I can bring myself to congratulate
the new member for Ladyburg.  But they were too late.  The announcement
came before they reached the door.  It was shouted in a stentorian
voice, by the chief scrutineer from the platform at the end of the hall.

Mr Dirk Courtney, National Labour Party: 2683 votes.

General Sean Courtney, South Africa Party: 2441 votes.  I give you the
new member for Ladyburg -'And Dirk Courtney leapt lightly on to the
platform, clasping both hands above his head like a prize-fighter. Well.
There was a twisted grin on Sean's face the skin had that greyish tone
again and his shoulders had slumped.  So, exit the Butcher of Fordsburg,
and Mark took him out to where the Rolls waited in the street.

The champagne was aDorn Perignon of that superb 1904 vintage, and Sean
poured it with his own hands, limping from guest to guest.  I had hoped
to toast victory with it, he smiled. But it will do as well to drown our
sorrows.  There was only a small gathering in the drawing-room of Lion
Kop homestead, and the few attempts at joviality were lost in the huge
room.  The guests left early.  Only the family sat down to dinner, with
Marion in Storm's old seat and Mark between her and Ruth Courtney. Well,
my boy, what are your plans now?  Sean -abruptly asked in one of the
silences, and Mark looked up with genuine astonishment.  We'll be going
back to Chaka's Gate, of course. Of course.  Sean smiled with the first
spontaneous warmth of that dark day.  How foolish of me to think
otherwise.  But you do realize what this, Sean made a gesture with one
hand, unable to say the word defeat, what this could mean for you?  Yes,
sir.  But you still have enormous influence.  There is our Wildlife
Society, we can fight.  We have to fight to keep Chaka's Gate.  Yes,
Sean nodded, and there was a little sparkle in his eyes again.  We'll
fight, but my guess is it will be a hard, dirty fight.  At first there
was no sign of the gathering clouds to darken the tall blue sky above
Chaka's Gate.  The only change was that Mark was submitting his monthly
report, not to Sean Courtney, but to the new Minister of Lands, Peter
Grobler, a staunch Hertzog man.  His reports were acknowledged formally,
but although his salary was still paid regularly by the Department, in a
short official letter Mark was informed that the whole question of the
proclaimed areas was now under consideration at Cabinet level, and that
new legislation would be promulgated at the next session of Parliament.
His appointment as game warden was to be considered a temporary post,
without pension benefits, and subject to monthly notice.

Mark worked on doggedly, but many nights he sat late in the lantern
light writing to General Courtney.  The two of them were planning at
long distance their campaign to awaken public interest in Chaka's Gate,
but when Marion had gone off to bed in the next room, he would take a
fresh page and cover it with the small cramped lines to Storm, pouring
out to her all his thoughts and dreams and love.

Storm never replied to his letters, he was not even certain that she was
still in that thatched cottage above the beach, but he imagined her
there, thinking of her at odd hours of the day and the night, seeing her
working at her easel, or walking the beach with baby John tottering at
her side.  One particular night he lay awake and imagined her in the
tiny shuttered bedroom with the child at her breast, and the image was
too vivid, too painful to allow him sleep.

He rose quietly, left a note for Marion as she slept heavily, and, with
Pungushe trotting at Trojan's head, set off up the valley.

Marion woke an hour after he had gone, and her first waking thought was
that if there was still no show on this morning then it was certain. She
had waited all these weeks for that absolute certainty, before telling
Mark.

Somehow she had been afraid that if she had spoken of it too soon, it
would have been bad luck.

She slipped from the bed and crossed the still dark room to the
bathroom.  When she returned minutes later she was hugging herself with
suppressed joy, and she lit the candle by her bedside, eager to see
Mark's face when she woke him to tell him.

Her disappointment when she saw the empty rumpled bed and the note
propped on the pillow was intense, but lasted only a short while before
her usual gentle placid nature reasserted itself.  It will give me more
time to enjoy it by myself, she said aloud, and then she spoke again.
Harold, Harold Anders?  No, that's too common.  I will have to think of
a really fine-sounding name.  She hummed happily to herself as she
dressed, and then went out into the kitchen yard.

It was a cool still morning with a milky pink sky.  A baboon called from
the cliffs of Chaka's Gate, the short explosive bark ringing across the
valley, a salute to the sunrise that was turning the heights to brazen
splendour.

It was good to be alive and to have a child growing on such a day,
Marion thought, and she wanted to do something to celebrate it.  Mark's
note had told her that he would be home by nightfall.  I'll bake a new
batch of bread, and, She wanted something very special for this day.
Then she remembered that it had rained five days previously.  There
might be wild mushrooms coming up from the rains, those rounded buds
with sticky brown tops; the rich meaty flesh was a favourite of Mark's
and he had taught her when and where to find them.

She ate her breakfast absentmindedly with Mark's copy of The Home Doctor
propped against the jam jar, re-reading the section on The Expectant
Mother.  Then she began on her housework, taking a comfortable pride in
the slippery glaze of the cement floors and the burnish which she had
worked on to the wood of the simple furniture, in the neatness and
order, the smell of polish, the wild flowers in their vases.  She sang
as she worked and once laughed out loud for no reason.

It was midmorning before she tied her sun bonnet under her chin, put a
bottle of Chamberlain's Superior Diarrhoea Remedy into her basket, and
set off up the valley.

She stopped at Pungushe's kraal and the youngest wife brought the baby
to her.  Marion was relieved to see that he was much improved, and
Pungushe's wife assured her that she had given him much liquid to drink.
Marion took him in her lap and fed him a spoonful of the diluted remedy,
despite his violent protests, and afterwards the five women sat in the
sun and talked of children and men and childbirth, of sickness and food
and clothing, and all the things that absorb a woman's life.

It was almost an hour later that she left the four Zulu women and went
down towards the river.

The downpour of rain had disquieted the lioness.  Some deep instinct
warned her that it was but the harbinger of the great storms to come.

The jessie thickets in the valley were a suitable retreat for her litter
no longer.  Heavy rain on the escarpment would soon turn the steep
narrow valley into a cascading torrent.

Twice already she had tried to lead the cubs away, but they were older
now and had developed a stubbornness and tenacity.  They clung to the
haven of the thick thorny jessie, and her efforts had failed.  Within
half a mile, one or two of the faint-hearts would turn and scurry back
to what they considered home.  Immediately the lioness turned back to
seize the deserter, it precipitated an undignified rush by the others in
the same direction, and within five minutes they were all back in the
jessie.

The lioness was distracted.  This was her first litter, but she was
governed by instinct.  She knew that it was time to wean her cubs, to
take them out of the trap of the narrow valley, to begin their hunting
lessons, but she was frustrated by the size of her litter, six-cub
litters were a rarity in the wilderness and so far there had been no
casualties among the cubs; her family was becoming too ungainly for her
to handle.

However, instinct drove her and in the middle of a cool bright morning
in which she could smell the rain coming, she tried again.  The cubs
gambolled along behind her, falling over each other and sparring
amicably, as far as the river.  This was familiar ground and they went
along happily.

When the lioness started out across the open white sandbanks towards the
far side, there was immediately the usual crisis in confidence.  Three
cubs followed her willingly, two stood undecidedly on the high bank and
whined and mewled with concern, while the sixth turned and bolted
straight back up the valley for the ebony.

The lioness went after him at a gallop and bowled him on his back.  Then
she took the scruff of his neck and lifted him.  The cubs were big now,
and although she lifted him to the full stretch of her neck, his
backside still bumped on every irregularity of the ground.  He curled up
his legs, wrapped his tail tightly up under his quarters and closed his
eyes, hanging from her mouth as she carried him down into the bed of the
Bubezi River.

The river was five hundred yards wide at this point, and almost
completely empty at the end of the dry season.

There were still deep green pools of water between the snowy-white
sand-banks, and the pools were connected by a slow trickle of warm clear
water only a few inches deep.

While five cubs watched in an agony of indecision from the near bank,
the lioness carried the cub through the shallows, soaking his dragging
backside so he hissed and wriggled indignantly, then she trotted up the
far bank and found a clump of dense watels where she placed him.

She turned back to fetch another cub, and he followed her with a panicky
rush.  She had to stop and box him about the ears, snarling until he
squealed and fell on his back.

She grabbed him by the neck and dragged him back into the wit-els.  She
started back across the river to find the cub stumbling along on her
heels again.  This time she nipped hard enough to really hurt, and
bundled him back into the thicket.  She nipped again at his hindquarters
until he cowered flat on the earth, so subdued and chastened that he
could not gather the courage to follow again.  He lay under the bush and
made distraught little sounds of anguish.

Marion had never been this far from the cottage alone, but it was such a
lovely warm clear morning, peaceful and still, that she wandered on in a
mood of enchantment and happiness such as she had seldom known before.

She knew that if she followed the river bank, she could not lose
herself, and Mark had taught her that the African bush is a safer place
in which to wander abroad than the streets of a city, as long as one
followed a few simple rules of the road.

At the branch of the two rivers she stopped for a few minutes to watch a
pair of fish eagles on top of their shaggy nest in the main fork of a
tall leadwood tree.  The white heads of the two birds shone like beacons
in contrast to the dark russet plumage, and she thought she could just
make out the chirruping sound of the chicks in the cup of the hay-stack
nest.

The sound of the young heightened the awareness of the life in her own
belly, and she laughed and went on down the branch of the Red Bubezi.

Once a heavy body crashed in the undergrowth nearby, and there was a
clatter of hooves on stony earth.  She froze with a fleeting chill of
fear, and then when the silence returned she regained her courage and
laughed a little breathlessly and went on.

There was a perfume on the warm still air, sweet as fullblooming roses,
and she followed it, twice going wrong but at last coming on a spreading
creeper hanging over a gaunt dead tree.  The leaves were dark shiny
green and the dense bunches of flowers were pale butter yellow.  She had
never seen the plant before, nor the swarm of sunbirds that fluttered
about it.  They were tiny restless darting birds, with bright, metallic,
shiny plumage like the little hummingbirds of America, and they dipped
into the perfumed flowers with long slim curved beaks.  Their colours
were unbelievable in the sunlight, emerald greens and sapphire blue,
black like wet anthracite and reds like the blood of kings.

They thrust their beaks deep into the open throats of the yellow blooms
to sip out the thick clear drops of nectar through their hollow tubular
tongues.

Watching them, Marion felt a deep pervading delight, and it was a long
time before she moved on again.

She found the first batch of mushrooms a little further on, and she
knelt to snap the stems off at the level of the earth and then hold the
umbrella-shaped fleshy plant to her face and inhale the delicious musty
odour, before laying it carefully, cap uppermost, in the basket so that
grit and dirt would not lodge in the delicately fluted gills.  She took
two dozen mushrooms from this one patch, but she knew they would cook
down to a fraction of their bulk.

She went on, following the lip of the steep bank.

Something hissed close by and her heart skipped again.

Her first thought was of a snake, one of those thick bloated reptiles,
with the chocolate and yellow markings and flat scaly heads, which blew
so loudly that they were called puff-adders.

She began moving backwards carefully staring into the clump of first
growth wit-els from which the sound had come.  She saw small movement,
but it was some seconds before she realized what she was seeing.

The lion cub was flat on its belly in the dappled shadow of the thicket,
and its own dappled baby spots blended beautifully against the bed of
dried leaves and leaf mould on which it lay.

The cub had learned already the first lesson of concealment, absolute
stillness; except for his two round fluffy ears.  The ears flicked back
and forth, signalling clearly every emotion and intention.  He stared at
Marion with wide round eyes that had not yet turned the ferocious yellow
of full growth, but were still hazed with the bluish glaze of
kittenhood.  His whiskers bristled stiffly, and his ears signalled
wildly conflicting messages.

Flattening against the skull: One step nearer and I'll tear you to
pieces.  Shooting out sideways: One step nearer and I'll die of fright.
Coming up and cupping forward: What the hell are you anyway?  Oh,
exclaimed Marion.  You darling little thing.  She set down the basket,
and squatted.  She extended one hand and made soft cooing noises.
There's a darling.  Are you all alone then, poor baby?

She moved forward slowly, still talking and cooing.  Nobody's going to
hurt you, baby.  The cub was uncertain, its ears rising into an attitude
of curiosity and indecision as it stared at her.  Are you all alone
then? You'll make a lovely pet for my own baby, won't you?  Closer and
closer she edged, and the cub warned her with a half-hearted apologetic
hiss.

What a cheeky darling we are, Marion smiled and squatted three feet from
the cub.

How are we going to take you home?  Marion asked.  Will you fit in the
basket?  In the river bed, the lioness carried the second cub through
the shallows, and was followed by one of the heroes of the litter,
struggling along gamely through the thick white sand.  However, when he
reached the edge of the shallow stream and tested it with one paw, his
newfound courage deserted him at the cold wet touch, and he sat down and
wept bitterly.

The lioness, by this time almost wild with distraction and frustration,
turned back, and dropped her burden which immediately set off in clumsy
gallop for the jessie thicket again, then she seized the weeping hero
instead and trotted back through the stream and set off determinedly for
the far bank.

Her huge round pads made no sound in the soft earth as she came up the
bank, carrying the cub.

Marion heard the crackling spluttering explosion of sound behind her,
and she whirled to her feet in one movement.

The lioness crouched on the lip of the bank fifty yards away.  It warned
her again with that terrible sound.

All that Marion saw were the eyes.  They were a blazing yellow, a
ferocious terrifying yellow, and she screamed, a wild high ringing,
rising sound.

The sound launched the lioness into her charge, and it came with an
unbelievably fluid flowing speed that turned into a yellow rushing blur.
She snaked in low, and the sand spurted beneath her paws, all claws
fully extended, the lips drawn back in a fixed silent snarl, the teeth
exposed, long and white and pointed.

Marion turned to run, and had gone five paces when the lioness took her.
She pulled her down with a swipe of a forepaw across the small of her
back and five curved yellow claws cut deeply, four inches through skin
and muscle, opening the abdominal cavity like a sabre cut, crushing the
vertebrae and bursting both kidneys instantaneously.

It was a blow that would have killed even a full-grown ox, and it hurled
Marion twenty feet forward, but as she fell on her back, the lioness was
on her again.

The jaws were wide open, the long white fangs framed the deep wet pink
cavern of tongue and throat.  In an instant of incredibly heightened
perception, Marion saw the smooth ridges of firm pink flesh that covered
the arched roof of the lioness mouth in regular patterns, and she smelt
the meaty stink of her breath.

Marian lay twisted under the great yellow cat, she was still screaming
and her lower body lay at an odd angle from the shattered spine, but she
lifted both arms to protect her face.

The lioness bit into the forearms, just below the elbows and the bone
crunched sharply, shattering into slivers and splinters in the mangled
flesh, both arms were severed almost through.

Then the lioness seized Marion's shoulder, and worried it until the long
eye teeth meshed through broken bone and fat and tissue, and Marion kept
screaming, twisting and writhing under the cat.

The lioness took a long time to kill her, confused by her own anger and
the unfamiliar taste and shape of the victim.

She tore and bit and ripped for almost a minute before she found the
throat.

When the lioness stood up at last, her head and neck were a gory mask,
her fur sticky and sodden with blood.

Her tail still lashed from side to side in residual anger, but she
licked her face with a long dextrous tongue and her lip curled at the
sweet unfamiliar flavour.  She wiped her face carefully with her paws
before trotting back to her cub, and licking him also with long pink
protective strokes.

Marion's broken torn body lay where she left it, until Pungushe's wives
came, a little before sundown.

Mark and Pungushe crossed the river in darkness with the moonlight
turning the sand-banks to ghostly grey, and the round white moon itself
reflected perfectly in the still mirror-surface of the pool below the
main camp.  The turbulence of their fording shattered the image into a
thousand points of light, like a crystal glass flung on to a stone
floor.

As they rode up the bank, they heard the death wall in the night, that
terrible keening, the mourning of Zulu women.  The men halted
involuntarily, the sound striking dread into both of them.  Come!
shouted Mark and kicked one foot from the stirrup.  Pungushe grabbed the
leather and swung off his feet as Mark lashed Trojan into a gallop and
they tore up the hill.

The fire that the women had lit threw a grotesque yellow wavering glow,
and weird dancing shadows.

The four women sat in a group around the long, karosswrapped bundle.

None of them looked up as the men ran forward into the firelight.  Who
is it?  Mark demanded.  What has happened?  Pungushe seized his eldest
wife by the shoulders, and shook her, trying to interrupt the hysteria
of mourning, but Mark strode forward impatiently and lifted one end of
the kaross.

He stared for a moment, not understanding, not recognizing, then
suddenly all colour fled from his face and he turned and ran into the
darkness.  There he fell to his knees and leaned forward to retch up the
bitter bile of horror.

Mark took Marion into Ladyburg, wrapped in a canvas buck-sheet, and
strapped into the side-car of the Ariel.

He stayed for the funeral and for the grief and recriminations of her
family.  if only you hadn't taken her out there into the bush, if only
you had stayed with her, If only, On the third day he went back to
Chaka's Gate.  Pungushe was waiting for him at the fold of the river.

They sat together in the sunlight under the cliffs, and when Mark gave
Pungushe a cigarette, he broke off the cork tip carefully and they
smoked in silence until Mark asked, Have you read the sign, Pungushe?  I
have, Jarnela.  Tell me what happened.  The lioness was moving her
little ones, taking them one at a time across the river from the jessie
bush.  Slowly, accurately, Pungushe reconstructed the tragedy from the
marks left in the earth which he had studied in Mark's absence, and when
he was finished speaking, they were silent again.

Where is she now?  Mark asked quietly.  She has taken the little ones
north, but slowly, and three days ago, the day after, Pungushe
hesitated, the day after the thing was done, she killed an impala ram,
and the cubs ate a little with her.  She begins now to wean them.  Mark
stood up and they forded the river, climbing together slowly up through
the forest to the cottage.

While Pungushe waited on the front stoep, Mark went into the small
deserted home.  The wild flowers had died and wilted in their vases,
giving the room a sad and dejected feeling.  Mark began to gather up all
Marion's personal possessions, her clothing, and cheap but treasured
jewellery, her combs and brushes, and the few hoarded pots of cosmetics.
He packed them carefully into her largest suitcase to take to her
sister, and when he was finished he carried the case out and locked it
in the tool shed.  It was too painful a reminder to keep in the house
with him.

Then he went back and changed out of his town clothes.

He took the Marinlicher down from the rack and loaded it with brass
cartridges from a fresh package.  The casings of the cartridges were
glistening yellow under their film of wax, the bullets soft-nosed for
maximum shock at impact.

When he went out on to the stoep carrying the rifle, Pungushe was still
waiting.  Pungushe, he said.  We have work to do now. The Zulu stood up
slowly, and for a moment they stared at each other.  Then Pungushe
dropped his eyes and nodded.

Take the spoor, Mark commanded softly.

They found where the lioness had killed the impala, but the scavengers
of the bush had cleaned the area effectively.

There were a few splinters of bone that had fallen out of the crushing
jaws of the hyena , a little hair, pulled out in tufts, a shred of dried
skin, and part of the skull with the twisted black horns still intact.
But the spoor was cold.

Wind and the trampling feet of the scavengers, the jackals, and hyena,
the vultures and marabou storks, had wiped sign.  She will keep going
north, said Pungushe, and Mark did not ask how he knew that, for the
Zulu could not have answered.  He simply knew.

They went slowly on up the valley, Pungushe scouting ahead of the mule,
making wide tracks back and forth, casting carefully for the sign, and
on the second day he cut the spoor.  She has turned now.  Pungushe
squatted over the pug marks, the big saucer-sized pads and the smaller
myriad prints of the cubs.  I think she was going back towards the
Usutu.  He nodded over the spoor, touching it with the thin reed wand he
carried as a tracking stick.  She was taking the little ones back, but
now she has changed her mind.  She has turned southwards, she must have
passed close to where we camped last night.  She is staying in the
valley.  it is her valley now, and she will not leave it.  No, Mark
nodded grimly.  She will not leave the valley again.  Follow, Pungushe.
The lioness was moving slowly and the spoor ran hotter every hour.  They
found where she had hunted without success.  Pungushe pointed out where
she had stalked, an d then the deep driving back claws had raked the
earth as she leapt to the back of a full-grown zebra.  Twenty paces
further, she had fallen heavily, dislodged by the stallion's wild
plunging.  She had struck shoulder first, Pungushe said, and the zebra
had run free but bleeding from the long slash of her claws.  The lioness
had limped away, and lain under a Thorn tree for a long time before
rising and going back slowly to where she had left her cubs.  Probably
she had torn muscle and sinew in that fall.  When will we come up with
her? Mark asked, his face a stony mask of vengeance.  Perhaps before
sunset.  But they lost two hours on a rocky ridge, and Pungushe had to
cast widely and work with all his skill to cut the spoor again at the
point where it doubled sharply and turned west towards the escarpment.

Pungushe and Mark camped on her spoor with only a tiny fire for comfort
and they lay directly on the earth.

Mark did not sleep.  He lay and watched the waning moon come up over the
tree tops, but it was only when Pungushe spoke quietly that he realized
that the Zulu also was sleepless.  The cubs are not weaned, he said. But
they will take a long time to die. No, Mark replied.  I will shoot them
also.  Pungusbe roused himself and took a little snuff, leaning on one
elbow and staring into the coals of the fire.  She has tasted human
blood, Mark said at last.  Even in his grief and anger, he sensed
Pungushe's quiet disapproval and wanted to justify what he was about to
do.  She did not feed, Pungushe stated.  Mark felt his gorge rise and
the bitter taste of it again as he remembered the terrible mutilation,
but Pungushe was right, the lioness had not eaten any of that Poor torn
flesh.  Pungushe, she was my wife. Yes, Pungushe nodded.  That is so.
Also it was her cub.  Mark considered the words, and felt for the first
time a confusion of his own objects.  The lioness had acted out of one
of the oldest instincts of life, the urge to protect her young, but what
were his motives?  I have to kill her, Pungushe, he said flatly, and
there was some slimy obscene thing in his belly; it moved there for the
first time, and he tried to deny its existence.

Marion was dead.  Sweet, loyal, dutiful Marion, who had been all that a
man could ask for in a wife.  She had died an unspeakable death, and now
Mark was alone, or did the word free come too readily to his tongue?

Suddenly he had an image of a slim, dark lovely girl and a lusty naked
little boy walking in the sunset at the edge of the sea.

Guilt, that slimy thing, uncoiled in his belly and began to ripple and
undulate like a serpent, and he could not crush it down.  She has to
die, Mark repeated, and perhaps his own guilt could die in that same
purging.  Very well, Pungushe agreed.  We will find her before noon
tomorrow.  He lay back and pulled his kaross over his head and his voice
was muffled, the words almost lost.  Let us hurry now towards the great
emptiness They found the lioness early the next morning.  She had moved
in close under the hills of the escarpment, and when the first heat of
the day made the cubs flag and begin to trail disconsolately along
behind her, she had selected an umbrella thorn with a flat-topped mass
of foliage spreading from the straight trunk and she had lain in the
shade on her side, exposing the soft creamy fur of her belly and the
double row of flat black nipples.

Now the cubs were almost satiated, only two of the greediest still
suckled valiantly, their bellies bulging and the effort of swallowing
almost too much.

The indefatigable hunter of tails was now concentrating all his prowess
on his mother's long whip-lash with.  its fine black tuft of hair which
she jerked out from under his nose at the very instant of each attack.

The other three were fighting off sleep, with violent outbursts of
undirected energy, succumbing slowly to drooping eyelids and strained
bellies, until at last they lay in an untidy heap of fluff and fur.

Mark was one hundred and twenty yards downwind.  He lay belly down
behind a small ant-heap, and it had taken almost an hour to work in this
close.  The umbrella thorn was set in an area of short open grassland,
and he had been forced to stalk flat, tortoising forward on his elbows
with the rifle held across the crook.  Can we get closer?  Mark asked,
his whisper merely a soft breath.  The short stiff yellow grass was just
high enough to screen the cat when she lay flat on her side.  Jamela, I
could get close enough to touch her.  He put the emphasis on the word I,
and left the rest of it unstated.

So they waited in the sun, another twenty minutes until at last the
lioness lifted her head.

Perhaps some deep sense of survival had warned her of the presence of
the hunters.  Her head came up in a flash of yellow movement, the
extraordinary swiftness so characteristic of all the big cats, and she
stared fixedly downwind, the sector of maximum danger.

For long seconds she watched, and the wide yellow eyes were steady and
unblinking.  Sensing her concern, two of the cubs sat up sleepily and
waited with her.

Mark felt the lioness was looking directly at him, but he obeyed the law
of absolute stillness.  The first movement of lifting the Marinlicher
would send her away in a blur of speed.  So Mark waited while the
seconds spun out.  Then suddenly the lioness dropped her head and
stretched out flat once again.  She is restless, warned Pungushe.  We
can get no closer.  I cannot shoot from here.  We will wait, said
Pungushe.

All the cubs slept now, and the lioness dozed, but always all her senses
were working, nostrils tasting carefully each breath of the wind for the
taint of danger, the big round ears never still, flicking to the
slightest sound of wind or branch, bird or animal.

Mark lay in the direct sunlight, and the sweat rose to stain his shirt.
A tsetse fly settled behind his ear and bit into the softness of his
neck, but he did not make the movement of brushing it away.  It was an
hour before his chance came.

The lioness rose suddenly to her full height, and swung her tail from
side to side.  She was too restless to stay here under the thorn tree
any longer.  The cubs sat up groggily, and looked to her with puzzled
furrowed faces.

The lioness was standing broadside to where Mark lay.

She held her head low, and her jaws were a little open as she panted
softly in the heat.  Mark was close enough to see the dark specks of the
tsetse fly sitting on her flanks.

She was still in shadow but now she was backlit by the pale yellow grass
beyond her.  It was a perfect shot, the point of the elbow the hunter's
aiming mark; the span of a hand back from there, and the bullet would
rake both lungs, the span of a hand lower would take the heart cleanly.

The lungs were certain, but the heart was swift.  Mark chose the heart
and lifted the rifle to his shoulder.  The safety-catch had long before
been set at the firing position.

Mark took up the slack in the trigger and felt the final resistance
before the mechanism tripped.

The bullet was 230 grains in weight, and the bronze jacket of the slug
was tipped with a grey blob of lead so that it would mushroom on impact
and open massive damage through the lioness's chest cavity.

The lioness called her cubs with a soft moaning grunt, and they
scrambled obediently to their feet, still a little unsteady from sleep.

She walked out into the sunlight, with that loose feline gait, her head
swinging from side to side at each pace, the long back slightly swayed
and the heavy droop of her full dugs thickening the graceful line of her
body.  No, thought Mark.  I will take the lungs.  He lifted his aim a
fraction, holding steady and true four inches behind the point of the
elbow, swinging the rifle to follow her as she went into a short
restless trot.

The cubs tumbled along behind her in disorder.

Mark held his aim until she reached the edge of the bush, and then she
was gone with the insubstantial blurred movement of a wisp of brown
smoke on the wind.

When she was gone, he lowered the rifle and stared after her.

Pungushe saw the thing break in him at last.  The cold stillness of
hatred and guilt and horror broke, and Mark began to cry, hacking
tearing sobs that scoured and purged.

It is a difficult thing for a man to watch another weep, especially if
that man is your friend.

Pungashe stood up quietly and walked back to where they had tethered the
mule.  He sat alone in the sun and took a little snuff and waited for
Mark.

GOVERNMENT MINISTER SPeAKS ON DUTY To HUMANITY

The newly appointed Deputy Minister of Lands, Mr. Dirk Courtney,
expressed concern today at the mauling of a young woman in the
proclaimed area of Northern Zululand.

The woman, Mrs.  Marion Anders, was the wife of the Government Ranger in
the area.  She was mauled to death by a lioness last Friday.

This unfortunate incident underlines the grave danger of allowing wild
animals to exist in proximity to settled areas of human habitation.

Residents in these areas will be in constant danger of animal attack, of
crop depredation and game-borne diseases of domestic.  animals as long
as this position is allowed to continue.

Mr.  Dirk Courtney said that the rinderpest epidemic if at the turn of
the century had accounted for a loss of domestic cattle estimated to
exceed two million head.

Rinderpest was a game-borne disease.  The minister pointed out, We
cannot risk a repetition of such a calamity.  The proclaimed area of
Northern Zululand encompasses both highly valuable arable land, and a
major watershed vital to proper conservation of our natural resources.
If the full potential of our national assets is to be exploited, these
areas must be turned over to properly controlled development.  The
minister went on, Your Government has placed priority on this issue, and
we will be placing legislation before Parliament at the next sitting.
Mark read the article through carefully.  It was placed prominently on
the leader page of the Natal Witness.  There are more, General Sean
Courtney thumbed open a slim folder with half a dozen other cuttings,
take them with you.  You'll see it's all the same general purport.  Dirk
Courtney is beating the drum with a very big stick, I'm afraid.  He's in
such a position of power now.  I never dreamed he would be a Deputy
Minister.  Yes, Sean nodded.  He has rushed to power, but on the other
hand we still have a voice.  One of our members in a solid seat has
stood down for Jannie Smuts, even I have been offered a seat in a safer
constituencyWill you take it, Sir?  Sean shook his silver beard slowly.
I've had a long time in public life, my boy, and anything you do too
long becomes a bore.  He nodded as he thought about his words.  Of
course, that's not strictly true.  I am tired, let the younger ones with
more energy pick up the reins now.

Jannie Smuts will keep in close touch, he knows he can call on me, but I
feel like an old Zulu chief.  I just want to sit in the sun, drink beer,
grow fat and count my cattle What about Chaka's Gate, Sir?  Mark
pleaded.

I have spoken to Jannie Smuts and some of the others, on both sides of
the house.  We have a lot of support in the new Government as well.  I
don't want to make it a party issue, I'd like to see it as an issue of
each man's own conscience.

They went on talking until Ruth intervened reluctantly.  It's after
midnight, dear.  You can finish your talk in the morning.  When are you
leaving, Mark?  I should be back at Chaka's Gate tomorrow night.  Mark
felt a prick of guilt as he lied.  He knew damned well he was not going
home just yet a while.  But you'll stay for lunch tomorrow?  Yes I'd
like that.  Thank you.  As Mark rose he picked up the file of newspaper
clippings from Sean's desk.  I'll let you have them back tomorrow, Sir.
However, the moment Mark was alone in his room, he dropped into an easy
chair and turned avidly to the reverse side of the newspaper cutting he
had brought with him.

He had not dared to turn over the cutting and read the words that had
caught his eye in the General's presence, but now he lingered over them,
re-reading and savouring.

Part of the article was missing, scissored away when the Deputy
Minister's speech had been trimmed, but there wasenough.

ExcEPTIONAL EXHIBITION BY YOUNG ARTIST Presently showing at the sample
rooms of the Marine Hotel on the Marine Parade is an exhibition of
thirty paintings by a young lady artist.

For Miss Storm Courtney, it is her first public exhibition and even a
much older and more established artist could have been justly gratified
with such a reception by the art-lovers of our fair city.  After the
first five days, twenty-one of her paintings had found enthusiastic
purchasers at prices as high as fifty guineas each.  Miss Courtney has a
classical conception of form, combined with both a sure sense of colour
and a mature and confident execution rare in an artist of such tender
years.

Worthy of special mention is Number 16, Greek athlete at rest.  This
painting, property of the artist and not for sale, is a lyrical
composition that would perhaps raise the eyebrows of the more
old-fashioned.  It is an unashamedly sensual ode to Here the scissors
had cut through, leaving Mark with a disturbing unfinished feeling.  He
read it once more, inordinately pleased that Storm had reverted to her
maiden name with which to sign her work.  Then carefully he folded the
cutting into his wallet, and he sat in the chair staring at the wall,
until he fell asleep, still fully dressed.

A young Zulu lass, no more than sixteen years of age, opened the door of
the cottage.  She was dressed in the traditional white cotton dustcoat
of the nanny and she carried baby John on her hip.

Both nanny and child regarded Mark with huge solemn eyes, but the
nanny's relief was patent when Mark addressed her in fluent Zulu.

At the sound of Mark's voice John let out an excited squawk that could
have been recognition, but was probably merely a friendly greeting.  He
began to leap up and down on the nanny's hip with such force that she
had to grab to prevent him taking off like a sky rocket, He reached out
both hands towards Mark, burbling and laughing and shouting, and Mark
took him, all warm and wriggling and baby-smelling, from the maid.  John
immediately seized a handful of Mark's hair and tried to remove it by
the roots.

Half an hour later when Mark handed him back to the little moon-faced
maid, and went down the steep pathway to the beach, John's indignant
howls of protest followed him, only fading with distance.

Mark kicked off his shoes and left them and his shirt above the
high-tide mark, then he turned northwards and followed the white sweep
of sand, his bare feet leaving wet prints on the smooth firm edge of the
seashore.

He had walked a mile, and there was no sign of any other person.  The
beach sand was rippled by static wind-blown wavelets, and dappled with
the webbed prints of sea-birds.

On his right hand, the surf rose in long glassy lines, curling green and
then dropping over in a crash of white water that shook the sand beneath
his feet.  on his left hand, the dense, dark green bush rose above the
white beach, and again beyond that, the far blue hills and taller bluer
sky.

He was alone, until he saw, perhaps a mile ahead, another solitary
figure, also following the edge of the sea, a far small and lonely
figure, coming towards him, still too distant to tell whether it was man
or woman, friend or stranger.

Mark lengthened his stride, and the figure drew nearer, clearer.

Mark began to run, and the figure ahead of him stopped suddenly, and
stood with that stillness poised on the edge of flight.

Then suddenly the stillness exploded, and the figure was racing to him.

It was a woman, a woman with dark silky hair streaming in the wind, a
woman with outstretched arms and flying bare brown feet, and white teeth
and blue, very blue eyes.

They were alone in the bedroom.  Baby John's cot had been removed to the
small dining-room next door, since he had begun to show an interest in
everything that looked like a good romp, hanging on the edge of his cot
with shouts of applause and approbation, and then trying his utmost to
scale the wooden railings and join the play.

Now they were enjoying those contented minutes between love and sleep,
talking softly in the candlelight under a single sheet, lying on their
sides facing each other, holding close, with their lips almost touching
as they murmured together.  But darling Mark, it is still a thatched
hut, and it is still wild bush.  It's a big thatched hut, he pointed
out.  I don't know.  I just don't know if I have changed that much.
There is only one way to find out.  Come with me.  But what will people
say?  The same as they'd say if they could see us now She chuckled
easily, and snuggled a little closer.  That was a silly question.  The
old Storm speaking.  People have said all there is to say about me, and
none of it really mattered a damn.  There aren't a lot of people out
there to sit in judgement.

Only Pungushe, and he's a very broad-minded gentleman.  She laughed
again sleepily.  Only one person I care about - Daddy mustn't know. I've
hurt him enough already So Storm came at last to Chaka's Gate.  She came
in the beaten and neglected Cadillac, with John on the seat beside her,
her worldly possessions crammed into the cab or strapped on the roof and
Mark riding his motorcycle escort ahead of her over the rude and bumpy
track.

Where the track ended above the Bubezi River, she climbed out and looked
around her.  Well, she decided after a long thoughtful survey of the
towering cliffs, and the river in its bed of green water and white
banks, framed by the tall nodding strands of fluffyheaded reeds and
great spreading sycamore figs, at least it's picturesque.  Mark put John
on his shoulder.  Tungushe and I will come back with the mules for the
rest of your gear.  And he led her down the footpath to the river.

Pungushe was waiting for them under the trees on the far bank, tall and
black and imposing in his beaded loin cloth.  Pungusbe, this is my lady
and her name is Vungu Vungu the Storm. I see you, Vungu Vungu, I see
also that you are misnamed, said Pungushe quietly, for a storm is an
ugly thing which kills and destroys.  And you are a lady of beauty.
Thank you, Pungushe.  Storm smiled at him.  But you are also misnamed,
for a jackal is a small mean creature.  But clever, said Mark solemnly,
and John let out a shout of greeting and bounced on Mark's shoulder,
reaching out with both hands for Pungushe.  And this is my son. Pungushe
looked at John.  There are two things a Zulu loves dearly, cattle and
children. Of the two, he prefers children preferably boy-children.  Of
all boy-children, he likes best those that are robust, and bold and
aggressive.  Jamela, I should like to hold your son, he said, and Mark
gave John to him.  I see you Phimbo, Pungushe greeted the child.  I see
you little man with a great voice.  And then Pungushe smiled that great
beaming radiant smile, and John shouted again with joy and thrust his
hand in Pungushe's mouth to grab those white shining teeth, but Pungushe
swung him up on to his shoulder and laughed with a great hipposnort and
carried him up the hill.

So they came to Chaka's Gate, and there was never any doubt, right from
that first day.

Within an hour, there was a polite tap on the screendoor of the kitchen
and when Mark opened it there stood in a row on the covered stoep all of
Pungushe's daughters, from the eldest who was fourteen to the youngest
of four.  We have come, announced the eldest, to greet Phimbo.  Mark
looked at Storm inquiringly, and she nodded.  The eldest daughter swung
John up on to her back with a practised action, and strapped him there
with a strip of cotton limbo.  She had played nurse-maid to all her
brothers and sisters, probably knew more about small children than both
Storm and Mark combined, and John took to the froglike position on her
back as though he had been born Zulu.  Then the little girl bobbed a
curtsey to Storm and trotted away, with all her sisters in procession,
bearing John off to a wonderland peopled entirely with playmates of
endless variety and fascination.

On the third day, Storm began sketching, and by the end of the first
week she had taken over the household management on a system that Mark
referred to as comfortable chaos, alternating with brief periods of
pandemonium.

Comfortable chaos was when everybody ate what they wanted, perhaps
chocolate biscuits and coffee for dinner one night and a feast of
barbecued meat the next.  They ate it where they felt like it, perhaps
sitting up in bed or lying on a rug on the sand-bank of the river.  They
ate when they wanted, breakfast at noon or dinner at midnight, if
talking and laughing delayed it that long.

Comfortable chaos was when the dusting of furniture or polishing of
floors were forgotten in the excitement of living, when clothes that
needed mending were tossed into the bottom of the cupboard, when Mark's
hair was allowed to grow in points over the back of his collar.
Comfortable chaos ended unpredictably and abruptly to be replaced by
pandemonium.

Pandemonium began when Storm suddenly got a steely look in her eye and
announced, This place is a pig sty!  followed by the snipping of
scissors, buckets of steaming water, clouds of flying dust, hanging
pots, and flashing needles.  Mark was shorn and clad in refurbished
clothing, the cottage gleamed and sparkled, and Storm's housekeeping
instincts were exhausted for another indefinite period.

And the next day she would be up on Spartan's back, John strapped
Zulu-fashion behind her, following Mark on patrol up the valley.

The first time John had been taken on patrol, Mark had asked anxiously,
Do you think it's wise to take him, he's still very small?  And Storm
had replied, I am older and more important than Master John.  He fits
into my life, not me into his.  So John rode patrol on muleback, slept
in his apple basket under the stars at night, and took his daily bath in
the coot green pools of the Bubezi River, quickly developed an immunity
to the occasional tsetse bite, and flourished.

They climbed the steep pathway to the summit of Chaka's Gate, sat with
their feet dangling over that fearful drop, and they looked across the
whole valley, the far blue hills and the plains and swamps and the wide
winding rivers.  When I first met you, you were poor, Storm said
quietly, leaning against Mark's shoulder with her eyes filled with the
peace and wonder of it, but now you are the richest man in the world,
for you are the owner of paradise.  He took her up the river to the
lonely grave below the escarpment.  Storm helped him to build a pile of
rocks, and to set the cross that Mark had made over it.  He told her
Pungushe's story of how the old man had been killed, and she cried
openly and unashamedly, holding John on her lap, sitting on the
gravestone, listening and living every word.  I have looked, but never
truly seen before, she said, as he showed her the nest of a suribird,
cunningly woven of lichen and spider web, turning it carefully so she
could peer into the funnel entrance and see the tiny speckled eggs.  I
never knew what true peace was until I came to this place, she said, as
they sat on the bank of the Bubezi in the yellow light of fading day,
and watched a kudu bull with long spiral corkscrew horns and
chalk-striped shoulders lead his big-eared cows down to the water.

I did not know what happiness was before, she whispered, when they had
woken together a little after midnight for no reason and reached for
each other in the darkness.

Then one morning she sat up in the rumpled bed, over which John was
rampaging unchecked and sowing crumbles of lightly chewed biscuit, and
she looked at Mark seriously.  You once asked me to marry you, I she
said.  Would you like to repeat that question, sir?  And it was later
that same day they heard the axeman at work up the valley.

The blade of a two-handed axe, swung against the hole of a standing
hardwood tree, rings like a gunshot, and the sound of it bounced against
the cliffs of Chaka's Gate and was flung back to break in dying echoes
down the valley, each stroke still lingering on the air while the next
cracked off the grey cliffs.  There was more than one axernan at work,
so that the din was continuous, like the sounds of battle.

Storm had never before seen such a passion of anger on Mark's face.  His
skin was drained of blood so that the tan of the sun was fever-yellow
and his lips seemed frost-bitten and pinched by the force of it.  Yet
his eyes blazed, and she had to run to match his angry stride as they
went up the scree slope from the river beneath the cliff s, and the
sound of the axes broke over them, each separate stroke as brutal and
shocking as the ones that preceded it.

Ahead of them, one of the lofty leadwoods quivered as though in agony
and moved against the sky.  Mark stopped in mid-stride to watch it, with
his head thrown back and the same agony twisting his own lips.  It was a
tree of extraordinary symmetry, the silvery trunk rising with such gyace
as to seem as slim as a young girl's waist.  It had taken two hundred
years to reach its towering height.

Seventy feet above the ground, it spread into a dark green dome of
foliage.

As they watched, the tree shuddered again and the axes fell silent.
Slowly, majestically, the leadwood swung into a downward arc, gathering
ponderous momentum, and the partially severed trunk groaned and popped
as the fibres tore; faster and faster still she fell, crashing through
the tops of the lesser vegetation below her, the twisting tearing wood
shrieking like a living thing until she struck solid earth with a
jarring impact they could feel in their guts.

The silence lasted many seconds, and then there was the sound of men's
voices, awed voices, as though intimidated

by the magnitude of the destruction they had wrought.

Then almost immediately after that, the axes started again, fragmenting
the great silences of the valley, and Mark began to run.  Storm could
not keep pace with him.

He came out in an area of devastation, a growing swathe of fallen trees
where fifty black men worked like ants, half-naked and burnished with
their own sweat, as they stripped the branches and piled them in
windrows for burning.  The wood chips shone white as bone in the
sunlight and the sap that oozed from the axe cuts had the sweetish smell
of newly spilled blood.

At the head of the long narrow clearing, a single white man crouched to
the eyepiece of a theodolite set on its squat tripod.  He was aiming the
instrument down the clearing and directing with hand signals the setting
of brightly painted markers.

He straightened from the instrument to face Mark, a young man with a
mild friendly face, thick spectacles in silver wire frames, lank sandy
hair flopping on to his forehead.  Oh, helln there, he smiled, and then
the smile froze as Mark hissed at him.  Are you in charge here?  Well,
yes, I suppose I am, the young surveyor stuttered.  You are under
arrest.  I don't understand.  It's quite simple, Mark blazed at him. You
are cutting standing timber in a proclaimed area.  I am the Government
Ranger, and I am placing you under arrest.  Now look here, the surveyor
began placatingly, spreading his open hands in a demonstration of his
friendly intentions.  I'm just doing my job.  In his blind wholesale
rage, Mark had not noticed the approach of another man, a heavy
broad-shouldered man who moved silently out of the uncut brush along the
edge of the clearing.  However, the thick north-country accent was
instantly familiar, and struck sparks along the surface of Mark's skin.
He remembered Hobday from that daywhen first he had returned to
Andersland to find his world turned upside down.  That's all right,
chummy.  I'll talk to Mister Anders.  Hobday touched the young
surveyor's shoulder placatingly and smiled at Mark, a smile that exposed
the short evenly ground teeth, but was completely lacking in any warmth
or humour.  There is nothing you can tell me, Mark started, and Hobday
lifted one hand to stop him.

J am here in my official capacity as a Provincial Inspector for the
Ministry of Lands, Anders.  You'd better listen.  The angry words died
and Mark stared at him, while Hobday calmly unfolded a letter from his
wallet and proffered it to Mark.  It was typewritten on Government paper
and signed by the Deputy Minister of Lands.  The signature was bold and
black, Dirk Courtney.  Mark read through the letter slowly, with a
plunging sense of despair, and when he finished, he handed it back to
Hobday.  It gave him unlimited powers in the valley, powers backed by
all the authority and weight of Government.  Youaregoingupintheworld, he
said, but stillworking for the same master.  And the man nodded
complacently, and then his eyes switched away from Mark's face as Storm
came up.  The expression on his face changed, as he looked at her.

Storm had her hair in thick twin braids, dangling forward on to each
breast.  The sun had turned her skin to a rich reddish brown, against
which her eyes were startlingly blue and clear.  Except for the eyes,
she looked like a Sioux princess from some romantic novel.

Hobday dropped his eyes slowly over her body, with such intimate
lingering insolence that she reached instinctively for Mark's arm and
drew closer to him, as though to bring herself under his direct
protection.  What is it, Mark?  She was still breathless from her climb
up the slope, and high colour lit her cheeks. What are they doing here?
They're Government men, said Mark heavily. From the Ministry of Lands.
But they can't cut our trees, she protested, her voice rising.  You've
got to stop them, Mark.  They're cutting survey lines, Mark explained.
They are surveying the valley. But those trees -'It don't really matter,
rna'am, Hobday told her.  His voice was lower now with a thick gloating
tone, and his eyes were still busy on her body, like insects crawling
greedily to the scent of honey, moving over the thin sun bleached cotton
that covered her breasts.  It don't matter a damn, he repeated.  They
are all going to be under water anyway, cut or standing, it's all going
under.  He turned away from her at last, and swept one hand down the
rude clearing.  From that side to this, he said, indicating the gap
between the towering grey cliffs of Chaka's Gate, right across it, we're
going to build the biggest bloody dam in the whole world.  They sat
together in darkness, close together as though for comfort, and Mark had
not lit the lantern.  The reflected glow of stars was thrown in under
the thatched veranda of the cottage, giving them just enough light to
make out each other's faces.  We knew it was coming, whispered Storm.
And yet somehow I did not believe it.  just as though wishing could make
it stop.  I'm going through early tomorrow to see your father Mark told
her.  He has to know.  She nodded.  Yes, we must be ready to confront
them.  What will you do?  I can't leave you here with John.  IAnd you
can't take me with you.  Not to my father, she agreed.  It's all right,
Mark, I'll take John back to the cottage.  We'll wait for you.  I'll
come for you there, and next time we return here, you'll be my wife. She
leaned against him.  If there is anything to return to, she whispered.
Oh Mark, Mark, they can't do it!

They can't drown all this, this -'The words eluded her and she fell
silent, clinging to him.

They did not speak again, until minutes later a low polite cough roused
them, and Mark straightened to see the dark familiar bulk of Pungushe
standing below the veranda in the starlight.  Pungushe, he said.  I see
you.  Jamela, the Zulu replied, and there was a tone and tightness in
his voice that Mark had never heard before.  I have been to the camp of
the strangers.  The cutters of wood, the men with painted poles, and
bright axes.  He turned his head to look down the valley, and they
followed his gaze.  The ruddy glow of many camp fires flickered against
the lower slopes of the cliffs and on the still night air, the sounds of
laughter and men's voices carried faintly.

Yes?  Mark asked.  There are two white men there.  One of them is young
and blind and of no importance, while the other is a square thick man,
who stands solid on his feet like a bull buffalo, and yet moves
silently, and speaks little and quietly.  Yes?  Mark asked again.  I
have seen this man before in the valley, Pungushe paused.  He is the
silent one of whom we have spoken.  He is the one who shot ixhegu, your
grandfather, and smoked as he watched him die.  Hobday moved quietly,
solidly, along the edge of the slashline of the trees.  The axes were
silent, now, but the end of the noon break would be enforced to the
minute.

At the stroke of the hour they would be back at work.  He was driving
them hard, he always worked his gangs hard, took a pride in his ability
to extract from each man effort beyond his wage.  It was one of the
qualities that Dirk Courtney valued in him, that and his loyalty, a
fierce unswerving loyalty that baulked at no demand upon it.

There was no squeamishness, no hesitating.  When Dirk Courtney ordered
it, there was no question asked.  Hobday's reward was every day more
apparent, already he was a man of substance, and when the new land was
apportioned, that red sweet well-watered soil, rich as newly butchered
beef, then his reward would be complete.

He paused at the spot where the slope increased sharply, angling into
its plunge to the river bed below, and he looked out across the land.
Involuntarily he licked his lips, like a glutton smelling rich food.

They had worked so long for this, each of them in his Own way, led and
inspired by Dirk Courtney, and although Hobday's personal share of the
spoil would be a minute fraction of a single percent, yet it was riches
such as most other men only dream of.

He licked his lips again, standing very still and silent in the shadows
and he looked to the sky.  The clouds were piled to the very heavens,
mountains of silver, blinding in the sunlight, and as he watched they
moved ponderously down on the light wind.  He could feel the closeness,
and he stirred impatiently.  Rain would delay them seriously, and rain
was coming, the big torrential summer rains.

Then he was distracted again.  Something moved on the far side of the
slash line, and his eye darted to the movement.  it was a flash of
bright colour like the flick of a sunbird's wing, and his veiled eyes
jumped to it instantly, his body without moving became charged with
tension.

The girl came out of the brush line, and paused thirty paces away.  She
had not seen him, and she stood poised, listening, head cocked like a
forest animal.

She stood lightly, gracefully, and her limbs were slim and brown, the
flesh so firm and young and sweet that he felt the quick bright rush of
lust again as he had when, the previous day, he had seen her for the
first time.

She wore a loose, wide peasant skirt of gay colour, and a thin cotton
bodice pulled low at the front and drawn loosely with a string that left
the bulge of bosom pushing free, the fine skin shading from dark ruddy
brown to pale cream.  She was dressed like a girl going to meet a lover,
and there was a deliciously fearful tenseness in the way she took a step
forward and stopped again uncertainly.  He felt the lust fuelled in his
groin, and he was suddenly aware of his own hoarse breathing.

The girl turned her head and looked directly at him, and as she saw him,
she started visibly, dropping back a pace with one hand flying to her
mouth.  She stared at him for fully five seconds, and then slowly a
transformation came over her.

The fingers dropped away from her face and she put both hands behind her
back, a movement that thrust the pert breasts against the cotton of her
bodice so he could see the rosy dark buttons of her nipples through the
material.  She thrust out one hip at a saucy angle, and lifted her chin
boldly.  Deliberately she let her eyes slide down his body, let them
linger on his groin, and then rise again to his face.  it was an
invitation as clear as the spoken word, and Hobday heard the blood
roaring in his ears.

She tossed her head, flicking the thick braid of hair over her shoulder,
and she turned away, walking deliberately back to the tree-line,
exaggerating the roll of tight round buttocks under the skirt.

She looked back over her shoulder, and as he started forward to follow,
she let out a tingling flirt of laughter and ran lightly on sandalled
feet, turning at an angle down the slope and Hobday began to run.

Within fifty yards Storm had lost sight of him in the heavy underbrush,
and she stopped to listen, fearful that he might have given up the
pursuit.  Then there was movement above her, at the crest of the slope,
and she realized with the first pang of real alarm that he had moved
more swiftly than she had anticipated, and he had not followed her down,
but had stayed above her in a position of command.

She went off again, running, and almost immediately she realized that he
was ahead of her, moving fast along the crest.  From up there, he could
trap her by a swift turn directly down the slope.

She felt panic spur her, and started to run in earnest.

Immediately the loose scree betrayed her and slipped away under her
feet.  She fell and rolled, flailing her arms for support and coming up
on to her knees the moment her fall was broken.

She let out a little sob of fear.  The man had seen her fall and had
come down the slope.  He was so close that she could see the square
white teeth in the brown smooth face.

He was grinning, a keen excited grimace, and he was steady and quick,
moving down directly into the path along which she must run to safety,
cutting her off squarely from where Mark waited.

She jumped to her feet and swirled away, doubling the slope,
instinctively turning directly away from her pursuer - and from all
help.  Suddenly, she was completely alone, fleeing on frantic feet into
the lonely spaces of the bush, beyond earshot of succour.  Mark had been
right, she realized, he had not wanted her to act as the bait.  He had
known just how dangerous a game she had set out to play, but in her
stubborn arrogant way she had insisted, laughing at his protests,
belittling his fears, until he had reluctantly agreed.  Now she was
running, terrified, the terror making her heart pound and squeezing her
lungs so that her legs felt weak and rubbery under her.

Once she tried to turn back, but like an old and wily hound coursing a
hare, he had anticipated and was there to block her, again she ran and
suddenly the river was in front of her.  The up-country rains had spated
the course of the Bubezi and it rolled past in wide green majesty.  She
had to turn again along the bank, and was immediately into the area of
thick jessie bush.  The heavy Thorn crowded her closely, leaving only
narrow passages, a labyrinth of dark and secret twists and turns in
which almost immediately she lost direction.  She stopped and stood,
trying to listen over the rush of her own breathing, trying to see
through the wavering mist of her tears, tears of fear and of
helplessness.

Her hair had come down in little wisps over her forehead, her cheeks
blazed with high colour, and the tears made her eyes glitter with a
feverish sheen.

She heard nothing, and the brown Thorn encircled her.

She turned slowly, almost like a blind woman, and now she was sobbing
softly in her terror; she chose one of the narrow passages for escape
and dived into it.

He was waiting for her.  She came round the first twist of the pathway
and ran almost directly into his chest.

Only at the very last instant she saw the outstretched arms, thick and
brown and smooth, with the fingers of both hands hooked to seize her.

She screamed, high and shrill, and spun away, back along the path she
had come, but his fingers caught in the thin cotton of her blouse.  It
tore like paper, and as she ran, the smooth creamy flesh of her back
shone through the rent, flashing with a pearly promise that spurred his
lust even higher, and when he laughed, it was a hoarse breathless blurt
of sound that launched Storm into a fresh paroxysm of terror.

He hunted her through the jessie, and twice when he could have taken
her, he deliberately let her slip through his fingers, drawing out the
excruciating pleasure of it, cat with mouse, delighting at the way she
shrieked at his touch, and at the fresh outburst of frantic terror with
which she tried to escape him.

But at last she was finished, and she backed up into a corner of solid
impenetrable Thorn wall, and crouched there, clutching the shreds of her
torn blouse about her, trembling with the wild uncontrollable shudders
of a patient in high fever, her face smeared with tears and her sweat,
staring at him with huge dark blue eyes.

He came slowly to her.  He stooped and she was unresisting as he placed
his big square brown hands on her shoulders.

He was still chuckling, but his own breath was unsteady, and his lips
were drawn back from the square white teeth in a grimace of lust and
excitement.

He pressed his mouth down over hers, and it was like one of those
nightmares in which she could not move nor scream.  His teeth crushed
painfully against her lips, and she tasted her own blood, a slick
metallic salt on her tongue and she felt herself suffocating, his hands
were hard and rough as granite on the soft silk of her breasts and she
came to life again, tugging unavailingly at his wrists, trying to drag
them away.

Yes, he grunted, in the soft thick choked voice.  Fight.

Keep fighting me.  Yes.  Yes.  That's right, struggle, don't stop.  His
voice roused her from the hypnotic spell of terror, and she screamed
again.  Yes, he said.  Do that.  Scream again.  And he turned her across
his body; forcing her down until his knee caught her in the small of the
back, and her body bent backwards like a drawn bow, her hair sweeping
the ground and the curve of her throat was soft and white and
vulnerable, he placed his open mouth on her throat.

She was pinned helplessly as with one hand he swept the wide peasant
skirt up above her waist.  Scream!  he whispered gutturally.  Scream
again.  And with complete and horrified disbelief she felt those thick
brown fingers, calloused and deliberately cruel, begin to prise open her
body.  They seemed to tear her tenderest, most secret flesh, like the
talons of an eagle, and she screamed and screamed.

Mark had lost them in the labyrinthine maze of the jessie bush, and
there had been silence now for many minutes.

He stood bareheaded and panting, listening with every fibre of his being
in the aching silence of the jessie Thorn, his eyes were wild, and he
hated himself with bitter venom for letting himself be persuaded by
Storm.

He had known how dangerous this man was he was a killer, a coldly
competent killer, and he had sent a girl, a young and tender girl, to
bait him.

Then Storm screamed, close by in the jessie, and with a violent lift of
savage relief, Mark began to run again.

At the last moment Hobday heard him coming, and he dropped Storm's slim
abused body and turned with unbelievable speed, dropping into the crouch
of a heavyweight prize fighter, solid and low behind lifted arms and
hunched shoulders, thick and rubbery with muscle.

Mark swung the weapon he had made the night before, a long sausage of
raw-hide, the seams double sewn, and then filled with lead buckshot.  It
weighed two pounds, and it made a sound through the air like the wings
of a wild duck and he swung full-armed, the blow given power and weight
by his terrible anger and hatred.

Hobday threw up his right arm to catch the blow.  The bones of his
forearm broke cleanly, with a sharp crackle, but still the force of the
blow was not fully expended and the leaded bag flew on, directly into
Hobday's face.

Had he not caught the full weight of it on his arm, the blow would have
killed him.  As it was, his face seemed to collapse and his head snapped
backwards to the full stretch of his neck.

Hobday crashed backwards into the wall of Jessie and the curved,
red-tipped thorns caught in his clothing and flesh and held him there,
sprawling like a boneless doll, arms outspread, legs dangling, his face
hanging forward on his chest and the thick dark droplets of blood
beginning to fall on to his shirt and roll softly downwards across his
belly, leaving wet crimson lines down the khaki drill.

The rain began as they carried Hobday up the track to where the two
vehicles were kept under the lee of the cliffs of Chaka's Gate, on the
south bank of the Bubezi.  It came with the first splattering of fat
warm drops, that stung exposed skin with their weight and momentum.  It
fell heavily and still more heavily, turning the surface of the track to
a glaze like melting chocolate, so they slipped under their burden.

Hobday was chained at his ankles with the manacles that Mark used for
holding arrested poachers.  His good arm was cuffed to the leather belt
at his waist, the other arm was crudely sprinted and strapped down to
the same belt.

Mark had tried to force him to walk, but either he was shamming or he
was really too weak.  His face was grotesquely distorted, the nose was
swollen and pushed to one side, both eyes almost closed and leaden blue
with bruises, his lips also were swollen and thickly scabbed with black
dried blood where they had been mashed against his teeth, and through
the mangled flesh were the dark gaps where five of the big square teeth
had been torn out or snapped off level with the gum by the murderous
force of Mark's blow.

Pungushe and Mark carried him between them, laboriously up the steep
path in the teeming, stinging rain, and behind them trailed Storm with
baby John on her hip, her hair melting in long black shiny smears down
her face in the rain.  She was shivering violently, in sudden
uncontrollable spasms, either from the cold or from lingering shock.

The child on her hip squalled petulantly, and she covered him with a
fold of oilskin and tried to hush him distractedly.

They reached the two vehicles under the crude thatched shelter Pungushe
had built to protect them from the elements.  They put Hobday into the
sidecar of the Ariel, and Mark buttoned the canvas screen over him to
protect him from the rain and to hold him secure.  He lay like a corpse.

Then Mark crossed to where Storm sat, shivering, and sodden and
miserable, behind the wheel of the battered old Cadillac.  I'm sending
Pungushe with you, he said, as he took her in his arms and held her
briefly.  She did not have the strength or will to argue, and she leaned
heavily against Mark's chest for comfort.  Go to the cottage, and stay
there, he instructed.  Don't move out of it until I come for you.  Yes,
Mark, she whispered, and shuddered again.  Are you strong enough to
drive?  he asked with sudden gentleness, and she roused herself and
nodded gamely.  I love you, he said.  More than anything or anybody in
this world!

Mark led on the motorcycle over the slippery, muddy track, and it was
almost dark when they reached the main road, itself hardly better than a
track with deeply churned double ruts in the glutinous mud, and all the
time the rain fell.

At the crossroads, Mark pulled the motorcycle off the road, and hurried
back to talk to Storm through the open window of the Cadillac.  It's six
hours from here to Umhlanga Rocks in this mud, don't try and push it, he
told her, and reached through the window.  They embraced awkwardly but
fiercely, and then she rolled up the window and the Cadillac pulled
away, the rear end sliding and skidding in the mud.

Mark watched it over a rise in the land, and when the rear lights winked
out over the ridge, he went back to the motorcycle and kicked the engine
to life.

In the sidecar the man stirred, and his voice was mushy and distorted
through the mangled lips.

I'm going to kill you for this, he said.  Like you killed my
grandfather?  Mark asked softly, and wheeled the cycle into the road. He
took the fork to Ladyburg, thirty miles away through the darkness and
the mud and the rain, and his hatred and anger warmed him all the way
like a bonfire in his belly, and he marvelled at his own restraint in
resisting the temptation to kill Hobday with the bludgeon when he had
the chance.

The man who had tortured and murdered the old man, and who had abused
and desecrated Storm was in his power and still the temptation to avenge
himself was fierce.

Mark pushed it aside and drove on grimly into the night.

The motorcycle slipped and slid from one verge of the road to the other
as he took it up the steep ascent of the Ladyburg escarpment, and below
him the lights of the town were blanketed by the falling white fog of
rain.

Mark was uncertain as to whether or not the General was in residence at
Lion Kop, but as he gunned the machine into the walled kitchen yard he
saw lights in the windows, and a clamorous pack of the General's hunting
dogs rushed out into the night followed by three Zulu servants with
lanterns.  Mark shouted at them.  Is the Nkosi here?  Their answers were
superfluous, for as Mark dismounted, he looked up and saw the bulky
familiar beloved shape step into the lighted window of the study, head
held low on broad shoulders, as Sean Courtney peered down at him.

Mark ran into the house, stripping off his streaming oilskins, and he
burst into the General's study.  My boy.  Sean Courtney hurried to meet
him across the huge room.  What is it?  Mark's whole being was charged
with a fierce and triumphant purpose.  I have the man who killed my
grandfather, he exulted, and halfway across the study Sean stopped dead
and stared at him.  Is it, he stopped, and the dread was plain on his
face, is it Dirk Courtney, is it my son?  The servants carried Hobday's
heavy inert body into the study and laid him on the buttoned leather
sofa in front of the fire.  Who put those chains on him?  growled Sean,
studying the man, and then without waiting for a reply, Take them off
him.  My God, what happened to his face?

Ruth Courtney came then, awakened by the uproar and excitement, dressed
in a long dressing-gown with her night cap still knotted under her chin,
Good Lord, she stared at Hobday.  His arm is broken, and perhaps his jaw
also.  How did it happen?  Sean demanded.  I hit him, Mark explained,
and Sean was silent for a long moment staring at him, before he spoke
again.

I think you had better tell me the whole story, he said.  From the
beginning.  While Ruth Courtney worked quietly over Hobday's broken
face, Mark began his explanation to the General.  His name is Hobday, he
works for Dirk Courtney, has done so for years.  One of his right-hand
men.  Of course, Sean nodded.  I should have recognized him.

It was the swollen face.  I've seen him before.  Quietly, quickly, Mark
told everything he knew about the man, starting from his first meeting
with Hobday at the deserted homestead on Andersland.  He told you he was
working for Dirk Courtney then?

Sean demanded.  For Ladyburg Sugar, Mark qualified, and Sean nodded his
white beard on to his chest.  Go on.  Mark repeated Pungushe's story of
the old man's death, how the three men had come with him to the valley,
and how the silent one had shot him and waited for him to die, and how
they had buried him in an unmarked grave.

However, Sean shook his head, frowning, and Hobday on the couch stirred
and tried to sit up.  His swollen, distorted jaw worked and the words
were blurred.  It's a bloody nigger lie, he said. First time I've ever
been to Chaka's Gate was three days ago.

Sean Courtney's worry showed clearly on his gaunt features as he turned
back to Mark.  You say you hit this man, that you are responsible for
his injuries.  How did it happen?  When he came to the valley, Pungushe
recognized him as the man who killed John Anders.  I lured him out of
his camp, and Pungushe and I captured him and brought him here.  After
half killing him?  Sean asked, heavily, and did not wait for Mark's
reply.  My boy, I think you've put yourself into a very serious
position.  I cannot see a shred of evidence to support all this,
evidence that would convict a man in a court of law, while on the other
hand you have assaulted somebody, grievous bodily harm and abduction at
the least.  Oh, I do have proof, Mark cut in quickly.

What is it?  Sean asked gruffly.

The man on the couch turned his battered face to Sean, and his voice
rose confidently.  He's a bloody liar.  It's all lies. Quiet!  Sean
waved him to silence, and looked to Mark again.  Proof?  he asked.  My
proof will be in the fact that Dirk Courtney kills this man, or has him
killed, the moment we turn him free. They all stared at Mark in stunned
silence, and Mark went on seriously. We all know how Dirk Courtney
works.  He destroys anything that stands in his way, or that is a danger
to him.  Hobday was watching him, and for once the eyes were no longer
veiled and cold.  His mangled lips quivered and gaped slightly, showing
the black gaps where the teeth were missing from his jaw.

It isn't necessary for this man to confess anything to us.

The fact that he has been here, in this house, with the General and
myself, in the camp of Dirk Courtney's enemies, the fact that his face
bears the marks of heavy persuasion, that will be enough for Dirk
Courtney.  Then one phone call is all it would take.  Something like
this Mark paused, then went on.  "Hobday was with us, he is ready to
make a sworn statement, about the killing of John Anders.  " Then we
take Hobday down to the village and leave him there.  Dirk Courtney
kills him, but this time we are ready.  For once we can trace the murder
directly to him.  God damn you, snarled Hobday, struggling into a
sitting position.  It's a lie.  I haven't confessed anything!  You can
tell that to Dirk Courtney.  He might believe you, Mark told him
quietly.  On the other hand, if you turned king's evidence and did
confess, you'd have the protection of the General and the law, all the
force of the law, and we would not turn you loose.  Hobday looked around
him wildly, as though some avenue of escape might open miraculously for
him, but Mark went on remorselessly.  You know Dirk Courtney better than
any of us, don't you, Hobday?  You know how his mind works.  Do you
think he will take the chance that you didn't confess?  Just how useful
are you going to be to him in the future?  Can you trust his loyalty,
now that the shadow of doubt is on you?  You know what he is going to
do, don't you?  If you think about it, you'll realize that your only
chance of survival will be to have Dirk Courtney locked up safely, or
dancing at the end of a rope.  Hobday glared at him.  You bastard, he
hissed through his broken lips, and it was as though a cork had been
drawn; a steady stream of obscenity poured from him, vicious filth, the
ugly meaningless words repeated over and over again, while his naked
eyes glittered with helpless hatred.

Mark stood up and cranked the handset of the telephone on Sean's desk.
Exchange, he said into the mouthpiece.  Please connect me with the
residence of Mister Dirk Courtney.  No!  choked Hobday. Don't do that!
and now terror had replaced hatred, and his face seemed to collapse
around the ruined nose and mouth.

Mark made no effort to obey, and clearly everybody in the room heard the
click of a connection being made, and then the squawk of a voice
distorted by the wires and distance.  This is the residence of the
Honourable Deputy Minister for Lands, Mr Dirk Courtney -Hobday lumbered
off the couch, and staggered to the desk, he snatched the earpiece from
Mark's hand and slammed it back on to its bracket of the telephone.  No,
he panted, with pain and fear. Please don't do that.  He hung on to the
corner of the desk, hunched up with the pain, clutching his broken arm
to his chest, his mashed features working convulsively.  They waited
quietly, Mark and Ruth and Sean, waiting for him to reach his decision.

Hobday turned and staggered heavily back to the sofa.  He collapsed upon
it with his head hanging forward, almost touching his knees, and his
breathing hissed and sobbed in the silence.  All right, he whispered
hoarsely.  What do you want to know?

General Sean Courtney shook himself as though awaking from a nightmare,
but his voice was decisive and brisk.  Mark, take the Rolls.  Co down
into town and get me a lawyer.  I want this statement drawn up in proper
form I'm still a justice of the Peace and Commissioner of Oaths.

I will witness the document.  Mark parked the Rolls in Peter Botes
gravel driveway of the big new house on the outskirts of town.

The house was dark and silent, but to Mark's heavy knocking on the
carved teak front door, a dog began to bark in the house somewhere, and
at last a light bloomed in an upstairs window and the sash slid up with
a squeal.

Who is it?  What do you want?  Peter's voice was querulous and fuddled
with sleep.  It's Mark, he shouted up at the window.  You've got to come
with me, now!  My God, Mark, it's after eleven o'clock.  Can't it wait
until morning?  General Courtney wants you, now.  The name had its
effect.  There was a mumble of voices within the bedroom, Marion's
sister protesting sleepily, and then Peter called down again.  All
right, give me a minute to dress, Mark.  As he waited in the driver's
seat of the Rolls with the rain slashing down on the roof, and rippling
in wavering lines down across the windshield, Mark pondered briefly why
he had chosen Peter Botes.  It was not only that he knew exactly where
to find him so late at night. He realized that he wanted Peter to be
there when they tore down his idol, he wanted to rub his nose in it when
they proved Dirk Courtney a thief and a murderer.  He wanted that
satisfaction, and he smiled bleakly without humour in the darkened
Rolls.  I deserve at least that, he whispered to himself, and the front
door of the house opened.  Peter hurried out, ducking his head against
the slanting rain.  What is it?  he demanded, through the window of the
Rolls.  It had better be important, getting me out at this time of
night.  It's important enough, Mark told him, and started the engine.
Get in!  I'll follow you in my Packard, Peter told him and ran to the
garage.

Peter Botes sat at General Courtney's big desk.  Hurriedly dressed, he
was without a necktie and his small prosperous paunch bulged the white
shirt, pulling it free of his trousers waistband.  His sandy hair was
thinning and ruffled, so that pink scalp showed through as he bowed over
the foolscap sheet of paper.

He wrote swiftly, a neat regular script, his features betraying each new
shock at the words he was transcribing, his cheeks pale and his mouth
set and thin.

Every few minutes he would pause incredulously and stare at Hobday
across the room, breathing heavily at some new and terrible admission.
Have you got that?  the General demanded, and Peter nodded jerkily and
began to write again.

The others listened intently.  The General slumped in his chair by the
fire.  His eyes were closed, as though he slept, but the questions he
rapped out every few minutes were bright and penetrating as a rapier
blade.

Mark stood behind his chair, quiet and intent, his face expressionless,
although his anger and his hatred cramped in his guts.

Hobday sat forward on the sofa and his voice was a muffled drone in his
thick north-country accent, muted in contrast to the terrible words he
spoke.

It was not only the killing of John Anders.  There was more, much more.
Forgery of State documents, bribery of high officials, direct abuse of
public office, and Mark started and leaned forward with shock as Hobday
recounted how he had tried on two occasions, following Dirk Courtney's
orders, to kill him.

Mark had not realized nor recognized him, but now Hobday's stocky shape
tied in his memory with the shadowy faceless hunter in the night on the
escarpment, and with the other figure seen through the rain and the
fever mists.  Hobday did not look up as he told it, and Mark had no
questions to ask.  It was as though once Hobday had started, he must
purge himself of all this filth, as though he were now deriving some
perverse satisfaction from the horror his words struck into his
audience.

They listened, appalled by the magnitude of it all.  Every few minutes,
Ruth exclaimed involuntarily, and Sean would open his eyes briefly to
stare at her, before closing them again and covering them with one hand.

At last Hobday came to the murder of John Anders, and each detail was
exactly as Pungushe had described it.  Mark felt sickened and wretched
as he listened, but he asked only one question.  Why did you let him die
so slowly, why didn't you finish him?  It had to look like an accident.
Hobday did not look up. One bullet only.  A man does not shoot himself
twice by accident.  I had to let him die in his own time.  There was no
breadth nor horizon to Mark's anger, and this time Ruth Courtney caught
her breath with a sound like a sob.  Again Sean Courtney opened his
eyes.  Are you all right, my dear?

She nodded silently, and Sean turned back to Hobday.

Go on, he said.

At the end, Peter Botes read the statement back, his voice quivering and
fading at the more horrendous passages, so that Sean had to gruff at him
fiercely.  Speak up, man.  He had made two fair copies, and Hobday
signed each page with an illiterate scrawl, and then each of them signed
below him, and Sean pressed his wax seal of office on to the final page
of each copy.  All right, he said, as he carried the top document to the
iron safe built into the wall behind his desk.  I want you to keep and
file the other copy, he said to Peter, Thank you for your help, Mr
Botes.  He locked the safe and turned back into the room.  Mark, will
you telephone Doctor Acheson now, please?  We've got to take care of our
witness, I suppose.

Though, for my money, I'd just as soon see him suffer.  When Doctor
Acheson arrived at Lion Kop, it was almost two in the morning, and Ruth
Courtney took him up to the guest room where Hobday lay.

Neither Sean Courtney nor Mark went up; they stayed in the study,
sitting quietly together across the fire which a servant had built.
Against the windows, the wind bumped and the rain spattered.  Sean was
drinking whisky, and Mark had filled his glass twice for him in the last
hour.

He was slumped down in his favourite chair now, tired and old and bowed
with grief, holding the glass with both hands.  If I had the courage, I
would take the rifle to him myself - like a rabid dog.  But he is still
my son, no matter how often I deny it, he is still of my blood, of my
loins.

Mark was silent, and Ruth came into the room.

Doctor Acheson is setting that man's arm, she said.  He will be another
hour, but I think you should come up to bed now, my dear.  She crossed
to Sean's chair and laid a gentle hand on his shoulder.  We have all had
more than enough for one day.  The telephone rang on the desk, a tinny
irritant sound that startled them all.  They stared at it for a full
five seconds, until it rang again demandingly and Ruth crossed to it and
lifted the earpiece.

Mrs.  Ruth Courtney, she said softly, almost fearfully.  Mrs.  Courtney,
are you the mother of Mrs, Storm Hunt?  Yes, this is correct.  I am
afraid we have very bad news.  This is the Superintendent of Addington
Hospital in Durban.  Your daughter has been involved in a motor
accident.  The rain and the mud, I am afraid.  Her son, your grandchild,
has been killed outright.  Thankfully he suffered no pain, but your
daughter is in a critical condition.  Can you come to her, as soon as
you possibly can?  We don't know if she will last the night, I'm afraid.
The telephone dropped from Ruth's hand, and she swayed on her feet, the
colour flying from her face, leaving it frosted with icy white.  Oh God!
she whispered, and she started to fall, her legs collapsed and she
crumpled forward.  Mark caught her before she hit the floor and lowered
her on to the sofa.

Sean crossed to the dangling earpiece and lifted it.  This is General
Courtney, he barked angrily.  What is it?  Mark took the big Rolls down
the long slanting right hand turn towards the bridge very fast.  The
woman he loved, the mother of his dead child, was dying, and Mark's
heart was breaking.  The road was deep with chocolate mud, and other
vehicles had rutted it deeply, churning the mud to a thick ugly
porridge.  The Rolls flared and kicked in the ruts, but Mark fought the
wheel grimly.

The bridge over the Baboon Stroom was five hundred yards ahead of them,
still invisible in the endless driving rain.  The headlights faded fifty
feet ahead, overwhelmed by the flights of white raindrops, thick as
javelins.

In the rear seat, Ruth Courtney sat quietly, staring ahead with eyes
that did not see.  The collar of her fur coat was pulled up around her
ears, so she looked small and frail as a child.

General Sean Courtney sat beside Mark, and he was talking quietly, as
though to himself.  I've left it too late.  I've been a stubborn old
fool.  I wanted too much from her, I wanted her to be better than human,
and I was too harsh on her when she did not meet the standards I set for
her.  I should have gone to her long ago, and now perhaps it's too late.
It's not too late, Mark denied.  She will live, she must live.  It's too
late for my grandson, whispered Sean.  I never saw him, and only now I
realize how much I wanted to -At the mention of baby John, Mark felt the
sickening jolt of despair in his stomach again and he wanted to shout,
He was my son.  My first born! But beside him, Sean was talking again.
I've been a spiteful and unforgiving old man.  God have mercy on me, but
I even cut my own daughter out of my will.  I disowned her, and now I
hate myself for that.  If only we can reach her, if only I can talk to
her once more.  Please, God, grant me that.  Ahead of them the steel
guard railings of the bridge loomed out of the torrential darkness, and
lightning bounced off the belly of the clouds. For an instant Mark saw
the spidery steel tracery of the railway bridge spanning the chasm two
hundred yards downstream.  Under it, the rocky sides of the gorge
dropped almost sheer a hundred and firty feet to the swollen racing
brown flood waters of the Baboon Stroom.

Mark touched the brakes, and then double-declutched the gears, bringing
the Rolls under tighter control as he lined up for the entrance to the
road bridge.

Suddenly, dazzling light flared from the darkness on the right hand side
of the road, and Mark threw up one hand to protect his eyes.

Out of the darkness rushed a great dark shape, with two blazing
headlights glaring like malevolent eyes as it came.

With sudden clarity of mind, Mark realized that the Rolls was trapped
helplessly on the approach ramp to the bridge, and that on his left
hand, only a frail railing of iron pipes screened them from the drop and
that the monstrous vehicle racing down from the right would come into a
collision which would hurl the Rolls through the railing as though it
were a child's toy.  Hold on!  he screamed, and swung the wheel to meet
the roaring towering monster of steel, and the blinding white light cut
into his eyes.

Peter Botes pulled off the road into the pine trees and switched off the
engine of the Packard.  In the silence he could hear the pine branches
thrashing restlessly on the wind, and the dislodged rain-drops tapped on
the roof.

Peter lit a cigarette and the match danced in his cupped hands.  He
inhaled deeply, waiting for the calming effect of the tobacco smoke, and
he stared ahead up the straight roadway that led to Great Longwood, the
homestead of Dirk Courtney.

He sensed that the decision he must make now was the most vital of his
entire life.  Whichever way he decided, his life was already changed for
ever.

When Dirk Courtney fell, he would bring down all those close to him,
even the innocent, as he was innocent.  The scandal and the guilt would
sully him, and he had worked so hard for it.  The prestige, the blooming
career and all the sweets that he was just now starting to enjoy.  All
of it would be gone, and he would have to begin again, perhaps in
another town, another land, to begin again right at the very bottom. The
thought appalled him, he had become used to being a man of substance and
importance.  He did not know if he could face a new beginning.

On the other hand, if Dirk Courtney did not come down, if he were saved
from death and disaster -just how grateful would he be to the man who
worked his salvation?  He knew the extent of Dirk Courtney's present
fortune and power, and it was conceivable that some of that, perhaps a
large slice of that might come to him, to Peter Botes, the man who had
saved Dirk Courtney and yet still retained the instrument of his
destruction.

it was one of those moments of destiny, Peter realized, that come only
occasionally to a chosen few.  On one hand dishonour and obscurity, on
the other, power and riches, tens of thousands, perhaps even millions.

He started the engine of the Packard and the rear wheels spun in the
slimy mud, and then he swerved back on to the driveway, and put the big
machine to the hill.

Dirk Courtney sat on the corner of his desk, one foot swinging idly.  He
wore a dressing-gown of patterned silk, and the lustrous material caught
the lamplight as he moved.  There was a white silk scarf at his throat,
and his eyes were clear and alert in the handsome tanned face, as though
he had not just risen from deep sleep.

He spun the duelling pistol on his forefinger as he listened intently.

Peter Botes sat nervously on the edge of the chair, and though there was
a fire in the grate that Dirk had poked and fed to a fierce blaze, still
he shivered every few moments and rubbed his hands together.  The cold
was in his soul, he realized, and his voice rose a little as he grabbled
on.

Dirk Courtney did not speak, made no comment nor exclamation, asked no
question until he was done.  He spun the pistol, two turns and the butt
snapped into the palm of his hand.  Two turns, and snap.

When Peter Botes finished, Dirk cocked the hammer Of the pistol and the
click of the mechanism was unreasonably loud in the silent room. Hobday,
my father, his wife, young Anders, and yourself. The only others that
know.  And the Zulu.  And the Zulu, Dirk agreed, and dry-fired the
pistol.  The hammer cracked against the pan.  How many copies of the
statement?  One, lied Peter.  In the iron safe of the General's study.
Dirk nodded and re-cocked the pistol.  All right.  If there is another
copy, you have it, he said.  But we don't lie to each other, do we,
Peter?  It was the first time he had used his given name, there was a
familiarity and a threat in it, and Peter could only nod with a dryness
in his throat.

Again Dirk dry-fired the pistol, and smiled.  It was that warm and
charming smile, that frank and friendly smile that Peter knew so well.
We love each other too much for that, don't we!  He kept smiling. That's
why you came to tell me this, isn't it? Because we love each Other?
Peter said nothing, and Dirk went on, still smiling, And of course you
are going to be a rich man, Peter, if you do as I ask.  A very rich man.
You will do as I ask, won't you, Peter?

And Peter nodded again.  Yes, of course, he blurted.  I want you to make
a phone call, said Dirk.  If you speak through a handkerchief, it will
sound as though it's long distance, and it will muffle your voice.
Nobody will recognize it.

Will you do that?  Of course, Peter nodded.  You will phone my father's
house, speak either to him or his wife.  I want you to pretend that you
are the Superintendent of Addington Hospital, and here is what you will
tell them Dirk Courtney sat in the darkened cab of the truck, and
listened to the rain as he reviewed his plans and preparations
carefully.

He did not like having to move in a hurry, without time for careful
planning.  It was too easy to overlook some vital detail.

He did not like having to do this type of work himself.  It was best to
send another.  He did not take personal risks, not any more, not unless
there was no other way.

Regrets and misgivings were vain and wasted the moments which still
remained before action.  He turned all his attention back to his
planning.

They would use the Rolls, and there would be three of them, the General
and his Jewish whore, and that arrogant scheming puppy Anders.

Dirk had picked the spot with care, and the farmyard truck was loaded
with fifty sacks of horse-feed.  Three tons of dead weight.  It would
give it irresistible momentum.

Afterwards he must do two things, firstly he must make sure of them.  He
had a length of lead piping wrapped in hessian packing.  It would crack
a skull without breaking skin.  Then he must take the General's keys.
The key of the safe was on the bunch, and it was on his watch chain.

The thought of plundering his father's dead body did not cause him even
a tremor.  His only concern was that the keys were retrievable, that
there was no fire and that the Rolls was not submerged in the roaring
torrent of the Baboon Stroom.

if that did happen, he must rely then on the General not having changed
his habits of twenty years before.  The spare key had been kept in the
wine cellar then, on the rack above the champagne bottles.  Dirk had
discovered it there when he had used the cellar in a boyhood game, and
he had taken the key twice for his own ends, and returned it secretly.
The General was an old dog, a creature of habit.

It would still be there.  Dirk was certain.

All right, then, the safe.  Two keys.  If neither was available, then it
was an old safe, but he did not want to use force on it.  He must hope
for the keys.  Anyway, he was content that he could open it one way or
another.

The statement was his, to be carefully burned, and that left Hobday.
Probably in one of the guest rooms, sedated, helpless.  The lead pipe
again, and then an overturned paraffin lamp.

it was a big house of old dry wooden beams and thick thatch.  It would
burn as a pyre, with Hobday lying in it like a Viking chieftain.

That left only Peter Botes, Dirk glanced sideways at him.

The situation was containable, it was no worse than fifty others he had
survived.  It needed only swift, direct action.

He spoke encouragingly to Peter.  Don't worry, he said.  After tonight,
a new life awaits you.  I'm going to take you with me along the paths of
wealth and power, Peter.  You'll never regret this night, I swear it to
you.  He squeezed Peter's upper arm, a comradely gesture in the
darkness.  Of course, he had a copy of the statement, Dirk thought, but
afterwards there would be time, plenty of time to find it and to be rid
of the pompous little prig.  In a year or so, when the excitement had
died down, another little accident, and it would all be over.  Have you
got the pistol?  he asked, and Peter gulped nervously, clutching the
bulky military model Smith Wesson with both hands between his knees.

u are not to use it, Dirk warned again.  Except as the very last resort.
We don't want bullet holes to explain.  You do understand?  Yes, I
understand.  You are insurance, that's all.  Final insurance.  And out
in the darkness, through the slanting arrows of rain a light glowed and
faded and grew again higher up the slope.  Here they come, said Dirk,
and started the engine of the truck.

Mark spun the wheel hard right, and thrust the accelerator pedal flat
against the floor-boards, trying to ride off the collision and beat the
great roaring vehicle to the threshold of the bridge.

Behind him Ruth Courtney screamed shrilly, but Mark thought he had made
it, he thought for an instant that the sudden acceleration had forged
the Rolls ahead, but the truck slewed hard, swinging viciously, and he
felt the crack of impact in every bone of his body.

It struck at the level of the rear wheels of the Rolls, and the big
heavy car snapped sideways, tearing his hands from the steering-wheel
and hurling Mark against the door.  He felt bones break in his chest
like dry twigs, and then the world turned end over end as the Rolls
cartwheeled.  A shower of bright white sparks flamed like the tail of a
meteor in the darkness as steel brushed murderously against steel. There
was another jerk as the Rolls crashed through the guardrail of the
bridge and then they were dropping free, plunging silently into black
space.

In the rear seat, Ruth Courtney was still screaming, and the Rolls
struck, a glancing shuddering blow, bounding off the rock wall of the
gorge, and leaping out into space once more.

Mark was pressed against the side door, held there by the accelerating
dropping force of the plunging Rolls, but at the next impact the door
was burst open, and Mark was hurled like a stone from a slingshot, out
into resounding swirling darkness.

He saw the burning headlights of the Rolls, spinning in a great vortex
of blinding white, below him, and the gorge rang with the iron echoes of
steel on rock, and the crazy bellowing roar of the Rolls-Royce engine
jammed at full power.

He seemed to fall for ever, through darkness, and then suddenly he
struck with a force that drove the air from his lungs.  The hard,
unyielding impact convinced him for a moment that his body was crushed
to boneless pulp on the rocky floor of the gorge, but then the cold,
tumultuous torrent of racing water overwhelmed him.  He had been thrown
far enough to fall into the river itself.

Clinging to his last shreds of consciousness, he fought for breath,
fought to keep his head above the surface, as the torrent swept him
away.  Glistening black boulders leapt like predators out of the dark,
clawing at his legs, pummelling his injured chest, barging into him with
numbing bruising power in the flood, and icy water gushed down his
straining throat, burning his lungs, and making him choke and retch for
each breath.

He slid down a racing spill of white rapids, feeling skin stripped from
his hip and shoulder at the contact of harsh rock and then, at the
bottom, he struck again, jammed solid between two monumental rocks.  In
the darkness, they stood over him like gravestones.

He was held in their jaws, and the water tore furiously at him, as
though denied of its prey, trying to pluck him away.

There was light, just enough to make out shapes and distances, and Mark
marvelled at that with a brain jellied by pounding and starved of
oxygen.  Then he looked up, and through streaming eyes saw that the
truck was parked on the threshold of the bridge high above the gorge,
its headlights struck the ironwork and the light was broken up and
diffused by the rain.  It cast a vague uncertain glow into the gorge.

Added to this was a closer, more powerful light source.

The smashed carapace of the Rolls-Royce lay at the foot of the cliff,
half in the water, half upon the rocky ledge.  It lay on its back, with
all four wheels spiralling idly, but both headlights still burned
fiercely, striking the uneven rock walls, providing a dramatic stage
lighting.

Mark looked around him, and saw that the current had swept him in under
the cliff, and that a ledge of glistening black rock extended out over
his head.  He reached up with his right hand, and then cried out as his
fingers touched the ledge, and bright agony flared in his wrist.

Something was broken there, he realized, as he clung desperately to the
slippery boulders, and tried to force the fingers of his right hand to
open or close.

The torrent was too strong to resist much longer, and he felt himself
starting to slide, dragging over the boulders, on the point of being
swept away once more.  He knew that less than a hundred yards
downstream, the first waterfall plunged, frothing and thundering, down
the sheer side of the escarpment.

He released his grip with the left hand, and threw himself upwards with
all his strength.  His fingers caught on the sharp lip of the ledge
above his head, and his body swung like a pendulum, the hungry waters
slashing at his knees, testing the strength of his grip, trying to drag
him away, trying to break the hooked fingers, tearing the fingernails
loose so that droplets of blood squeezed out from under them.

Slowly, achingly, Mark bent the arm at the elbow, lifting his knees,
drawing his feet clearof the water and its murderous drag.

He hung another moment, gathering what was left of his strength and
resolve, and then, with one last convulsive heave, he threw his right
arm upwards and hooked his elbow over the ledge, and followed it
immediately with his left elbow.

Another moment of rest, and then he wriggled painfully out on the ledge
and lay face down.  He thought he was blind now, or that the lights had
been doused, but the darkness was in his head only.

Slowly the darkness cleared, and he lifted his head.  The thunder of the
river drowned out all other sound, he could not hear the scrabble of
loose stone and the slide of booted feet as Dirk Courtney came down the
almost vertical pathway below the bridge.  It did not surprise Mark that
it was him, it seemed only natural that Dirk Courtney should be here, at
the scene of disaster.  He was dressed in hunting breeches and
calf-length boots, a thick navy pea jacket and a woollen cap pulled low
over his face.

He slid down the last ten feet of the cliff, keeping his balance, light
as a dancer on his feet, and he paused on the ledge beside the shattered
Rolls.  Carefully he looked about him, flashing a lantern into the
shadows and crevices.

Mark flattened himself down on the rock, but he was beyond the range of
the lantern beam.

Dirk turned the beam on to the Rolls, and Mark groaned with the shock of
it.

General Sean Courtney had been thrown halfway through the windscreen,
and then the full weight of the machine had rolled on to his upper
torso.  His head was almost severed, and the thick white beard was
sodden with bright blood, that shone like rubies in the lantern light.

Dirk Courtney stooped over him, and felt for the carotid pulse in the
throat.  Despite the fearful mutilation, he must have detected some
flutter of stubborn life there.  Dirk rolled the head sideways, and the
eyes were open and startled.  Dirk lifted the short thick club he
carried in his right hand.  It was wrapped in coarse brown hessian, but
its weight and heft were obvious, by the way he handled it.

Mark tried to cry out, but his hoarse croak was lost in the roar of
waters.  Dirk struck his father across the temple, above the right ear,
where the wet grey curls were plastered against the skull, and Mark
seemed to feel the thud of the blow in his own soul.

Then with one exploring forefinger, Dirk pressed the temple and felt the
give of mortal damage, the grating of the rough edges of shattered bone
shard deep in his father's head.

Dirk's features were expressionless, cold and remote, but then he did
something which seemed to Mark more dreadful more shocking than the
killing blow.  With a tender touch of his fingertips, he closed the
eyelids over Sean Courtney's dead staring eyes.  Then he went down on
one knee and kissed his father's bloodied lips lightly, without a change
of expression.  It was the act of an unhinged mind.  It was only at that
moment that Mark realized that Dirk Courtney was insane.

Almost immediately, Dirk's manner changed and his hands lost the gentle
touch, becoming once again businesslike andprecise.  He rolled the body,
unbuttoned the camelhair overcoat and searched swiftly through Sean's
clothing.

Then he drew out a gold watch chain with the keys and gold hunter
attached.

He examined the keys briefly and then pushed them into his pocket.  He
stood and went to the rear door of the Rolls and struggled with the
handle.  The door burst open at last, and Ruth Courtney's body spilled
out sideways and lay at his feet.  He took a handful of her thick dark
hair and drew her head back.  Again he swung the short thick club
against her temple, and again he felt the skull like a doctor making

his diagnosis, prodding to feel the soft spot of crushed bone.

Satisfied, he lifted Ruth Courtney's limp, childlike body in his arms
and carried her to the edge of the water.  He dropped her over the side,
and she was gone instantly, dashed away on the dark current, down to
where the plunging waterfalls would tumble her body into the Ladyburg
valley, and the cruel rocks would leave no doubt in a coroner's mind as
to how she had died.

Helpless with his injuries and exhaustion, his body battered and
strained beyond its natural limits, Mark could not move, could hardly
breathe as he watched Dirk Courtney stoop and grasp his father's ankles.
He dragged the General's heavy body to the edge of the torrent, strai
ing backwards, against the dead weight.

Mark dropped his face into his hands and found that he was weeping,
great racking dry sobs that probed the injuries deep in his chest.

When he looked up again, Sean Courtney's body was gone, and Dirk
Courtney was coming towards where he lay, cautiously following the
narrow ]edge, searching the darkness with the lantern beam, sweeping the
dark tumbling waters, examining each foot of the ledge, looking for him,
looking for Mark, knowing he had been in the Rolls.

The headlights of the truck had struck full into Mark's face in that
fatal instant of collision.  Dirk Courtney knew he was here, somewhere.

Mark rolled on to his side and tried to unfasten the buttons of his coat
but in his haste he had tried with the right hand, and he whimpered with
the pain.  With his left hand now, he ripped the buttons away and
struggled.  out of the garment, its wet folds resisting each movement so
that when he at last was free of it, Dirk Courtney was only fifty feet
away, coming steadily, carefully along the ledge, the lantern in one
hand, the short heavy club dangling in the other.

Lying on the edge of the river, Mark flipped the jacket sideways, trying
to make it fall on to the rocks in the torrent below, but he had no time
to see if he had succeeded.  Dirk Courtney was too close.

Mark rolled in towards the foot of the cliff, stifling the cry of pain
as his damaged ribs and broken wrist came in rude contact with the rock.

In the lee of the cliff there was a dark shallow chimney, screened from
the light of the headlights and lantern.  Mark came to his feet.  Dirk
Courtney was out of sight beyond the angle of the cliff, but the beam of
his lantern jumped and swept and swung, bobbing with each pace as he
came on.

Mark turned his face to the cliff, gathered himself, and found that some
of his dissipated strength was returning, and his anger was still alive,
like a small warm flame in his chest.  He did not know if it was enough
strength, or anger, to carry him through, but he began to climb, slowly,
clumsily, like a maimed insect he clung to the cold wet rock and dragged
himself upwards.

He was twenty feet up when Dirk Courtney stopped on the ledge directly
below him.  Mark froze into stillness, the last defence of the helpless
animal, but he knew that the instant Dirk lifted the beam, he was
discovered.  He waited for it, with the numbed resignation of the beast
waiting in the abattoir chute.

Dirk made another careful search, swinging the lantern in a full slow
traverse of both sides of the river, and he was on the point of lifting
the beam to play it on to the cliff where Mark hung, when something
caught his attention.

He took two hurried paces to the edge of the rocky ledge and shone the
lantern downwards.

Mark's jacket was caught on one of the boulders, and Dirk went down on
one knee to try and reach it with one outstretched arm.

It was the respite that Mark needed.  Dirk's full attention was on the
stranded jacket and the rush and roar of water covered the noise of
Mark's scrabbling feet and hands on the cliff.

He did not look down again until he had dragged himself fifty feet
higher, and then he saw that the jacket had succeeded as a decoy.  Dirk
Courtney was a hundred feet downstream, standing on the lip of the first
steep waterfall, on the very edge of the escarpment.  He had the sodden
jacket in his hands and he was peering over the fearsome drop.  In the
lantern light, the water was black and smooth as oil, as it streamed
into the abyss, turning slowly to thick white spume as it fell.

Dirk Courtney threw the jacket out into black space and stood back from
the drop.  He settled down comfortably on his haunches, sheltered by the
cliff from rain and wind, and quite calmly he selected a cigar, like a
workman taking a break after performing satisfactorily a difficult task.

That casual little act, the flare of a sulphur match, and the contented
puff of blue tobacco smoke in the lantern light, probably saved Mark's
life.  It stoked his anger to the point when it could overcome his agony
and bodily exhaustion.  It provided him with the will to go on, and he
began to climb again.

Sometimes during the climb, reality faded away from Mark.  Once a sense
of warmth and well-being began to suffuse his whole body, a wonderful
feeling, floating as though on the very frontiers of sleep, but he
caught himself before he fell, and deliberately punched his right hand
against the rock face.  He screamed with the pain of it, but with the
pain came new resolve.

But resolve faded slowly in the cold and the pain, and fantasy grew
again.  He believed that he was one of King Chaka's chosen, following
the old king up that terrible cliff to the summit of Chaka's Gate, and
he found himself talking gibberish in broken Zulu, and in his head he
heard the deep resonant voice of the old king calling him on, giving him
encouragement, and he knew if he climbed faster he might catch a glimpse
of the king's face.  He lost his grip in his impatience, and slid away,
gathering momentum down the incline, until he crashed into one of the
stunted dwarf trees that grew from the cliff face.  It broke his fall,
but he screamed again at the pain of broken ribs.

He climbed on, and then he heard Storm's voice.  It was so clear and
close that he stopped, and turned his face up into the rain and
darkness.  She was there, floating above his head, so beautiful and pale
and graceful, Come, Mark, she said, and her voice echoed and rang like a
silver bell in his head.  Come, my darling.

He knew then that she was alive, that she was not dying in a cold
hospital bed, that she was here, come to him in his pain and exhaustion.
Storm, he cried, and threw himself upwards, falling forward, and lying
face down in the short wet grass at the top of the cliff.

He just wanted to lie there, for ever.  He was not even sure that he had
reached the top, was not sure if this was not yet another fantasy,
perhaps he was dead already and this was all there was to it.

Then slowly he was aware of the rain drops on his cheek, and the sound
of the little tree frogs clinking in the rain, and the cold breath of
the wind, and he realized with regret that he was still alive.

The pain began returning then.  It started in his wrist first, and began
to spread, and he did not think he had the strength left to ride it.

Then suddenly he had the image, clearly formed in his mind, of Dirk
Courtney stooped over his father's body, with the club raised in his
hand to strike, and Mark's anger came to save him again.

Mark pushed himself to his knees and looked about him.  A hundred yards
away, the truck was parked on the threshold of the iron bridge, and in
its headlights, he could make out the shape of a man.

With one more huge, draining effort, Mark came to his feet, and stood
swaying, gathering himself for his next lumbering step.

Pete Botes stood in the rain, holding the heavy pistol hanging in his
right hand.  The rain had soaked his fine sandy hair, and it ran down
his cheeks and forehead, so he kept wiping it away with his left hand.

The rain had soaked through the shoulders of his overcoat also, and he
shivered spasmodically, as much from fear as from cold.

He was caught up in the great swirl of events over which he had no
control, an encircling web from which he could see no escape, even
though his lawyer's mind twisted and turned.  Accessory to murder,
before and after the fact.  He did not want to know what was going on
down there at the foot of the cliff, and yet he felt the sick
fascination and dread of it.

This was not what he had imagined when he had made the decision to go to
Dirk Courtney.  He had thought it would be a few words, and he could
walk away, pretending it had not happened, crawling back into his wife's
warm bed and pulling the blankets over his head.

He had not been prepared for this horror and violence, for a gun in his
hand, and this ugly bloody business in the gorge.

The penalty is death, he thought, and shivered again.

He wanted to run, but there was no place to run now.  Oh God, why did I
do it?  he whispered aloud.  I wish, oh God, I wish, the age-old cry of
the weakling, but he did not finish the wish.  There was a sound behind
him and he began to turn, lifting the pistol and beginning to point it
with both arms at full stretch in front of him.

A figure came towards him out of the darkness, and Peter opened his
mouth to cry out.

The figure was an apparition of blood and mud, with a distorted pale
face, and it came so swiftly that the cry never reached his lips.

Peter Botes was a man of words and ideas, a soft little man of desks and
rich foods, and the man who came out of the darkness was a soldier.

Mark knelt over him in the mud, panting and holding his ribs, waiting
for the pain of movement to recede, and for his starred vision to clear.

He looked down at the man under him.  His face was pressed into the mud,
and Mark took a handful of his hair and rolled the head on its narrow
shoulders to prevent the man drowning; it was only then that Mark
recognized him.  Peter!  he whispered hoarsely, and felt his senses reel
again, uncertain if this was another fantasy.

He touched the unconscious man's lips, and they were warm and soft as a
girl's.  Peter!  he repeated stupidly, and suddenly he knew it all.  It
did not have to be thought out a step at a time.  He understood how Dirk
Courtney had known where to set his ambush.  He knew that Peter was the
traitor, and he knew that the decoy had been Storm and baby John, he
knew it was all a lie then.  He knew that Storm and her child were safe
and sleeping in the tiny bedroom above the beach, and the knowledge
buoyed him.

He picked the Smith Wesson revolver out of the mud with his left hand
and wiped it carefully on his shirt.

Dirk Courtney paused at the head of the pathway.  He was only slightly
breathless from the climb, but his boots were thick with mud and
raindrops dewed his shoulders, glittering in the burning headlights of
the truck.

The headlights dazzled him, and there was an area of unfathomable
darkness behind them.

Peter?  he called, and lifted one arm to shield his eyes.

He saw the shadowy figure of the waiting man leaning against the cab of
the truck, and he walked forward.  It's done, he said.  You have nothing
to worry about now.  I have the key to the safe, it's just the cleaning
up left to do.  He stopped abruptly, and peered again at the waiting
figure.  The man had not moved.  Peter, his voice cracked.  Come on,
man!  Pull yourself together.  There is still work to do.  And he
started forward again, stepping out of the beam of the headlights.  What
time is it?  he asked.  It must be getting late.  Yes.  Mark's voice was
thick and slurred.  For you, it's very late.  And Dirk stopped again,
staring at him.  The silence seemed to last for all of eternity, but it
was only the instant that it took Dirk to see the revolver and the pale
mud-smeared face.  He knew that the bullet would come now, and he sought
to delay it, just long enough.  Listen to me, said Dirk urgently.  Wait
just one second.  He changed his grip on the lantern in his right hand,
and his voice was compelling, the tone quick and persuasive, just enough
to hold Mark's finger on the trigger.  There is something you must know.
Dirk made a disarming gesture, swinging the lantern back, and then
hurling it forward in a wide arc of his long powerful arm, and, at the
same instant, hurling himself forward.

The lantern struck Mark on the shoulder, a glancing blow, just enough to
deflect his gun hand as he fired.

But he heard the bullet strike, that muffled thumping sound of soft lead
expanding into living flesh, and he heard the grunt of air driven
forcibly from Dirk Courtney's lungs by the strike.

Then the man's big hard body crashed into Mark, and as they reeled
sideways, supported by the chassis of the truck, he felt one arm lock
around his chest and hard fingers close over his gun hand.

In that first moment of direct encounter, Mark knew instantly that Dirk
Courtney's strength and weight were far greater than his own.  Even if
he had been uninjured, it would have been no contest, he was so
out-matched that he felt as though he had been caught up in the cogs of
a powerful piece of machinery.  Dirk Courtney's body seemed not to be
made of flesh and bone, but of brutal iron.

Mark's broken ribs moved in the vast encircling grip, and he cried out
as the sharp edges of splintered bone lanced into his flesh.  He felt
his gun hand being forced back, the muzzle of the pistol training up
into his own face, and Dirk Courtney swung him off his feet, both of
them spinning into a turn like a pair of waltzing dancers, so that only
the wildest effort and a lucky trick of balance allowed Mark to come
down on his feet again.  But now he no longer had the support of the
truck -chassis and the next effort would throw him headlong into the
mud.

He felt Dirk Courtney gather himself for the next effort, the hard
athlete's muscles moving him into perfect balance.  Mark tried
desperately to meet it, but it came with a smooth surge of power as
irresistible as a huge comber rushing towards the beach.  Then
miraculously, at the moment when he was going, Mark felt the big body
hit with a tremor, heard the sobbing outrush of Dirk Courtney's breath,
and almost instantly Mark's stomach was drenched with a copious rush of
warm liquid as it poured from his adversary.

The strength melted out of Dirk Courtney's body, Mark could feel his
balance go, the grip on his pistol hand relaxed slightly, and Mark
realized that his bullet had done damage, and that that last effort had
torn something open in Dirk's chest.  His life blood was expelled from
the wound in thick hissing jets by the powerful pump of his heart, and
Mark found he was able, by a supreme effort, to reverse the direction of
the pistol barrel, swinging it in a slow arc back, back until pointed
into Dirk Courtney's face.

Mark did not believe that he had the strength left to pull the trigger.
The weapon seemed to fire of its own accord, and the muzzle flash almost
blinded him.

Dirk Courtney's head snapped back as though he had been hit in the mouth
with the full swing of a baseball bat.

He was hurled backwards, out of the beam of the headlights into the
darkness, and Mark heard his body sliding and tumbling down the steep
side of the gorge.

The pistol dropped from Mark's hand, and he fell, first on to his knees,
and then slowly toppled forward on to his face in the mud.

This is the last will and Testament of SEAN COURTNEY, married out of
community of property to RUTH COURTNEY, (formerly FRIEDMAN, born COHEN),
and presently residing at LionKop Ranch in the district of Ladyburg.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . I
give and bequeath my entire estate and effects, movable or immovable,
whether in possession, reversion, expectancy or contingency, wherever
situate and of whatever description nothing excepted, to my wife the
said RUTH COURTNEY.

At first light the next morning, Mark led the search party down the
steep river banks.  His right arm was in a sling, his ribs were strapped
tightly under his shirt, and he hobbled painfully with his injuries.

They found Sean Courtney half a mile below the last cataract, where the
Baboon Stroorn debauched into the valley.

He lay on his back, and there was no blood, the waters had cleansed
every drop of it, and even his wounds were clean and washed pale blue.
Except for the dent in his temple, his features were almost unmarked,
and the white bush of his beard had dried in the early morning sun.  it
curled proudly on his chest.  He looked like a carved stone effigy of a
medieval knight laid out with his armour and sword on a sarcophagus in
the dim depths of an ancient cathedral.

In the event of my wife predeceasing me, or dying simultaneously, or
within six months of each other The river had been kind and carried her
down to the same sand-bank.  She was lying face down, half buried in the
soft white sand.  One slim naked arm was outflung, and on the third
finger was the simple band of bright gold.

The fingers almost, but not quite, touched her husband's arm.

They buried them together, side by side, in the same deep excavation on
the slope of the escarpment, a little way beyond the big house of Lion
Kop.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . I
direct that the following shaLl apply in regard to the rest and residue
of my estate.

There followed almost five hundred separate bequests which covered fifty
pages, and totalled almost five millions of sterling.  Scan Courtney had
forgotten nobody.  Beginning with the humblest grooms and domestic
servants enough for a piece of ground, a small herd, the equivalent of a
life pension.

TO those with a lifetime of service and loyalty, the gift was greater,
in proportion.

To those who had laboured to build up the various prosperous companies
and enterprises, there was a share of those companies, a large share.

He had not forgotten a single friend nor relative, not one of them.

I acknowledge that I have one legitimate man-child, though I hesitate to
employ the word son, one DIRK COURTNEY, presently residing at Great
Longwood in the district of Ladyburg.  However, God or the devil has
already provided for him so abundantly, that anything I could add would
be superfluous.  Therefore I leave him nothing -not even my blessing.

They buried Dirk Courtney in the pine forest, below the dog ring.  No
priest could be found to recite the office of burial, and the undertaker
closed the grave under the curious eyes of a few members of the Press
and a throng of sensation-seekers.  Though there were many to stare,
there was nobody to weep.

To my daughter STORM HUNT (born COURTNEY), who took lightly her filial
duties, I, in turn, discharge my paternal duties with the bequest of a
single guinea.  He did not mean it, Mark whispered to her.  He was
talking about you that night, as it happened, he was remembering you.  I
had his love, she said softly. Even though, at the end - he tried to
deny it, I will have it always.  That is riches enough.  I don't need
his money as well.  To MARK ANDERS, for whom I have conceived the
affection a man usually accords only to his natural son, I leave no
money, as I am well aware of the contempt he holds for that commodity. I
bequeath to him, in lieu of cash, all my books, paintings, guns, pistols
and rifles, personal jewellery, and all my domestic animals, including
dogs, horses and cattle.

The paintings in themselves made up a considerable fortune, and many of
the books were unique in rarity and condition.

Mark sold only the cattle and horses, for they were many and there was
no place for them all in the tsetse-infested valley of the Bubezi.

The rest and residue of my Estate I bequeath to the said MARK ANDERS in
his capacity as the Trustee of the Wild Life Protection Society.  The
bequest to be used to further the aims of the Society, particularly to
the development and extension of the proclaimed lands presently known as
Chaka's Gate, into a Wild Life Reservation.  No one in Government will
want to touch a Bill that was drawn up and piloted by the former Deputy
Minister of Lands, General jannie Smuts prophesied to Mark, as they
stood talking quietly together after the funeral.  The man's name will
leave a pungent stink on anything he ever touched. Political reputations
are too fragile to risk like that, I foresee a stampede by the new
Government to dissociate themselves from his memory. We can confidently
expect a new Bill being introduced, confirming and upgrading the status
of the proclaimed lands of Chaka's Gate, and I can assure you, my boy,
that the Bill will have the full support of my party.  As General Smuts
had foreseen, the Bill passed through the House at the following
Session, becoming law on 31 st May 1926, as Act No.  56 of 1926 of the
Parliament of the Union of South Africa.  Five days later, the telegram
from the Minister of Lands arrived at Ladyburg confirming Mark's
appointment as first Warden of Chaka's Gate National Park.

There was no trial at which Hobday could turn king's evidence and claim
immunity from the crime of murder; so at Hobday's own trial, the Public
Prosecutor asked for the death sentence.  In his summing up, the Chief
justice mentioned the evidence given by Sithole Zama, alias Pungushe. He
made an excellent impression on this Court.

His answers were clear and precise.  At no time did the defence shake
his transparent honesty and powers of total recall.  On Christmas Eve in
the whitewashed room at Pretoria Cential-Gaol, with his arms and legs
pinioned by leather straps, and his head covered by a black cotton bag,
Hobday dropped to eternity through the crashing wooden trap.

Peter Botes, cleared of any implication in the crimes of murder and
attempted murder by the testimony of Mark Anders, was not placed on
trial.  His crimes were weakness and greed, Mark tried to explain to
Storm.  If there were punishment for those, then there would be a
gallows waiting for each of us.  Besides, there has been enough
vengeance and death already Peter Botes left Ladyburg immediately after
the hearings, and Mark never learned where he went or what became of
him.

Now when you cross the Bubezi River by the low concrete bridge, where
Dirk Courtney's dam wall and hydroelectric station might have stood, you
will come to the barrier on the far bank.

A Zulu ranger in smart suntans and a slouch hat will salute you, and
give you a smile that sparkles like the Parks Board badge on his hat
brim.

When you leave your vehicle and go into the office building of hewn
stone and neat thatch to sign the register, look then to the left wall
beyond the reception desk.  In a glass case there is a permanent display
of photographs and memorabilia from the park's early days.  The
centre-piece of this collection is a large photograph of a sprightly old
gentleman, lean and tanned and tough as a strip of rawhide, with a shock
of pure white hair and a marvelous pair of spiky moustaches.

His cotton jacket is a little rumpled and fits him as though it was made
for his elder brother, the knot of his tie has slipped down an inch and
one tab of his shirt collar is slightly awry.  Although his smile is
impish, his jaw is firm and determined.  However, it is the eyes that
arrest attention.  They are serene and direct, the eyes of a visionary
or a prophet.

Under the photograph is the legend: Colonel Mark Anders, First Warden of
Chaka's Gate National Park And below that again in smaller letters,
Because of this man's energy and farsightedness, Chaka's Gate National
Park has come down to posterity.  Colonel Anders served on the Board of
the National Parks Trust from its inception in 1926.  In 1935, he was
elected Chairman.  He fought with distinction in two world wars, was
severely wounded in one, and commanded his battalion in North Africa and
Italy in the second.  He is the author of many books on wildlife,
including Sanctuary and Vanishing Africa.  He has travelled the world to
lecture and to gain support for the work of conservation.  He has been
honoured by monarchs and governments and universities!

in the photograph, a tall slim woman stands beside the Colonel.  Her
hair is streaked with grey and drawn back severely from her face, and
although there are crow's-feet at the corners of her eyes and deep lines
around her mouth, yet they are the lines of laughter and the planes and
angles of her face still show traces of what must once have been great
beauty.  She leans half protectively, half possessively against the
Colonel's right arm and below the photograph the legend continues:His
wife and life-long companion in his work was the internationally
celebrated artist, who painted her memorable African landscapes and
wildlife studies under her maiden name of Storm Courtney.  In 1973,
Colonel Anders retired from his position of Chairman of the Parks Board,
and went with his lady to live in a cottage overlooking the sea at
Urnhlanga Rocks on the Natal Coast!

When you have read the legend you may go back to your motorcar.  The
Zulu ranger will salute you again and raise the barrier.  Then you too
can go, for a short time, into Eden.