Leopard Hunts in Darkness b-4

by Wilbur A. Smith

  He had not reached the halfway point when he felt the structure move under him and he flung himself upwards too violently.

  One of the poles broke with a report likea musket shot, and the entire structure lurched sideways. Craig grabbed the side frame, just as three or four cross-rungs broke away under him and fell, hitting the water below with a resounding series of splashes. His legs were dangling in space, and every time he kicked for a foothold, he felt the timberwork sag dangerously.

  "Pupho!" I'm stuck. I can't move or the whole bloody thing will come down."

  "Wait!" A few seconds of silence and then Tungata's voice again. "Here's the rope. There is a loop in the end." it dropped six feet from him.

  "Swing it left a little, Sam." The loop swung towards him.

  "A little more! Lower, a little lower!" It dangled within reach.

  "Hold hard! Craig made a lunge,4i it and got his arm through the loop.

  "I'm coming on!" He released his hold on the side frame and swung free.

  He was too weak to climb.

  "Pull me up!" Slowly he was drawn upwards, and even in that dangerously exposed position, Craig appreciated the strength that it needed to lift a full-grown man this way- Without Tungata, he would never have made it.

  He saw the glow of the lamp reflected off the walls of the shaft and getting closer, and then Sally-Anne's head peering over the edge of the platform at him.

  "Not far now. Hold on!" He came level with the edge of the rock platform, and there was Tungata braced against the far wall, a loop of the rope over his back and shoulder, hauling doublehanded on the rope with the cords standing out in his throat and his mouth open, grunting with the effort. Craig hooked his elbow over the edge and then as Tungata heaved again he kicked wildly and wriggled over the edge on his belly.

  It was many minutes before he could sit up and take an interest in his surroundings again. The four of them were huddled, shivering and sodden, on a canted platform of water-worn limestone, just large enough to accommodate them.

  Above them, the vertical shaft continued upwards, disappearing into darkness, the walls smooth and unseal, able. The ladder work built by the old witch-doctors reached only as high as this platform. In the silence, Craig could hear the drip of water somewhere up there in the darkness and the squeak of bats disturbed by their voices and movements. Sally' Anne held the lamp high, but they could not make out the top of the shaft.

  Craig looked about the ledge. It was about eight feet Hill wide, and then in the far wall he saw the entrance to a subsidiary branch of the tunnel, much lower and narrower than the main shaft, cutting into the rock on the horizontal.

  "That looks like the only way to go," Sally' Anne whispered. "That's where the old witch, doctors were headed." Nobody replied. They were all exhausted by the climb and chilled to the bone.

  "We should keep going!" Sally-Anne insisted, and Craig roused himself.

  (Leave the bags and rope here." His voice was still hoarse and scratchy from the tear gas and he coughed painfully.

  "We can come back for them when we need them." He did not trust himself to stand. He felt weak and unsteady and the black drop of the shaft was close at his side. He crawled on hands and knees to the opening in the far wall.

  "Give me the lamp." Sally-Anne handed it to him and he crawled into the low entrance.

  There was a passage beyond. After fifty feet the roof lifted so that he could rise into a crouch and, steadying himself against the wall with his free hand, go on a little faster. The others were following him. Another hundred feet, and he stooped through a last low natural doorway of stone and then stood to his full height. He looked about him with swiftly rising wonder. The others coming out of the opening behind him jostled him, but he hardly noticed it. He was so enraptured by his new surroundings.

  They stood in a group, close together, as if to draw comfort and courage from each other, and they stared.

  Their heads revolved slowly, craning upwards and from side to side.

  "My God, it's beautiful," whispered Sally-Anne. She took the lamp from Craigi hand and lifted it high.

  They had entered # cavern of lights, a cavern of crystal.

  Over countless ages I the sugary crystalline calcium had been deposited by water seepage over the tall vaulted ceiling and down the walls. It had dripped onto the floor and solidified.

  It had crafted marvelous sculptures in glittering iridescent light. On the walls there were traceries, like ancient Venetian lace, so delicate that the lamplight shone through them as though through precious porcelain. There r were cornices and pillars of monolithic splendour Joining the high roof to the floor, there were suspended marvels of rainbow colours shaped like the wings of angels in flight.

  Huge spiked stalactites hung as menacingly as the bur rushed sword of Damocles, or as the white teeth in the upper jaw of a man-eating shark. Others suggested gigantic chandeliers, or the pipes of a celestial organ, while from the floor the stalagmites rose in serried ranks, platoons and squadrons of fantastic shapes, hooded monks dressed in cassocks Of mother-of-pearl, wolves and hunchbacks, heroes in gleaming armour, ballerinas and hobgoblins, graceful and grotesque, but all burning with a million tiny crystalline sparks in the lamplight.

  Still in a small group, hesitantly, a step at a time, they moved forward down the length of the cavern, picking their way through the gallery of tall stalagmitic statues and stumbling over the dagger like points of limestone that had broken off the ceiling and littered the floor like ancient arrowheads.

  Craig stopped again, and the others pressed up so closely to him that they were all touching.

  The centre of the cavern was open. The floor had been swept of fallen debris, and in the open space human hands had built, from gleaming limestone, a square platform, a stage or a pagan altar. On the altar, with legs drawn up against his chest, clad in the golden and dappled skin of a leopard, sat the body of a man.

  "Lobengula." Tungata sank down on one knee. "The one who drives like the wind: Lobengula's hands were clasped over his knees, and they were mummified, black and shrunken. His fingernails had continued growing after death. They were long and curved, like the claws of a predatory beast. Lobengula. must once have worn a tall headgear of feathers and fur, but it had fallen from his head and now lay on the altar beside him.

  The heron feathers were still blue and crisp, as though plucked that very day.

  Perhaps by design, but more likely by chance, the sitting corpse had been placed directly beneath one of the seepages from the roof. Even as they stood before the altar, another droplet fell from high above and, with a soft tap, burst upon the old king's forehead, and then snaked down over his face like slow tears. Millions upon millions of drops must have fallen upon him, and each drop had laid down its deposit of shining calcium on the mummified head.

  Lobengula was being transformed into stone, already his scalp was covered with a translucent helmet, like the tallow from a guttering candle. It had run down and filled his eye-cavities with the pearly deposit, it had lined his withered lips and built up the line of his jaw. Lobengula's perfect white teeth grinned out of his stone mask at them.

  The effect was unearthly and terrifying. Sarah whimpered with superstitious dread and clutched at Sally' Anne who returned her grip as fervently. Craig played the lamp beam over that dreadful head and then slowly lowered it.

  On the rock altar in front of Lobengula had been placed five dark objects. Four beer-pots, hand-moulded from clay with a stylized diamond pattern inscribed around each wide throat, and the mouth of each pot had been sealed with the membrane from the, ladder of a goat. The fifth object was a bag, made from the skin of an unborn zebra foetus, the seams stitched -with animal sinew.

  "Sam, you-" Craig started, and his voice cracked. He cleared his throat, and started again. "You are his descendant. You are the only one who should touch anything here." Tungata was still down on one knee, and he did not reply. He was staring at the old king's transformed head, and
his lips moved as he prayed silently. Was he addressing Sir, the Christian God, Craig wondered, or the spirits of his ancestors?

  Sally-Anne's teeth chattered spasmodically, the only sound in the cavern, and Craig placed his arms around the two girls. They pressed against him gratefully, both of them shivering with the cold and with awe.

  Slowly Tungata rose to his feet and stepped forward to the stone altar. "I see you, great Lobengula,"he spoke aloud.

  Samson Kumalo, of your totem and of your blood, greet you across the years!" He was using his tribal name again, claiming his lineage as he went on in a low but steady voice. "If I am the leopard cub of your prophecy, then I ask your blessing, oh king. But if I am not that cub, then strike my desecrating hand and wither it as it touches the treasures of the house of Mashobane." He reached out slowly and placed his right hand on one of the black clay pots.

  Craig found that he was holding his breath, waiting for he was not sure what, perhaps for a voice to speak from the king's long-dead throat, or for one of the great stalactites to crash down from the roof, or for a bolt of lightning to blast them all.

  The silence drew out, and then Tungata placed his other hand on the beer pot and slowly lifted it in a salute to the corpse of the king.

  There was a sharp crack and the brittle baked clay split.

  The bottom fell out of the pot, and from it gushed a torrent of glittering light that paled and rendered insipid the crystalline coating of the great cavern. Diamonds rattled and bounced on the altar stone, tumbling and slithering over each other, piled in a pyramid, and lay smouldering like live coals in the lamplight.

  cannot believe these are diamonds," Sally-Anne whispered. "They look like pebbles, pretty, shiny pebbles, but pebbles." They had poured the contents of all four pots and of the zebra-skin bag into the canvas food-bag, and leaving the empty clay pots at the feet of the old king's corpse, they retreated from Lobengula's presence to the end of the crystal cavern nearest the entrance passage.

  "Well, first thing," Craig observed, "legend was wrong.

  Those pots weren't a gallon each, more likea pint."

  "Still, five pints of diamonds is better than a poke in the eye with a rhino horn,"Tungata countered.

  They had salvaged a dozen poles from the top section of the ladder work in the shaft and built a small fire on the cavern floor. As they squatted in a circle around the pile of stones, their damp clothing steamed in the warmth from the flames.

  "If they are diamonds," Sally-Anne was still sceptical.

  "They are diamonds," Craig declared flatly, "every single one of them. Watch this!" Craig selected one of the stones, a crystal with a knife edge to one of its facets. He drew the edge across the lens of the lamp. It made a shrill squeal that set their teeth on edge, but it gouged a deep white scratch in the glass.

  "That's proof! That's a diamond!"

  "So big!" Sarah picked, out the smallest she could find.

  "Even the smallest is bigAr than the top joint of my finger." She compared them.

  "The old Matabele labourers picked only those large enough to show up in the first wash of gravel," Craig explained. "And remember that they will lose sixty per cent or more of their mass in the cutting and polishing.

  That one will probably end up no bigger than a green pea."

  "The colours," Tungata murmured, "so many different colours." Some were translucent lemon-coloured, others dark r amber or cognac, with all shades in between, while again there were those that were un tinted clear as snow-melt in a mountain stream, with frosted facets that reflected the flames of the smoky little fire.

  "Just look at this one." The stone Sally-Anne held up was the deep purplish blue of the Mozambique current when the tropic midday sun probes its depths.

  "And this." Another as bright as the blood from a spurting artery.

  "And this." Limpid green, impossibly beautiful, changing with each flicker of the light.

  Sally-Anne laid out a row of the coloured stones on the cavern floor in front of her.

  "So pretty," she said. She was grading them, the yellows and golds and ambers in one row, the pinks and reds in another.

  "The diamond can take any of the primary colours. It seems to take pleasure in imitating the colours proper to other gems. John Mandeville, the fourteenth-century tray eller, wrote that." Craig spread his hands to the blaze. "And jj it can crystallize to any shape from a perfect square to octahedron or dodecahedron."

  "Blimey, mate," Sally-Anne mocked him, "what's an octahedron, pray?"

  "Two pyramids with triangular sides and a common base."

  "Wow! And a dodecahedron?" she challenged.

  "Two rhombs of lozenge shape with common facets."

  "How come you know so much?" 41 wrote a book remember?" Craig smiled back. "Half the book was about Rhodes and Kimberley and diamonds."

  "Enough already, "she capitulated.

  "Not nearly enough," Craig shook his head. "I can go on.

  The diamond is the most perfect reflector of light, only IL chromate of lead refracts more light, only chrysolite disperses it more. But the diamond's combined powers of reflection, refraction and dispersion are unmatched."

  "Stop!" ordered Sally-Anne, but her expression was still interested, and he went on.

  "It's brilliance is un decaying though the ancients did not have the trick of cutting it to reveal its true splendour.

  For that reason, the Romans treasured pearls more highly and even the first Hindu artisans only rubbed up the natural facets of the Kohinoor. They would have been appalled to know that modern cutters reduced the bulk of that stone from over seven hundred carats to a hundred and six."

  "How big is seven hundred carats?" Sarah wanted to know.

  Craig selected a stone from the ranks that Sally-Anne had set out.

  It was the size of a golf ball.

  "That is probably three hundred carats it might cut to a paragon, that is a first, water diamond over a hundred carats. Then men will give it a name, like the Great Mogul or the Orloff or the Shah, and legends will be woven around it." Tobengula's Fire, Sarah hazarded.

  "Good!" Craig nodded. "A good name for it. Lobengula's Fire!" "How much?" Tungata wanted to know. "What is the value of this pile of pretty stones?"

  "God knows," Craig "khrugged. "Some of them are rubbish-" He picked out a huge amorphous lump of dark grey colour, in which the black specks and fleckings of its imperfections were obvious to the naked eye and the flaws and fracture lines cut ffirough its interior like soft silver leaves. "This is industrial quality, it will be used for machine tools and the cutting edges in the head of an oil drill, but some of the others the only answer is that they are worth as much as a rich man will pay. It wou impossible to sell them all at one time, the market could not absorb them. Each stone would require a special buyer and involve a major financial transaction."

  "How much, Pupho?" Tungata insisted. "What is the least or the most?"

  "I truly don't know, I could not even hazard." Craig picked out another large stone, its imperfect facets frosted and stippled to hide the true fire in its depths. "Highly skilled technicians will work on this for weeks, perhaps months, charting its grain and discovering its flaws. They will polish a window on it, so they can microscopically examine its interior. Then, when they had decided how to make" the stone, a master cutter with nerves of steel will cleave it along the flaw line with a tool likea butcher's cleaver. A false hammer stroke and the stone could explode into worthless chips. They say the master cutter who cleaved the Cullinan diamond fainted with relief when he hit a clean stroke and the diamond split perfectly." Craig juggled the big diamond thoughtfully. "If this stone "makes" perfectly, and if its colour is graded "D", it could be worth, say, a million dollars."