The Leopard Hunts In Darkness Part 76

"Not you al soP "There are crocs in the Limpopo, no crocs here she pointed out.

Slowly Craig beg4 nato unb.u.t.ton his s.h.i.+rt, and Tungata smiled and began readying the rope. They all watched with interest while Craig unstrapped his leg and laid it carefully aside. He stood one-legged in his underpants at the edge of the pool while Tungata fastened the end of the rope around his waist.

"Pupho," Tungata said quietly, "you will need dry clothes afterwards. Why do you wish to wet these?"

"Sarah," Craig explained and glanced at her.

"She is Matabele. Nudity does not offend us."

"Leave him his secrets," Sarah smiled, "though I have none from him." And Craig remembered her nakedness in the water below the bridge. He sat on the edge of the rock slab and pulled off his underpants, tossing them on top of the heap of his clothing. Neither of the girls averted their eyes, and he slid into the water, gasping at the cold. He paddled out gently into the centre of the pool and trod water.

"Time me," he called back to them. "Give me a double tug on the rope every sixty seconds. At three minutes, pull me up regardless, okay?"

"Okay." Tungata had the coils of rope between his feet, ready to feed out.

Craig hung in the water and began to hyperventilate, pumping his lungs likea bellows, purging them of carbon dioxide. It was a dangerous trick, an inexperienced diver could black out from oxygen starvation before the build-up of CO, triggered the urge to breathe again. He grabbed a full lung and flipped his leg and lower body above the surface in a duck dive, and went down cleanly into the cold clear water.

Without a gla.s.s face-plate, his vision was grossly distorted, but he held the flashlight beam on the sharp pinnacle of limestone thirty feet below and went down swiftly, the pressure popping and squeaking in his ears.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How do you feel?" Sarah asked.

"b.l.o.o.d.y marvelous," he gasped. "Nothing likea bracing dip "He's all right," Tungata a.s.sured them, "as soon as he St. arts snarling, he's all right." Craig cupped his hands over the chimney of the lantern for warmth and gradually his s.h.i.+vering eased. Sarah leaned across to Tungata, and with a wicked smile directed at Craig's naked lower body, whispered something.

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

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

This mundane little sc.r.a.p of metal was for all of them the proof that changed fantasy to factual reality.

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

Without diving apparatus, n.o.body is going to get past that seal." Sally-Anne was shrugging on her damp s.h.i.+rt over her white bra, but she stopped and stared at him challengingly.

"We can't just give up, Craig darling, we can't just walk away and never know. It would eat me up not knowing a mystery like that! I'd never be happy, never again as long as I lived."

"I'm open to suggestions," Craig agreed sarcastically.

"Anybody got a scuba tucked in their back pocket? How about paying Vusamanzi a goat and he can make the water jump aside, shades of Moses and the Red Sea."

"Don't be flippant, "said Sally-Anne.

"Come on somebody, be intelligent and inventive what? No takers?

Okay, then let's get back to where there ri is a re and a little sun light." Craig dropped the rusted piece of chain back into the pool.

"Sleep well, Lobengula, "the one who drives like the wind", keep your fire-stones beside you, and shala ease, stay in peace!" he climb back up through the maze of pa.s.sages and inter leading caverns was a dismal and silent procession, although Craig checked and remarked each turn and juncture as he pa.s.sed it.

When they reached the main cavern again, it took only a few minutes to blow the embers on the hearth to flames and boil a canteen of water.

The strong, over sweetened tea warmed away the last of Craig's chills and heartened them all.

must return to the village," Vusamanzi told them. "If the Shana soldiers come and do not find me, they will become suspicious they will begin to bully and torture my women. I must be there to protect them, for even the Shana fear my magic." He gathered up his pouch and cloak and his ornately carved staff. "You must remain in the cavern at all times. To leave it is to risk discovery by the soldiers. You have food and water and firewood and blankets and paraffin for the lanterns, there is no need for you to go out. My women will come to you the day after tomorrow with food and news of the Shana." He went to kneel before Tungata. "Stay in peace, great prince of k.u.malo. My heart tells me that you are the leopard-cub of the prophecy, and that you will find a way to free the spirit of Lobengula."

"Perhaps I will return here one day with the special machines that are necestry to reach the king's resting place."

"Perhaps," Vusamanz'iagreed. "I will make sacrifice and consult the spirits, They might condescend to show me the way." At the entrance of the cave he paused and saluted them. "When it is safe, I shall return. Stay in peace, my children." And then he was gone.

"Something tells me it's going to be a long, hard time," said Craig, "and not the most attractive place to pa.s.s it." They were all active and restlessly intelligent people, and the confinement began to irk almost immediately.

Tacitly they divided the cavern, a communal area around either end for each couple.

the hearth and a private area at The seepage of water down the rock face when collected in a clay pot was sufficient for all their needs, including ablutions, and there was a vertical pothole shaft in one of the pa.s.sages which served as a natural latrine. But there was nothing to read and a lack that Craig felt keenly no writing material. To alleviate the boredom, Sarah began teaching Sally-Anne Sindebele, and her progress was so rapid that she could soon follow ordinary conversation and respond to it fairly fluently.

Tungata recovered rapidly during those days of enforced inactivity. His gaunt frame filled out, the scabs on his face and body healed rapidly, and he regained his vitality. It was often Tungata who led the long rambling discussions at the fireside, and that irrepressible sense of humour that Craig remembered so well from the old days began to break through the sombre moods that had at first overwhelmed him.

When Sally-Anne made a disparaging remark about the neighbouring South African state and its apartheid polities, Tungata contradicted her with mock severity.