The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (57 page)

Uncoiling the second rope Vusamanzi cautiously climbed down the treacherous floor of the crack. The crack widened as it descended, and the roof receded into the gloom above their heads. It
reminded Craig of the great gallery in the heart of Cheops’ pyramid, a fearsome cleft through living rock, dangerously steep, so they had to steady themselves with the rope at every pace.
They had almost reached the limit of the rope, when Vusamanzi halted and stood tall on a tilted slab, lit by his own lantern, looking like a black Moses descended from the mountain.

‘What is it?’ Craig called.

‘Come on down!’ Tungata ordered, and Craig scrambled down the last slope and found Vusamanzi and the others perched on the rock slab peering over the ledge into the still surface of
a subterranean lake.

‘Now what?’ Sally-Anne asked, her voice muted with awe of this deep and secret place.

The lake had filled the limestone shaft. Across the surface, a hundred and fifty feet away, the roof of the shaft dipped into it at the same angle as the floor on which they stood.

Craig used the flashlight that they had salvaged from the wrecked Cessna for the first time. He shone it into the water that had stood undisturbed through the ages so that all sediment had
settled out of it, leaving it clear as a trout stream. They could see the inclined floor of the gallery sinking away at the same angle into the depths. Craig switched off the flashlight, conserving
the batteries.

‘Well, Sam.’ Craig put one hand on his shoulder. ‘Here’s your big chance to swim like a fish.’ Tungata’s chuckle was brief and insincere, and they both looked
at Vusamanzi.

‘Where now, revered father?’

‘When Taka-Taka came to these hills and my grandfather and my father saved the king’s body from defilement, there had been seven long terrible years of drought scorching the land.
The level of the water in this shaft was much lower than it is now. Down there,’ Vusamanzi pointed into the limpid depths, ‘there is another branch in the rock. In that place they laid
Lobengula’s body. In the many years since then, good and plentiful rains have blessed the land, and each year the level of these waters has risen. The first time I visited this place, brought
here by my father, the waters were below that pointed rock—’

Briefly Craig switched on the flashlight and in its beam the splintered limestone lay thirty feet or more below the surface.

‘But even then the king’s grave was far below the surface.’

‘So you have never seen the grave with your own eyes?’ Craig demanded.

‘Never,’ Vusamanzi agreed. ‘But my father described it to me.’

Craig knelt at the edge of the lake and put his hand into the water. It was so cold that he shivered and jerked his hand out. He dried it on his shirt, and when he looked up, Tungata was
watching him with a quizzical expression.

‘Now you just hold on there, my beloved Matabele brother,’ Craig said vehemently. ‘I know exactly what that look means – and you can forget all about it.’

‘I cannot swim, Pupho my friend.’

‘Forget it,’ Craig advised him.

‘We will tie one of the ropes around you. You can come to no harm.’

‘You know where you can put your ropes.’

‘The torch is waterproof, it will shine underwater,’ Tungata went on with equanimity.

‘Christ!’ Craig said bitterly. ‘African rule number one: when all else fails, look around for the nearest white face.’

‘Do you remember how you swam across the Limpopo river for a ridiculous wager, a case of beer?’ Tungata asked sweetly.

‘That day I was drunk, now I’m sober.’ Craig looked at Sally-Anne for support and was disappointed.

‘Not you also!’

‘There are crocs in the Limpopo, no crocs here,’ she pointed out.

Slowly Craig began to unbutton his shirt, 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 like a 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
₂
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 glass 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 flashing the torch beam ahead of him, but the water was
turning murky and dark as he stirred up the sediment from the floor.

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

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

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

High above him, the lantern glowed and he swam upwards, with his senses beginning to flutter like a 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 prevent 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 like a foetus, coughing and heaving the water from his lungs and shaking
violently with cold.

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

‘How do you feel?’ Sarah asked.

‘Bloody marvellous,’ he gasped. ‘Nothing like a bracing dip.’

‘He’s all right,’ Tungata assured them, ‘as soon as he starts snarling, he’s all right.’

Craig cupped his hands over the chimney of the lantern for warmth and gradually his shivering eased. Sarah leaned across to Tungata, and with a wicked smile directed at Craig’s naked lower
body, whispered something.

‘Right on!’ Tungata chuckled, imitating a black American 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 wagon. My grandfather used it to lower the
king’s body down the shaft.’

‘So you have found the king’s grave?’ Tungata asked. This mundane little scrap of metal was for all of them the proof that changed fantasy to factual reality.

‘I think so,’ Craig began strapping on his leg, ‘but we will never know for certain.’ They all watched his face and waited. Craig suffered another paroxysm of coughing,
then his breathing settled and he went on, ‘There is a passage, just as Vusamanzi described. It is about another fifteen feet below that pinnacle and it goes off to the 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, nobody is going to get past that seal.’

Sally-Anne was shrugging on her damp shirt 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 is a fire and a little sunlight.’

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 gashle
, stay in peace!’

T
he climb back up through the maze of passages and interleading caverns was a dismal and silent procession, although Craig checked and remarked
each turn and juncture as he passed 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, oversweetened tea warmed away the last of Craig’s chills and heartened them all.

‘I must return to the village,’ Vusamanzi told them. ‘If the Shona 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 Shona 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 Shona.’ He went to kneel before Tungata. ‘Stay in peace, great prince of Kumalo. 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 necessary to reach the king’s resting place.’