The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (65 page)

The only way out of the cavern was back through the subterranean lake and up the grand gallery, but how long would the Shona guard that exit? How long could they last out here? There was food
for a day or two, water seepage from the cavern roof would give them drink, but the batteries of the two lamps were failing, the light they gave was turning yellow and dull, the timber from the
ladder might feed the fire for a few days more, and then – the cold and the darkness. How long before it drove them crazy? How long before they were forced to attempt that terrible swim back
through the shaft into the arms of the waiting troopers at the—

Craig’s broodings were violently interrupted. The rock on which he lay shuddered and jumped under him, and he scrambled to his hands and knees.

From the shadows of the cavern roof one of the great stalactities, twenty tons of gleaming limestone, snapped off like a ripe fruit in a high wind, and crashed to the floor barely ten paces from
where they lay. It filled the cavern with billows of limestone dust. Sarah awoke screaming with terror, and Tungata was thrashing around him and shouting as he came up from deep sleep.

The earth tremor lasted for seconds only, and then the stillness, the utter silence of the earth’s depths, fell over them again and they looked into each other’s frightened faces
across the smouldering fire.

‘What the hell was that?’ Sally-Anne asked, and Craig was reluctant to answer. He looked to Tungata.

‘The Shona—’ Tungata said softly ‘ – I think they have dynamited the grand gallery. They have sealed us off.’

‘Oh my God.’ Slowly Sally-Anne covered her mouth with both hands.

‘Buried alive.’ Sarah said it for them.

T
he shaft was just over 160 feet deep from the edge of the platform to water level. Tungata plumbed it with the nylon rope before Craig began the
descent. It was deep enough to kill or maim anybody who slipped and fell into the chasm.

They secured the end of the rope to one of the poles wedged like an anchor in the opening of the tunnel that led to the crystal cavern, and Craig abseiled down the rope to the water at the
bottom of the shaft once more. Gingerly he committed his weight to the rickety remains of the ladderwork as he neared the surface of the water and then lowered himself into the water.

Craig made one dive. It was enough to confirm their worst fears. The tunnel leading into the grand gallery was blocked by a heavy fall of rock. He could not even penetrate as far as the remains
of the wall built by the witch-doctors. It was sealed off with loose rock that had fallen from the roof, and it was dangerously unstable. His groping hands brought down another avalanche of
rumbling rolling rock all around him.

He backed out of the tunnel, and fled thankfully back to the surface. He clung to the timber ladderwork, panting wildly from the terror of almost being pinned in the tunnel.

‘Pupho, are you all right?’

‘Okay!’ Craig yelled back up the shaft. ‘But you were right. The tunnel has been dynamited. There is no way out!’

When he climbed back to the platform, they were waiting for him. Their expressions were grim and taut in the firelight.

‘What are we going to do?’ Sally-Anne asked.

‘The first thing to do is to explore the cavern minutely.’ Craig was still gasping from the swim and the climb. ‘Every corner and nook, every opening and branch of every
tunnel. We will work in pairs. Sam and Sarah, start working from the left – use the lamps with care, save the batteries.’

Three hours later by Craig’s Rolex, they met back at the fire. The lanterns were giving out only a feeble yellow glow by now, the batteries drained and on the point of failing.

‘We found one tunnel at the back of the altar,’ Craig reported. ‘It looked good for quite a way, but then it pinched out completely. And you? Anything?’ Craig was
cleaning a scrape on Sally-Anne’s knee where she had fallen on the treacherous footing. ‘Nothing,’ Tungata admitted. Craig bound the knee with a strip torn from the tail of
Sally-Anne’s shirt. ‘We found a couple of likely leads, but they all petered out.’

‘What do we do now?’

‘We will eat a little and then rest. We have got to try and sleep. We will need to keep our strength up.’ Craig realized it was an evasion even as he said it, but surprisingly, he
did sleep.

When he awoke, Sally-Anne was cuddled against his chest, and she coughed in her sleep. It was a rough phlegmy sound. The cold and damp was affecting them all, but the sleep had refreshed Craig
and given him strength. Although his own throat and chest were still painful from the gas, they seemed to have eased a little and he felt more cheerful. He lay back against the rock wall, careful
not to disturb Sally-Anne. Tungata was snoring across the fire, but then he grunted and rolled over and was silent.

The only sound in the cavern now was the drip of water from the seepages in the roof, and then, very faintly, another sound, a whispering, so low that it might have been merely the echoes of
silence in his own ears. Craig lay and concentrated his hearing. The sound annoyed him, niggled at his mind as he tried to place it.

‘Of course,’ he recognized it, ‘bats!’

He remembered hearing it more clearly when he had first reached the platform. He lay and thought about it for a while and then gently eased Sally-Anne’s head off his shoulder. She made a
soft gurgling in her throat, rolled over and subsided again.

Craig took one of the lanterns, and went back into the tunnel that led to the platform and the shaft. He flashed the lantern only once or twice, conserving what was left in the batteries, and in
darkness he stood on the platform with his back against the rock wall and listened with all his being.

There were long periods of silence, broken only by the musical pinging of water drips on rock, and then suddenly a soft chorus of squeaks that echoed down the chimney of the shaft, then silence
again.

Craig flicked on the lantern, and the time was five o’clock. He was not certain if it was morning or evening, but if the bats were roosting up there, then it must still be daylight in the
outside world. He squatted down and waited an hour, at intervals checking the slow passage of time, and then there was a new outburst of far-off bat sounds, no longer the occasional sleepy squeaks,
but an excited chorus, many thousands of the tiny rodents coming awake for the nocturnal hunt.

The chorus dwindled swiftly into silence, and Craig checked his watch again. Six-thirty-five. He could imagine somewhere up above the airborne horde pouring out of the mouth of a cave into the
darkening evening sky, like smoke from a chimney pot.

He moved carefully to the edge of the platform, steadied himself on the side wall and leaned out over the drop very cautiously, keeping a handhold. He twisted his head to look up the shaft,
holding the lantern out to the full stretch of his arm. The feeble yellow light seemed only to emphasize the blackness above him.

The shaft was semicircular in plan, about ten feet across to the far wall. He gave up on trying to penetrate the upper darkness and concentrated on studying the rock of the shaft wall opposite
him, prodigally using up the battery of the lamp.

It was smooth as glass, honed by the water that had bored it open. No hold or niche, nothing, except— He strained out over the drop for an extra inch. There was a darker mark on the rock
just at the very edge of his vision, directly opposite him, and well above the level of his head. Was it a stratum of colour, or was it a crack? He could not be sure, and the light was fading. It
could even be a trick of shadow and light.

‘Pupho,’ Tungata’s voice spoke behind him and he pulled back. ‘What is it?’

‘I think this is the only way open to the surface.’ Craig switched off the lantern to save it.

‘Up that chimney?’ Tungata’s voice was incredulous in the darkness. ‘Nobody could get up there.’

‘The bats – they are roosting up there somewhere.’

‘Bats have wings,’ Tungata reminded him, and then after a while, ‘How high up there?’

‘I don’t know, but I think there may be a crack or a ledge on the other side. Shine the other lamp, its battery is stronger.’

They both leaned out and stared across.

‘What do you think?’

‘There is something there, I think.’

‘If I could get across to it!’ Craig switched off again.

‘How?’

‘I don’t know, let me think.’

They sat with their backs against the wall, their shoulders just touching.

After a while Tungata murmured, ‘Craig, if we ever get out of here – the diamonds. You will be entitled to a share—’

‘Do shut up, Sam. I’m thinking.’ Then, after many minutes, ‘Sam, the poles, the longest pole in the ladder – do you think it would reach across to the other
side?’

They built a second fire on the ledge, and it lit the shaft with an uncertain wavering light. Once again Craig went down the rope, onto the remains of the timber ladder, and this time he
examined each pole in the structure. Most of them had been axed to shorter lengths, probably to make it easier to carry them down through the tunnels and passages from the surface, but the side
frames were in longer pieces. The longest of these was not much thicker than Craig’s wrist, but the bark was the peculiar pale colour that gave it the African name of ‘the elephant tusk
tree’. Its common English name was ‘leadwood’, one of the toughest, most resilent woods of the veld.

Moving along it, measuring it with the span of his arms, Craig reckoned this pole was almost sixteen feet long. He secured the end of the rope to the upper end of the pole, shouting up to the
platform to explain what he was doing, and then he used his clasp-knife from the kit to cut the bark rope holding the pole into the ladderwork. There was the terrifying moment when the pole finally
broke free and hung on the rope, swinging like a pendulum, and the entire structure, deprived of its king-pin, began to break up and slide down the shaft.

Craig hauled himself up the rope and flung himself thankfully onto the platform, and when he had recovered his breath, the pole was still dangling down the shaft on the end of the rope, although
the rest of the ladderwork had collapsed into the water at the bottom.

‘That was the easy part,’ Craig warned them grimly.

With Tungata and himself providing the brute strength, and the two girls coiling and guiding the rope, they worked the pole up an inch at a time until the tip of it appeared above the level of
the platform. They anchored it, and Craig lay on his belly and used the free end of the rope to lasso the bottom end of the pole. Now they had it secured at both ends and could begin working it up
and across.

After an hour of grunting and heaving, and coaxing, they had one end of the pole resting against the wall of the shaft opposite them, and the other end thrust back into the tunnel behind
them.

‘We have got to lift the far end,’ Craig explained while they rested, ‘and try and get it into that crack on the far wall – if it is a crack.’

Twice they nearly lost the pole as it rolled out of their grip and almost fell into the well below, but each time they just held it on the rope and then began the heart-breaking task all over
again.

It was after midnight by Craig’s Rolex before they at last had the tip of the pole worked up the far wall to the height of the dark mark only just visible in the beam of the lamp.

‘Just an inch to the right,’ Craig grunted, and they rolled it gently, felt the pole slide in their hands, and then with a small bump the tip of it lodged in the crack in the wall
opposite them and both Craig and Tungata sagged onto their knees and hugged each other in weary congratulations.

Sarah fed the fire with fresh wood and in the flare of light they reviewed their work. They now had a bridge across the shaft, rising from the platform on which they stood at a fairly steep
angle, the rear end jammed solidly against the wall behind them, and the far end wedged in the narrow crack in the opposite wall.

‘Somebody has to cross that.’ Sally-Anne’s voice was small and unsteady.

‘And what happens on the other side?’ Sarah asked.

‘We’ll find out when we get there,’ Craig promised them.

‘Let me go,’ Tungata said quietly to Craig.

‘Have you ever done any rock climbing?’ Tungata shook his head. ‘Well, that answers that,’ Craig told him with finality. ‘Now we’ll take two hours’ rest
– try to sleep.’

However, none of them could sleep, and Craig roused them before the two hours were up. He explained to Tungata how to set himself up firmly as anchorman, sitting flat with both feet braced, the
rope around his waist and up over his back and shoulder.

‘Don’t give me too much slack, but don’t cramp me,’ Craig explained. ‘If I fall I’ll shout “I’m off!”, then jam the rope like this and hold
with everything you’ve got, okay?’

He hung one of the lanterns over his shoulder with a strip of canvas as a sling and then, with both the girls sitting on the end of the pole to hold it firmly, Craig straddled it and began
working out along it with both feet dangling into the void. The loop of rope hung behind him as Tungata fed it out.

Within a few feet Craig found that the upward angle was too steep, and he had to lie flat along the pole with his ankles hooked over it, and push himself upwards with his legs. He moved quickly
out of the firelight, and the black emptiness below him was mesmeric and compelling. He did not look down. The pole flexed under the weight of each of his movements and he heard the far tip of it
grating against the rock above him, but at last his fingertips touched the cold limestone of the shaft wall.

He groped anxiously for the crack, and felt a little lift of his spirits as his fingers made out the shape of it. It ran vertically up the shaft, the outside lips about three inches apart, just
enough to accommodate the end of the pole, then it narrowed quickly as it went deeper.

‘It’s a crack all right!’ he called back. ‘And I’m going to have a shot at it.’

‘Be careful, Craig.’

‘Christ!’ he thought. ‘What a stupid bloody thing to say.’