Today's Embrace (43 page)

“This all couldn't be a trap, could it?” Parnell mused. “After Anthony, there's little to surprise me.”

“I thought of a trap first thing.” Rogan swiveled in his saddle and with narrowed gaze studied the layout of the land. There was open yellowed grassland beneath flat-topped acacia trees along the crest of the ridge.

“Do you see that rocky kopje?”

Parnell and Derwent turned their heads eastward to where Rogan pointed.

“Yes, what about it?” Parnell asked.

“Plenty. Do you know what that distant blue summit is called?”

“The Sentinel,” Derwent said.

“Do you notice its shape?”

“A crouching lion,” Parnell said with a bit of surprise in his voice.

“It fits the map, too. Henry drew the lion facing Zimbabwe. All right,” Rogan said at last. “Let's have a look.” He smiled. “Who knows?” He patted his pocket where the gold bird was out of sight again. “This may be the beginning of the end.”

Rogan sat astride his horse, gazing down from the brow of the hill. The Valley of Ruins was below in the amber-colored brush and grasses. Zimbabwe's past glory was visible beneath the blue sky and hot sun, though no longer as a walled fortress, but as heaps of stone with a mysterious history, reminding him of bleached bones after a massive battle, bones scattered across the valley like some puzzling maze.

Dr. Jakob had identified the one remaining standing structure as a temple. “An elliptical building,” he had said. Was he right? And was it shaped this way by these particular ancients to follow the course of the planets?

The Basuto guides found an easier trail down the kopje into the sun-warmed valley, leading the way on foot, leading the mules laden with their supplies. Rogan, Parnell, and Derwent maneuvered their horses down through the dry brush. The sweet, poignant smell of sunbaked brush filled the air. The wind rippled the heads of the ripening grasses, causing a sleepy rustling sound.

Reaching the valley floor, Rogan spurred his horse forward toward the granite walls. But he had not taken lightly what Parnell had said about a trap. With his .45 securely belted, he slowly dismounted, his eyes busy, looking for any sign of danger. He had not yet told his brother or Derwent about Julien's bargain about the Matopos. He thought Julien was clean in his offer about the gold, though Rogan knew he'd been fooled before.

Parnell and Derwent soon joined him, and the Basuto led the horses and mules to a secure spot.

Rogan walked through the tall grasses in the open space, but his boots were calf-length, his breeches stuffed inside, and unless an unwary snake happened to strike at his knee, he was moderately safe.

The sight of the standing walls and broken heaps of smooth stone were enough to spur Rogan's imagination, as it must have Henry's so long ago.

“Aye,” said Derwent, pushing his hat back from his eyes and lifting his head to gaze up at the huge stone wall.

“Must be ten meters high in some places, Mr. Rogan.”

“All made from smooth stones of uniform size, too, and no mortar,” Parnell said.

“The construction is complex,” Rogan said with a measuring glance. “There's little proof, if any, that the present tribes produced such a skilled building program as this. If so, why aren't there more ruins like Zimbabwe all over South Africa? The tribes are nomadic. They're not city builders.”

“Dr. Jakob says there's a big debate about that,” Derwent offered.

“Then who were the men who built Zimbabwe? What happened to them?” Parnell asked in a tone that expected no answer. “These ruins are still a riddle the archaeologists can't answer.”

“There's much the archaeologists and scientists don't know,” Derwent stated. He ran his fingers through his hair. “Maybe the builders were miners who were sent by the Queen of Sheba—seeing as this area might be the Ophir of the Scriptures.”

Rogan had met and spoken with Jakob van Buren at the Bulawayo Mission before leaving there with Parnell and Derwent for Fort Victoria. Jakob had mentioned many ancient artifacts and gold jewelry found here, including giant soapstone eaglelike birds, some carried off to museums, including those in Germany.

Then there were the usual tales of hidden caches of gold and jewels, as well. Rogan was troubled. Could this be what Henry had in mind?
Had it all been some wild figment of his fever-crazed imagination? Had he somehow convinced himself of a gold deposit where there was only mystery?

Yet he could not accept this explanation either. Henry Chantry had not been any more fanciful than Rogan.

Who built Zimbabwe? “No one knows,” Dr. Jakob had stated over dinner to Rogan. “Men have always hunted for gold and ivory. Jezebel and Ahab's palace in Samaria was a treasure chest of gold, and it held tremendous amounts of ivory, too. Arabs have also spoken of gold mines in this area of Africa in the eleventh century.

“There have been ancient gold mines here from the times of the African rulers of Monomatapa. Those chieftains, or kings if you prefer, traded with the Portuguese during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Whether an African tribe built these ruins, or the Arab traders, or the ancient Romans, or some other group, it's all uncertain. King Solomon, too, had his miners. Scripture says he had many ships sent out to bring back gold.”

And Dr. Jakob had whipped out his battered old Bible and flipped to what he said was Second Chronicles, chapter nine, and read in his gravelly voice with its odd Dutch and South African accent: “For the king's ships went to Tarshish with the servants of Hiram. Once every three years the merchant ships came, bringing gold, silver, ivory, apes, and monkeys. So King Solomon surpassed all the kings of the earth in riches and wisdom.”

Apes
for King Solomon's zoo sounded to Rogan as if his ships had sailed to Africa.

“Maybe Dr. Jakob was right,” Rogan said, feeling the hot sun on his shoulders and back as he gazed at the wall.

“Sure could be, Mr. Rogan. Solomon's miners may have come here for gold and apes. Then forgot the mines when Solomon died and his son Rehoboam took over. As Jakob had said, Israel was divided after Solomon's death with ten tribes in the north, and Judah and Benjamin in
the south under King Rehoboam. The mines would have fallen into disuse as wars rolled across Israel until they were taken captive into Babylon.”

Rogan passed through a crumbling gap in the massive walls. Stones crunched beneath his boots as he walked up to a conical structure. A temple? “Let's have a look around.”

There was a second inner wall about a meter distant that ran parallel. Rogan entered that passage with Derwent and Parnell in single file behind. The passage was narrow and dark, and they sometimes climbed some steps, and sometimes descended. Rogan rounded a curve, and the passage widened into what was probably a religious enclosure of sorts.

“Doesn't look sacred to me,” Derwent complained, wiping his brow on the back of his sleeve.

“You have no imagination, Vicar Derwent,” Parnell taunted. “You want music, candles, and bells.”

“I want truth, Mr. Parnell. I can do without all the religious trappings as long as Dr. Jakob teaches the Scriptures.”

“Here, look at that,” Rogan said.

In the center of the area there was a cone-shaped obelisk. Rogan guessed it to be nine meters high and maybe five or six at the base. There was also a large, raised flat block of stone to one side of the obelisk.

“What do you think it's for?” Parnell grimaced. He was back to his fastidious ways. He took out a neat white handkerchief and blotted his forehead.

Rogan looked at it questioningly. “Well, Parnell, I'd say it suggests an altar of sorts. Maybe when the stars and planets were in the right positions, the Zimbabweans, like other pagan races, offered sacrifices to their planetary gods. What do you say?”

“Aye, an altar, most likely. The people who lived after Noah built a great ziggurat, and at the top was an altar. They offered human sacrifices to what they thought was the sun god.”

“After the Flood? Rather extraordinary! Hadn't they learned their lesson? They couldn't have been dense enough to think the sun god had
defeated the flood god.” Parnell shook his head. “But why sacrifices, I wonder …”

“It's important that there were true and false sacrifices, Mr. Parnell. After the sin in the Garden of Eden, God told Abel to bring a lamb as a sacrifice for his sin. The lamb was a picture of the Savior who would die on the altar of the cross for the sins of the whole world. When Jesus was pointed out as the Savior, John the Baptist said, ‘Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.' ”

Derwent pointed to the flat block at the side of the central cone. “But this was only one of many places where there was a false sacrificial system. The people who lived and spread over the whole earth after the Flood made up their own religions, degrading some of the truths their ancestors knew. They offered sinful sacrifices to the sun, moon, stars, and planets. They turned away from the true and living God to make idols of things in His creation, to nature—the sun, moon, and stars—to gods of spiritual darkness, to demons, and even to Satan himself. All that nagging stuff—the sacrificed chicken and the hakata divining bones—all that comes from the prince of darkness. He has plenty of sway here. And that's why missionaries like Robert Moffat are so greatly needed.”

Parnell frowned. “Hakata divining bones—very dark rituals indeed. There's nothing good about that.”

“Nothing at all,” Rogan said briefly. “But the God who made heaven and earth has both justice and love, justice to require a penalty for evil, and love to be willing to become the innocent suffering sacrifice for the guilty. As Derwent quoted about Jesus, ‘Behold the lamb of God which takes away the sin of the world.' ”

Parnell rubbed his forehead. “Say, little brother, where'd you learn all this?”

“Vicar Edmund Havering, Rectory of St. Graves Parish, Grimston Way.” He smiled. “I listened, old boy.”

“Ha! You and those books on South Africa you smuggled in! All right … and that's why we took communion at the chapel, right? The bread and the cup, for His sacrifice on the cross.”

Derwent smiled. “You said it right, Mr. Parnell. We do it because Jesus said to, so we would remember His death until He comes again. But you got to have Christ in your heart, or it's just another ritual. Almost like all that hokey-pokey—witchcraft.”

Parnell grimaced. “Thanks for the warning, Derwent.”

Rogan had walked over to one end where there were several trees growing. He stood, hands on hips, studying them. The trees were rounded, with dense leaves, and offered welcome areas of cooler shadow.

“But it's not a baobab tree.”

“And no bird or lion, either,” Parnell said wearily. “I'm beginning to think all this is Uncle Julien's folly. Or maybe it's a trap to do us in.”

“We could sure use some optimism, Mr. Parnell.”

“Yeah. Well, I've reason to be suspicious of Sir Julien Bley.”

“To be truthful, I'm a bit uneasy myself about all this. Seems odd to me how Sir Julien just ups and tells Mr. Rogan what he's discovered about the Zimbabwe Ruins.”

Rogan as yet had not told either Derwent or Parnell about Julien's bargain to let him have all the gold discovered from Henry's map.

“You two can continue to indulge in your doubts and suspicions all you want, but I'm going to keep looking around.”

Outside, standing near the massive wall, Rogan gazed toward the other side of the valley where the hills lifted again toward the brazen blue sky. A few isolated white clouds drifted easily. He studied the second area of Zimbabwe known among archaeologists as the Acropolis. The stone ruins topped a low hill and stared down across the valley as though on guard.
Probably was used as a fortress
, he thought.

Derwent and Parnell walked up.

“There's a path that goes up there,” Rogan said. “Let's have a look.”

“I'm going to be famished tonight,” Parnell complained. “And, Derwent, tell those guards I don't want to eat any more of those mealies!”

The steps, cut out of stone, were exceedingly steep and so narrow that they had to climb single file—no doubt to keep invaders from rushing up by the hundreds to take the fortress. Was it true what Dr. Jakob
had told him at the mission? Jakob, who had long been a friend of the tribes and their chieftains, had heard tales in abundance about the ruins of Zimbabwe. Jakob had taken him aside before Rogan left and told him what he'd heard from a deposed induna on the Zambezi years ago. The induna claimed that when he was a boy he'd heard his father say that there was another way out of the fortress of Zimbabwe by way of a tunnel. The tunnel was supposed to have gone through the hill to the other side. Neither the induna's father nor Jakob knew how to find the tunnel if it existed.