Leopard Hunts in Darkness - Smith Wilbur (бесплатные полные книги .txt) 📗
it was still dark and they ate their meagre rations of cold maize cake and sweet tea in silence. They had barely gulped it down before Peter Fungabera ordered them back to the masonry wall.
Tungata's torn hands were clumsy and stiff. Peter Fungabera stood behind him in the opening and when he faltered slashed him with the kiboko, around the ribs, in the soft and sensitive flesh below the armpit. Tungata growled likea wounded lion and lifted a hundredweight block out of the wall.
The sun cleared the crown of the hill, and its golden rays illuminated the cliff-face. With a branch of dead wood, Tungata and one of the Shana troopers levered up another lump of rock, and as it began to move, there was a rumble and a harsh grating and the inner wall collapsed towards them. They jumped clear and stood coughing in the swirl of dust, peering into the aperture that they had made.
The air from the cave stank likea drunkard's mouth, stale and sour, and the darkness beyond was forbidding and menacing.
"You first," Peter Fungabera ordered, and Tungata hesitated. He was overcome with a superstitious awe. He was an educated and sophisticated man, but beneath that, he was African. The sfirits of his tribe and his ancestors guarded this place. He looked at Peter Fungabera and knew that he was experiencing the same dread of the supernatural, even though he was armed with a flashlight, whose batteries he had conserved zealously for this moment.
"Move!" Fungabera ordered. His harsh tone could not disguise his disquiet, and Tungata, to shame him, stepped cautiously over the rock fall into the cave.
He stood for a while until his eyes adjusted to the gloom and he could make out the configuration of the cave. The floor beneath his feet was smooth and worn, but it sloped downwards at a steep angle. Obviously this cave had been the lair of animals and the home of primitive man for tens of thousands of years before it became the tomb of a king.
Peter Fungabera, standing behind Tungata, played the beam of his flashlight over walls and roof. The roof was crusted with the soot of ancient cooking-fires, and the smooth walls were rich with the art of the little yellow Bushmen who had lived here. There were depictions of the wild game that they had hunted and observed so minutely: herds of black buffalo, and tall, dappled giraffe, rhinoceros and homed antelope in glowing colours, all delightfully caricatured. With them the pygmy artist had drawn his own people, sticklike figures with buttocks as pronounced as a camel's hump and imperial erections to boast of their manhood. Armed with bows, they pursued the herds across the rock wall.
Peter Fungabera. flicked the torch beam over this splendid gallery and then held it steady into the inner recesses of the cave where the throat narrowed and the rocky passage turned upon itself and was shrouded in darkness and mysterious shadow far below them.
"Forward!" he ordered, and Tungata moved cautiously down the sloping floor of the chamber.
They reached the throat of the cave and were forced to stoop under the low roof. Tungata turned the corner of the rocky passage and went on for fifty paces before he stopped J9 short.
He had come out into a capacious cavern with a domed roof twenty feet above their heads. The floor was level, but cluttered with rock fallen from above. Peter Fungabera flashed his beam around the cavern.
Against the far wall was a ledge the height of a man's shoulder and he held the beam on a jumble of objects that were stacked upon it.
For a moment Tungata was puzzled, and then he recognized the shape of a wagon wheel of a design from a hundred Years before, a wheel taller than the oxen that drew it; then he made out the wagon bed and the frames.
The vehicle had been broken down into its separate parts and carried up to the cave.
"Lobengula's wagon," he whispered. "His most cherished possession, the one his warriors pulled when the oxen failed--2 Peter Fungabera prodded him with the barrel of the Tokarev and they picked their way forward through the litter of fallen rock.
There were rifles, stacked like wheat, sheaves old Lee Enfields part of the payment that Cecil Rhodes had made to Lobengula for his concessions. Rifles and a hundred gold sovereigns every month the price of a land and a nation sold into slavery, Tungata recalled bitterly. There were other objects piled upon the ledge, salt-bags of leather, stools and knives, beads and ornaments and snuff-horns and broad-bladed assegais.
Peter Fungabera exclaimed with avarice and impatience. "Hurry. W must find his corpse, the diamonds will be with the body." Bones! They gleamed in the torchlight. A pile of them below the ledge.
A skull! It grinned mirthlessly up at them, a cap of matted wool still coveriqg the pate.
"That's him! cried Peter jubilantly. "There is the old -to his knees beside the skeleton.
devil." He dropped Tungata stood aloof. After the first pang of alarm, he had realized that it was the skeleton of a small and elderly man, not much larger than a child, with teeth missing in the front upper jaw. Lobengula had been a big man with fine flashing teeth. Everyone who had met him in life had commented on his smile. This skeleton was still decked in the gruesome paraphernalia of the witch-doctor's trade: beads and shells and bones, plugged duiker-horns of medicine and skulls of reptiles belted about the bony waist.
Even Peter recognized his mistake, and he jumped to his feet.
"This isn't him!" he cried anxiously. "They must have sacrificed his witch-doctor and placed him here as a guardian." He was playing the torch wildly about the cave.
"Where is he?" he demanded. "You must know. They must have told you." Tungata remained silent. Above the skeleton of the witch, doctor the ledge jutted out, rather likea large pulpit of rock. The king's possessions were laid out neatly around this prominence, the human sacrifice laid below it. The entire focus of the cavern was on this spot. It was the logical and natural position in which to place the king's corpse. Peter Fungabera sensed that also and slowly turned th e beam back to it.
