The Angels Weep (27 page)

Around each naked carcass, stripped of its hide and with the
obscene pink bellies massively swollen with gases, the hyena
whooped and chuckled and the little dog-like jackal darted in
nervously to snatch up a titbit of offal. The vultures hopped and
flapped and squabbled, pecking at each other with steely hooked
beaks, forcing their way through the enlarged anus of the cadaver
into the belly cavern.

The tall black and white marabou storks, solemn as
undertakers, stalked in with their bright greedy eyes set in the
naked face-mask. Their crops were naked of feathers also; pink
and scalded-looking, they dangled down in front of the throat
like the swollen genitalia of some repulsive albino. With their
long and powerful bills, they would rip off a strip of flesh on
which the greenish iridescent sheen of putrefaction was already
blooming. Then they pointed the bill at the sky, gaping and
straining with the effort of gobbling the morsel down on top of
their already gorged crop.

The stink of rotting, scorched flesh and the smell of the
scavengers wafted down on the little circle of wagons, and kept
the women from sleep.

‘Ralph, can we leave here tomorrow?’ Cathy
whispered.

‘Why?’ he asked sleepily. ‘You like it here,
you said so.’

‘Not any more,’ she answered, and then after a
while, ‘Ralph, if we go on burning and killing like this,
how long will it last?’

He was so startled that he heaved himself on one elbow and
peered at her in the candlelight.

‘What on earth are you talking about, girl?’

‘When the animals are all gone, this will no longer be
the land I know and love.’

‘Gone?’ He shook his head in sympathy, as though
for an idiot child. ‘Gone? By God, Katie, you saw the herds
out there. They are countless, limitless. They are as thick as
that all the way north to Khartoum. We could hunt like that every
day, and not scratch the surface. No, Katie, they will never
go.’

‘How many did you kill?’ she asked quietly.

‘Me? Two hundred and fourteen, thirty-two more than your
esteemed brother-in-law.’ Ralph lay back comfortably, and
pulled her head down onto his chest. ‘And that cost the
cocky bastard a guinea of his ill-gotten loot.’

‘Between you, almost four hundred – in a single
day’s hunting, Ralph.’ Her voice was so low that he
barely heard it, but his own became rough with impatience.

‘Damn it, Katie, I need the skins. They are mine to take
if I want them. That’s all there is to it. Now, go to
sleep, silly girl.’

I
f anything,
Ralph Ballantyne’s estimate of the buffalo herds was
conservative. Probably never had any large mammal been so
prolifically massed upon the earth’s face in all of its
history. From the great Sud where the infant Nile weaves its way
through fathomless swamps of floating papyrus, southwards over
the wide savannahs of eastern and central Africa, down to the
Zambezi and beyond to the golden glades and forests of
Matabeleland, the vast black herds roamed.

They were very seldom hunted by the primitive tribes. They
were too swift and fierce and powerful for their bows and spears.
The digging of a pitfall large and deep enough to trap such an
enormous beast was a labour that few of the tribesmen thought
about seriously enough to interrupt their dancing and
beer-drinking and cattle-raidings. The Arab travellers into the
interior were not interested in such coarse game, rather they
were intent on capturing and chaining the tender young black
maidens and youths for the markets at Malindi and Zanzibar, or in
hunting the wrinkled grey elephant for their curved ivory tusks.
Very few European travellers, bearing their sophisticated
weapons, had yet ventured into these remote lands, and even the
huge prides of lion which followed the herds could not check
their natural multiplication.

The grasslands were blackened by the huge bovine beasts. Some
herds, twenty or thirty thousand strong, were so dense that the
animals in the rear literally starved, for the pasturage was
destroyed by the forerunners before they could reach it. Weakened
by their own vast multitudes, they were ripe for the pestilence
that came out of the north.

It came out of Egypt. It was the same plague that Moses’
God Jehovah had inflicted on the Pharaoh of Egypt. It was the
Peste bovine
, the rinderpest, a virus disease which
attacks all the ruminants, but of those the most susceptible are
the bovines: buffalo and domestic cattle. The stricken animals
are blinded and choked by the discharge from the mucous
membranes. Mucus pours in thick ropes from their nostrils and
jaws. The discharge is highly infectious and contagious, and it
persists on the pasturage over which the animal has passed long
after its host has perished.

The course of the disease is rapid and irreversible. The
mucous discharges are swiftly followed by profuse diarrhoea and
dysentery, with the beasts straining to evacuate even after their
bowels are purged of all but bloody slime. Then when at last the
animal goes down and no longer has the strength to rise, the
convulsions twist the horned head back and around, until the nose
touches the flank. That is the position in which they die.

The rinderpest passed with the speed of a gale wind across the
continent, so that in places where the concentrations of buffalo
were heaviest, a herd of ten thousand great horned animals was
wiped out between the dawn and the sunset of a single day. The
carcasses lay so thickly on the denuded savannah that they were
touching each other like shoals of poisoned sardine washed up on
a beach. Over this carnage hung the characteristic fetid odour of
the disease with which soon mingled the stench of putrefaction,
for even the teeming flocks of vultures and packs of gluttonous
hyena could not devour one thousandth part of this awful
windfall.

This gale of disease and death blew southwards, swallowing up
the blundering, bellowing herds – southwards until at last
it reached the Zambezi. Even that wide stretch of swirling green
water could not check the pestilence. It was carried to the far
bank in the bulging crops of the vultures and carrion storks, and
was scattered upon the pasture in the faeces that they voided in
flight.

The dreadful gale began again, southwards it moved, ever
southwards.

I
sazi, the
little Zulu driver, was always the first awake in the laager. It
gave him satisfaction to be alert and aware when others half his
age still slept.

He left his mat and he went to the watch-fire. It was nothing
but a pile of fluffy white ash, but Isazi moved the blackened
tips of the logs together, crushed a few dry leaves of the ilala
palm between them and leaned close to blow upon it. The ash flew
away, and a coal glowed sullenly before the palm leaf popped into
a cheery little flame. The logs took and Isazi warmed his palms
for a moment, and then left the circle of wagons and wandered
down to where the oxen were penned.

Isazi loved his bullocks as some men love their children or
their dogs. He knew each by name. He knew their separate natures,
their strengths and their weaknesses. He knew which of them would
try to turn out of the span when the going got tough or the
footing soft, and he knew those with great hearts and special
intelligence. Of course, he had his favourites, like the huge red
wheeler he had christened Dark Moon for his huge soft eyes, an ox
who had held a loaded eighteen-footer against the flood of the
Shashi when the mud bank was crumbling under his hooves, or
Dutchman, the black and white dappled lead ox that he had trained
to come like a dog to his whistle and lead the others to their
place in the span.

Isazi chuckled lovingly, as he opened the thorn bush gate of
the temporary kraal and whistled for Dutchman. In the pre-dawn
gloom, a beast coughed, and the sound had a peculiarly harrowing
quality that struck a chill into Isazi’s guts. A healthy
bullock did not cough that way.

He stood in the opening of the kraal, hesitating to go in,
then he smelled something that he had never smelled before. Faint
though the whiff of it was, it made his gorge rise. It smelled
like a beggar’s breath or a leper’s sores. He had to
force himself to go forward against the smell and his own
dread.

‘Dutchman,’ he called. ‘Where are you, my
beauty?’

There was the explosive spluttering sound of a beast racked by
dysentery, and Isazi ran towards it. Even in the bad light he
recognized the bulky dappled shape. The bullock was lying
down.

Isazi ran to it. ‘Up,’ he called. ‘
Vusa,
thandwa
! Get up, my darling.’ For a beast only lies
down when it has given up hope.

The bullock heaved convulsively, but did not come to its feet.
Isazi dropped to his knees, and placed his arm around its neck.
The neck was twisted back at an awkward unnatural angle. The
velvety muzzle pressed into the beast’s flank. The muscles
under the sleek skin were convulsed as rigidly as cast iron.

Isazi ran his hands down the beast’s neck, feeling the
fierce heat of fever. He touched the cheek, and it was slick and
wet. Isazi lifted his hand to his own nose. It was coated with a
thick slime and the little Zulu gagged at the smell of it. He
scrambled to his feet, and backed away fearfully until he reached
the gate. Then he whirled and ran to the wagons.

‘Henshaw,’ he yelled wildly. ‘Come quickly,
little Hawk.’

‘F
lame
lilies,’ Ralph Ballantyne growled. His face was congested
with black angry blood, as he strode through the kraal. The lily
was a lovely flower of crimson edged with gold that grew on a
bright green bush that tempted any grazing animal that did not
know them.

‘Where are the herdboys? Bring those bloody
mujiba
here.’ He stopped beside the twisted carcass
of Dark Moon, a trained wheeler like this was worth £50. It
was not the only dead ox, eight others were down and as many more
were sickening.

Isazi and the other drivers dragged in the herders. They were
terrified children, the eldest on the verge of puberty, the
youngest ten years old, their immature groins covered only by a
scrap of
mutsha
cloth, their little round buttocks
naked.

‘Don’t you know what a flame lily is?’ Ralph
shouted at them. ‘It’s your job to watch for poison
plants and keep the oxen off them. I’m going to thrash the
skin off your black backsides to teach you.’

‘We saw no lilies,’ the eldest boy declared
stoutly, and Ralph rounded on him.

‘You cocky little bastard.’

In Ralph’s hand was a sjambok of hippo hide. It was
almost five foot long, thicker than a man’s thumb at the
butt and tapering to whip cord at the tip. It had been cured to
the lovely amber colour of a meerschaum pipe.

‘I’ll teach you to look to the oxen, instead of
sleeping under the nearest tree.’

Ralph swung the lash around the back of the child’s
legs. It hissed like a puff-adder, and the boy screamed at the
cut of it. Ralph seized his wrist, and held him up for a dozen
more strokes across the legs and buttocks. Then he let him go and
grabbed the next
mujiba
. The child danced to the tune of
the sjambok, howling at each cut.

‘All right.’ Ralph was satisfied at last.
‘Get the healthy animals into the span.’

There were only sufficient oxen left to make up three teams.
Ralph was forced to abandon half of the wagons, with their loads
of salted buffalo hides, and they trekked on southwards as the
sun came up over the horizon.

Within an hour another ox had fallen in the traces, with its
nose twisted back against its side. They cut it loose and left it
lying beside the track. Half a mile further two more bullocks
went down. Then they began dropping so regularly that by noon
Ralph was forced to abandon two more wagons, and the last one
rolled on with a depleted span dragging it. Long ago
Ralph’s rage had given way to bewilderment. It was clear
that this was no ordinary case of veld poisoning. None of his
drivers had seen anything to equal it, and there was not even a
precedent in the whole vast body of African folklore.

‘It is a
tagathi
,’ Isazi gave his opinion.
He had seemed to shrink with grief for his beloved bullocks, so
now he was a mournful little black gnome of a man. ‘This is
a terrible witchcraft.’

‘By God, Harry,’ Ralph led his new brother-in-law
out of earshot of the women. ‘We’ll be lucky to get
even the one wagon home. There are a few bad river drifts to
cross yet. We had better ride ahead and try to pick an easier
crossing on the Lupane river.’

The river was only a few miles ahead, they could already make
out the dark green of the forest along its course. Ralph and
Harry rode side by side, both of them worried and anxious.

‘Five wagons lying out here,’ Ralph muttered
moodily. ‘At three hundred pounds each, to say nothing of
the cattle I’ve lost—’ He broke off and sat up
very straight in the saddle.

They had come out onto another open glade beside the river,
and Ralph was staring across it at the three huge dappled
giraffe. With the stilt legs of herons and the long graceful
necks of swans, they were the strangest looking of all
Africa’s mammals. Their huge eyes were soft and sorrowful,
their heads, strangely ugly-beautiful, were topped not by true
horns but by outgrowths of bone covered with skin and hair. Their
gait had the same deliberate slow motion of a chameleon, and yet
a big bull would weigh a ton and stand eighteen feet tall. They
were mute, no extremity of pain or passion could induce a whisper
of sound from their swanlike throats. Their heart was large as a
drum to pump as high as that head, and the arteries of the neck
were fitted with valves to prevent the brain exploding under the
pressure when the giraffe stooped, splay-legged, to drink.