The Angels Weep (57 page)

Gandang led them, and a pace behind him on either hand came
his half-brothers Babiaan and Somabula, and behind them again the
other sons of Mashobane, wearing the headrings of honour and
carrying every one of them the broad silver killing blades and
the tall rawhide shields that gave them their name Matabele,
‘the People of the Long Shields’.

Ten paces in front of Zouga, Gandang stopped and grounded his
shield, and the two men stared deeply into each other’s
eyes, and both of them were thinking of the day they had first
met thirty years and more before.

‘I see you, Gandang, son of Mzilikazi,’ Zouga said
at last.

‘I see you, Bakela, the one who strikes with the
fist.’

And behind Zouga Mr Rhodes ordered calmly, ‘Ask him if
it is to be war or peace.’

Zouga did not take his eyes from those of the tall emaciated
induna.

‘Are the eyes still red for war?’ he asked.

Gandang’s reply was a deep rumble, but it carried
clearly to every induna who followed him, and it rose up to the
massed ranks of warriors upon the heights.

‘Tell Lodzi that the eyes are white,’ he said, and
he stooped and laid his shield and his assegai upon the ground at
his feet.

T
wo Matabele,
dressed only in loincloths, pushed the steel cocopan along the
narrow-gauge railway tracks. When they reached the tip, one of
them knocked out the retaining pin and the steel pan swivelled
and spilled its five-ton load of sugary blue quartz in the
funnel-shaped chute. The rock tumbled and rolled into the sizing
box, and piled on the steel grating where another dozen Matabele
fell upon it with ten-pound sledgehammers, and broke it up so
that it could fall through the grating into the stamp boxes
below.

The stamps were of massive cast iron; hissing steam drove them
in a monotonous see-saw rhythm, pounding the ore to the
consistency of talcum powder. The roar of the stamps was
ear-numbing. A continuous stream of water, piped up from the
stream in the valley below, sluiced the powdered ore out of the
stamp boxes and carried it down the wooden gutters to the James
tables.

In the low open-sided hut, Harry Mellow stood over the No. 1
table, and watched the flow of thick mud-laden water washing
across the heavy copper sheet that was the tabletop. The top was
inclined to allow the worthless mud to run to waste, and
eccentric cams agitated the table gently to spread the flow and
ensure that every particle of ore touched the coated surface of
the table. Harry closed the screw valve, and diverted the flow of
mud to the No. 2 table. Then he threw the lever and the agitation
of the table ceased.

Harry glanced up at Ralph Ballantyne and Vicky who were
watching him avidly, and he cocked a thumb to reassure them
– the thunderous roar of the stamps drowned all
conversation here – and then Harry stooped over the table
once more. The tabletop was coated with a thick layer of
quicksilver, and, using a wide spatula, Harry began scraping it
off the copper and squeezing it into a heavy dark ball. One of
the unique properties of mercury is its ability to mop up
particles of gold the way that blotting paper sucks up ink.

When Harry had finished, he had a ball of amalgamated mercury
twice the size of a baseball, that weighed almost forty pounds.
He needed both hands to lift it. He carried it across to the
thatched rondavel that served as laboratory and refinery for the
Harkness Mine, and Ralph and Vicky hurried after him, and crowded
into the tiny room behind him.

The three of them watched with utter fascination as the ball
of amalgam began to dissolve and bubble in the retort over the
intense blue flame of the primus stove.

‘We cook off the mercury,’ Harry explained,
‘and condense it again, but what we have left behind is
this.’

The boiling silver liquid reduced in quantity, and began to
change in colour. They caught the first reddish-yellow promise,
the gleam that has enchanted men for more than six thousand
years.

‘Just look at it!’ Vicky clapped her hands with
excitement, shaking out her thick coppery tresses, and her eyes
shone as though with a reflection of the lustre of the precious
liquid that she was watching. The last of the mercury boiled
away, and left behind a deep glowing puddle of pure gold.

‘Gold,’ said Ralph Ballantyne. ‘The first
gold of the Harkness Mine.’ And then he threw back his head
and laughed. The sound startled them. They had not heard Ralph
laugh since he had left Bulawayo, and while they stared at him,
he seized both of them, Vicky in one arm and Harry in the other,
and danced them out into the sunlight.

They danced in a circle, and the two men whooped and howled,
Ralph like a highlander, and Harry like a Plains Indian, while
the Matabele hammer-boys broke off their labours and watched
them, first with astonishment, and then chuckling in
sympathy.

Vicky broke out of the circle first, panting and holding the
first bulge of her pregnant tummy in both hands.

‘You are mad!’ she laughed breathlessly.
‘Mad! Both of you! And I love you for it.’

T
he mix was
fifty-fifty, half river-clay dug from the banks of the Khami and
half yellow anthill clay, the adhesive qualities of which had
been enhanced by the saliva of the termites which had carried it
up through their subterranean tunnels to the surface. The clays
were puddled in a pit beside the bottom well, the same well that
Clinton Codrington, Robyn’s first husband, and Jordan
Ballantyne had dug together so long ago, even before the Charter
Company’s pioneers had first ridden into Matabeleland.

Two of the Mission converts cranked up each bucketful from the
well, and spilled it into the mixing pit, another two shovelled
in the clay and a dozen naked black children, led by Robert St
John, made a game out of trampling the clay to the correct
consistency. Robyn St John was helping pack the clay into the
oblong wooden moulds, each eighteen inches by nine. A line of
Mission boys and girls carried the filled moulds away to the
drying ground, where they carefully turned out the wet bricks
onto the beds of dry grass, and then hurried back with the empty
moulds to have them refilled.

There were thousands of yellow bricks lying in long lines in
the sun, but Robyn had calculated that they needed at least
twenty thousand for the new church alone. Then of course they
would have to cut all the timber and cure it, and in a
month’s time the thatch grass in the vleis would be tall
enough to begin cutting.

Robyn straightened and placed her muddied yellow hand in the
small of her back to ease the cramping muscles. A lock of
grey-flecked hair had escaped from under the scarf she had
knotted over her head, and there was a smear of mud down her
cheek and neck, but the little runnels of her own sweat were
eroding this away and staining the high collar of her blouse with
it.

She looked up at the burned-out ruins of the Mission; the
charred roof beams had fallen in and the heavy rains of the last
wet season had dissolved the unbaked brick walls into a shapeless
hillock. They would have to re-lay every brick, and lift every
rafter into place again, and the prospect of all that grinding,
unremitting labour gave Robyn St John a deep and exciting sense
of anticipation. She felt as strong and alive as the young
medical missionary who had first stepped onto this unforgiving
African soil almost forty years before.

‘Thy will be done, dear Lord,’ she said aloud, and
the Matabele girl beside her cried happily, ‘Amen,
Nomusa!’

Robyn smiled at her, and was about to bend once more to the
brick moulds, when she started, shaded her eyes, and then picked
up her skirts and rushed down the track towards the river,
running like a young girl.

‘Juba,’ she cried. ‘Where have you been? I
have waited so long for you to come home.’

Juba set down the heavy load she carried balanced on her head,
and came lumbering to meet her.

‘Nomusa!’ She was weeping as she hugged Robyn to
her. Great fat oily tears slid down her cheeks and mingled with
the sweat and mud on Robyn’s face.

‘Stop crying, you silly girl,’ Robyn scolded her
lovingly. ‘You will make me start. Just look at you! How
skinny you are, we will have to feed you up! And who is
this?’

The black boy dressed only in a soiled loincloth came forward
shyly.

‘This is my grandson, Tungata Zebiwe.’

‘I did not recognize him, he has grown so
big.’

‘Nomusa, I have brought him to you so that you can teach
him to read and to write.’

‘Well, the first thing we will have to do is give him a
civilized name. We shall call him Gideon and forget that horrible
vengeful name.’

‘Gideon,’ Juba repeated. ‘Gideon Kumalo. And
you will teach him to write?’

‘We have a lot of work to do first,’ Robyn said
firmly. ‘Gideon can go into the mud puddle with the other
children and you can help me pack the moulds. We have to start
all over, Juba, and build it all up from the beginning
again.’

‘I
admire
the grandeur and loneliness of the Matopos, and therefore I
desire to be buried in the Matopos on the hill which I used to
visit and which I called the “View of the World” in a
square to be cut in the rock on the top of the hill and covered
with a plain brass plate with these words thereon: “Here
lie the remains of CECIL JOHN RHODES”.’

So when at last the pumping of his diseased heart ceased, he
came to Bulawayo once more along the railroad that Ralph
Ballantyne had laid. The speical saloon coach in which his coffin
rode was draped with purple and black, and at each town and
siding along the way, those whom he had called ‘my
Rhodesians’ brought wreaths to pile upon the casket. From
Bulawayo the coffin was taken on a guncarriage into the Matopos
Hills and the pure black bullocks that drew it plodded slowly up
the rounded egg-shaped dome of granite that he had chosen.

Above the open sepulchre stood a tripod gantry, with block and
chain at the peak, and around it a dense throng of humanity:
elegant gentlemen, uniformed officers, and ladies with black
ribbons on their hats. Then, farther out, there stretched a vast
black sea of half-naked Matabele, twenty thousand come to see him
go down into the earth. At their head were the indunas who had
met him near this same hill to treat for peace. There were
Gandang and Babiaan and Somabula, all of them very old men
now.

Gathered at the head of the grave were the men who had
replaced them in real power, the administrators of the Charter
Company, Milton and Lawley, and the members of the first
Rhodesian Council. Ralph Ballantyne was amongst them with his
young wife beside him.

Ralph’s expression remained grave and tragic as the
coffin was lowered on its chains into the gaping tomb, and the
bishop read aloud the obituary that Mr Rudyard Kipling had
composed:

As the heavy brass plaque was lowered into position, Gandang
stepped out of the ranks of the Matabele, and lifted one
hand.

‘The father is dead,’ he cried, and then in a
single blast of sound, like the thunder of a tropical storm, the
Matabele nation gave the salute they had never given to a white
man before.

‘Bayete!’ they shouted as one man.
‘Bayete!’

The salute to a king.

T
he funeral
crowds dispersed, slowly, seemingly reluctantly. The Matabele
drifted away like smoke amongst the valleys of their sacred
hills, and the white folk followed the path down the face of the
granite dome. Ralph helped Elizabeth over the uneven footing, and
he smiled down at her.

‘The man was a rogue, and you weep for him,’ he
teased her gently.

‘It was all so moving,’ Elizabeth dabbed at her
eyes. ‘When Gandang did that—’

‘Yes. He fooled them all, even those he led into
captivity. Damn me, but it’s a good thing they buried him
in solid rock and put a lid on him, or he would have squared the
devil and got out of it at the last moment.’

Ralph turned her out of the stream of people, of mourners who
were following the path.

‘I told Isazi to bring the carriage round to the back of
the hill, we don’t want to be caught in the
crush.’

Under their feet the granite was painted a vivid orange with
lichen, and the little blue-headed lizards scuttled for cover in
the crevices and then glared at them with their throats throbbing
and the cockscomb crests of the monstrous heads fully erect.
Ralph paused on the lower slope of the dome, where a twisted and
deformed msasa tree had found precarious purchase in one of the
crevices and he looked back up at the peak.

‘So he’s dead at long last, but his Company still
governs us. I have work to do yet, work that may take the rest of
my life.’

Then abruptly and uncharacteristically, Ralph shivered,
although the sun was blazing hot.

‘What is it, my dear?’ Elizabeth turned to him
with quick concern.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I just walked
over my own grave.’ Then he chuckled. ‘We’d
best go down now before Jon-Jon drives poor Isazi completely out
of his mind.’

He took her arm and led her down to where Isazi had parked the
carriage in the shade, and from a hundred paces they picked up
the piping of Jonathan’s questions and speculations, each
punctuated with a demanding: ‘
Uthini
, Isazi? What do
you say, Isazi?’

And the patient reply: ‘Eh-heh,
Bawu
. Yes, yes,
little Gadfly.’