The Angels Weep by Wilbur Smith Page A

trek, and then
Somabula’s voice rose joyfully as he described the crossing
of the Limpopo and the Shashi rivers and the discovery of this
beautiful bountiful land beyond.
    By then Somabula’s voice was strained and hoarse, and he
sank down onto his stool and drank from the beerpot while
Babiaan, his half-brother, rose to describe the great days, the
subjugation of the surrounding tribes, the multiplication of the
Matabele cattle-herds until they darkened the sweet golden
grasslands, the ascension of Lobengula, ‘the one who drives
like the wind’, to the kingship, the fierce raids when the
impis swept hundreds of miles beyond the borders, bringing home
the plunder and the slaves, that made the Matabele great. He
reminded them how the regiments, plumed and befurred, carrying
their great colour-matched war shields had paraded before the
king like the endless flow of the Zambezi river; how the maidens
danced at the Festival of First Fruits, bare-breasted and
anointed with shiny red clay, bedecked with wild flowers and
beads. He described the secret showing of the treasure, when
Lobengula’s wives smeared his vast body with thick fat and
then stuck the diamonds to it, diamonds stolen by the young bucks
from the great pit that the white men had dug far to the
south.
    Listening to the telling of it, the indunas remembered vividly
how the uncut stones had glowed on the king’s gross body
like a coat of precious mail, or like the armoured scales of some
wondrous mythical reptilian monster. In those days how great had
been the king, how uncountable his herds, how fierce and warlike
the young men and how beautiful the girls – and they nodded
and exclaimed in approbation.
    Then Babiaan sank down and Gandang rose from his stool. He was
tall and powerful, a warrior in the late noon of his powers, his
nobility unquestioned, his courage tested and proven a hundred
times, and as he took up the tale, his voice was deep and
resonant.
    He told how the white men had come up from the south. To begin
with there were only one or two of them begging small favours, to
shoot a few elephant, to trade their beads and bottles for native
copper and ivory. Then there were more of them, and their demands
were more insistent, more worrisome. They wanted to preach a
strange three-headed god, they wanted to dig holes and search for
the yellow metal and the bright stones. Deeply troubled,
Lobengula had come to this place in the Matopos, and the Umlimo
had warned him that when the sacred bird images flew from the
ruins of Great Zimbabwe, then there would be no more peace in the
land.
    ‘The stone falcons were stolen from the sacred
places,’ Gandang reminded them, ‘and Lobengula knew
then that he could no more resist the white men than his father,
Mzilikazi, had been able to.’
    Thus the king had chosen the most powerful of all the white
petitioners, ‘Lodzi’, the big blue-eyed man who had
eaten up the diamond mines and who was the induna of the white
queen across the sea. Hoping to make him an ally, Lobengula had
entered into a treaty with Lodzi; in exchange for gold coins and
guns, he had granted to him a charter to dig for the buried
treasures of the earth exclusively in Lobengula’s eastern
dominions.
    However, Lodzi had sent a great train of wagons with hard
fighting men like Selous and Bakela, leading hundreds of young
white men armed like soldiers to take possession of the Charter
lands. Sorrowfully, Gandang recited the long list of grievances
and the breaking of faith, which had culminated in the clatter of
Maxim guns, in the destruction of the king’s kraal at
Bulawayo, and the flight of Lobengula towards the north.
    Finally, he described Lobengula’s death. Broken-hearted
and sick, the king had taken poison, and Gandang himself had laid
the body in a secret cave overlooking the valley of the Zambezi,
and he had placed all the king’s possessions around him,
his stool, his