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.
The rock pulpit was empty.
"He isn't here," Peter whispered, his voice tense with disappointment and frustration. Tobengula's body is gone! The signs that Tungata had noticed at the outer wall, N the place where the masonry wall had been opened and U1 resealed with less meticulous workmanship, had led him to the correct conclusion. The old king's tomb had obviously been robbed many years previously. The corpse had long ago been spirited away and the tomb resealed to hide the traces of this desecration.
Peter Fungabera clambered up onto the rock pulpit, and searched it frantically on his hands and knees. Standing back impassively, Tungata marvelled at how ludicrous greed could render even such a dangerous and impressive man as Peter Fungabera. He was muttering incoherently t 0 himself as he strained the dusty detritus; from the floor through his hooked fingers.
"Look! Look here! He held up a small dark object, and Tungata stepped closer. In the torchlight he recognized that it was a shard from a clay pot, a piece of the rim decorated in the traditional diamond pattern used on the Matabele beer-pots.
"A beer-pot." Peter turned it in his hands. "One of the diamond pots broken!" He dropped the fragment and scratched in the dirt, stirring up a soft cloud of dust that undulated in the torch beam.
Here!" He had found something else. Something smaIller. He held it up between thumb and forefinger. It was the size of a small walnut.
He turned the torch beam full upon it, and immediately the light was shattered into the rainbow hues of the spectrum. Shafts of coloured light were reflected into Peter Fungabera's face, like sunlight off water.
"Diamond," he breathed with religious awe, turning it slowly in his fingers so that it shot out arrows and blades of light.
It was an uncut stone, Tungata realized, but the crystal had formed in such symmetry and each plane was so perfect as to catch and reflect even the meagre beam of the torch.
"How beautiful!" Peter murmured, bringing it closer still to his face.
This diamond was a perfect natural octahedron and its colour, even in artificial light, was clear as snowmelt in a mountain stream.
"Beautiful," Peter Fungabera repeated, and then gradually his face lost its drelmy, gloating expression.
"Only one!" he whispered. "A single stone dropped in haste, when there Ishould have been five beer-pots brimming with diamonds." His eyes swivelled from the diamond to Tungata. The torch was held low, and it cast weird shadows across his face, giving him a demoniacal look.
knew," he accused. "I sensed all along you were "You hiding something back. You knew the diamonds had been taken, and you knew where." Tungata shook his head in denial, but Peter Fungabera ri was working himself into a fury. His features contorted, his mouth worked soundlessly and a thin white froth coated his lips.