When he switched off the engine, he heard the bleating amongst the camel-thorns and now he was truly shocked.
"Goats!" he spoke aloud. "They are running goats on King's Lynn." Bawu Ballantyne's ghost must be without rest or peace. Goats on his beloved grassland. Craig went to look for them. There were two hundred or more in one herd. Some of the agile multi-coloured animals had climbed high into the trees and were eating bark and seedpods, while others were cropping the grass down to the roots so that it would die and the soil would sour. Craig had seen the devastation that these animals had created in the tribal trust lands
There were two naked Matabele boys with the herd.
They were delighted whep Craig spoke to them in their own language. They stuffed the cheap candy that he had brought with him for JOst such a meeting into their cheeks, and chattered without inhibition.
Yes, there were thirty families living on King's Lynn now, and each family had its herd of goats the finest goats in Matabeleland, they boasted through sticky lips, and under the trees a homed old billy mounted a young nanny with a vigorous humping of his back. "See!" cried the herd boys "they breed with a will. Soon we will have more goats than any of the other families."
"What has happened to the white farmers that lived here?" Craig asked.
"Gone! they told him proudly. "Our warriors drove them back to where they came from and now the land belongs to the children of the revolution." They were six years old, but still they had the revolutionary cant word-perfect.
Each of the children had a slingshot made from old rubber tubing hanging from his neck, and around his naked waist a string of birds that he had killed with the slingshot: larks and warblers and jewelled sun birds Craig knew that for their noon meal they would cook them whole on a bed of coals, simply letting the feathers sizzle off and devouring the tiny blackened carcasses with relish. Old Bawu Ballantyne would have strapped any herdboy that he caught with a slingshot.
The herd boys followed Craig back to the road, begged another piece of candy from him and waved him away like an old dear friend. Despite the goats and songbirds, Craig felt again the overwhelming affection for these people.
They were, after all, his people and it was good to be home again.
He stopped again on the crest of the hills and looked down on the homestead of King's Lynn. The lawns had died from lack of attention, and the goats had been in t -le flower-beds. Even at this distance, Craig could see the main house was deserted. Windows were broken, leaving unsightly gaps like missing teeth, and most of the asbestos sheets had been stolen from the roof and the roof-timbers were forlorn and skeletal against the sky. The roofing sheets had been used to build ramshackle squatters" shacks down near the old cattlepens.
Craig drove down and parked beside the dip tank. The tank was dry, and half-filled with dirt and rubbish. He went past it to the squatters" encampment. There were half a dozen families living here. Craig scattered the yapping cur dogs that rushed out at him with a few well-aimed stones, then he greeted the old man who sat at one of the fires.
"I see you, old father." Again there was delight at his command of the language. He sat at the fire for an hour, chatting with the old Matabele, the words coming more and more readily to his tongue and his ear tuning to the rhythm and nuances of Sindebele. He learned more than he had in the four days since he had been back in Matabeleland.
"They told us that after the revolution every man would have a fine motor-car, and five hundred head of the best white man's cattle." The old man spat into the fire. "The only ones with motorcars are the government ministers.
They told us we would always have full bellies, but food costs five times what it did before Smith and the white men ran away. Everything costs five times more sugar and salt and soap everything." During the white regime a ferocious foreign exchange control system and a rigid internal price control structure had isolated the country from the worst effects of inflation, but now they were experiencing all the joys of re-entering the international community, and the local currency had already been devalued twenty per cent.
"We cannot afford cattle," the old man explained, "so we run goats. Goats!" He spat again into the fire and watched his phlegm sizzle. "GoA! Like dirt-eating Shana." His tribal hatred boiled, ll his spittle.
Craig left him muttering and frowning over the smoky fire and walked up to the house. As he climbed the steps to the wide front veranda, he had a weird premonition that his grandfather would suddenly come out to meet him with some tart remark. In his mind's eye he saw again the old man, dapper and straight, with thick silver hair, skin like tanned leather and impossibly green Ballantyne eyes, standing before him.
"Home again, Craig, dragging your tail behind you!" However, the veranda was littered with rubble and bird droppings from the wild pigeons that roosted undisturbed in the rafters.
He picked his way along the veranda to the double doors that led into the old library. There had been two huge elephant tusks framing this doorway, the bull which Craig's great-great-grandfather had shot back in the 1860s.
Those tusks were family heirlooms, and had always guarded the entrance to King's Lynn. Old grandpa Bawu had touched them each time he passed, so that there had been a polished spot on the yellow ivory. Now there were only the holes in the masonry from which the bolts holding the ivory had been torn. The only family relics he had inherited and still owned were the collection of leather bound family journals, the laboriously handwritten records of his ancestors from the arrival of his great-great-grandfather in Africa over a hundred years before. The tusks would complement the old books. He would search for them, he promised himself. Surely such rare treasures must be traceable.