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You are right, of course, but what you are asking will cost a great deal. Everything I have is in this company, I don't have a shilling in my pocket. I want your services only, she told him. I will pay for the vehicles, the equipment and the wages of the servants. Then it is possible, but what about my side of the bargain? In exchange, she placed her right hand over her stomach, I will give you the bastard you left in me. He gaped at her.

Centaine- Slow, deep joy spread over his face. A child! You are to have our child! Instinctively, he came towards her again, Stay back, she warned him, not our child. It's yours alone. I want nothing to do with it after it is born. I don't even want to see it. You will take it from the childbed, and do whatever you want with it. I don't want it. I hate it, and I hate the man who put it in me.

With Lothar's wagons the journey from the Place of All Life to their rendezvous with Garry Courtney at the Finger of God had taken weeks. Their return to the mountain range took only eight days, and would have been quicker, except that they had to build the road for the all, motor vehicles through several rocky valleys and numerous dry river beds. Twice Lothar had to resort to dynamite to break a way through obdurate rock.

The convoy consisted of the Ford and two lorries, which Centaine had purchased in Windhoek. Lothar had chosen six camp servants, two black drivers for the lorries, and as a bodyguard for Centaine and camp overseer, he selected i Swart Hendrick, his Ovambo henchman.

I cannot trust him, Centaine had protested. He's like a man-eating lion. You can trust him, Lothar assured her, because he knows that if he fails you in even the smallest degree, I will kill him very, very slowly. He said it in front of Swart Hendric, who grinned, c It is true, missus, he has done it to others. Lothar travelled in the lead truck with Swart Hendrick and the construction gang. In forest country the black gang r an ahead of the slow-moving convoy, hacking out the road, and when the forest opened, they swarmed on to the back of the truck and the convoy bowled forward at a good speed. The second lorry, heavily laden with stores and equipment, followed the first, and Centaine brought up the rear at the wheel of the Ford.

Each night she ordered her tent to be set up well separated from the rest of the camp. She ate her meals there and slept with a loaded shotgun beside the bed. Lothar seemed to have accepted her terms of contract; his bearing was proud, but he became increasingly silent and he spoke to her only when the conduct of the expedition demanded it.

Once in the middle of the morning when they halted unexpectedly, Centaine climbed down from the Ford and impatiently hurried up to the head of the convoy. The lead truck had hit a spring-hare burrow and broken a half-shaft. Lothar and the driver were working on it, and Lothar had stripped off his shirt. He had his back to her and did not hear her come up.

She stopped abruptly when she saw the pale muscles of his back bulging as he pumped on the jack-handle, and she stared fascinated at the ugly purple scar where the Luger bullet had torn out of his back. How close it must have come to his lung! She felt quick sharp remorse and turned away, the angry words that had been on her lips left unspoken, and she went softly back to her place at the end of the column.

When at last on the eighth day the mountain appeared ahead of them, floating on its glistening lake of mirage like some great ark of orange stone, Centaine stopped and climbed up on to the bonnet of the Ford, and as she stared at it, she relived a hundred memories and found herself swayed by many conflicting emotions, borne up on the joy of homecoming and at the same time crushed down by the leaden burden of grief and doubt.

Lothar roused her from her reverie; he had come back from the head of the column without her even seeing him.

You have not told me exactly where you wish me to take you. To the lion tree, she told him. To the place where you found me. The marks of the beast's claws were still slashed into the trunk of the mopani, and its bones were scattered in the grass, beneath it, white as stars and shining in the sun.

Lothar worked with his construction gang for two days to establish a permanent camp for her. He built a private stockade of mopani poles around the solitary tree and piled Thorn branches against the exterior wall of the stockade to reinforce it and make it proof against predators.

He dug a screened latrine pit connected to the stockade by a tunnel of poles and woven Thorn branches, and then he set up Centaine's tent in the centre of the stockade, shaded by the mopani, and built an open hearth for her camp fire in front of it. At the entrance to her stockade he constructed a -heavy timber gate and a guard house.

Swart Hendrick will sleep here, always within call, he told Centaine.

At the edge of the forest, two hundred paces from her camp, he built another larger stockade for the servants and labourers, and when it was all finished, he came to Cen .

tame again. I have done all that is necessary. She nodded. Yes, you have completed your side of the bargain, she agreed. Come back in three months time, and I will complete my side.

He left within the hour in the second truck, taking only the black driver with him and sufficient water and gasoline for the return journey to Windhoek.

As they watched the truck disappear into the mopani, Centaine said to Swart Hendrick, I will wake you at three o'clock tomorrow morning. I want four of the construction men to come with us. They must bring their blankets and cooking pots, and rations for ten days The moon lit their way as Centaine led them up the narrow valley to the cavern of the bees. At the dark entrance, she explained where she was going to take them, and Swart Hendrick translated for those who could not understand Afrikaans.

There is no danger if you remain calm and do not run But when they heard the deep hum resound through the cavern, the labourers backed out hurriedly, threw down t their loads and got ere into a mutinous, sullen bunch.

Swart Hendrick, tell them they have a choice, Centaine ordered. They can either follow me through or you will shoot them, one at a time. Hendrick repeated this with such relish, and unslung his Mauser in such workmanlike fashion, that they hurriedly gathered up their loads again and crowded up behind Centaine. As always, the transit of the cavern was nerve-racking but swift, and as they filed out into the secret valley, the moon was silvering the mongongo grove and polishing the high surrounding cliffs.

There is much work to do, and we will live here, in this valley, until it is finished. That way you will only have to pass through the place of the bees one more time.

That is when we leave. Abraham Abrahams had instructed Centaine in every aspect of pegging a mining claim. He had written out a sample notice for her and showed her how to set it up.

With a steel measuring tape he had demonstrated the trick of squaring a claim across the diagonals, and how to overlap each claim slightly so that there were no holes to give a claim-jumper a toehold.

Still it was hot, exhausting and monotonous work.

Even with the four labourers and Swart Hendrick to help her, Centaine had to make every measurement herself and write out each claim notice and attach it to the claim posts of Mongongo timber that they set up ahead of her.

At dusk every evening, Centaine dragged herself wearily down to the thermal pool in the subterranean grotto and soaked away her sweat and the aches of her body in the steaming waters. She was already starting to feel the drag of her advancing pregnancy. She was bigger this time and it seemed harder and more wearying than Shasa's pregnancy had been, almost as though the foetus sensed her feeling towards it, and was responding vindictively. Her back ached particularly viciously, and by the end of the ninth day she knew that she could not continue much longer without a rest.