The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 145

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The banks of shallow drawers contained the collection which she had boasted on their first meeting was the finest in the world. She showed Craig microscopic feather winged beetles of the family Pdhidae which were a mere one hundredth of an inch long and compared them" to the monstrous African Goliath beetles. She showed him insects of exquisite jewelled beauty and others of repulsive ugliness. She showed him insects that imitated orchids and flowers and sticks and tree bark and snakes. There was a wasp that used a pebble as a tool, and a fly that, like a cuckoo, placed its eggs in the nest of another. There were ants that kept aphids as milk cows and farmed crops of fungus.

She showed him insects that lived in glaciers and others that lived in the depths of the Sahara, some that lived in seawater and even larvae that existed in pools of crude Petroleum where they devoured other insects trapped in the glutinous liquid.

She showed him dragonflies with twenty thousand eyes and ants. that could lift a thousand times their own body weight, she explained bizarre forms of nutrition and reproduction, and such was her rapture that she forgot her -vanity and put the horn-rimmed spectacles back on her nose. She looked so cute that Craig wanted to hug her.

At the end of two hours, she removed the spectacles and faced him defiantly. "Okay," she said. "So I am primarily the curator of the collection of Hexapoda, but at the same time I am also a consultant to the Departments of Agriculture, Wildlife and Nature Conservation and Public Health. That's what entomologists do, mister now what the hell do you do?" "What I do is I go around inviting entomologists to lunch." "Lunch?" She looked vague. "What is the time? My God, you've wasted my entire Saturday morning!" "T-bone steaks," he wheedled. "I have just been paid." "Perhaps I am lunching with Roly,"she told him cruelly. "Roly is in the bush." "How do you know that?" "I phoned Aunty Val at Queen's Lynn to check." "You crafty blighter." She laughed for the first time. "Okay, I give up. Take me to lunch." The steaks were thick and juicy and the beer was icy cold, with dew running down the glass. They laughed a lot and at the end of the meal he asked, "What do entomologists do on Saturday afternoons?" "What do police sergeants do? "she countered.

"They go sleuthing up their family antecedents in weird and wonderful places want to come along?" She knew all about the Land-Rover by now, so she put a silk scarf around her head and dark glasses over her eyes to protect them from the wind, and Craig restocked the cool box with crushed ice and beer. They drove out into the Rhodes Matopos National Park, into the enchanted hills where once the Umlimo had held sway and the Matabele had come for succour and sanctuary in the times of tribal disasters. The beauty of the place struck Janine to the heart.

"The hills look like those wonderful fairy castles along the banks of the Rhine." In the valleys there were herds of wild antelope, sable and kudu, as tame as sheep. They barely lifted their heads as the Land-Rover passed and then returned to graze.

It seemed that they had the hills to themselves, for few others would risk being alone on these dirt-surfaced roads in the very stronghold of Matabele tradition, but when Craig parked the Land-Rover in a shady grove beneath a massive bald dome of granite, an old Matabele guardian in the suntans and slouch hat of the Park Board came down to meet them and escort them as far as the gates that bore the inscription. "Here are buried men who deserve well of their country."

They climbed to the summit of the hill and there, guarded by stone sentinels of natural granite and covered by a heavy bronze plaque, they found the grave of Cecil John Rhodes.

"I know so little about him,"Janine confessed.

"I don't think anybody knew much about him," Craig said. "He was a very strange man, but when they buried him, the Matabele gave him the royal salute. He had some incredible power over other men." They went down the far side of the hill to the square mausoleum of stone blocks with its bronze frieze of heroic figures.

"Allan Wilson and his men," Craig explained, "they exhumed their bodies from the battlefield on the Shangani, and reburied them here."

On the north wall of the memorial were the names of the dead and Craig ran his finger down the graven roll of honour and stopped at one name.

"The Rev. Clinton Codrington," he read it aloud. "He was my great-great-grandfather, a strange man, and his wife, my great-great-grandmother was a remarkable woman indeed. The two of them, Clinton and Robyn, founded the Mission Station at Khami. A few months after he was killed by the Matabele, she married the commander of the column who had ordered Clinton to his death, an American chap called St. John. I bet there was some interesting hanky panky there! A bit of hithering and thithering, a touch of to-ing and fro-ing "They used to do it even in those days?" Janine asked. "I thought it was a recent invention." They wandered on around the side of the hill and came to another grave. Over the grave stood a misshapen and dwarfed ms asa tree that had taken precarious hold in a fault in the solid granite. Like the one on the summit, this grave also was covered by a heavy plate of weathered bronze, but the inscription read. "Here lies the body of SIR RALPH BALLANTYNE, FIRST PRIME MINISTER OF SOUTHERN

RHODESIA.

He deserves we'll of his country." "Ballantyne,"she said. "Must be an ancestor of Roly's." "A mutual ancestor of both of ours," Craig agreed. "Our great-grandfather, Bawu's papa. This is the real reason why we have driven out here." What do you know about him?" "A great deal, actually. I have just finished reading his personal journals.

He was quite a lad. If they hadn't knighted him, they would probably have had to hang him. By his own secret confessions, he was an unqualified rogue, but a colourful one." "So that is where you get it from," she laughed. "Tell me more "Funny things." he was a sworn enemy of that other old rogue up there." Craig pointed up the hill towards Cecil Rhodes" grave. "And here they are buried almost side by side. Great-grandpa Ralph writes in his journal that he discovered the Wankie coal field but Rhodes cheated him out of it. He swore an oath to destroy Rhodes and his Company, he actually wrote that down! I'll show you! And he boasts that he succeeded. In 1923 the rule of Rhodes" British South Africa Company came to an end. Southern Rhodesia became a British colony, old Sir Ralph was its prime minister. He had made good his threat." They sat down, side by side, on the curbstone of the grave and he told her the-funniest and most interesting of the stories that he had read in the secret journals, and she listened with fascination.

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