Ballantyne.01.A.Falcon.Flies.1980 by Smith Wilbur

Author:Smith, Wilbur [Smith, Wilbur]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Google: D74AT9BizfMC
Amazon: 0312940718
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

A Falcon Flies

At last, reluctantly, he left Robyn at the head of the pass and went back through the grey rock portals to bring on the caravan. He found the second tusk removed, and both of them bound up with bark rope on to the carryingpoles of newly cut rnsasa wood, but the porters had laid aside their packs and were indulging in an orgy of fresh meat, and that most sought-after of African spoils, thick white globs of elephant fat.

They had cut a trapdoor into the belly of the elephant carcass, and pulled out the entrails, and these glistened in the early sunlight, huge rubbery tubes of purple and yellow guts, already swelling and ballooning with the trapped gases they contained.

Half a dozen porters, stripped mother-naked, had crawled into the interior of the elephant’s carcass, disappearing completely from view and wading almost waist-deep in the clotting, congealing bath of trapped blood. They crawled out, painted with it from head to foot, eyes and grinning teeth startlingly white in the grisly shining wet red visages, their arms filled with tidbits of liver and fat and spleen.

These delicacies were hacked into pieces with the blade of an assegai and thrown on the glowing coals of one of half a dozen fires, then snatched up again, black on the outside and more than half raw within to be wolfed down with every appearance of ecstatic pleasure.

There would be no moving them until they were satiated, Zouga realized.

So he left instructions to Jan Cheroot, himself already potbellied with the meat he had gorged, to follow as soon as the carcass had been either eaten or packed up for carrying, and taking the Sharps rifle returned back up the slope to where he had left Robyn.

He called for her, fruitlessly, for almost half an hour, and was really becoming concerned for her safety when her reply echoed off the cliffs, and looking upwards he saw her standing on a ledge a hundred feet above him, waving him to come up to her.

Zouga climbed up swiftly to where she stood on the ledge, and checked the rebuke that he had ready for her when he saw her expression. She was pale, a sickly greyish colour, under the gilding of the sun, and her eyes were reddened and still swimming with tears. What is it, Sissy? ” he asked with quick concern, but she seemed unable to reply, the words choking in her throat so she had to swallow thickly, and motion him to follow her.

The ledge on which they stood was narrow, but level - and was cut back under the cliff, forming a low long cavern. The cavern had been used before by other men, for the rocky roof was blackened with the sooty smoke of countless cooking-fires, and the back wall was decorated with the lyrically childlike paintings of the little yellow bushmen who over the centuries must have used this as a regular camp during their endless wanderings.

The paintings lacked both perspective

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