A Cleft Of Stars Read online

  'What's your interest in The Hill?' he persisted. 'Or hers?'

  A warning note sounded at the back of my mind. I'd told Charlie Furstenberg enough – perhaps too much – about myself. I shrugged it off. 'Scientific. Both of us.'

  But he eyed me narrowly and persisted.

  'Say, if you knew where Rankin was, would you go after him?'

  I was taken aback by this continued questioning. Until then I had never seriously considered either revenge on Rankin or forcing an admission of my innocence out of him. He was simply the target of my hatred, as disembodied as a malign ghost. Charlie's question therefore only sounded academic.

  'Naturally. I told you. I've got a big score to settle.'

  Charlie started to fiddle with a book, his eyes down. Probably I would not have seen the trap in them if he had looked directly at me, they were so dark and inscrutable. His voice was very soft. I thought I was hearing things.

  'Rankin's at The Hill.'

  I have no recollection of grabbing him by the front of his khaki overall and lifting him bodily so that his face was level with my own.

  'Let me go, you fool!' he snapped, keeping his voice down.

  'They'll see! Let go – do you want to spoil everything?'

  I released him but my hands were shaking so I couldn't hold the book-binding tools steady when I pretended to start working again.

  At last I found my voice. 'Who says so?'

  Charlie shrugged. 'The grapevine. It's reliable. He's there all right.'

  'But how . . .

  'Rankin's holed up there, I tell you. If you both know the layout of the place it should be easy enough to find him.'

  A tidal wave of emotions, unformed plans and hopes swept across my mind. They included Rankin, The Hill, Nadine, my release date, Charlie, the future. I simply stood and looked stupidly at the piles of battered books on the table. Charlie said, 'Get a grip of yourself, man. So – are you going after him?'

  I was too overwrought to notice his insistence.

  'Yes! Yes! Just let me get my hands on him!'

  There was an odd, almost reminiscent note in his response.

  'Maze! un b'rachah then!'

  'What does that mean, for Pete's sake?'

  He was very quiet. 'Good luck and prosperity. We used to say it to clinch a bargain at the Diamond Dealers' Club in New York. It's Yiddish. Traditional. Binding. Members never break their word. Or hardly ever.'

  For a moment the set smile vanished as a curtain opened on the past, revealing a hard, almost cruel face. I said , softly, 'You've come a long way on the back of that little devil called IDB, Charlie.'

  In a flash the fixed smile was back and his reply held no overtones.

  'It's the way the cookie crumbles, boy.' He looked at me keenly. 'You've got a lot to think over. My guess is that you won't sleep tonight.'

  Nor did I.

  In the small hours, from Charlie's cell next to mine, came the words of a song, sung too softly to reach beyond my own ears:

  Winkel, winkel, little store,

  How I wonder more and more.

  Whether with the mine so nigh,

  You deal in diamonds on the sly.

  I made a vow to go back to The Hill, alone.

  CHAPTER TWO

  My resolve brought me no inner peace: on the contrary, it did the opposite. A restless fret took over from my previous static bitterness and I started counting the days until my release. My frame of mind, sharpened often to explosion-point against my fellow-prisoners, was aggravated by my decision that Nadine could have no hand in my confrontation with Rankin. How this was to be engineered cost me as many nights' sleep as my plans to waylay Rankin himself. At times the weight of the problem seemed as heavy as The Hill's own bulk. This was especially so after I had seen Nadine on her Friday visits. For she was so bound up with The Hill that it seemed inconceivable to exclude her. Nadine and I had gone to The Hill together as students on the first post-war scientific expedition in 1947. The place had, as I had told Charlie, lain undisturbed for years. Its natural population of wild animals had soared during the war period when ammunition for hunting was unobtainable. What few communications had existed in the way of tracks had been destroyed by floods or sandstorms.

  The Hill has no counterpart in Africa. It is a kind of landlocked Gibraltar across a strategic communications route where two great rivers and a natural north-south migration highway meet. It is situated about sixty miles west of the South African border town of Messina, where one of the world's richest copper mines is located. The town lies in the heart of a broad belt of semi desert which spans a one hundred and fifty mile wide strip of territory from the Zoutpansberg mountains of the Northern Transvaal to the southern reaches of Rhodesia. To the north and south is pleasant savannah country. Sandwiched between is a sandy area of burning heat half the size of Scotland studded with eroded, mesa-like hills, or koppies as they are known in South Africa. It is primarily the home of the grotesque baobab trees whose bulbous, purple-hued trunks reel across the arid landscape like an army of drunken Falstaffs, blown and dropsied with stored water. Archaeological evidence shows that as recently as a thousand years ago the climate of this part of Southern Africa was vastly different from what it is today and that it supported great populations.

  The two main rivers of this land, the Limpopo and the Shashi, meet about half a mile from The Hill to form the common international boundary between South Africa, Rhodesia and Botswana. The British military column which annexed Rhodesia to Queen Victoria's Empire marched past nearby towards the end of the nineteenth century. For ten centuries before that the traffic had been in the opposite direction. Hordes of Negroid peoples, emigrated southwards from Central to Southern Africa. Geography channelled these migrating legions into a natural funnel. Astride the mouth of that funnel stands The Hill. Its natural merits as a fortress - unscalable cliffs hundreds of feet high, a summit surrounded by natural walls of stone - were strengthened by man -into a stronghold impregnable to all but twentieth century weapons. Like Gibraltar dominating the Mediterranean approaches, The Hill sits square across the double river approaches; it also possesses its own independent water supply against siege in the form of a spring on the summit. To all this is added one asset of incalculable military value to its defenders: there was, and still remains, only one narrow secret stairway through the rock to the top. This was formed at some forgotten time in the past by a huge block of rock weighing thousands of tons shattering near the summit (probably under the intense summer heat) and 'calving' or slipping sideways to open up a cleft. It is so narrow and steep that only.one man at a time can make his way up. The entrance at ground level has been concealed for centuries by a huge wild fig of a rare species. It was named after General Smuts, South Africa's great soldier-statesman. With these assets, no Horatio holding the bridge had a finer strategic advantage than The Hill offered one regiment of determined men on its flat table top. Who occupied this Gibraltar held Southern Africa. Without The Hill's word, none dared pass. Militarily and geographically, therefore, The Hill is without an equal. This would not account for it alone being named The Hill. It is certainly raw, savage, forbidding, cruel characteristically African but the Dark Continent has a thousand mountains nobler and ten thousand hills more eyecatching than the rough-cut slab of untidy sandstone. Why then its special title: The Hill?

  It is the supernatural which elevates it to this claim – a curse so old and deep-rooted that The Hill is regarded by natives as the ultimate taboo. To merely look at it, they maintain, means death. Consequently a large area round about it has been left uninhabited for centuries. Far away from it, if the dreaded name The Hill is mentioned, natives will turn their backs in its direction. They believe it is sacred to the great ancestral spirits who lodged their treasures in its fastnesses. Nothing is known of its past, except legend, since Africa has no indigenous written history. No other hill holds so many unexplained secrets; the dark crumbling rocks, recesses and ruined fortifications, buil
t and laid out with almost uncannily modern skill, seem to draw a cloak of mystery about themselves. There is a palpable air of dread and death. One almost expects to see the strongpoints on the skyline come alive with the soldiers of a vanished master-race manning it against phantom hordes sweeping in from the north.

  It took nearly a century of European occupation of the Transvaal before the taboo, the remoteness, the malaria, wild animals and the intolerable heat which had isolated The Hill were overcome. In the early 1930s a terrified native broke the age-old curse and showed a farmer-prospector the secret route to the summit. There had been a cloudburst a day or two before, and gold lay exposed. Frenzied scratching With hunting knives revealed the first evidence of Africa's strangest and richest treasure trove since Tutankhamen. The men had happened on a royal grave which was later to yield a golden crown and regalia, a golden model rhino idol and countless gold beads. Priceless lesser articles also came to light, such as superb pottery related to vanished Middle East civilizations, striking large beads with a similar background, and Chinese porcelain of the late Sung period (twelfth to fourteenth centuries AD). Outside Egypt, no hoard like it has been discovered in Africa, before or since.

  One of the treasure-finders was a student from Pretoria University. He and his father, recognizing the uniqueness of the discovery, turned over its secret to the institution. The state stepped in and further treasure-hunting was banned. Part of The Hill was excavated scientifically before the outbreak of World War II put an end to the operations. Before this, however, the experts were startled to find evidence of ancient religious practices, including 'beast burials' and funerary urns, which have no parallel on the Dark Continent south of the Sahara. The skill of the goldwork and purity of the metal is hard to match-even in the space age. A ceremonial cemetery points to the fact that this sophisticated master-race, which held Africa at bay from a position chosen with unerring military insight, passed away peacefully and not by conquest. Long after they had disappeared, their curse held The Hill shut fast.

  Nadine and I, fellow-students in archaeology at the Witwatersrand University, joined the first post-war expedition to The Hill with enthusiasm. I was in my middle twenties, a late starter because of the war, most of which I spent in a German POW camp; and she about five years younger. I had been too busy with my studies to take much notice of the dark-haired girl who was rumoured to be the richest in the university, daughter of Harold Raikes the magnate, a household word in the Golden-City.

  Our convoy of three Land-Rovers had rendezvoused at Messina and had then struck westwards, parallel to the Limpopo, to reach our destination. It was a rough, tough trip and one vehicle was damaged. There was a great deal of preliminary work to be done before the excavations proper could start. Much of the previous scientific work had been lost because the pits and trenches had been choked with soil. In any event, pre-war expeditions had concentrated mainly on the north-western tip of The Hill's tabletop summit where the queen's grave and its treasures had been discovered. This was clearly only a part of the occupation area. Dr Drummond, the professor who had led the expedition, believed that the whole summit and a surrounding walled area at ground level had formed a unit as a fortress-city. He decided to start operations within the containing wall on the ground, concentrating on two places: the foot of the secret stairway, and at another about 150 yards away also against the cliffs. This latter was named Mahobe's in honour of a long-dead chieftains of the nearest tribe. Nadine was to me no more than one of a group during the early stages of the expedition. Perhaps her beauty and wealth made her a little remote. Then, one afternoon when most of us were working at the secret stairway site, there was a sudden shout from Nadine at Mahobe's. Our 'dig' was considered to have better prospects than Mahobe's, which was more or less a shot in the dark. It was not an excited whoop but there was something in her voice which had us all at her trench in a flash.

  Nadine was on her knees in the excavation, bare-headed, her dark hair flecked with the dust which coated everything at the slightest breeze. She wore a pair of faded fawn jeans and a golden-yellow shirt, open at the throat. I stopped short. I stared, not at the priceless thing she held, but at her face. Maybe the fire of the malaria already burning in my veins or which I was shipped away prematurely before I really got to know The Hill sharpened my perception of Nadine. She knelt in the trench, in a curious votive attitude, facing The Hill and cradling the statuette she had found, as though in some strange way identifying with its age-old mystery. She did not look up at us but simply crouched there with the thing in her arms. All the millenia of Africa seemed to be epitomized in that vignette of the sinister Hill and the lovely girl bowed in the dust at its foot. Suddenly, too, I was acutely aware of the unusualness of her face: there appeared to be some Eastern Mediterranean derivation in its dark loveliness, but the classic line was broken by the high, almost Slavic cheekbones, the generous mouth and straight, full eyebrows. She was looking at the figurine, calmly and impassively, with an air of detachment from her surroundings.

  The spell was broken by a noisy barrage of questions, excitement and congratulations. Nadine stood up and passed the figure, still partly hidden in a lump of earth to Dr Drummond. With a loud exclamation he took it from her while the others crowded around. Nadine still stood waist-deep in the trench: I went to her and offered a hand to pull her up. I then saw what was in her eyes. It was only for a few seconds that we stood so, her foot braced for the jump, our hands and eyes locked. I hauled her up – a little too vigorously perhaps –

  for at the top she was slightly off balance and lurched against me. She steadied herself after a longer pause than was necessary. She _stared at me curiously, searchingly, the sea-green of the fine eyes still hazed from their mute communion with the unknown. She then joined Dr Drummond, who was pouring out excited, expert praise. I stood back from the group.

  Dr Drummond declared she must have found some place of ritualistic worship. Work was called off for the day to clean up and examine Nadine's find. We gathered in high anticipation in the big marquee which served as a mess room and the professor prepared to extract the statuette from its matrix, as the envelope of earth is called. The late afternoon brought no relief from the heat. It came in waves through the shimmering canvas. My ears started to ring and I felt nauseated. Nadine helped Dr Drummond deftly with drills, probes and brushes. As the figure became progressively exposed Dr Drummond became more excited. It was a female figure, carved from a material which resembled ivory. The head was revealed first, showing clear, fine features, a rather prominent nose and high forehead. The breasts were capped with gold leaf of afer thinness. Dr Drummond exclaimed that the metal was as thin and apparently as pure as any modern process could achieve. More earth was cleared and we saw the navel similarly capped in gold. As the matrix was brushed off further to expose the waist, however, no more of the precious metal came to light. Then the last concealing fragment of earth fell away, showing buttocks which had none of the gross enlargement called steatopygia which is the sign of a primitive race. It was a slim body fashioned in perfect physiological detail. A hush fell upon the onlookers and Dr Drummond handed the figure to Nadine. He began drawing some comparison with emphasis on sex worship among the Hamitic peoples of the Mediterranean coastline. In the heat haze the, group seemed far away, as if I were looking at them through the wrong end of a telescope. The oppressiveness bore down upon me; the buzzing in my ears grew. I did not know that malaria was at work. I was able to focus only by screwing up my eyes. I swayed on my feet, waves of hot and cold sweat sweeping across me. The nearest thing to it I had known was air-sickness.

  I remember trying to concentrate on Nadine's face when she started to speak. Her words were drowned by a roar in my I clawed at the trestle table to save myself, but my hands seemed to have no power. I slid to the ground.

  They told me at the hospital that my delirium lasted five days while the fever ran its course. Each time I rose to semiconsciousness I fought to catch Nadine's words
. My fogged brain conjured her up clothed in gold, a priestess sacrificing before an altar shaped like The Hill; I saw her kneeling and begged her to lift her eyes to mine but she would not; I saw her drop the priestess's robe and stand naked except for golden points like the statuette's at her breasts and navel. She came towards me .. .

  I broke through to consciousness in a torrent of sweat. Nadine was sitting by my bed in the white ward.

  It is easy to fall in love after a war which has torn apart the lives of half the world and one comes ydung and new to the task of remaking it. The Hill and its age-old mystery lay close to both our hearts. My own work – the study of the art of a people who left to posterity their genius in the form of beautifully engraved boulders with wild animal designs 殆as related.

  We fell in love.

  We both sensed rather than felt the first tug of the tide that day in the little hospital at Messina. She told me how my sudden collapse had caused consternation among the expedition. It had been impossible to consider driving me through the bush tracks in the dark. Next morning, still delirious, I'd been taken by two of the party by Land-Rover to the hospital. Nadine sat by the bed and eyed me thoughtfully.

  'That was the moment when all our troubles began.'

  My brain felt as agile as a hipped dinosaur. I hadn't begun to consider how she herself came to be at the town instead of The Hill. I experienced a sense of warm elation that she was there, and it was enough at that stage.

  She smiled. 'You've been missing from the world for nearly a week. It didn't stop because of that, you know.'