Vol. 2 Streets Paved with Gold

Vol. 2

Streets Paved with Gold

by: Clive Cooke

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Published by Clive Cooke at Smashwords

Copyright 2018 Clive Cooke

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Cover Design by Vila Design

Cover photo courtesy of CanStockPhoto

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This volume comprises a collection of nineteen short stories. I have used the British style of spelling throughout and have taken liberties with English grammar to represent local speech. I have also added a sprinkling of foreign words for local colour. The meanings are given at the beginning of each story.

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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Contents

The Naturalist

The Tramp

Any Fish To-Day?

A Little White Lie

The Snake

I Want My Cows

White Man’s Muti

The Resurrection

Homecoming 1

Homecoming 2

Alarm

The Entrepreneur

The Crocodile Queen

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Rebellion

Baboon’s Hat

Letters Home

Division of the Spoils

Zama-Zama

Maritzburg Station

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The Naturalist

Glossary: drift (Afrik) ford across a river; impi (Zulu) regiment; kraal (Afrik) homestead, animal enclosure; uSuthu (Zulu) battle cry; veld (Afrik) grasslands, savannah.

The young man crouched down in the long grass watching a colony of termites scurrying around. The insects climbed up the stems of the reedy grass, cutting them into short lengths and carrying them off to their nest. He listened intently, imagining that he could hear the sound of ten thousand tiny jaws cutting and chewing. It was probably only the wind in the grass. He vaguely remembered reading about these insects in a book on natural history back home, but he had forgotten most of it as he never expected to see termites during his lifetime. Yet here he was, observing them in the African veld in their natural habitat. He felt privileged.

He rested his rifle against the trunk of a dead tree. It was strictly forbidden to leave one’s weapon unattended, but no-one would notice. The sergeant had wandered off to smoke his pipe and the officers had disappeared into their tents. He noticed a row of holes in the bark of a dead branch and piles of sawdust on the ground. ‘Wood borers,’ he said to himself. Something black and shiny hiding under the flaking bark caught his eye. He took his bayonet and carefully stripped off the bark revealing an enormous beetle with a single horn protruding from its head. It had six segmented legs, two pointing forwards and four backwards. The front claws were more like grappling irons while the rear set were made for some other purpose like digging or pushing. There was money to be made from selling beetles. Museums back home would pay good prices for exotic specimens like this one. He put the beetle into his pocket and congratulated himself on a good start.

The young man’s name was David Williams, twenty-two years of age and on his first trip outside Wales. In fact, he had never even been as far as London and here he was in a remote part of this wild continent called Africa. There were no proper roads, no bridges over the rivers and no maps. They had brought all their food and equipment by wagon which slowed their progress to the pace of a team of oxen and during the last crossing over the swollen river one of the wagons had overturned.

Williams picked up a termite crawling over his boot and held it gently while it struggled to escape. It had a soft, white abdomen with brown stripes, a tasty morsel for a bird. He had never seen an insect like this before. It looked like a large ant, but it wasn’t an ant. The creature’s head was dark brown with tiny black eyes and small jaws for cutting, not the powerful pincers of a soldier. He put it back onto the ground where it scurried about on its spindly legs as if nothing had happened.

It was mid-morning. They had missed breakfast after a false alarm and by the time they had been ordered to stand down, the food was cold. This made the men grumble. The cook said they would have an early lunch as compensation. The sky was overcast, but the heat was oppressive. Williams had never experienced heat like this before. Sweat was running down the inside of his red tunic and his undershirt was sopping wet. He put his hand to his neck, pink and raw from the burning sun.

A gentle breeze rustled the tall grass. This was not the type of soft grass they had back home. It was tough and reedy and used for making huts. They had passed several ‘beehive’ kraals the previous day made entirely out of thatching grass.

When the fighting was over, Williams planned to dig open a termite nest. Then, he would write an article for a natural history journal together with a few sketches. He was not much good at drawing, but he would do his best. A publication under his own name was important. It could open doors. It could be the start of a new career. The officers of his regiment believed that the campaign would be over in a few weeks. After the first skirmish, they predicted that the enemy would run away. He would be home within a month which did not give him much time to collect beetles. The rest of the men looked forward to parties and receptions at Pietermaritzburg at the end of the war. They would be treated as heroes. Some would be awarded medals.

‘Ow… ouch!’ Private Williams wiped his legs frantically. There was something crawling up the inside of his pants biting his bare skin.

His friend, Private Thomas was standing nearby, cleaning his teeth with a dry grass stalk. The two young men came from the same village in Wales and played for the same rugby club.

‘What is it Dai?’

‘Ants…. they burn like the Deuce.’

‘Argh….’ Suddenly Private Thomas was doing a war dance. ‘They’ve got me too.’ Dozens of tiny, black ants were crawling up his legs. Williams brushed ants off the back of his friend’s uniform.

The black ants were not the usual worker ants foraging for food. Private Williams watched them moving purposefully, as if aiming for some specific objective, as if under military command. Several columns of ants poured over the dusty pathway like a black river. Different tributaries joined together, swelling into a flood. Then, Williams realised what was happening: they were attacking the termite colony.

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Private Williams. ‘This is a planned military campaign.’

Williams had thought that animals and insects lived in peaceful harmony. If a territorial dispute arose, the weaker group would always back down. Clearly, this was not so. The ants and the termites were mortal enemies. The black ants were small compared to the termites, but they were more aggressive and far more numerous. The termites did not stand a chance. Within minutes the termite nest had been overwhelmed and the victorious ants carried dead termites in their jaws back to their citadel. Private Williams had witnessed something he had never heard of, let alone read about in natural history books. He would have to write an article about this when he returned home.

‘Private! What are you doing?’

‘It’s war, Sir.…’

The lieutenant on horseback was doing a tour of the front line.

‘Yes, Private, I know it is war. That’s why we are here.’

‘Sir, the black ants and the white termites....’

‘Name?’

‘Williams Five, Sir.’

‘Don’t let me catch you messing about, Williams Five!’

‘Permission to relieve myself, Sir?’

‘Granted.’

They had been standing in position for three hours and the men had become restless. They were keen for an engagement. Everything was ready. A large enemy force had been rumoured to be in the vicinity ever since they crossed the Buffalo River, but the force seemed to have melted away like the morning mist. Boredom had now become the enemy. Talk amongst the officers was that the rumours of enemy movements were false. ‘Jittery scouts,’ said the lieutenant. ‘Cowards’ said the captain. ‘Poor intelligence’ said the general. The captain believed that the biggest danger was that the enemy would refuse to fight a pitched battle. The regiment would end up spending months in the field chasing shadows without achieving a definite result. Meanwhile, the captain and the lieutenant were playing cards in his tent waiting for the scouts to return from patrol.

Williams walked slowly towards the hill behind the tented camp. The stand down bugle sounded. Civilians in charge of the transport wagons were milling about with nothing to do. They were due to return to the drift higher up the river before nightfall. The Buffalo River was in flood and the ford near the camp was impassable. Cooks were clearing away uneaten breakfast and getting ready for lunch.

Private Williams’ objective was a small plateau about a quarter of the way up the hill. There were boulders and thorn trees to hide behind, not that he intended to relieve himself. His aim was to collect beetles.

As he walked, he looked up at the hill. From this angle it took on the shape of a sphinx. This was a strange co-incidence as the sphinx was the badge of his regiment, the British Army 24th, presented to them after their service in Egypt. He was an infantryman in the First Battalion. He touched the brass sphinx pinned to his red tunic for good luck.

A quarter of the way up the hill, he found a secluded spot out of view of the officers and non-commissioned officers and which gave him a view over the gently sloping valley and the hills beyond. The valley was peaceful. The humid air vibrated with the sound of cicadas. He saw the gun emplacement on a little conical hill about two miles away to the east. A group of horsemen were galloping back to camp. ‘Scouts,’ he said to himself. On the escarpment to the north, he could see more horsemen and he could hear the faint popping sound of gunfire.

Private Williams was looking for the huge spider web had had seen hanging from a thorn tree the previous day. He found it easily and the lady in the centre hadn’t moved. She was enormous with striped yellow and black legs. An expert huntress, the spider had a larder of neatly tied packages of food she had caught, waiting to be sucked dry. Bits and pieces of debris had collected on the web, but the spider took no notice of them. She was only interested in insects that struggled to escape. Williams was no expert in spiders. When he returned home, he would try to identify it in a book on natural history. If the spider was unknown to science, he would name it the Brecon Ranger after his rugby club at home. The insect’s yellow and black striped legs were the same colours as his rugby team’s socks.

At two o’clock that morning, the general had moved out with the Second Battalion. This was one of the rare occasions that the First and Second Battalions had fought together side by side. Private Williams slept fitfully through the noise of their departure. The captain had posted a vedette at the top of the hill, but the men reported seeing nothing except for a few herdsmen driving their cattle down to the river. By now, the general and the Second Battalion would be more than twenty miles away and out of sight. There was no possibility of getting word to them in the event of an emergency.

‘Well, look what we have here.’ Private Williams had nearly stepped on a beetle. He recognised the African dung beetle rolling its ball of manure. The beetle did not have horns like the wood borer, but it had interesting looking feelers. As he watched, the beetle lost control of its ball which went rolling back down the slope. Undeterred, it retrieved its load and started up the slope again. This was an exercise in persistence. Interestingly, the beetle was not only pushing its ball of manure backwards, but it was also doing it standing on its head. Then, for a second time, the beetle lost its precious load. Williams picked up the beetle and put it into his pocket. He took the ball of manure and broke it open to see if there was anything inside like an egg, or a grub.

A bugle call broke the stillness, the order to fall in. He took another look at the yellow-and-black spider. Then, he noticed another spider sitting motionless a few inches away from the big female. It was medium brown and much smaller the female. She seemed unconcerned about its presence. Was this an offspring? Was it her mate, an invader? A second bugle call sounded. Williams grabbed his Martini-Henry rifle and bounded down the hillside.

‘Williams Five!’ shouted the sergeant.

‘Stomach trouble, Sergeant.’

‘I’ll give you stomach trouble!’

The sky was growing darker. Rain was expected during the afternoon as had happened every day since their arrival. All the rivers were swollen and the usual crossings were impassable. Williams looked at the clouds, purple and angry, but the darkness was not caused by an imminent thunder storm.

‘It’s an eclipse,’ said Private Thomas. ‘The sergeant says the Zulus won’t attack during an eclipse. It’s a bad omen.’

The scouts Williams had seen from the hillside had dismounted and were talking excitedly to the officers outside their tent. One of them pointed to the hills across the valley. The sergeant ordered the men to report to the Quartermaster. Seventy rounds of ammunition for each man.

‘Fix bayonets. Move out,’ ordered the Lieutenant. ‘Open order, six feet apart. Get along there! Take your positions. First line prone, second line kneeling.’

It was noticeably darker now. Private Williams saw birds returning to the thorn trees to roost. He looked for his termites, wondering if they worked at night. On a small bush directly in front of him he saw a locust, a fantastic looking beast in green and yellow armour. He grabbed it and put it into his pocket. Its thorny legs pierced his fingers drawing the first blood of the day. Its wings were brilliant red like his tunic. The cicadas had stopped singing. Nature was preparing to sleep while man was preparing for battle.

Another noise, faint but audible, became noticeable in the gentle breeze. Private Williams listened intently. It sounded like the buzzing of bees, tens of thousands of angry bees. He had heard that African bees were aggressive. Bees hated the smell of sweat, attacking riders and their sweaty horses. Some people died from bee stings. Private Williams was conscious of his own sweaty body under his uniform and his exposed neck, pink from sunburn. What would they do if the line of infantrymen was attacked by a swarm of wild bees? However, Private Williams need not have worried about wild bees, the First Battalion was about to be visited by a swarm of a very different kind.

‘Oh mother…. Dai, look…. the hill…. oh mother.’ Private Thomas’ voice was trembling. He was twenty-one years old.

The buzzing sound was coming from the hill several miles away from the camp. The whole hillside was alive with men pouring over the brow, fanning out to the left and right. It was a massive Zulu impi twenty times larger than the force defending the camp situated at foot of the hill which looked like a sphinx, the hill which the Zulus called Isandlwana.

‘Steady, Dai, steady.’ Private Williams’s throat was dry. His hands were shaking and his fingers were slippery with sweat. His twenty third birthday was a month away.

The buzzing noise drifting from the hillside grew louder every minute. It came from the human throat, tens of thousands of human throats; Zhi…. Zhi…. Zhi…Then it stopped as the warriors lined up in battle formation, beating their ox hide shields with their assegais. The noise was the death rattle.

It was a disciplined force facing the 24th. Each Zulu regiment had different coloured cow-hide shields: white, black, brown, multi-coloured. Each had a specific job to do. The men were moving rapidly like the river of black ants Williams had watched earlier. This was the classic strategy called the horns of the ox. The right and left-hand horns comprising young men moved at a running pace to surround the British camp and to cut off their retreat while the main body of veterans, called the chest, spear-headed the frontal attack.

‘When I give the command!’ shouted the lieutenant.

The chest of veterans reached the valley floor, entering dead ground and out of range. The detachment at the gun emplacement on the rocky knoll fired a few desultory rounds at a deserted kraal and then fled in the face of the Zulu left horn. They linked up with a patrol returning from the hillside falling back to a more secure position in a muddy gully. From this strong point, two hundred Martini-Henrys released a devastating fire. The advancing left horn stopped. Bodies fell in heaps.

‘Load…. aim…. fire!’

The infantrymen of the 24th opened fire. The chest had moved out of dead ground and were advancing against the first battalion one behind the other, ten to twelve deep. They moved in short bursts using the long grass as cover. The infantrymen were strung out in a thin line about a mile away from the ammunition wagons. Their superior weapons took a huge toll on the chest. Warriors in the front row fell, to be replaced by others from the ranks behind them. By one o’clock, it was apparent that the assault had stalled. The rattling of the shields stopped and the buzzing sound started afresh: Zhi…. Zhi…. Zhi…. rising and falling in great waves. A Zulu general with a headdress of feathers ran up and down in front of the chest encouraging his men. Then he fell as a bullet from a Martini-Henry went straight through his head.

Morale amongst the 24th was high. Talk was that the Zulus were about to turn and run. Infantrymen shared jokes with one another.

‘Dai,’ called out Private Thomas. ‘We’re holding them.’

Private Williams’ ammunition was running low. His rifle was hot from firing bullets, burning his hands. He cut a strip of material off his trousers with his bayonet and used it to hold his rifle. His shoulder was bruised from the recoil of his Martini-Henry. He held it away from his body as he fired.

It was not only the infantry line that was low in ammunition. The troops in the gully were also experiencing shortages. A runner sent to the quartermaster with a request for more ammunition for the soldiers was refused on the grounds that the quartermaster only accepted requests from an officer. Rules were rules.

The Zulu left horn made a long detour to avoid the murderous fire from the gully and by two o’clock both horns of the Zulu army had nearly surrounded the camp at the base of the hill which looked like a sphinx. The officer in charge decided to evacuate and to consolidate his position closer to the camp which was now under threat. It was quite dark now. The eclipse had reached its peak.

The evacuation of the gully meant that the right flank of the 24th was now exposed. The main Zulu centre saw the British soldiers falling back and realised that their opportunity had arrived. They raised their voices in their traditional war cry ‘uSuthu’ and pressed forward. Warriors poured through the British front line in their thousands. The bugle sounded for the infantrymen to retreat, but it was all over. The infantrymen were overwhelmed by sheer numbers. Privates Williams and Thomas ran for their lives back through the camp, back towards Isandlwana Hill.

The men from the gully reached the camp to find that it was in total chaos. Men and animals were panicking. There had been no attempt to fortify the camp and there was no defensive line. Officers tried to rally the men, but few heard the orders and even fewer obeyed. Refugees streamed back along the road to the crossing point over the flooded Buffalo River. The first to flee were the civilians. Then the local Natal Militia made a dash to escape before the gap between the left and right horns closed completely. Men begged to be given a ride on the few available horses.

Williams and Thomas reached the small plateau about a quarter of the way up the hill. Dai had seen a small cave higher up. Perhaps they could save themselves by making a barricade inside the narrow opening. They stopped to catch their breaths before continuing upwards.

Down below, they could see the chaos that had enveloped the camp. It was hand-to-hand fighting as small groups of men banded together for protection. Some took refuge under the wagons until their ammunition ran out. Others hid in the tents in the vain hope they would not be discovered. Soldiers, horses and warriors blended in an orgy of stabbing. There was no time to load rifles and many had run out of ammunition. The two bugler boys, aged fourteen and fifteen, were hung onto meat hooks and disembowelled. The dreaded cry ‘uSuthu’ or ‘this is father’s cow’ announced fresh victims.

Williams and Thomas resumed their climb up the hill.

‘How much ammunition do you have, Dai?’

‘Five or six rounds.’

‘I’ve got about the same.’

Private Williams’ pockets were bulging, but not with ammunition. This was his collection of beetles. He had plans to write articles for scientific journals and there was money to be made from selling specimens to museums. He had vague ideas of leaving the army one day to study his favourite subject, entomology. Then he saw her again, hanging from her silken thread, the giant spider with yellow and black striped legs, his Brecon Rambler. He looked for her smaller companion, but it was no longer there. Had it wandered off, or was it now wrapped in a package of silk? Williams had read that certain spiders ate their partners after mating. He would have liked to have watched the ritual.

‘Look at her, John.’ He pointed to the spider in the centre of her enormous web. ‘Isn’t she magnificent? Feel how strong the silk is.’ He pulled at the spider’s web. ‘If the light catches the thread from a certain angle, it appears to be made out of pure gold.’

‘Come on, Dai’ said Private Thomas, ‘we haven’t a moment to waste.’

When the general and the rest of his army returned from patrol later that evening, they were greeted by the sight of total devastation in the camp: piles of bodies, smouldering tents, dead and dying horses. The Zulus had removed their dead and wounded, leaving the First Division dead behind. The carnage was indescribable. Some of the men averted their eyes when they recognised their fallen comrades. Some broke down and cried. Following Zulu tradition, the corpses had been disembowelled to release their spirits. The general and the Second Division rode through the camp in total silence. This was the greatest defeat that the British Army had suffered up to that moment in history. The disgrace would stay with Lord Chelmsford for the rest of his life. That night, the men slept amongst the corpses and the dead horses. If you reached out, complained one of the men, you would touch a corpse. Before dawn, they moved off to relieve the Swedish mission station whose smoke from the burning building hung in the sky. They expected to find a similar scene awaiting them.

The bodies of the fallen soldiers were not buried until three months later. In the scorching heat, the corpses decomposed quickly, becoming unrecognisable. What the heat did not achieve, the vultures completed. When the men were finally buried, identification had to be done from personal effects found in their pockets: badges, letters and trinkets.

Curiously, the pockets of one of the soldiers they found near to a cave about a third of the way up Isandlwana Hill were filled with beetles rather than with personal effects for which no-one could provide a satisfactory explanation.

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The Tramp

‘Mr McKenzie is quite well educated,’ I hear my mother telling my father. ‘Perhaps he can help.’ Father grunts something in reply. Then, the fly-screen door bangs shut and he leaves for the lands. They are busy planting winter wheat. What was that conversation all about? Mr McKenzie is living in the hay loft in our barn. He is a tramp.

My mother comes through from the kitchen to supervise my sister and me in our daily arm-wrestling contest with Grade One Arithmetic. The nearest school is a hundred miles away.

‘Now, let’s have a look,’ she says.

Mother bends over my shoulder. Her arms are covered in flour from making cheese scones. A snowstorm descends over me and my books. Mother inspects my exercise book. The page is empty. She clicks her tongue in disapproval and looks at my sister’s exercise book which is also empty. I tell her I couldn’t write anything because I broke my pencil. Mother asks me why I didn’t sharpen it. She picks up the text book with her dough-covered fingers and reads out aloud:

‘A pound of sweets costs one shilling. If I sell one quarter of my sweets to Johnny for four pence and another quarter to Daisy for six pence, how much must I charge Freddy for the rest in order to make a profit of sixpence?’ I venture that there weren’t any sweets left over because Johnny ate them all. Mother tells me to behave myself.

Her lips move as she re-reads the question to herself in silence. ‘Hmm…. hmm.’ She reads it a third time. Fanny and I look at one another across the table. Fanny giggles.

‘Girls, I tell you what. Leave this one for now. We’ll come back to it later.’ Mother turns over the page to the next problem. I can smell the cheese scones baking in the oven.

‘Let’s try this one. A farmer goes to market to sell his produce. His pig sells for five shillings per pound, his tomatoes sell for six pence per box and his milk for two pence per pint….’ Mother’s voice trails off. ‘Hmm…. hmm….’ She turns over the page. ‘This one sounds better.