Читать книгу The Lost Ark of the Covenant: The Remarkable Quest for the Legendary Ark - Tudor Parfitt, Tudor Parfitt - Страница 4

It was a time of drought. In 1987 my home was a grass hut in a dried out tribal area of central Zimbabwe in southern Africa, completely cut off from the outside world. I had been doing fieldwork on a mysterious African tribe called the Lemba. This was part of my job. At the time I was Lecturer in Hebrew in the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in the University of London and for a while now this tribe had been my main academic subject.

How had I spent my time in the village? In the blistering heat of the day I would wander over the hills near the village and poke around the remains of the ancient stone-building culture, which, the Lemba claimed, was the work of their distant ancestors. With my little trowel I had discovered a few bones, pieces of local pottery and one or two iron tools of uncertain age. Not much to write home about. Then I would read, write up my notes and spend much of the night listening to the elders’ narratives.

The Lemba harboured an astonishing claim to be of Israelite origin, although the presence of Israelites or Jews in central Africa had never before been attested. On the other hand, since early medieval times there had been rumours of lost Jewish kingdoms in darkest Africa. What I had heard was that the tribe believed that when they left Israel they settled in a city called Senna - somewhere across the sea. No-one had any idea where in the world this mysterious Senna was located and neither did I. The tribe had asked me to find their lost city, and I had promised to try.

What I knew about the 40,000 strong Lemba tribe in 1987 was that they were black, they spoke various Bantu languages such as Venda or Shona, they lived in various locations in South Africa and Zimbabwe, they were physically indistinguishable from their neighbours and that they had a host of customs and traditions identical to those of the African tribes among whom they lived.

They appeared to be completely African.

But, on the other hand, they also had some mysterious customs and legends which did not appear to be African. They did not intermarry with other tribes. They did not traditionally eat with other groups. They circumcised their boys. They practised the ritual slaughter of animals, using a special knife; they refused to eat pigs and a number of other creatures; they sacrificed animals on high places like the ancient Israelites; and they followed many of the other laws of the Old Testament. The sighting of the new moon was of cardinal importance for them as it is for Jews. Their clan names looked as if they were derived from Arabic or Hebrew or some other Semitic language.

During the months I had spent in the village trying to unveil their secrets, I never found the absolute proof - the smoking gun, demonstrating that their oral tradition, which linked them with ancient Israel, was true. I never found an inscription on stone, a fragment of a Hebrew prayer, an artefact from ancient Israel. Not even a coin or a shard of pottery.

Before arriving in Zimbabwe I had spent a couple of months with the large Lemba communities in the neighbouring country of South Africa. Here the leaders of the tribe had given me a good deal of information. I had hoped to build on this in Zimbabwe and asked the local Lemba chief to facilitate my research. Chief Mposi called a meeting of the elders of the Lemba clans and, tempted by my promise to try to find their lost city of Senna, they formally agreed to permit me to research their history.

But subsequently they did not tell me nearly as much as I had hoped they would. They were tight-lipped about anything to do with their religious practices. It was only my willingness to sit around late into the night, until my whisky had loosened the old men’s tongues, that had enabled me to hear something of their remarkable cult.

The following day they would regret their nocturnal indiscretions and mutter that the clan elders shouldn’t have authorized my research, that white men had no business meddling in their affairs and that I should stop trying to penetrate the cloak of secrecy which veiled their religious rites.

Others tried to frighten me into leaving by telling me lurid tales of what had happened to previous generations of researchers who had wandered too far down forbidden paths. One of them had been forcibly circumcised after daring to walk on Dumghe, the tribe’s sacred mountain. Another had wandered too close to a sacred cave at the base of Dumghe, and had been stabbed with a traditional assegai and badly beaten. He had narrowly escaped with his life.

As my hopes of finding the critical clue regarding their true identity began to die, so did the crops in the fields around the village. It had not rained at all for months. There was some thick muddy liquid at the bottom of the boreholes. Every morning the women brought water in rusty old oilcans balanced on their heads. When that was gone, there would be nothing left to drink. Except beer from the bottle shop, for people with money. And there weren’t many of those.

This morning, early, before the sun had risen, the chief had called for a rain ceremony. The chief’s messenger had arrived just as the household was beginning to stir. The cooking fire was being blown into life and water was being heated for tea and the washing water, which was brought every morning to my hut by the daughter of my gentle host, Sevias. The messenger told Sevias that his presence would be required that evening. This was a last desperate throw of the dice.

There had been drought for so long that the streams which once had brought life and the occasional fish to the village had completely disappeared. They now looked like goat tracks filled with deep, fine dust. With no water, life in the village would soon become impossible. The tribe would have to move elsewhere. But where? The drought covered the whole land.

Towards evening the elders and notables congregated in the chief’s large hut at the centre of his kraal - the group of huts that formed his property. They had been invited to drink chibuku - home-brewed maize beer, the consistency of porridge, dance the night away and to entreat the ancestors for rain. This was deepest Africa.

Sevias invited me to accompany him. We walked together across the parched earth as he told me about the great herds he had once owned, of the trees groaning with fruit, of the maize which used to be as big as pumpkins.

We were among the first guests. I sat next to Sevias on a baked mud bench circling the hut and watched the preparations for the ancestor party with keen interest. I had never imagined I would be permitted to observe anything as close as this undoubtedly was to the heart of their cult.

I had a camera, tape recorder and notebook. I was fairly sure that this evening would provide me with the material for at least one academic article, and an impressive one at that.

Chief Mposi sat alone. He was in poor health and gave the impression of being preoccupied. He stared at the mud floor, resting his head on the knop of his stick. With a sudden movement he bawled at his wives to serve beer.

‘It’s sitting there and it’s not doing any good to anyone!’

‘I’m serving it,’ snapped his oldest wife, lifting up the beer pot with her muscular arms.

‘Too late,’ he growled.

The chibuku pot was passed from hand to hand, from right to left, with no unseemly show of haste, like a decanter of Madeira after a dons’ dinner at Oxford.

The silence was broken by the chief calling out the names of his four wives. They were singularly different from each other in age, size and beauty. They answered in turn, knelt side by side, and started to clap. They turned away from the chief, rose to their feet and lit candles, as the other women began ululating and whistling.

A long antelope horn was thrust through the opening into the hut and a triumphant blast silenced the shrill sound of the women. The man blowing the horn was tall and well-built. He was wearing a skirt made of strips of black fur and around his head he had a strip of leopard skin. He was the witchdoctor. His name was Sadiki - one of the Lemba clan names - an unmistakably Semitic name whose presence in central Africa was a mysterious anomaly. He led the ceremony. Magagada rattles made of dried marrows were tied to his ankles with bark fibre thongs. He stamped his feet on the earthen floor of the hut and blew a long haunting note on the horn.

Four elderly women sitting together on the mud bench that went round the hut started pounding on wooden drums. The rest of the guests were clustered behind the witchdoctor, propelled into the small, juddering movements of the dance by the rhythms of the drums and the magagada rattles, barely moving, lost in concentration.

Sadiki stood at the epicentre of the storm of sound, directing its movement. He had an overpoweringly regal air, and looked arrogantly around him. Suggestively he moved a foot. Then a hand. His body followed and, positioning himself in front of one of the drums, he danced, like David before the Ark, pausing to blow the ram’s horn similar to the shofar which had once been blown in the Temple of Jerusalem. The drummers looked far too old and frail to be able to produce such a sound and yet they were to drum for hours without a pause.

The beer started to circulate faster. Poverty had taken its grip on the village. It had been a long time since the beer pots had been passed around so liberally. Some of the men, no longer accustomed to drinking, were already inebriated.

The chief’s oldest wife was apparently already possessed by the spirits of the ancestors. Staring from side to side she fell to the ground weeping. Looking around in an unfocussed way she pulled her long, western-style dress up over her fat marbled buttocks and over her head. She danced naked, positioning herself in the space in front of the women drummers vacated by Sadiki.

The pulse quickened again. Sadiki, sweat pouring down his broad, muscular chest, placed a headdress of black eagle feathers on the naked woman’s head. Sevias told me that this was to show respect to the ancestors. She danced on, casting great shadows on the candlelit walls. She fell to her knees, sobbing, in front of the old chief and tenderly placed the headdress on his head.

The chief was dying. Everyone said so. He looked grey and ill. He gestured to me that I should join him. He took my hand in his and whispered in my ear, ‘The ancestors have come from Israel: they have come from Senna. They are here with us. Goodbye, Mushavi. Perhaps we shall see each other in Senna.’ Senna was the lost city from which they had come and it was also the place they expected to go when they died.

His face, illuminated by the flickering light of the candles, was corrugated with lines of age and illness; his eyes were concealed by dewlaps of mottled light-coloured flesh. He peered at me and then indicated that I should rise and leave him. Saddened and mystified by his words, I went back to the bench to my notebook, camera, and recorder.

I had been here in the village so long I was beginning to feel at home, one of them. I had drunk a good deal of their chibuku beer. After the first few swigs it becomes more or less palatable and after a while positively acceptable. It struck me that this was no time for sitting in a corner taking notes and recording Lemba music. There were more important things to do. This was more a time for observer participation. I removed my shirt in order, as I thought, to blend in with the half-naked men and women whose ghoulish shadows were leaping wildly on the walls and who were falling into a kind of trance all around me. The chief’s oldest wife crossed the hut, leaned over me, her withered breasts brushing my shoulder, and whispered something incomprehensible in Shona, the language of the dominant Shona tribe among whom the Zimbabwe Lemba lived.

I started to dance to the pounding rhythm of the drums. One of the chief’s younger wives was dancing topless in front of me, swaying drunkenly, supplicating the ancestors, running her hands over her breasts and down over her belly and legs.

The women drummers quickened the rhythm of their drums.

Another woman in a bleary-eyed trance slid out of her clothes and moved into the centre of the hut. Men stood around her admiring her slim body and full breasts, urging her on.

‘She is speaking to the ancestors,’ Sevias bellowed in my ear. ‘Soon they will reply. When their voices are heard it will be better for you to leave.’

Towards midnight there was a change in the atmosphere. I imagined that the time had come for the cultic incantations and secret prayers to be offered up. These were the closely guarded things. These were the oral codes which governed their lives and which no doubt held the clues to their past that I was seeking. These codes and incantations were for me the heart of the matter. This is what I wanted to be part of. This is what I had come here for.

My arms were raised; my face was turned up to the straw roof above. Sweat was pouring off me. I felt a great sense of excitement. I had been accepted. I was one of them. The ancestors were about to descend and I would be there to observe what happened next. No one from the outside had ever observed this before. Inside my head I could feel a kind of channel opening which seemed to be a channel of communication with the Israelite ancestors of the tribe.

I was rejoicing in the efficacy of my five-star research methodology when I felt a fist driven into the side of my face. It was the fist of the chief’s oldest and sturdiest wife. I fell to the ground on top of the recumbent and malodorous body of Mposi’s greatest drunk - a sort of tramp called Klopas whom I had met and smelled many times before. For a few seconds I lost consciousness. I was pulled out of the hut by some of the men and propped up against the side of the chief’s hut.

‘Er, I upset the chief’s wife,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

I did not feel at all sorry. I felt bloody furious.

‘Mushavi,’ said Sevias leaning over me. ‘You did not upset anybody. This blow was just a welcome from the ancestors. Perhaps it was also a little warning. Just a little warning. If the ancestors had not wanted you here at all they would not have given you a light blow like this but they would have torn you into pieces. Now you must go because the ancestors are coming among us. The uninitiated must leave.’

The spirits of the ancestors would not be happy to see me there, he explained. Secrets would be shared. There were things I should not know. Truculently, I thought to myself if I don’t get to learn the secret things, here, tonight, the chances are I never will. It was now or never.

Outside the hut, a group of elders were looking anxiously at the night sky, hoping for signs of rain. Sevias sat down next to me against the wall. His kindly lined face betrayed signs of concern. His concern was not only for the rain, or lack of it, although this was as critical a matter for him as for the others - indeed his own life and the life of his family depended upon it - but also for me and my disappointment at not being admitted to all the tribal secrets. I had already told him that my fieldwork had not yielded as much as I had hoped.

Head cocked, his hands held in a gesture of supplication, he asked with just a hint of a smile, ‘Mushavi, have you found what you were looking for in your time with us?’

He often honoured me with the tribal praise name Mushavi which the Lemba generally use solely among themselves and which I thought could perhaps be connected with Musawi - the Arabic form of ‘follower of Moses (Musa)’. Perhaps he was trying to flatter me by calling me Mushavi but the rest of his question was incomprehensible. He knew full well that the tribal secrets for the most part were still intact.

I smiled and with as much patience as I could muster said, ‘You know very well, Sevias, that there are still many secrets you have not told me. And don’t forget the elders of all the clans agreed that I should be given access to everything.’

‘Yes,’ he replied gravely, ‘but many times I have explained to you that no matter what was said at that meeting of the clans, there are things which cannot be told outside the brotherhood of the initiated. Prayers, spells, incantations. Many of our secrets cannot be revealed. We told you that. My brother, the chief, told you that. The others told you that. They would have to kill you, Mushavi, if you learned those sacred things. That is the law.’

His lined face became almost a parody of concern and anxiety.

Sevias was a good man. In all the months I had spent in his kraal, despite the drought and the uncertain political situation both within the tribe and in the country at large, despite family difficulties, he had always been calm, kind and dignified. I realized now that I had never been happier in my life than sitting writing under the great tree in Sevias’ kraal.

He shuffled his bare, calloused feet in the parched earth.

‘But how about the tribal objects?’ I insisted. ‘Those things you brought with you from the north, from Senna. I’ve been told about these but I’ve still seen nothing of them.’

‘It’s true,’ he said. ‘We brought objects from Jerusalem long ago and we brought objects from Senna. Sacred, important objects from Israel and Senna.’

Senna was the original lost city which the tribe maintained it had once inhabited after leaving the Land of Israel. Professor M.E.R. Mathivha - the scholarly head of the Lemba tribe in South Africa - had already told me a good deal about their Senna legend. The tribe had come from Senna ‘across the sea’. No-one knew where it was. They had crossed ‘Pusela’ - but no-one knew where or what that was either. They had come to Africa where they twice rebuilt Senna. That was the sum of it.

‘Sevias,’ I insisted, ‘can’t you at least tell me what happened to the tribal objects?’

He studied the sky and said nothing. Then he murmured, ‘The tribe is scattered over a wide area. Yo u know, once we broke the law of God. We ate mice, which are forbidden to us, and we were scattered by God among the nations of Africa. So the objects were scattered and are hidden in different places.’

‘And the ngoma? Where do you think that may be?’ I asked.

This was a wooden drum used to store sacred objects. The tribe had followed the ngoma, carrying it aloft, on their sojourn through Africa. They claim to have brought it from Israel so many years ago that no-one remembered when. According to their oral traditions they carried the ngoma before them to battle and it had guided them on their long trek through the continent.

According to Lemba oral tradition the ngoma used to be carried before the people on two poles. Each pole was inserted into the two wooden rings which were attached to each side of the ngoma. The ngoma was intensely sacred to the tribe, practically divine. Sacred cultic objects were carried inside. It was too holy to be placed on the ground: at the end of a day’s march it was hung from a tree or placed on a specially constructed platform. It was too holy to be touched. The only members of the tribe who were allowed to approach it were the hereditary priesthood who were always members of the Buba clan. The Buba priests served and guarded the ngoma. Anyone who touched it other than the priests and the king would be struck down by the fire of God which erupted from the drum itself. It was taken into battle and ensured victory. It killed the enemies of its guardians.

I had first heard of the ngoma months before in South Africa. Professor Mathivha had told me what he knew about it and I had had a detailed account from an old Lemba man called Phophi who was steeped in the history of the tribe. Phophi had told me how big the ngoma was, what its principal properties were and what traditions were associated with it.

I also knew that some forty years before, an ancient ngoma had been found by a German scholar called von Sicard in a cave by the Limpopo, the crocodile-infested river which marks the border between Zimbabwe and South Africa. He had photographed it and the photograph had been included in a book he had written on the subject, but apparently the ngoma had long since disappeared without a trace. Mathivha, Phophi and other Lemba elders had told me that the artefact found by the German in its remote cave was without doubt the original ngoma that the Lemba had brought from the north.

One night, a few weeks before the rain dance, sitting up late around the fire with Sevias and other old men, I heard a little more of the legend of the ngoma.

‘The ngoma came from the great temple in Jerusalem,’ said Sevias. ‘We carried it down here through Africa on its poles. At night it rested on a special platform.’

It suddenly occurred to me that in form, size and function the ngoma lungundu was similar to the Biblical Ark of the Covenant, the famous lost Ark which had been sought without success throughout the ages. The biblical description of it, which I knew from the years I spent as an undergraduate studying classical Hebrew at Oxford, was etched in my mind:

an Ark of shittim wood: two cubits and a half shall be the length thereof, and a cubit and a half the breadth thereof, and a cubit and a half the height thereof […] thou shall cast four rings of gold for it, and put them in the four corners and two rings shall be on one side of it and two rings in the other side of it. And thou shall make poles of shittim wood and overlay them with gold. And thou shalt put the poles into the rings by the sides of the Ark, that the Ark may be borne with them. The poles shall be in the rings of the Ark; they shall not be taken from it. And thou shalt put into the Ark the testimony which I shall give thee.

The Ark, like the ngoma, had supernatural powers. It was never allowed to touch the ground. It was practically divine. Like the ngoma it was carried into battle as a guarantor of victory. Sacred objects, including the tablets on which the Te n Commandments had been inscribed and the magic wand of Moses’ brother Aaron, were kept inside it. Anyone who as much as looked at it would be blasted by its awesome power. A priestly caste founded by Aaron, the brother of Moses, guarded the Ark. The priestly clan of the Buba founded by an individual called Buba, who was thought to have led the Lemba out of Israel, guarded the ngoma.

The functional similarities were striking. But the differences in form were significant. The Ark was apparently a kind of box, coffer, or chest, while the ngoma - although it also carried things inside it - was a drum. The Ark was made of wood but it was covered in sheets of gold; the ngoma was just made of wood.

Most critically, there was no connection in ancient times between the world of the Bible and this distant and remote inland corner of Africa. And there was no proof at all, in any way, that the Lemba guardians of the ngoma were of Jewish ancestry. Nonetheless, the area of overlap between these seemingly very different objects attracted me and turned my mind towards the strange story of the Ark of the Covenant. It was an interesting comparison but, I thought, no more than that.

* * *

Outside the chief’s hut, with the tumultuous din of the drums crowding out all the night sounds, I leaned against the mud and straw wall of the hut and slowly felt the pain of the blow recede. Sevias looked ill at ease. He took my arm and raised me to my feet, guiding me further away from the groups of men who were standing around, enjoying the cool of the night air before returning to the frenzy of the dance.

‘Talking about the ngoma and the things that were brought from Israel is too dangerous, Mushavi. This is part of the secret lore of the tribe. I cannot tell you any more about this than we have already told you. We told you that we call ourselves Muzungu ano-ku bva Senna - “the white men who came from Senna”. We told you that the ngoma came with us from Senna. We told you what the ngoma used to do. And we told you that the ngoma has not been seen by men for many, many years.’

Sevias was about to turn away when he hesitated and put his hand on my arm.

‘The old men say it was the ngoma that guided us here and some people say that when the time is right the ngoma will come to take us back. Things are getting worse in this country. Perhaps the time is coming.’

‘Sevias,’ I asked. ‘I know this is one of the great secrets of your tribe and I know that there are many in the tribe who do not wish to share their secrets with me. But I am leaving soon. I don’t want to leave empty-handed. Could you just tell me, please, if you have any idea where the ngoma lungundu might be?’

Sevias paused, looked around, and fell silent. He glanced up at the disappointingly bright night sky and again shuffled his feet in the fine dust of the kraal. ‘Where it is now I do not know. But some years ago the very old men used to say it was hidden in the cave below Dumghe Mountain. It is safe there. It is protected by God, by the king, by the “bird of heaven”, by twoheaded snakes and by the lions, “the guardians of the king”. It had been taken there, so the old men said, by the Buba from Mberengwe. They are the clan of Lemba priests and in those days there were some of them who stayed down on the Mberengwe side. But, as you know, that is the one place that you should not go. Not on Dumghe Mountain.’

He bade me goodnight and walked quickly back to join the elders.

I took Tagaruze, the policeman who had been instructed by the local police headquarters to act as my bodyguard (and to keep an eye on me), and walked the couple of miles back to Sevias’ kraal.

I felt a pang of regret that I would soon be leaving this beautiful place with its rugged hills and great rounded boulders, moulded and shaped by aeons of wind and rain, sun and drought.

The next day, I was planning to move on north towards Malawi and Tanzania, following the trail of the passage across Africa of this enigmatic tribe, in search of their lost city of Senna. It seemed a long, lonely quest and all of a sudden I found myself yearning for home.

I had had a letter from Maria, my voluptuous, salsa dancing Latin American girlfriend. It was tender but firm. She wanted me to go back, to leave this self-indulgent quest of mine for what she called the non-existent Senna. She wanted me to marry her and lead a normal life, the conventional and sedentary life of a scholar and university teacher. If I didn’t want to marry her there were plenty of men around who did.

‘Men,’ she said, ‘there are millions of them. Yo u are an imbecil if you do not take the chance now when you have it. Others would.’

And it was true. Every time she walked down the street there were very few men who failed to notice her. She had a way of walking. I tried to put her out of my mind. She would wait. Probably.

I was still feeling tipsy from the chibuku. If what Sevias had told me was correct there was perhaps some chance of me actually finding their ngoma lungundu. This would perhaps reveal something about where the tribe had come from. It would perhaps help me find the lost city of Senna. Perhaps there was some writing on it, or secret, sacred objects inside it, which could help me on my quest. All I needed to do was to go to Dumghe.

I felt a tremor of excitement. The sacred mountain of the Lemba is situated a couple of miles away from Sevias’ kraal. It was a beautiful rounded hill, east facing and covered with the characteristic rounded boulders of the region and was sparsely wooded. There was open country between the kraal and Dumghe. There were no villages or kraals - and no noisy dogs to alert the tribe to my activities. There was no dangerous wild life, save packs of jackals and the occasional leopard and I was too drunk to be overly concerned about them.

Following a sudden, chibuku-inspired urge, I decided to walk to the sacred cave, the one place where the tribe had forbidden me to go. A no-go area. In the past anyone daring to go there not of the initiated would be punished by death.

The elders would be dancing and drinking for hours to come, I thought to myself. The rest of the tribe were asleep. No one would ever know I’d been there. I knew that the cave was situated at the base of two massive rocks which had sheared away from a cliff which formed the eastern side of the mountain. It is covered with great, smooth round boulders created over the millennia by wind erosion. The rocks behind which the cave was hidden had once been pointed out to me, and I had been told that behind the sacred cave there was another cave even holier than the first. That was perhaps where the ngoma was protected, as they said, by its guardian lions and polycephalous snake.

It was about two o’clock in the morning when I arrived - along with Tagaruze, my tough police bodyguard - at the great meshunah tree where I had encountered the Lemba guardian of Dumghe during my first days in the village. From the tree all paths leading to the cave could be seen. The official guardian was reputed always to be on duty but that was difficult to believe and, in any case, as far as this occasion went, I had little to worry about for I had seen him at the rain party, drunk like all the others.

We paused for a moment and then made our way up the side of the mountain towards the rough track which led down to where the cave was. To one side the path hugged the rock face; to the other there was a sheer forty-foot drop into the void. It was a treacherous descent and stones kept plummeting into the abyss.

Even Tagaruze was scared. Tonight he was going way beyond the call of duty. He was as fascinated by the Lembas’ stories as I was. But he was beginning to regret having agreed to accompany me this night. He was not much given to words but finally he muttered, ‘Why are we doing this? What are we looking for?’ I was scared too, and did not reply.

I thought I heard a noise in the trees and brush above the stone face of Dumghe. We fell silent. One of the elders had seen a lion, a white lion, he had said, on the mountain, a few days before. The elders had told me that the ngoma was always protected by lions. These were the lions of God, the guardians of the king. We pushed on, slithering down the path which led down to the cave at the base of the rocks, pausing from time to time to listen for signs of danger. Tagaruze took the gun from its holster and stuck it into his belt. There was a damp, acrid smell in the air. My hands were wet with sweat from the effort of the walk and from fear.

Suddenly, the path fell away under my feet and it was only Tagaruze’s swiftness in grabbing my arm that prevented me from disappearing over the edge. Loose stones fell over the cliff in a tidy avalanche. A flat, neat echo sounded below us. We paused and looked down into the ravine. I could just make out the outline of the final stage of the descent which led down the cliff opposite the great wall of rock.

Carefully we edged our way down. Once there was a crack of branches; once the sound of a large bird and of rushing air, then silence. I wondered if this was the ‘bird of heaven’, the creature Sevias had claimed was one of the protectors of Dumghe.

We reached the base of the two great rocks. There was another sound of a branch snapping. Perhaps the Lemba did keep someone posted here all the time to guard their treasures, after all. There was only space for us to walk one abreast. I led the way, flashing my torch around until we reached what appeared to be the entrance to the cave. This, I thought, must be the Lemba holy of holies. Between the boulder and the cliff face there was a mound of loose scree. I placed my desert-booted foot on it, holding the torch with one hand and resting the other against the side of a boulder. There was nothing to be seen. Encouraged, I went through the narrow entrance and pointed my torch straight ahead. All I could see was a wall of rock.

But I could hear something: a sort of rasping sound, a cough or a snarl, and then a louder sound - a snort, perhaps, which became a deafening roar as it bounced off the surrounding rockface. My hand gripped the torch in terror. My legs turned to jelly. The gun, I thought, shoot it whatever it is. Tagaruze had the gun but when I turned around I realized that Tagaruze was no longer behind me. Tagaruze had disappeared. I was alone.

I retreated through the opening, back first, keeping my face to the sound and then scrambled up the narrow track after him and fled through the wooded slopes of Dumghe. The noise followed us, rising through the natural shaft made by the great rocks high into the mountain. It was a terrifying sound - it could have been a lion or a leopard or just about anything else. We did not wait to find out. We ran as fast as we could until we got to the meshunah tree.

Breathlessly we sat down at the base of the tree. As my rump hit the ground I felt something slithering away under me into the undergrowth. Shuddering, I stood up quickly.

‘What the hell was that?’ I asked.

‘That was just a snake,’ Tazaruze said offhandedly.

My blood turned cold and I felt like throwing up. I had been told that one of the guardians of the ngoma was a two-headed snake. I was a million times more afraid of even the smallest, most inoffensive grass snake than of any cat, great or small, on the face of the earth.

I shuddered. ‘And how about that thing in the cave?’ ‘It must have been a Lemba ancestor in the body of a leopard or a lion. Or it was the protectors of the ngoma, the lions of the Almighty, the guardians of the king. Everyone knows they prowl around this mountain. This was a terrible, big mistake.’

What the policeman had said was undoubtedly true. It was a mistake. I was to rue that mistake for many years to come. We did not find the elusive and mysterious ngoma lungundu, the strange artefact which played such an important role in the imagination of this remote African tribe, but the events of that night were to change my life and lead me on a quest which would only be resolved many, many years later.