A fresh breeze stirred the blue of the waves, as the milky surf came tumbling up the pebbly beach with thunderous roar. Out in the roadstead vessels were riding to their anchors, prominent among them the blue-white hull and red funnel of the big mail steamer which had brought Wyvern round the day before. On the right, as they faced seaward, beyond the white boil of surf on the bar, rose the bush-clad Bluff, capped by its lighthouse, and behind, and stretching away on the other hand, the line of scrub-grown sandhills, beyond which rose the wooded slopes of the Berea.
“Now we’re all right,” pronounced Fleetwood, leading the way along the beach. “We’ve got the whole show to ourselves and we know it. Not a soul can get within earshot of us and we not know it, which is important if you’ve got anything important to talk about.”
“Yes,” assented Wyvern, lighting his pipe. “Now—drive ahead. Found a gold mine, eh?”
“That’s just about what it is; only it’s not a gold mine in the ordinary sense of the word. It’s buried gold.”
“The deuce it is. Where?”
“That’s what I’m coming to. Now listen. There exists a certain Zulu of my acquaintance, a head-ringed man named Hlabulana. I have known him a long while, some time before the war, in fact, and he’s a wonderfully straight and reliable man. Well, a good many years ago a strange thing came within his experience. Off the coast of Zululand, about where the Umfolosi river runs out at Saint Lucia Bay, there arrived a ship—a small ship, I gathered from his account, probably a brig or schooner. Now this in itself was an event, because there was absolutely no trade done with Zululand by sea in those days, any more than there is now. But where this craft undertook to anchor was off one of the most rotten, swampy and uninhabited parts of the whole coast. A boat put off from her and came ashore, and in it were four men. They landed, and no sooner had they done so than the vessel, which appears to have been lying a good way out, was seen suddenly to disappear. She had, in fact, gone to the bottom.”
“One minute, Fleetwood,” interrupted Wyvern. “When was this—have you any sort of idea?”
“Yes, I have as it happens. It can’t have been many months before the big fight between Cetywayo and Umbulazi for the succession. Now that came off at the end of 1856, which locates this earlier in the same year. Good while back, isn’t it? Close upon thirty years.”
“Right. Go on.”
“Well, then, they took some packages out of the boat; not very large ones, but still, it seems, about as much as they could manage. They hid the boat under bushes and started inland. All this, of course, was seen, because although that part of the country is poorly populated, still there were, and are, people there, and such an unusual occurrence was not likely to go unspotted. But the Zulus didn’t show themselves. They kept out of sight, and shadowed the four.”