The Leopard Hunts in Darkness Read Online Free Page A

after all those lovely royalties for him, others who would allow him to write their life stories and generously split the profits with him or sell him insurance
or a South Sea Island paradise, commission him to write movie scripts for a small advance and an even smaller slice of any profits, all kinds gathering like hyenas to the lion’s kill.
    Sally-Anne lifted a hard-back portfolio from the floor beside her and placed it on the table in front of Craig. While Ashe adjusted the spotlight, Sally-Anne untied the ribbons that secured the
folder and sat back.
    Craig opened the cover and went very still. He felt the goose-bumps rise along his forearms, and the hair at the nape of his neck prickle – this was his reaction to greatness, to anything
perfectly beautiful. There was a Gauguin in the Metropolitan Museum on Central Park; a Polynesian madonna carrying the Christ child on her shoulder. She had made his hair prickle. There were
passages of T.S. Eliot’s poetry and of Lawrence Durrell’s prose that made his hair prickle every time he read them.
    The opening bar of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony; those incredible jeté leaps of Rudolph Nureyev, and the way Nicklaus and Borg struck the ball on their good days – those
things had made him prickle, and now this girl was doing it to him also.
    It was a photograph. The finish was egg-shell grain so every detail was crisp. The colours clear and perfectly true.
    It was a photograph of an elephant, an old bull. He faced the camera in the characteristic attitude of alarm, with his ears spread like dark flags. Somehow he portrayed the whole vastness and
timelessness of a continent, and yet he was at bay, and one sensed that all his great strength was unavailing, that he was confused by things that were beyond his experience and the trace memories
of his ancestors, that he was about to be overwhelmed by change – like Africa itself.
    With him in the photograph was shown the land, the rich red earth riven by wind, baked by sun, ruined by drought. Craig could almost taste the dust on his tongue. Then, over it all, the
limitless sky, containing the promise of succour, the silver cumulo-nimbus piled like a snow-clad mountain range, bruised with purple and royal blue, pierced by a single beam of light from a hidden
sun that fell on the old bull like a benediction.
    She had captured the meaning and the mystery of his native land in the one hundredth of a second that it took the lens shutter to open and close again, while he had laboured for long agonizing
months and not come anywhere near it, and secretly recognizing his failure was afraid to try again. He took a sip of the insipid wine that had been offered to him as a rebuke for this crisis of
confidence in his own ability, and now the wine had a quinine aftertaste that he had not noticed before.
    ‘Where are you from?’ he asked the girl, without looking at her.
    ‘Denver, Colorado,’ she said. ‘But my father has been with the Embassy in London for years. I did most of my schooling in England.’ That accounted for the accent.
‘I went to Africa when I was eighteen, and fell in love with it,’ she completed her life story simply.
    It took a physical effort for Craig to touch the photograph and gently turn it face down. Beneath it was another of a young woman seated on a black lava rock beside a desert waterhole. She wore
the distinctive leather bunny-ears headdress of the Ovahimba tribe. Her child stood beside her and nursed from her naked breast. The woman’s skin was polished with fat and ochre. Her eyes
were those from a fresco in a Pharaoh’s tomb, and she was beautiful.
    ‘Denver, Colorado, forsooth!’ Craig thought and was surprised at his own bitterness, at the depths of his sudden resentment. How dare a damned foreign girl-child encapsulate so
unerringly the complex spirit of a people in this portrait of a young woman. He had lived all his life with them and yet never seen an African so clearly as at