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though we were royalty. Sally soon ran out of pennies, throwing them to watch the resulting scramble, and clapping her hands with delight. When she started tossing our lunch out of the window I pulled my guitar from its case to distract her.
    'Sing happy, Ben,' Sally instructed.
    'And bawdy,' added Louren. I think it was to needle her, or perhaps test her.
    'Yes,' Sally agreed readily. 'Make it meaty and happy.'
    And I started with the saga of the Wild, Wild Duck, with Sal and Louren shouting the chorus at the end of each verse.
    We were children going on a picnic that first day out, and we made a good run of it to the pan. The sun was a big fat ball of fire amongst the tattered streamers of cloud on the horizon when we came out on the edge of the pan. Louren parked the Land-Rover and we climbed out to wait for the trucks and stared out with silent awe across that sombre, glistening plain that stretched away to the range of the eye.
    When the trucks arrived they spilled their load of black servants before they had properly stopped, and I timed it at seventeen and a half minutes to when the tents were pitched, the camp-beds made up and the three of us sitting around the fire, drinking Glen Grant malt on the rocks of glistening ice that dewed the glasses. From the cooking fire drifted the tantalizing smell of the hunter's pot as our cook reheated it and tossed in a dash more garlic and oregano. They were a good, cheerful gang that Larkin had given us and after we had eaten they gathered around their own fire fifty yards away and sweetened the night with the old hunting songs.
    I sat and listened half to them, and half to the involved and heated argument between Sal and Louren. I could have warned her that he was playing the devil's advocate, needling her again, but I enjoyed the interplay of two good minds. Whenever the discussion threatened to degenerate into personal abuse and actual physical violence, I intervened reluctantly and herded them back to safety.
    Sally was staunchly defending the premise of my book Ophir that postulated an invasion of southern central Africa by Phoenician or Carthaginian colonizers in about 200 BC and which flourished until about AD 450, before disappearing abruptly.
    'They were not equipped for a major voyage of discovery as early as that,' Louren challenged. 'Let alone a colonizing...'
    'You will find, Mr Sturvesant, that Herodotus records a circumnavigation of Africa in the reign of King Necho. It was led by six Phoenician navigators as early as 600 BC or thereabouts. They started at the apex of the Red Sea and in three years returned through the Pillars of Hercules.'
    'A single voyage,' Louren pointed out.
    'Not a single voyage, Mr Sturvesant. Hanno sailed from Gibraltar to a point south in the west coast of Africa in about 460 BC, a voyage from which he returned with bartered ivory and gold sufficient to whet the appetites of all the merchant adventurers.'
    Still Louren attacked her dates. 'How do you get a date of 200 BC, when the very earliest carbon-datings from the foundations of Zimbabwe are mid-fifth century AD and most of them are later?'
    'We are not concerned with Zimbabwe, but with the culture that preceded it,' Sally came back at him. 'Zimbabwe could have been built towards the end of the ancients reign, probably only occupied for a short time before they disappeared; that would fit neatly with your carbon-dating of around AD 450. Besides the carbon-dating from the ancient mines at Shala and Inswezwe show results at 250 and 300 BC.' Then she ended it with fine feminine logic. 'Anyway, carbon-dating isn't that accurate. It could be out by hundreds of years.'
    'The mines were worked by the Bantu,' declared Louren. 'And Caton-Thomas - and of course, more recently, Summers - said--'
    Fiercely she attacked Louren. 'Did the Bantu, who only probably arrived in the area about AD 300 suddenly conceive of a brilliant prospecting talent which enabled them to locate the metal lodes where not a