A clamor arose outside. "Maba kitara! Maba kitara!" shouted the natives.
   "What's the hubbub about?" mused Zane Lundergard.
   Into the tent burst Mgembe Okolo. "Bwana!" he shouted. "It is the maba
kitara! The gold wind!"
   "Hot dog!" said Jack Cash with a grin. "Boy, are you in for a treat!"
   All around the village of mud and brick, homemade windscoops of all
shapes and sizes began to take the air. Old women cranked ramshackle
gears that lifted windsock-like scoops made of red gingham. At the
eastern edge of the village, 8 men worked at shoring up an unwieldy
apparatus about 18 feet high, made of many flapping bits of fine blue
netting. Youths argued as they worked to get aloft their large, flimsy
kites, all green and red and painted with pugnacious, teenage slogans.
   And in came the wind. One could see filaments of golden dust blowing
past. They trailed faint shadows on the ground. "There!" yelled Jack
Cash, and he and Mgembe leaped, poking their long poles and wide nets
into the sky. They danced, whirled, and capered, following vein as it
drifted and twisted past.
   Finally, they brought down the nets and shook them out over a heavy
piece of canvas weighed down with stones. Nothing visible. Not until the
men lifted sections of the canvas and corraled the dust together into a
little pocket.
   "Jesus!" exclaimed Zane Lundergard.
   A few ounces of glittering yellow gold dust. "Lookathat!" laughed Jack
Cash. "Why, I'd say this is worth about fourteen...fifteen hundred pounds
at least!"