by Wilbur Smith
‘Well, first thing,’ Craig observed, ‘legend was wrong. Those pots weren’t a gallon each, more like a pint.’
‘Still, five pints of diamonds is better than a poke in the eye with a rhino horn,’ Tungata countered.
They had salvaged a dozen poles from the top section of the ladderwork in the shaft and built a small fire on the cavern floor. As they squatted in a circle around the pile of stones, their damp clothing steamed in the warmth from the flames.
‘If they are diamonds,’ Sally-Anne was still sceptical.
‘They are diamonds,’ Craig declared flatly, ‘every single one of them. Watch this!’
Craig selected one of the stones, a crystal with a knife edge to one of its facets. He drew the edge across the lens of the lamp. It made a shrill squeal that set their teeth on edge, but it gouged a deep white scratch in the glass.
‘That’s proof! That’s a diamond!’
‘So big!’ Sarah picked out the smallest she could find. ‘Even the smallest is bigger than the top joint of my finger.’ She compared them.
‘The old Matabele labourers picked only those large enough to show up in the first wash of gravel,’ Craig explained. ‘And remember that they will lose sixty per cent or more of their mass in the cutting and polishing. That one will probably end up no bigger than a green pea.’
‘The colours,’ Tungata murmured, ‘so many different colours.’
Some were translucent lemon-coloured, others dark amber or cognac, with all shades in between, while again there were those that were untinted, clear as snow-melt in a mountain stream, with frosted facets that reflected the flames of the smoky little fire.
‘Just look at this one.’
The stone Sally-Anne held up was the deep purplish blue of the Mozambique current when the tropic midday sun probes its depths.
‘And this.’ Another as bright as the blood from a spurting artery.
‘And this.’ Limpid green, impossibly beautiful, changing with each flicker of the light.
Sally-Anne laid out a row of the coloured stones on the cavern floor in front of her.
‘So pretty,’ she said. She was grading them, the yellows and golds and ambers in one row, the pinks and reds in another.
‘The diamond can take any of the primary colours. It seems to take pleasure in imitating the colours proper to other gems. John Mandeville, the fourteenth-century traveller, wrote that.’ Craig spread his hands to the blaze. ‘And it can crystallize to any shape from a perfect square to octahedron or dodecahedron.’
‘Blimey, mate,’ Sally-Anne mocked him, ‘what’s an octahedron, pray?’
‘Two pyramids with triangular sides and a common base.’
‘Wow! And a dodecahedron?’ she challenged.
‘Two rhombs of lozenge shape with common facets.’
‘How come you know so much?’
‘I wrote a book – remember?’ Craig smiled back. ‘Half the book was about Rhodes and Kimberley and diamonds.’
‘Enough already,’ she capitulated.
‘Not nearly enough,’ Craig shook his head. ‘I can go on. The diamond is the most perfect reflector of light, only chromate of lead refracts more light, only chrysolite disperses it more. But the diamond’s combined powers of reflection, refraction and dispersion are unmatched.’
‘Stop!’ ordered Sally-Anne, but her expression was still interested, and he went on.
‘It’s brilliance is undecaying, though the ancients did not have the trick of cutting it to reveal its true splendour. For that reason, the Romans treasured pearls more highly and even the first Hindu artisans only rubbed up the natural facets of the Kohinoor. They would have been appalled to know that modern cutters reduced the bulk of that stone from over seven hundred carats to a hundred and six.’
‘How big is seven hundred carats?’ Sarah wanted to know.
Craig selected a stone from the ranks that Sally-Anne had set out. It was the size of a golf ball.
‘That is probably three hundred carats – it might cut to a paragon, that is a first-water diamond over a hundred carats. Then men will give it a name, like the Great Mogul or the Orloff or the Shah, and legends will be woven around it.’
‘Lobengula’s Fire,’ Sarah hazarded.
‘Good!’ Craig nodded. ‘A good name for it. Lobengula’s Fire!’
‘How much?’ Tungata wanted to know. ‘What is the value of this pile of pretty stones?’
‘God knows,’ Craig shrugged. ‘Some of them are rubbish—’ He picked out a huge amorphous lump of dark grey colour, in which the black specks and fleckings of its imperfections were obvious to the naked eye and the flaws and fracture lines cut through its interior like soft silver leaves. ‘This is industrial quality, it will be used for machine tools and the cutting edges in the head of an oil drill, but some of the others – the only answer is that they are worth as much as a rich man will pay. It would be impossible to sell them all at one time, the market could not absorb them. Each stone would require a special buyer and involve a major financial transaction.’
‘How much, Pupho?’ Tungata insisted. ‘What is the least or the most?’
‘I truly don’t know, I could not even hazard.’ Craig picked out another large stone, its imperfect facets frosted and stippled to hide the true fire in its depths. ‘Highly skilled technicians will work on this for weeks, perhaps months, charting its grain and discovering its flaws. They will polish a window on it, so they can microscopically examine its interior. Then, when they had decided how to “make” the stone, a master cutter with nerves of steel will cleave it along the flaw line with a tool like a butcher’s cleaver. A false hammer stroke and the stone could explode into worthless chips. They say the master cutter who cleaved the Cullinan diamond fainted with relief when he hit a clean stroke and the diamond split perfectly.’ Craig juggled the big diamond thoughtfully. ‘If this stone “makes” perfectly, and if its colour is graded “D”, it could be worth, say, a million dollars.’
‘A million dollars! For one stone!’ Sarah exclaimed.
‘Perhaps more,’ Craig nodded. ‘Perhaps much more.’
‘If one stone is worth that,’ Sally-Anne lifted a cupped double handful of diamonds and let them trickle slowly through her fingers, ‘how much will this hoard be worth?’
‘As little as a hundred million, as much as five hundred million,’ Craig guessed quietly, and those impossible sums seemed to depress them all, rather than render them delirious with joy.
Sally-Anne dropped the last few stones, as though they had burned her fingers, and she hugged her own arms and shivered. Her damp hair hung in lank strands down her face and the firelight underscored her eyes with shadow. They all of them looked exhausted and bedraggled.
‘Then as we sit here,’ said Tungata, ‘we are probably as rich as any man living – and I would give it all for one glimpse of sunlight and one taste of freedom.’
‘Pupho, talk to us,’ Sarah pleaded. ‘Tell us stories.’
‘Yes,’ Sally-Anne joined in. ‘That’s your business. Tell us about diamonds. Help us forget the rest. Tell us a story.’
‘All right,’ Craig agreed, and while Tungata fed the fire with splinters of wood, he thought for a moment. ‘Did you know that Kohinoor means “Mountain of Light” and that Baber, the Conqueror, set its value at half the daily expense of the entire known world? You would think there could be no other gem like it, but it was only one of the great jewels assembled in Delhi. That city outstripped imperial Rome or vainglorious Babylon in its treasures. The other great jewels of Delhi had marvellous names also. Listen to these: the Sea of Light, the Crown of the Moon, the Great Mogul—’
Craig ransacked his memory for stories to keep them from dwelling on the hopelessness of their position, from the despair of truly realizing that they were entombed alive deep in the earth.
He told them of the faithful servant whom de Sancy entrusted with the great Sancy diamond, when he sent it to Henry of Navarre to add to the crown je
wels of France. ‘Thieves learned of his journey, and they waylaid the poor man in the forest. They cut him down and searched his clothing and his corpse. When they could not find the diamond, they buried him hastily and fled. Years afterwards, Monsieur de Sancy found the grave in the forest, and ordered the servant’s decomposed body to be gutted. The legendary diamond was found in his stomach.’
‘Ghastly,’ Sally-Anne shuddered.
‘Perhaps,’ Craig agreed with her. ‘But every noble diamond has a sanguine history. Emperors and rajahs and sultans have intrigued and mounted campaigns for them, others have used starvation or boiling oil or hot irons to prick out eyes, women have used poison or prostituted themselves, palaces have been looted and temples have been profaned. Each stone seems to have left a comet’s train of blood and savagery behind it. And yet none of these terrible deeds and misfortunes ever seemed to discourage those who lusted for them. Indeed when Shah-Shuja stood before Runjeet Singh, “The Lion of the Punjab”, starved to a skeleton and with his wives and family broken and mutilated by the tortures that had at last forced him to give up the Great Mogul, the man who had once been his dearest friend, gloating over the huge stone in his fist, asked, “Tell me, Shah-Shuja, what price do you put upon it?”
‘Even then Shah-Shuja, broken and vanquished, knowing himself at the very threshold of ignoble death, could still answer, “It is the price of fortune. For the Great Mogul has always been the bosom talisman of those who have triumphed mightily.”’
Tungata grunted as the tale ended, and prodded the pile of treasure in the firelight before him with a spuming finger. ‘I wish one of these could bring us just a little of that good fortune.’
And Craig had run out of stories, his throat had closed painfully from cold and talking and the searing tear gas, and none of the others could think of anything to say to cheer them. They ate the unappetizing scorched maize cakes in silence and then lay down as close to the fire as they could get. Craig lay and listened to the others sleeping, but despite his fatigue, his brain spun in circles, chasing its tail and keeping him awake.
The only way out of the cavern was back through the subterranean lake and up the grand gallery, but how long would the Shona guard that exit? How long could they last out here? There was food for a day or two, water seepage from the cavern roof would give them drink, but the batteries of the two lamps were failing, the light they gave was turning yellow and dull, the timber from the ladder might feed the fire for a few days more, and then – the cold and the darkness. How long before it drove them crazy? How long before they were forced to attempt that terrible swim back through the shaft into the arms of the waiting troopers at the—
Craig’s broodings were violently interrupted. The rock on which he lay shuddered and jumped under him, and he scrambled to his hands and knees.
From the shadows of the cavern roof one of the great stalactities, twenty tons of gleaming limestone, snapped off like a ripe fruit in a high wind, and crashed to the floor barely ten paces from where they lay. It filled the cavern with billows of limestone dust. Sarah awoke screaming with terror, and Tungata was thrashing around him and shouting as he came up from deep sleep.
The earth tremor lasted for seconds only, and then the stillness, the utter silence of the earth’s depths, fell over them again and they looked into each other’s frightened faces across the smouldering fire.
‘What the hell was that?’ Sally-Anne asked, and Craig was reluctant to answer. He looked to Tungata.
‘The Shona—’ Tungata said softly‘– Ithink they have dynamited the grand gallery. They have sealed us off.’
‘Oh my God.’ Slowly Sally-Anne covered her mouth with both hands.
‘Buried alive.’ Sarah said it for them.
The shaft was just over 160 feet deep from the edge of the platform to water level. Tungata plumbed it with the nylon rope before Craig began the descent. It was deep enough to kill or maim anybody who slipped and fell into the chasm.
They secured the end of the rope to one of the poles wedged like an anchor in the opening of the tunnel that led to the crystal cavern, and Craig abseiled down the rope to the water at the bottom of the shaft once more. Gingerly he committed his weight to the rickety remains of the ladderwork as he neared the surface of the water and then lowered himself into the water.
Craig made one dive. It was enough to confirm their worst fears. The tunnel leading into the grand gallery was blocked by a heavy fall of rock. He could not even penetrate as far as the remains of the wall built by the witch-doctors. It was sealed off with loose rock that had fallen from the roof, and it was dangerously unstable. His groping hands brought down another avalanche of rumbling rolling rock all around him.
He backed out of the tunnel, and fled thankfully back to the surface. He clung to the timber ladderwork, panting wildly from the terror of almost being pinned in the tunnel.
‘Pupho, are you all right?’
‘Okay!’ Craig yelled back up the shaft. ‘But you were right. The tunnel has been dynamited. There is no way out!’
When he climbed back to the platform, they were waiting for him. Their expressions were grim and taut in the firelight.
‘What are we going to do?’ Sally-Anne asked.
‘The first thing to do is to explore the cavern minutely.’ Craig was still gasping from the swim and the climb. ‘Every corner and nook, every opening and branch of every tunnel. We will work in pairs. Sam and Sarah, start working from the left – use the lamps with care, save the batteries.’
Three hours later by Craig’s Rolex, they met back at the fire. The lanterns were giving out only a feeble yellow glow by now, the batteries drained and on the point of failing.
‘We found one tunnel at the back of the altar,’ Craig reported. ‘It looked good for quite a way, but then it pinched out completely. And you? Anything?’ Craig was cleaning a scrape on Sally-Anne’s knee where she had fallen on the treacherous footing. ‘Nothing,’ Tungata admitted. Craig bound the knee with a strip torn from the tail of Sally-Anne’s shirt. ‘We found a couple of likely leads, but they all petered out.’
‘What do we do now?’
‘We will eat a little and then rest. We have got to try and sleep. We will need to keep our strength up.’ Craig realized it was an evasion even as he said it, but surprisingly, he did sleep.
When he awoke, Sally-Anne was cuddled against his chest, and she coughed in her sleep. It was a rough phlegmy sound. The cold and damp was affecting them all, but the sleep had refreshed Craig and given him strength. Although his own throat and chest were still painful from the gas, they seemed to have eased a little and he felt more cheerful. He lay back against the rock wall, careful not to disturb Sally-Anne. Tungata was snoring across the fire, but then he grunted and rolled over and was silent.
The only sound in the cavern now was the drip of water from the seepages in the roof, and then, very faintly, another sound, a whispering, so low that it might have been merely the echoes of silence in his own ears. Craig lay and concentrated his hearing. The sound annoyed him, niggled at his mind as he tried to place it.
‘Of course,’ he recognized it, ‘bats!’
He remembered hearing it more clearly when he had first reached the platform. He lay and thought about it for a while and then gently eased Sally-Anne’s head off his shoulder. She made a soft gurgling in her throat, rolled over and subsided again.
Craig took one of the lanterns, and went back into the tunnel that led to the platform and the shaft. He flashed the lantern only once or twice, conserving what was left in the batteries, and in darkness he stood on the platform with his back against the rock wall and listened with all his being.
There were long periods of silence, broken only by the musical pinging of water drips on rock, and then suddenly a soft chorus of squeaks that echoed down the chimney of the shaft, then silence again.
Craig flicked on the lantern, and the time was five o’clock. He was not certain if it was morning or evening, but
if the bats were roosting up there, then it must still be daylight in the outside world. He squatted down and waited an hour, at intervals checking the slow passage of time, and then there was a new outburst of far-off bat sounds, no longer the occasional sleepy squeaks, but an excited chorus, many thousands of the tiny rodents coming awake for the nocturnal hunt.
The chorus dwindled swiftly into silence, and Craig checked his watch again. Six-thirty-five. He could imagine somewhere up above the airborne horde pouring out of the mouth of a cave into the darkening evening sky, like smoke from a chimney pot.
He moved carefully to the edge of the platform, steadied himself on the side wall and leaned out over the drop very cautiously, keeping a handhold. He twisted his head to look up the shaft, holding the lantern out to the full stretch of his arm. The feeble yellow light seemed only to emphasize the blackness above him.
The shaft was semicircular in plan, about ten feet across to the far wall. He gave up on trying to penetrate the upper darkness and concentrated on studying the rock of the shaft wall opposite him, prodigally using up the battery of the lamp.
It was smooth as glass, honed by the water that had bored it open. No hold or niche, nothing, except—He strained out over the drop for an extra inch. There was a darker mark on the rock just at the very edge of his vision, directly opposite him, and well above the level of his head. Was it a stratum of colour, or was it a crack? He could not be sure, and the light was fading. It could even be a trick of shadow and light.
‘Pupho,’ Tungata’s voice spoke behind him and he pulled back. ‘What is it?’
‘I think this is the only way open to the surface.’ Craig switched off the lantern to save it.
‘Up that chimney?’ Tungata’s voice was incredulous in the darkness. ‘Nobody could get up there.’
‘The bats – they are roosting up there somewhere.’
‘Bats have wings,’ Tungata reminded him, and then after a while, ‘How high up there?’
‘I don’t know, but I think there may be a crack or a ledge on the other side. Shine the other lamp, its battery is stronger.’