The River of Diamonds

by Geoffrey Jenkins

  This array of colours was remarkable enough. But the column of rose quartz marked the site of something that was of far more interest to us. Under a shimmer of mist to the right lay an outline of palest turquoise, sheening like a lake. Instinctively I looked for the two landmarks which would confirm what leapt to my tired brain. There they were — hard on the right, two enormous dunes! Sand encircled, muted and lovely it lay before our seared eyes — Strandloper's Water!

  But there was no water.

  The lake-like sheen was as much a delusion as the name. Perhaps in Caldwell and Shelborne's time it might have earned it, for there was solidified mud in the pan. The contorted corpse of a moringa tree, squat, silver-barked, stood near it, and a moringa stores water and lives on it for years. But it, too, had died of thirst. There was no sign of Shelborne's mule wagon. I knew that he must have lied about it, for no vehicle could possibly have traversed the dunes. The other side of the ancient watercourse was as impassable to the wheel as to the foot — mile upon mile of endless file of razor-edged outcrops of rock.

  I searched Strandloper's Water for Caldwell's. grave. There was nothing except a fireplace of blackened stones near the moringa tree skeleton. The place was as featureless as a mirror. Had Shelborne's year in the desert been fiction too? I began to wonder: water there was none, nor animal life, vegetation, insect or shade. The pitiless glare forced us back into the sundial shadow of the isolated monolith. We slept, oblivious, in its shadow until the sun moved and woke us. We cursed and shifted; slept and were woken by the sun; cursed and shifted yet once again. At sunset the stunning chill struck at us.

  We decided to return to the coast.

  The Uri-Hauchab mountains, fine and near on the map, took no account of the Namib. We were without much food and our precious water supply was dwindling. Our bodies were beaten, lame, exhausted. The fountainhead recurred again and again to my mind, but what I most wanted was water, shade, shelter from the desert's pitilessness. We decided to rest the next day and make for Mercury the following night.

  That was, until I heard the Bells that night; until Johaar saw the moving helio in the dunes; until the water demijohn burst.

  The Bells brought me out of sleep. Through the insulating sand came the familiar long reverberation. The river-bed trembled under me, but its tremor was slight compared to the heave of Mercury. I was awake in a flash, but Koeltas was before me, sitting up in his sleeping-bag, rifle in hand, his eyes wide with terror.

  'Shelborne!' he — said thickly. 'Shelborne brings the Bells… We die…'

  'Shelborne is at sea on his way to Waivis Bay,' I snapped.

  Johaar was muttering to himself.

  'Let's march,' said Koeltas.

  The hell with that — at this time and the state we're in,' I replied roughly. I lay down again, my thoughts racing. My sealed gas pockets on the sea-bed would obviously not be audible at this distance and through the intervening land mass. They could not explain the Bells, then. Koeltas sat and smoked his rank tobacco endlessly. The dunes were black and white under the hard moon, like some unreal zebra's flank. The Bells, the ancient river line… What, I asked myself if we were lying on the dome roof of a gigantic underground cavern, not only stretching under Mercury in the form of the Glory Hole, but under the desert itself? Could the mushroom-shaped blowholes be vents from it? With the uplift of the coast, had the river been forced underground, now flowing beneath its original bed? Had Strandloper's Water run dry for the same reason? If we were on top of the diamond fountainhead, the diamonds must be under an overburden of sand which would make even the Oranjemund experts with their tournadozers and tournascrapers blanch. Yet, I believed, Caldwell had found some way in… It was impossible to prospect: I had no trommel and even if I had, you need water to wash gravel. Water was life, and our store was scanty enough.

  It was scantier in the morning.

  I was aroused by an urgent, hysterical note in Johaar's voice.

  The half-gallon jar was cracked, frozen from the bitter night. There were chunks of ice left, but most of it had been lost. We gathered the precious pieces together and thawed them in empty cans, carefully pouring the food-tainted liquid into my two canteens. Koeltas had one bottle left. During our wretched, silent breakfast the Bells sounded softly. Koeltas's eyes were staring. A day lying around under the scourge of the sun would send them both round the bend.

  'Kulunga!' muttered Johaar. 'Kulunga comes!'

  'Pull yourself together!' I said sharply. 'Who the hell is Kulunga anyway?'

  'He walks among us, but you don't see him,' he replied, as if glad to get it off his chest. 'Man-god. He has two baskets. One has the good things, the other death. Kulunga comes here.'

  'Rubbish!'I replied.

  'No,' he went on seriously. 'Kulunga kills, or I kill Kulunga.' He took out his big knife and looked round 'Maybe Shelborne is Kulunga.'

  There was no use trying to rationalize his primitive fear. 'Listen,' I told him and Koeltas. 'We can make out for two days more with the water we have. It will take us every bit of that to reach the sea. We trek — now!'

  The bolt snapped shut and he pointed the Remington at me from where he sat, cross-legged, not six feet away. 'We go on,' he snarled. 'If we go back, the Bells will kill us. Maybe ahead we find water. Maybe not. We die anyway. But better die away from the Bells.'

  I looked at the hard, closed slits of eyes and at the rifle. Two days! That would take us, going hard, to Uri-Hauchab. Or almost. If I was right about the ancient river and the lift of the land, its underlying bedrock might have been cupped at the mountains into a lake or a dam… Shelborne had lived for a year in the desert — among the wild peaks of Uri-Hauchab he might have found water and game…

  I replied, 'It suits me to go on. But I don't like doing things at gunpoint, see. I don't want a couple of lily-livered yellow bastards hanging like a stone round my neck in a tough spot like this.'

  Koeltas was dispassionate. 'Mister, if I shoot you, Johaar and I have more water. No one will know. No one will find you. No one come to look for you.' Shelborne might have used the same logic about Caldwell.

  'Rhennin will send a helicopter to bring me out,' I bluffed. Shoot me, and they'll take you back and hang you.'

  He didn't smile, but the muscles jerked along the line of his cruel lips and high cheekbones. He went on grudgingly, 'I'd like to shoot you for the water, mister. But you're as tough and as slim as a Richtersveld goat and maybe you bring us alive out of this, huh?

  'I haven't any intention of dying,' I said tersely. 'Right, let's trek then. Beyond Strandloper's Water we'll pick up the course of the river…'

  Johaar was on his feet. 'Kulunga!' he mouthed. 'Kulunga!' He pointed to the dunes high above.

  I swung round in time to catch the helio flash. It was gone in a split second. The dunes were empty.

  'Kulunga comes!' he raved. 'I go and kill Kulunga!'

  I grabbed him by the shoulder, but he brushed me aside. Knife in hand, he started across the river-bed.

  'Johaar!' I yelled, following him. 'Come back, you bloody fool! There's nothing there! A bit of bright quartz, that's all…'

  I stumbled and fell. Koeltas was beside me. Johaar was on his way to the nearest defile.

  'He sees spooks,' said Koeltas casually. 'Let him go — more water for us.'

  'He's crazy! He'll die in a couple of hours out there…'

  'Look how the spook gives him strength,' said Koeltas nonchalantly. Johaar moved at speed across the last patches of river-bed before entering the wadi. 'First it burns him up and then it kills him! Let him go!'

  'I won't leave a man to die,' I replied. 'Fair enough, let him chase things in his own mind. He'll drop soon — I'll go and bring him in.'

  He looked at me with a curious sadness, as if I were a child. Then he shrugged. 'We wait today, drink no water. Tonight we follow his tracks.'

  Johaar was dead when we found him after moonrise, maybe a mile and a half away. His tracks were clear. He hadn't died
of thirst or sunstroke.

  His own knife stood out between his shoulder-blades.

  Koeltas rolled him over and pointed to the gaping mouth. The lips were ringed with scum. 'He fight — look! They fight here.' The sand was stamped and disturbed. He said something in patois which I didn't understand. It might have been a prayer or an epitaph. But there was fear in his eyes. 'Johaar was very strong. To kill Johaar, a man must be stronger.' He spat. 'That bastard Shelborne!'

  His fear was infectious. My recollection of the resonant, educated voice made the killing at my feet more hideous.

  'We trek,' I said harshly.

  Fatalism was mixed with the little Hottentot's terror. 'He watches us. Maybe we see him.' He lifted the rifle expressively. A man could be behind the next dune and we would not see him.

  We saw the helio of light, the sharp flash of reflected sun, from a dune-top next morning after a hard night's march. We must have put nearly ten miles between ourselves and Strandloper's Water. The terrain became more broken. Sand-blasted, wind-eroded hills began to show among the dunes. What was Shelborne — for now I was sure it was Shelborne — carrying which reflected the sun? He wasn't careless or unwise enough to advertize his position.

  'Not a gun,' said Koeltas decisively. Too much light.'

  There was no sign of water. When we drank sparsely and ate some of our unpalatable food, I realized that we had travelled beyond the point of no return. Our water would never bring us back to Mercury. Our best — and only — hope was to continue. By noon we were unable to stumble on. There was no shade; the banks were too low for it. We pulled the sleeping-bags loose over our heads for protection. Soon, the sand was damp with my sweat and my temples were throbbing. All afternoon the sun sapped our strength, striking through the fabric. When it sank and the first of the night's frightening chill struck, I pulled on my thick sweater, climbed into the bag, and fell into a sleep of utter exhaustion.

  I woke after midnight, frozen, hungry, uneasy. I reached out my hand for my water-bottle. It wasn't there. Panic gripped me. I started upright, but Koeltas hadn't made off — his head was jutting out of his bag. Between us lay a battered water-bottle, its rough brown cloth covering almost worn off, the aluminium showing through dully. A trickle of icy fear ran through me. Someone had stolen our water! I reached out for the old bottle. It was heavy, full. A scrap of paper was stuck through the chafed strap. By matchlight I read: John, follow my tracks. I must speak to you alone. Johaar came for me and I had to kill him. So leave Koeltas and the gun when you come. Fred Shelborne.

  John! I smiled grimly. A nice familiar approach when you were trying to lure someone away from the protection of a rifle! I weighed the water-bottle in my hand. The most precious bribe added — water. I drew the cork with my teeth. It tasted good, a little sandy. It wasn't Mercury water. I wasn't fool enough to fall for that sort of blandishment. If Shelborne had anything to say, let him come to us. Koeltas and I would stick together, close together, from now on.

  Before dawn we trekked.

  16

  The Long Wall

  It was common Gestapo torture to take a man out of boiling water, and plunge him in ice up to his neck. But our next three days were every bit as excruciating. The blaze of the sun was too much for our ebbing strength and our treks were made at night. The nightmare became more substantial as the light waned insubstantial; there were times when I wavered between a detached, somnambulistic stumble through the red-hot grieshoch of sand and an uncaring delirium. I threw away the compass, steering only at the twin spitskoppe peaks of Uri-Hauchab, bullet-shaped, scored like a dumdum bullet. They would fade to invisibility in the blackness before moon-rise, — when they did become visible I was unsure whether their wavering, uncertain outline was not a mirage. On two occasions we jerked from our stunned sleep to find our water-bottles full and a row of tracks running into the dunes, but there were no more notes from Shelborne. Koeltas saw his plan clearly, too, but we had no strength to stand sentry. He fired once at the unaccountable helio of light, but Shelborne was out of range and the clap of the shot fell sick against the sound-absorbing sand.

  I woke. The sun stabbed my eyelids. The hills were absurd. Some were upside down and their sides leaned over impossible overhangs. The twin spitskoppe of Uri-Hauchab, at whose foot we had camped in exhausted triumph the night before, hung suspended from the sky like the teats of a monster cow. The flanking ridges, chopped into light and shadow waves by last night's moon, this morning were built up of globes and plates alternately: here and there others rose like inverted mushrooms. The edges were shimmering, ill-defined, and the lines which the moon had carved so firmly were evanescent, fragmentary. My weak laugh was lost, — I knew that I was at the end of the line. I raised my fist and screamed an obscenity towards the dunes. Shelborne! He had prolonged our agony with his canteens of water. Shelborne! Christ! How he must have enjoyed killing Caldwell! Now, thirty and more years after, he'd pulled the same killer-gag on the next person to try to find his secret! I rose to my knees. The whole sky and landscape reeled, turned upside down, stood out clear. Not death, but a mirage. A few hundred yards ahead was a rough cairn of stones. The Namib, in all its wild contortions, hadn't invented that. It was man-made. Those stones had been placed in position.

  I shook Koeltas to make sure I was not imagining it. He stirred, but lay still. With some frenetic last reserve of strength, I hauled him up so that he faced it.

  His eyes went wide. 'Hadje Aibeep!' he click-clacked. 'On my mother's grave, Hadje Aibeep!'

  Then the whole scene spun, altered, reversed — the mirage spun its wild patterns again before our eyes.

  'What is it?' My lips were rubbery, congealed. 'What is Hadje Aibeep, for God's sake?'

  He shook himself like a dog. 'I never thought to see it. The cave of Hadje Aibeep — the little wild men of the desert throw their dead into it. Each puts a stone above for a dead man. The cave is deep. They say there is a lake at Hadje Aibeep, under the desert. Let us look.'

  We stumbled to the cairn. Next to it a deep shaft went down into the bowels of the earth. The hole was circular, about twenty feet across. Its lips, for about ten feet all round, were smooth, polished, of a substance I could not identify — not volcanic lava but some strange sort of solidified mud from the depths below.

  We could smell water. I dropped a stone, and from far below came an answering splash.

  This was the ancient river; this was the bearer of diamonds!

  We had to get to the water, but we had neither rope nor strength. Somehow we would have to negotiate the smooth incline, up which the air came pure and sweet. I took a rock to the geyser-like mud. If we couldn't cut steps, we might as well be out in the parched dunes. I hacked at it; my crude tool sank easily: it was as soft as soapstone.

  'I want something sharp,' I told Koeltas. 'I'll cut the first lot of steps and you the next — in turns.'

  He held up the water-bottle. 'We drink all this first, eh?'

  'Yes.' If we couldn't reach the water below, we'd die anyway. We finished it. I went to the cairn for a sharp stone.

  'No!' said Koeltas. 'Not those stones — bad luck. Each stone is a dead man.'

  At the base, half-covered by sand, were the remains of Bushmen arrows — the shafts had gone but the flint-heads remained — thongs of bows, primitive stone-head axes and crumbled wooden shafts. Bushmen buried weapons with the dead. I found one axe with about a foot of shaft, and the thongs lashing it to the head looked fair.

  The first few steps were the worst. Once I could fashion a grip for my hands, however, the work went quickly. It was mercifully cool and the smell of water was tantalizing. Although it grew darker, there was some suffused light deeper down. After I had chipped foot- and hand-holds for about fifty feet, I sent Koeltas down for his stint. I lay in the shadow of the cairn.

  Among the savage gramadullas I thought I saw a helio of light. Shelborne was watching us.

  I cut the final steps. Down, down, down. Then I saw: belo
w me was water — swift, flowing, with chocolate reflections as from polished steel. The shaft was through the roof of an immense cavern. A beach of pure white sand would cushion my drop of the last twenty feet. I shouted to Koeltas to come, then let go and fell.

  I lay still, spellbound by the muted loveliness of the scene after the torture of the dunes. We were in a huge cavern to whose dim roof soared enormous pillars of limestone, intercalated with hundreds of pure white stalactites. We lay and cupped the water to our mouths. I estimated the river to be half a mile wide; it may have been more. The white beach was littered with Bushmen bones and skulls, and ran along the water's edge into the distance.

  Koeltas anticipated my thoughts. 'It flows to the sea! To Mercury!'

  My hunch had been correct: here was the old river which had once flowed in the bed, now dry above, and had been forced into this subterranean channel by the uplift of the coastline. Here was the diamond-carrying river, the distributor of the fountainhead's riches! The fountainhead itself must lie between Hadje Aibeep and Mercury. There was nothing ancient, however, in the strong young flow of the river. The brown told me, this is floodwater. Was it on its way to burst through to the sea like the Orange at Oranjemund? There was no mouth in Spencer Bay; the outlet must also hold the secret of the fountainhead. We must follow the river, here where we could see.