by Wilbur Smith
‘You could smuggle us in,’ she suggested.
He shook his head. ‘Not worth the risk. We might get away with it, but if I were caught it could mean a fine of £100,000 or five years in the slammer.’
She laid her hand on his arm, the first time she had deliberately touched him. ‘Please, Shasa. I want so badly to film it.’
He shook his head sorrowfully. ‘I’m sorry, Kitty, can’t be done, I’m afraid,’ and he stood up. ‘Got to go up and change for dinner. You can break it to your crew while I’m away. Your flight back to Jo’burg leaves at ten o‘clock tomorrow.’
It was obvious at the dinner-table that she hadn’t warned her crew of the change of plans, for they were still jovial and garrulous with good German beer.
For once Kitty took no part in the conversation, and she sat morosely at the end of the table, nibbling without interest at the hearty Teutonic fare and occasionally darting a sulky glance at Shasa. David skipped coffee to go and make his nightly phone call to Matty and the children, and Hank and his crew had been told of a local night spot with hot music and even hotter hostesses.
‘Ten days with no feminine company except the boss,’ Hank complained. ‘My nerves need soothing.’
‘Remember where you are,’ Shasa warned him. ‘In this country black velvet is royal game.’
‘Some of the poontang I’ve seen today would be worth five years’ hard labour,’ Hank leered.
‘Did you know that we have a South African version of Russian roulette?’ Shasa asked him. ‘What you do is take a coloured girl into a telephone booth. Then you phone the police Flying Squad and see who comes first.’
Kitty was the only one who didn’t laugh, and Shasa stood up. ‘I’ve got some papers to go over. We’ll save the farewells until breakfast.’
In his suite he shaved and showered quickly, then slipped on a silk dressing-gown. As he went through to check that there was ice in the bar, there was a light tap on the door of the suite.
Kitty stood on the threshold looking tragic.
‘Am I disturbing you?’
‘No, of course not.’ He held the door open and she crossed the lounge and stood staring out of the window.
‘Can I get you a night-cap?’ Shasa asked.
‘What are you drinking?’ she asked.
‘A Rusty Nail.’
‘I’ll have one also — whatever it is.’
While he mixed Drambuie and malt whisky, she said, ‘I came to thank you for everything you’ve done for me these last ten days. It’s going to be hard to say goodbye.’
He carried the glasses across to where she stood in the middle of the floor, but when he reached her she took both glasses from him and placed them on the coffee table. Then she stood on tiptoe, slid both arms around his neck and turned her face up for his kiss.
Her lips were soft and sweet as warm chocolate, and slowly she pushed her tongue deeply into his mouth. When at last their mouths parted with a little wet sucking sound, he stooped and hooked an arm around the back of her knees and lifted her against his chest. She clung to him, pressing her face against his throat as he carried her through to the bedroom.
She had the lean hips and flat belly of a boy, and her buttocks were white and round and hard as a pair of ostrich eggs. Like her face, her body seemed childlike and immature except for those tight little pear-shaped breasts and the startling burst of thick dark hair at the base of her belly, but when he touched her there he found to his surprise that it was fine as silk and soft as smoke.
Her love-making was so artful as to seem totally uncontrived and spontaneous. She had the trick of telling him exactly what he was doing to her in the coarsest barnyard terms, and the obscenities on that soft innocent-looking mouth were shockingly erotic. She took him to those heights that he had seldom scaled before, and left him completely satiated.
In the dawn glow she snuggled against him and whispered, ‘I don’t know how I am going to be able to bear being parted from you after this.’
He could see her face in the wall mirror across the room, although she was unaware of his scrutiny. ‘Damn it – I can’t let you go,’ he whispered back. ‘I don’t care what it costs, I’m taking you down to the Sperrgebiet with me.’
In the mirror he watched her smile, a complacent and smug little smile. He had been correct, Kitty Godolphin used her sexual favours like trumps in a game of bridge.
At the airport her crew were packing their equipment into the Dove under David Abrahams’ supervision when Shasa and Kitty drove up in the second company car, and Kitty jumped out and went to David.
‘How are you going to work it, Davie?’ she asked, and he looked puzzled.
‘I don’t understand the question.’
‘You’ll have to fake the flight plan, won’t you?’ Kitty insisted. Still mystified, David glanced at Shasa. Shasa shrugged and Kitty became exasperated.
‘You know very well what I mean. How are you going to cover the fact that we are going into the Sperrgebiet without permits?’
‘Without permits?’ David echoed, and fished a handful of documents out of the zip pocket of his leather flying-jacket. ‘Here are the permits. They were issued a week ago — all kosher and correct.’
Kitty wheeled and glared speechlessly at Shasa, but he refused to meet her eyes and instead ambled off to make his walk-around check of the Mosquito.
They didn’t speak to each other again until Shasa had the Mosquito at twenty thousand feet, flying straight and level, then Kitty said into his earphones, ‘You son of a bitch.’ Her voice shook with fury.
‘Kitty, my darling.’ He turned and smiled at her over the oxygen mask, his single eye glinting happily. ‘We both got what we wanted, and had a lot of fun in the process. What are you so mad about?’
She turned her face away and stared down at the magnificent lion-coloured mountains of the Khama’s Hocht-land. He left her to sulk. Some minutes later he heard an unusual stuttering sound in his headset, and he frowned and leaned forward to adjust the radio. Then, from the corner of his eye he saw that Kitty was hunched up in the seat shaking uncontrollably and that the stuttering sound was coming from her.
He touched her shoulder and she turned her face to him, it was swollen and crimson with suppressed laughter and tears of mirth were squeezing out of the corners of her eyes with the pressure. She couldn’t hold it any longer, and she let out a snort.
‘You crafty bastard,’ she sobbed. ‘Oh, you tricky monster—’ and then she became incoherent as laughter overwhelmed her.
A long time later she wiped away her tears. ‘We are going to get on just fine together, you and me,’ she declared. ‘Our minds work the same way.’
‘Our bodies don’t do too badly either,’ he pointed out, and she unclipped her oxygen mask and leaned across to offer him her mouth again. Her tongue was sinuous and slippery as an eel.
Their time in the desert together passed too swiftly for Shasa, for since they had become lovers he found her a constant joy to be with. Her quick and curious mind stimulated his own, and through her observant eyes he saw old familiar things afresh.
Together they watched and filmed the elephantine yellow caterpillar tractors ripping the elevated terraces that had once been the ocean bed. He explained to Kitty how in the time when the crust of the earth was soft and the molten magma still burst through to the surface, the diamonds, conceived at great depth and heat and pressure, were carried up with this sulphurous outpouring.
In the endless rains of those ancient times the great rivers scoured the earth, running down to the sea, washing the diamonds down with them, until they collected in the pockets and irregularities of the seabed closest to the river mouth. As the emerging continent shrugged and shifted, so the old seabed was lifted above the surface. The rivers had long ago dried up or been diverted, and sediment covered the elevated terraces, concealing the diamond-bearing pockets. It had taken the genius of Twentyman-Jones to work out the old river courses. Using aerial photography an
d an inherent sixth sense, he had pinpointed the ancient terraces.
Kitty and her team filmed the process by which the sand and rubble churned up by the dozer blades was screened and sieved, and finally dry-blown with great multi-bladed fans, until only the precious stones — one part in tens of millions – remained.
In the desert nights the mine hutments, lacking air-conditioning, were too hot for sleep. Shasa made a nest of blankets out amongst the dunes, and with the faint peppery smell of the desert in their nostrils they made love under a blaze of stars.
On their last day Shasa commandeered one of the company jeeps and they drove out into a land of red dunes, the highest in all the world, sculptured by the incessant winds off the cold Benguela Current, their ridges crested like living reptiles as they writhed high against the pale desert sky.
Shasa pointed out to Kitty a herd of gemsbok, each antelope large as a pony, but with a marvellously patterned face mask of black and white and slender horns, straight and long as they were tall, that were the original unicorn of the fable. They were beautiful beasts, so adapted to their harsh country that they need never drink from surface water, but could survive only on the moisture they obtained from the silvery sun-scorched grasses. They watched them dissolve magically into the heat mirage, turning to squirming black tadpoles on the horizon before they disappeared.
‘I was born here. Somewhere in these deserts,’ Shasa told her as they stood hand in hand on the crest of one of the dunes and looked down a thousand feet to where they had left the jeep in the gut of the sand mountains.
He told her how Centaine had carried him in her womb through this terrible terrain, lost and abandoned, with only two little Bushmen as her guides and companions, and how the Bushwoman, for whom the H‘ani Mine was named, acted as midwife at his birth and named him Shasa — ‘Good Water’ – after the most precious substance in her world.
The beauty and the grandeur affected them both so they drew close together in the solitude, and by the end of that day Shasa was sure that he truly loved her and that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her.
Together they watched the sun sink towards the red dunes and the sky turned to a screen of hot hammered bronze, dented with flecks of blue cloud as though by blows from a celestial blacksmith’s hammer. As the sky cooled, the colours chameleoned into puce and orange and lofty purples until the sun sank behind the dunes – and at the instant it disappeared, a miracle occurred.
They both gasped in wonder as in a silent explosion the entire heavens flared into electric green. It lasted only as long as they held their breath, but in that time the sky was as green as the ocean depths or the ice in the gaping cracks of a high mountain glacier. Then it faded swiftly into the drab gun-metal of dusk, and Kitty turned to him with a silent question in her eyes.
‘We saw it together,’ Shasa said softly. ‘The Bushmen call it the Green Python. A man can live a lifetime in the desert without seeing it. I have never witnessed it, not until this moment.’
‘What does it mean?’ Kitty asked.
‘The Bushmen say it is the most fortunate of all good omens.’ He reached out and took her hand. ‘They say that those who see the Green Python will be specially blessed – and we saw it together.’
In the fading light they went down the slip face of the dune to where Shasa had parked the jeep. They sank almost knee-deep in the fluffy sun-warm sand, and laughing they clung to each other for support.
When they reached the jeep, Shasa took her by the shoulders, turned her to face him and told her, ‘I don’t want it to end, Kitty. Come with me. Marry me. I’ll give you everything that life has to offer.’
She threw back her head to laugh in his face. ‘Don’t be daft, Shasa Courtney. What I want from life isn’t yours to give,’ she told him. ‘This was fun, but it wasn’t reality. We can be good friends for as long as you want, but our feet are set on different paths, and we aren’t going in the same direction.’
The next day when they landed at Windhoek airport, a telegram addressed to her was pinned to the board in the crew room. Kitty read it swiftly. When she looked up she wasn’t seeing Shasa any longer.
‘There is another story breaking,’ she said. ‘I have to go.’
‘When will I see you again?’ Shasa asked, and she looked at him as though he were a complete stranger.
‘I don’t know,’ she said, and she and her crew were on the commercial flight that left for Johannesburg an hour later.
Shasa was angry and humiliated. He had never offered to divorce Tara for any other woman – had never even contemplated it – and Kitty had laughed at him.
There were well-explored avenues down which he knew he could cure his anger; one was the hunt. For Shasa nothing else existed in the world when the hunter’s passion thrilled in his blood, when a bull buffalo, big as a mountain and black as hell, came thundering down upon him, bloody saliva drooling from its raised muzzle, the polished points of its curved horns glinting, and murder in its small piglike eyes. However, this was the rainy season and the hunting grounds in the north would be muggy wet and malarial, and the grass high above a man’s head. He could not hunt, so he turned to his other sure panacea, the pursuit of wealth.
Money held endless fascination for Shasa. Without that obsessive attraction he could not have accumulated such a vast store of it, for that required a devotion and dedication that few men are capable of. Those that lack it console themselves with old platitudes about it not buying happiness and being the root of all evil. As an adept, Shasa knew that money was neither good nor evil, but simply amoral. He knew that money had no conscience, but that it contained the most powerful potential for both good and evil. It was the man who possessed it who made the ultimate choice between them, and that choice was called power.
Even when he had believed himself to be totally absorbed with Kitty Godolphin, his instinct had been in play. Almost subconsciously he had noticed those tiny white specks way out on the green Benguela Current of the Atlantic. Kitty Godolphin had not been gone from his life for an hour before he stormed into the offices of Courtney Mining and Finance in Windhoek’s main street and started demanding figures and documents, making telephone calls, summoning lawyers and accountants, calling in favours from men in high places in government, dispatching his minions to search the archives of the registrar and the local newspapers, assembling the tools of his trade, facts, figures and influence, and then losing himself happily in them, like an opium-eater with his pipe.
It was another five days before he was ready to bring it all together, and make the final weighing up. He had kept David Abrahams with him, for David was an excellent sounding-board in a situation like this one, and Shasa liked to bounce ideas off him and catch the returns.
‘So this is what it looks like,’ Shasa began the summing up. There were five of them in the boardroom, sitting under the magnificent Pierneef murals that Centaine had commissioned when the artist was in his prime, Shasa and David, the local manager and the secretary of Courtney Mining, and the German lawyer based in Windhoek whom Shasa kept on permanent retainer.
‘It looks like we have been asleep on our feet. In the last three years an industry has sprung up under our noses, an industry that last year alone netted twenty million pounds, four times the profits of the H’ani Mine, and we have let it happen.’
He glowered cyclops-eyed at his local manager for an explanation.
‘We were aware of the recommencement of the fishing industry at Walvis Bay,’ that unfortunate gentleman sought to explain. ‘The application for pilchard trawling licences was gazetted, but I didn’t think that fishing would match up with our other activities.’
‘With due respect, Frank, that’s the kind of decision I like to make myself. It’s your job to pass on all information, of whatever nature, to me.’ It was said quietly, but the three local men had no illusions as to the severity of the reprimand and they bowed their heads over their notepads. There was silence for ten seconds while Shas
a let them suffer.
‘Right, Frank,’ Shasa ordered him. ‘Tell us now what you should have told us four or five years ago.’
‘Well, Mr Courtney, the pilchard-fishing industry was started in the early 1930s at Walvis Bay, and although initially successful it was overtaken by the Depression, and with the primitive trawling methods of those days was unable to survive. The factories closed down and became derelict.’
As Frank spoke, Shasa’s mind went back to his childhood. He remembered his first visit to Walvis Bay and blinked with the realization that it had been twenty years ago. He and Centaine had driven down in her daffodil-coloured Daimler to call in the loan she had made to De La Rey’s canning and fishing company and to close down the factory. Those were the desperate years of the Depression when the Courtney companies had survived only through his mother’s pluck and determination — and ruthlessness.
He remembered how Lothar De La Rey, Manfred’s father, had pleaded with his mother for an extension of the loan. When his trawlers lay against the wharf, loaded to the gunwales with their catch of silver pilchards, and the sheriff of the court, on Centaine’s orders, had put his seals on the factory doors.
That was the day he had first met Manfred De La Rey. Manfred had been a bare-footed, cropped-head hulk of a lad, bigger and stronger than Shasa, burned dark by the sun, dressed in a navy-blue fisherman’s jersey and khaki shorts that were smeared with dried fish-slime, while Shasa had worn immaculate grey slacks, white open-neck shirt and a college sweater with polished black shoes on his feet.
Two boys from different worlds, they had come face to face on the main fish wharf and their hostility had been instantaneous, their hackles rising like dogs, and within minutes, gibes and insults had turned to blows and they had flown at each other furiously, punching and wrestling down the wharf while the coloured trawlermen had egged them on delightedly. He remembered clearly even after all this time Manfred De La Rey’s pale ferocious eyes glaring into his as they fell from the wharf on to the slippery, stinking cargo of dead pilchards, and he felt again the dreadful humiliation as Manfred had forced his head deeply into the quagmire of cold dead fish and he had begun to drown in their slime.