Men of Men b-2

by Wilbur Smith

  The offer had been made six months before, before those dreaded words "the blue" were whispered in the inner sanctum of the long bar of the Kimberley Club.

  Nobody would offer ZOUGA 5,000 pounds for his claims now.

  On the contrary, a week after he first heard those two dreaded words, the manager of the Standard Bank had sent a note asking him to call.

  "Major Ballantyne, in view of recent developments, the bank has been forced to review the value of collateral securing our clients" overdrafts. We have calculated the present market value of your claims as five hundred pounds each."

  "That's ridiculous, sir."

  "Major, the blue has shown on the claims of the orphen Company."

  The bank manager did not have to elaborate. The Orphen block was only separated from the Devil's Own by a dozen intervening claims. "I don't enjoy doing this, Major, but I must ask you to reduce our overdraft to one thousand pounds."

  "The blue" was the reason why many of the town's merchants were running down their stocks, preparing themselves to pull out.

  "The blue" was the reason why many of the transport riders were re-routing their wagons to the new goldfields at Pilgrims" Rest.

  "What is the blue?" asked Louise Sint John, and when none of the others spoke, Zouga's duty as host placed the burden of reply upon him.

  "The blue is the diggers, name for a type of rock formation, missis Sint John. A volcanic conglomerate, dark blue in colour and very hard, too hard to work easily." Zouga picked up his champagne glass, sipped the yellow wine and then studied the rising pinpricks of bubbles.

  "Is that all?" Louise asked quietly.

  "It has zircons in it, small zircons the size of sugar grains, but there is no market for zircons," Zouga went on grudgingly.

  "What is the significance of this, blue?" Louise persisted.

  Zouga paused to pick his words with care.

  "The diamondiferous earth is a friable yellow gravel friable means crumbling., "Thank you," Louise smiled without rancour. "I do know the word."

  "Well, then, on some of the deeper claims in the northern section the yellow gravel has pinched out, and we have come up short against this hard blue floor, hard as marble and just as sterile."

  "That hasn't been proved," Rhodes cut in sharply, and Zouga inclined his head in acceptance.

  "No, it hasn't been proved, but that is what we all fear.

  That we have come to the end. That the fields are worked out., They were all silent then, contemplating that terrifying eventuality.

  "When will you know for certain?" Mungo Sint John asked. "When will you know that this blue ground underlies the entire field, and that there are no diamonds in it?"

  "It will be many months still before the shallower claims can be worked down to the level of those that have run into the blue," Rhodes answered. "Then if we do find it covers the whole field, we will have to drive pot-holes through it to make sure that it is not a thin layer, and that the yellow gravel does not recur below it., "I see," Sint John nodded. "It seems that I was fortunate to delay my visit to Kimberley until after this blue ground was encountered, or I might have found myself the owner of a mountain of blue marble and no diamonds."

  "You have always been a fortunate man, Mungo."

  Louise flashed a smile at him, and he replied to it gravely.

  "You, my dear, are the greatest of all my good fortunes."

  With obvious relief the company abandoned the subject of the dreaded blue ground and turned to lighter topics. Only Rhodes did not join them, but sat silent and brooding at the head of the long table.

  Though Zouga smiled and nodded at the repartee, he also was distracted by the talk of lurking disaster, and his thoughts were a barrier between him and the company, so that Louise Sint John had to repeat his name to gain his attention.

  "Is that possible, Major Ballantyne?"

  Zouga roused himself and turned to her. "Forgive me, missis Sint John.

  Will you repeat the question?"

  Louise was not accustomed to having a man's thoughts wander when she was talking to him. This cold and correct Englishman was truly beginning to irritate her, and she found herself wanting to shock some natural reaction out of him. She had thought of including a man's word, one of Mungo's soldier's words, in her conversation, but good sense warned her that he would merely raise an eyebrow at such gaucherie. She had thought of ignoring him, but intuition warned her that he would probably welcome that treatment. The best course open to her was to direct her queries at him and force him to recognize her existence, and let it nettle him.

  "I was led to understand that you were the Chairman of the Kimberley Sporting Club?"

  "I have that honour," Zouga agreed.

  "I have heard also that your steeplechases or pointto-point races, I am never quite sure of your British terminology, are the most popular diversions on the diamond fields."

  Zouga shook his head and smiled. "I'm not sure of the terminology myself. They certainly are not steeplechases, we are critically short of steeples out here, and they are not point-to-point exactly, for we throw in a little rifle drill. So, we prefer to call them rough rides.

  A fairly accurate description, I think."

  "i thought to enter one of my horses, in a rough ride," Louise said.

  "We would welcome your participation," Zouga agreed.

  "I could prepare a list of our better riders from which you could choose."

  "I prefer to ride myself," Louise shook her head.

  "I am afraid that would not be possible, missis Sint John., "Why now "Because you are a woman., Her expression gave Zouga his first truly satisfying moments in her company. She had turned waxen pale so that the freckles stood out boldly on her cheeks and her eyes glowed a lighter, brighter, angry blue.

  Zouga waited for her retort, but she sensed his anticipation and, with a huge effort, denied him the satisfaction. Instead she turned to her husband.

  "It's after three o'clock. It has been a very pleasant luncheon, but I should like to return to the hotel now."

  She stood up quickly, and Mungo Sint John shrugged resignedly and stood up beside her.

  "Please do not let us break up this delightful gathering., his smile and his tone asked their indulgence for a womanly whim.

  The groom brought her horse to her and she caressed its pale silken muzzle. Then she gathered the reins, looked up at the group of men on the stoep, held Zouga's eye for a moment, before deliberately turning away.

  She placed one neat gloved hand on the stallion's withers where the long white mane rose into the crest of the shoulders, and then in the next instant she was seated on the broad and powerful back, her small feet thrust deeply into the silver-starred Mexican-type stirrups.

  Zouga was astounded. He had never seen a woman vault to the saddle. Usually it took a groom to hold the head and another to form a bridge of linked fingers to boost her to the height of the horse's back.

  Louise Sint John had gone up so lightly and easily that she might have flown, and the movement of her left hand that made the stallion rear was only apparent to someone looking for it.

  The huge horse went up on its hind legs, walking backwards in a circle, cutting at the air with its forehooves, until it faced the five-foot barbed-wire fence that marked the division between Zouga's camp and the public road.

  Then Louise moved her hand again and the stallion dropped into a dead run, straight at the fence.

  The watching men exclaimed in alarm for the stallion had a bare twenty strides to build up momentum for the jump, yet he flew at it with his pink nostrils flaring and the serpentine veins beneath the burnished skin of his cheeks swelling with the pumping of the great heart.

  Louise's thick black braids were flung out behind her head by the power of the stallion's acceleration, and then she lifted him into the jump with her knees and her hands.

  For an instant of time the horse and the tiny figure upon its back seemed to hang suspended against the pale blue of th
e sky, the horse with its forefeet drawn up beneath its noble head and the woman rising in the saddle to cushion the shock of take-off and landing, and then they were over.

  The stallion landed neatly, with his rider in perfect balance, and the golden body flowed smoothly into the continuation of his run.

  There was a soft involuntary sigh from the group on the verandah, and Zouga felt a surge of relief as powerful as the driving leap of the stallion. He had had a mental image of the woman caught up in the bloody strands of barbed wire, like a wild bird in the trapper's net, with torn body and broken wings.

  Zouga stood on top of the central stagings. He was as high above the level of the plain as a three-storey building, and from his vantage point he could see as far north as the Vaal river. The dark-green stain of the lusher scrub and grass along its course looked like cloud shadow upon the dust-pale earth, but there were no clouds in the high vault of the sky, and the brutal sun threw stark shadows below the high stagings, geometrical patterns that parodied in two-dimensional plan the intricate structure of timber and iron and steel wire. The stagings clung perilously to the sheer precipice that fell into the depths.

  It was as though a gigantic meteor had ploughed into the yellow earth, gouging this bowl-shaped dish through the earth's crust. In the deepest sections it was almost two hundred feet deep already, and each spadeful of gravel had been dug out by hand, lifted to the surface and laboriously picked over before being discarded in the mountainous waste dumps. It was a monument to the persistence of those antlike creatures that swarmed down there on the pit floor.

  Zouga wiped the black grease off his hands with a wad of cotton waste, and nodded to the Matabele winchman who threw in the gear lever of the steam winch.

  Once again the numbing clatter hammered against Zouga's skull and the slender thread of shining steel cable slithered in over the drums. The winch and steam boiler had cost Zouga over a thousand pounds, the entire winnings of an unusually productive week's labour when Jordan had picked eleven good diamonds off the sortingtable. That week's recovery had been one of the false promises that the Devil's Own had whispered to him, like an unfaithful wife.

  Zouga moved to the front of the stagings to escape the painful sound of the winch. He was on an unguarded wooden balcony with the drop sucking seductively at him, but he ignored it.

  He had ten minutes to rest now, the time that it took the gravel skip to travel up from the claims to the surface. He could see it lifting off the floor below like a fat spider creeping up its individual silken thread towards him, still too deep for him to recognize for certain the human figure riding on the enormous steel bucket.

  Zouga lit a cheroot, and it tasted of engine grease from his fingers. He looked down again, and decided that instead of an ant's nest the pit reminded him more of a beehive. Even at these deep levels the precise shape of each claim had been maintained, and the geometrical shapes were like the individual cells in a honeycomb.

  if only mine would yield a little more honey," he thought.

  The skip was close enough now for there to be no doubt of the tall young figure standing casually on the lip of the steel bucket, balancing easily with both hands on his hips as the drop grew steadily deeper under him.

  it was a matter of pride amongst the younger diggers to ride the skip in the most casual or spectacular manner possible. Zouga had forbidden Ralph to dance on the skip, a fad that had been started by a young Scot who had once danced between the floor and the stagings, accompanying himself on the bagpipes.

  Ralph drew steadily closer, rising up through the glistening web of steel cables that hung over the pit like a silver cloud. Hundreds of cables, one for each individual claim, every strand polished by the pulley wheels, by the friction over the winding drums, until they caught the sunlight and shimmered into a silver mist that hung like an aura over the pit, ethereal and lovely, hiding the harsh reality of that gouged raw earth, with its dangers and disappointments.

  While he waited for the skip to reach him, Zouga cast his mind back to that first day when he had led the single oxen into the sprawling encampment with Aletta on the wagon box beside him, and they had looked up at the riddled and torn kopje.

  So much earth had been moved since then, so many men had died in this terrible pit where that kopie had once stood and so many dreams had perished with them.

  Zouga lifted the wide-brimmed hat. Carefully he mopped the beads of sweat from the smoother paler skin along his hairline, and then he inspected the damp red stain on the silk bandanna and grimaced with distaste.

  It looked like blood.

  He re-knotted the silk about his throat, still peering down into the depths, and his eyes clouded with disenchantment as he remembered the high hopes and bounding expectation that he had brought with him on that day, was it really ten years ago? It seemed like a day and an eternity.

  He had found himself dreaming, the random events from those lost years replaying through his mind, the sorrows and the joys magnified by his imaginings and by the passage of time.

  Then, after a few minutes, Zouga roused himself.

  Dreaming was an old man's vice. The past was beyond regret; today was all that counted. He straightened his shoulders and looked down at Ralph in the swinging skip. Something jarred him, scattering the last of his dreams.

  The skip was riding differently, it did not have the accustomed weight to it, he could not yet make out the heaped yellow gravel, which, despite his orders, Ralph usually over-loaded high above the steel sides of the skip.

  It was empty, and Ralph was alone. He was coming up without the Matabele gang to help run the skip over the bars and up-end its burden of gravel into the chute, down which it would be carried to the waiting cart.

  Zouga cupped his hands to his mouth to shout his enquiry, but the words stayed in his throat.

  Ralph was close enough now for Zouga to see the expression on his face. It was tragic, stricken with some terrible emotion.

  Zouga lowered his hands and stared at his son in anticipation. The skip hit the end bars with an iron clasp and the winchman threw out the gear lever, expertly, braking the steel skip against the bars.

  Ralph jumped lightly across the narrow gap onto the platform, and stood there, still staring at Zouga.

  "What is it, my boy?" Zouga asked quietly, fearfully and for answer Ralph turned away and glanced down int the empty body of the skip.

  Zouga stepped up beside him, and followed his glance He saw that he had been mistaken, the skip was not empty.

  "It has taken us all morning to hack that out of the east face," Ralph told him.

  It looked like a roughly cut gravestone, before the inscription was chiselled in, as wide as the stretch of man's arms and imperfectly squared up, the marks of the steel wedges and pickaxe still fresh upon it.

  "We broke three pick handles on it," Ralph went on grimly, "and we only got it out because there was natural fracture line that we could crack open with wedges."

  Zouga stared at the ugly cube of stone, not wanting to believe what it was, trying to close his ears against his son's voice.

  "Underneath it's the same, solid, hard as a whore heart, no faults, no cracks."

  The lump of stone was a dull ugly mottled thing across which the steel tools had left paler weals and furrows.

  "Sixteen of us," Ralph went on. "We worked on it all morning." He opened his hands, and showed them palms upwards. The horny yellow calluses had been torn open, the raw flesh beneath was mushy and caked with dust and earth. "All morning we broke our hearts and our picks on it, and that bloody little chip weighs less than half a ton."

  Slowly Zouga stooped over the edge of the skip and touched the stone. it was as cold as his heart felt, and its colour was dark mottled blue.

  "The blue," Ralph confirmed quietly. "We have hit the blue."

  "Dynamite or blasting gelatine," Ralph said. "That's the only way we'll ever move it."

  He was stripped to the waist, a polish of sweat on his arms, a
nd little drops of it hanging like dew in the thick hair of his chest.

  The tombstone of blue marble lay at his feet, and Ralph rested on the shaft of the sledgehammer. The blows he had swung at the rock had raised bursts of sparks and tiny puffs of white dust that stung their nostrils like pepper, but had not cracked the rock through.

  "We cannot blast in the pit," Zouga said tiredly. "Can you imagine two hundred diggers firing away dynamite, every one doing it when and how he wanted?" He shook his head.

  "There is no other way," Ralph said. "No other way to get it out."

  "And if you do get it out? Jordan asked from the verandah where he had stood without speaking for the past hour.

  "What do you mean?" Zouga demanded. He could hear the strain in his own voice, and knew how close, his anger and frustration were to the surface.

  "What will you do with it when you do get it out?

  Jordan persisted, and they all stared at the awful blue lump.

  "There are no diamonds in that stuff." Jordan said it for them.

  "How do we know that?" Ralph snapped at him, his voice rough and ugly with the same tension that gripped Zouga.

  "I know it," Jordan said flatly. "I can sense it, just look at it. It's hard and bleak and bare."

  Nobody replied to that, and Jordan shook his curls.regretfully. "Even if there were diamonds in it, how would you free them from the blue? You can't smash them out with sledgehammers. You'd end up with diamond dust."

  "Ralph," Zouga turned away from Jordan, "this stuff, this blue, it's only on the east face, isn't it?"

  "So far." Ralph nodded. "But, "

  "I want you to cover up the east face," Zouga told him bluntly. "Shovel gravel over the exposed rock. Nobody else must see it. Nobody else must know."

  Ralph nodded, and Zouga went on, "We will keep on raising the yellow gravel from the other sections as though nothing has happened; and nobody, not one of you, is to say a word about, about Us having struck the blue." He looked directly at Jordan. "Do you understand, not a word to anybody."

  Zouga sat easily in the saddle, riding with the long stirrups of a Boer hunter or of a born colonial.