by Wilbur Smith
A pariah dog sniffed the breath of one of the unconscious drunks, and recoiled with shock before slinking away to raid the open drum that served as a rubbish bin behind the shack.
Zouga stepped over the sprawling bodies and gingerly made his way into the noisome slum beyond. He had to make half a dozen further enquiries until he found Jock Danby’s hut. So obsessed were the diggers with their own race for the hidden glitter of wealth, and so transient the population of the diggings, that a man seemed to know only the names of his immediate neighbours. It was a community of strangers, every man caring only for himself, completely uninterested in the other human beings about him, except in as much as they could either hinder or help him in his quest for the bright stones.
Jock Danby’s hut was hardly distinguishable from a thousand others. Two rooms built of adobe bricks and covered with thatch and tattered canvas. There was a lean-to at one end, with a smoking cooking fire on which stood a sooty black three-legged pot.
In the cluttered dusty yard stood the inevitable diamond sorting-table, a low structure with sturdy wooden legs, the top covered with a sheet of flat iron which was scoured shiny bright by the diamondiferous pebbles that had brushed over the surface. The wooden scrapers lay abandoned on the table top, and a heap of sieved and washed gravel formed a glittering pyramid in the centre of the table.
A two-wheeled cart stood in front of the main door of the hut, two somnolent donkeys still in the traces, flicking their ears at the swarming black cloud of flies. The cart was piled with lumps of yellow earth, but the yard was deserted.
Incongruously there were a few straggling scarlet geraniums growing in galvanized one-gallon syrup cans on each side of the doorway. There were also dainty lace curtains in the single window, so freshly washed that they had not yet turned ochre red with dust, nor become speckled with the excrement of the swarming flies.
The touch of a woman was unmistakable, and to confirm Zouga’s guess there was the faint but harrowing sound of a woman weeping from the open doorway.
As Zouga hesitated in the yard, disconcerted by the sounds of grief, a brawny figure filled the doorway and stood blinking in the sunlight, shading his eyes with a gnarled and dirt-ingrained hand.
‘Who are you?’ Jock Danby demanded, with unnecessary roughness.
‘I spoke to you yesterday,’ Zouga explained, ‘up at the pit.’
‘What do you want?’ the digger demanded, showing no sign of recognition, his features screwed up in an expression of truculence and something else, some other emotion which Zouga did not immediately recognize.
‘You spoke of selling your briefies,’ Zouga reminded him.
Jock Danby’s face seemed to swell and turn dark ugly red; the veins and cords stood out in his throat as he ducked his head down on the thickly muscled shoulders.
‘You filthy bloody vulture,’ he choked, and he came out into the sunlight with the heavy irresistible crabbing rush of a gut-shot buffalo bull.
He was taller than Zouga by a head, ten years younger and fifty pounds heavier. Taken completely by surprise, Zouga was a hundredth part of a second late in ducking and spinning away from the man’s charge. A fist like a cannon ball smashed into his shoulder, a glancing blow but with the force to send Zouga reeling to sprawl on his back across the sorting-table, scattering diamondiferous gravel across the dusty yard.
Jock Danby charged again, his swollen face working, his eyes mad, his thick stained fingers hooked as they reached for Zouga’s throat. Zouga jack-knifed his legs, drawing himself into a ball, tense as the arch in an adder’s neck at the moment before it strikes, and he drove the heels of his boots into the man’s chest.
The breath whistled out of Jock Danby’s throat, and he stopped in mid-charge as though hit in the chest with a double charge of buckshot. His head and arms snapped forward, nerveless as a straw-man, and he flew backwards, crashing into the unbaked brick wall of the hut and beginning to slide down onto his knees.
Zouga bounded off the tabletop. His left arm was numb to the fingertips from the unexpected blow, but he was light on his feet as a dancer, and the quick rush of cold anger armed and strengthened him. He closed the gap between them with two swift strides and hooked Jock Danby, high in the side of his head just above and in front of his ear; the shock of the punch jarred his own teeth but sent the man spinning along the wall to slump on his knees in the red dust.
Jock Danby was stunned and his eyes were glazing over, but Zouga jerked him to his feet and propped him against the side of the cart, setting him up carefully for the next punch. His anger and outrage driving him on to revenge that unprovoked and senseless attack, Zouga shifted his weight, holding Jock Danby steady with his left hand and pulling back the right fist for a full-blooded swing.
Then he froze. He never threw the punch. Instead he stared incredulously. Jock Danby was blubbering like a child, his heavy shoulders shaking uncontrollably, tears greasing down the sunraddled cheeks into the dusty beard.
It was somehow shocking and embarrassing to see a man like this weep, and Zouga felt his anger swiftly extinguished. He dropped his fist and unclenched it at his side.
‘Christ—’ Jock Danby choked hoarsely. ‘What kind of man are you to try and make a profit of another man’s grief?’
Zouga stared at him, unable to answer the accusation.
‘You must have smelt it, like a hyena or a fat bloody vulture.’
‘I came to make you a fair offer – that’s all,’ Zouga replied stiffly. He took the handkerchief from his jacket pocket and handed it to Jock Danby. ‘Wipe your face, man,’ he ordered gruffly.
Jock smeared his tears and then studied the stained linen. ‘You didn’t know then?’ he whispered. ‘You didn’t know about the boy?’ He looked up and studied Zouga’s face sharply and, seeing his answer, he handed back the handkerchief and shook his head like a spaniel shaking off the water from its ears, trying to steady his reeling senses. ‘I’m sorry,’ he grunted. ‘I thought somehow you had learned about the boy – and come to buy me out.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Zouga told him, and Jock Danby started for the door of the shack.
‘Come,’ he said, and led Zouga through the hot stuffy little front room. The chairs covered with dark green velvet were too bulky for the size of the room, and the family treasures – Bible and faded ancestral photographs, cheap cutlery and a porcelain dish commemorating the Queen’s wedding to Prince Albert – were on display upon the central table.
In the door of the back room Zouga paused, and felt a sickening little lurch in the pit of his stomach. A woman knelt beside the bed. She had a shawl spread over head and shoulders. Her hands clasped before her face were roughened and reddened by the drudgery of labour over the diamond sorting-table.
She lifted her head and looked at Zouga in the doorway. She might once have been a pretty girl, but the sun had coarsened her skin and her eyes were swollen and reddened with grief. The wisps of hair that hung lankly from under the shawl were greasy and prematurely greyed.
After that one glance she lowered her head again and her lips moved silently as she prayed.
A child lay upon the bed, a boy no older than Jordan. His eyes were closed, his features very pale, bloodless as candlewax, but infinitely peaceful. He was dressed in a clean nightshirt, his limbs neatly arranged, the hands folded on his chest.
It took Zouga a full minute to realize that he was dead. ‘The fever,’ whispered Jock at Zouga’s side. He broke off and stood dumb and massive as an ox awaiting the butcher’s stroke.
Zouga took Jock Danby’s cart down to Market Square and purchased a dozen rough-sawn planks of lumber, paying the transport rider’s price without haggling.
In the dusty yard in front of Danby’s shack he stripped to his shirtsleeves and planed the raw planks, while Jock sawed and shaped them. They worked in silence except for the whicker of plane and saw.
The rough coffin was ready before noon, but as Jock lifted his son’s body into it Zouga cau
ght the first whiff of corruption; it happens very swiftly in the African heat.
Jock’s wife rode on the battered cart with the coffin and Zouga walked beside Jock Danby.
The fever was ravaging the camp. There were two other carts already at the burial ground, a mile beyond the last tents on the Transvaal road, each surrounded with a silent knot of mourners; and there were graves ready dug, and a grave-digger to demand his guinea.
On the way back from the burial ground Zouga stopped the cart in front of one of the canteens that fronted the market square, and with the remaining coins in his pocket he bought three bottles of Cape brandy.
He and Jock sat facing each other on the over-stuffed green velvet chairs, with an open bottle and two tumblers on the table between them. The tumblers were embossed with cheery gold letters:
The Queen, God Bless Her.
Zouga half-filled the tumblers and pushed one across to Jock.
The big man studied the contents of the tumbler, holding it in his huge fists between his knees, hunching his shoulders and drooping his head.
‘It was so quick,’ he muttered. ‘Yesterday evening he ran to meet the cart, and rode home on my shoulder.’ He took a swallow of the dark liquor and shuddered. His voice was husky as he went on. ‘He was so light. No meat on his little bones.’
They drank in unison.
‘There was a jinx on me from the moment I drove my first peg on these bloody claims.’ Jock shook his great shaggy head. ‘I should have stayed on the river-diggings, like Alice told me.’
Outside the single lace-covered window the sun was already setting, a lurid red show through the dust clouds; and as the gloom gathered in the room, Alice Danby came through and placed a smoky hurricane lantern on the table between them and followed it with two bowls of Boer-meal porridge swimming in a thin and oily mutton stew. Then she disappeared silently into the back room and, from time to time during the long night, Zouga heard her gentle sobs through the thin dividing wall.
In the dawn Jock Danby lolled in the green velvet armchair, his shirt open to the navel and his hairy stomach bulging out of it. The third bottle was half empty.
‘You are a gentleman,’ Jock slurred unevenly. ‘I don’t mean a swell or a toff but a bloody gentleman, that’s what you are.’
Zouga sat upright, grave and attentive; except for a slight reddening of his eyes he seemed totally unaffected by the night’s drinking.
‘I wouldn’t want to wish the Devil’s Own on a gentleman like you.’
Zouga said quietly, ‘If you’re going, you have to sell to someone.’
‘They’re jinxed, those two claims,’ mumbled Jock. ‘They’ve killed five men already, they’ve broken me, they’ve given me the worst year of my life. I’ve seen men on each side of me pull big stones; I’ve seen them become rich – while me—’ he made a drunken gesture that encompassed the sordid little shack, ‘look at me.’
The canvas that screened the connecting doorway was jerked aside and Alice Danby stood bareheaded beside her husband. It was evident by her drawn grey features that she had not slept either.
‘Sell them,’ she said. ‘I cannot stay here another day. Sell them, sell everything – let’s go, Jock, let’s get away from this dreadful place. I cannot bear to spend another night here.’
The mining commissioner was a dour little magistrate appointed by President Brand of the fledgling Boer Free State, who laid claim to the diggings.
Brand was not the only one to have done so. Old Waterboer, the chief of the Griqua Bastaards, made cross claim to the arid plains where his people had lived for fifty years and more. In London, Lord Kimberley, Secretary of State for the Colonies, had only just awakened to the potential wealth of the diamond diggings, and for the first time was listening attentively to the pleas of the Imperialists to support old Nicholaas Waterboer’s claim and take Griqualand into the sphere of British influence.
In the meantime the Free State mining commissioner was trying, with only qualified success, to maintain some order over the unruly diggers. Just as his roadways were crumbling into the surrounding pits on Colesberg kopje, so his authority was eroding before the onrush of events with the gathering of national interests and the emergence from obscurity of the first powerful figures as the financial aristocracy of the fields.
Zouga and Jock Danby found the commissioner bewailing his task over a liquid breakfast in the bar of the London Hotel and, supporting him by each elbow, they escorted him back across Market Square to his office.
By mid-morning that day, the commissioner had copied the details of the Devil’s Own, claim Nos 141 and 142 held under perpetual quit-rent letter, from J. A. Danby, Esq. to Major M. Z. Ballantyne, and noted payment in full in the sum of £2,000 by cheque drawn on the Standard Bank.
An hour after noon, Zouga stood at the corner of Market Square, and watched the cart piled high with the green velvet armchairs and the brass bedstead pull away towards the northern corner of the square. Jock Danby led the team, and his wife sat thin and erect upon the load. Neither of them looked back at Zouga, and the moment they disappeared into the maze of narrow alleys and shanties Zouga turned towards the kopje.
Despite the night of sleep that he had missed, he felt no fatigue, and his step was so light that he almost ran out along the narrow causeway that intersected the jumble of claims and workings.
The Devil’s Own were deserted, two forlorn patches of raw yellow earth, neatly squared off and littered with abandoned equipment. Jock Danby’s black workers had gone, for there was always a desperate shortage of labourers on the diggings. When Jock had not mustered them the previous dawn they had simply wandered away to take daily hire with one of the other diggers.
Most of the mining gear left on the claims seemed worn out, the buckets on the point of bursting and the ropes furry as fat yellow caterpillars. Zouga would not trust them with his own weight.
Gingerly he climbed down the swaying ladder, his cautious movements alerting the diggers on the neighbouring claims that he was an outsider.
‘Those are Jock Danby’s briefies, man,’ one of them shouted a challenge. ‘You breaking the diggers’ law. That’s private ground. You better clear out – and bloody quick, at that.’
‘I bought Jock out,’ Zouga shouted back. ‘He left town an hour ago.’
‘How do I know that?’
‘Why don’t you go up to the commissioner’s office?’ Zouga asked. The challenger scowled up at him uncertainly, the level of his claim twenty feet below the Devil’s Own.
Men had stopped work along the length of the irregular pit, others had lined the causeway high above, and there was an ugly mood on all of them – that was broken by a clear young voice speaking in the cadence and intonation of a refined English gentleman.
‘Major Ballantyne – that is you, is it not?’ And, peering up at the causeway, Zouga recognized Neville Pickering, his drinking companion from the first day in the London Hotel.
‘It is indeed, Mr Pickering.’
‘That’s all right, fellows. I’ll vouch for Major Ballantyne. He is the famous elephant hunter, don’t you know?’
Almost immediately they lost interest and turned away to become absorbed once more in their own race to get the buckets of gravelly yellow stuff to the surface.
‘Thank you,’ Zouga called up to the man on the causeway above him.
‘My pleasure, sir.’ Pickering flashed a brilliant smile, touched the brim of his hat and sauntered away, a slim and elegant figure in the press of bearded dust-caked diggers.
Zouga was left alone, as alone in spirit as he had ever been in any of his wanderings across the vast African continent. He had spent almost the last penny he owned on these few square feet of yellow earth at the bottom of this hot and dusty pit. He had no men to help him work it, no experience, no capital – and he doubted that he would recognize an uncut diamond if he held one in the palm of his hand.
As suddenly as it had descended upon him, the gambler’s elatio
n, the premonition of good fortune that awaited him here evaporated. He was instantly overwhelmed by his own presumption and by the enormity of the gamble he was taking.
He had risked it all on claims that so far had not yielded a single good stone, the price of diamonds was plummeting, the ‘pool goods’, small splints of half a carat or less which formed the vast bulk of stones recovered, were fetching only five shillings each.
It was a wild chance, and his stomach slid sickeningly as he faced the consequences of failure.
The sun was almost directly overhead, burning down into the bottom of the workings; the air around him wavered with the heat and it came up through the leather of his boots to scorch the soles of his feet. He felt as though he were suffocating, as though he could not bear it another moment, as though he must scramble up out of this loathsome pit to where the air was cooler and sweeter.
He knew then he was afraid. It was an emotion to which he was not accustomed. He had stood down the charge of a wounded bull elephant, and taken his chance – man to man, steel to steel – on the frontiers of India and in the wild border wars of the Cape.
He was not accustomed to feeling fear, but the waves of panic rose up out of some dark place in his soul and he fought to control them. The sense of impending disaster crushed down upon him. Under his feet he could almost feel the sterility of the baking earth, the barren earth which would cripple him at last, and destroy the dream which had been the fuel on which his life had run for all these years.
Was it all to end here in this hot and hellish pit?
He took a deep breath, and held it for a moment, fighting off the waves of blind panic, and slowly they receded, leaving him feeling weak and shaken as though from a heavy dose of malarial fever.
He went down on one knee and took a handful of the yellow stuff, sifting it through his fingers, and then examined the residue of dull and worthless pebbles. He let them drop and dusted his hand against his thigh.