by Wilbur Smith
Pickering glossed over the remark tactfully. He did not have to declare his own birth. He was an English gentleman, and nobody would ever mistake that.
‘There are many parts of your book that fascinated me. I’ll teach you what I know about sparklers if you’ll answer my questions. Bargain?’
Over the days that followed they bombarded each other with questions, Zouga demanding every detail of the process of raising and sorting the yellow gravel from the deepening pit, while Pickering kept turning the conversation back to the land to the north, asking about the tribes and the gold reefs, about the rivers and mountains and the wild animals that swarmed upon the plains and in the lonely forests that Zouga had conjured up so vividly in Hunter’s Odyssey.
Each morning an hour before the first light, Zouga would meet Pickering at the edge of the roadway above the workings. There would be an enamelled kettle bubbling on the brazier and they drank black coffee that was strong enough to stain the teeth, while around them in the gloom the black mine-workers gathered sleepily, still hugging their fur karosses over their shoulders, their voices muted but musical, their movements stiff and slow with sleepiness and the dawn chill.
At a hundred other points around the growing pit the gangs assembled, waiting for the light; and when it glimmered on the eastern horizon the men went swarming down into the workings, like columns of ants, along the boardwalks and down the swaying ladders, spreading out on the chequerboard of claims, the hubbub rising, the chant of tribesmen, the squeal of ropes, the hectoring shouts of the white overseers, and then the rattle of bucketloads of yellow gravel into the waiting carts upon the roadway.
Pickering was working four claims, which he owned in partnership.
‘My partner is down in Cape Town. Heaven knows when he will be back.’
Neville Pickering shrugged with that deceptively indolent air which he cultivated. ‘You’ll meet him one of these fine days, and it will be an experience – memorable but not necessarily enjoyable.’
It amused Zouga to see how Neville contrived to maintain his foppish elegance of dress, how he could walk the length of the No. 6 Roadway without the dust hazing the shine of his boots; how he could scramble across the ladderworks without dampening his shirt with sweat, or exchange a flurry of blows with a brawny digger who was encroaching on his claims without it seeming to affect the drape of his Norfolk jacket. His casual sauntering gait carried him from one end of the diggings to the other, at a pace which had Zouga stretching his own legs.
The four claims were not in a single block, but each separated from the others by a dozen or so intervening claims, and Pickering moved from one to the other coordinating the work, pulling a gang of half-naked black men from one claim and leading them across to another where the work had fallen behind.
Abruptly he was on the roadway, checking the loading of the carts, and then again, just as abruptly, at the fenced-off plot beyond Market Square where his black workers were rocking the cradles of gravel.
The diamond cradles were like giant versions of the old-fashioned baby cradles from which they took their name. Standing on their half-moon-shaped feet, a man on each side kept them swinging easily from side to side while a third worker shovelled the yellow gravel into the top deck of the cradle from the mound that the cart had dumped. The top deck was a coarse steel sieve, with inch and a half openings in the mesh.
As the cradle rocked rhythmically, the gravel tumbled and bounced across the sloping sieve, the finer stuff under one and a half inches in diameter dropping through onto the second deck of the cradle while the coarse pebbles and waste rolled over under the surveillance of the two cradle men, who watched for the highly unlikely flash of a diamond too big to fall through onto the second deck.
A diamond more than one and a half inches across would be the fortune-maker, the finder’s passport to great wealth, the almost impossible ‘pony’ of the diggers’ dreams, a stone heavier than one hundred carats.
On the second deck the mesh was much finer, half-inch square, and a yellow dust blew away like smoke as the cradle agitated it, while on the third deck the mesh was finer still, allowing only the worthless tailings to drop to waste, stuff smaller than the crystals of refined sugar.
From the third deck the gravel was gathered with reverential care, and this was washed in a tub of precious water, every drop of which had been transported thirty miles from the Vaal river.
The gravel was washed in a circular sieve of the No. 3 mesh, the finest of all. The worker agitating and dipping over the tub, muddy to the elbows. Finally the contents of the sieve, cleansed of mud, were dumped onto the flat metal surface of the sorting-table, and the sorters began picking over it with the flat wooden blades of their scrapers.
Women were far away the best sorters, they had the patience, the manual dexterity and the fine eye for colour and texture that was needed. The married diggers kept their wives and daughters at the sorting-table from the minute the mellow morning light was strong enough until the dusk faded each evening.
Pickering was not lucky enough to have women working his tables, but the Africans he had were carefully trained, although never trusted.
‘You would never credit what they do with a good stone to try and get away with it. I smile sometimes at what the Duchess would think if she knew that the shiner hanging around her neck had been up the tail end of a big black Basuto,’ Pickering chuckled. ‘Come, I’ll show you what to look for.’
The wiry little black sorter at the head of the table advertised his superior status by his European finery, embroidered waistcoat and Derby hat, but his feet were bare and he carried his snuff-horn in the pierced lobe of his ear. He vacated his seat at the table cheerfully, and Neville Pickering took up the scraper and began to sift through the gravel, a few pebbles at a time.
‘There!’ he grunted suddenly. ‘Your first wild diamond, old man! Take a good look at it, and let’s hope it isn’t your last.’
Zouga was surprised. It was not what he had expected, and then his surprise was replaced immediately by disappointment. It was a drab little chip of stone, barely the size of one of the sand fleas which swarmed in the red dust of the camp.
It lacked the fire and flash that Zouga had expected, and its colour was a dingy yellow: the colour of champagne perhaps, but without that wine’s sparkle.
‘Are you sure?’ Zouga asked. ‘It doesn’t look like a diamond to me. How can you tell?’
‘It’s a splint-chip, probably a piece of a larger stone. It will go ten points, that’s a tenth part of a carat, and we will be lucky to get five shillings for it, but it will pay the wages of one of my men for a week.’
‘How do you tell the difference between that – and those?’ Zouga indicated the mound of gravel in the centre of the table, still wet from the washing-tub, glistening in a thousand different shades of red and gold, anthracite black and flesh pinks, the gaudy show of diamondiferous gravel.
‘It’s the soapiness,’ Pickering explained, ‘the soap texture. You will train your eye to it soon, don’t bother about the colour – look for the soap.’ He took the stone in the teeth of a pair of wooden tweezers and turned it in the sunlight. ‘A diamond is unwettable, it repels water; so in the wet gravel it stands out, and the difference is that soapy look.’
Neville proffered the stone. ‘There, I tell you what, you keep it as a gift, your first diamond.’
They had been hunting for nearly ten days now, and had gradually moved farther and farther north.
Twice they had sighted quarry, small groups, but each time the quarry had scattered at the first approach.
Zouga was getting desperate. His claims were lying abandoned in the New Rush workings, the level of the surrounding claims would be sinking swiftly, making his more difficult to work and every day increasing the danger of rock slide. Those claims had already killed five men. Jock Danby had warned him.
He was lying now, belly down, on a tiny rocky kopje fifty miles north of the Vaal river, eighty mil
es from New Rush, and he was still not certain when he could finish this business and turn southwards again.
Jan Cheroot and the two boys were farther down the slope with the horses, holding them in a shallow ravine that was choked with scrub thorn. Jordan’s girlish tones carried to where Zouga sat, blending with the cries of circling birds, and Zouga lowered the binoculars to rest his eyes and to listen to his son’s voice.
He had worried about taking the boy on this rough journey, especially so soon after that bout of camp fever, but there had been no alternative, no safe place to leave him. Once again Jordan’s stamina had belied his delicate looks. He had ridden hard and kept up well with his brother, at the same time recovering the flesh that the fever had burned from his body; and in the last days the deathly pallor of his skin had been gilded to velvety peach.
Thinking about Jordan led directly to memories of Aletta, memories still so filled with sorrow and raw guilt that he could not bear them and he lifted the binoculars again and raked the plain, seeking distraction. He found it with relief.
There was unusual movement far out on the wide plain. Through the lens Zouga picked up a herd of a hundred wildebeest, the ‘wild cattle’ of the Boers. These ungainly animals, with their mournful Roman noses and scraggly beards, were the clowns of the veld. They chased each other in aimless circles, nose to earth and heels kicking at the sky, then abruptly they ceased this lunatic cavorting and stood snorting at one another with wild-eyed expressions of amazement.
Beyond them Zouga caught a flicker of other movement: until that moment it had been hidden by the dust kicked up by the splayed wildebeest hooves. Carefully he adjusted the bevelled focus ring of his binoculars, and the heat mirage trembled and melted before his gaze, turning the movement into a serpentine wriggle that seemed to float above the plain on a lake of silver shimmering water.
‘Ostriches!’ he thought disgustedly. The distant shapes seemed to wriggle like long black tadpoles in the watery wavering mirage of distance. The long-legged birds seemed to float free of the earth, blooming miraculously in the tortured air above the plain. Zouga tried to count them, but they changed shape and coagulated into a dark wavering mass, their plumed backs bobbing.
Suddenly Zouga sat up. He dropped the binoculars and polished the lens with the tail of the silk bandanna around his throat, then quickly lifted them to his eyes again. The grotesque dark shapes had separated, the lumpy wriggling bodies fined down, the elongated legs had assumed normal proportions.
‘Men!’ whispered Zouga, and counted them eagerly, as eagerly as he had ever made a first sighting of the huge ivory-carrying grey bull elephants in the hunting veld. He reached eleven before another layer of heated air intervened and altered the distant man-shapes to grotesque unsteady monsters once again.
Zouga slung the binoculars over his shoulder and went down the slope with the loose scree rolling under his boots. Jan Cheroot and the boys lay in the bottom of the ravine on their saddle blankets, their saddles propped behind them as bolsters.
Zouga slid down the bank and landed between them before they had returned from the fairyland that Jan Cheroot had been spinning for them.
‘A good bunch,’ he told Jan Cheroot.
Zouga reached down and withdrew the short Martini-Henry carbine from the leather bucket of Ralph’s saddle. He levered the breech-block down and checked the weapon was empty.
‘We aren’t after springbuck. Don’t you load until either Jan Cheroot or I tell you,’ he ordered sternly.
Jordan was still too little to handle the heavy rifle, but he rode well enough to make the encircling sweep with which they would try to close the net.
‘Remember, Jordie, that you stay close enough to Jan Cheroot to hear what he tells you,’ Zouga told him, glancing up at the sun as he did so.
It was well past noon; he would have to move fairly soon – for if they could not surround the little band of black men at the first attempt, if they did not achieve surprise, then it would be the old time-consuming business of spooring them down individually. So far attempts at doing so had always been interrupted by the sudden African nightfall.
‘Saddle up,’ Zouga ordered, and they scrambled to their horses.
Zouga swung up onto the bay gelding and glared sternly at Ralph.
‘Now you do what you are told – or I’ll warm your tail feathers for you, young man.’
He swung the horse’s head and pointed it down the ravine, while behind his back Ralph grinned at Jan Cheroot conspiratorially, his face flushed with excitement, and the little Hottentot closed one eyelid briefly but kept his flat wrinkled oriental features expressionless.
Zouga had chosen the kopje with care; from it a ravine meandered out across the plain in an approximate east to west direction – and he followed it now, slouching in the saddle to keep his head below the level of the banks and keeping the gelding down to a walk so as not to raise dust.
After half a mile he removed the wide-brimmed hat from his head and raised himself cautiously in the stirrups until his eyes were just above the bank, and he darted a quick glance into the north and then immediately ducked down again.
‘Station here,’ he told Ralph. ‘And don’t move until I do.’
They moved on down the ravine, while Zouga placed Jan Cheroot and Jordan side by side in a bend of the ravine where the bank had collapsed and formed an easy ramp up which they could launch their charge.
‘Keep Jordie close,’ Zouga cautioned Jan Cheroot, and swung the gelding around with the saddlery creaking as the animal turned in the narrow gut of the ravine; then Zouga trotted back until he was in the centre of the waiting line, and there he halted and contained his impatience, glancing up repeatedly at the lowering sun.
There would probably not be another chance for many days, and each day was vital for those untended claims. Zouga jerked the rifle from the leather bucket at his knee, selected a cartridge from the bandolier around his waist and slipped it into the breech. Then he returned the weapon uncocked to the bucket. It was merely a precaution, but he had no means of knowing what manner of men those approaching figures were.
Even if their intentions were peaceable, and their ultimate object identical to Zouga’s own, yet they would be armed and nervous, so nervous that they had avoided the road from the north and were travelling over the open veld. They were in company for defence, and Zouga knew they would have been harassed often along the way, by black men and white: the black men trying to rob and cheat them of their meagre possessions, the white men of something infinitely more valuable, their right to contract their labour to the highest bidder.
On the day that Zouga thanked Neville Pickering for his tuition and began preparing to work the Devil’s Own claims for his personal account, he had faced the problem that was already wracking the entire sub-continent.
Only black men could stand the conditions of physical labour in the diggings. Only black men would work for a wage that made the diggings profitable, and even that beggarly wage was many times more than the Boer farmers of the surrounding backveld republics could afford to pay.
The diamond diggings had denuded the countryside of labourers for five hundred miles around; and the Boers resented that as fiercely as they resented the nest of adventurers and fortune seekers that the diggings supported.
The diamonds had caused an upheaval in the Boers’ traditional way of life; not only were the miners threatening the supply of cheap labour, which only just allowed a diligent and frugal farmer to eke out a living for himself and his family from the savage land, but the diggers were doing something else that from the Boer point of view was unforgivable, that went against all their deeply held beliefs and threatened not just their livelihood but their very physical existence.
The diamond diggers were paying the black tribesmen with guns. The Boers had fought the tribes at Blood River and Mosega, they had stood to the laager in ten thousand threatening dawns, the favourite hour of attack. They had seen the smoke rising from their bur
ning homesteads and crops, they had ridden out on commando on the spoor of their stolen herds, and they had buried the pale corpses of their children, the blood drained from the frail bodies through the gaping and terrible wounds of the assegai. They had buried them at Weenen – the Place of Weeping – and at other accursed and abandoned grave sites across the land.
The payment of black men with guns went against every one of their instincts; it flew full in the face of their laws and offended the memories of their dead heroes.
For these reasons Boer commandos from the little backveld republics were sweeping the land and patrolling the lonely roads from the north to try and prevent the tribesmen reaching the diggings and instead press them to work upon the land.
However, five shillings a week and a musket at the end of a three years’ contract were a lure that brought the tribesmen, on foot, against a hundred hazards, on a journey of hundreds of miles, daring the commandos and all else, to reach the diggings.
They came in their hundreds, but still not enough of them arrived to fill those hungry diamond pits. In vain Zouga and Jan Cheroot had ridden the workings. Every black man was signed on contract, and jealously guarded by his employer.
Zouga had told Jan Cheroot, ‘We’ll offer seven shillings and sixpence a week.’
They signed five men that same day at the higher wage, and the next day there were a dozen deserters waiting outside Zouga’s camp, eager for the new coin.
Before Zouga could sign them, Neville Pickering sauntered up. ‘Official visit, old man,’ he murmured apologetically. ‘As a member of the jolly old Diggers’ Committee, I have to tell you the rate is five shillings not seven and six.’
When Zouga opened his mouth to protest, Pickering smiled easily and held up his hand.
‘No, Major. I’m sorry. It’s five shillings, and not a penny more.’
Zouga was already in no doubt about the sweeping powers of the Diggers’ Committee. An edict from the elected body was enforced firstly by a warning, then a beating, and finally by the full aggression of the entire community of diggers which could end in a burning or even a lynching.