by Wilbur Smith
‘I still cannot imagine you living like one of the San women, Mater. Not you. I mean it just goes beyond imagination.’
‘It was hard,’ she said softly. ‘It was hard beyond the telling of it, beyond imagination – and yet without that tempering and toughening I would not be what I am now. You see, Shasa, out here in the desert when I had almost reached the breaking point I swore an oath. I swore that I, and my son, would never again be so deprived. I swore that we would never again have to suffer those terrible extremes.’
‘But I was not with you then.’
‘Oh yes,’ she nodded. ‘Oh yes, you were. I carried you within me on the Skeleton Coast and through the heat of the dune lands and you were part of that oath when I made it. We are creatures of the desert, my darling, and we will survive and prosper when others fail and fall. Remember that. Remember it well, Shasa, my darling.’
Early the next morning they left the servants to break camp, load the pack horses and follow them as they turned their horses regretfully in the direction of the H’ani Mine. At noon they rested under a camel-thorn tree, lying against their saddles and lazily watching the drab little weavers above their heads busily adding to their communal nest that was already the size of an untidy haystack. When the heat went out of the sun, they caught the hobbled horses, upsaddled and rode along the base of the hills.
Shasa straightened in the saddle suddenly and shaded his eyes with one hand as he looked up at the hills.
‘What is it, chéri?’
He had recognized the rocky gorge to which Annalisa had led him.
‘Something is worrying you,’ Centaine insisted, and Shasa felt a sudden urge to lead his mother up the gorge to the shrine of the witch of the mountain. He was about to speak when he remembered his oath and he stopped, teetering uneasily on the brink of betrayal.
‘Don’t you want to tell me?’ She was watching the struggle on his face.
‘Mater doesn’t count. She’s like me. It’s not as though I were telling a stranger,’ he justified himself and burst out before his conscience could overtake him. ‘There is the skeleton of a Bushman in the gorge up there, Mater. Would you like me to show you?’
Centaine paled under her suntan and stared at him. ‘A Bushman?’ she whispered. ‘How do you know it’s a Bushman?’
‘The hair is still on the skull – little Bushman peppercorn curls, just like Kwi and his clan.’
‘How did you find it?’
‘Anna—’ he broke off and flushed with guilt.
‘The girl showed you?’ Centaine helped him.
‘Yes.’ He nodded and hung his head.
‘Can you find it again?’ Centaine’s colour had returned, and she seemed eager and excited as she leaned across and tugged his sleeve.
‘Yes, I think so, I marked the place.’ He pointed up the cliffs. ‘That notch in the rocks and that cleft shaped like an eye.’
‘Show me, Shasa,’ she ordered.
‘We will have to leave the horses and go up on foot.’
The climb was onerous, the heat in the gorge fierce and the hooked thorns snatched at them as they toiled upwards.
‘It must be about here.’ Shasa climbed up on one of the tumbled boulders and orientated himself. ‘Perhaps just a little more to the left. Look for a pile of rock with a mimosa growing below it. There is a branch covering a small niche. Let’s spread out and search.’
They picked their way slowly up the gorge, moving a little apart to cover more ground and keeping in touch with whistles and calls when scrub and rocks separated them.
Centaine did not respond to Shasa’s whistle, and he stopped and repeated it, cocking his head for her reply and feeling a prickle of concern in the silence.
‘Mater, where are you?’
‘Here!’ Her voice was faint, wracked with pain or some deep emotion and he scrambled over the rock to reach her.
She stood small and forlorn in the sunlight, holding her hat against the front of her hips. Moisture sparkled on her cheeks. He thought it was sweat, until he saw the soft slow slide of tears down her face.
‘Mater?’ He moved up behind her and realized that she had found the shrine.
She had drawn the screening branch aside. The small circle of glass jars was still in place, the floral offering brown and withered.
‘Annalisa said the skeleton was a witch,’ Shasa breathed with superstitious awe as he stared over Centaine’s shoulder at the pathetic pile of bones and the small neat white skull that surmounted it.
Centaine shook her head, unable to speak.
‘She said the witch guarded the mountain and that she would grant a wish.’
‘H’ani.’ Centaine choked on the name. ‘My beloved old grandmother.’
‘Mater!’ Shasa seized her shoulders and steadied her as she swayed on her feet. ‘How do you know?’
Centaine leaned against his chest for support but did not reply.
‘There could be hundreds of Bushman skeletons in the caves and gorges,’ he went on lamely, and she shook her head vehemently.
‘How can you be certain?’
‘It’s her.’ Centaine’s voice was blurred with grief. ‘It’s H’ani, the chipped canine tooth, the design of ostrich shell beads on her loincloth.’ Shasa had not noticed the scrap of dry leather decorated with beads that lay beneath the pile of bones, half buried in dust. ‘I don’t even need that proof. I know it’s her. I just know it.’
‘Sit down, Mater.’ He lowered her to sit on one of the lichen-covered boulders.
‘I’m all right now. It was just such a shock. I’ve searched for her so often over the years. I knew where she must be.’ She looked around her vaguely. ‘O’wa’s body must be somewhere close at hand.’ She looked up at the cliff that seemed to hang over them like a cathedral roof. ‘They were up there trying to escape when he gunned them down. They must have fallen close together.’
‘Who shot them, Mater?’
She drew a deep breath, but even then her voice shook as she said his name. ‘Lothar. Lothar De La Rey!’
For an hour longer they searched the bottom and sides of the gorge, looking for the second skeleton.
‘It’s no good.’ Centaine gave up at last. ‘We will never find him. Let him lie undisturbed, Shasa, as he has all these years.’
They climbed down to the little rock shrine, and as they returned they plucked the wild flowers along the way.
‘My first instinct was to gather her remains and give them a decent burial,’ Centaine whispered as she knelt in front of the shrine, ‘but H’ani wasn’t a Christian. These hills were her holy place. She will be at peace here.’
She arranged the flowers with care and then sat back on her heels.
‘I’ll see that you are never disturbed, my beloved old grandmother, and I will come to visit you again.’ She stood up and took Shasa’s hand. ‘She was the finest, gentlest person I have ever known,’ she said softly. ‘And I loved her so.’ Still hand in hand they went down to where they had tethered the horses.
They did not speak again on the ride home, and the sun had set and the servants were anxious by the time they reached the bungalow.
At breakfast the next morning Centaine was brisk and brittly cheerful, though there were dark bruised smudges beneath her eyes and the lids were puffed from weeping.
‘This is our last week before we must return to Cape Town.’
‘I wish we could stay here for ever.’
‘For ever is a long time. You have school waiting for you, and I have my duties. We will come back here, you know that.’ He nodded and she went on. ‘I have arranged for you to spend this last week working in the washing plant and sorting rooms. You’ll enjoy that. I guarantee it.’
She was right, as usual. The washing plant was a pleasant place. The flow of water over the wiffle boards cooled the air, and after the unremitting thunder of the mill plant it was blessedly quiet. The atmosphere in the long brick room was like the cathedral calm of a holy place, for
here the worship of Mammon and Adamant reached its climax.
Shasa watched with fascination as the crushings from the mill plant were carried in on the slowly moving conveyor belt. The oversize rubble had been screened off and returned for another crushing under the spinning rollers. These were the fines. They dropped from the end of the moving belt into the puddling tank, and from there were pushed by the agitating arms of the revolving sweep down the sloping boards of the wiffle table.
The lighter materials floated away and were run off to the waste dump. The heavier gravels, containing the diamonds, were carried on through a series of similar ingenious separating devices until there remained only the concentrates, one thousandth part of the original gravels.
These were washed over the grease drums. The drums revolved slowly, each of them coated with a thick layer of heavy yellow grease. The wet gravel flowed easily over the surface, but the diamonds were dry. One of the diamond’s peculiar qualities is its unwettability. Soak it, boil it as long as you wish, but it remains dry. Once the dry surface of the precious stones touched the grease they stuck to it like insects to fly paper.
The grease drums were locked behind heavy bars and a white supervisor sat overlooking each of them, watching them constantly. Shasa peered through the bars for the first time and saw the small miracle occur only a few inches from his nose: a wild diamond captured and tamed like some marvellous creature of the desert. He actually witnessed the moment when it flowed out of the upper bin in a wet porridge of gravel, and he saw it touch the grease and adhere precariously to the slick yellow surface, causing a tiny V-shaped disturbance to the flow like a rock in the ebb of the tide. It moved, seeming to lose its grip in the grease for an instant, and Shasa wanted to thrust out his hand and seize it before it was for ever lost, but the gaps between the steel bars were too narrow. Then the diamond stuck fast and breasted the gentle flood of gravel, sitting up proudly, dry and transparent like a blister on the yellow skin of a gigantic reptile. It left him with a feeling of awe, the same feelings as he had experienced when he witnessed his mare Celeste give birth to her first foal.
He spent the entire morning passing from one to the other of the huge yellow drums and then back again down the line, watching the diamonds sticking on the grease more and more thickly with each hour that passed.
At noon the washroom manager came down the line with his four white assistants, more than were necessary, other than to watch each other and forestall any opportunity for theft. With a broad-bladed spatula they scraped the grease from the drums and collected it in the boiling pot, then meticulously spread each drum with a fresh coating of yellow grease.
In the locked de-greasing room at the far end of the building the manager placed the steel pot on the spirit stove and boiled off the grease until finally he was left with a pot half full of diamonds, and Dr Twentyman-Jones was there to weigh each stone separately and record it in the leather-bound recovery book.
‘Of course you will notice, Master Shasa, that none of these stones is smaller than half a carat.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Shasa had not thought of that. ‘What happened to the smaller ones?’
‘The grease table is not infallible – indeed the stones must have a certain minimum weight to get them to adhere. The others, even a few large valuable stones, pass across the table.’
He led Shasa back to the washroom and showed him the trough of wet gravel that had survived the journey over the drums. ‘We drain all the water and reuse it. Out here water is precious stuff, as you know. Then all the gravel has to be hand picked.’ As he spoke two men emerged from the door at the end of the room and each scooped a bucket of gravel from the trough.
Shasa and Twentyman-Jones followed them back through the doorway into a long narrow room well lit with glass skylights and high windows. A single long table ran the length of the room, its top clad in a polished metal sheet.
On each side of the table sat rows of women. They looked up as the two men entered and Shasa recognized the wives and daughters of many of the white workers as well as those of the black boss-boys. The white women sat together nearest the door and, with a decent and proper distance between them, the black women sat separated at the far end of the room.
The bucket boys dumped the damp gravel onto the metal table top and the women transferred their attention back to it. Each had a pair of forceps in one hand and a flat wooden scoop in the other. They drew a little of the gravel towards them, spread it with the scoop and then picked over it swiftly.
‘It’s a job at which the women excel,’ Twentyman-Jones explained as they passed down the line, watching over the stooped shoulders of the women. ‘They have the patience and the sharp eyes and the dexterity that men lack.’
Shasa saw that they were picking out tiny opaque stones, some as small as sugar grains, others the size of small green peas, from the duller mass of gravel.
‘Those are our bread and butter stones,’ Twentyman-Jones remarked. ‘They are used in industry. The jewellery grade stones that you saw in the grease room are the strawberry jam and the cream.’
When the mine hooter signalled the end of the day shift, Shasa rode down with Twentyman-Jones in the front seat of his Ford from the washing gear to the office block. On his lap he carried the small locked steel box in which was the day’s recovery.
Centaine met them on the verandah of the administration building and led them into her office. ‘Well, did you find it interesting?’ she asked, and smiled at Shasa’s hearty response.
‘It was fascinating, Mater, and we got one real beauty. Thirty-six carats – it’s a jolly great monster of a diamond!’ He set the box on her desk and when Twentyman-Jones unlocked it he showed her the diamond as proudly as if he had mined it with his own hands.
‘It’s big,’ Centaine agreed, ‘but the colour isn’t particularly good. There, hold it to the light. See, it’s as brown as whisky and soda, and even with the naked eye you can see the inclusions and flaws, those little black specks inside the stone and that tear through the middle.’
Shasa looked crestfallen that his stone was so denigrated and she laughed and turned to Twentyman-Jones. ‘Let’s show him some really good diamonds. Will you open the vault please, Dr Twentyman-Jones?’
Twentyman-Jones pulled out the bunch of keys from the fob pocket of his waistcoat and led Shasa down the passage to the steel grille door at the end. He opened it with his key and relocked it behind them before they went down the stairs to the underground vault. Even from Shasa he screened the lock with his body as he tumbled the combination and then used a second key before the thick green Chubb steel door swung ponderously aside and they went into the strongroom.
‘The industrial-grade stones are kept in these canisters.’ He touched them as he passed. ‘But we keep the high-grade stuff separately.’
He unlocked the smaller steel door set in the rear wall of the vault and selected five numbered brown paper packages from the crowded shelf.
‘These are our best stones.’ He handed them to Shasa as a mark of his trust, and then they went back again, opening and re-locking each door as they passed through.
Centaine was waiting for them in her office, and when Shasa placed the packages in front of her she opened the first and gently spread the contents on her blotter.
‘Golly gee!’ Shasa goggled at the array of large stones glittering with a soapy sheen. ‘They are gi-normous!’
‘Let’s ask Dr Twentyman-Jones to give us a dissertation,’ Centaine suggested, and hiding his gratification behind a sombre countenance, he picked up one of the gem stones.
‘Well, Master Shasa, here is a diamond in its natural crystalline formation, the octahedron of eight faces – count them. Here is another in a more complicated crystalline form, the dodecahedron of twelve faces, while these others are massive and uncrystallized. See how rounded and amorphous they are. Diamonds come in many guises.’
He laid each in Shasa’s open palm, and not even his prim monotonous recit
al could dull the fascination of this shining treasure. ‘The diamond has a perfect cleavage, or as we call it “grain”, and can be split in all four directions, parallel to the octahedral crystal planes.’
‘That’s how the cutters cleave a stone before polishing,’ Centaine cut in. ‘During your next holidays I will take you to Amsterdam so you can see it done.’
‘This rather greasy sheen will disappear when the stones are cut and polished.’ Twentyman-Jones took over again, resenting her intrusion. ‘Then all their fire will be revealed as their very high refractive power captures the light within and dispersive powers separate it into the spectral colours.’
‘How much does this one weigh?’
‘Forty-eight carats.’ Centaine consulted the recovery book. ‘But remember it may lose more than half its weight when it is cut and polished.’
‘Then how much will it be worth?’
Centaine glanced at Twentyman-Jones.
‘A great deal of money, Master Shasa.’ Like the true lover of any beautiful object, gem or painting, horse or statue, he disliked placing a monetary value upon it, so he hedged and returned to his lecture. ‘Now I want you to compare the colours of these stones—’
Darkness fell outside the windows, but Centaine switched on the lights and they huddled over the small pile of stones for another hour, meeting question with answer and talking quietly and intently until at last Twentyman-Jones swept the stones back into their packages and stood up.
‘“Thou hast been in Eden, the Garden of God,”’ he quoted unexpectedly, ‘“every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz and diamond . . . Thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire.”’ He stopped and looked self-conscious. ‘Forgive me. I don’t know what got into me.’
‘Ezekiel?’ Centaine asked, smiling fondly at him.
‘Chapter 28, verses thirteen and fourteen.’ He nodded, trying not to show how impressed he was by her knowledge. ‘I’ll put these away now.’
‘Dr Twentyman-Jones,’ Shasa stopped him. ‘You didn’t answer my question. How much are these stones worth?’