Authors: Wilbur Smith
‘I’m sixteen now,’ Ralph told him. ‘And besides, I know how to read and to write.’
‘Don’t you think you might have mentioned your decision,’ Zouga asked with deceptive mildness, ‘if only in passing?’
‘You were busy, Papa, I didn’t want to worry you with something so unimportant. You’ve got enough to worry about without that.’
Zouga hesitated. Was that just his usual clever twisting, or did Ralph truly realize how finely stretched they were, just how much Zouga truly did have to worry about?
Ralph sensed his advantage. ‘We need every pair of hands we can get, and these are free.’ He held them up, and Zouga noticed for the first time that they were powerful and broad with
yellow calluses on the palms.
‘Just what is this new idea of yours?’ Zouga’s scowl smoothed away, and Ralph grinned as he realized that he was no longer a schoolboy; and he began to explain, gesturing with
spread hands while Zouga nodded.
‘All right,’ he said at last. ‘It makes sense. We’ll try it.’
Zouga turned and walked away, and Ralph spat on his hands and shouted in Matabele.
‘Come on, you are not a bunch of women hoeing for yams; let’s break ground.’
O
n Claim No. 183 an American digger named Calvin Hine hit an enrichment, a tiny pocket, and in a single bucket he took out two hundred and sixteen
diamonds, the biggest over twenty carats. In a stroke he was transformed from a ragged, bearded sun-blackened beggar grovelling in the yellow dust into a rich man.
Calvin was there that night when Diamond Lil climbed up onto the wooden counter of her grog-shop, with her ostrich feathers swirling and her sequins aglitter in the lamplight. She asked in
cockney that chimed like Bow Bells:
‘Will some sporting gent name me a price for these fancy goods?’ and squeezed out her own big round breasts between painted red fingertips, so that they bulged over the top of her
crimson velvet bodice, the skin smoother than the velvet and the big pink coin of a nipple coming up like the dawn over the horizon of her neckline.
‘Come on, dearies, one night of paradise, one little glimpse of heaven, me loves.’
‘Tenner, Lil darling. Ten iron men,’ shouted a digger at the back of the bar, and Lil turned and flipped up the back of her skirts at him.
‘Shame on you, for a mean little man,’ she chided him over her white shoulder; and the laced and beribboned pantaloons beneath her rustling skirts had no crotch to them, so for a
fleeting part of a second they saw what she was selling, and bellowed like trek-oxen five days in the desert when they smell the waterhole.
‘Lil, my beauty.’ Calvin climbed unsteadily onto the packing case that acted as a table. He had been drinking since noon when he left the kopje-walloper’s office. ‘Lily,
the moon of my soul,’ he crooned, ‘every night for a year and more I dreamed of this moment.’
He dug into the back pocket of his coat and held up a fistful of crumpled five-pound notes.
‘I don’t know how much that is,’ he blurted, ‘but it’s yours.’
For a moment Lily’s plucked and pencilled eyebrows contracted as she made a rapid calculation of the proffered wad of banknotes; and then she smiled so that the tiny diamond set in her
front tooth sparkled like the evening star.
‘You beautiful boy,’ she sang. ‘Tonight I am your bride. Take me in your arms, my lover.’
The next day someone took a thirty carat stone on the eastern section, a lovely white stone of the first water, and the day after that a huge champagne-coloured diamond came from Neville
Pickering’s block.
‘You’ll be leaving now?’ Zouga asked him when they met on the roadway above the Devil’s Own, and he hoped that the envy did not show in his smile.
‘No.’ Pickering shook his head, and answered with his own charming sunny smile. ‘I always bet on a winning streak. My partner and I are staying in the game.’
It seemed that the diamond god was intent on showering sudden largesse on the New Rush, and a fever of expectation and excitement gripped them all so that the great pit at noon sounded like a
hive of wild bees when the acacia forests are in yellow bloom. Three great finds in three days; nobody had seen it happen before.
At night around the camp fires, and in the lantern-lit grog-shops and canteens, the wild theories were aired by dusty diggers drunk on bad liquor and reborn hope.
‘It’s a stratal enrichment,’ pontificated one. ‘It’s a layer of fat babies right across the kopje. You mark my words, somebody will take a pony before the week is
out.’
‘Hell no,’ argued another. ‘The stones are lying in potholes. Some lucky bastard is going to scoop the pot again, like Calvin’s two one six or Pickering’s
monkey.’
Thursday night of the crazy week it rained. Here on the fringes of the Kalahari desert the rainfall was less than twenty inches a year. They had almost half of that on that single night.
The rain was a slanting curtain of silver arrow shafts in the brilliant crackling blue flare of the lighting. The clouds piled to the heavens banged against one another like fighting bulls,
mountainous in the lightning bursts, and the thunder jarred the earth while the rain hissed down.
In the dawn it was still raining, and at another time the diggers might have stayed out of the pit and waited for it to dry out. But not on this day, not with the fierce excitement that gripped
the entire settlement. That day nothing would keep them out of the pit.
The diggings were greasy with yellow mud. The lowest claims were knee deep with the insidious clinging stuff. It coated the bare legs of the black workmen to the thigh; it built up in mud bricks
on the boots of the white overseers, weighing them down like convicts shackled to a ball and chain.
The thick red mud on the roadways clogged the wheels of the gravel carts and had to be prised clear with the point of a crowbar. They shovelled the slush into the buckets and as they were
hoisted the thin watery mud cascaded down on the men below, so that it was no longer possible to tell black man from white behind their slick and glistening yellow masks.
What none of the men in the workings realized was that, apart from the discomfort and filth that the downpour of the night’s thunderstorms had brought to the pit, they had created a less
obvious but infinitely graver change in the riddled remains of Colesberg kopje.
The rushing rivulets had found a fissure at the neck of No. 6 Roadway and had poured into it, carving and cutting and weakening; and the slimy yellow mud had hidden the deep vertical cracks in
the hundred-foot high earthen embankment.
There were sixteen mule carts crowded onto the causeway, most of them fully laden with the first load of the morning, the drivers swearing at each other, the long trek whips firing explosively
as they tried to clear a path to get their load out to the waiting cradles.
Down on the Devil’s Own the Matabele teams were working side by side, but the icy sting of the rain on bare shoulders and backs slowed the swing of the picks, and at each forward pace they
slithered and slipped in the treacherous footing. The work chant sounded like a dirge; Zouga snarled at them to keep them moving, and the mood was ugly.
Up on the roadway an overladen gravel cart began to slide sideways in the mud, and the wheeler mule was pulled down on his knees, unable to hold it. The off wheel dropped over the edge, and the
cart sagged drunkenly and then hung out over the pit. The team slewed across the narrow causeway in tangled traces while the unequal weight of gravel snapped the outer axle of the cart.
Zouga’s cart was directly behind the stranded team, facing in the same direction, and Ralph jumped down off the driver’s seat and shouted furiously.
‘You damned fool – you’ve jammed us in.’
‘You cheeky puppy,’ the driver of the bogged-down vehicle yelled back. ‘You need a lick of the whip across your backside.’
Immediately half a dozen diggers were joining in, taking sides, shouting advice or abuse.
‘Cut the traces, get those bloody animals off the roadway.’
‘Dump the gravel out, you’re overloaded.’
‘You don’t touch my rig,’ yelled the driver of the stricken cart. Ralph had drawn the sheath knife from his belt and run forward.
‘That’s the ticket, Ralph.’
‘That little blighter needs a lesson.’
Men and vehicles and mud-smeared beasts formed an angry, unstable knot at the top of the high earthen wall. In the bottom of the diggings, Zouga threw his head back and cupped his hands to his
mouth.
‘Ralph!’ he bellowed. He could see how dangerous the tangle had become. Tempers were flaring; he could sense how close they were to mortal danger as fighting men lost control of
panicking animals.
In the uproar Zouga’s voice was almost drowned, and if Ralph heard him, he gave no sign of doing so. He was kneeling beside the downed wheel mule, hacking at the thongs of the traces with
his sheath knife.
‘Get away from there,’ howled the driver, and reared back, the long trek whip flying out high above his shoulders and then snaking forward, twenty feet long, whispering like the wing
of a wild duck in flight.
Ralph saw it, and ducked behind the mule’s heavy barrel-like body; the lash exploded in the air like a bursting grenade, and the mule lunged wildly, swinging the disselboom of the cart
across the causeway so that the broken axle collapsed before the snapping of the half-severed leather thongs allowed the mule to regain its feet and then gallop away down the muddy track to firmer
ground.
Ralph leaned out and ran to his own team. He called to his wheeler mule, ‘Pull, Bishop!’ The wheels sucked and farted in the mud as Ralph drove them at the narrow gap, the stranded
cart on one side, sprawled half across the track, on the other the sheer unguarded drop into the open workings.
‘Ha, Rosie!’ Ralph grabbed the bridle of the lead mule and, running at her head, guided her into the gap.
‘Ralph, damn you!’ Zouga roared. ‘Stop! Do you hear me, stop!’
But he was a helpless spectator. It would take five minutes or longer to reach the causeway across the complicated system of ladderworks and board walks. There was nothing he could do to prevent
the developing tragedy.
The infuriated owner of the stranded cart was still on the body of the vehicle, brandishing his long whip and howling with anger and frustration. He was not a big man, an inch or so shorter than
Ralph – but heavy in the shoulder and the belly, not flabby fat but work-braided muscle, and his hands on the stock of the whip were rough as oak bark, baked by the sun and scoured by gravel
and the haft of pick and shovel.
‘I’ll settle your account, you little bugger,’ he shouted, and again threw back the whip; again Ralph ducked under the flailing lash, but it caught the sleeve of his faded and
patched shirt, splitting the rotted material and opening the skin of Ralph’s upper arm in a thin red razor cut from which the bright blood bloomed instantly.
Rising from his crouch in the mud, Ralph placed one hand on the wheel mule’s withers and used his own impetus and the leverage of his arm to leap high in the air. It was a trick that Jan
Cheroot had taught him, the way a good teamsman crosses from one side of the span to another. In mid-air Ralph tucked his legs and swung his body, vaulting cleanly over the mules’ backs and
landing on the far side of the team alongside the leading wheel. His next jump carried him onto the truck of the cart, and with the same movement he had snatched his own long trek whip from its
slot beside the brake handle.
The handle was ten feet long, and the tapered lash another twenty. A skilled teamsman could cut a fly off the tip of the lead mule’s ear with the lash, and Jan Cheroot had trained Ralph:
he was good with the whip, very good.
Ralph’s lips were a thin chalky white line, his eyes green and furious. The sting of the whip had driven him into murderous, unthinking rage.
‘Ralph!’ Zouga shouted vainly. He had seen his son like this before. It frightened him. ‘Ralph! Stop!’
Standing high on the cart bed Ralph shot the lash out to full stretch behind him. It was an easy graceful movement like a salmon fisherman putting up the fly, and in the same action he brought
the tip of the whip stock forward, all wrist and shoulders, and the lash whined and reached out to the other driver.
It cut him like a sword stroke, from breast to belt buckle, and only the heavy wet oilskin he wore protected him from serious injury. The torn fabric flapped about his body, and the rain diluted
the dribble of blood from the shallow wound.
Ralph’s mules swung from the crack of the whip, and the off wheel hooked that of the stranded cart, locking both vehicles hopelessly in the soft mud.
Ralph was too close now to the other driver to stretch the lash, and he reversed the whip stock, using it like a club, and swung it at the man’s head.
Below them in the diggings, the Matabele were encouraging their favourite with the fighting ‘Jee!’ and it goaded Ralph. He was quicker than the other driver, nimble to avoid his
swinging stock, using his own like the fighting sticks with which he had trained so assiduously.
The mules were panicked by the uproar, the crack of whips, the Matabele war chant, the shrieked insults and the bellow of the watchers.
Rosie reared and cut with her fore-hooves, whinnying hysterically, and her team mate lunged and struggled against the jammed off wheel.
Bishop shirked the yoke, turned from it; his hind legs scrabbled on the crumbling edge of the causeway and he went over, hanging in the tangle of reins and chains, kicking and pawing at the air
and shrieking wildly.
Then quite gently, like a sleeper awaking from deep slumber, the yellow earthen causeway shook itself.
The movement started below the wheels of the locked carts and the trampling hooves of the terrified mules – and then it rippled along the embankment to the neck where it joined the rim of
the pit – and at that point a deep vertical crack opened miraculously in the muddy yellow wall. It opened with only a soft wet sound like an infant suckling at the breast, but it silenced the
shouting, chanting men who watched.