The Power of One (72 page)

My camouflage, begun so many years before under the persecution of the Judge, was now threatening to become the complete man. It was time to slough the mottled and cunningly contrived outer skin and emerge as myself, to face the risk of exposure, to regain the power of one. I had reached the point where to find myself was essential.

I was not conscious of how long I had been sitting cross-legged on the shelf, but slowly my eyes focused and the soft blur of blue in front of them sharpened into the mountains to the west. In the rain forest below me I heard the cry of a red lourie. My legs were stiff and my ankles sore where they had been crossed. I felt an overwhelming sense of freedom—the same sense of being free that I had felt when the big, black, hissing train had pulled out of the platform, away from Mevrou and the Judge. When Hoppie had sat opposite me and we had first shared an adventure and a green sucker between us.

I had come back from the dreamtime in the crystal cave of Africa with a certainty that I would be tested once more before the power of one would become mine alone. When my destiny would be in my own hands.

I continued to sit completely still as Doc had taught me to do when observing any living thing: “Still like rock, Peekay, past the itch and the scratch and the pain, where the concentration sees with a diamond-sharp light.” And so I sat perfectly still, emerging slowly from the cocoon of the trance I had been in. In my mind I asked Doc for a sign.

At that moment, sitting still as a rock on the shelf directly outside the crystal cave of Africa, I had no doubts, nor was I troubled by the intellectual absurdity of the request for a sign, a confirmation in a physical sense of the message I felt so clearly within me.

At first it was hardly a movement at all, less even than the flicker of an eyelid, a slight blurring of light. Then the head of the black mamba rose above the edge of the shelf two feet from where I sat. Its flat anthracite head froze inches above the shelf. Its forked tongue, as though possessing a life of its own, flicked and trembled the air for vibrations. The huge snake rose, periscoping above the shelf, moving forward until its head was no more than six inches from my face. I could see its eyes, black tektites without movement, set above jaws of injected death. Its head moved in slow motion from side to side, sweeping across my sightline. If it struck I would have fifteen minutes to live— enough time to enter the cave and lie beside Doc before my nervous system collapsed. The mamba's head moved below my line of sight and then came to rest on the toe of my boot. I could feel the pressure of its body as it slid over the boot and along the shelf to disappear over the cliffs far edge. The snake could only have come out of the cave. Doc had sent me a sign. I knew what I was required to do.

Slowly the numbness left my body, and I felt the rush of adrenaline as it hit my bloodstream, leaving me trembling. I waited until the shaking had ceased before I dropped down to the tiny ledge and worked my body flat against the cliff wall until I stood facing into the opening to the cave. The floor of the tunnel leading to the cave was covered with sand worn from the walls by the erosion of the wind. I could clearly see where the snake had entered and then returned, no doubt having fed on the hapless bats asleep inside. Doc had sent me the sign I wanted.

I carefully worked my way back to the ledge, shouldered my small rucksack, and started to climb down the cliff. The snake was unlikely to be on my path. Fat from eating bats, it would find a place to sleep under the safety of a rock where it was unlikely to be disturbed.

Once I had recovered from my fear, I found the snake an entirely appropriate, perhaps even a magnificent, symbol. The black mamba, the most deadly snake in the world, takes one partner for life. If its partner is killed, the second snake will often wait for the killer to return, prepared to die in order to take revenge. Not naturally aggressive, it will nevertheless defend its young, raising itself onto the last few inches of its tail and striking sideways in a whipping action. As most humans instinctively raise their arms in panic to defend their eyes, the mamba fangs most often strike into the top of the upper arm. The journey to the heart is swift and the outcome deadly certain.

There was a great deal of consternation from everyone concerned when I announced that I wanted to take a year off between school and university and that I would go up to Northern Rhodesia to work in the copper mines. It was as though all who loved me, even the boxers, felt that if I broke the continuity of my life, the spell that bound our relationship would be broken.

Gert's brother had visited him at Christmas from the Copperbelt and had talked of the shortage of white labor in the mines of both the Copperbelt and the Congo. The Korean War had caused copper prices to soar. He told of diamond drillers making two hundred pounds a week and young grizzly men making a hundred after they were paid their copper bonus.

Northern Rhodesia was a British colony across the Zambesi River. It was far away from the people who held me so dearly within the thrall of their ambitions. It was away from the legend of the Tadpole Angel. It was even away from boxing. I saw it as an opportunity to come to terms with myself and to build my body to the size of a welterweight. The hard underground work would toughen me, while twelve months away from the ring would do me no harm. I had been boxing since I was seven years old and had fought 116 amateur fights. My instincts, which had always served me well, told me it was time for a rest.

Gert's brother, Danie, worked as a diamond driller, the elite corps among the Copperbelt miners. Most of the diamond drillers were Afrikaners from Johannesburg attracted by the huge copper bonus white mine workers were being paid. They were so named because the cutting edge of the drill bits were studded with industrial quality diamonds to make them hard enough to cut through the rock. Danie worked in a mine near Ndola, the capital of Northern Rhodesia. He said he could get me a job as a grizzly man at the Rhone Antelope Mine owned by Anglo American in the small mining town of Luanshya. A grizzly man worked with high explosives and was the next highest paid job on the mine.

The four-day train left South Africa at Beitbridge and traveled across Southern Rhodesia to Victoria Falls, where I crossed the Zambesi into Northern Rhodesia. Southern Rhodesia is not unlike the Eastern and Northern Transvaal, but across the great Zambesi the country changes to flat grassland and equatorial forest. The trees that covered vast areas of the country were unlike any I had seen before, for they carried their autumnal coloring all through summer: leaves of brilliant reds and yellows and even mauves and purple, all the colors expected of a northern hemisphere fall. A passenger who sat beside me told me of giant edible mushrooms that appear in the forest overnight and grow two feet tall with a canopy three feet across. A mushroom weighing thirty pounds. I'd been around long enough not to believe everything I heard as gospel, but in the months to come I would see Africans selling these huge mushrooms at the side of the road, simply cutting off the amount the purchaser required. Giant, brilliantly colored moths with a wingspan ten inches across also bred on the wet, leafy floor of the forest.

Northern Rhodesia felt different and the Africans, like most of those from central Africa, were truly black, their faces seemingly flatter and their build smaller than the lighter milk chocolate brown of the Zulu or the Shangaan. They spoke a language I didn't understand, and it was with some consternation that I realized I was cut off from the African people for the first time in my life. In the mines they talked a language known as Ki-Swahili, which was not unlike Fanagalo, but like all languages designed for a working purpose, it was limited and stunted. Africans raw from their villages in the bush were recruited to the mines where they were taught this mine language so that they could take instructions from their white bosses and, in many cases, talk to each other. A work gang often contained black miners from half a dozen different tribes, each with a different language.

At four o'clock in the afternoon on the fourth day we finally pulled into Ndola, the sleepy capital of the Copperbelt. Ndola was really only a small town made up of miners' families and tradespeople who lived off the giant copper mines. The remainder of the townspeople were British colonial service administration officers and their families. It made for an uneasy white dichotomy. The mining families seldom mixed socially with the civil service families, who were established at a separate end of the town. Ndola was thirty miles or so from Luanshya but the end of the railroad as far as passenger trains were concerned.

Gert's brother met me at the station, where the air was filled with the babble of confused and frightened blacks. White mine officers feigned indifference while blue-uniformed black mine policemen filled with self-importance and professional impatience herded and pushed hundreds of Africans from the train. It was too late now to turn back; they had been harvested from the bush like wild tsamma melons.

For the past two days and nights the train had stopped at small sidings with no more than a tin shed and a small clearing to separate them from the rest of the bush. Here small groups of perhaps a dozen Africans wrapped in blankets would be herded onto the train by a black recruiting officer. The whites of their eyes showed their fear and
confusion
as they were bundled aboard the hissing, steam-belching monster, jeered at by those who had earlier been gathered up and who were by now, with arms resting casually on the sills of carriage windows, accustomed to the lickity-clack of momentum and the wonderment of the snake that runs on an iron road.

Now they were almost at the end of their journey. I watched as the black mine police tried to get them roughly into line. They had come only because drought and a great locust plague had destroyed their crops and the grazing for their cattle. Driven from their villages as indentured labor for the mines, they would work for a year so they could send money to keep their starving women and children alive. The fear these poor creatures felt the first time they were plummeted into the bowels of the earth was a source of great mirth to the initiated black miners as well as to many of the whites.

Gert's brother noticed me looking at the poor buggers.
“Ag,
man, they like monkeys when they first come. They can't even climb a ladder, and when you show them a mirror they go almost white when they see the big ape looking back at them. It's very funny, man, I'm telling you.” He picked up my suitcase and I followed him over to a green Bedford utility. “I just come off shift, so I'll drive you to Luanshya. I telephoned the mess there yesterday, and they know you coming. Tomorrow you got to report to the mine recruiting office for a medical and then you go sign on for the school of mines for three months. I got to warn you, man, they got a Welsh bastard there called Thomas, watch out for him. If you get out of the school of mines and get your blasting license, you go onto grizzlies for six months, three if you lucky. But the money is good.”

“Why only six months or even three?” I asked as we pulled out of the station.

“I didn't want to tell you before, but if you onto grizzlies much longer the odds is cut down.”

“The odds?”

“Ja,
man, the odds of getting badly injured or killed.” Gert laughed. “They don't pay you that kind of money for nothing, you know.”

“Does everyone go onto grizzlies?”

“Ja,
all the young guys, if you over twenty-two your reaction's not fast enough. Only young guys are fast enough or,” he grinned, “mad enough to do it!”

“Christ, it doesn't look as though I've got a lot of choice!”

Gert's brother laughed again. “None. All young guys got to be grizzly men, nobody else will do it. On the Rand it's not even allowed. Moving ore through a grizzly is the best way, but it's also the most dangerous. The miner's union on the Rand won't have a bar of it, and grizzlies are banned anywhere in South Africa, but here in Northern Rhodesia they don't care, man. As long as they get the muck out, they happy.” He paused as he made a turn, heading the ute onto a corrugated dirt road leading out of town. “But you make blery good money, and if you careful you'll be orright.”

I laughed. “Don't worry, Danie, I'll be bloody careful!”

He looked at me, his hands vibrating on the steering wheel as we hit a particularly badly rutted strip. “That's the blery trouble, a grizzly man comes on night shift, eleven to seven, he got the job to pull all the ore out of a stope. That's my job as a diamond driller. I drill the stope all day and you got to pull the muck out through the grizzly at night. If you too careful and you don't get enough muck through the grizzly so I got an empty stope to work with, you in a lot of trouble, man!” He gave me a knowing grin. “You do that a few times and you can collect your ticket. The diamond driller is king, and you fuck up his stope, you don't work in the mines no more, man.”

I remained silent. I hadn't any idea what he was talking about, but I gathered that whatever a grizzly man did he was under all sorts of pressure. And pressure creates accidents.

“That's one good thing about Thomas in the school of mines, he makes things so blery bad in your training that if you make it and get your blasting license you got a good chance of staying alive on a grizzly.”

Danie left me at the mine mess, where I had a room reserved for a month before I moved into a hut of my own in one of the single men's compounds surrounding the mess.