Men of Men (33 page)

She placed one neat gloved hand on the stallion’s withers where the long white mane rose into the crest of the shoulders, and then in the next instant she was seated on the broad and
powerful back, her small feet thrust deeply into the silver-starred Mexican-type stirrups.

Zouga was astounded. He had never seen a woman vault to the saddle. Usually it took a groom to hold the head and another to form a bridge of linked fingers to boost her to the height of the
horse’s back.

Louise St John had gone up so lightly and easily that she might have flown, and the movement of her left hand that made the stallion rear was only apparent to someone looking for it.

The huge horse went up on its hind legs, walking backwards in a circle, cutting at the air with its forehooves, until it faced the five-foot barbed-wire fence that marked the division between
Zouga’s camp and the public road.

Then Louise moved her hand again and the stallion dropped into a dead run, straight at the fence.

The watching men exclaimed in alarm for the stallion had a bare twenty strides to build up momentum for the jump, yet he flew at it with his pink nostrils flaring and the serpentine veins
beneath the burnished skin of his cheeks swelling with the pumping of the great heart.

Louise’s thick black braids were flung out tautly behind her head by the power of the stallion’s acceleration, and then she lifted him into the jump with her knees and her hands.

For an instant of time the horse and the tiny figure upon its back seemed to hang suspended against the pale blue of the sky, the horse with its forefeet drawn up beneath its noble head and the
woman rising in the saddle to cushion the shock of take-off and landing – and then they were over.

The stallion landed neatly, with his rider in perfect balance, and the golden body flowed smoothly into the continuation of his run.

There was a soft involuntary sigh from the group on the verandah, and Zouga felt a surge of relief as powerful as the driving leap of the stallion. He had had a mental image of the woman caught
up in the bloody strands of barbed wire, like a wild bird in the trapper’s net, with torn body and broken wings.

Z
ouga stood on top of the central stagings. He was as high above the level of the plain as a three-storey building, and from his vantage point he
could see as far north as the Vaal river. The dark-green stain of the lusher scrub and grass along its course looked like cloud shadow upon the dust-pale earth, but there were no clouds in the high
vault of the sky, and the brutal sun threw stark shadows below the high stagings, geometrical patterns that parodied in two-dimensional plan the intricate structure of timber and iron and steel
wire. The stagings clung perilously to the sheer precipice that fell into the depths.

It was as though a gigantic meteor had ploughed into the yellow earth, gouging this bowl-shaped dish through the earth’s crust. In the deepest sections it was almost two hundred feet deep
already, and each spadeful of gravel had been dug out by hand, lifted to the surface and laboriously picked over before being discarded in the mountainous waste dumps. It was a monument to the
persistence of those antlike creatures that swarmed down there on the pit floor.

Zouga wiped the black grease off his hands with a wad of cotton waste, and nodded to the Matabele winchman who threw in the gear lever of the steam winch.

Once again the numbing clatter hammered against Zouga’s skull and the slender thread of shining steel cable slithered in over the drums. The winch and steam boiler had cost Zouga over a
thousand pounds, the entire winnings of an unusually productive week’s labour when Jordan had picked eleven good diamonds off the sorting-table. That week’s recovery had been one of the
false promises that the Devil’s Own had whispered to him, like an unfaithful wife.

Zouga moved to the front of the stagings to escape the painful sound of the winch. He was on an unguarded wooden balcony with the drop sucking seductively at him, but he ignored it.

He had ten minutes to rest now, the time that it took the gravel skip to travel up from the claims to the surface. He could see it lifting off the floor below like a fat spider creeping up its
individual silken thread towards him, still too deep for him to recognize for certain the human figure riding on the enormous steel bucket.

Zouga lit a cheroot, and it tasted of engine grease from his fingers. He looked down again, and decided that instead of an ant’s nest the pit reminded him more of a beehive. Even at these
deep levels the precise shape of each claim had been maintained, and the geometrical shapes were like the individual cells in a honeycomb.

‘If only mine would yield a little more honey,’ he thought.

The skip was close enough now for there to be no doubt of the tall young figure standing casually on the lip of the steel bucket, balancing easily with both hands on his hips as the drop grew
steadily deeper under him.

It was a matter of pride amongst the younger diggers to ride the skip in the most casual or spectacular manner possible. Zouga had forbidden Ralph to dance on the skip, a fad that had been
started by a young Scot who had once danced between the floor and the stagings, accompanying himself on the bagpipes.

Ralph drew steadily closer, rising up through the glistening web of steel cables that hung over the pit like a silver cloud. Hundreds of cables, one for each individual claim, every strand
polished by the pulley wheels, by the friction over the winding drums, until they caught the sunlight and shimmered into a silver mist that hung like an aura over the pit – ethereal and
lovely, hiding the harsh reality of that gouged raw earth, with its dangers and disappointments.

While he waited for the skip to reach him, Zouga cast his mind back to that first day when he had led the single oxen into the sprawling encampment with Aletta on the wagon box beside him, and
they had looked up at the riddled and torn kopje.

So much earth had been moved since then, so many men had died in this terrible pit where that kopje had once stood and so many dreams had perished with them.

Zouga lifted the wide-brimmed hat. Carefully he mopped the beads of sweat from the smoother paler skin along his hairline, and then he inspected the damp red stain on the silk bandanna and
grimaced with distaste. It looked like blood.

He re-knotted the silk about his throat, still peering down into the depths, and his eyes clouded with disenchantment as he remembered the high hopes and bounding expectation that he had brought
with him on that day – was it really ten years ago? It seemed like a day and an eternity.

He had found himself dreaming, the random events from those lost years replaying through his mind, the sorrows and the joys magnified by his imaginings and by the passage of time.

Then, after a few minutes, Zouga roused himself. Dreaming was an old man’s vice. The past was beyond regret; today was all that counted. He straightened his shoulders and looked down at
Ralph in the swinging skip. Something jarred him, scattering the last of his dreams.

The skip was riding differently, it did not have the accustomed weight to it, he could not yet make out the heaped yellow gravel, which, despite his orders, Ralph usually over-loaded high above
the steel sides of the skip.

It was empty, and Ralph was alone. He was coming up without the Matabele gang to help run the skip over the bars and up-end its burden of gravel into the chute, down which it would be carried to
the waiting cart.

Zouga cupped his hands to his mouth to shout an enquiry – but the words stayed in his throat.

Ralph was close enough now for Zouga to see the expression on his face. It was tragic, stricken with some terrible emotion.

Zouga lowered his hands and stared at his son in dread anticipation. The skip hit the end bars with an iron clash and the winchman threw out the gear lever, expertly braking the steel skip
against the bars.

Ralph jumped lightly across the narrow gap onto the platform, and stood there, still staring at Zouga.

‘What is it, my boy?’ Zouga asked quietly, fearfully – and for answer Ralph turned away and glanced down into the empty body of the skip.

Zouga stepped up beside him, and followed his glance. He saw that he had been mistaken – the skip was not empty.

‘It has taken us all morning to hack that out of the east face,’ Ralph told him.

It looked like a roughly cut gravestone, before the inscription was chiselled in, as wide as the stretch of a man’s arms and imperfectly squared up, the marks of the steel wedges and
pickaxe still fresh upon it.

‘We broke three pick handles on it,’ Ralph went on grimly, ‘and we only got it out because there was a natural fracture line that we could crack open with wedges.’

Zouga stared at the ugly cube of stone, not wanting to believe what it was, trying to close his ears against his son’s voice.

‘Underneath it’s the same, solid, hard as a whore’s heart, no faults, no cracks.’

The lump of stone was a dull ugly mottled thing, across which the steel tools had left paler weals and furrows.

‘Sixteen of us,’ Ralph went on. ‘We worked on it all morning.’ He opened his hands, and showed them palms upwards. The horny yellow calluses had been torn open, the raw
flesh beneath was mushy and caked with dust and earth. ‘All morning we broke our hearts and our picks on it – and that bloody little chip weighs less than half a ton.’

Slowly Zouga stooped over the edge of the skip and touched the stone. It was as cold as his heart felt – and its colour was dark mottled blue.

‘The blue,’ Ralph confirmed quietly. ‘We have hit the blue.’

‘D
ynamite or blasting gelatine,’ Ralph said. ‘That’s the only way we’ll ever move it.’

He was stripped to the waist, a polish of sweat on his arms, and little drops of it hanging like dew in the thick hair of his chest.

The tombstone of blue marble lay at his feet, and Ralph rested on the shaft of the sledgehammer. The blows he had swung at the rock had raised bursts of sparks and tiny puffs of white dust that
stung their nostrils like pepper – but had not cracked the rock through.

‘We cannot blast in the pit,’ Zouga said tiredly. ‘Can you imagine two hundred diggers firing away dynamite, every one doing it when and how he wanted?’ He shook his
head.

‘There is no other way,’ Ralph said. ‘No other way to get it out.’

‘And if you do get it out?’ Jordan asked from the verandah where he had stood without speaking for the past hour.

‘What do you mean?’ Zouga demanded. He could hear the strain in his own voice, and knew how close his anger and frustration were to the surface.

‘What will you do with it when you do get it out?’ Jordan persisted, and they all stared at the awful blue lump.

‘There are no diamonds in that stuff.’ Jordan said it for them.

‘How do we know that?’ Ralph snapped at him, his voice rough and ugly with the same tension that gripped Zouga.

‘I know it,’ Jordan said flatly. ‘I can sense it – just look at it. It’s hard and bleak and bare.’

Nobody replied to that, and Jordan shook his curls regretfully. ‘Even if there were diamonds in it, how would you free them from the blue? You can’t smash them out with
sledgehammers. You’d end up with diamond dust.’

‘Ralph,’ Zouga turned away from Jordan, ‘this stuff, this blue – it’s only on the east face, isn’t it?’

‘So far.’ Ralph nodded. ‘But—’

‘I want you to cover up the east face,’ Zouga told him bluntly. ‘Shovel gravel over the exposed rock. Nobody else must see it. Nobody else must know.’

Ralph nodded, and Zouga went on, ‘We will keep on raising the yellow gravel from the other sections as though nothing has happened; and nobody, not one of you, is to say a word about
– about us having struck the blue.’ He looked directly at Jordan. ‘Do you understand, not a word to anybody.’

Z
ouga sat easily in the saddle, riding with the long stirrups of a Boer hunter or of a born colonial.

He knew that Rhodes was leaving in the next few weeks, to keep his term at Oxford University. Perhaps his imminent departure would make his judgement hasty.

‘Let’s hope so, anyway.’ And his mount flicked his ears back to listen to his voice.

‘Steady, old man.’ Zouga touched his withers, feeling a quick twist of guilt at his intentions. He knew he was going to try and sell faulty goods, and he steeled himself against his
own conscience.

He touched his mount’s flank with his knee and turned him off the rutted dusty track through the break in the milkwood fence and into Rhodes’ camp.

Rhodes sat with his back to the mud wall of the shack, a mug in his hand, the big shaggy leonine head cocked to something that Pickering was saying.

The talk of the diggings was that he was already a multimillionaire, at least on paper, and Zouga had seen the champagne bucket of uncut diamonds poured out onto his lunch table. Yet here Rhodes
was sitting on a soap box in the dusty yard, dressed in shabby ill-fitting clothes, drinking from a chipped enamel mug.

Zouga dropped his reins and his horse stopped obediently, and when he slipped off its back there was no need for him to tether it. It would stand as long as Zouga wanted it to.

He crossed the yard towards the small group of men, and Zouga smiled to himself. Rhodes’ mug might be chipped – but it contained a twenty-year-old cognac. Rhodes’ seat might be
a soapbox, but he sat it as though it were a throne, and the men that sat around him like courtiers or supplicants were all rich and powerful men, the new aristocracy of the diggings.

One of these rose now and came to meet Zouga, laughing lightly and brandishing a rolled newspaper.

‘By gad, Major, they say you need only speak of the devil.’ He clapped Zouga’s shoulder. ‘I hope you are taking this assault on our masculine pride as seriously as we are
– and have come to offer to champion our cause.’

‘I don’t understand.’ Zouga’s protest was lost in the laughter and friendly pummelling as they came to crowd around him. Only Rhodes had not left his seat against the
wall, but even he was smiling.