The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (64 page)

Lobengula’s hands were clasped over his knees, and they were mummified, black and shrunken. His fingernails had continued growing after death. They were long and curved, like the claws of
a predatory beast. Lobengula must once have worn a tall headgear of feathers and fur, but it had fallen from his head and now lay on the altar beside him. The heron feathers were still blue and
crisp, as though plucked that very day.

Perhaps by design, but more likely by chance, the sitting corpse had been placed directly beneath one of the seepages from the roof. Even as they stood before the altar, another droplet fell
from high above and, with a soft tap, burst upon the old king’s forehead, and then snaked down over his face like slow tears. Millions upon millions of drops must have fallen upon him, and
each drop had laid down its deposit of shining calcium on the mummified head.

Lobengula was being transformed into stone, already his scalp was covered with a translucent helmet, like the tallow from a guttering candle. It had run down and filled his eye-cavities with the
pearly deposit, it had lined his withered lips and built up the line of his jaw. Lobengula’s perfect white teeth grinned out of his stone mask at them.

The effect was unearthly and terrifying. Sarah whimpered with superstitious dread and clutched at Sally-Anne who returned her grip as fervently. Craig played the lamp beam over that dreadful
head and then slowly lowered it.

On the rock altar in front of Lobengula had been placed five dark objects. Four beer-pots, hand-moulded from clay with a stylized diamond pattern inscribed around each wide throat, and the mouth
of each pot had been sealed with the membrane from the bladder of a goat. The fifth object was a bag, made from the skin of an unborn zebra foetus, the seams stitched with animal sinew.

‘Sam, you—’ Craig started, and his voice cracked. He cleared his throat, and started again. ‘You are his descendant. You are the only one who should touch anything
here.’

Tungata was still down on one knee, and he did not reply. He was staring at the old king’s transformed head, and his lips moved as he prayed silently. Was he addressing the Christian God,
Craig wondered, or the spirits of his ancestors?

Sally-Anne’s teeth chattered spasmodically, the only sound in the cavern, and Craig placed his arms around the two girls. They pressed against him gratefully, both of them shivering with
the cold and with awe.

Slowly Tungata rose to his feet and stepped forward to the stone altar. ‘I see you, great Lobengula,’ he spoke aloud. ‘I, Samson Kumalo, of your totem and of your blood, greet
you across the years!’ He was using his tribal name again, claiming his lineage as he went on in a low but steady voice. ‘If I am the leopard cub of your prophecy, then I ask your
blessing, oh king. But if I am not that cub, then strike my desecrating hand and wither it as it touches the treasures of the house of Mashobane.’

He reached out slowly and placed his right hand on one of the black clay pots.

Craig found that he was holding his breath, waiting for he was not sure what, perhaps for a voice to speak from the king’s long-dead throat, or for one of the great stalactites to crash
down from the roof, or for a bolt of lightning to blast them all.

The silence drew out, and then Tungata placed his other hand on the beer-pot, and slowly lifted it in a salute to the corpse of the king.

There was a sharp crack and the brittle baked clay split. The bottom fell out of the pot, and from it gushed a torrent of glittering light that paled and rendered insipid the crystalline coating
of the great cavern. Diamonds rattled and bounced on the altar stone, tumbling and slithering over each other, piled in a pyramid, and lay smouldering like live coals in the lamplight.

‘I
cannot believe these are diamonds,’ Sally-Anne whispered. ‘They look like pebbles, pretty, shiny pebbles, but
pebbles.’

They had poured the contents of all four pots and of the zebra-skin bag into the canvas food-bag, and leaving the empty clay pots at the feet of the old king’s corpse, they retreated from
Lobengula’s presence to the end of the crystal cavern nearest the entrance passage.

‘Well, first thing,’ Craig observed, ‘legend was wrong. Those pots weren’t a gallon each, more like a pint.’

‘Still, five pints of diamonds is better than a poke in the eye with a rhino horn,’ Tungata countered.

They had salvaged a dozen poles from the top section of the ladderwork in the shaft and built a small fire on the cavern floor. As they squatted in a circle around the pile of stones, their damp
clothing steamed in the warmth from the flames.

‘If they are diamonds,’ Sally-Anne was still sceptical.

‘They
are
diamonds,’ Craig declared flatly, ‘every single one of them. Watch this!’

Craig selected one of the stones, a crystal with a knife edge to one of its facets. He drew the edge across the lens of the lamp. It made a shrill squeal that set their teeth on edge, but it
gouged a deep white scratch in the glass.

‘That’s proof! That’s a diamond!’

‘So big!’ Sarah picked out the smallest she could find. ‘Even the smallest is bigger than the top joint of my finger.’ She compared them.

‘The old Matabele labourers picked only those large enough to show up in the first wash of gravel,’ Craig explained. ‘And remember that they will lose sixty per cent or more of
their mass in the cutting and polishing. That one will probably end up no bigger than a green pea.’

‘The colours,’ Tungata murmured, ‘so many different colours.’

Some were translucent lemon-coloured, others dark amber or cognac, with all shades in between, while again there were those that were untinted, clear as snow-melt in a mountain stream, with
frosted facets that reflected the flames of the smoky little fire.

‘Just look at this one.’

The stone Sally-Anne held up was the deep purplish blue of the Mozambique current when the tropic midday sun probes its depths.

‘And this.’ Another as bright as the blood from a spurting artery.

‘And this.’ Limpid green, impossibly beautiful, changing with each flicker of the light.

Sally-Anne laid out a row of the coloured stones on the cavern floor in front of her.

‘So pretty,’ she said. She was grading them, the yellows and golds and ambers in one row, the pinks and reds in another.

‘The diamond can take any of the primary colours. It seems to take pleasure in imitating the colours proper to other gems. John Mandeville, the fourteenth-century traveller, wrote
that.’ Craig spread his hands to the blaze. ‘And it can crystallize to any shape from a perfect square to octahedron or dodecahedron.’

‘Blimey, mate,’ Sally-Anne mocked him, ‘what’s an octahedron, pray?’

‘Two pyramids with triangular sides and a common base.’

‘Wow! And a dodecahedron?’ she challenged.

‘Two rhombs of lozenge shape with common facets.’

‘How come you know so much?’

‘I wrote a book – remember?’ Craig smiled back. ‘Half the book was about Rhodes and Kimberley and diamonds.’

‘Enough already,’ she capitulated.

‘Not nearly enough,’ Craig shook his head. ‘I can go on. The diamond is the most perfect reflector of light, only chromate of lead refracts more light, only chrysolite
disperses it more. But the diamond’s combined powers of reflection, refraction and dispersion are unmatched.’

‘Stop!’ ordered Sally-Anne, but her expression was still interested, and he went on.

‘It’s brilliance is undecaying, though the ancients did not have the trick of cutting it to reveal its true splendour. For that reason, the Romans treasured pearls more highly and
even the first Hindu artisans only rubbed up the natural facets of the Kohinoor. They would have been appalled to know that modern cutters reduced the bulk of that stone from over seven hundred
carats to a hundred and six.’

‘How big is seven hundred carats?’ Sarah wanted to know.

Craig selected a stone from the ranks that Sally-Anne had set out. It was the size of a golf ball.

‘That is probably three hundred carats – it might cut to a paragon, that is a first-water diamond over a hundred carats. Then men will give it a name, like the Great Mogul or the
Orloff or the Shah, and legends will be woven around it.’

‘Lobengula’s Fire,’ Sarah hazarded.

‘Good!’ Craig nodded. ‘A good name for it. Lobengula’s Fire!’

‘How much?’ Tungata wanted to know. ‘What is the value of this pile of pretty stones?’

‘God knows,’ Craig shrugged. ‘Some of them are rubbish—’ He picked out a huge amorphous lump of dark grey colour, in which the black specks and fleckings of its
imperfections were obvious to the naked eye and the flaws and fracture lines cut through its interior like soft silver leaves. ‘This is industrial quality, it will be used for machine tools
and the cutting edges in the head of an oil drill, but some of the others – the only answer is that they are worth as much as a rich man will pay. It would be impossible to sell them all at
one time, the market could not absorb them. Each stone would require a special buyer and involve a major financial transaction.’

‘How much, Pupho?’ Tungata insisted. ‘What is the least or the most?’

‘I truly don’t know, I could not even hazard.’ Craig picked out another large stone, its imperfect facets frosted and stippled to hide the true fire in its depths.
‘Highly skilled technicians will work on this for weeks, perhaps months, charting its grain and discovering its flaws. They will polish a window on it, so they can microscopically examine its
interior. Then, when they had decided how to “make” the stone, a master cutter with nerves of steel will cleave it along the flaw line with a tool like a butcher’s cleaver. A
false hammer stroke and the stone could explode into worthless chips. They say the master cutter who cleaved the Cullinan diamond fainted with relief when he hit a clean stroke and the diamond
split perfectly.’ Craig juggled the big diamond thoughtfully. ‘If this stone “makes” perfectly, and if its colour is graded “D”, it could be worth, say, a
million dollars.’

‘A million dollars! For one stone!’ Sarah exclaimed.

‘Perhaps more,’ Craig nodded. ‘Perhaps much more.’

‘If one stone is worth that,’ Sally-Anne lifted a cupped double handful of diamonds and let them trickle slowly through her fingers, ‘how much will this hoard be
worth?’

‘As little as a hundred million, as much as five hundred million,’ Craig guessed quietly, and those impossible sums seemed to depress them all, rather than render them delirious with
joy.

Sally-Anne dropped the last few stones, as though they had burned her fingers, and she hugged her own arms and shivered. Her damp hair hung in lank strands down her face and the firelight
underscored her eyes with shadow. They all of them looked exhausted and bedraggled.

‘Then as we sit here,’ said Tungata, ‘we are probably as rich as any man living – and I would give it all for one glimpse of sunlight and one taste of freedom.’

‘Pupho, talk to us,’ Sarah pleaded. ‘Tell us stories.’

‘Yes,’ Sally-Anne joined in. ‘That’s your business. Tell us about diamonds. Help us forget the rest. Tell us a story.’

‘All right,’ Craig agreed, and while Tungata fed the fire with splinters of wood, he thought for a moment. ‘Did you know that Kohinoor means “Mountain of Light” and
that Baber, the Conqueror, set its value at half the daily expense of the entire known world? You would think there could be no other gem like it, but it was only one of the great jewels assembled
in Delhi. That city outstripped imperial Rome or vainglorious Babylon in its treasures. The other great jewels of Delhi had marvellous names also. Listen to these: the Sea of Light, the Crown of
the Moon, the Great Mogul—’

Craig ransacked his memory for stories to keep them from dwelling on the hopelessness of their position, from the despair of truly realizing that they were entombed alive deep in the earth.

He told them of the faithful servant whom de Sancy entrusted with the great Sancy diamond, when he sent it to Henry of Navarre to add to the crown jewels of France. ‘Thieves learned of his
journey, and they waylaid the poor man in the forest. They cut him down and searched his clothing and his corpse. When they could not find the diamond, they buried him hastily and fled. Years
afterwards, Monsieur de Sancy found the grave in the forest, and ordered the servant’s decomposed body to be gutted. The legendary diamond was found in his stomach.’

‘Ghastly,’ Sally-Anne shuddered.

‘Perhaps,’ Craig agreed with her. ‘But every noble diamond has a sanguine history. Emperors and rajahs and sultans have intrigued and mounted campaigns for them, others have
used starvation or boiling oil or hot irons to prick out eyes, women have used poison or prostituted themselves, palaces have been looted and temples have been profaned. Each stone seems to have
left a comet’s train of blood and savagery behind it. And yet none of these terrible deeds and misfortunes ever seemed to discourage those who lusted for them. Indeed when Shah-Shuja stood
before Runjeet Singh, “The Lion of the Punjab”, starved to a skeleton and with his wives and family broken and mutilated by the tortures that had at last forced him to give up the Great
Mogul, the man who had once been his dearest friend, gloating over the huge stone in his fist, asked, “Tell me, Shah-Shuja, what price do you put upon it?”

‘Even then Shah-Shuja, broken and vanquished, knowing himself at the very threshold of ignoble death, could still answer, “It is the price of fortune. For the Great Mogul has always
been the bosom talisman of those who have triumphed mightily.”’

Tungata grunted as the tale ended, and prodded the pile of treasure in the firelight before him with a spurning finger. ‘I wish one of these could bring us just a little of that good
fortune.’

And Craig had run out of stories, his throat had closed painfully from cold and talking and the searing tear gas, and none of the others could think of anything to say to cheer them. They ate
the unappetizing scorched maize cakes in silence and then lay down as close to the fire as they could get. Craig lay and listened to the others sleeping, but despite his fatigue, his brain spun in
circles, chasing its tail and keeping him awake.