Men of Men (7 page)

He stooped and with his bare hand dressed the mound where the earth had collapsed at one corner.

With the first diamond I will buy the headstone, he promised himself silently. The red earth had stained under his fingernails, little half-moons the colour of blood.

With a supreme effort he overcame his sense of futility, overcame the self-consciousness sufficiently to speak aloud to someone who could not hear.

‘I will look after them, my dear,’ he said. ‘That is my last promise to you.’

‘J
ordie will not eat, Papa.’ Ralph greeted him as he stooped into the tent, and Zouga felt the leap of alarm swamp his sorrow and his
guilt. He strode to the cot on which the child lay, facing the canvas wall of the tent with his knees drawn up to his chest.

Jordan’s skin was burning hot as the sun-scorched rocks that littered the plain outside the tent, and his silken cheeks smeared with tears were flushed a furious fever red.

By morning Ralph was feverish also, both boys tossing and muttering in delirium, their bodies hot as two little furnaces, the blankets sodden with their sweat and the tent reeking with the
carrion stench of fever.

Ralph fought the fever.

‘Ja, just look at him.’ Jan Cheroot paused fondly in the act of sponging down the robust strong-boned body. ‘He takes the sickness like an enemy, and struggles with
it.’

Helping him, kneeling on the opposite side of the cot, Zouga felt the familiar glow of pride surface through his concern as he looked down at him. Already there were little smoky wisps of hair
under Ralph’s arms, and a darker explosion of curls at the base of his belly; and his penis was no longer the little wormlike appendage with a childish cap of wrinkled loose skin. His
shoulders were squaring and filling with muscle, and his legs were straight and sturdy.

‘He will be all right,’ Jan Cheroot repeated, and Ralph thrashed out angrily in his delirium, his features scowling and dark with determination.

The two men drew the blanket up over him and turned to the other cot.

Jordan’s long thick lashes fluttered like the wings of a beautiful butterfly, and he whimpered pitifully, unresisting as they stripped and sponged him. His little body was as sweetly
formed as his features, but clad still in its puppy-fat so that his buttocks were round as apples and plump as a girl’s; but his limbs were delicately boned and shapely, his feet and hands
long and narrow and graceful.

‘Mama,’ he whimpered. ‘I want my Mama.’

The two men nursed the boys, taking turns day and night, everything else neglected or forgotten, an hour snatched here to water and tend the horses, another hour for a hurried journey into the
camp to purchase patent medicine from a transport rider or scramble for the few vegetables offered for sale on the farmers’ carts. But diamonds were forgotten, never mentioned in the hot
little tent where the struggle for life went on, and the Devil’s Own claims were abandoned and deserted.

In forty-eight hours Ralph had regained consciousness, in three days he was sitting up unaided and wolfing his food, in six days they could no longer keep him in his cot.

Jordan rallied briefly on the second day, becoming lucid and demanding his mother fretfully, and then remembered that she was gone, began weeping again and immediately began to sink. His life
teetered, the pendulum swinging erratically back and forth, but each time he fell back the presence of death grew stronger in the baking canvas tent, until its stench overpowered the odour of
fever.

The flesh melted from his body, burned away by the fever, and his skin took on a pearly translucent sheen, so that it seemed in that uncertain light of dusk and early dawn that the very outline
of the delicate bone structure showed through.

Jan Cheroot and Zouga nursed him in turns, one sleeping while the other watched – or, when neither could sleep, sitting together, seeking comfort and companionship from each other, trying
to discount their helplessness in the face of onrushing death.

‘He’s young and strong,’ they told each other. ‘He will be all right also.’

And day after day Jordan sank lower, his cheekbones rising up out of his flesh, and his eyes receding into deep cavities the colour of old bruises.

Exhausted with guilt and sorrow, with helpless worry, Zouga left the tent each dawn before sunrise to be the first at Market Square – perhaps there was a transport rider freshly arrived
with medicines in his chests, and certainly there would be Boer farmers with cabbages and onions and, if he was lucky, a few wizened and half-green tomatoes, all of which would be sold half an hour
after dawn.

On the tenth morning, as Zouga hurried back to the tent, he paused for a moment at the entrance, frowning angrily. The falcon statue had been dragged from the tent, and there was a long furrow
scraped by its base in the loose dust. It stood now at a careless angle, leaning against the trunk of the scraggy camel-thorn tree that gave meagre shade to the camp.

The branches of the tree were festooned with black ribbons of dried springbuck meat, with saddlery and trek gear – so that the statue seemed to be part of this litter. There was one of the
camp’s brown hens perched on the falcon’s head, and it had dropped a long chalky smear of liquid excrement down the stone figure.

Still frowning, Zouga ducked into the tent. Jan Cheroot squatted beside Ralph’s cot, and the two of them were deeply involved in a game of five stones, using polished pebbles of agate and
quartz for the counters.

Jordan lay very still and pale, so that Zouga felt a lurch of dismay under his ribs. It was only when he stooped over the cot that he saw the rise and fall of Jordan’s chest and caught the
faint whisper of his breathing.

‘Did you move the stone falcon?’

Jan Cheroot grunted without looking up from the shiny stones. ‘It seemed to trouble Jordie. He woke up crying again – and kept calling to it.’

Zouga would have taken it further, but suddenly it did not seem worth the effort. He was so tired and dispirited. He would bring the statue back into the tent later, he decided.

‘There are a few sweet potatoes – nothing else,’ he grunted as he took up the vigil beside Jordan’s cot.

Jan Cheroot made a stew of dried beans and mutton, and mashed this with the boiled potatoes. It was an unappetizing mess, but that evening, for the first time, Jordan did not roll his head away
from the proffered spoon, and after that his recovery was startlingly swift.

He asked only once more after Aletta, when he and Zouga were alone in the tent.

‘Has she gone to heaven, Papa?’

‘Yes.’ The certainty in Zouga’s tone seemed to reassure him.

‘Will she be one of God’s angels?’

‘Yes, Jordie, and from now on she will always be there – watching over you.’

The child thought about that seriously and then nodded contentedly, and the next day he seemed strong enough for Zouga to leave him in Ralph’s charge while he and Jan Cheroot went up to
the kopje and walked out along No. 6 Roadway to look down on the Devil’s Own claims.

All the mining equipment, shovels and picks, buckets and ropes, sheave wheels and ladders had been stolen. At the prices the transport riders were charging it would cost a hundred guineas to
replace them.

‘We will need men,’ Zouga said.

‘What will you do when you have them?’ Jan Cheroot asked.

‘Dig the stuff out.’

‘And then?’ the little Hottentot demanded with a malicious gleam in his dark eyes, his features wrinkled as a sour windfallen apple. ‘What do you then?’ he insisted.

‘I intend to find out,’ Zouga replied grimly. ‘We have wasted enough time here already.’

‘M
y dear fellow,’ Neville Pickering gave him that charming smile. ‘I’m delighted that you asked. Had you not, then I
should have offered. It’s always a little problematic for a new chum to find his feet,’ he coughed deferentially, and went on quickly, ‘not that you are a new chum, by any
means—’

That was a term usually reserved for the fresh-faced hopefuls newly arrived on the boat from ‘home’. ‘Home’ was England, even those who were colonial born referred to it
as ‘home’.

‘I’d bet a fiver to a pinch of giraffe dung that you know more about this country than any of us here.’

‘African born,’ Zouga admitted, ‘on the Zouga river up north in Khama’s land; accounts for the odd name – Zouga.’

‘By Jove, didn’t realize that, I must say!’

‘Don’t hold it against me.’ Zouga smiled lightly, but he knew that there were many who would. Home born was vastly superior to colonial born. It was for that reason that he had
insisted that Aletta should make the long sea voyage with him when it seemed that her pregnancies would reach full term. Both Ralph and Jordan had been born in the same house in south London, and
both had arrived back at Good Hope before they were weaned. They were home born: that was his first gift to them.

Pickering glossed over the remark tactfully. He did not have to declare his own birth. He was an English gentleman, and nobody would ever mistake that.

‘There are many parts of your book that fascinated me. I’ll teach you what I know about sparklers if you’ll answer my questions. Bargain?’

Over the days that followed they bombarded each other with questions, Zouga demanding every detail of the process of raising and sorting the yellow gravel from the deepening pit, while Pickering
kept turning the conversation back to the land to the north, asking about the tribes and the gold reefs, about the rivers and mountains and the wild animals that swarmed upon the plains and in the
lonely forests that Zouga had conjured up so vividly in
Hunter’s
Odyssey.

Each morning an hour before the first light, Zouga would meet Pickering at the edge of the roadway above the workings. There would be an enamelled kettle bubbling on the brazier and they drank
black coffee that was strong enough to stain the teeth, while around them in the gloom the black mine-workers gathered sleepily, still hugging their fur karosses over their shoulders, their voices
muted but musical, their movements stiff and slow with sleepiness and the dawn chill.

At a hundred other points around the growing pit the gangs assembled, waiting for the light; and when it glimmered on the eastern horizon the men went swarming down into the workings, like
columns of ants, along the boardwalks and down the swaying ladders, spreading out on the chequerboard of claims, the hubbub rising, the chant of tribesmen, the squeal of ropes, the hectoring shouts
of the white overseers, and then the rattle of bucketloads of yellow gravel into the waiting carts upon the roadway.

Pickering was working four claims, which he owned in partnership.

‘My partner is down in Cape Town. Heaven knows when he will be back.’

Neville Pickering shrugged with that deceptively indolent air which he cultivated. ‘You’ll meet him one of these fine days, and it will be an experience – memorable but not
necessarily enjoyable.’

It amused Zouga to see how Neville contrived to maintain his foppish elegance of dress, how he could walk the length of the No. 6 Roadway without the dust hazing the shine of his boots; how he
could scramble across the ladderworks without dampening his shirt with sweat, or exchange a flurry of blows with a brawny digger who was encroaching on his claims without it seeming to affect the
drape of his Norfolk jacket. His casual sauntering gait carried him from one end of the diggings to the other, at a pace which had Zouga stretching his own legs.

The four claims were not in a single block, but each separated from the others by a dozen or so intervening claims, and Pickering moved from one to the other coordinating the work, pulling a
gang of half-naked black men from one claim and leading them across to another where the work had fallen behind.

Abruptly he was on the roadway, checking the loading of the carts, and then again, just as abruptly, at the fenced-off plot beyond Market Square where his black workers were rocking the cradles
of gravel.

The diamond cradles were like giant versions of the old-fashioned baby cradles from which they took their name. Standing on their half-moon-shaped feet, a man on each side kept them swinging
easily from side to side while a third worker shovelled the yellow gravel into the top deck of the cradle from the mound that the cart had dumped. The top deck was a coarse steel sieve, with inch
and a half openings in the mesh.

As the cradle rocked rhythmically, the gravel tumbled and bounced across the sloping sieve, the finer stuff under one and a half inches in diameter dropping through onto the second deck of the
cradle while the coarse pebbles and waste rolled over under the surveillance of the two cradle men, who watched for the highly unlikely flash of a diamond too big to fall through onto the second
deck.

A diamond more than one and a half inches across would be the fortune-maker, the finder’s passport to great wealth, the almost impossible ‘pony’ of the diggers’ dreams, a
stone heavier than one hundred carats.

On the second deck the mesh was much finer, half-inch square, and a yellow dust blew away like smoke as the cradle agitated it, while on the third deck the mesh was finer still, allowing only
the worthless tailings to drop to waste, stuff smaller than the crystals of refined sugar.

From the third deck the gravel was gathered with reverential care, and this was washed in a tub of precious water, every drop of which had been transported thirty miles from the Vaal river.

The gravel was washed in a circular sieve of the No. 3 mesh, the finest of all. The worker agitating and dipping over the tub, muddy to the elbows. Finally the contents of the sieve, cleansed of
mud, were dumped onto the flat metal surface of the sorting-table, and the sorters began picking over it with the flat wooden blades of their scrapers.

Women were far away the best sorters, they had the patience, the manual dexterity and the fine eye for colour and texture that was needed. The married diggers kept their wives and daughters at
the sorting-table from the minute the mellow morning light was strong enough until the dusk faded each evening.