by Wilbur Smith
No! he said explosively, and then dropped his voice. I wouldn't like that. He shivered at the persistent images her words had invoked. Is that going to happen, Mater? Could it happen? Might we also be poor? We could be, cheri. It could happen quickly and cruelly if we are not on guard every minute. A fortune is extremely difficult to build but very easy to destroy. Is it going to happen? he insisted, and he thought about the Midas Touch, his yacht, and the polo ponies, and his friends at Bishops, and the vineyards of Weltevreden and he was afraid.
Nothing is certain. She reached across and took his hand.
That's the fun of this game of life, if it was then it wouldn't be worth playing. I wouldn't like to be poor. No! She said it as vehemently as he had. It will not happen, not if we are cunning and bold. What you said about the trade of the world coming to a halt. People no longer able to buy our diamonds... Before those had been merely words, now they were a dreadful possibility.
We must believe that the wheels will one day begin to turn again, one day soon, and we must play the golden rules.
Do you remember them? She swung the Daimler through the climbing turns up the slope and around the spur of the hills so that the mine buildings disappeared behind the rock wall of the cliff.
What was the first golden rule, Shasa? she prompted him.
Sell when everybody else is buying and buy when everybody else is selling he repeated.
Good. And what is happening now? Everybody is trying to sell. It dawned upon him and his grin was triumphant.
He's so beautiful, and he has the sense and the instinct, she thought as she waited for him to follow the coils of the serpent until he reached its head and discovered the fangs.
His expression changed as it happened. He looked at her crestfallen.
But, Mater, how can we buy if we haven't got the money? She pulled to the side of the track and cut the engine.
Then turned to him seriously and took both his hands.
I am going to treat you as a man, she said. What I tell you is our secret, our private business that we share with nobody. Not Grandpater or Anna, or Abraham Abrahams or TWentyman-jones. It's our thing, yours and mine alone. He nodded and she drew a deep breath. I have a premonition that this catastrophe that has engulfed the world is our pivot, an opportunity that very few are ever offered. For the last few years I have been preparing to exploit it. How did I do that, cheri? He shook his head, staring at her fascinated.
I have turned everything, with the exception of the mine and Weltevreden, into cash, and even on those I have borrowed heavily, very heavily. That's why you called all the loans. That's why we went to Walvis for that fish factory and the trawlers, you wanted the money. 'Yes, cheri, yes, she encouraged him, unconsciously shaking hands, willing him to see it. And his face lit again.
You are going to buy! he exclaimed.
I have already begun, she told him. I have bought land and mining concessions, fishing concessions and guano concessions, buildings. I have even bought the Alhambra Theatre in Cape Town and the Coliseum in Johannesburg. But most of all I have bought land, and the option to buy more land, tens and hundreds of thousands of acres, cheri, at two shillings an acre. Land is the only true store of wealth. He could not really grasp it, but he sensed the enormity of what she told him and she saw it in his eyes.
Now you know our secret, she laughed. If I have guessed right, we will double and redouble our fortune. And if it doesn't change. If the, he searched for the word, if the Depression goes on and on for ever, what then, Mater? She pouted and dropped his hands. Then, cheri, nothing will matter very much, one way or the other. She started the Daimler and drove up the last pitch of the road to the bungalow standing alone in its wide lawns, with lights burning in the windows and the servants lined up respectfully on the front verandah in their immaculate white livery to welcome her.
She parked at the bottom of the steps, turned off the engine and turned to him again.
No, Shasa cheri, we are not going to be poor. We are going to be richer, much richer than we ever were before. And then later, through you, my darling, we will have power to go with our wealth. Great fortune, enormous power. Oh, I have it all planned, so carefully planned! Her words filled Shasa's head with turbulent thoughts. He could not sleep.
Great fortune, enormous power. The words excited and disturbed him. He tried to visualize what they meant and saw himself like a strongman at the circus, in leopard-skins and leather wristbands, standing with arms akimbo, huge biceps flexed, upon a pyramid of golden sovereigns, while a congregation in white robes knelt and made obeisance before him.
He ran the images through his head over and over, each time altering some detail, all of them pleasurable but lacking the final touch until he bestowed upon one of his white robed worshippers a crown of unruly wind-tousled sun-streaked curls. He placed her in the front rank, and she lifted her forehead from the ground and stuck her tongue out at him.
His erection was so quick and hard that it made him gasp, and before he could prevent himself he had slipped his hand under the sheet and prised it out of the fly of his pyjamas.
lock Murphy had warned him about it. It will spoil your eye, Master Shasa. I have seen many a good man with a bat or a polo stick ruined by Mrs Palm and her five daughters. But in his fantasy Armalisa was sitting up, her long legs apart, and she was slowly drawing up the skirt of her white robe. The skin of her legs was smooth as butter, and he moaned softly. She was staring at the front of his costume, her tongue whisking lightly over her parted lips, and the white skirt rose higher and higher, and his fist began to jerk rhythmically. He could not prevent it.
Up and up rode the white skirt, never quite reaching the fork of her crotch. Her legs seemed to stretch forever, like the railway tracks across the desert running on and on and never meeting. He choked and jerked into a sitting position on the feather mattress, doubled over his flying fist, and when it came it was sharp and painful as a bayonet driven up into his intestines, and he cried out and fell back against the pillows.
Annalisa's sly grinning freckled face receded, and the wet front of his pyjamas began to turn icy cold, but he did not have the will to strip them off.
When the servant woke him with a tray of coffee and a dish of hard sweet rusks, he felt dazed and exhausted. It was still dark outside, and he rolled over and pulled the pillows over his head.
Madam your mother, she says I wait here until you get up, said the Ovambo servant darkly, and Shasa dragged himself to the bathroom trying to conceal the dry stain on the front of his pyjamas.
One of the grooms had his pony saddled and waiting at the front steps of the bungalow. Shasa took a moment to joke and laugh with the groom and then greet and caress his pony, rubbing foreheads with him and blowing softly into his nostrils.
You are getting fat, Prester John, he chided the pony.
We'll have to work that off you with the polo sticks. He swung up into the saddle and took the short cut, following the pipe track around the shoulder of the hill. The pipe line carried the water from the spring around the hills to the mine and the washing gear. He passed the pumphouse and felt a guilty pang at its associations with last night's depravity, but then the dawn lit the plains below the cliffs and he forgot that in the pleasure of watching the veld come alive and greet the sun.
On this side of the hills Centaine had ordered that the forest be left untouched and the mopani was tall and stately.
A covey of francolin were dawn-crying in the thicket down the slope, and a grey duiker, returning from the spring, bounded across the track under the pony's nose. Shasa laughed as he shied theatrically.
Stop that, you old show-off! He turned the corner of the cliff and the contrast was depressing. The desecrated forest, the deforming scar of the workings on the hillside, the graceless square iron buildings and the stark skeletal girders o t was ing gear, they were.
He gave the pony a touch with his heels and they galloped the last mile and reached the main haulage just as Twe
nty-man-Jones old Ford came up the track from the village with headlights still burning. He checked his watch as he stepped out and looked sad as he saw that Shasa was three minutes ahead of time.
Have you ever been down the haulage, Master Shasa? No, sir. He was going to add, My Mater has never allowed it, but somehow that seemed superfluous, and for the first time he felt a twinge of resentment at his mother's all-pervading presence.
Twenty-man-Jones led him to the head of the haulage and introduced him to the shift boss.
Master Shasa will be working with you, he explained.
Treat him normally, just like you would treat any other young man who will one day be your managing director, he instructed. It was impossible to tell by Twenty-man-jones expression when he was joking, so nobody laughed.
Get a tin helmet for him, Twenty-man-Jones ordered, and while Shasa adjusted the straps of the helmet he led him to the foot of the sheer cliff.
The incline tunnel had been cut into the base of the cliff, a round aperture into which the steel rail tracks angled downwards at forty-five degrees before disappearing into the dark depths. A string of cocopans stood at the head of the tracks, and Twenty-man-jones led him to the first truck and they climbed into the steel bin. The shift swarmed into the trucks behind them, a dozen white foremen and one hundred and fifty black workers in ragged dusty overalls and helmets of bright unpainted metal, laughing and ragging each other in boisterous horseplay.
The steam winch of the winding gear clattered and hissed and the string of trucks jerked forward and then, rocking and swaying, ran down the steeply inclined ramp on the narrow-gauge railway tracks. The steel wheels rumbling and clacking over the joints of the track, they dropped down into the dark maw of the tunnel.
Shasa stirred uneasily, stabbed with unreasoning fear at the sudden absolute blackness that engulfed them. However, in the trucks behind him the Ovambo miners were singing, their deep melodious voices echoing in the dark confines of the tunnel, a marvelous chorus raised in an African work chant, and Shasa relaxed and leaned closer to Twenty-man-Jones to follow his explanation.
The incline is forty-five degrees and the capacity of the winding gear is one hundred tons, in mining parlance that is sixty loads of ore. Our target is six hundred loads a shift raised to the surface. Shasa was trying to concentrate on the figures; he knew his mother would question him this evening, but the darkness and singing and the rumble of the swaying trucks distracted him. Ahead of him there was a tiny coin of brilliant white light that grew swiftly in size until abruptly they burst out of the far end of the tunnel and involuntarily Shasa gasped with astonishment.
He had studied the diagrams of the pipe and, of course, there were photographs on his mother's desk at Weltevreden but they had not adequately prepared him for its immensity.
It was an almost perfectly round hole in the centre of the hills. It was open to the sky, and the sides of the excavation were vertical and sheer, a circular wall of grey rock like a cockpit. They had entered it through the tunnel that connected the workings to the far side of the hills and the narrow ramp on which they were riding continued down at the same angle of forty-five degrees until it reached the floor of the excavation two hundred feet below them. The drop on either hand was breathtaking. The great rock-lined hole was a mile across, and its sheer walls four hundred feet from the tip to the floor.
Twenty-man-Jones was still lecturing him. This is a volcanic pipe, a blow hole from the earth's depths up which the molten magma was forced to the surface in the beginning of time. In those temperatures, as hot as the sun, and enormous pressures the diamonds were forged, and they were brought up in the fiery lava. Shasa stared around him, screwing his head to take in the proportions of the huge excavation as TWentyman-Jones went on, Then the pipe was pinched off at depth, and the magma in it cooled and solidified. The upper layer, exposed to air and sun, was oxidized into the classical "yellow ground" of the diamondiferous formation.
We worked down through that for eleven years, and only recently we reached the "blue ground". He made an expansive gesture that took in the slaty blue rock that formed the floor of the huge pit. That is the deeper deposit of the solidified magma, hard as iron and as full of diamonds as currants in a hot cross bun. They reached the floor of the workings and climbed down from the truck.
The operation is fairly straightforward, Twenty-man-jones went on.
The new shift comes in at first light and begins work on the previous evening's blast. The broken ground is lashed and loaded into the cocopans and sent up the haulage to the surface. After that they mark out and drill the shot-holes for the next blast and then they set the charges. At dusk we pull out the shift, and the shift boss lights the fuses.
After the blast we leave the workings overnight to settle and for the fumes to disperse, then the next morning we begin the whole process over again. There, he pointed to an area of shattered blue grey rock, 'that's last night's blast.
That's where we will begin today. Shasa had not expected to be so absorbed by the fascination of this mighty excavation, but his interest grew more intense as the day went on. Not even the heat and the dust daunted him. The heat was trapped between the sheer walls when at noon the sun beat down directly onto the uneven broken floor. The dust was floury, rising from the shattered ore body as the hammer-men swung their ten-pound sledges to crack the larger lumps into manageable pieces. The dust hung in a fog over the lashing teams as they loaded the cocopans, and it coated their faces and their bodies and turned them into ghostly grey albinos.
We get a bit of miners phthisis, Twenty-man-jones admitted. The dust gets into their lungs and turns to stone. ideally we should hose the ore down and keep it wet to lay the dust, but we are short of water. We haven't enough for the washing gear. We certainly can't afford to splash it around. So men die and are crippled, but it takes ten years to build up in the lungs, and we give them, or their widows, a good pension, and the miners inspector is sympathetic, though his sympathy costs a penny. At noon TWentyman-jones called Shasa across. 'Your mother said you need only work half the shift. I'm going up now.
Are you coming? I'd rather not, sir, Shasa answered diffidently. 'I'd like to watch them charge the holes for the blast., TWentyman-jones shook his head sorrowfully. Chip off the old block! and went away still muttering.
The shift boss allowed Shasa to fight the fuses, under his careful supervision. It gave Shasa a sense of importance and power to touch the flaring chesa stick, the igniter, to the bunched tips of the fuses, passing quickly down the line and watching the fire run down the twisted white fuses, turning them sizzling black in the swirl of blue smoke.
He and the shift boss rode up on the haulage to the cry of Fire in the hole! and Shasa lingered at the head of the main haulage until the shots fired and he felt the earth tremble beneath his feet.
Then he saddled Prester John and, dusty, streaked with sweat, bone-tired and happy as he had seldom been in his life, he rode back along the pipe track.
He was not even thinking about her when he reached the pump-house, but there she was, perched up on top of the silver-painted waterpipe. The shock was such that when Prester John shied under him he almost lost his seat and had to snatch at the pommel.
She had plaited a wreath of wild flowers into her hair and unbuttoned the top of her blouse. In one of the books in the library at Weltevreden there was an illustration of satyrs and nymphs dancing in the forest. The book was kept in the forbidden section to which his mother guarded the key, but Shasa had invested some of his pocket money in a duplicate and lightly clad nymphs were among his favourites of all that treasure house of erotica.
Annalisa was one of these, a wood nymph, only part human, and she slanted her eyes at him slyly and her eye teeth were pointed and very white.
Hello, Annalisa. His voice cracked treacherously, and his heart was beating so wildly that he thought it might spring into his throat and choke him.
She smiled but did not reply, instead she caressed
her own arm, a slow lingering stroke from her wrist to her bare shoulder. He watched her fingers raising the fine coppery hair on her forearm and his loins swelled.
She leaned forward and placed her forefinger on her lower lip, still grinning slyly, and her bosom changed shape and the opening of her blouse gaped and he saw that the skin in the vee was so white and translucent that the tiny blue veins showed through it.
He kicked out of the stirrups and swung a leg over Prester John's withers in the showy polo player's forward dismount, but the girl whirled to her feet, hoisted her skirts high and, with a flash of creamy thighs, sprang lightly over the pipeline and disappeared into the thick scrub on the hillside beyond.
Shasa raced after her, and found himself struggling through dense undergrowth. It clawed at his face and seized his legs.
He heard her giggle once, not far ahead of him, but a rock twisted under his boot and he fell heavily, winding himself.
When he pulled himself up and limped after her, she was gone.
A while longer he floundered around in the scrub, his ardour swiftly cooling, and by the time he battled his way back to the pipe track to find that Prester John had taken full advantage of the diversion and decamped, he was bubbling over with anger at himself and the girl.
it was a long tramp back to the bungalow and he hadn't realized how tired he was. It was dark by the time he got home. The pony with empty saddle had raised the alarm and Centaine's concern changed instantly to relieved fury when she saw him.
A week in the heat and dust of the workings and the monotony of the work began to pall, so TWentyman-Jones sent Shasa to work in the winch room of the main haulage. The winch driver was a taciturn, morose man and jealous of his job. He would not allow Shasa to touch the controls of the winch.
My union doesn't allow it. He stood his ground stubbornly and after two days Twenty-man-Jones moved Shasa to the weathering ground.
Here the ore was tipped out and spread in the open by gangs of Ovambo labourers, all stripped to the waist and chanting in chorus as they went through the laborious repetitive process of tip and spread under the urgings of their white supervisor and his gang of black boss-boys.
