by Wilbur Smith
‘Low and left. Papa is getting old,’ Ralph thought derisively, and brought the gelding crashing down to a stiff-legged halt. Before he could fire, Zouga had shot again, and the lioness collapsed and rolled like a yellow ball on the stony earth, shot through the neck a hand’s span behind the ear.
‘Bully for you!’ Ralph laughed with excitement, and kicked his heels into the gelding’s flank as they charged up the slope, shoulder to shoulder.
‘Where is Jan Cheroot?’ Zouga shouted, and as if in reply they heard the clap of rifle fire in the forest on the left, and they swung the horses in that direction.
‘Can you see him?’ Ralph called.
The bush was thicker ahead of them, and the thorn branches whipped at their thighs as they passed. There was a second shot, and immediately afterwards the furious ear-numbing roars of the lion mingled with Jan Cheroot’s shrill squeals of terror.
‘He is in trouble!’ Zouga called anxiously, as they burst out of the thick scrub.
Before them there lay parkland, fine open grass beneath the tall flat-topped acacia trees along the crest of the ridge. A hundred yards ahead Jan Cheroot was tearing along the crest, twisted in the saddle to look over his shoulder, his face a mask of terror, his eyes huge and glistening white. He had lost his hat and rifle, but he was lashing his mount across the neck and shoulders, although the animal was already at a wild uncontrolled gallop.
The lion was a dozen strides behind them, but gaining with each elastic bound as though they were standing still. Its heaving flank was painted slick and shiny with bright new blood, shot through the guts, but the wound had not crippled nor even slowed the beast. Rather it had maddened him, so that the solid blasts of sound from his throat sounded like the thunder of the skies.
Ralph swerved his gelding to try and intercept the little Hottentot, and alter the angle to give himself an open shot at the lion, but at that moment the cat came up out of its flat snaking charge, reared up over the bunched and straining quarters of the horse and raked them with long curved talons so that the sweat-darkened hide opened in deep parallel wounds, and the blood smoked from them in a fine crimson cloud.
The horse shrieked and lashed out with its hind hooves, catching the lion in his chest, so that he reeled and lost a stride. Immediately he gathered himself and came again, quartering in beside the running horse, his eyes inscrutably yellow as he prepared to leap astride the panic-driven animal.
‘Jump, Jan Cheroot!’ Ralph yelled. The lion was too close to risk a shot. ‘Jump, damn you!’ But Jan Cheroot did not appear to have heard him, he was clinging helplessly to the tangled flying mane, paralysed with fear.
The lion rose lightly into the air, and settled like a huge yellow bird on the horse’s back, crushing Jan Cheroot beneath his massive, blood-streaked body. At that instant, horse and rider and lion seemed to disappear into the very earth, and there was only a swirling column of dust to mark where they had been. Yet the shattering roars of the enraged animal and Jan Cheroot’s howls of terror grew even louder as Ralph galloped up to the point on the ridge where they had disappeared.
With the Winchester in one hand he kicked his feet from the stirrup irons and jumped from the saddle, letting his own momentum throw him forward until he stood on the edge of a sheer-sided pitfall at the bottom of which lay a tangle of heaving bodies.
‘The devil is killing me!’ screamed Jan Cheroot, and Ralph could see him pinned beneath the body of the horse. The horse must have broken its neck in the fall, it was a lifeless heap with head twisted up under its shoulder and the lion was ripping the carcass and saddle, trying to reach Jan Cheroot.
‘Lie still,’ Ralph shouted down at him. ‘Give me a clear shot!’
But it was the lion that heard him. He left the horse and came up the vertical side of the pit with the ease of a cat climbing a tree, his glossy muscular hindquarters driving him lightly upwards and his pale yellow eyes fastened upon Ralph as he stood on the lip of the deep hole.
Ralph dropped on one knee to steady himself for the shot, and aimed down into the broad golden chest. The jaws were wide open, the fangs long as a man’s forefinger and white as polished ivory, the deafening clamour from the open throat dinned into Ralph’s face. He could smell the rotten-flesh taint of the lion’s breath and flecks of hot saliva splattered against his cheeks and forehead.
He fired, and pumped the loading-handle and fired again, so swiftly that the shots were a continuous blast of sound. The lion arched backwards, hung for a long moment from the wall of the pit, and then toppled and fell back upon the dead horse.
Now there was no movement from the bottom of the pit, and the silence was more intense than the shattering uproar that had preceded it.
‘Jan Cheroot, are you all right?’ Ralph called anxiously.
There was no sign of the little Hottentot, he was completely smothered by the carcasses of horse and lion.
‘Jan Cheroot, can you hear me?’
The reply was in a hollow, sepulchral whisper. ‘Dead men cannot hear – it’s all over, they have got old Jan Cheroot at last.’
‘Come out from under there,’ Zouga Ballantyne ordered, as he stepped up to Ralph’s shoulder. ‘This is no time to play the clown, Jan Cheroot.’
Ralph dropped a coil of manilla rope down to Jan Cheroot, and between them they hauled him and the saddle from the dead horse to the surface. The excavation into which Jan Cheroot had fallen was a deep narrow trench along the crest of the ridge. In places it was twenty feet deep, but never more than six feet wide. Mostly it was choked with creepers and rank vegetation, but this could not disguise the certainty that it had been dug by men.
‘The reef was exposed along this line,’ Zouga guessed, as they followed the edge of the old trench, ‘the ancient miners simply dug it out and did not bother to refill.’
‘How did they blast the reef?’ Ralph demanded. ‘That’s solid rock down there.’
‘They probably built fires upon it, and then quenched it with water. The contraction cracked the rock.’
‘Well, they seem to have taken out every grain of the ore body and left nary a speck for us.’
Zouga nodded. ‘They would have worked out this section first, and then when the reef pinched out they would have started sinking potholes along the strike to try and intercept it again.’ Zouga turned to Jan Cheroot and demanded, ‘Now do you recognize this place, Jan Cheroot?’ And when the Hottentot hesitated, he pointed down the slope. ‘The swamp in the valley down there, and the teak trees—’
‘Yes, yes.’ Jan Cheroot clapped his hands, and his eyes twinkled with delight. ‘This is the same place where you killed the bull elephant – the tusks are on the stoep at King’s Lynn.’
‘The ancient dump will be just ahead.’ Zouga hurried forward.
He found the low mound covered by grass, and went down on his knees to scrabble amongst the grass roots, picking out the chips of white sugar quartz, examining each one swiftly and discarding it. Occasionally he wet one with his tongue, held it to the sunlight to try and highlight the sparkle of metal, then frowned and shook his head with disappointment.
At last he stood and wiped his hands on his breeches.
‘It’s quartz all right, but the ancient miners must have hand-sorted this dump. We will have to find the old shafts if we want to see visible gold in the ore.’
From the top of the ancient dump Zouga orientated himself rapidly.
‘The carcass of the bull elephant fell about there,’ he pointed, and to confirm it Jan Cheroot searched in the grass and lifted a huge thighbone, dry and white as chalk, and at last after thirty years beginning to crumble.
‘He was the father of all elephant,’ Jan Cheroot said reverently. ‘There will never be another like him, and it was he that led us to this place. When you shot him he fell here to mark it for us.’
Zouga turned a quarter-circle and pointed again. ‘The ancient shaft where we buried old Matthew will be there.’
Ralph recalled the elep
hant hunt as his father had described it in his celebrated book A Hunter’s Odyssey. The black gunbearer had not flinched from the great bull elephant’s charge, but had stood it down and handed Zouga the second gun, sacrificing his own life for that of his master. So Ralph understood and remained silent, as Zouga went down on one knee beside the rock pile that marked the gunbearer’s grave.
After a minute, Zouga rose and dusted off his knee, and said simply, ‘He was a good man.’
‘Good, but stupid,’ Jan Cheroot agreed. ‘A wise man would have run.’
‘And a wise man would have chosen a better grave,’ Ralph murmured. ‘He is plumb in the centre of a gold reef. We will have to dig him out.’
But Zouga frowned. ‘Let him lie. There are other shafts along the strike.’ He turned away, and the others followed him. A hundred yards farther on, Zouga stopped again. ‘Here!’ he called with satisfaction. ‘The second shaft – there were four of them altogether.’
This opening had also been refilled with chunks of native rock. Ralph shrugged off his jacket, propped his rifle against the bole of the nearest tree and climbed down into the shallow depression until he stooped over the narrow blocked entrance.
‘I’m going to open it up.’
They worked for half an hour, prising loose the boulders with a branch of a leadwood and manhandling them aside until they had exposed the square opening to the shaft. It was narrow, so narrow that only a child could have passed through it. They knelt and peered down into it. There was no telling how deep it was, for it was impenetrably black in the depths and it stank of damp, of fungus and bats, and of rotting things.
Ralph and Zouga stared into the opening with a horrid fascination.
‘They say the ancients used child slaves or captured Bushmen in the workings,’ Zouga murmured.
‘We have to know if the reef is down there,’ Ralph whispered. ‘But no grown man—’ he broke off and there was another moment of thoughtful silence, before Zouga and Ralph glanced at each other and smiled, and then both their heads turned in unison towards Jan Cheroot.
‘Never!’ said the little Hottentot fiercely. ‘I am a sick old man. Never! You will have to kill me first!’
Ralph found a stump of candle in his saddlebag, while Zouga swiftly spliced together the three coils of rope used for tethering the horses, and Jan Cheroot watched their preparation like a condemned man watching the construction of the gallows.
‘For twenty-nine years, since the day I was born, you have been telling me of your courage and daring,’ Ralph reminded him, as he placed an arm around Jan Cheroot’s shoulder and led him gently back to the mouth of the shaft.
‘Perhaps I exaggerated a little,’ Jan Cheroot admitted, as Zouga knotted the rope under his armpits and strapped a saddlebag around his tiny waist.
‘You, who have fought wild men and hunted elephant and lion – what can you fear in this little hole? A few snakes, a little darkness, the ghosts of dead men, that’s all.’
‘Perhaps I exaggerated more than a little,’ Jan Cheroot whispered huskily.
‘You are not a coward are you, Jan Cheroot?’
‘Yes,’ Jan Cheroot nodded fervently. ‘That is exactly what I am, and this is no place for a coward.’
Ralph drew him back, struggling like a hooked catfish on the end of the rope, lifted him easily and lowered him into the shaft. His protests faded gradually as Ralph paid out the rope.
Ralph was measuring the rope across the reach of his outstretched arms. Reckoning each span at six feet, he had lowered the little Hottentot a little under sixty feet before the rope went slack.
‘Jan Cheroot!’ Zouga bellowed down the shaft.
‘A little cave.’ Jan Cheroot’s voice was muffled and distorted by echoes. ‘I can just stand. The reef is black with soot.’
‘Cooking fires. The slaves would have been kept down there,’ Zouga guessed, ‘never seeing the light of day again until they died.’ Then he raised his voice. ‘What else?’
‘Ropes, plaited grass ropes, and buckets, leather buckets like we used on the diamond diggings at New Rush—’ Jan Cheroot broke off with an exclamation. ‘They fall to pieces when I touch them, just dust now.’ Faintly they could hear Jan Cheroot sneezing and coughing in the dust he had raised and his voice was thickened and nasal as he went on, ‘Iron tools, something like an adze,’ and when he called again they could hear the tremor in his voice. ‘Name of the great snake, there are dead men here, dead men’s bones. I am coming up – pull me up!’
Staring down the narrow shaft, Ralph could see the light of the candle flame wavering and trembling at the bottom.
‘Jan Cheroot, is there a tunnel leading off from the cave?’
‘Pull me up.’
‘Can you see a tunnel?’
‘Yes, now will you pull me up?’
‘Not until you follow the tunnel to the end.’
‘Are you mad? I would have to crawl on hands and knees.’
‘Take one of the iron tools with you, to break a piece off the reef.’
‘No. That is enough. I go no farther, not with dead men guarding this place.’
‘Very well,’ Ralph bellowed into the hole, ‘then I will throw the end of the rope down on top of you.’
‘You would not do that!’
‘After that I will put the rocks back over the entrance.’
‘I am going.’ Jan Cheroot’s voice had a desperate edge, and once again the rope began slithering down into the shaft like a serpent into its nest.
Ralph and Zouga squatted beside the shaft, passing their last cheroot back and forth and waiting with ill grace and impatience.
‘When they deserted these workings, they must have sealed the slaves in the shaft. A slave was a valuable chattel, so that proves they were still working the reef and that they left in great haste.’ Zouga paused, cocked his head to listen and then said, ‘Ah!’ with satisfaction. From the depths of the earth at their feet came the distant clank of metal tool on living rock. ‘Jan Cheroot has reached the working-face.’
However, it was many minutes more before they saw the wavering candle light in the bottom of the pit again and Jan Cheroot’s pleas, quavering and pitiful, came up to them.
‘Please, Master Ralph, I have done it. Now will you pull me up, please?’
Ralph stood with one booted foot on each side of the shaft, and hauled in the rope hand over hand. The muscles of his arms bulged and subsided under the sleeves of his thin cotton shirt, as he lifted the Hottentot and his burden to the surface without a pause, and when he had finished, Ralph’s breathing was still even and quiet and there was not a single bead of perspiration on his face.
‘So, Jan Cheroot, what did you find?’
Jan Cheroot was coated all over with fine pale dust through which his sweat had cut muddy runnels and he stank of bat guano and the mushroom odour of long-deserted caves. With hands that still shook with fear and exhaustion, he opened the flap of the saddlebag at his waist.
‘This is what I found,’ he croaked, and Zouga took a lump of the raw rough rock from him.
It had a crystalline texture, that glittered like ice and was marbled with blue and riven by minute flaws and fissures, some of which had cracked through under the pounding of the iron adze with which Jan Cheroot had hacked it from the rock face. However, the shattered fragments of shining quartz were held together by the substance that had filled every crack and fault line in the ore. This cement was a thin malleable layer of bright metal, that twinkled in the sunlight when Zouga wet it with the tip of his tongue.
‘By God, Ralph, will you look at that!’ And Ralph took it from his father’s hand with the reverence of a worshipper receiving the sacrament.
‘Gold!’ he whispered, and it sparkled at him, that lovely yellow smile that had captivated men almost from the time they had first stood upon their hind legs.
‘Gold!’ Ralph repeated.
To find this glimmer of precious metal they had laboured most of their lives, f
ather and son, they had ridden far and, in the company of other freebooters, had fought bloody battles, had helped destroy a proud nation and hunt a king to a lonely death.
Led by a sick man with swollen crippled heart and grandiose dreams, they had seized a vast land that now bore that giant’s name, Rhodesia, and they had forced the land to yield up, one by one, its riches. They had taken its wide sweet pastures and lovely mountain ranges, its forests of fine native timber, its herds of sleek cattle, its legions of sturdy black men who for a pittance would provide the thews to gather in the vast harvest. And now at last they held the ultimate treasure in their hands.
‘Gold!’ Ralph said for the third time.
They struck their pegs along the ridge, cutting them from the living acacia trees that oozed clear sap from the axe cuts, and they hammered them into the hard earth with the flat of the blade. Then they built cairns of stone to mark the corner of each claim.
Under the Fort Victoria Agreement, which both of them had signed when they volunteered to ride against Loben-gula’s impis, they were each entitled to ten gold claims. This naturally did not apply to Jan Cheroot. Despite the fact that he had ridden into Matabeleland with Jameson’s flying column and shot down the Matabele amadoda at the Shangani river and the Bembesi crossing with as much gusto as had his masters, yet he was a man of colour, and as such he could not share the spoils.
In addition to the booty to which Zouga and Ralph were entitled under the Victoria Agreement, both of them had bought up many blocks of claims from the dissolute and spendthrift troopers of Jameson’s conquering force, some of whom had sold for the price of a bottle of whisky. So between them they could peg off the entire ridge and most of the valley bottoms on each side of it.
It was hard work, but urgent, for there were other prospectors abroad, one of whom could have followed their tracks. They worked through the heat of noon and by the light of the moon until sheer exhaustion forced them to drop their axes and sleep where they fell. On the fourth evening, they could stop at last, content that they had secured the entire reef for themselves. There was no gap between their pegs into which another prospector could jump.
