Men of Men, Page 2

  Master and servant flung themselves from the heaving staggering animal and ran at the slope. Their scarlet caps bobbing above the scrub thorn could be seen from a half mile distance, and a hoarse excited cheer went up from the ragged column that pursued them.

  On the crest of the hill, the Hottentot servant had burrowed a shaft ten feet into the hard earth, a tiny scratch when compared to what was to follow. Frantic with haste, casting fearful glances down the hillside at the horde that raced up towards him, Fleetwood drove the centre line of his claim pegs across the narrow mouth of the shallow prospect shaft.

  Night fell over a battlefield on which brawny diggers cursed each other and swung punches and pick-handles to clear the ground and drive their own claim pegs. By noon the next day, when farmer De Beer rode across from his primitive two-roomed dwelling to begin writing out the ‘briefies’, which was taal for ‘letters’, the entire kopje was covered with claim pegs; even the flat plain for a quarter of a mile below the slopes was bristling with pegs.

  Each claim was thirty feet square, its centre and corners marked with a sharpened wood stake cut from a camel-thorn branch. On payment of an annual fee of ten shillings to farmer De Beer, the digger received his written ‘briefie’ which entitled him to hold and work the claim in perpetuity.

  Before nightfall that first day the lucky diggers who had pegged the centre of the new rush had merely scratched the stony earth, but had turned up over forty stones of the first water; and already horsemen were away southwards carrying the word to the world that Colesberg kopje was a mountain of diamonds.

  When Zouga Ballantyne’s single wagon creaked the last few miles down the rutted red earth track towards Colesberg kopje, it was already half demolished, eaten away as though by the maggots in a rotten cheese, and men still swarmed over what remained. On the dusty plain below it were encamped almost ten thousand souls, black and brown and white. The smoke from their cooking fires blurred the high china-blue sky with dirty grey, and for miles in each direction the diggers had almost denuded the plain of the beautiful camel-thorn trees to feed those fires.

  The settlement was strewn about under dirty weatherworn canvas, although already some sheets of the ubiquitous corrugated iron had been laboriously transported from the coast and knocked up into boxlike shanties. Some of these, with a fine sense of order, had been arranged in an approximation of a straight line, forming the first rudimentary streets.

  These belonged to the ‘kopje-wallopers’, the previously nomadic diamond buyers who had until recently roamed the diggings, but who had now found it worth their while to set up permanent shop below the crumbling remains of Colesberg kopje. According to the infant diamond laws of the Boer Free State, each licensed buyer was obliged to display his name prominently. This they did in crudely lettered signs upon the little iron sweat-box offices, but most of them went further and flew a disproportionately large gaudy and fancifully designed flag from a mast on the roof to announce to the diggers that the incumbent was in office and ready to do business. The flags lent a carnival air to the settlement.

  Zouga Ballantyne walked beside the offside lead ox of his team, following one of the narrow meandering rutted tracks that ran through the settlement. Occasionally the team had to be swung to avoid the tailings that had spilled into the track from one of the recovery stations, or to avoid a deep morass formed by spilled sewerage and washings from the sorting tables.

  The settlement was densely crowded upon itself – that was the first impression that struck Zouga. He was a man of the plains and savannah forests, accustomed to long uninterrupted horizons, and the crowding jarred upon his senses. The diggers lived within touching distance of each other, every man attempting to get as close to his claim as he could so that the gravel that he won from it would not have to be carried too far to the place where he would process it.

  Zouga had hoped to find an open space upon which to outspan his wagon and erect the big bell tent, but there was no open space within a quarter of a mile of the kopje.

  He glanced back at Aletta on the box. She was sitting very still, moving only as the wagon jolted, looking straight ahead as though oblivious of the almost naked men, many wearing merely a scrap of trade cloth about the loins, who milled the crunchy lumps of yellow gravel and then shovelled it into the waiting cradles. Swearing or singing as they worked, all of them oiled with their own sweat in the cruel white sunlight.

  The filth appalled even Zouga, who had known the kraals of the Mashona in the north and had lived in a bushman settlement with the little creatures who never bathed in their entire lifetimes.

  Civilized man generates particularly loathsome wastes, and it seemed that every square inch of the dusty red earth between the tents and the shanties of the settlement was covered with a litter of rusty bully beef tins, broken fragments of bottles and porcelain that glittered in the sunlight, a snowstorm of paper scraps, the decomposing corpses of stray kittens and unwanted dogs, the scrapings from the cooking pots, the excrement of those too lazy to dig a latrine in the hard earth and screen it with a thatch of the silvery Karroo grass, and all the other unidentifiable offal and castings with which ten thousand human beings without control or sanitary regulations had surrounded themselves.

  Zouga caught Aletta’s eyes and smiled at her reassuringly, but she did not return the smile. Her lips were set bravely, but her eyes were huge and brimming with tears that lapped at her lower lids.

  They squeezed past a transport rider who had brought up a wagonload of goods from the coast, six hundred miles, and had set up shop from the tailboard of his wagon, displaying a sign on which he had chalked up a price list:

  Candles – £1 a pkt

  Whisky – £12 a case

  Soap – 5/- a piece

  Zouga did not look back again at Aletta, the prices were twenty times higher than those prevailing at the coast. De Beer’s New Rush was probably at that moment the most expensive spot on the surface of the globe. The remaining sovereigns in the wide leather money belt around Zouga’s waist seemed suddenly feather light.

  By noon that day they had found space to outspan the wagon on the periphery of the huge circular encampment. While Jan Cheroot, Zouga’s Hottentot retainer, drove the cattle away to find grazing and water, Zouga hurriedly erected the heavy canvas tent, Aletta and the boys holding the guy ropes while he drove the pegs.

  ‘You must eat,’ Aletta mumbled, still not looking at him as she squatted over the smouldering cooking fire and stirred the cast iron stew pot that contained the remains of a springbuck that Ralph had shot three days before.

  Zouga went to her, stooped and with his hands on her shoulders lifted her to her feet. She moved stiffly as an old woman, the long hard journey had taken a heavy toll of her frail body.

  ‘It will be all right,’ he told her, and still she would not look at him, perhaps she had heard that assurance too often. He cupped her chin and lifted her face, and the tears broke at last and slid down her cheeks, leaving little runnels through the red dust that powdered her skin. The tears angered Zouga unreasonably, as though they were an accusation. He dropped his hands and stepped back from her.

  ‘I will be back before dark,’ he told her harshly and, turning from her, he strode away towards the ruined silhouette of the Colesberg kopje which stood out starkly, even through the stinking miasma of smoke and dust that hovered over the camp.

  Zouga might have been a wraith, a thing of air, invisible to human eyes. They hurried by him on the narrow track, or remained stooped over mill and cradle while he passed, without an inclination of head or even a casual glance, an entire community living for one thing only, completely absorbed and obsessed.

  From experience Zouga knew there was one place where he might be able to establish human contact, and through it glean the information he so desperately needed. He was looking for a canteen that sold hard liquor.

  Below the kopje there was an open space, the only one in the camp. It was roughly square in shape, bordered by
shacks of canvas and iron, cluttered with the wagons of the transport riders.

  Zouga selected one of the shacks that grandly announced itself as ‘The London Hotel’ and on the same board advertised:

  Whisky 7/6. Best English Beer 5/- a schooner.

  He was picking his way across the littered, rutted market square towards it when ragged cheers and a bellowed chorus of ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’ from the direction of the kopje checked him. A motley band of diggers came stamping through the dust carrying one of their number upon their shoulders, singing and yelling, their faces brick red with dust and excitement. They shouldered their way into the rickety bar ahead of Zouga, while from the other canteens and from the parked wagons men came running to find the cause of the excitement.

  ‘What happened?’ the question was yelled.

  ‘Black Thomas pulled a monkey,’ the reply was hurled back.

  It was only later that Zouga learned the diggers’ parlance. A ‘monkey’ was a diamond of fifty carats or more, while a ‘pony’ was that impossible diggers’ dream, a stone of one hundred carats.

  ‘Black Thomas pulled a monkey.’ The reply was picked up and called across the square and through the encampment, and soon the crowd overflowed the rickety canteen so that the frothing schooners of beer had to be passed overhead to the men on the fringes.

  The fortunate Black Thomas was hidden from Zouga’s view in the crowd that pressed about him, everybody trying to draw close as though some of the man’s luck might rub off onto them.

  The kopje-wallopers heard the excitement, hastily lowered their flags and hurried across the square, gathering like carrion birds to the lion’s kill. The first of them arrived breathless on the fringe of the revellers, hopping up and down for a glimpse of the man.

  ‘Tell Black Thomas that Lion-heart Werner will make an open offer – pass it on to him.’

  ‘Hey, Blackie, Lion-arse will go open.’ The offer changed shape as it was yelled through the packed doorway. An ‘open offer’ was firm and the digger was free to tout the other buyers. If he received no higher bid for his diamond, he was entitled to return and close with the open offer.

  Once again Black Thomas was raised by his fellows until he could see over their heads. He was a little gypsy-dark Welshman and his moustache was rimed with beer froth. His voice had the sweet Welsh lilt as he sang his defiance:

  ‘Hear me, then. Lion-arse the robber, I would sooner—’ what he proposed to do with his diamond made even the rough men about him blink and then guffaw with surprise ‘ – rather than let you get your thieving paws on it.’

  His voice rang with the memory of a hundred humiliations and unfair bargains that had been forced upon him. Today Black Thomas with his ‘monkey’ was king of the diggings, and though his reign might be short, he was determined to reap all the sweets that it promised.

  Zouga never laid eyes on that stone; he never saw Black Thomas again; for by noon the following day the little Welshman had sold his diamond, and sold too his ‘briefies’, and taken the long road south on the beginning of his journey home to a fairer, greener land.

  Zouga waited in the press of hot sweat-stinking bodies that filled the canteen, choosing a man with care while he listened to the voices grow louder and the chaff coarser as the schooners went down.

  He selected one who by his comportment and speech was a gentleman, and home-bred rather than colonial born. The man was drinking whisky, and when his glass was empty Zouga moved closer and ordered it refilled.

  ‘Very decent of you, old man,’ the man thanked him. He was in his twenties still and remarkably good-looking, with fair English skin and silky sideburns. ‘The name is Pickering, Neville Pickering,’ he said.

  ‘Ballantyne – Zouga Ballantyne.’ Zouga took the proffered hand and the man’s expression altered.

  ‘Good Lord, you are the elephant hunter.’ Pickering raised his voice. ‘I say, fellows, this is Zouga Ballantyne. You know, the one who wrote Hunter’s Odyssey.’

  Zouga doubted half of them could read, but the fact that he had written a book made him an object of wonder. He found the centre of interest had shifted from Black Thomas to himself.

  It was after dark when he started back to the wagon. He had always had a strong head for liquor and there was a good moon, so he could pick his way through the ordure that littered the track.

  He had spent a few sovereigns on liquor, but in return he had learned a great deal about the diggings. He had learned of the diggers’ expectations and fears. He knew now the going price for ‘briefies’, the politics and economics of diamond pricing, the geological composition of the strike and a hundred other related facts. He had also made a friendship that would alter his whole life.

  Although Aletta and the boys were already asleep in the wagon tent, Jan Cheroot, the little Hottentot, was waiting for him, squatting beside the watch-fire, a small gnome-like figure in the silver moonlight.

  ‘There is no free water,’ he told Zouga morosely. ‘The river is a full day’s trek away, and the thieving Boer who owns the wells sells water at the same price as they sell brandy in this hell-hole.’ Jan Cheroot could be relied upon to know the going price of liquor ten minutes after arriving in a new town.

  Zouga climbed into the wagon body, careful not to jolt the boys awake; but Aletta was lying rigidly in the narrow riempie bed. He lay down beside her and neither of them spoke for many minutes.

  Then she whispered. ‘You are determined to stay in this,’ her voice checked, then went on with quiet vehemence, ‘in this awful place.’

  He did not reply, and in the cot behind the canvas screen across the body of the wagon Jordan whimpered and then was silent. Zouga waited until he had settled before he replied.

  ‘Today a Welshman named Black Thomas found a diamond. They say he has been offered twelve thousand pounds by one of the buyers.’

  ‘A woman came to sell me a little goat’s milk while you were away.’ Aletta might not have heard him. ‘She says there is camp fever here. A woman and two children have died already and others are sick.’

  ‘A man can buy a good claim on the kopje for one thousand pounds.’

  ‘I fear for the boys, Zouga,’ Aletta whispered. ‘Let us go back. We could give up this wandering gypsy life for every. Daddy has always wanted you to come into the business—’

  Aletta’s father was a rich Cape merchant, but Zouga shuddered in the darkness at the thought of a high desk in the dingy counting-room of Cartwright and Company.

  ‘It is time the boys went to a good school, else they will grow up as savages. Please let us go back now, Zouga.’

  ‘A week,’ he said. ‘Give me a week – we have come so far.’

  ‘I do not think I can bear the flies and filth for another week.’ She sighed and turned her back to him, careful not to touch him in the narrow cot.

  The family doctor in Cape Town, who had attended Aletta’s own birth, the birth of both boys and her numerous miscarriages, had warned them ominously.

  ‘Another pregnancy could be your last, Aletta. I cannot be responsible for what may happen.’ For the three years since then she had lain with her back to him, on those occasions when they had been able to share a bed.

  Before dawn Zouga slipped out of the wagon while Aletta and the boys still slept. In the darkness before first light he stirred the ashes and drank a cup of coffee crouching over them. Then in the first rosy glow of dawn he joined the stream of carts and hurrying men that moved up for the day’s assault on the hill.

  In the strengthening light and rising heat and whirls of dust he moved from claim to claim, looking and assessing. He had long ago trained himself as an amateur geologist. He had read every book that he could find on the subject, often by candlelight on the lonely hunting veld; and on his infrequent returns home he had passed days and weeks in the Natural History Museum in London, much of the time in the Geological Section. He had trained his eye and sharpened his instinct for the lie of the rock formations and for
the grain and weight and colour of a sample of reef.

  At most of the claims his overtures were met with a shrug and a turned back, but one or two of the diggers remembered him as the ‘elephant hunter’ or the ‘writer fellow’ and used his visit as an excuse to lean on their shovels and talk for a few minutes.

  ‘I’ve got two briefies,’ a digger who introduced himself as Jock Danby told Zouga, ‘but I call them The Devil’s Own. With these two hands,’ he held up his huge paws, the palms studded with raised calluses, the nails chipped away and black with dirt, ‘with my own hands I’ve shifted fifteen thousand tons of stuff, and the biggest stone I’ve pulled is a two. That there,’ he pointed to the adjoining claim, ‘was Black Thomas’s claim. Yesterday he pulled a monkey, a bloody fat stinking monkey, only two feet from my side peg. Christ! It’s enough to break your heart.’

  ‘Buy you a beer.’ Zouga jerked his head towards the nearest canteen, and the man licked his lips then shook his head regretfully.

  ‘My kid is hungry – you can see the ribs sticking out of the little bugger and I have to pay wages by noon tomorrow.’ He indicated the dozen half-naked black tribesmen labouring with pick and bucket in the bottom of the neatly squared off excavation with him. ‘These bastards cost me a fortune every day.’

  Jock Danby spat on his callused palms and hefted the shovel, but Zouga cut in smoothly.

  ‘They do say the strike will pinch out at the level of the plain.’ At this point the kopje had been reduced to a mere twenty feet above the surrounding plain. ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Mister, it’s bad luck to even talk like that.’ Jock checked the swing of his shovel and scowled heavily up at Zouga on the roadway above him, but there was fear in his eyes.

  ‘You ever thought of selling out?’ Zouga asked him, and immediately Jock’s fear faded to be replaced by a sly expression.

  ‘Why, mister? You thinking of buying?’ Jock straightened. ‘Let me give you a little tip for free. Don’t even think about it, not unless you got six thousand pounds to do the talking for you.’