Men of Men - Smith Wilbur - Страница 10
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"Those are Jock Danby's briefies, man," one of them shouted a challenge. "You breaking the diggers" law.
That's private ground. You better clear out, and bloody quick, at that."
"I bought Jock out," Zouga shouted back. "He left town an hour ago."
"How do I know that?"
"Why don't you go up to the commissioner's office?" Zouga asked. The challenger scowled up at him uncertainly, the level of his claim twenty feet below the Devil's Own.
Men had stopped work along the length of the irregular pit, others had lined the causeway high above, and there was an ugly mood on all of them, that was broken by a clear young voice speaking in the cadence and intonation of a refined English gentleman.
"Major Ballantyne, that is you, is it not!"And, peering up at thecauseway, Zouga recognized Neville Pickering, his drinking companion from the first day in the London Hotel.
"It is indeed, mister Pickering."
"That's all right, fellows. I'll vouch for Major Ballantyne. He is the famous elephant hunter, don't you know?"
Almost immediately they lost interest and turned away to become absorbed once more in their own race to get the buckets of gravelly yellow stuff to the surface.
"Thank you," Zouga called up to the man on the causeway above him.
"My pleasure, sir." Pickering flashed a brilliant smile, touched the brim of his hat and sauntered away, a slim and elegant figure in the press of bearded dust-caked diggers.
Zouga was left alone, as alone in spirit as he had ever been in any of his wanderings across the vast African continent. He had spent almost the last penny he owned on these few square feet of yellow earth at the bottom of this hot and dusty pit. He had no men to help him work it, no experience, no capital, and he doubted that he would recognize an uncut diamond if he held one in the palm of his hand.
As suddenly as it had descended upon him, the gambler's elation, the premonition of good fortune that awaited him here evaporated. He was instantly overwhelmed by his own presumption and by the enormity of the gamble he was taking.
He had risked it all on claims that so far had not yielded a single good stone, the price of diamonds was plummeting, the "pool goods", small splints of half a carat or less which formed the vast bulk of stones recovered, were fetching only five shillings each.
It was a wild chance, and his stomach slid sickeningly as he faced the consequences of failure.
The sun was almost directly overhead, burning down into the bottom of the workings; the air around him wavered with the heat and it came up through the leather of his boots to scorch the soles of his feet. He felt as though he were suffocating, as though he could not bear it another moment, as though he must scramble up out of this loathsome pit to where the air was cooler and sweeter.
He knew then he was afraid. It was an emotion to which he was not accustomed. He had stood down the charge of a wounded bull elephant, and taken his chance , man to man, steel to steel, on the frontiers of India and in the wild border wars of the Cape.
He was not accustomed to feeling fear, but the waves of panic rose up out of some dark place in his soul and he fought to control them. The sense of impending disaster crushed down upon him. Under his feet he could almost feel the sterility of the baking earth, the barren earth which would cripple him at last, and destroy the dream which had been the fuel on which his life had run for all these years.
Was it all to end here in this hot and hellish pit?
He took a deep breath, and held it for a moment, fighting off the waves of blind panic, and slowly they receded, leaving him feeling weak and shaken as though from a heavy dose of malarial fever.
He went down on one knee and took a handful of the yellow stuff, sifting it through his fingers, and then examined the residue of dull and worthless pebbles. He let them drop and dusted his hand against his thigh.
He had beaten back the engulfing panic, but he was left with a terrible sense of despondency, and a weariness that ached in his bones so that he hardly had strength enough to climb the swaying rope ladder and his feet dragged and scuffed the ochre-red earth of the track, while around him the encampment swam and wavered in the heat and dust as he started back towards the outspan.
Above the hubbub of the camp a clear childish voice rang, and Zouga lifted the golden beard from his chest, his mood lightening as he recognized his son's sweet piping tones.
"Papa! Oh Papa!" Jordan was racing towards him, wild abandon in every frantic pace, his arms pumping and his feet flying over the rutted track, while the mass of silken curls flew about his lovely face.
"Oh Papa, we have searched for you, all night, all day."
"What is it, Jordan?" The child's distress alarmed Zouga afresh, and he started forward.
Jordan reached him and threw both arms about Zouga's waist, he pressed his face to Zouga's coat front so that his voice was muffled and he trembled like a frightened little wild animal.
"It's Mama! Something has happened to Mama! Something terrible has happened."
The delirium of typhoid fever came upon Aletta. in hot grey fog banks that blotted out reality and filled her head with phantoms and fantasies which cleared abruptly, leaving her too weak to sit upright, but with her senses enhanced so that her hot skin was hypersensitive to the touch of the clammy flannel against her face and the oppressive weight of her clothing threatened to smother her.
Her vision was sharp and the images enlarged as though seen through a fine reading glass. She could study each long curved eyelash that made up the dense fringe about Jordan's beautiful green eyes. She could see each individual pore in the satiny skin of his cheeks, could delight in the texture of his perfectly bowed lips that trembled now with his agitation and fear as he stooped over her.
She was lost in wonder at her son's beauty, and then the roaring started in her ears again and the beloved child's face receded, until she was looking at it down a long narrow tunnel through the roaring darkness.
She clung desperately to the image, but it began to turn, slowly at first like the wheel of a carriage, then faster still until Jordan's face blurred dizzily and she felt herself tumbling down into the humid darkness again like a leaf upon the roaring wind.
Again the darkness opened, a veil drawn aside in some deep place in her head, and with joy she sought the boy's face again, but instead she saw the falcon high above her.
It was the bird figure of the graven idol that had always been a part of her life since Zouga had come into it. At every cottage, at every outspan or room that they had called home for a day or a week or a month, that stone idol seemed to have been there with them, silent, implacable, heavy with a brooding and ancient malevolence.
She had always hated that idol, had always sensed the aura of evil that surrounded it, but now her hatred and her fear could focus fully upon the stone bird that stood tall above the cot on which she lay.
She cursed it weakly, silently, lying on her back on the narrow, cot, the robe she wore clinging damply to her skin with the fever-sweat; and she mouthed her hatred at the stone image that towered above her on its polished green soapstone column. Again her vision narrowed, became concentrated so that the falcon head was her whole existence.
Then miraculously the blank stone eyes began to glow with a strange golden light; they revolved slowly in the sockets of the polished stone skull, and suddenly they were looking down at her. The pupils were black and glossy, alive and seeing, but cruel and so truly evil that she quailed in terror, staring up at the bird.
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