"Sam, you-" Craig started, and his voice cracked. He cleared his throat, and started again. "You are his descendant. You are the only one who should touch anything here." Tungata was still down on one knee, and he did not reply. He was staring at the old king's transformed head, and his lips moved as he prayed silently. Was he addressing Sir, the Christian God, Craig wondered, or the spirits of his ancestors?
Sally-Anne's teeth chattered spasmodically, the only sound in the cavern, and Craig placed his arms around the two girls. They pressed against him gratefully, both of them shivering with the cold and with awe.
Slowly Tungata rose to his feet and stepped forward to the stone altar. "I see you, great Lobengula,"he spoke aloud.
Samson Kumalo, of your totem and of your blood, greet you across the years!" He was using his tribal name again, claiming his lineage as he went on in a low but steady voice. "If I am the leopard cub of your prophecy, then I ask your blessing, oh king. But if I am not that cub, then strike my desecrating hand and wither it as it touches the treasures of the house of Mashobane." He reached out slowly and placed his right hand on one of the black clay pots.
Craig found that he was holding his breath, waiting for he was not sure what, perhaps for a voice to speak from the king's long-dead throat, or for one of the great stalactites to crash down from the roof, or for a bolt of lightning to blast them all.
The silence drew out, and then Tungata placed his other hand on the beer pot and slowly lifted it in a salute to the corpse of the king.
There was a sharp crack and the brittle baked clay split.
The bottom fell out of the pot, and from it gushed a torrent of glittering light that paled and rendered insipid the crystalline coating of the great cavern. Diamonds rattled and bounced on the altar stone, tumbling and slithering over each other, piled in a pyramid, and lay smouldering like live coals in the lamplight.
cannot believe these are diamonds," Sally-Anne whispered. "They look like pebbles, pretty, shiny pebbles, but pebbles." They had poured the contents of all four pots and of the zebra-skin bag into the canvas food-bag, and leaving the empty clay pots at the feet of the old king's corpse, they retreated from Lobengula's presence to the end of the crystal cavern nearest the entrance passage.
"Well, first thing," Craig observed, "legend was wrong.
Those pots weren't a gallon each, more likea pint."
"Still, five pints of diamonds is better than a poke in the eye with a rhino horn,"Tungata countered.
They had salvaged a dozen poles from the top section of the ladder work in the shaft and built a small fire on the cavern floor. As they squatted in a circle around the pile of stones, their damp clothing steamed in the warmth from the flames.
"If they are diamonds," Sally-Anne was still sceptical.
"They are diamonds," Craig declared flatly, "every single one of them. Watch this!" Craig selected one of the stones, a crystal with a knife edge to one of its facets. He drew the edge across the lens of the lamp. It made a shrill squeal that set their teeth on edge, but it gouged a deep white scratch in the glass.
"That's proof! That's a diamond!"
"So big!" Sarah picked, out the smallest she could find.
"Even the smallest is bigAr than the top joint of my finger." She compared them.
"The old Matabele labourers picked only those large enough to show up in the first wash of gravel," Craig explained. "And remember that they will lose sixty per cent or more of their mass in the cutting and polishing.
That one will probably end up no bigger than a green pea."
"The colours," Tungata murmured, "so many different colours." Some were translucent lemon-coloured, others dark r amber or cognac, with all shades in between, while again there were those that were un tinted clear as snow-melt in a mountain stream, with frosted facets that reflected the flames of the smoky little fire.
"Just look at this one." The stone Sally-Anne held up was the deep purplish blue of the Mozambique current when the tropic midday sun probes its depths.
"And this." Another as bright as the blood from a spurting artery.
"And this." Limpid green, impossibly beautiful, changing with each flicker of the light.
Sally-Anne laid out a row of the coloured stones on the cavern floor in front of her.
"So pretty," she said. She was grading them, the yellows and golds and ambers in one row, the pinks and reds in another.
"The diamond can take any of the primary colours. It seems to take pleasure in imitating the colours proper to other gems. John Mandeville, the fourteenth-century tray eller, wrote that." Craig spread his hands to the blaze. "And jj it can crystallize to any shape from a perfect square to octahedron or dodecahedron."
"Blimey, mate," Sally-Anne mocked him, "what's an octahedron, pray?"
"Two pyramids with triangular sides and a common base."
"Wow! And a dodecahedron?" she challenged.
"Two rhombs of lozenge shape with common facets."
"How come you know so much?" 41 wrote a book remember?" Craig smiled back. "Half the book was about Rhodes and Kimberley and diamonds."
"Enough already, "she capitulated.
"Not nearly enough," Craig shook his head. "I can go on.
The diamond is the most perfect reflector of light, only IL chromate of lead refracts more light, only chrysolite disperses it more. But the diamond's combined powers of reflection, refraction and dispersion are unmatched."
"Stop!" ordered Sally-Anne, but her expression was still interested, and he went on.
"It's brilliance is un decaying though the ancients did not have the trick of cutting it to reveal its true splendour.
For that reason, the Romans treasured pearls more highly and even the first Hindu artisans only rubbed up the natural facets of the Kohinoor. They would have been appalled to know that modern cutters reduced the bulk of that stone from over seven hundred carats to a hundred and six."
"How big is seven hundred carats?" Sarah wanted to know.
Craig selected a stone from the ranks that Sally-Anne had set out.
It was the size of a golf ball.
"That is probably three hundred carats it might cut to a paragon, that is a first, water diamond over a hundred carats. Then men will give it a name, like the Great Mogul or the Orloff or the Shah, and legends will be woven around it." Tobengula's Fire, Sarah hazarded.
"Good!" Craig nodded. "A good name for it. Lobengula's Fire!" "How much?" Tungata wanted to know. "What is the value of this pile of pretty stones?"
"God knows," Craig "khrugged. "Some of them are rubbish-" He picked out a huge amorphous lump of dark grey colour, in which the black specks and fleckings of its imperfections were obvious to the naked eye and the flaws and fracture lines cut ffirough its interior like soft silver leaves. "This is industrial quality, it will be used for machine tools and the cutting edges in the head of an oil drill, but some of the others the only answer is that they are worth as much as a rich man will pay. It wou impossible to sell them all at one time, the market could not absorb them. Each stone would require a special buyer and involve a major financial transaction."