Zouga would have taken it further, but suddenly it did not seem worth the effort. He was so tired and dispirited.
He would bring the statue back into the tent later, he decided.
"There are a few sweet potatoes, nothing else," he grunted as he took up the vigil beside Jordan's cot.
Jan Cheroot made a stew of dried beans and mutton, and mashed this with the boiled potatoes. It was an unappetizing mess, but that evening, for the first time, Jordan did not roll his head away from the proffered spoon, and after that his recovery was startlingly swift.
He asked only once more after Aletta, when he and Zouga were alone in the tent.
"Has she gone to heaven, Papa?"
"Yes." The certainty in Zouga's tone seemed to reassure him.
"Will she be one of God's angels?"
"Yes, Jordie, and from now on she will always be there , watching over you."
The child thought about that seriously and then nodded contentedly, and the next day he seemed strong enough for Zouga to leave him in Ralph's charge while he and Jan Cheroot went up to the kopje and walked out along number 6 Roadway to look down on the Devil's Own claims.
All the mining equipment, shovels and picks, buckets and ropes, sheave wheels and pulleys had been stolen.
At the prices the transport riders were charging it would cost a hundred guineas to replace them.
"We will need men," Zouga said.
"What will you do when you have them?" Jan Cheroot asked.
"Dig the stuff out."
"And then?" the little Hottentot demanded with a malicious gleam in his dark eyes, his features wrinkled as a sour windfallen apple. "What do you then?" he insisted.
"I intend to find out," Zouga replied grimly. "We have wasted enough time here already."
"My dear fellow," Neville Pickering gave him that charming smile. "I'm delighted that you asked. Had you not, then I should have offered. It's always a little problematic for a new chum to find his feet," he coughed deferentially, and went on quickly, "not that you are a new chum, by any means, " That was a term usually reserved for the fresh-faced hopefuls newly arrived on the boat from "home". "Home' was England, even those who were colonial-born referred to it as "home".
"I'd bet a fiver to a pinch of giraffe dung that you know more about this country than any of us here."
"African born," Zouga admitted, "on the Zouga river up north in Khama's land; accounts for the odd name Zouga."
"By jove, didn't realize that, I must say!"
"Don't hold it against me." Zouga smiled lightly, but he knew that there were many who would. Home born was vastly superior to colonial born. It was for that reason that he had insisted that Aletta should make the long sea voyage with him when it seemed that her pregnancies would reach full term. Both Ralph and Jordan had been born in the same house in south London, and both had arrived back at Good Hope before they were weaned. They were home-born, that was his first gift to them.
Pickering glossed over the remark tactfully. He did not have to declare his own birth. He was an English gentleman, and nobody would ever mistake that.
"There are many parts of your book that fascinated me.
I'll teach you what I know about sparklers if you'll answer my questions. Bargain?"
Over the days that followed they bombarded each other with questions, Zouga demanding every detail of the process of raising and sorting the yellow gravel from the deepening pit, while Pickering kept turning the conversation back to the land to the north, asking about the tribes and the gold reefs, about the rivers and mountains and the wild animals that swarmed upon the plains and in the lonely forests that Zouga had conjured up so vividly in Hunter's Odyssey.
Each morning an hour before the first light, Zouga would meet Pickering at the edge of the roadway above the workings. There would be an enamelled kettle bubbling on the brazier and they drank black coffee that was strong enough to stain the teeth, while around them in the gloom the black mine-workers gathered sleepily, still hugging their fur karosses over their shoulders, their voices muted but musical, their movements stiff and slow with sleepiness and the dawn chill.
At a hundred other points around the growing pit the gangs assembled, waiting for the light; and when it glimmered on the eastern horizon the men went swarming down into the workings, like columns of ants along the board walks and down the swaying ladders, spreading out on the chequer board of claims, the hubbub rising, the chant of tribesmen, the squeal of ropes, the hectoring shouts of the white overseers, and then the rattle of bucket loads of yellow gravel into the waiting carts upon the roadway.
Pickering was working four claims, which he owned in partnership.
"My partner is down in Cape Town. Heaven knows when he will be back."
Neville Pickering shrugged with that deceptively indolent air which he cultivated. "You'll meet him one of these fine days, and it will be an experience, memorable but not necessarily enjoyable."
It amused Zouga to see how Neville contrived to maintain his foppish elegance of dress, how he could walk the length of the number 6 Roadway without the dust hazing the shine of his boots; how he could scramble across the ladderworks without dampening his shirt with sweat, or exchange a flurry of blows with a brawny digger who was encroaching on his claims without it seeming to affect the drape of his Norfolk jacket. His casual sauntering gait carried him from one end of the diggings to the other, at a pace which had Zouga stretching his own legs.
The four claims were not in a single block, but each separated from the others by a dozen or so intervening claims, and Pickering moved from one to the other coordinating the work, pulling a gang of half-naked black men from one claim and leading them across to another where the work had fallen behind.
Abruptly he was on the roadway, checking the loading of the carts, and then again, just as abruptly, at the fenced-off plot beyond Market Square where his black workers were rocking the cradles of gravel.
The diamond cradles were like giant versions of the old-fashioned baby cradles from which they took their name. Standing on their half-moon-shaped feet, a man on each side kept them swinging easily from side to side while a third worker shovelled the yellow gravel into the top deck of the cradle from the mound that the cart had dumped. The top deck was a coarse steel sieve, with inch and a half openings in the mesh.
As the cradle rocked rhythmically, the gravel tumbled and bounced across the sloping sieve, the finer stuff under one and a half inches in diameter dropping through onto the second deck of the cradle while the coarse pebbles and waste rolled over under the surveillance of the two cradle men, who watched for the highly unlikely flash of a diamond too big to fall through onto the second deck.
A diamond more than one and a half inches across would be the fortune-maker, the finder's passport to great wealth, the almost impossible "pony" of the diggers' dreams, a stone heavier than one hundred carats.
on the second deck the mesh was much finer, halfinch square, and a yellow dust blew away like smoke as the cradle agitated it, while on the third deck the mesh was finer still, allowing only the worthless tailings to drop to waste, stuff smaller than the crystals of refined sugar.
From the third deck the gravel was gathered with reverential care, and this was washed in a tub of precious water, every drop of which had been transported thirty miles from the Vaal river.
The gravel was washed in a circular sieve of the number 3 mesh, the finest of all. The worker agitating and dipping over the tub, muddy to the elbows. Finally the contents of the sieve, cleansed of mud, were dumped onto the flat metal surface of the sorting-table, and the sorters began picking over it with the flat wooden blades of their scrapers.
Women were far away the best sorters, they had the patience, the manual dexterity and the fine eye for colour and texture that was needed. The married diggers kept their wives and daughters at the sorting-table from the minute the mellow morning light was strong enough until the dusk faded each evening.