it means that he showed them.'
'Showed them what?'
The treasure,' Vicky cut in, and Lizzie rounded on her.
'I'm telling him!'
'All right, Lizzie.' Mungo was leaning forward, interest tempering the indulgent smile. 'You tell me.'
'It's a secret. Mama says that if other people, bad people, heard about it, it would be terrible for King Ben.
Robbers might come.'
'It's a secret then,' Mungo agreed.
'Cross your heart.'
And Lizzie was telling it before he had made the sign of good faith. Lizzie was determined that Vicky would not get in ahead of her, this time.
'He shows them the diamonds. His wives rub fat all over him, and then they stick the diamonds onto the fat.'
'Where did King Ben get all these diamonds?' Scepticism warred with the need to believe.
'His people bring them from Kimberley. Juba says it isn't really stealing. King Ben says it is only the tribute that a king should have.'
'Did Juba say how many diamonds?'
'Pots full, pots and pots of them.'
Mungo Sint John turned his single eye from her flushed and shining face and looked across the grassy golden plains to the Hills of the Indunas, and his eye was flecked golden yellow like one of the big predatory cats of Africa.
Jordan looked forward to this early hour of day. it was one of his duties to check each evening in the nautical - almanac the time of sunrise, and to waken mister Rhodes an hour beforehand.
Rhodes liked to see the sun come up, whether it was from the balcony of his magnificent private railway coach or drinking coffee in the dusty yard of the corrugated iron cottage that he still maintained behind Market Square in Kimberley, from the upper deck of an ocean-going liner or from the back of a horse as they rode the quiet pathways of his estate on the slopes of Table Mountain.
It was the time when Jordan was alone with his master, the time when ideas which mister Rhodes called his 'thoughts' would come spilling out of him. Incredible ideas, sweeping and grand or wild and fanciful, but all fascinating.
It was the time when Jordan could feel that he was part of the vast genius of the man, as he scribbled down mister Rhodes' draft speeches in his shorthand pad, speeches that would be made in the lofty halls of the Cape Parliament to which mister Rhodes had been elected by the constituents of what had once been Griqualand, or at the board table of the governors of De Beers, of which he was chairman. De Beers was the mammoth diamond company which mister Rhodes had welded together out of all the little diggers' claims and lesser competing companies. Like some mythical boa constrictor, he had swallowed them all, even Barney Barnato, the other giant of the fields. mister Rhodes owned it all now.
On other mornings they would ride in silence, until mister Rhodes would lift his chin from his chest and stare at Jordan with those stark blue eyes. Every time he had something startling to say. Once it was, 'You should thank God every day, Jordan, that you were born an Englishman.'
Another time it was, 'There is only one real purpose behind it all, Jordan. It is not the accumulation of wealth. I was fortunate to recognize it so early. The real purpose is to bring the whole civilized world under British rule, to recover North America to the crown, to make all the Anglo-Saxon race into one great empire.'
It was thrilling and intoxicating to be part of all this, especially as so often the big burly figure would rein his horse and turn his head and look to the north, towards a land that neither he nor Jordan had ever seen, but which, during the years that Jordan had been with him, had become a part of both their existences.
'My thought,' he called it. 'My north, my idea.'
'That's where it will really begin, Jordan. And when the time comes, I shall send you. The person I can trust beyond any other.'
It had never seemed strange to Jordan that those blue eyes had looked in that direction, that the open land to the north had come to loom so large in mister Rhodes' magination, that it had taken on the aura of a sacred quest.
Jordan could mark the day that it had begun, not only the day but the hour. For weeks after Pickering had been buried in the sprawling cemetery on the Cape Road, Jordan had respected mister Rhodes' mourning. Then, one afternoon, he had left his office early. He had returned to the camp.
He retrieved the bird image from where it had 'been abandoned in the yard, and with the help of three black workmen, he moved it into the cottage. The living-room had been too small to hold it; it hindered access to both the dining-table and the front door.
In the small cottage, there was only one free wall, and that was in mister Rhodes' bedroom, at the head of his narrow cot. The statue fitted perfectly into the space beyond the window. The next morning, when Jordan went to call him, mister Rhodes had already left his cot and, wearing a dressing-gown, was standing before the statue.
In the fresh pink light of sunrise, as they rode down to the De Beers offices, mister Rhodes had said, suddenly: ` I have had a thought, Jordan, one which I'd like to share with you. While I was studying that statue, it came to me that the north is the gateway, the north is the hinterland of this continent of ours.' That is how it had begun, in the shadow of the bird.
When the architect, Herbert Baker, had consulted mister Rhodes on the decoration and furnishings of the mansion that they were building on his Cape Estate, 'Groote Schuur', 'The Great Barn', Jordan had sat aside from the two men. As always in the presence of others he was unobtrusive and self-effacing, taking the notes that mister
