The silence drew out, a log crumbled and crashed softly in the hearth; sparks shot up and the flare lit Zouga's face.
'When will he see me?' he asked.
'We can be at Groote Schuur in four hours' ride.'
'It will be dark by then.'
'There are fifteen bedrooms for you to choose from,' Jordan smiled, and Zouga laughed like a man who has been given back all the excitement and eagerness of youth.
'Then why are we sitting here?' he asked. 'Jan Cheroot, bring my heavy coat.'
Zouga strode out onto the verandah of the cottage, and on the top step he checked and reached out with his right hand to the pillar of blue stone. He touched it with a strangely formal caress, and with the same hand touched his own lips and forehead, the gesture with which an Arab greets an old friend.
Then Zouga glanced at Jordan, and smiled.
'Superstition,' he explained. 'Good luck.'
'Good luck?' Jan Cheroot snorted from below the steps where he held Zouga's horse. 'Damn stone, all the way from Kimberley, trip over the thundering rubbish.' He went on muttering to himself as Zouga mounted.
Jan Cheroot would pine away if he didn't have something to complain about.' Zouga winked at Jordan, and they trotted out from under the milkwood trees onto the track.
'I often think back to that day when we hit the blue,' Jordan said. 'If we had only known!'
'How could we know?'
'It was I, I feel sure of that. It was I who convinced you that the blue ground was barren.'
'Jordan, you were only a boy.'
'But I was supposed to be the diviner of diamonds. If I had not been so certain that it was dead ground, you would never have sold the Devil's Own.'
'I never sold it. I gambled it away.'
'Only because you thought it was worthless. You would never have accepted mister Rhodes' bet if you had known that the blue was not the end, but only the beginning.'
'Nobody knew that, not then.'
'mister Rhodes sensed it. He never lost faith. He knew what the blue was. He knew it with a certain instinct that nobody else had.'
'I have never been back to Kimberley, Jordie.' Zouga settled down in the saddle, riding with long stirrups like a Boer hunter. 'I never wanted to go back, but of course the news filters down the line of rail. I heard that when Rhodes and Barnato made their deal, they valued the Devil's Own claims at half a million pounds.'
'They were the keys to the field,' Jordie explained. 'It just happened that they were the central claims in the main enrichment. But you could never have guessed that, Papa.'
Strange how right one man's instincts can be,' Zouga brooded. 'And how wrong another man's. I always knew, or thought I knew, that my road to the north began in that hole, that terrible hole.'
'Perhaps it still does. The money to take us all to the north will still come from it. mister Rhodes' millions.'
'Tell me about the blue. You have been with Rhodes through it all. Tell me about it.'
'It changes,' Jordan said. 'It's as simple as that, it alters.'
Zouga shook his head. 'It's like some sort of miracle.'
'Yes,' Jordan nodded. 'Diamonds are nature's beautiful miracles. I'll never forget my own astonishment when mister Rhodes showed it to me. That hard blue rock is unyielding as any granite when it comes out of the earth, and yet after it has been laid out in the stacking fields for a year or two it starts to crumble. It's the sunlight, we think, that does it. It crumbles up like a loaf of stale bread, and the diamonds, oh Papa, the diamonds. Incredible stones, eleven thousand carats of diamonds each day. The blue is the mother lode, the blue is the heart.'
He broke off in embarrassment. 'Sometimes I run away with myself,' he confessed, and Zouga smiled with him.
Who could resist this beautiful young man, that was the word to describe him, not handsome, not good-looking, but beautiful, with a quality of gentleness and goodness that seemed to form an aura about him.
'Papa.' Jordan sobered. 'Oh Papa, you will never know how happy I am that you are to be part of it, after all.
You and mister Rhodes.'
'mister Rhodes,' Zouga thought indulgently. 'Always mister Rhodes. And yet it's a good thing for a young man to have a hero. Pity this poor world of ours when the last hero passes.'
Can you judge a man by his books? Zouga wondered.
The library was choked with them. One complete wall packed to the ceiling with the sources and references which Gibbon had consulted for his Decline and Fall.
So impressed had Rhodes been with this work that he had ordered Hatchards of London to collect and, if necessary, translate and bind the complete authorities. Jordan said it had cost him 8000 pounds thus far, and was not yet complete.
Ranked beside this formidable array were all the published lives of Alexander, of Julius Caesar and of Napoleon. What dreams of empire they must sustain. Zouga smiled inwardly as he listened to the high hypnotic voice of the
