Zouga was surprised. It was not what he had expected, and then his surprise was replaced immediately by disappointment. It was a drab little chip of stone, barely the size of one of the sand fleas which swarmed in the red dust of the camp.
It lacked the fire and flash that Zouga had expected, and its colour was a dingy yellow: the colour of champagne perhaps, but without that wine's sparkle.
'Are you sure?' Zouga asked. 'It doesn't look like a diamond to me. How can you tell?'
'It's a splint-chip, probably a piece of a larger stone. It will go ten points, that's a tenth part of a carat, and we will be lucky to get five shillings for it, but it will pay the wages of one of my men for a week.'
'How do you tell the difference between that, and those?' Zouga indicated the mound of gravel in the centre of the table, still wet from the washing-tub, glistening in a thousand different shades of red and gold, anthracite black and flesh pinks, the gaudy show of diamondiferous gravel.
'It's the soapiness,' Pickering explained, 'the soap texture. You will train your eye to it soon, don't bother about the colour, look for the soap.' He took the stone in the teeth of a pair of wooden tweezers and turned it in the sunlight. 'A diamond is unwettable, it repels water; so in the wet gravel it stands out, and the difference is that soapy look.'
Neville proffered the stone. 'There, I tell you what, you keep it as a gift, your first diamond.'
They had been hunting for nearly ten days now, and had gradually moved farther and farther north.
Twice they had sighted quarry, small groups, but each time the quarry had scattered at the first approach.
Zouga was getting desperate. His claims were lying abandoned in the New Rush workings, the level of the surrounding claims would be sinking swiftly, making his more difficult to work and every day increasing the danger of rock slide. Those claims had already killed five men. Jock Danby had warned him.
He was lying now, belly down, on a tiny rocky kopje fifty miles north of the Vaal river, eighty miles from New Rush, and he was still not certain when he could finish this business and turn southwards again.
Jan Cheroot and the two boys were farther down the slope with the horses, holding them in a shallow ravine that was choked with scrub thorn. Jordan's girlish tones carried to where Zouga sat, blending with the cries of circling birds, and Zouga lowered the binoculars to rest his eyes and to listen to his son's voice.
He had worried about taking the boy on this rough journey, especially so soon after that bout of camp fever, but there had been no alterative, no safe place to leave him. Once again Jordan's stamina had belied his delicate looks. He had ridden hard and kept up well with his brother, at the same time recovering the flesh that the fever had burned from his body; and in the last days the deathly pallor of his skin had been gilded to velvety peach.
Thinking about Jordan led directly to memories of Aletta, memories still so filled with sorrow and raw guilt that he could not bear them and he lifted the binoculars again and raked the plain, seeking distraction. He found it with relief.
There was unusual movement far out on the wide plain. Through the lens Zouga picked up a herd of a hundred wildebeest, the 'wild cattle' of the Boers. These ungainly animals, with their mournful Roman noses and scraggly beards, were the clowns of the veld. They chased each other in aimless circles, nose to earth and heels kicking at the sky, then abruptly they ceased this lunatic cavorting and stood snorting at one another with wild-eyed expressions of amazement.
Beyond them Zouga caught a flicker of other movement: until that moment it had been hidden by the dust kicked up by the splayed wildebeest hooves. Carefully he adjusted the bevelled focus ring of his binoculars, and the heat mirage trembled and melted before his gaze, turning the movement into a serpentine wriggle that seemed to float above the plain on a lake of silver shimmering water.
,'Ostriches!' he thought disgustedly. The distant shapes seemed to wriggle like long black tadpoles in the watery wavering mirage of distance. The long-legged birds seemed to float free of the earth, blooming miraculously in the tortured air above the plain. Zouga tried to count them, but they changed shape and coagulated into a dark wavering mass, their plumed backs bobbing.
Suddenly Zouga sat up. He dropped the binoculars and polished the lens with the tail of the silk bandanna around his throat, then quickly lifted them to his eyes again. The grotesque dark shapes had separated, the lumpy wriggling bodies fined down, the elongated legs had assumed normal proportions.
'Men!' whispered Zouga, and counted them eagerly, as eagerly as he had ever made a first sighting of the huge ivory-carrying grey bull elephants in the hunting veld.
He reached eleven before another layer of heated air intervened and altered the distant man-shapes to grotesque unsteady monsters once again.
Zouga slung the binoculars over his shoulder and went down the slope with the loose scree rolling under his boots. Jan Cheroot and the boys lay in the bottom of the ravine on their saddle blankets, their saddles propped behind them as bolsters.
Zouga slid down the bank and landed between them before they had returned from the fairyland that Jan Cheroot had been spinning for them.
'A good bunch,' he told Jan Cheroot.
Zouga reached down and withdrew the short Martinihenry carbine from the leather bucket of Ralph's saddle.
He levered the breech-block down and checked the weapon was empty.
'We aren't after springbuck. Don't you load until either Jan Cheroot or I tell you,' he ordered sternly.
Jordan was still too little to handle the heavy rifle, but he rode well enough to make the encircling sweep with which they would try to close the net.
'Remember, Jordie, that you stay close enough to Jan Cheroot to hear what he tells you,' Zouga told him, glancing up at the sun as he did so.
It was well past noon; he would have to move fairly soon, for if they could not surround the little band of black men at the first attempt, if they did not achieve surprise, then it would be the old time-consuming business of spooring them down individually. So far attempts at doing so had always been interrupted by the sudden African nightfall.
