'Hold on, boy!' Zouga's voice carried faintly above the pandemonium. 'They're coming. Hold on!'
But under Ralph's belly the earth whispered and shrugged impatiently and the driver's weight pulled him another inch towards the drop.
'Hold on, Ralph!'
Across that aching breathless space Zouga was reaching out with both hands, a gesture that was more eloquent than any words, a gesture of suffering and helpless love.
Then suddenly Ralph felt rough hands seize the ankles of his muddy boots, the shouts of many men behind him, the rasp of a hairy manila rope against his cheek, the noose dangling in front of his face, and with a huge surge of relief he saw the dangling driver thrust his free arm through the noose and saw it drawn tight.
Ralph could let the muddy wrist slip from his grip, and he crawled back from the edge.
He looked down at his father. It was too far for either of them to see the expression on each other's face.
For a moment longer Zouga stared up at him. Then he turned away abruptly, his stride businesslike, his gestures imperative as he ordered his Matabele forward to the rescue work.
The rescue went on all that day. For once every digger on New Rush was united by a common purpose.
The Diggers' Committee closed the workings and ordered every man out of the unaffected areas. The five other roadways that had not collapsed were declared out of bounds to all traffic and they stood high and menacing in the silver clouds of drifting rain.
On the churned and collapsed remnants of number 6 Roadway the -rescuers swarmed. These were the men who had been trapped on the floor by the severed ladderworks and the fallen system of gantries.
There were no members of the Committee in the number 6 area, and Zouga Ballantyne with his natural air of authority was quickly accepted as the leader. He had marked the position of the gravel carts and drivers on the roadway at the moment of the cave-in, and he split the available men into gangs and set them to digging where be guessed men and vehicles were buried. They attacked the treacherous shapeless mass of earth with a passion which was a mixture of hatred and stale fear, an expression of their own relief at having escaped that smothering entombing yellow cascade.
For the first hour they dug men out alive, some miraculously protected by an overturned cart or the body of a dead mule. one of &these survivors rose shakily to his feet unaided when the earth was shovelled away, and the rescuers cheered him with a kind of wild hysteria.
Three mules had survived the drop (one of these was Zouga's old grey Bishop) but others were fearfully mutilated by the wrecked carts. Someone lowered a pistol and a packet of cartridges from the ground level and Zouga slipped and slid from one team to the other and shot the unfortunate beasts as they lay screaming and kicking in the mud.
While this was going on there were teams of men busy above them at ground level. Under the direction of the Diggers' Committee they were rigging rope ladders and a makeshift gantry to bring up the dead and the injured.
By noon that day they could begin taking the injured out, strapped to six-by-three timber boards and hoisted on the new gantry, swaying up the high wall of the pit.
Then they began to find the dead men.
The last of the missing men was locked like a foetus into the cold muddy womb of the earth. Zouga and Bazo stooped shoulder to shoulder into the mouth of the excavation, seized the limp wrist that protruded from the bank and, straining together, freed the corpse. It came out in a rush of slippery mud, like the moment of birth, but the man's limbs were convulsed in rigor mortis and his eye sockets packed with mud. Other hands lifted the corpse and carried it away, and Zouga flexed his back and groaned. Cold and weariness had tied knots in his muscles.
'We are not finished yet,' he said, and the young Matabele nodded.
'What is there still to do?' he asked simply, and Zouga felt a rush of gratitude and -affection towards him. He placed his hand on Bazo's shoulder and for a moment they considered each other gravely, then Bazo asked again, 'What must be done?'
'The roadway is gone. There will be no work on these claims, not for a long time,' Zouga explained, his voice dulled and his hand dropping wearily from Bazo's shoulder. 'If we leave any tools or equipment down here, they will be stolen.'
They had lost the gravel cart, the hoist with its iron sheave wheels and valuable rope, and the gravel buckets.
Zouga sighed, and the fatigue swept over him like a cold dark wave. There was no money to replace those essentials. 'We must save what we can from the vultures.'
Bazo called to his men in their own language and led them along the shapeless bank of broken earth from which protruded shattered pieces of equipment and tangles of sodden rope, to the deserted Devil's Own claims.
The fallen roadway had buried the eastern corner of number 142, but the rest of the claims were clear. However, a pressure crack had opened in a deep zigzag across the floor and some of Zouga's equipment had fallen into it and lay half submerged in muddy water.
Bazo clambered down into the fissure and groped for the mess of rope and tools, passing it up to the Matabele on the bank above his head. Here Zouga supervised them as they tied the tools into bundles and then staggered away with them to the high eastern bank, there to wait their turn for the single functioning gantry to hoist the bundles out to ground level.
As they worked the last pale rays of the sun pierced the mass of low cloud and struck down into the huge man-made pit.
In the bottom of the fissure Bazo found the last missing pick, passed it up, and then leaned against the bank to rest for a few moments. He felt that he no longer had the strength to climb out of the deep crack. The cold lio had numbed his legs and softened his skin until it was wrinkled and water-logged like that of a drowned man.
He shivered and laid his forehead on his arm, bracing himself against the bank of yellow earth. He felt that if he
