the borders of the king's domains. For thus spoke the king: 'Bring me guns to answer the smoke of the white man's guns. Bring me diamonds and bring me the yellow coins that I may grow as strong as the white Queen who lives beyond the sea. For then her soldiers will not dare to come against me.' Bazo replied for them all. 'Let Lobengula know that what he requires of us he shall have. Guns he shall have, for it is part of our contract with the white man. Each of us will carry a gun when we return to Matabeleland, some of us who have worked out two Isitupa will carry two guns when we return. Some of us will bring three guns.'
'That is known,' Kamusa nodded.
'Lobengula will have gold coins, for we are paid in coin, and what we bring home to Thabas Indunas belongs to the king.'
'That is right and proper.'
'But diamonds?' Bazo asked. 'The diamonds belong to the white man. They are fierce for them as a lioness is fierce for her cubs. How are we to bring diamonds to the king?'
'Listen to me,' whispered Kamuza. 'There will be no more 'pick-ups'. When one of you turns up the shine of a diamond in the yellow gravel, then that diamond belongs to Lobengula.'
'It is against the law.'
'Against the white man's law only, not against the law of Lobengula, who is your king.'
'To hear is to obey,' Bazo grunted, but he thought of Bakela, the Fist, who was his father, and Henshaw, the Hawk, who was his brother, and he did not relish stealing the stones for which they laboured as hard as Bazo did himself.
'Not only in the pit,' Kamuza went on. 'Each of you will watch for the chance on the sorting-tables, you, Donsela. -' He picked out a Matabele across the fire from him, a young man with a deep intelligent brow and strong jaw. 'You have been chosen to work in the new grease house.'
'The tables are guarded,' Donsela. replied. 'They are covered with a steel screen.'
They had all of them heard Donsela. speak of the marvel of the new grease house.
Once again the ingenuity of the white men had put the diamond's unique qualities to his own advantage.
The diamond was unwetable, shedding moisture like the body feathers of a goose. So while wet gravel would roll across a steel table smeared with thick yellow grease, the dry diamond would stick fast.
The pipeline from the Vaal river had at last reached Kimberley, and this water supply was augmented by the subterranean water pumped up from the depths of the vast excavation. There was water enough now to wash the gravel, instead of laboriously dry-sorting it, water enough to wash the sieved gravel over the slanting grease tables. The diamonds stuck like fat little blisters, half embedded in the grease, ready to be scraped off with a steel spatula at the end of each shift.
'There is a steel screen over the tables,' Donsela repeated, and Kamuza smiled and passed him a thin reed, cut from the riverbank. On the tip of the reed was a little lump of beeswax.
'The reed will pass through the mesh of the screen,' Kamuza told him. 'The diamond will stick more firmly to the wax than to the grease.'
Donsela examined the reed cautiously. 'Last week a Basuto was found with a stone. That same day he fell from the skip as they were bringing him out of the pit.
Men who steal stones have accidents. Those accidents always kill them.'
'A warrior's duty is to die for his king,' Kamusa told him drily.
'Do not let the overseer catch you, and pick out only the biggest and brightest stones.'
In the three years between Kamusa's departure from Kimberley and his abrupt return, Ralph had reached his full growth. Only months short of his twenty-first birthday, he stood as tall as Zouga; but unlike his father, he was cleanshaven except for the thick dark moustache which he allowed to curl down at the corners of his mouth.
At rare intervals he was still able to gather together the ten gold sovereigns necessary to keep his surreptitious friendship with Diamond Lil alive. Then suddenly that was no longer relevant, for Ralph fell in love.
It happened in the street outside that exclusive institution, already the most famous in Africa south of the equator, membership of which conferred enormous prestige and a semi-mystical entre to the elite band of men who wielded the growing wealth and burgeoning power of the diamond fields.
Yet the Kimberley Club was merely a single-storeyed wood-and-iron building as drab as any on the diggings.
True it boasted a billiard room with a full-sized table, a picket fence of ornate cast iron and a stained-glass front door, but it was situated in the noisiest street just off Market Square, and it enjoyed its fair share of the flies and the all-pervading red dust.
It was midmorning and Ralph was bringing one of the gravel carts back from the blacksmith who had replaced the iron tyres on the wooden-spoked wheels.
There was a stir in the street ahead of him. He saw men run from the canteens and kopje-wallopers' offices, most of them bareheaded and in shirtsleeves.
A vehicle came bowling out of the Square, an extraordinary vehicle, light and fast, with high narrow wheels, so cunningly sprung that it seemed to float behind the pair that drew it. They were matched, a strange pale.
brazen colour, softer than the colour of honey, and their manes were white blond.
Both horses were martingaled to force them to arch their necks, and the long-combed platinum maines flew like the battle colours of a famous regiment.
The driver, either by chance, but more probably by skill, had them leading with their off fores in perfect unison, and their gait was an exaggerated trot in which they threw their forehooves so high that they seemed almost to touch the shining heads as they nodded to the rhythm of their run.
Ralph was stabbed by such a pang of envy that it was a physical pain. He had never seen anything so beautiful
