While he waited for the skip to reach him, Zouga cast his mind back to that first day when he had led the single oxen into the sprawling encampment with Aletta on the wagon box beside him, and they had looked up at the riddled and torn kopje.
So much earth had been moved since then, so many men had died in this terrible pit where that kopie had once stood and so many dreams had perished with them.
Zouga lifted the wide-brimmed hat. Carefully he mopped the beads of sweat from the smoother paler skin along his hairline, and then he inspected the damp red stain on the silk bandanna and grimaced with distaste.
It looked like blood.
He re-knotted the silk about his throat, still peering down into the depths, and his eyes clouded with disenchantment as he remembered the high hopes and bounding expectation that he had brought with him on that day, was it really ten years ago? It seemed like a day and an eternity.
He had found himself dreaming, the random events from those lost years replaying through his mind, the sorrows and the joys magnified by his imaginings and by the passage of time.
Then, after a few minutes, Zouga roused himself.
Dreaming was an old man's vice. The past was beyond regret; today was all that counted. He straightened his shoulders and looked down at Ralph in the swinging skip. Something jarred him, scattering the last of his dreams.
The skip was riding differently, it did not have the accustomed weight to it, he could not yet make out the heaped yellow gravel, which, despite his orders, Ralph usually over-loaded high above the steel sides of the skip.
It was empty, and Ralph was alone. He was coming up without the Matabele gang to help run the skip over the bars and up-end its burden of gravel into the chute, down which it would be carried to the waiting cart.
Zouga cupped his hands to his mouth to shout his enquiry, but the words stayed in his throat.
Ralph was close enough now for Zouga to see the expression on his face. It was tragic, stricken with some terrible emotion.
Zouga lowered his hands and stared at his son in anticipation. The skip hit the end bars with an iron clasp and the winchman threw out the gear lever, expertly, braking the steel skip against the bars.
Ralph jumped lightly across the narrow gap onto the platform, and stood there, still staring at Zouga.
'What is it, my boy?' Zouga asked quietly, fearfully and for answer Ralph turned away and glanced down int the empty body of the skip.
Zouga stepped up beside him, and followed his glance He saw that he had been mistaken, the skip was not empty.
'It has taken us all morning to hack that out of the east face,' Ralph told him.
It looked like a roughly cut gravestone, before the inscription was chiselled in, as wide as the stretch of man's arms and imperfectly squared up, the marks of the steel wedges and pickaxe still fresh upon it.
'We broke three pick handles on it,' Ralph went on grimly, 'and we only got it out because there was natural fracture line that we could crack open with wedges.'
Zouga stared at the ugly cube of stone, not wanting to believe what it was, trying to close his ears against his son's voice.
'Underneath it's the same, solid, hard as a whore heart, no faults, no cracks.'
The lump of stone was a dull ugly mottled thing across which the steel tools had left paler weals and furrows.
'Sixteen of us,' Ralph went on. 'We worked on it all morning.' He opened his hands, and showed them palms upwards. The horny yellow calluses had been torn open, the raw flesh beneath was mushy and caked with dust and earth. 'All morning we broke our hearts and our picks on it, and that bloody little chip weighs less than half a ton.'
Slowly Zouga stooped over the edge of the skip and touched the stone. it was as cold as his heart felt, and its colour was dark mottled blue.
'The blue,' Ralph confirmed quietly. 'We have hit the blue.'
'Dynamite or blasting gelatine,' Ralph said. 'That's the only way we'll ever move it.'
He was stripped to the waist, a polish of sweat on his arms, and little drops of it hanging like dew in the thick hair of his chest.
The tombstone of blue marble lay at his feet, and Ralph rested on the shaft of the sledgehammer. The blows he had swung at the rock had raised bursts of sparks and tiny puffs of white dust that stung their nostrils like pepper, but had not cracked the rock through.
'We cannot blast in the pit,' Zouga said tiredly. 'Can you imagine two hundred diggers firing away dynamite, every one doing it when and how he wanted?' He shook his head.
'There is no other way,' Ralph said. 'No other way to get it out.'
'And if you do get it out? Jordan asked from the verandah where he had stood without speaking for the past hour.
'What do you mean?' Zouga demanded. He could hear the strain in his own voice, and knew how close, his anger and frustration were to the surface.
'What will you do with it when you do get it out?
Jordan persisted, and they all stared at the awful blue lump.
'There are no diamonds in that stuff.' Jordan said it for them.
