steps onto the verandah and into the bungalow without looking back.
Jordan led the mules out into the rutted road and swung them towards the settlement. He walked bareheaded in the sunlight. He was tall and slim and he moved with a peculiar grace, stepping lightly and lithely in the soft red dust. His chin was up, his eyes focused far ahead, with the dreaming, yet all-seeing, gaze of a poet.
Men and women, especially women, looked after him as he passed and their expressions softened, but Jordan walked on as though he were alone on a deserted street.
Though his lips never moved, the words of the invocation to the goddess Panes kept running through his mind.
'- Why did you run away? You would have been better with us -' So many times he had called to the goddess, the words were part of his very existence. 'Will you not come back to us, great Panes?'
The goddess was going, and Jordan did not believe he could support the agony of it. Statue, goddess and mother were all one in his mind, his last link with Aletta. Aletta who had become Panes.
He felt desolate, bereaved as though of his dearest love, and when he reached the milkwood fence of Rhodes' camp, he stopped and wild fancies seized him. He would take the goddess, run with her into the wilderness, hide her in some distant cave. His heart bounded. No, he would take her back to the ancient ruined city from which she had come, that far place in the north from which his father had stolen her, where she would be safe.
Then with a plunge of his spirits and a slide of despair in his guts he knew that these were childish dreamings and that he was no longer a child.
With a light touch on the lead mule's bridle, he guided her into the camp, and Rhodes was standing at the front door of his bungalow, bareheaded and in shirtsleeves. He was talking quietly, urgently to a man below the stoep.
Jordan recognized him as one of the Central Diamond Company overseers.
When Rhodes looked up and saw Jordan, he dismissed the overseer with a curt word and a nod.
jordan,' Rhodes' greeting was grave, perhaps he sensed the mood of the young man before him, 'you have brought it?'
When Jordan nodded, he turned back to the waiting overseer.
'Bring four of your best men,' he ordered. 'I want this cart unloaded, and carefully. It's a valuable work of art.'
He watched keenly as they untied the ropes that held the tarpaulin in place, but cocked the large curly head when Jordan spoke.
'If we have to lose it, then I'm glad it's you that it goes to, mister Rhodes.'
'The bird means something to you also, Jordan?'
'Everything,' Jordan said simply, and then caught himself; that sounded ridiculous. mister Rhodes would think him strange. 'I mean, it has been in my family since before I was born. I don't really know what it will be like without that goddess. I don't really want to think about losing it.'
'You don't have to lose it, Jordan.'
Jordan looked at him, unable to bring himself to ask the meaning.
'You can follow the goddess, Jordan.'
'Please don't tease me, mister Rhodes.'
1you are bright and willing, you have studied Pitman's shorthand, and you have an excellent pen,' Rhodes said.
'I need a secretary, somebody who knows and loves diamonds as I do. Somebody whom I feel easy with.
Somebody I know and whom I like. Somebody I can trust. Jordan felt a vast soaring rush of joy, something sharper, brighter and more poignant than he had ever known before. He could not speak; he stood rooted and stared into the pale blue and beautiful eyes of the man whom he had worshipped for so many years.
'Well, Jordan, I am offering you the position. Do you want it?'
'Yes,' Jordan said softly. 'More than anything on earth, mister Rhodes.'
'Good, then your first task is to find a place to set up the bird.'
The white overseer had pulled the tarpaulin aside to expose the statue, and the sheet hung down over the side of the cart.
'Easy now,' he shouted at the gang of black labourers.
'Get a rope on it. Don't drop it. Watch that end, damn YOU.
They swarmed over the statue, too many of them for the job, getting in one another's way, and Jordan's heady joy at Rhodes' offer was submerged in a quick stab of concern for the safety of the bird.
He started forward to set the ropes himself, but at that moment there was the clatter of hooves and Neville Pickering rode into the yard. He was astride his mare, a highly bred and finely mettled bay, and he reined her down to a walk.
He shot a glance at Jordan, and his face clouded for an instant, a quick show of irritation, or of something else.
With a sudden intuitive flash Jordan realized that Pickering resented his presence here.
Then as quickly as it had come the shadow passed from Pickering's handsome features and he smiled that sunny charming smile of his and looked down at the statue in the cart.
'What have we here?' His tone was gay, his manner carefree and relaxed. As always he was elegantly dressed,
