wiped his hands on his breeches.
'It's quartz all right, but the ancient miners must have hand-sorted this dump. We will have to find the old shafts if we want to see visible gold in the ore.' From the top of the ancient dump Zouga orientated himself rapidly.
'The carcass of the bull elephant fell about there,' he pointed, and to confirm it Jan Cheroot searched in the grass and lifted a huge thighbone, dry and white as chalk, and at last after thirty years beginning to crumble.
'He was the father of all elephant,' Jan Cheroot said reverently.
'There will never be another like him, and it was he that led us to this place. When you shot him he fell here to mark it for us.' Zouga turned a quarter-circle and pointed again. 'The ancient shaft where we buried old Matthew will be there.' Ralph recalled the elephant hunt as his father had described it in his celebrated book A Hunter's Odyssey.
The black gunbearer had not flinched from the great bull elephant's charge, but had stood it down and handed Zouga the second gun, sacrificing his own life for that of his master. So Ralph understood and remained silent, as Zouga went down on one knee beside the rock pile that marked the gunbearer's grave.
After a minute, Zouga rose and dusted off his knee, and said simply, 'He was a good man.' 'Good, but stupid,' Jan Cheroot agreed.
'A wise man would have run.' 'And a wise man would have chosen a better grave,' Ralph murmured. 'He is plumb in the centre of a gold reef. We will have to dig him out.' But Zouga frowned. 'Let him lie.
There are other shafts along the strike.' He turned away, and the others followed him. A hundred yards farther on, Zouga stopped again. 'Here!' he called with satisfaction. 'The second shaft there were four of them altogether.' This opening had also been refilled with chunks of native rock. Ralph shrugged off his jacket, propped his rifle against the hole of the nearest tree and climbed down into the shallow depression until he stooped over the narrow blocked entrance.
'I'm going to open it up.' They worked for half an hour, pr ising loose the boulders with a branch of a lead wood and manhandling them aside until they had exposed the square opening to the shaft. It was narrow, so narrow that only a child could have passed through it. They knelt and peered down into it. There was no telling how deep it was, for it was impenetrably black in the depths and it stank of damp, of fungus and bats, and of rotting things.
Ralph and Zouga stared into the opening with a horrid fascination.
'They say the ancients used child slaves or captured Bushmen in the workings,'Zouga murmured.
'We have to know if the reef is down there,' Ralph whispered.
'But no grown man-' he broke off and there was another moment of thoughtful silence, before Zouga and Ralph glanced at each other and smiled, and then both their heads turned in unison towards Jan Cheroot.
'Never!' said the little Hottentot fiercely. 'I am a sick old man. Never! You will have to kill me first!' Ralph found a stump of candle in his saddlebag, while Zouga swiftly spliced together the three coils of Rrope used for tethering the horses, and Jan Cheroot watched their preparation like a condemned man watching the construction of the gallows.
'For twenty-nine years, since the day I was born, you have been telling me of your courage and daring,' Ralph reminded him, as he placed an arm around Jan Cheroot's shoulder and led him gently back to the mouth of the shaft.
'Perhaps I exaggerated a little,' Jan Cheroot admitted, as Zouga knotted the rope under his armpits and strapped a saddlebag around his tiny waist.
'You, who have fought wild men and hunted elephant and lion what can you fear in this little hole? A few snakes, a little darkness, the ghosts of dead men, that's all.' 'Perhaps I exaggerated more than a little,' Jan Cheroot whispered huskily.
'You are not a coward are you, Jan Cheroot?' 'Yes,' Jan Cheroot nodded fervently. 'That is exactly what I am, and this is no place for a coward.' Ralph drew him back, struggling like a hooked catfish on the end of the rope, lifted him easily and lowered him into the shaft. His protests faded gradually as Ralph paid out the rope.
Ralph was measuring the rope across the reach of his outstretched arms. Reckoning each span at six feet, he had lowered the little Hottentot a little under sixty feet before the rope went slack.
'Jan Cheroot!'Zouga bellowed down the shaft.
'A little cave.' Jan Cheroot's voice was muffled and distorted by echoes. 'I can just stand. The reef is black with soot.' 'Cooking fires. The slaves would have been kept down there,' Zouga guessed, 'never seeing the light of day again until they died. 'Then he raised his voice. 'what else?' 'Ropes, plaited grass ropes, and buckets, leather buckets like we used on the diamond diggings at New Rush-' Jan Cheroot broke off with an exclamation. 'They fall to pieces when I touch them, just dust now.' Faintly they could hear Jan Cheroot sneezing and coughing in the dust he had raised and his voice was thickened and nasal as he went on, 'Iron tools, something like an adze,' and when he called again they could hear the tremor in his voice. 'Name of the great snake, there are dead men here, dead men's bones. I am coming up pull me up!' Staring down the narrow shaft, Ralph could see the light of the candle flame wavering and trembling at the bottom. 'Jan Cheroot, is there a tunnel leading off from the cave?' 'Pull me up.' 'Can you see a tunnel?' 'Yes, now will you pull me up?' 'Not until you follow the tunnel to the end.' 'Are you mad? I would have to crawl on hands and knees.' 'Take one of the iron tools with you, to break a piece off the reef.' 'No. That is enough. I go no farther, not with dead men guarding this place.' 'Very well,' Ralph bellowed into the hole, 'then I will throw the end of the rope down on top of you.' 'You would not do that!' 'After that I will put the rocks back over the entrance.' 'I am going.' Jan Cheroot's voice had a desperate edge, and once again the rope began slithering down into the shaft like a serpent into its nest.
Ralph and Zouga squatted beside the shaft, passing their last cheroot back and forth and waiting with ill grace and impatience.
'When they deserted these workings, they must have sealed the slaves in the shaft. A slave was a valuable chattel, so that proves they were still working the reef and that they left in great haste.'
Zouga paused, cocked his head to listen and then said, 'Ah!' with satisfaction. From the depths of the earth at their feet came the distant clank of metal tool on living rock. 'Jan Cheroot has reached the working-face.' However, it was many minutes more before they saw the wavering candle light in the bottom of the pit again and jan Cheroot's pleas, quavering and pitiful, came up to them.
'Please, Master Ralph, I have done it. Now will you pull me up, please?' Ralph stood with one booted foot on each side of the shaft, and hauled in the rope hand over hand. 'The muscles of his arms bulged and subsided under the sleeves of his thin cotton shirt, as he lifted the Hottentot and his burden to the surface without a pause, and when he had finished, Ralph's breathing was still even and quiet and there was not a single bead of perspiration on his face.
'So, Jan Cheroot, what did you find?' Jan Cheroot was coated all over with fine pale dust through which his sweat had cut muddy tunnels and he stank of bat guano and the mushroom odour of long-deserted caves. With hands that still shook with fear and exhaustion, he opened the flap of the saddlebag at his waist.
'This is what I found, he croaked, and Zouga took a lump of the raw rough rock from him.
It had a crystalline texture, that glittered like ice and was marbled with blue and riven by minute flaws and fissures, some of which had cracked through under the pounding of the iron adze with which Jan Cheroot had hacked it from the rock face. However, the shattered fragments of shining quartz were held together by the substance that had filled every crack and fault line in the ore. This cement was a thin malleable layer of bright metal, that twinkled in the sunlight when Zouga wet it with the tip of his tongue.
'By God, Ralph, will you look at that!' And Ralph took it from his father's hand with the reverence of a worshipper receiving the sacrament.
'Gold!' he whispered, and it sparkled at him, that lovely yellow smile that had captivated men almost from the time they had first stood upon their hind legs.
'Gold!' Ralph repeated.
To find this glimmer of precious metal they had laboured. most of their lives, father and son, they had ridden far and, in the company of other freebooters, had fought bloody battles, had helped destroy a proud nation and hunt a king to a lonely death.
Led by a sick man with swollen crippled heart and grandiose dreams, they had seized a vast land that now bore that giant's name, Rhodesia, and they had forced the land to yield up, one by one, its riches. They had taken its wide sweet pastures and lovely mountain ranges, its forests of fine native timber, its herds of sleek cattle, its legions of sturdy black men who for a pittance would provide the thews to gather in the vast harvest. And now at last they held the ultimate treasure in their hands.
'Gold!' Ralph said for the third time.
They struck their pegs along the ridge, cutting them from the living acacia trees that oozed clear sap from the axe cuts, and they hammered them into the hard earth with the flat of the blade. Then they built cairns of stone to mark the corner of each claim.
Under the Fort Victoria Agreement, which both of them had signed when they volunteered to ride against Lobengula's imp is they were each entitled to ten gold
