Not even the day’s unremitting physical labour could tire Johnny sufficiently to drug his dreams of a lovely girl in a short white skirt and high boots - or an old white-headed man with a face like a granite cliff.
Out of those long days and longer nights came solid achievements to stand like milestones marking the road of his career. He brought in a new diamond field, small but rich, in country which no one else had believed would yield diamonds. He pegged a uranium lode which Van Der
Byl Diamonds sold for two and a half millions, and there were other fruits from his efforts as valuable if not as spectacular.
At twenty-five, Johnny Lance’s name was whispered in the closed and forbidding halls of the diamond industry as one of the bright young comers.
There were approaches - a junior partnership in a firm of consulting geologists, field manager for one of the struggling little companies working marginal ground in the Murderers” Karroo. Johnny turned them down. They were good offers, but he stayed on with the Old Man.
Then the big Company noticed him. A century ago the first payable pipe of “blue ground” in Southern Africa was discovered on a hard scrabble farm owned by a Boer named De Beer. Old De Beer sold his farm for 16,000, never dreaming that a treasure worth 300,000,000 pounds lay beneath the bleak dry earth. The strike was named De Beers New Rush, and a horde of miners, small businessmen, drifters, chancers, rogues and scoundrels moved in to purchase and work minute claims, each the size of a large room.
From this pretty company of fortune’s soldiers two men rose high above the others, until between them they owned most of the claims in De Beers New Rush. When these two, Cecil John Rhodes and Barney Barnato, at last combined their resources, a formidable financial enterprise was born.
From such humble beginnings the Company has grown to awesome respectability and dignity. Its wealth is fabled, its influence immeasurable, its income is astronomical. It controls the diamond supply to the world. It controls also mineral concessions over areas of Central and Southern Africa which total hundreds of thousands of square miles, and its reserves of un-mined precious and base minerals cannot be calculated. Small diamond companies are allowed to co-exist with the giant until they reach a certain size then suddenly they become part of it, gobbled up as a tiger shark might swallow any of its pilot fish who become too large and daring. The big Company can afford to buy the best prospects, equipment - and men. It reached out one of its myriad tentacles to draw in Johnny Lance. The price they set on him was twice his present salary, and three times his future prospects.
Johnny turned it down flat. Perhaps the Old Man did not notice, perhaps it was mere coincidence that a week later Johnny was promoted Field Manager of Beach Operation. The nickname that went with the job was “King Canute’.
Van Der Byl Diamonds had thirty-seven miles of beach concession.
The tiny ribbon of shoreline, one hundred and twenty feet above highwater mark, and one hundred and twenty feet below low-water mark.
Inland the concession belonged to the big Company. It had purchased the land, a dozen vast ranches, simply to obtain the mineral rights.
The sea concessions, territorial up to waters twelve miles off shore, belonged to them also. Granted to them by Government charter twenty years before. But Van Der Byl Diamonds had the Admiralty strip - and it was“King Canuta’s job to work it.
The sea-mist came smoking in like ground pearl dust off the cold waters of the Benguela current. From out of the mist bank the high unhurried swells marched in towards the bright yellow sands and the tall wave-cut Cliffs of Namaqualand.
The swells peaked up sharply as they felt the land. Their crests trembled and turned luminous green, began to dissolve in plumes of wind-blown spray, arched over and slid down upon themselves in the roar and rumble of white water.
Johnny stood on the driver’s seat of the open Landrover. He wore a sheepskin jacket against the chill of the dawn mist, but his head was bare and his dark hair fluttered nervously against his forehead in the wind.
His heavy jaw was thrust forward, and his hands in the pockets of the sheepskin jacket were balled into fists. He scowled aggressively as he measured the height and push of the surf. With his crooked nose he looked like a boxer waiting for the gong.
Suddenly with an awkward angry movement he jerked his left hand from his pocket and looked down at the dial of his wrist watch. Two hours and three minutes to low tide. He pushed his fist back into his pocket, and swivelled quickly to look at his bulldozers.
There were eleven of them, big bright yellow D.8 Caterpillars, lined up along the highwater mark. The operators sat goggled and tense in their high stem seats.
They were all watching him anxiously.
Beyond them, standing well back, were the earthloaders.
They were ungainly, pregnant-looking machines with swollen bellies, and heavily lugged tyres that stood taller than a man. When the time came they would rush in at thirty miles an hour, drop a steel blade beneath their bellies and scrape up a fifteen-ton load of sand or gravel, race back inland and drop their load, turn and rush back for another gargantuan bite out of the earth.
Johnny was steeling himself, judging the exact moment in which to hurt a quarter of a million pounds” worth of machinery into the
Atlantic Ocean, in the hope of recovering a handful of bright pebbles.
The moment came, and Johnny spent half a minute of precious time in scrutinizing his preparations before committing himself to action.
Then “GO!” he shouted into his loudhailer and windmilled his right arm in the unmistakable command to advance.
“Go!” he shouted again, but his voice was lost. Even the sound of the wild surf was lost in the bull bellow of the diesels. Lowering their massive steel blades, a chorus line of steel monsters, they crawled forward.
Now the golden sand curled before the scooped blades, like butter from the knife. It built up before the monstrous machines, becoming a pile and then a high wall. Thrusting, pulling back, butting, worrying, the bulldozers swept the wall of sand forward. The arms of the operators pumping the handles of the controls like mad harmen drawing a thousand pints of beer, the diesels roaring and muttering and roaring again.
The wall of sand met the first low push of sea water up the beach and smothered it. In seeming astonishment and uncertainty the sea pulled back, swirling and creaming before the advancing dyke of sand.
The bulldozers were performing a complicated but smoothly practised ballet now. Weaving and crossing, blades lifting and falling, backing and advancing, all under the supervision of the master choreographer, Johnny Lance.
The Land-Rover darted back and forward along the edge of the huge pit that was forming, with Johnny roaring orders and instructions through the electric loudhailer.
Gradually a sickle-shaped dyke of sand was thrown out into the sea, while behind it the bulldozer blades cut down, six, ten, fifteen feet through the loose yellow sand.
Then suddenly they hit the oyster line, that thin layer of fossilized oyster shell that so often covers the diamond gravels of South West Africa.
Johnny saw the change in the character of his pit, saw the shell curling from the blades of the bulldozers.
With half a dozen orders and hand signals he had his “dozers flatten a ramp at each end of his pit, to give the earthloaders access.
Then he ordered them away to hold the dyke against the sea.
He glanced at his watch. “One hour thirteen minutes,” he muttered. “We’re running tight!” Quickly he checked his pit. Two hundred yards long, fifteen feet deep, the overburden of sand stripped away, the oyster line showing clean and white in the sun, the bulldozers clear of the pit bottom - fighting back the sea.
“Right,” he grunted. “Let’s see what we’ve got.” He turned to face the two earth movers waiting expectantly above the highwater mark.
“Go in and get it!” he shouted, and gave the windmill arm signal.
Nose to tail the earthloaders roared forward, swinging wide at the head of the pit, then swooping down the ramp and dashing along the bottom. They scooped up a load of shell and gravel without checking their speed and
