dragging himself up the bank.
Now he had lost direction. The spoor began a long curve to the northwards, running again. It came round full circle, and where it crossed itself, Benedict had sat down. The marks of his buttocks were unmistakable. He must have controlled his panic here because once more the spoor struck out with determination towards the mountains.
However, within half a mile he had tripped and fallen.
Now he was staggering off course again, drifting southwards.
Once more he had fallen, but here he had lost a shoe.
Johnny picked it up and read the printed gold lettering on the inner sole. “BALLY OF SWITZERLAND, SPECIALLY MADE FOR HARRODS. That’s out boy Benedict, all right.
Forty-guinea black kid,” he muttered grimly, and climbed back into the Land-Rover. His excitement was climaxing now. It would be soon, very soon.
Farther on Benedict had wandered down into the bed of an ancient watercourse, and turned to follow it. His right foot was lacerated by the razor flints in the river bed, and at each pace he had left a little dab of brown crumbly blood.
He was staggering like a drunkard.
Johnny zigzagged the Land-Rover through the boulders that dotted the watercourse. gu epene , and spicockscomb ridges of black rock hedged it in on either hand.
The air in the watercourse was a heavy blanket of heat. It seared the throat, and dried the mucus in Johnny’s nostrils brick hard. A
small noon breeze came off the mountains, a sluggish stirring of the heavy air, that provided no relief but seemed only to heighten the bite of the sun and the suffocating oppression of the air.
Scattered along the river bed were bushes of stunted scrub.
Grotesque little plants, crippled and malformed by the drought of years.
From one of the bushes ahead of the Land-Rover a monstrous black bird flapped its wings lethargically. Johnny screwed up his eyes, uncertain if it was reality or a mirage of the heat and the tortured air.
Suddenly the bird resolved itself into the jacket of a dark blue suit. It hung in the thorny branches, the breeze stirring the folds of expensive cloth.
“In his coat. He put it in his coat pocket.” With eyes only for the jacket, recklessly he pressed down the accelerator and the
Land-Rover surged forward. Johnny did not see the knee-high boulder of ironstone in his path.
He hit it at twenty miles an hour, and the Land-Rover stopped dead with the squeal of tearing metal. Johnny was flung forward against the steering-wheel, the impact driving the breath from his lungs.
He was still doubled up with the pain of it, wheezing for breath, as he hobbled to the jacket and snatched it out of the bush.
He felt the heavy drag of the weighted pocket.
Then the fat canvas bag was in his hands, the contents crunched nuttily as he tore at the drawstring. Nothing else in the world felt like that.
“Such a diamond as you will never see again.” The drawstring was knotted tightly. Johnny ran back to the Land-Rover. Frantically he scrabbled in the seat locker an with the nile . he cut the rawstring an dumpe the contents of the bag on to the bonnet of the Land-Rover.
“Oh God! Oh sweet God!” he whispered through cracked lips. His eyesight blurred, and the big blue diamond glowed mistily, distorted by the tears that flooded his vision.
It was a full minute before he could bring himself to touch it.
Then he did so reverently - as though it were a sacred relic.
Johnny Lance had worked all his life to take a stone such as this.
He held it in both hands and sank down into the scrap of shade beside the body of the Land-Rover.
It was another five minutes before the hot cloying smell of engine oil reached the conscious level of his mind.
He turned his head and saw the slowly spreading pool of it beneath the Land-Rover chassis. Quickly he rolled on to his stomach and, still clutching the diamond, crawled under the vehicle. The ironstone boulder had shattered the engine sump. The Land-Rover had bled its lifeblood into the hot sand of the river bed.
He wriggled out from under the body of the Land-Rover and leaned against the front tyre. He looked at his wrist watch and was surprised to see it was already a few minutes after two o’clock in the afternoon.
He was surprised also at the conscious effort it required to focus his eyes on the dial of the watch. Two days and two nights without sleep, the unremitting emotional strain of those days and nights, the battering his body had taken, the long hours in the heat and the soul-corroding desolation of this lunar landscape - all these had taken their toll. He knew he was as light-headed as in the first stages of inebriation, he was beginning to act irrationally. That sudden reckless charge down the boulder-strewn river bed, which had wrecked the Land-Rover, was a symptom of his present instability.
He fondled the great diamond, touching the warm smooth surface to his lips, rubbing it softly between thumb and forefinger, changing it from hand to hand, while every fibre of his muscles and the very marrow of his bones cried out for rest.
A soft and treacherous lethargy spread through his body and reached out to numb his brain. He closed his eyes for a moment to shut out the flare, and when he opened them again with an effort the time was four o’clock. He scrambled to his feet. The shadows in the gully were longer, the breeze had dropped.
Although he moved with the stiffness of an old man, the sleep had cleared his mind and while he wolfed a packet of biscuits spread with meat paste and washed it down with a mugful of lukewarm water he made his decision.
He buried the canvas bag of rough diamonds in the sand beneath the
Land-Rover, but he could not bring himself to part with the big blue.
He buttoned it securely into the back pocket of his slacks. Into the light knapsack from the seat locker he packed the two-pint water bottle, the first aid kit, a small hand-bearing compass, two of the smoke flares and the knife. He checked his pockets for his cigarette lighter and case.
Then without another glance at the radio set on the dashboard of the Land-Rover he turned away and hobbled up the gully on the spoor of
Benedict van der Byl.
Within half a mile he had walked the stiffness out of his body, and he lengthened his stride, going well now. The hatred and hunger for vengeance which had died to smouldering ash since he had found the diamonds now flared up again strongly. It gave power to his legs and sharpened his senses.
The spoor turned abruptly up the side of the gully and he lost it on the black rock of the ridge, but found it again on his first cast.
He was closing fast now. The spoor was running across the grain of the land, and Benedict was clearly weakening rapidly. He had fallen repeatedly, crawled on bloody knees over cruel gravel and rock, he had blundered into the scrub bushes and left threads of his clothing on the hooked redtipped thorns.
Then the spoor led out of the ridges and scrub into another area of low orange-coloured sandhills and Johnny broke into a jog trot. The sun was sliding down the sky, throwing blue shades in the hollows of the dunes and the heat abated so that Johnny’s sweat was able to cool him before drying.
Johnny was intent on the staggering footprints, beginning to worry now that he would find Benedict already dead. The signs were those of a man in extreme distress, and still he was driving himself on.
Johnny did not notice the other prints that angled in from the dunes and ran parallel to those of Benedict, until they closed in again and began overlaying the human prints.
Johnny stopped and went down on one knee to examine the broad dog-like pug marks.
“Hyena!” He felt the sick little flutter of revulsion in his stomach as he spoke. He glanced around quickly and saw the other set of prints out on the left.
“A pair of them! They’ve smelt the blood.” Johnny began to run on the spoor now. His skin crawled with what he knew could happen when they caught up with a helpless man. The filthiest and most cowardly animals in Africa, but with jaws that could crunch to splinters the thigh bone of a full-grown buffalo, and their thick stubby fangs were coated with such a slime of bacteria from a diet of putrid carrion that their bite was as deadly as that of a black
