Power of the Sword - Smith Wilbur - Страница 42

I'm all right now. It was just such a shock. I've searched for her so often over the years. I knew where she must be. She looked around her vaguely. O'wa's body must be somewhere close at hand. She looked up at the cliff that seemed to hang over them like a cathedral roof. They were up there trying to escape when he gunned them down. They must have fallen close together. Who shot them, Mater? She drew a deep breath, but even then her voice shook as she said his name. 'Lothar. Lothar De La Rey! For an hour longer they searched the bottom and sides of the gorge, looking for the second skeleton.

It's no good. Centaine gave up at last. We will never find him. Let him lie undisturbed, Shasa, as he has all these years. They climbed down to the little rock shrine, and as they returned they plucked the wild flowers along the way.

,MY first instinct was to gather her remains and give them a decent burial, Centaine whispered as she knelt in front of the shrine, 'but H'an i wasn't a Christian. These hills were her holy place. She will be at peace here. She arranged the flowers with care and then sat back on her heels.

I'll see that you are never disturbed, my beloved old grandmother, and I will come to visit you again. She stood up and took Shasa's hand. She was the finest, gentlest person I have ever known, she said softly. And I loved her so. Still hand in hand they went down to where they had tethered the horses.

They did not speak again on the ride home, and the sun had set and the servants were anxious by the time they reached the bungalow.

At breakfast the next morning Centaine was brisk and brittly cheerful, though there were dark bruised smudges beneath her eyes and the lids were puffed from weeping.

This is our last week before we must return to Cape Town. I wish we could stay here for ever. For ever is a long time. You have school waiting for you, and I have my duties. We will come back here, you know that. He nodded and she went on. I have arranged for you to spend this last week working in the washing plant and sorting rooms. You'll enjoy that. I guarantee it. She was right, as usual. The washing plant was a pleasant place. The flow of water over the wiffle boards cooled the air, and after the unremitting thunder of the mill plant it was blessedly quiet. The atmosphere in the long brick room was like the cathedral calm of a holy place, for here the worship of Mammon and Adamant reached its climax.

Shasa watched with fascination as the crushings from the mill plant were carried in on the slowly moving conveyor belt. The oversize rubble had been screened off and returned for another crushing under the spinning rollers. These were the fines. They dropped from the end of the moving belt into the puddling tank, and from there were pushed by the agitating arms of the revolving sweep down the sloping boards of the wiffle table.

The lighter materials floated away and were run off to the waste dump. The heavier gravels, containing the diamonds, were carried on through a series of similar ingenious separating devices until there remained only the concentrates, one thousandth part of the original gravels.

These were washed over the grease drums. The drums revolved slowly, each of them coated with a thick layer of heavy yellow grease. The wet gravel flowed easily over the surface, but the diamonds were dry. One of the diamond's peculiar qualities is its unwettability. Soak it, boil it as long as you wish, but it remains dry. Once the dry surface of the precious stones touched the grease they stuck to it like insects to fly paper.

The grease drums were locked behind heavy bars and a white supervisor sat overlooking each of them, watching them constantly. Shasa peered through the bars for the first time and saw the small miracle occur only a few inches from his nose: a wild diamond captured and tamed like some marvelous creature of the desert. He actually witnessed the moment when it flowed out of the upper bin in a wet porridge of gravel, and he saw it touch the grease and adhere precariously to the slick yellow surface, causing a tiny V-shaped disturbance to the flow like a rock in the ebb of the tide. It moved, seeming to lose its grip in the grease for an instant, and Shasa wanted to thrust out his hand and seize it before it was for ever lost, but the gaps between the steel bars were too narrow. Then the diamond stuck fast and breasted the gentle flood of gravel, sitting up proudly, dry and transparent like a blister on the yellow skin of a gigantic reptile. it left him with a feeling of awe, the same feelings as he had experienced when he witnessed his mare Celeste give birth to her first foal.

He spent the entire morning passing from one to the other of the huge yellow drums and then back again down the line, watching the diamonds sticking on the grease more an d more thickly with each hour that passed.

At noon the washroom manager came down the line with his four white assistants, more than were necessary, other than to watch each other and forestall any opportunity for theft. With a broad-bladed spatula they scraped the grease from the drums and collected it in the boiling pot, then meticulously spread each drum with a fresh coating of yellow grease.

in the locked de-greasing room at the far end of the building the manager placed the steel pot on the spirit stove and boiled off the grease until finally he was left with a pot half full of diamonds, and Dr Twenty-man-Jones was there to weigh each stone separately and record it in the leather-bound recovery book.

of course you will notice, Master Shasa, that none of these stones is smaller than half a carat. Yes, sir. Shasa had not thought of that. What happened to the smaller ones? The grease table is not infallible, indeed the stones must have a certain minimum weight to get them to adhere. The others, even a few large valuable stones, pass across the table. He led Shasa back to the washroom and showed him the trough of wet gravel that had survived the journey over the drums. We drain all the water and reuse it. Out here water is precious stuff, as you know. Then all the gravel has to be hand picked. As he spoke two men emerged from the door at the end of the room and each scooped a bucket of gravel from the trough.

Shasa and Twenty-man-jones followed them back through the doorway into a long narrow room well lit with glass skylights and high windows.

A single long table ran the length of the room, its top clad in a polished metal sheet.

On each side of the table sat rows of women. They looked up as the two men entered and Shasa recognized the wives and daughters of many of the white workers as well as those of the black boss-boys. The white women sat together nearest the door and, with a decent and proper distance between them, the black women sat separated at the far end of the room.

The bucket boys dumped the damp gravel onto the metal table top and the women transferred their attention back to it. Each had a pair of forceps in one hand and a flat wooden scoop in the other. They drew a little of the gravel towards them, spread it with the scoop and then picked over it swiftly.

It's a job at which the women excel, Twenty-man-Jones explained as they passed down the line, watching over the stooped shoulders of the women. They have the patience and the sharp eyes and the dexterity that men lack. Shasa saw that they were picking out tiny opaque stones, some as small as sugar grains, others the size of small green peas, from the duller mass of gravel.

Those are our bread and butter stones, Twenty-man-Jones remarked. 'They are used in industry. The jewellery grade stones that you saw in the grease room are the strawberry jam and the cream. When the mine hooter signalled the end of the day shift, Shasa rode down with Twenty-man-Jones in the front seat of his Ford from the washing gear to the office block. On his lap he carried the small locked steel box in which was the day's recovery.