The Angels Weep (3 page)

‘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 bole 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, prising loose the boulders with
a branch of a leadwood 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!’

R
alph found a
stump of candle in his saddlebag, while Zouga swiftly spliced
together the three coils of rope 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 runnels 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.

T
hey 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 Loben-gula’s
impis, they were each entitled to ten gold claims. This naturally
did not apply to Jan Cheroot. Despite the fact that he had ridden
into Matabeleland with Jameson’s flying column and shot
down the Matabele
amadoda
at the Shangani river and the
Bembesi crossing with as much gusto as had his masters, yet he
was a man of colour, and as such he could not share the
spoils.

In addition to the booty to which Zouga and Ralph were
entitled under the Victoria Agreement, both of them had bought up
many blocks of claims from the dissolute and spendthrift troopers
of Jameson’s conquering force, some of whom had sold for
the price of a bottle of whisky. So between them they could peg
off the entire ridge and most of the valley bottoms on each side
of it.

It was hard work, but urgent, for there were other prospectors
abroad, one of whom could have followed their tracks. They worked
through the heat of noon and by the light of the moon until sheer
exhaustion forced them to drop their axes and sleep where they
fell. On the fourth evening, they could stop at last, content
that they had secured the entire reef for themselves. There was
no gap between their pegs into which another prospector could
jump.

‘Jan Cheroot, there is only one bottle of whisky
left,’ Zouga groaned, and stretched his aching shoulders,
‘but tonight I am going to let you pour your own
dop.’

They watched with amusement the elaborate precautions which
Jan Cheroot took to get the last drop into his brimming mug. In
the process, the line around the bottom that marked his daily
grog ration was entirely ignored, and when the mug was full, he
did not trust the steadiness of his own hand but slurped up the
first mouthful on all fours like a dog.

Ralph retrieved the bottle, and ruefully considered the
remnants of the liquor before pouring a dram for his father and
himself.

‘The Harkness Mine,’ Zouga gave them the
toast.

‘Why do you call it that?’ Ralph demanded, when he
lowered his mug and wiped his moustache with the back of his
hand.

‘Old Tom Harkness gave me the map that led me to
it,’ Zouga replied.

‘We could find a better name.’

‘Perhaps, but that’s the one I want.’

‘The gold will be just as bright, I expect,’ Ralph
capitulated, and carefully moved the whisky bottle out of the
little Hottentot’s reach, for Jan Cheroot had drained his
mug already. ‘I am glad we are doing something together
again, Papa.’ Ralph settled down luxuriously against his
saddle.

‘Yes,’ Zouga agreed softly. ‘It’s been
too long since we worked side by side in the diamond pit at New
Rush.’

‘I know just the right fellow to open up the workings
for us. He is a top man, the best on the Witwatersrand
goldfields, and I’ll have my wagons bringing up the
machinery before the rains break.’

It was part of their agreement that Ralph would provide the
men and machinery and money to run the Harkness Mine when Zouga
led him to it. For Ralph was a rich man. Some said he was already
a millionaire, though Zouga knew that was unlikely. Nevertheless,
Zouga remembered that Ralph had provided the transport and
commissariat for both the Mashonaland column and the Matabeleland
expedition against Lobengula, and for each he had been paid huge
sums by Mr Rhodes’ British South Africa Company, not in
cash but in company shares. Like Zouga himself, he had speculated
by buying up original land grants from the thriftless drifters
that made up the bulk of the original column and had paid them in
whisky, carried up from the railhead in his own wagons.
Ralph’s Rhodesia Lands Company owned more land than did
even Zouga himself.

Ralph had also speculated in the shares of the British South
Africa Company. In those heady days when the column first reached
Fort Salisbury, he had sold shares that Mr Rhodes had issued to
him at £1 for the sum of £3-15
s
-0
d
on
the London stock market. Then, when the pioneers’ vaunting
hopes and optimism had withered on the sour veld and barren ore
bodies of Mashonaland, and Rhodes and Jameson were secretly
planning their war against the Matabele king, Ralph had
re-purchased British South Africans at eight shillings. He had
then seen them quoted at £8 when the column rode into the
burning ruins of Lobengula’s kraal at GuBulawayo and the
Company had added the entire realm of the Matabele monarch to its
possessions.