Geoffrey Jenkins: The River of Diamonds

We shuffled on, my muscles rebelling at the unnatural sandtrapper gait. The wadi was as tortuous in direction as it was treacherous above. A hundred tons of rock detached itself and fell, noiseless. Dust billowed, but otherwise the rocks' agony was mute. In five minutes we would have been marching across the spot. Johaar, leading, turned and gestured expressively. Yet another bend: we paused in astonishment, even in that region of unlikely colours. The overhang expanded funnel-wise above, but instead of flaming scarlet it was burnished jet-black. It was hornblende, stippled here and there with emerald-green boulders of pure copper. The heat became almost intolerable as the black drank up the sun; two feathery cascades, not of water, but of white sand, ran over the shoulders of the dark cliffs.

Then the gramadullas opened and the terrain became flat — the ancient watercourse!

We threw our packs in the shadow of the banks and lay down exhausted. But even here the late afternoon sun would not leave us alone. The shadow disappeared and there was nothing for it but to return to the stifling defile and the black cliff. The Bernadelli bullets tasted better than the water. I fell asleep sucking raw brass and lead; I was awakened by bitter cold and dark. It was barely eight o'clock and the temperature must have fallen over fifty degrees. There was no fire because there was nothing to burn. We ate an unpalatable meal of bully-beef and dried fruit, washed down with a little water. We decided to trek with the moon and lie up during the heat of the day. The river-bed seemed an impenetrable wash of sand, without a white pock-mark or a dead buck to guide our search for Strandloper's Water.

I shivered in my sleeping-bag and sleep was fitful. I must have fallen into a deeper sleep towards midnight, for I started awake as Koeltas shook me. The muted light caught the yellow bronze of his skin; his eyes were two slits of shadow. In his long oilskin, his Tartar face was as unreal in that goblin-land as a goblin itself. What he said was as strange.

'Put on the shoe of Mantis.'

The bullet rattled awkwardly against my teeth. 'For Christ's sake, what are you talking about?'

He turned away so that his silhouette was lost against the black cliff and he said softly, in his thin, harsh voice. The Bushmen say, the moon is the shoe of Mantis. Let us put it on and get the hell out of this spook-land.'

I kept the compass but jettisoned the Bernadelli, the shells and the binoculars — a holster of dried fruit was worth more than a gun. Koeltas, however, kept the Remington. Johaar and I marched with our sleeping-bag? doubled round our waists; Koeltas's was bundled up neatly on his rucksack. In the heat of the previous day he had been least affected. He drank less water than Johaar or myself.

We trekked. We kept no account of time. The river sand was deep, but level. The sandshuffler gait paid off here without the muscle-cracking strain of endless ascent and descent. The cold was formidable. Sockless, open-toed, I soon lost all feeling in my feet and the numbness worked its way up mid-calf like Socrates's hemlock. The stars were radium needles above the serried lines of endless wadis flowing into the main stream. Of water, of life,there was no sign. The Glory Hole, the diamond fountainhead itself, became unimportant beside the need to lift one unfeeling foot in front of the next. The bullet I sucked felt like a drop of warm water in my palm.

I led. I didn't see the dawn, although my face was towards it. My brain was numb, unresponsive: my eyes were conditioned to the next muscle-sapping step. Nor did I notice that the river-bed was widening — flattening into a sort of sand delta. It was colour that pulled my head up. A mile or two away, a slender monolith of rock stood up one hundred feet from the sandy bed. It was not black, or red, or any of yesterday's colours. It was crushed strawberry. For a moment I imagined it to be the coming flush of light, but it was not the magic of sunrise — the rock itself was that colour. The sun brought no warmth but, momentarily, greater cold. We paused in mid-river within sight of the strawberry rock: if I could have rejoiced then in the thought of diamonds I would have done so at the sight of a striated bank: it was bright blue, like the tailings of the Kimberley diamond mines. This began where the river narrowed the way we had come, but farther on as it fanned out the blue gave way to an astonishing display of reds, yellows, pinks and lighter blues, shot through with a white purer even than the sand. I guessed this to be kaolin, and the others not diamond gravel but clays of various kinds.

This array of colours was remarkable enough. But the column of rose quartz marked the site of something that was of far more interest to us. Under a shimmer of mist to the right lay an outline of palest turquoise, sheening like a lake. Instinctively I looked for the two landmarks which would confirm what leapt to my tired brain. There they were — hard on the right, two enormous dunes! Sand encircled, muted and lovely it lay before our seared eyes — Strandloper's Water!

But there was no water.

The lake-like sheen was as much a delusion as the name. Perhaps in Caldwell and Shelborne's time it might have earned it, for there was solidified mud in the pan. The contorted corpse of a moringa tree, squat, silver-barked, stood near it, and a moringa stores water and lives on it for years. But it, too, had died of thirst. There was no sign of Shelborne's mule wagon. I knew that he must have lied about it, for no vehicle could possibly have traversed the dunes. The other side of the ancient watercourse was as impassable to the wheel as to the foot — mile upon mile of endless file of razor-edged outcrops of rock.

I searched Strandloper's Water for Caldwell's. grave. There was nothing except a fireplace of blackened stones near the moringa tree skeleton. The place was as featureless as a mirror. Had Shelborne's year in the desert been fiction too? I began to wonder: water there was none, nor animal life, vegetation, insect or shade. The pitiless glare forced us back into the sundial shadow of the isolated monolith. We slept, oblivious, in its shadow until the sun moved and woke us. We cursed and shifted; slept and were woken by the sun; cursed and shifted yet once again. At sunset the stunning chill struck at us.

We decided to return to the coast.

The Uri-Hauchab mountains, fine and near on the map, took no account of the Namib. We were without much food and our precious water supply was dwindling. Our bodies were beaten, lame, exhausted. The fountainhead recurred again and again to my mind, but what I most wanted was water, shade, shelter from the desert's pitilessness. We decided to rest the next day and make for Mercury the following night.

That was, until I heard the Bells that night; until Johaar saw the moving helio in the dunes; until the water demijohn burst.

The Bells brought me out of sleep. Through the insulating sand came the familiar long reverberation. The river-bed trembled under me, but its tremor was slight compared to the heave of Mercury. I was awake in a flash, but Koeltas was before me, sitting up in his sleeping-bag, rifle in hand, his eyes wide with terror.

'Shelborne!' he — said thickly. 'Shelborne brings the Bells… We die…'

'Shelborne is at sea on his way to Waivis Bay,' I snapped.

Johaar was muttering to himself.

'Let's march,' said Koeltas.

The hell with that — at this time and the state we're in,' I replied roughly. I lay down again, my thoughts racing. My sealed gas pockets on the sea-bed would obviously not be audible at this distance and through the intervening land mass. They could not explain the Bells, then. Koeltas sat and smoked his rank tobacco endlessly. The dunes were black and white under the hard moon, like some unreal zebra's flank. The Bells, the ancient river line… What, I asked myself if we were lying on the dome roof of a gigantic underground cavern, not only stretching under Mercury in the form of the Glory Hole, but under the desert itself? Could the mushroom-shaped blowholes be vents from it? With the uplift of the coast, had the river been forced underground, now flowing beneath its original bed? Had Strandloper's Water run dry for the same reason? If we were on top of the diamond fountainhead, the diamonds must be under an overburden of sand which would make even the Oranjemund experts with their tournadozers and tournascrapers blanch. Yet, I believed, Caldwell had found some way in… It was impossible to prospect: I had no trommel and even if I had, you need water to wash gravel. Water was life, and our store was scanty enough.