Geoffrey Jenkins - The River of Diamonds

I woke. The sun stabbed my eyelids. The hills were absurd. Some were upside down and their sides leaned over impossible overhangs. The twin spitskoppe of Uri-Hauchab, at whose foot we had camped in exhausted triumph the night before, hung suspended from the sky like the teats of a monster cow. The flanking ridges, chopped into light and shadow waves by last night's moon, this morning were built up of globes and plates alternately: here and there others rose like inverted mushrooms. The edges were shimmering, ill-defined, and the lines which the moon had carved so firmly were evanescent, fragmentary. My weak laugh was lost, — I knew that I was at the end of the line. I raised my fist and screamed an obscenity towards the dunes. Shelborne! He had prolonged our agony with his canteens of water. Shelborne! Christ! How he must have enjoyed killing Caldwell! Now, thirty and more years after, he'd pulled the same killer-gag on the next person to try to find his secret! I rose to my knees. The whole sky and landscape reeled, turned upside down, stood out clear. Not death, but a mirage. A few hundred yards ahead was a rough cairn of stones. The Namib, in all its wild contortions, hadn't invented that. It was man-made. Those stones had been placed in position.

I shook Koeltas to make sure I was not imagining it. He stirred, but lay still. With some frenetic last reserve of strength, I hauled him up so that he faced it.

His eyes went wide. 'Hadje Aibeep!' he click-clacked. 'On my mother's grave, Hadje Aibeep!'

Then the whole scene spun, altered, reversed — the mirage spun its wild patterns again before our eyes.

'What is it?' My lips were rubbery, congealed. 'What is Hadje Aibeep, for God's sake?'

He shook himself like a dog. 'I never thought to see it. The cave of Hadje Aibeep — the little wild men of the desert throw their dead into it. Each puts a stone above for a dead man. The cave is deep. They say there is a lake at Hadje Aibeep, under the desert. Let us look.'

We stumbled to the cairn. Next to it a deep shaft went down into the bowels of the earth. The hole was circular, about twenty feet across. Its lips, for about ten feet all round, were smooth, polished, of a substance I could not identify — not volcanic lava but some strange sort of solidified mud from the depths below.

We could smell water. I dropped a stone, and from far below came an answering splash.

This was the ancient river; this was the bearer of diamonds!

We had to get to the water, but we had neither rope nor strength. Somehow we would have to negotiate the smooth incline, up which the air came pure and sweet. I took a rock to the geyser-like mud. If we couldn't cut steps, we might as well be out in the parched dunes. I hacked at it; my crude tool sank easily: it was as soft as soapstone.

'I want something sharp,' I told Koeltas. 'I'll cut the first lot of steps and you the next — in turns.'

He held up the water-bottle. 'We drink all this first, eh?'

'Yes.' If we couldn't reach the water below, we'd die anyway. We finished it. I went to the cairn for a sharp stone.

'No!' said Koeltas. 'Not those stones — bad luck. Each stone is a dead man.'

At the base, half-covered by sand, were the remains of Bushmen arrows — the shafts had gone but the flint-heads remained — thongs of bows, primitive stone-head axes and crumbled wooden shafts. Bushmen buried weapons with the dead. I found one axe with about a foot of shaft, and the thongs lashing it to the head looked fair.

The first few steps were the worst. Once I could fashion a grip for my hands, however, the work went quickly. It was mercifully cool and the smell of water was tantalizing. Although it grew darker, there was some suffused light deeper down. After I had chipped foot- and hand-holds for about fifty feet, I sent Koeltas down for his stint. I lay in the shadow of the cairn.

Among the savage gramadullas I thought I saw a helio of light. Shelborne was watching us.

I cut the final steps. Down, down, down. Then I saw: below me was water — swift, flowing, with chocolate reflections as from polished steel. The shaft was through the roof of an immense cavern. A beach of pure white sand would cushion my drop of the last twenty feet. I shouted to Koeltas to come, then let go and fell.

I lay still, spellbound by the muted loveliness of the scene after the torture of the dunes. We were in a huge cavern to whose dim roof soared enormous pillars of limestone, intercalated with hundreds of pure white stalactites. We lay and cupped the water to our mouths. I estimated the river to be half a mile wide; it may have been more. The white beach was littered with Bushmen bones and skulls, and ran along the water's edge into the distance.

Koeltas anticipated my thoughts. 'It flows to the sea! To Mercury!'

My hunch had been correct: here was the old river which had once flowed in the bed, now dry above, and had been forced into this subterranean channel by the uplift of the coastline. Here was the diamond-carrying river, the distributor of the fountainhead's riches! The fountainhead itself must lie between Hadje Aibeep and Mercury. There was nothing ancient, however, in the strong young flow of the river. The brown told me, this is floodwater. Was it on its way to burst through to the sea like the Orange at Oranjemund? There was no mouth in Spencer Bay; the outlet must also hold the secret of the fountainhead. We must follow the river, here where we could see.

Our march was cool and easy after the aridity of the dunes. The sand fringe was pebbly and comforted our blistered feet. We rejoiced in the smell of water. The shaft of Hadje Aibeep illuminated the first part of our way. Then Koeltas grew uneasy about the dark, but it seemed obvious that the line of what I had thought to be blowholes must be vents similar to Hadje Aibeep, though smaller. I had not expected them earlier than Strandloper's Water, but there were some at irregular intervals. Above, they must lie among the wasteland of rocky outcrops we had avoided, which would account for our not having seen them.

By nightfall — the cavern became pitch-back as the sun sank — I estimated that we must be half-way back to the coast. Before rolling in my sleeping-bag, I went to the water's edge. The water had ceased its rapid flow and was sullen, turgid, scarcely moving. What mammoth obstruction lay ahead to dam it up? It also seemed the the cavern's roof was lower — was the water-level rising towards the ceiling? The quantity pouring in would trap us if there were no exit, and the occasional vent was far out of our reach. To climb the stalactites would be as impossible as to scale a skyscraper. Was Shelborne's killer in front? Or behind?

By mid-morning next day we passed, according to ray dead-reckoning, directly under Strandloper's Water. The roof was lower and the water, so friendly the previous day, was menacing. The river beach had disappeared about Strandloper's Water and now we picked our way cautiously along water-smooth rock within a couple of feet of the river itself. Ahead — maybe half a mile — I saw a shaft of sunlight. I made up my mind.

'Koeltas,' I said, 'if that next blowhole is close enough to our heads, let's get out of here.'

He shuddered and nodded. As the ceiling had crept nearer our head, he had become more strained. From time to time he looked back, holding the rifle.

We were in the sunshaft of the blowhole. I hauled Koeltas on to my shoulder, but it was still out of reach. The smooth rock offered no hand-holds. We would have to go on. What had killed the springbok at these blowholes?

The going worsened and we found ourselves clinging in places to the wall and splashing in the water. Ahead, another shaft cut into the blackness. I edged forward. My head touched the roof. A thrill of panic ran through me, blind, unreasoning fear. Where in God's name were we? We were trapped like rats in a sewer. Now was the time for Shelborne to make his kill. The water was deep, marginless, on my right. What if we emerged in the quicksands? We would simply be exchanging one form of dying for another. We must get out!