Geoffrey Jenkins - The River of Diamonds

The tiny cabin swam around me. I held on to the table. 'You said my father. You mean… your father.'

'My father — and yours.'

'He shot me.'

'And with a bullet in his lung… I didn't know he was so bad… he half-carried you down the Long Wall to the beach and — collapsed there. I rowed you both here…'

'But Shelborne killed Caldwell.'

'He didn't, for the simple reason there was never any Shelborne. Shelborne did not exist, any more than the Hottentots' Paradise.'

'I'm not with you… He told you this…?'

She said, firmly, 'Yes, he did — on our way to Walvis. That's why he turned back after you, not to kill you as you thought, but to tell you who he was, who you are. I am his daughter and you are his son — we're half-brother and sister. He knew I was his daughter — Caldwell's daughter — in court. You saw how it took him then. He was forced — he called it his luck again — to bid against his own daughter for the sea-bed right.'

'What about the deed of cession.'

'It was a fake. He deliberately changed his handwriting to that fine italic style so it wouldn't be recognized. There was never any Shelborne. Dad was as much of a loner as you are. He invented the whole thing. He wanted the world to believe that the great Caldwell was dead.'

'And your mother too?'

'I didn't know until he told me, and she never said: before Kleinzee she had told him that if he went off on what she described as another of his hare-brained expeditions, she was through with him. She never understood his "behind the ranges" side. She wanted security, a husband with a steady job, a suburban home. Caldwell, the legend, the diamond genius — and his fate — weren't for her. She told him so. He tried to sugar the pill by saying he was off to the Hottentots' Paradise but in fact he had a hunch — like you — that Mercury was the fountainhead of the Sperrgebiet, its original and sole source of diamonds. He explored the coast and the desert. There's an enormous underground cavern…'

'I know,' I roughed in the picture of the methane gas barrier, the ancient river, and the Bells of St Mary's.

She nodded.. 'He prospected the coastline until he knew practically every rock of it. He suspected the diamonds were there. If he went back with his fountain-head theory unsubstantiated and with no diamonds to prove it, you realize what they would have said: Caldwell missed all the big ones and now he's back with one of those cock-and-bull yarns about an inaccessible treasure trove. He had to prove it. He returned to tell my mother…'

He returned?'

'Yes. She didn't believe a word of his story. She thought he'd gone off on another wild-goose chase and was soft-soaping her. He'd gone, despite her ultimatum. As far as she was concerned, he could go off for good on his wild schemes. She told him so.'

That was what sent him to the Takla Makan and the Atacama?'

'Yes. He became a sailor in order to get back to Mercury…'

'I thought that was it. The Shelborne impersonation came later?'

'It was easy. Even my mother scarcely recognized him after his blackwater fever at Strandloper's Water. He was bald — as he told the court — and he'd changed in himself too. He'd got asthma and that's what worries me now about his lung.' She said gently. 'You think he's tough, but it's his conquest of himself that makes him so…'

'All this doesn't make Caldwell my father.'

She said softly, 'You remember the cairn on the Oyster Line, John. The little boy? It was probably a gang of the Hottentot refugees and riff-raff which used to terrorize those parts in the early days who took him. Dad didn't know your story until I told him on the way to Walvis bay. Dates, times, age — everything tallies. Tregard the missionary was your foster-father, you know that, but what about where you really came from. You were the little boy. Your mother was murdered.' She made a curious, heart-warming gesture towards the other bunk. 'He's suffered greatly, John. He discovered the Oyster Line and he came back to… well, to that cairn of stones. The diamond fountainhead is his — it's his dream, his life, — and then the bitterness of finding it hopelessly inaccessible, beyond his power to break open. He has sat his life away on Mercury, watching, waiting, hoping…' There was a long silence. The only sound was the creak of the cutter's anchor cables. 'When he heard about you, he turned the Gquma round then and there. You were in grave danger, he said, something big was about to happen. He risked his life to fetch you.'

He must have known that the gas barrier was due to burst.

'Why didn't you ask him…?' I began.

The voice from the bunk, though weak, was resonant. 'Why don't you ask him yourself?'

Mary went over and took his arm from under the blanket. She crooked it in hers and at the same time drew me over, linking her free arm in mine. Caldwell tried to smile, but it turned into a grimace of pain and a fit of coughing. Mary wiped away the pinky foam.

I said awkwardly, 'We could have saved all this… The Mazy Zed offer…'

He replied, with a flash of his old self, 'You've got to get out of this bay quick, boy.'

'You'll be fine, once we get a doctor to you…'

He shook his head. 'It wasn't that I was thinking of… maybe I will, or maybe not. But there's a barrier of methane gas…'

'It's going to burst.'

'Yes,' he answered. 'I thought you must have worked it out, the way you set off inland. Yes, John, it's going to burst. I've waited a lifetime for it to happen. Once or twice it was pretty close, but it didn't come off, and the long wait began all over again. It's not a thing a man can do anything about. The old underground river floods when the rains are heavy on the mountains behind the desert. For it to be as it is now there must have been once-in-a-lifetime floods. When it breaks, it will sweep the diamonds out to sea — Oranjemund won't be in it…'

The Bells reverberated against the Gquma's hull.

'The whole bay is shaking like hell,' I said. 'Mercury is the centre…?'

'Yes,' he replied weakly. 'Mercury is the fountainhead of the Sperrgebiet.'

I couldn't forget the dead men. 'You tried to scare off the Mazy Zed rather than share it.'

Mary darted an angry glance at me, but Shelborne said, 'No, John, it wasn't that way. Strangely enough, I wanted to save lives. Yours, Rhennin's, those on the Mazy Zed. When the barrier goes, it will take everything with it — maybe Mercury too. Hundreds of thousands of tons of gravel and millions of gallons of water will be unleashed. In prehistoric times before the continent lifted, the flushing process was easy because the floods had freeway to the sea. If the Mazy Zed had been operating,' she would have been swept away like a twig in a maelstrom. So I used scare tactics, but they got out of hand — the Bells, the gas, the rest of it. Somehow in my life every good motive of mine has boomeranged and turned out wrong.' He smiled, but it was edged with bitterness. 'Caldwell's luck, you know. Mary has told you, of course?'

'Yes. What about the Praying Mantis?'.'

'I intended to wreck her and to rescue you all with the flatboom. I didn't bargain for a storm like that. I reckoned that once the survey vessel was out of the way, you'd stick to other places and not come back. I wasn't to know you were on to the fountainhead idea.'

'And the attack at Angras Juntas?'

He tried to shrug and his face went white with pain. Mary intervened, but he waved her aside. 'It wasn't the People's Second Atlantic Group, or whatever they call themselves, but a more private enterprise — a Polish fishing outfit based on Conakry, near Freetown. They run the occasional parcel of stones into West Africa for me, for a consideration, to keep my prospecting efforts going. They were only too pleased to have a crack at the opposition, but there again things misfired. They promised me they would do no more than inflict superficial damage and create enough rumpus to keep you away from Mercury. By the time you were able — or wanted — to get here I hoped the barrier would have exploded and the thing would have solved itself. But they took it as an opportunity to try to sink the Mazy Zed…'