Geoffrey Jenkins - A Cleft Of Stars

Like a marksman who fears to dwell too long on his aim, Asscher struck.

Two fragments fell into the box below — but they were not diamond. The ultra-hard steel blade had shattered. The Cullinan sat in its 'dop' — unmarked.

As if in a trance Asscher reached for the second cleaver. He fitted it into the slot. For the second time he raised the short rod above his head. A muscle twitched from the point of his chin along the line of his jaw to his left ear. The rod fell. There was a firm, sensitive click.

The Cullinan dropped in two main halves and four fragments into the tin box, and Asscher to the floor in a dead faint.

One shot — followed by two in quick succession from the direction of The Hill — jerked me back to the hard realities of my present situation: a toughs breath-robbing slog; thirst; clutching sand; and a killer at large. I had long since lost the benefits of my kaftirtulp drink. My forehead throbbed and. my right-eye vision was hazed. I was worn out and in no shape to encounter Rankin. I was almost grateful to him for blasting off periodically but the fact that nearly an hour had elapsed since his previous shot showed the extent of his tenacity. The baobab now started to look invitingly near but I had some way still to cover through sand before I would hit the first hard slopes of K2.

I set off, flagging, on this final leg, each sand-filled boot a penance. Again I could not prevent thoughts of diamonds from pushing their way to the forefront of my mind: Rankin's diamonds had pitchforked me into my present crisis and my father's diamonds had shaped my life. It was no exaggeration to say that he had tried to mould me like one of his own blasted diamond facets. My education which, because of the family's continual travelling, had largely come from him, had all been diamond-orientated. To him (and therefore to me)" the heroes of history were the heroes of diamonds, the lines of my geography the courses of diamond-bearing kimberlite pipes, my mathematics the intricacies of metric carat measurement. Even my study of languages had been tainted with the jargonsmatterings of the diamond races — Yiddish, Hindustani, Persian and Arabic. Because twelve of the world's fifty major diamonds are South African, my father had indoctrinated me about South Africa. Its history, however, had no meaning for him before 1867 when two youths found a blink-klip on the banks of the Orange River near a one-horse village called Hopetown. It was inevitable that we should have made a sentimental journey to the place. There remain to this day on the window of a local store scratch marks which were made to test a diamond which was to rocket to world acclaim as the 83-carat Star of South Africa, and 'begin the country's diamond rush. My father carried his infatuation so far as to force me to study Alexander the Great's campaigns — not as campaigns but because he maintained that diamond mining had originated with Alexander the Great when he had ordered his soldiers to recover gems from a snake-guarded pit. The ingenious conqueror had used lanoline-soaked sheepskins to which the diamonds stuck. The modem vibrating-table with its grease-covered terraces over which diamond concentrate is sluiced was, in my father's eyes, merely a sophisticated development of Alexander's 330 BC idea.

My father's death came almost as a relief from this sort of thing and formal schooling in England made a welcome contrast. I did a lot of yachting and joined the Royal Navy at the outbreak of war. I was captured during a cross-Channel Combined Operations strike and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp. My mother was shot by the Gestapo in Amsterdam: I never heard why.

I shook my head like a punch-drunk boxer and cleared away the intruding cloud of memories. The ground began to rise and become harder — K2 at last. I got rid of the sand from my boots and paused before the final effort of the ascent. From where I crouched only the tabletop of The Hill lay open to my view, rather lovely but with that enduring air of watchfulness mysterious in its own way, like Nadine with the queen's ring. It brought to mind a final kickback of my night's diamond recollections: my father had an affectation of calling an engagement ring a Tower Ring because out-offavour Royal Favourites used the rings lovingly bestowed upon them to scratch messages before execution on the walls and windows of the Tower of London. I intended to find our love again in its own special context — damn all diamonds!

I pulled on my boots and started up the steep slope out of the bowl towards the rim, keeping below the skyline to avoid detection by Rankin. The wadi separating K2 from The Hill was deserted and the pinpoint of light from my fire had disappeared. There had been no shots for a long time; I took this at face value only because my mind and body were too fagged to make any effort beyond the last burst to reach the baobab. I arrived at a plateau on the top and trudged the few remaining yards to my target. Its massive trunk had (as I had hoped) a cool hollow in which I would be safe. I crawled thankfully into it and with the diamond pencil sliced a segment of pithy bark to suck and quench my thirst. The thin, acid sweetness tasted better than any drink I'd ever known.

I propped myself up against the cool wall of the interior, meaning to keep watch for Rankin. But my eyes grew heavier and my right one more painful until I could keep them open no longer. So I yielded and stretched out on the ground: the last thing I remembered was Charlie Furstenberg's doggerel:

'Winkel, winkel, little store.

I slept.

The buzzing in my ears woke me.

I came to with a start of guilt at having overslept, perhaps at having slept at all. It was broad daylight outside the shelter and I caught the sound of a faint, disappearing drone. My right eye was swollen and full of pus; my leg muscles stiff and aching. I became aware of my physical discomforts but it was the humming which made me wide awake and tense. My snap diagnosis, as I became fully conscious, made me feel sick and depressed. I had heard that faint sound once before when I had collapsed during the scientific expedition and I knew that it portended an attack of malaria.

Before getting round to considering its effects on my campaign against Rankin, I concentrated on its immediate implications which were negative and ominous: illness made me a sitting duck for him. Thirst and inevitable delirium could drive me out into the open once the attack got under way. There either Rankin or heat-stroke would get me. I sat up quickly, determined to try and sidetrack those consequences as much as I could before my senses started to slip away. In a kind of panic I got out the diamond pencil and started to hack myself a supply of the baobab's acidsweet pith as an insurance against the days ahead, at the same time cramming my mouth with it and chewing to obtain as much liquid as I could. I also gathered together flaked bark, leaves and other veld rubbish into a corner to make a rough sick-bed for myself. I tried to focus my thoughts on the attractive smell of my den's concealed moisture as a kind of mental gimmick to keep myself hidden and not venture out when I became irrational. Whatever happened, I drummed into myself over and over, I must remain inside the humpbacked walls and low gnarled roof. My testing-time came quicker than I expected when the hum returned, still distant but deep inside my head. I went to the entrance and spat out the chewed pith, meaning to recharge my mouth immediately with a fresh supply. As my head emerged so did the sound grow and I realized with a surge of thankfulness that it was nothing to do with me but that it came from overhead in the sky — a plane.

For a moment I forgot all about Rankin and made my way beyond the tree's thick shade to try and spot the aircraft. Its echo struck back from the koppies and the way it waxed and waned led me to think it must be circling out of sight on the river side of The Hill.