Geoffrey Jenkins: A Cleft Of Stars

'Now Jock knows all about emergency drill; he's done plenty of rock work. That's why Dr Drummond chose him in the first place to go along. He found that the loop had cut into the Prof's neck and had dislocated his right shoulder.'

'Why should a poacher lay a snare there?' I interrupted. 'The climb's far too difficult for any but the smallest game to venture up it to the spring.'

Nadine went on quietly without replying directly to my question. 'Listen. Jock had almost freed Dr Drummond when he himself slipped. He dropped until his right leg broke his fall by lodging across the bad narrow section. You could say he was lucky, in a way. If he hadn't stuck there would have been nothing to prevent him falling to the bottom. He'd have been killed, for sure. As it was, his leg was smashed in two places and there's a lot of damage to the knee. He'll never climb again. He's in the next ward here in the hospital.'

'It could happen to anyone,' I rejoined, trying to dispel the sinister undertone in what she was saying. lock probably became careless in his hurry to help the Prof.'

She thrust her tongue against her front teeth so that it forced open her lips slightly.

'Jock said he didn't slip. He was pushed!

'Never! There's not a soul there! The Hill's been deserted from the time the last scientific expedition left just before war broke out. Our party's the first since: you know that as well as I do.'

'Yes, Guy, I know it only too well. It gives force to what I'm saving. All excavations came to a complete stop then, of course. We natched up their injuries and waited for your jeep to return. That same night Bob and Dave decided to move the spare petrol away from the cliff area in case of another rockfall. They made a dump about half a mile away from the camp out in the open and heaped sand over — the jerricans so that there would be no danger of sparks from the camp fires. It's fantastic, I know, but the dump blew up like an outsize Guy Fawkes display.'

I sat incredulous.

' Yes,' she repeated. 'Somehow or other sealed and buried jerricans managed to ignite. Like the rockfall business, it also took place in the middle of the night. The explosions were like bombs. The cans leapt high into the air trailing flames — one after another they went up. It was really pretty spectacular, if we hadn't all been so scared.'

'What,' I asked grimly, 'was given as the cause of that?'

'The heat. Spontaneous combustion. Sympathetic explosions.'

'Rubbish! Petrol in sealed cans doesn't catch fire by spontaneous combustion! Anyway, it's cooler at night than during the day if you care to put that explanation to the test.'

'We were looking round for some sort of rational answer and it was good enough at the time for a crowd of really frightened people. The spirit had been completely knocked out of the venture by then and Dr Drummond had to take an on-the-spot decision on his own responsibility about what to do because there was no way of getting in touch with the authorities — you know yourself the nearest phone is sixty miles away. He couldn't afford either to take any risks in that heat with Jock's injury. He followed the only course he could and called off the expedition. We were all only too relieved about it and glad to leave. When your jeep returned we managed to find enough fuel in the tanks of the wrecked ones for it and made our way here to Messina. It was appallingly overcrowded and Jock suffered hell with his leg over the rough sections. Dr Drummond has already left to go back home and report.'

The end of the expedition was the beginning of our love; The Hill with its associations could not have been other than part of it. This was strengthened by Nadine's wish to have her engagement ring copied from the queen's taken from the royal grave on the tabletop. I obtained official permission for this with considerable difficulty. In spite of her father's opposition, we intended to marry.

Then, the day in Cohen's store when I handed over Rankin's diamonds and faced a police revolver, our world collapsed.

How I would put the pieces together again I planned a thousand times during my remaining year in prison after Charlie Furstenberg had divulged that Rankin was at The Hill. My pent-up feelings took the form of frustrated energy which I channelled into reconstructing the jail library in its entirety. Shortly after our conversation Charlie was moved to a 'privileged' section of the prison and later put to work in the jail hospital. There was no reason why the little Jew should have been given such special consideration. I saw him only once or twice more in the distance during my imprisonment. We never had the chance to talk again. Oddly enough, it was my library work which supplied the solution to the problem of concealing from Nadine my mission to find Rankin. About a month before I was due out the Superintendent informed me that I had been given a remission of a week off my sentence in recognition of it. Nadine came as usual on the last visitors' day, unaware of my remission. She was radiant, full of plans for our future. 'Only a week and I shall come and fetch you home,' were her parting words.

A few hours later I was released. I made my way furtively to Johannesburg, saw my old professor briefly, picked up a few belongings-and a rifle.

I headed for The Hill.

The tool cut the barbed wire, and again I was in the presence of the hill which is death to look upon.

Not a bird sang, not an insect moved.

The wire sprang back to the nearest post, the barbs throwing up little spurts of dust as they plucked at the burning sand. To my tensed senses there was some doubt whether I had actually heard the faint noise of the wire's ring or whether it was tinnitus, an imaginary sound which isolation evokes in the desert, having no reality except in the ear of the hearer. By cutting the wire I had crossed my Rubicon and was committed to the critical stage of my pursuit of Rankin. I had forced a way into the prohibited area of The Hill and our confrontation would have to take place somewhere among the sunstruck tumble of rocks and hills which I could see as I raised my eyes cautiously to the level of the wide sandstone terrace on which The Hill stands along the river front. The terrace — a platform of rock half a mile long — rises abruptly about thirty feet out of a soft incline which is, in fact, the river's maximum bed at floor level. In normal times it is no more than a broad belt of sand studded with stunted palms and small trees. In The Hill's hey-day this steep platform served as its outer line of defence against attack from the river quarter. Centuries of erosion, however, had fashioned two or three sizeable gullies into gateways through the defences. These access points had now been blocked by rolls of militarystyle barbed wire where they opened on to the river bed and higher up at terrace-level by an eight-strand security fence with a workmanlike overhang at the top to prevent climbing. Furthermore, the head of each of these entry-points was reinforced by a padlocked barbed-wire gate. Whoever had done the job knew what he was about. Two high stone walls, still in a state of fair repair, completed the process of sealing off the place on either flank.

These were the reported precautions Nadine had read out to me that day in prison. It would not be impossible to break into the fortress enclosure but it needed time and resourcefulness. My commando training had enabled me to work through the outlying rolls of barbed wire-a long, exacting crawl-but I had been stumped by the security fence and gate. Then I remembered a curious old instrument in my pocket called a diamond pencil. It was one of the things I had brought with me in my hasty departure. It was a diamond-cutter's tool which had belonged to my grandfather and had a direct association with the Cullinan, for he had lent it to the famous Joseph Asscher of Amsterdam to make the initial cut in the great gem. It was an odd-looking thing with a bronze hexagonal shaft which had been worn smooth, as if by many hands in the past. In its tip was set a diamond to cut other diamonds. Called technically a 'sharp' my diamond pencil looked like an ordinary pencil made of metal, slightly thicker where the fingers gripped it, tapering towards both ends. Before the invention of the modern polariscope, which 'sees' into the heart of a diamond, cutting depended entirely on skill. A diamond has a hidden natural grain which must be established. A groove is cut along the surface of this plane with a diamond pencil, which then receives the cleaving knife. If diamond would cut diamond, I reasoned, diamond would cut the barbed wire obstructing me now.