Роберт Фиш - Rough Diamond

“Good God!” he said in awestruck tones. “How many bloody men are down there?” He had to raise his voice to be heard over the noise rising from the depths of the mine itself and from the whims and the other lifting wheels and mechanisms arranged around the rim.

Harry smiled broadly, pleased that his Kimberley mine had received the startled adulation he had expected and which it obviously deserved. He raised his voice as well.

“Well,” he said, “figure it out. Each claim is thirty-one feet by thirty-one feet, African measure — which is almost the same as English measure — and the mine is roughly round in shape and about a quarter of a mile across. So figure it out. And each claim may be being worked by as many as six men, maybe one white man to direct and keep an eye open for thieves and maybe five natives to do the real work of digging and shoveling the dirt into the buckets to be hoisted to the surface. Thirty-one feet square,” he said, almost with satisfaction, “hardly enough room to swing a pick or a shovel without hitting somebody in the head!”

Barney still could scarcely comprehend the confusion of the scene below. Who could do any decent work — digging, whatever — in that maelstrom? “But there has to be some sort of bloody organization, or you’d think there would be bloody anarchy—!”

“There is. Or as close to it as you might want,” Harry said quietly, and pointed. “There used to be roads running across the mine to carry the dirt out in wagons pulled by horses — those are the parts of the big hole you see that aren’t as deep as the rest of the mine. But they simply fell in when the diggers started to dig deeper on either side of them. Men, horses, they’ve all been killed falling in. They still get killed. Say one claim is fifty feet lower than the claim next to it. A man goes down his ladder to his claim and starts to dig, all aboveboard, all on his own claim.” He made a chopping motion with a hand. “Bam! First thing he knows his neighbor’s claim falls in on top of him. And then they get into a great argument — if either one of them is still alive — as to who has the right to the earth that fell in.” Harry grinned at his brother. “Still want to be a digger?”

“How do you go about getting a claim?”

“I’ll tell you later. Seen enough for a day?”

“Why? Where do you want to go?”

“Why,” Harry said lightly, almost as if he hadn’t been thinking about it for the past hour, “I imagine after two months on the trail, eating biltong and mealies, you could stand some rib-sticking food. One thing we have in Kimberley is good food. When and if you can afford it,” he added under his breath, and spoke up again. “What would you say to a broth to put the hair on your chest, a big juicy joint to add muscle to your elbows, two or three vegs — not mealies — to remind you of what we used to ramp off the wagons in Covent Garden when we were kids, and a bottle of real African beer?”

“I’d say it was what I could stand,” Barney said with a grin, and was about to turn away from the edge of the huge hole when a disturbance in the mine caught his attention. He looked down. A fight of some sort seemed to have broken out on a claim almost directly below them and no more than fifty or sixty feet from the surface. Two white men were pummeling a black unmercifully. The black had no place to go even had he been able to break loose; the sheer cliff of the reef prevented escape on one side, and below him the claims on that side contained men staring upward and he apparently felt he could look to small sympathy or help from them. With a sudden twist he broke free and dashed for the ladder on one side of the claim that led upward and eventually to the surface, but he had no more than started to climb when one of the men had him by the ankle and dragged him back. The black seemed to lose spirit at this defeat; he merely sat on the ground while the two men kicked and beat at him. At last he turned and spat. One of the white men ran his boot sole over the spittle and then bent to pick something from the ground. The black merely sat until the men dragged him to his feet and shoved him hard against the ladder. He stood there for a moment until one of the white men kicked him; then he dispiritedly began to climb. He came to the rim, pulled himself over within feet of Barney and Harry, and limped away, bleeding.

Barney had been staring in surprise. “What was that?”

“Someone trying to steal a diamond. Sometimes they stick right out of the soil, almost asking to be picked up.” Harry shrugged. “That one was lucky they didn’t beat him more. He’s lucky to walk away.”

Barney took a deep breath, remembering. It also brought back memories of Fay with her arms around him. He put that thought away. “We saw some men on horses kill a black near the river. They shot him. Andries — he was the driver of the ox wagon — said it was for stealing diamonds.”

“That’s the worst crime there is around here, stealing anything, but especially diamonds. Even trading in stolen diamonds is asking for a few years on the Cape Town breakwater,” Harry said. “But they rarely kill anyone for it. Those men you saw were probably from Klipdrift or Pniel or one of the other river diggings. Here they just beat them up — pretty bad — but they seldom kill them. If they’re white they get beat up and kicked out of town; word gets around and a man might as well go home. They won’t let him near the other mines, either. But very few get shot or killed. The Miner’s Committee doesn’t like guns; you don’t see anyone carrying them. This isn’t like America.”

They had been walking through the town; Barney now began to understand the deserted nature of the place when he had arrived. Everyone who didn’t have business in town was at the mine, working. Well, at least that meant somebody was making a living out of the diamonds, even if it wasn’t a very fancy one. It was an encouraging thought. Harry turned into the Queen’s Hotel, leading the way past the desk into a separate dining room. The Queen’s Hotel, Barney could see, was far better than the so-called hotel where Harry entertained and where he had gotten directions. Maybe Kimberley wasn’t as bad as his first impression of it had been. Well, whether it was or not, here he was and here he intended to stay.

The two men seated themselves at a table and waited until a matronly looking woman came to serve them. Harry did the ordering, quite as if he ate there every day, and once the beer had been brought and the woman had gone back into the kitchen, Harry leaned back and looked at his younger brother rather indulgently.

“Well, what do you want to know about diamonds?”

“Everything,” Barney said simply.

“You’ve come to the right man,” Harry said, and smiled. “I can tell you everything except how to make money in them.”

Barney smiled back. “And that’s the only part I’m interested in.”

Harry held up a hand. “Don’t misunderstand me,” he said. “I can tell you how others make money in them. I just can’t tell you how you can make money in them. Or me,” he added a bit more quietly.

“Tell me how the others do it,” Barney said, and then held up his hand. “Wait. First, explain something to me. How many diamond mines are there around here?”

“Outside of the river diggings, which really aren’t mines, there are four,” Harry said promptly. “Kimberley, De Beers, Bultfontein, and Dutoitspan.”

“How about the Colesberg Kopje, the New Rush, the Old Rush, and all of those?”

Harry laughed. “You’ll need a bit of history,” he said. “Diamonds have been found on three farms around here, besides the river diggings at places like Pniel and Klipdrift. The three farms are Bultfontein, Dutoitspan, and Vooruitzigt. We’re on what was the Vooruitzigt farm right now; both the Kimberley mine and the De Beers mine are on it. Now, they call the original De Beers mine the Old Rush, because that’s where people first went to try their luck at finding diamonds, the original rush for them, so to speak. Then one night, a Cape colored named Damon, who was servant to a man named Rawstorne, got drunk and became a nuisance, so Rawstorne sent him out of the camp to keep him from disturbing the others — Rawstorne and his pals were playing cards — and Damon settled himself down on the hillock to sober up. And woke up in the morning to find he’d had a restless night because the pebbles he thought he’d been sleeping on turned out to be diamonds. He went back and like a good and faithful servant told Rawstorne. And the New Rush was on. At first Rawstorne called the place Colesberg Kopje — a kopje is simply a hill and nothing else, and a hill in this part of the country is anything higher than a small boy — simply because Rawstorne and his friends had originally come from a place called Colesberg in the Cape. But after the town was renamed Kimberley after the new Colonial Secretary, and since the mine is the biggest of all four, they now call it the Kimberley mine. So Kimberley, Colesberg Kopje, and New Rush are one and the same mine. The mine you were looking down into a while ago. Any questions?”