Men of Men - Smith Wilbur (книги бесплатно без txt) 📗

They had lost the gravel cart, the hoist with its iron sheave wheels and valuable rope, and the gravel buckets.

Zouga sighed, and the fatigue swept over him like a cold dark wave. There was no money to replace those essentials. "We must save what we can from the vultures."

Bazo called to his men in their own language and led them along the shapeless bank of broken earth from which protruded shattered pieces of equipment and tangles of sodden rope, to the deserted Devil's Own claims.

The fallen roadway had buried the eastern corner of number 142, but the rest of the claims were clear. However, a pressure crack had opened in a deep zigzag across the floor and some of Zouga's equipment had fallen into it and lay half submerged in muddy water.

Bazo clambered down into the fissure and groped for the mess of rope and tools, passing it up to the Matabele on the bank above his head. Here Zouga supervised them as they tied the tools into bundles and then staggered away with them to the high eastern bank, there to wait their turn for the single functioning gantry to hoist the bundles out to ground level.

As they worked the last pale rays of the sun pierced the mass of low cloud and struck down into the huge man-made pit.

In the bottom of the fissure Bazo found the last missing pick, passed it up, and then leaned against the bank to rest for a few moments. He felt that he no longer had the strength to climb out of the deep crack. The cold lio had numbed his legs and softened his skin until it was wrinkled and water-logged like that of a drowned man.

He shivered and laid his forehead on his arm, bracing himself against the bank of yellow earth. He felt that if he closed his eyes he would fall asleep on his feet.

He kept them open with an effort, and stared at the earth in front of his face. A trickle of rainwater was still running down from the level above his head; it had cut a narrow runnel a few inches wide and deep. Most of the mud had settled out of this little streamlet, and it was almost clear, only slightly milked with colour.

At one point in its trickle down the mud wall it had encountered an obstacle, and was pouring over it, forming a little plume of running water.

Suddenly Bazo was thirsty. His throat was rough and dry. He leaned forward, and let the trickle flow over his lips and tongue, and then slurped a mouthful.

The watery sun touched the bank, and a strange brilliant light flared inches from Bazo's face. It came pouring up, powerful and pure and dancing white, from the tiny freshet from which he was drinking.

He stared at it dully, and slowly it dawned upon him that the obstruction over which the water was pouring was something embedded in the gravel bank, something that glowed and flickered as the random beam of sunlight played upon it, something that seemed to change shape and substance through the trickling yellow-tinged waters.

He touched it with his forefinger, and the cold water ran down his forearm and dripped from his elbow. He tried to work it loose, but it was firmly implanted, and soapy feeling in his raw numb fingers so that he could not get a fair grip upon it.

He took the buckhom whistle from around his neck and used the point to prise the pretty fiery object loose, and it dropped heavily into the raw pink palm of his hand, almost filling it.

It was a stone, but a stone such as he had never seen before. He held it under the trickle of rainwater, and with his thumb rubbed off the clinging mud until it was clean. Then he looked at it again, turning it curiously in the weak sunlight.

Until Bazo had arrived at New Rush he had never thought about rocks and stones as being different from one another, any more than one drop of water differed from another or one cloud in the sky was more valuable or useful than the others. The Matabele language did not differentiate between a granite pebble and a diamond, they were both simply "imitshe". Only the white men's maniacal obsession with stones had made him look at them afresh.

In all these months he had spent toiling in the diggings, he had seen many strange things and learned much of the white men and their ways. At first he had not been able to believe the extraordinary value they placed on the most trivial items. That a single pebble could be exchanged for six hundred head of prime cattle seemed some grotesque madman's dream, but at last he had seen that it was true and he and his little band of amadoda had become fanatical gatherers of pebbles.

Every sparkling or coloured stone they had pounced upon like magpies and carried proudly to Bakela for their reward.

This initial enthusiasm had swiftly waned, for there was neither logic nor system in the white man's mind.

The showiest stones were discarded contemptuously.

Lovely shiny red and blue pebbles, some of them shot through with different colours like ceramic beads, Bakela handed back to them with a grunt and a shake of the head. While occasionally, very occasionally, he would select some dull and uninteresting little chip and hand the delighted finder a gold coin.

At first, payment in coin had confused the Matabele, but they learned fast. Those little metal discs could be exchanged in their turn for anything a man desired, as long as he had enough of them he could have a gun, or a horse, a woman or a fine ox.

Bakela had tried to explain to Bazo and his Matabele how to recognize the stones for which he would pay a red gold coin. Firstly, they were small, never much bigger than the seed of the camel-thorn tree.

Bazo considered the stone in his palm. It was huge; he could barely close his fingers over it. The stones that Bakela wanted were usually of a certain shape, a regular shape with eight sides, one for every finger less the thumbs. This huge stone was not so shaped. It had one clean side, as though cut through with a knife blade, and the rest of it was rounded and polished to a strange soapy sheen.

Bazo held it under the trickle of rainwater again, and when he brought it out the film of water that covered the surface instantly coagulated into little droplets and shrank away, leaving the stone dry and glittering.

That was strange Bazo decided, but the stone was the wrong colour. Bakela had explained that they must look for pale lemon, or glossy grey, even brown colour. This stone was like looking into a clear pool in the mountains. He could see the shape of his own hand through it, and it was full of stars of moving light that hurled little darts of sunlight into his eyes as he turned it curiously. No, it was too big and much too pretty to be of value, Bazo decided.

"Bazo! Checha!" Bakela was calling him. "Come on, let's go where we can eat and sleep."

Bazo dropped the stone into the leather pouch at his waist and scrambled up out of the open fissure. Already the file of Matabele workers led by Zouga were plodding away through the mud, each of them bowed under a bundle of spades or picks, one of the big leather buckets or a coil of sodden muddy rope.

"He has the lives Of six men on his hands. I was there, digger with a I saw it all happen. He drove his team into Mark Sander son's gravel bucky., The accuser was a tall huge shaggy head of greying hair, heavy shoulders and heavier paunch. He was working himself up into a boil Of righteous indignation, and Zouga saw that it was infectious, the crowd was beginning to growl and surge restlessly around the wagon body.

The New Rush Diggers" Committee was in public session. Ten minutes previously they had formed themselves into a Board of Enquiry into the cave-in of number 6

Roadway.

A wagon had been dragged into the centre of Market Square to provide a platform for their deliberations, and around it was a solid packed crowd of diggers from the Number-6 Section. Since the cave-in, they had not been able to get back into the diggings to work their claims and they had just come from the mass funeral of the six men that had been crushed to death by the treacherous yellow gravel. Most of them had begun the wake for their mates and were carrying uncorked green bottles.