This thought gave urgency to my search, and I renewed it anxiously. At chest-height, out of reach of animals, I spotted a sickly flower above a crown of fronds. It was what I sought — a kaffirtulp or hypoxis — indicating a water-filled bulb which was just visible between rocks. With the diamond pencil I, stripped away the envelope of husks and gulped down the sticky orange-yellow liquid which made a good, if somewhat flat, drink. I used damp segments of the bulb to clean my face. I felt better and concentrated on Rankin. I still held one ace: he did not know it was Guy Bowker who was on his trail. If he had seen and recognized me he would have realized without doubt that I had come for a reckoning and, rather than showing aggression, might have vanished as completely as he had done from the diggings.
From the direction of The Hill came a thud and the magnified echo of a single shot which brought me satisfactory knowledge that my man was still in place — firing at shadows maybe, or at the movement of an animal.
Then I sighted the kind of hide-out I was seeking when the moon silhouetted a giant baobab on top of the distant crag of K2. The span of the biggest I had ever seen before was sixty feet and I guessed this one was as big. Its branches were patterned like a surrealist finger-spread against the moon. Not only would the water-filled monster provide a sentry-box if it were hollow (many of them are) but it would also solve my water problem. The tree would be cool and safe, with an unlimited supply of water-laden pith tasting slightly like acid drops.
I set off without further ado to climb K2. The going on the downslope into the valley was easy enough but once at the bottom it became heavy in thick sand. Because of this, I soon revised my time schedule for reaching the baobab: I reckoned now it would take a couple of hours.
I tried to lighten the slog by devising an accompaniment of words to my stomping steps. It came easily enough and I grinned to myself: Damn all Diamonds! Damn all Diamonds! My boots quickly filled with sand and held me back but I didn't want to shed them for fear of snakes. After the initial few hundred yards I had to pause to catch my breath. When I started off again I felt as if my mind were drifting away from the physical self plodding along. I found myself reciting a childhood verse of my father's which I had known disrespectfully as the Dismal Diamond Ditty:
The Evil Eye shall have no power to harm
Him that shall wear the Diamond as a charm;
No monarch shall attempt to thwart his will
And e'en the gods his wishes shall fulfil.
I started to march in rhythm with the jingle. Perhaps the liquid I had drunk contained some mild hypnotic; perhaps it was lack of sleep and reaction which dredged the words from the recesses of my brain.
I took five strides onwards and I found myself reverting to the first line like a cracked gramophone record: 'The Evil Eye..
The harmless game suddenly went sour on me. Christ, how I hated diamonds!
My own name-William Guybon Atherstone Bowker which had aroused the prison officer's derision, was in itself a proclamation of my father's diamond mania. I had been named in honour of the expert who, a century earlier, had identified the first 'shining stone' and had set South Africa on the road to becoming more famous for diamonds than the legendary Golconda of the East. The diamond had been found by a youth on the banks of the Orange River before anyone suspected that South Africa contained the world's largest diamond fields; it had been merely a child's plaything before being spotted by an acute trader.
Remembering this bit of history turned my mental spotlight on to my father, discoverer of the great Cullinan. Not only had diamonds been my father's life but he had bent the lives of his wife and son to them too. Appropriately, he had married the daughter of one of Amsterdam's leading diamond cutters; Erasmus had assisted Asscher at the cutting of the Cullinan. He had also lent him for the task the diamond pencil now reposing in my pocket. Perhaps my mother's long background of diamonds enabled her to accept my father's burning passion for them, but for my part it provoked a reaction so strong that by the time I was a teenager I loathed and rejected anything and everything connected with the things.
Early in 1905 my father and Rankin together had found the Cullinan, the size of a man's fist and weighing a pound and a quarter, at the Premier Mine near Pretoria. From the moment of its discovery the gem was an embarrassment, by virtue of both its size and its value. The unlikely manner of its discovery added further glamour: my father and Rankin had spotted what they thought was a chunk of broken bottle sticking out of an open-cast face; they had prised it out with a screwdriver.
The two men had sold the diamond to the mine for a sum which was rumoured to be about half a million sterling-an immense fortune at that time — which they had split between them. They were feted and honoured and a thousand tributes showered upon them. But the diamond was so big that a buyer couldn't be found for it. So it was sent on a kind of shopwindow tour of all the cities in South Africa; but still no purchaser came forward. Later the Transvaal government of the day had a brainwave. It bought the diamond and had it presented by the mine owner, Thomas Cullinan, to King Edward VII as a gift for his sixty-sixth birthday late in 1907. Cullinan was knighted and the diamond named after him. The great gem was still uncut and King Edward turned-to the man who often before had served the British Royal Family well, Asscher of Amsterdam. But Asscher was not to be hurried over cutting the stone and studied it for months before undertaking the nerve-racking task the following year, when it was divided into nine major stones, all of which today either form part of the British Royal Regalia or are personal jewels of the Royal Family.
I could remember every detail of the day I was taken as a child, in an atmosphere of awe and reverence, to the Tower of London to see the main stone of the Cullinan, the Star of Africa, set in the head of the Sovereign's Sceptre. Charles II's gold, richly-jewelled Sceptre was refurbished with the Cullinan at the command of King Edward. I, like the other onlookers, goggled through the armour-plated glass at the great dropshaped thing — over two and a quarter inches long and nearly one and a quarter wide — blazing under electric light. Our guide went on to say that the Cullinan's second largest portion was set in the Imperial State Crown next to the Black Prince's Ruby which Henry V had worn at Agincourt and the Sapphire of Edward the Confessor …
Suddenly my father's hand had crushed mine in a fierce grip. I turned in astonishment to see him staring at the great jewel as if in a trance. He whispered, 'Where that comes from there must be plenty more.' I yelled; as much in fright at his blank eyes as at his grip.
Now my reverie was cut short by the distant clap of another shot and its long echo among the hills — and I was back in the present, being hunted by my father's own partner. Bastard! I thought rancorously, I'm glad you're still imagining things! I wished I could see The Hill, which was largely hidden from my view by the intervening range. I had managed to labour through the sand to about the halfway mark in the valley and I felt exhausted; but the baobab beckoned from the top of K2 like the lattice-sight of an ack-ack gun against the skyline. I was tempted to rest but the sound of the shot drove me on in another burst of energy. However, I soon started to flag: the sand seemed even thicker. Once again I found the childhood doggerel rising as if of its own accord into my tired mind: 'Him that shall wear the Diamond as a charm — . My mind's eye turned inward, back to my father: he had always insisted that I should write diamond with a capital D because the Roman poet who had composed the ditty had done so. It was also a mark of respect for diamonds. Capital D or no capital D, I reminded myself cynically, it hadn't helped him, even with the biggest diamond in the world to his credit, to charm away the Evil Eye. Mystery surrounded his death: he was variously supposed to have been shot by a gang in London when on a visit to float a syndicate, or run down in a fake street accident.