You know, the one who wrote Hunter's Odyssey."
Zouga doubted half of them could read, but the fact that he had written a book made him an object of wonder. He found the centre of interest had shifted from Black Thomas to himself.
It was after dark when he started back to the wagon.
He had always had a strong head for liquor and there was a good moon, so he could pick his way through the ordure that littered the track.
He had spent a few sovereigns on liquor, but in return he had learned a great deal about the diggings. He had learned of the diggers" expectations and fears. He knew now the going price for "briefies", the politics and economics of diamond pricing, the geological composition of the strike and a hundred other related facts.
He had also made a friendship that would alter his whole life.
Although Aletta and the boys were already asleep in the wagon tent, Jan Cheroot, the little Hottentot, was waiting for him, squatting beside the watch-fire, a small gnome-like figure in the silver moonlight.
"There is no fresh water," he told Zouga morosely. "The river is a full day's trek away, and the thieving Boer who owns the wells sells water at the same price as they sell brandy in this hell-hole." Jan Cheroot could be relied upon to know the going price of liquor ten minutes after arriving in a new town.
Zouga climbed into the wagon body, careful not to jolt the boys awake; but Aletta was lying rigidly in the narrow riempie bed. He lay down beside her and neither of them spoke for many minutes.
Then she whispered. "You are determined to stay in this," her voice checked, then went on with quiet vehemence, "in this awful place."
He did not reply, and in the cot behind the canvas screen across the body of the wagon Jordan whimpered and then was silent. Zouga waited until he had settled before he replied.
"Today a Welshman named Black Thomas found a diamond. They say he has been offered twelve thousand pounds by one of the buyers."
"A woman came to sell me a little goat's milk while you were away." Aletta might not have heard him. "She says there is camp fever here. A woman and two children have died already and others are sick."
"A man can buy a good claim on the kopje for one thousand pounds."
"I fear for the boys, Zouga," Aletta whispered. "Let us go back. We could give up this wandering gypsy life for ever. Daddy has always wanted you to come into the business." Aletta's father was a rich Cape merchant, but Zouga shuddered in the darkness at the thought of a high desk in the dingy counting-room of Cartwright and Company.
"It is time the boys went to a good school, else they will grow up as savages. Please let us go back now, Zouga."
"A week," he said. "Give me a week, we have come so far."
"I do not think I can bear the flies and filth for another week."
She sighed and turned her back to him, careful not to touch him in the narrow cot.
The family doctor in Cape Town, who had attended Aletta's own birth, the birth of both boys and her numerous miscarriages, had warned them ominously.
"Another pregnancy could be your last, Aletta. I cannot be responsible for what may happen." For the three years since then she had lain with her back to him, on those occasions when they had been able to share a bed.
Before dawn Zouga slipped out of the wagon while Aletta and the boys still slept. In the darkness before first light he stirred the ashes and drank a cup of coffee crouching over them. Then in the first rosy glow of dawn he joined the stream of carts and hurrying men that moved up for the day's assault on the hill.
In the strengthening light and rising heat and whirls of dust he moved from claim to claim, looking and assessing. He had long ago trained himself as an amateur geologist. He had read every book that he could find on the subject, often by candlelight on the lonely hunting veld; and on his infrequent returns home he had passed days and weeks in the Natural History Museum in London, much of the time in the Geological Section. He had trained his eye and sharpened his instinct for the lie of the rock formations and for the grain and weight and colour of a sample of reef.
At most of the claims his overtures were met with a shrug and a turned back, but one or two of the diggers remembered him as the elephant hunter" or the "writer fellow" and used his visit as an excuse to lean on their shovels and talk for a few minutes.
"I've got two briefies," a digger who introduced himself as Jock Danby told Zouga, "but I call them The Devil's Own. With these two hands," he held up his huge paws, the palms studded with raised calluses, the nails chipped away and black with dirt, "with my own hands I've shifted fifteen thousand tons of stuff, and the biggest stone I've pulled is a two. That there," he pointed to the adjoining claim, "was Black Thomas's claim. Yesterday he pulled a monkey, a bloody fat stinking monkey, only two feet from my side peg. Christ!
It's enough to break your heart."
"Buy you a beer." Zouga jerked his head towards the nearest canteen, and the man licked his lips then shook his head regretfully.
"My kid is hungry, you can see the ribs sticking out of the little bugger and I have to pay wages by noon tomorrow." He indicated the dozen half-naked black tribesmen labouring with pick and bucket in the bottom of the neatly squared off excavation with him. "These bastards cost me a fortune every day."
Jock Danby spat on his callused palms and hefted the shovel, but Zouga cut in smoothly.
"They do say the strike will pinch out at the level of the plain."
At this point the kopje had been reduced to a mere twenty feet above the surrounding plain. "What do you think?"
"Mister, it's bad luck to even talk like that." Jock checked the swing of his shovel and scowled heavily up at Zouga on the roadway above him, but there was fear in his eyes.
"You ever thought of selling out?" Zouga asked him, and immediately Jock's fear faded to be replaced by a sly expression.
"Why, mister? You thinking of buying?" Jock straightened. "Let me give you a little tip for free. Don't even think about it, not unless you got six thousand pounds to do the talking for you."
He peered up at Zouga hopefully, and Zouga stared back at him without expression.
"Thank you for your time, sir, and for your sake I hope the gravel lasts."
Zouga touched the wide brim of his hat and sauntered away. Jock Danby watched him go, then spat viciously on the yellow ground at his feet and swung the shovel at it as though it were a mortal enemy.
As he walked away Zouga felt a strange sense of elation. There was a time when he had lived by the turn of a card and the fall of a dice, and he felt the gambler's instinct now. He knew the gravel would not pinch out.
He knew it sank down, pure and rich into the depths.
He knew it with a deep unshakable certainty, and he knew something else with equal certainty.
"The road to the north begins here." He spoke aloud, and felt his blood thrill in his veins. "This is where it begins."
He felt the need to make an act of faith, of total affirmation, and he knew what it must be. The price of livestock on the diggings was vastly inflated, and his oxen were costing him a guinea a day to water. He knew how to close the road back.
By midafternoon he had sold the oxen: a hundred pounds a head, and five hundred for his wagon. Now he was committed, and he felt the currents of excitement coursing through his body as he paid the gold coin over the raw wooden counter of the tin shack that housed the branch of the Standard Bank.