The River of Diamonds

He paused; another sandslide tobogganed soundlessly into the sea.

I said nervously. 'Those slides… What happens when…?'

I did not finish the sentence. Shelborne's gaze was riveted on the shoreline dunes where they lapped the foot of the cliff.

I saw nothing. 'What's going on?'

'Quick!' he rapped. 'Quick! Get this thing packed! Come on!' Without waiting for me, he spun the wingnut holding the instrument to the tripod and thrust it into my hands. 'Get it into the case!'

'There's nothing…'

Shelborne swept up the batteries and heavy instrument case and started off not for our landing-beach, but towards the dunes inland. I trailed awkwardly with the tripod and by the time he had reached the bottom of the cliff, I was fifty yards behind. The rough descent he had made loaded with equipment seemed to make no impression on him; his breathing was scarcely more than normal when I reached him.

'Across there, towards that rise.'

I hadn't enough breath to question him. The whole place looked exactly the same as on our way up. Our new course seemed purposeless, into the desert away from the flatboom, away from Sudhuk. Shelborne plunged into sand up to the ankles of his moccasins, and fell into a peculiar shuffling gait without lifting his feet; but he travelled fast. I'd only seen it once before; the old half-Bushman guide who had taken me up Mount Bruk-karos to the American solar ray station had used it. It is the hallmark of the desert wanderer, the 'sand-trapper' or sandshuffler as they call him in the Namib. After less than a mile into the high seas of sand, Shelborne stopped and waited for me.

'Look!'

The crest of the next dune was alive with tiny creatures, jumping, rolling like balls in eddies of wind, leaping, cavorting.

'Beetles!' I panted. 'Beetles! God's truth, I haven't been dragged all this way to see beetles!'

Shelborne did not answer, but shuffled to where the beetles were thickest, cartwheeling about in the air almost as if they could fly properly. I stumbled in his wake, trying to get my breath. He knelt, took a beetle between his fingers, and held it up to me. It was transparent: I could see right into it, like one of those plastic anatomical models.

He was excited. I had not seen him like this before.

'Look at those sandshoes! If I had them, I'd be able to go up and down dunes like a bat out of hell!'

Tiny snow-shoe-like bristles and brushes spun round and round.

He laughed in a relaxed way. 'You know, Tregard, I once had ideas of modelling a pair of my own shoes on these. Of course, it didn't work…' Then his mood changed and he said, 'It'll be one hell of a storm.'

I still had hardly enough breath to comment on this non sequitui. I gasped. 'Storm? What the devil have beetles to do with a storm?'

The migrating legions rolled, jumped and spun, swarming by the ten thousand.

Shelbome was not disconcerted. 'It's a sure sign. A mass migration heralds a storm. But this is a surer pointer still.' He held up his captive. This section of his body becomes diaphanous in moist air — it's highly hygroscopic, it absorbs water from the air. No man-made instrument if half as sensitive.'

I found some breath. 'Did you pick that up from Caldwell too?'

I can see him yet, kneeling with the beetle in his fingers while the rest of the host rolled by. He looked up sharply at Caldwell's name, but his animation remained. 'I learned everything about the desert from Caldwell.' He freed his beetle, watching it thoughtfully as it scrambled away at high speed. 'You really think you'll strike it lucky, you and Rhennin and the Mazy Zed?.'

'Yes. I'm backing my hunch. That's why I'm here.'

'You mean, at Mercury?'

'Generally, Mercury — in particular, perhaps, Strandloper's Water.'

'Tregard,' he said quietly. 'I've spent a whole lifetime looking for something. You're trying to take a short cut. It doesn't work, you know. The Namib sees to that.'

'You say you have spent your whole life looking for a diamond field under the sea?'

His voice dropped, became mysterious. It was almost as if he was talking to himself when he replied. 'No. What I told the court about dropping a few grabs and, dredges was quite true. That was about the extent of my sea-bed prospecting. Our search — Caldwell's and mine — was for… something really…'

He fumbled, choosing his words, but he couldn't prevent that mysterious private stratum of his thoughts breaking through, like a gold reef in a quartz hillside.

'I heard you talk a lot of bull about the Hottentots' Paradise.'

He smiled faintly. 'I agree, it was bull. But you mustn't forget how different our orientation was in those early days. The next strike might have been the Oyster Line, Oranjemund, Kleinzee…'

'You are listing only Caldwell's failures.'

'We were like the early explorers who sailed beyond the horizon, not knowing whether or not they would fall over the edge of the world.'

'The Atacama, the Takla Makan, what about them? You've got two images in your mental rangefinder; they're irreconcilable, you can't match them up together.'

The concept remains basic, it is only the physical aspects which differ.'

'Why didn't you sell that night aboard the Gquma? You're on to something big, aren't you?'

He came close so that I was aware of that dry-rot odour which I recognized now as coming from the dunes.

'I have told you, you can't take a short cut to it.'

'What is it?'

'Caldwell

'I'd rather talk about Shelborne.'

'What if the Oyster Line itself were only an adjunct, a supplement as it were to…'

'What do you mean?'

'I tried to tell the Judge, it isn't only the diamonds, although they are woven into the fabric of the thing. That is why…'

That is why you killed Caldwell.'

For a moment the green flame flickered in his long eyes, but almost at once there was a pity, a compassion. I knew then that I had missed my trick as he gathered his cards, as it were, from the table. The confession was over.

'You must beat out to sea before the storm strikes. You must follow my directions.'

I was not interested in a hurricane at the moment. I tried to drag the conversation back. 'Shelborne, it is not too late for that deaclass="underline" your knowledge, your secret, if you like…'

He laughed softly. There was a ruthless note too, as I was later to remember. 'Confessions are always dangerous, are they not?'

'In melodramas they may lead to murder.'

'The storm,' he said urgently. 'You must get to your ship.'

'Blast the storm and blast the beetles!'

'You wouldn't last a day in the Namib, Tregard. The storms here hit like a piston: one moment it's peaceful like now and the next it's a howling mass of solid sand so you can't see your hand in front of your face and the sea is breaking over Sudhuk.'

'You can't tell all that from one beetle.'

'We're getting out of here… fast. Dump that tripod if it worries you. Or give it to me.' He snatched it up as if the extra weight were nothing and struck off towards the landing-beach. Soon he had gained a quarter of a mile. By the time I reached the boat, breathless, she was riding at the oars and Shelborne's eyes were on the south-west. The wrecks stood like ghouls on the eroded shore. We swung alongside the Praying Mantis.

'Where's your barometer… in the wheelhouse?'

I nodded and he grabbed his sealskin coat and jumped aboard. Only later was I to ask myself why he wanted to see the barometer when he was so sure that his beetles were more sensitive than any man-made instruments, and why he took his coat, which had lain in the boat while we had been ashore.

Minnaar called out in surprise. 'What's up? Why did you cut off the test? What's eating that old bastard?'

'We made a snap expedition into the desert. Saw some fascinating beetles. Going to be a God-almighty storm, the beetles say.'