"Ballantyne 02 - Men of Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith Wilbur)

Jordan's eyes were huge and swimming with horror.

He helped her half crawl, half stagger back to the cot and collapse upon it.

Waves of heat and nausea and giddiness broke over her.

Zouga was the first customer at the office of the Standard Bank when the clerk opened the door onto Market Square. Once he had deposited the contents of Aletta's casket and the clerk had locked it in the big green iron safe against the far wall, Zouga had a balance of almost 2,500 pounds to his credit.

That knowledge armed his resolve. He felt tall and powerful as he strode up the ramp of the central causeway.

The roadways were seven feet wide. The mining commissioner, after the lesson of the diggings at Bultfontein and Dutoitspan, had insisted that these access roads be left open to service the claims in the centre of the growing pit. The workings were a mosaic of square platforms, each precisely thirty feet square. Some of the diggers, with more capital and better organization, were sinking their claims faster than others, so that the slower workers were isolated on towers of golden yellow earth, high above their neighbouring claims, while the fastest miners had sunk deep square shafts at the bottom of which toiled the naked black labourers.

For a man to move from one claim to another was already a laborious and often downright dangerous journey: crossing rickety board walks above the dizzying shaft of a deep claim, scrambling up high swaying rope ladders or down the steps of a pole ladder, lengths of native timber lashed together with cross-steps that creaked and gave with a man's weight.

Standing on the crumbling roadway with the workings gaping below him, Zouga wondered what would be the outcome if the strike continued to great depth. It already required a level head and strong stomach to chance the uneven pit, and he wondered again at man's determination to accumulate wealth against any odds, in the face of any danger.

He watched while from the bottom of the workings a leather bucket, brimming with broken lumps of the compacted yellow gravel, was hauled up, swinging at the end of a long rope, two sweating black men dipping and swinging over the windlass, their muscles swelling and subsiding in the bright sunlight.

The bucket reached the lip of the roadway, and they seized it, lugged it to the waiting cart with its patient pair of mules, and dumped the contents into the halffull body. Then one of them dropped the empty bucket over the side of the roadway to the waiting men fifty feet below. At hundreds of points along the fourteen causeways the same operation was being repeated, endlessly the loaded buckets came swinging up and were dropped back empty.

Occasionally, breaking the monotonous rhythm, the seam of a leather bucket would burst showering the men below with jagged chunks of rock, or a worn rope would snap and, with warning shouts, the toilers at the bottom of the pit would hurl themselves aside to avoid the plunging missile.

There was an impatient humming excitement that seemed to embrace the entire workings. The urgent shouted commands between pit and roadway, the squeal of rope sheaves, the thudding jar of pick and swinging shovel, the rich lilting chorus of a gang of Basuto tribesmen singing as they worked, small wiry little mountaineers from the Dragon Range.

The white diggers, bullying and bustling, scrambled down the swaying ladderworks or stood over their gangs on the pit floor, hawk-eyed to forestall a "pick-up': the possibility of a valuable diamond being exposed by a spade and swiftly palmed by one of the black workers, to be slipped into the mouth or other body opening at the first opportunity.

Illegal diamond selling and buying was already the plague of the diggers. In their eyes, every black man was a suspect. Only men with less than one quarter black blood were allowed to hold and work claims.

This law made it easier to apportion blame, for a black face with a diamond in his possession was guilty without appeal.

However, this law could not control the shady white men that hung around the diggings, ostensibly travelling salesmen, actors or proprietors of infamous drinking canteens but in reality all I.D.B., Illegal Diamond Buyers.

The diggers hated them with a ferocity that sometimes boiled over in a night of rioting and beating and burning in which innocent merchants, as well as the guilty, lost all their possessions in the flames, while the mob of diggers danced about the burning shacks chanting: I.D.B! I.D.B!" Zouga moved cautiously out along the crest of the roadway, at times pushed perilously close to the edge by a passing cart laden with diamondiferous earth.

He reached the point above Jock Danby's claims from which he had spoken to the friendly digger the previous day.

The two claims were deserted, the leather bucket and rope coils abandoned, a pick handle standing upright with its point driven into the earth far below the level of the roadway.

There was a big bearded digger working the adjoining claim, and he scowled up in response to Zouga's hail.

"What you want?"

"I'm looking for Jock Danby."

"Well, you are looking in the wrong place."

The man turned and aimed a kick at the nearest labourer. "Sebenza, you black monkey!"

"Where will I find him?"