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

Before nightfall that first day the lucky diggers who had pegged the centre of the new rush had merely scratched the stony earth, but had turned up over forty stones of the first water; and already horsemen were away southwards carrying the word to the world that Colesberg kopje was a mountain of diamonds.

When Zouga Ballantyne's single wagon creaked the last few miles down the rutted red earth track towards Colesberg kopje, it was already half demolished, eaten away as though by the maggots in a rotten cheese, and men still swarmed over what remained. On the dusty plain below it were encamped almost ten thousand souls, black and brown and white. The smoke from their cooking fires blurred the high china-blue sky with dirty grey, and for miles in each direction the diggers had almost denuded the plain of the beautiful camel-thorn trees to feed those fires.

The settlement was strewn about under dirty weatherworn canvas, although already some sheets of the ubiquitous corrugated iron had been laboriously transported from the coast and knocked up into boxlike shanties.

Some of these, with a fine sense of order, had been arranged in an approximation of a straight line, forming the first rudimentary streets.

These belonged to the "kopie-wallopers", the previously nomadic diamond buyers who had until recently roamed the diggings, but who had now found it worth their while to set up permanent shop below the crumbling remains of Colesberg kopje. According to the infant diamond laws of the Boer Free State, each licensed buyer was obliged to display his name prominently. This they did in crudely lettered signs upon the little iron sweatbox offices, but most of them went further and flew a disproportionately large gaudy and fancifully designed flag from a mast on the roof to announce to the diggers that the incumbent was in office and ready to do business. The flags lent a carnival air to the settlement.

Zouga Ballantyne walked beside the offside lead ox of his team, following one of the narrow meandering rutted tracks that ran through the settlement. Occasionally the team had to be swung to avoid the tailings that had spilled into the track from one of the recovery stations, or to avoid a deep morass formed by spilled sewerage and washings from the sorting-tables.

The settlement was densely crowded upon itself, that was the first impression that struck Zouga. He was a man of the plains and savannah forests, accustomed to long uninterrupted horizons, and the crowding jarred upon his senses. The diggers lived within touching distance of each other, every man attempting to get as close to his claim as he could so that the gravel that he won from it would not have to be carried too far to the place where he would process it.

Zouga had hoped to find an open space upon which to outspan his wagon and erect the big bell tent, but there was no open space within a quarter of a mile of the kopje.

. He glanced back at Aletta on the box. She was sitting very still, moving only as the wagon jolted, looking straight ahead as though oblivious of the almost naked men, many wearing merely a scrap of trade cloth about the loins, who milled the crunchy lumps of yellow gravel and then shovelled it into the waiting cradles. Swearing or singing as they worked, all of them oiled with their own sweat in the cruel white sunlight.

The filth appalled even Zouga, who had known the kraals of the Mashona in the north and had lived in a bushman settlement with the little creatures who never bathed in their entire lifetimes.

Civilized man generates particularly loathsome wastes, and it seemed that every square inch of the dusty red earth between the tents and the shanties of the settlement was covered with a litter of rusty bully beef tins, broken fragments of bottles and porcelain that glittered in the sunlight, a snowstorm of paper scraps, the decomposing corpses of stray kittens and unwanted dogs, the scrapings from the cooking pots, the excrement of those too lazy to dig a latrine in the hard earth and screen it with a thatch of the silvery Karroo grass, and all the other unidentifiable offal and castings with which ten thousand human beings without control or sanitary regulations had surrounded themselves.

Zouga caught Aletta's eyes and smiled at her reassuringly, but she did not return the smile. Her lips were set bravely, but her eyes were huge and brimming with tears that lapped at her lower lids. Zouga did not look back again at Aletta.

They squeezed past a transport rider who had brought up a wagonload of goods from the coast, six hundred miles, and had set up shop from the tailboard of his wagon, displaying a sign on which he had chalked up a price list: Candles, 1 pound a packet Whisky, 12 pounds a case Soap, 5 shillings a piece.the prices were twenty times higher than those prevailing at the coast.

De Beer's New Rush was probably at that moment the most expensive spot on the surface of the globe. The remaining sovereigns in the wide leather money-belt around Zouga's waist seemed suddenly feather light.

By noon that day they had found space to outspan the wagon on the periphery of the huge circular encampment. While Jan Cheroot, Zouga's Hottentot retainer, drove the cattle away to find grazing and water, Zouga hurriedly erected the heavy canvas tent, Aletta and the boys holding the guy ropes while he drove the pegs.

"You must eat," Aletta mumbled, still not looking at him as she squatted over the smouldering cooking fire and stirred the cast iron stew pot that contained the remains of a springbuck that Ralph had shot three, days before.

Zouga went to her, stooped and with his hands on her shoulders lifted her to her feet. She moved stiffly as an old woman, the long hard journey had taken a heavy toll of her frail body.

"It will be all right," he told her, and still she would not look at him, perhaps she had heard that assurance too often. He cupped her chin and lifted her face, and the tears broke at last and slid down her cheeks, leaving little Funnels through the red dust that powdered her skin. The tears angered Zouga unreasonably, as though they were an accusation. He dropped his hands and stepped back from her.

"I will be back before dark," he told her harshly and, turning from her, he strode away towards the ruined sillhouette of the Colesberg kopje which stood out starkly, even through the stinking miasma of smoke and dust that hovered over the camp.

Zouga might have been a wraith, a thing of air, invisible to human eyes. They hurried by him on the narrow track, or remained stooped over mill and cradle while he passed, without an inclination of head or even a casual glance, an entire community living for one thing only, completely absorbed and obsessed.

From experience Zouga knew there was one place where he might be able to establish human contact, and through it glean the information he so desperately needed. He was looking for a canteen that sold hard liquor.

Below the kopje there was an open space, the only one in the camp.

It was roughly square in shape, bordered by shacks of canvas and iron, cluttered with the wagons of the transport riders.

Zouga selected one of the shacs that grandly announced itself as "The London Hotel" and on the same board advertised:

Whisky 7,"6. Best English Beer 5,"- a schooner.