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

many years before.

There were little creases below his eyes from squinting at the
sunlight at far horizons, and harsh lines cut his cheeks from the corner
of his nose and ran down into the beard, lines of hardship and
heartbreak. He looked down into the gaping pit below him and the green
of his eyes clouded as he remembered the high hopes and bounding
expectation that had brought him here, was it ten years before? It
seemed like a day and an eternity.

He had first heard the name Colesberg kopje, when he had stepped out of
the burn-boat onto the beach at Rogger Bay below the vast square
monolithic bulk of Table Mountain, and the sound of it had made his skin
tingle and raised the hair at the nape of his neck.

"They have struck diamonds at Colesberg kopje, diamonds big as grapeshot
and so thick they'll wear out the soles of your boots just walking
across them!"

In a clairvoyant flash he had known that this was where his destiny
would lead him. He knew that the two years he had just spent in old
England, trying desperately to raise backing for his grand venture in
the north, had been marking time for this moment.

The road to the north began in the diamond gravels of Colesberg kopje.
He knew it with certainty as he heard the name.

He had one single wagon left, and a depleted span of draught oxen.

Within forty-eight hours they were plodding through the deep sands that
clogged the track across the Cape Flats, northwards six hundred miles to
that kopje below the Vaal river.

The wagon carried all his possessions, and there were precious few of
these. Twelve years following a grandiose dream had wasted his substance
all away. The considerable royalties from the book that he had written
after his travels to the unexplored lands below the Zambezi river, the
gold and ivory that he had brought back from that remote interior, the
ivory from four more hunting expeditions to that same haunting and yet
sadly flawed paradise, all of it was gone. Thousands of pounds and
twelve years of heartbreak and frustration, until the splendid dream had
become clouded and soured and all he had to show for it was a tattered
scrap of parchment on which the ink was beginning to yellow and the
folds were almost worn through so that it had to be glued to a backing
sheet to hold it together.

That parchment was "The Ballantyne Concession" title for one thousand
years to all the mineral wealth of a huge tract of the wild African
interior, a tract the size of France which he had cajoled from a savage
black king.