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

the night sky was clear and cold and brilliant with white stars that
shone like the diamonds that they were certain awaited them at the end
of the journey.

Sitting beside the watch-fire with his two sons flanking him, Zouga
would talk in that magnetic compelling tone that had the two small boys
rigid with attention.

He spun descriptions of great elephant hunts and ancient ruined cities,
of graven idols and red native gold in the land to the north, the land
to which he would one day take them.

Listening quietly from across the fire, wrapped in a shawl against the
night chill, Aletta would find herself enchanted with the romantic
dream, as she had been as a girl, and she wondered again at herself and
the strange attraction of this intense golden-bearded man who was her
husband of so many years and still so often seemed a stranger to her.

She listened as he told the boys how he would fill their caps with
diamonds, fat glistening diamonds, and then at last they would set out
on the final journey northwards.

She found herself believing it all again, though she had long ago
experienced the first disillusion. He was so persuasive, so vital and
strong and convincing, that the failures and the frustrations seemed of
no account, only a temporary check on the destiny he had set for all Of
them.

The days rolled by at the leisurely pace of the wagon wheels and became
weeks, weeks in which they travelled across a great sun-washed plain
that was furrowed by steep dry watercourses and studded with the dense
dark-green camel-thorn trees in whose branches hung the enormous
communal nests of thousands of dry-land weaver birds, each nest the size
of a haystack, growing until it snapped off the sturdy branch that
supported it.

The monotonous line of the horizon was relieved by the occasional low
hillock, the kopje of the African continent, and the track led them
directly towards one of these.

Colesberg kopje. It was only weeks after they had arrived at it that
Zouga heard the story of how the diamond hillock had been discovered.

A few miles north of Colesberg kopje the plain was broken by the bed of
a wide shallow river, along whose banks the trees were taller and
greener. The trek Boers had called it the Vaal river, which in the
African Dutch taal means "the grey river", the colour of its sluggish
waters. From its bed and from the alluvial gravels of the flood plains
along its course, a small colony of diamond diggers had for years been
gleaning the odd sparkling stone.