A Cleft Of Stars

CHAPTER FIVE

I was parched and my tongue felt like leather. I also wanted water to clean up the sticky mess of blood and grit on my forehead. During my escape blood had run from the cut into my injured right eye and now, as I lay quietly among the sheltering rocks, it began to congeal, further hindering my vision. I was badly bruised where the bolt had struck me. My physical discomfort, however, was not as great as my anguish of mind. I cursed that old rifle for letting me down at the moment when everything was going my way. I got to my feet, wondering where I should begin to search for water. The present area was clearly useless. The broken summit, though ideal cover in the cool of night, would become an intolerable furnace by day. I rejected a passing thought of making a wide detour of the fortress and returning to my boat. It seemed too much like throwing in the towel before the fight had begun and I was determined to remain within striking distance of Rankin while I concocted a fresh plan. The faraway glow of my fire was visible from my elevated position and I knew Rankin must be nearby. My task was to find some safe shelter where I could keep watch and later get my hands on him. The focus of my attention was The Hill and would remain so while he was anywhere near it.

I probed for water-bearing plants among the rocks — ghostly in the moonlight which now illumined the circle of hills. I was on a smallish peak at the western extremity while below me, stretching eastwards for a couple of miles, was a wide valley wholly ringed by the chain of hills. From my position on the rim I faced the inside of the bowl. The hills were of a more or less uniform height all round the compass except for one prominent square-cut crag which rose out of the northern group facing the wadi and, of course, across its sand, The Hill. It was the most noteworthy peak in the area with the exception of The Hill itself. Our scientific party had christened it simply K2 but there had been no opportunity to explore it. The moonlight softened the raw terrain and scabbed remains of bush but I knew what a death-trap it could be if I were caught there without water.

This thought gave urgency to my search, and I renewed it anxiously. At chest-height, out of reach of animals, I spotted a sickly flower above a crown of fronds. It was what I sought — a kaffirtulp or hypoxis — indicating a water-filled bulb which was just visible between rocks. With the diamond pencil I, stripped away the envelope of husks and gulped down the sticky orange-yellow liquid which made a good, if somewhat flat, drink. I used damp segments of the bulb to clean my face. I felt better and concentrated on Rankin. I still held one ace: he did not know it was Guy Bowker who was on his trail. If he had seen and recognized me he would have realized without doubt that I had come for a reckoning and, rather than showing aggression, might have vanished as completely as he had done from the diggings.

From the direction of The Hill came a thud and the magnified echo of a single shot which brought me satisfactory knowledge that my man was still in place — firing at shadows maybe, or at the movement of an animal.

Then I sighted the kind of hide-out I was seeking when the moon silhouetted a giant baobab on top of the distant crag of K2. The span of the biggest I had ever seen before was sixty feet and I guessed this one was as big. Its branches were patterned like a surrealist finger-spread against the moon. Not only would the water-filled monster provide a sentry-box if it were hollow (many of them are) but it would also solve my water problem. The tree would be cool and safe, with an unlimited supply of water-laden pith tasting slightly like acid drops.

I set off without further ado to climb K2. The going on the downslope into the valley was easy enough but once at the bottom it became heavy in thick sand. Because of this, I soon revised my time schedule for reaching the baobab: I reckoned now it would take a couple of hours.

I tried to lighten the slog by devising an accompaniment of words to my stomping steps. It came easily enough and I grinned to myself: Damn all Diamonds! Damn all Diamonds! My boots quickly filled with sand and held me back but I didn't want to shed them for fear of snakes. After the initial few hundred yards I had to pause to catch my breath. When I started off again I felt as if my mind were drifting away from the physical self plodding along. I found myself reciting a childhood verse of my father's which I had known disrespectfully as the Dismal Diamond Ditty:

The Evil Eye shall have no power to harm

Him that shall wear the Diamond as a charm;

No monarch shall attempt to thwart his will

And e'en the gods his wishes shall fulfil.

I started to march in rhythm with the jingle. Perhaps the liquid I had drunk contained some mild hypnotic; perhaps it was lack of sleep and reaction which dredged the words from the recesses of my brain.

I took five strides onwards and I found myself reverting to the first line like a cracked gramophone record: 'The Evil Eye..

The harmless game suddenly went sour on me. Christ, how I hated diamonds!

My own name-William Guybon Atherstone Bowker which had aroused the prison officer's derision, was in itself a proclamation of my father's diamond mania. I had been named in honour of the expert who, a century earlier, had identified the first 'shining stone' and had set South Africa on the road to becoming more famous for diamonds than the legendary Golconda of the East. The diamond had been found by a youth on the banks of the Orange River before anyone suspected that South Africa contained the world's largest diamond fields; it had been merely a child's plaything before being spotted by an acute trader.

Remembering this bit of history turned my mental spotlight on to my father, discoverer of the great Cullinan. Not only had diamonds been my father's life but he had bent the lives of his wife and son to them too. Appropriately, he had married the daughter of one of Amsterdam's leading diamond cutters; Erasmus had assisted Asscher at the cutting of the Cullinan. He had also lent him for the task the diamond pencil now reposing in my pocket. Perhaps my mother's long background of diamonds enabled her to accept my father's burning passion for them, but for my part it provoked a reaction so strong that by the time I was a teenager I loathed and rejected anything and everything connected with the things.

Early in 1905 my father and Rankin together had found the Cullinan, the size of a man's fist and weighing a pound and a quarter, at the Premier Mine near Pretoria. From the moment of its discovery the gem was an embarrassment, by virtue of both its size and its value. The unlikely manner of its discovery added further glamour: my father and Rankin had spotted what they thought was a chunk of broken bottle sticking out of an open-cast face; they had prised it out with a screwdriver.

The two men had sold the diamond to the mine for a sum which was rumoured to be about half a million sterling-an immense fortune at that time — which they had split between them. They were feted and honoured and a thousand tributes showered upon them. But the diamond was so big that a buyer couldn't be found for it. So it was sent on a kind of shopwindow tour of all the cities in South Africa; but still no purchaser came forward. Later the Transvaal government of the day had a brainwave. It bought the diamond and had it presented by the mine owner, Thomas Cullinan, to King Edward VII as a gift for his sixty-sixth birthday late in 1907. Cullinan was knighted and the diamond named after him. The great gem was still uncut and King Edward turned-to the man who often before had served the British Royal Family well, Asscher of Amsterdam. But Asscher was not to be hurried over cutting the stone and studied it for months before undertaking the nerve-racking task the following year, when it was divided into nine major stones, all of which today either form part of the British Royal Regalia or are personal jewels of the Royal Family.

I could remember every detail of the day I was taken as a child, in an atmosphere of awe and reverence, to the Tower of London to see the main stone of the Cullinan, the Star of Africa, set in the head of the Sovereign's Sceptre. Charles II's gold, richly-jewelled Sceptre was refurbished with the Cullinan at the command of King Edward. I, like the other onlookers, goggled through the armour-plated glass at the great dropshaped thing — over two and a quarter inches long and nearly one and a quarter wide — blazing under electric light. Our guide went on to say that the Cullinan's second largest portion was set in the Imperial State Crown next to the Black Prince's Ruby which Henry V had worn at Agincourt and the Sapphire of Edward the Confessor …

Suddenly my father's hand had crushed mine in a fierce grip. I turned in astonishment to see him staring at the great jewel as if in a trance. He whispered, 'Where that comes from there must be plenty more.' I yelled; as much in fright at his blank eyes as at his grip.

Now my reverie was cut short by the distant clap of another shot and its long echo among the hills — and I was back in the present, being hunted by my father's own partner. Bastard! I thought rancorously, I'm glad you're still imagining things! I wished I could see The Hill, which was largely hidden from my view by the intervening range. I had managed to labour through the sand to about the halfway mark in the valley and I felt exhausted; but the baobab beckoned from the top of K2 like the lattice-sight of an ack-ack gun against the skyline. I was tempted to rest but the sound of the shot drove me on in another burst of energy. However, I soon started to flag: the sand seemed even thicker. Once again I found the childhood doggerel rising as if of its own accord into my tired mind: 'Him that shall wear the Diamond as a charm — . My mind's eye turned inward, back to my father: he had always insisted that I should write diamond with a capital D because the Roman poet who had composed the ditty had done so. It was also a mark of respect for diamonds. Capital D or no capital D, I reminded myself cynically, it hadn't helped him, even with the biggest diamond in the world to his credit, to charm away the Evil Eye. Mystery surrounded his death: he was variously supposed to have been shot by a gang in London when on a visit to float a syndicate, or run down in a fake street accident.

·

Shortly after his death my mother and I had left South Africa to settle with Erasmus in Amsterdam and I went to school in England. Erasmus had always shut up like a clam when I had questioned him about my father's end. The most I could extract from him was the tribute that 'he was the world's greatest diamond-finder'. In many other respects, too, I came to the conclusion that Erasmus knew a great deal more about my father than he cared to admit.

When it came to talking about the Cullinan gem itself, however, Erasmus was much more forthcoming. He lived in the same street as the maestro Asscher who had made his reputation a couple of years before the discovery of the Cullinan by cutting the Excelsior, also from a South African mine, which, until the Cullinan itself, had been the largest diamond ever discovered. The street was as famous for diamonds as Antwerps' Pelikaanstraat for in it had also lived Coster and Voorsanger, who had re-cut the Koh-I-noor for Queen Victoria. Erasmus, a pupil of Asscher's, had been present at the cleaving of the Cullinan and had lent him the ancient diamond pencil for the job.

I had heard this story in detail many times from my grandfather: after his long study of the hidden planes of the Cullinan, Asscher was ready at last on a cold February day in 1908. He had made his final checks and had marked in with Indian ink those places which were invisible to all eyes but his.

It was a day of high drama in the freezing grey Dutch city. A police cordon was thrown around Asscher's factory. Everyone approaching was searched. A doctor and a special nurse stood by Asscher. The great man was tight with strain. He was examined by the doctor and his blood pressure found to be as high as a fighter pilot's in a dogfight. To mark the solemnity of the occasion, Asscher wore a black waistcoat. He rolled his shirtsleeves to the elbow like a fencer and knotted his white overall in a big bow at the back of his neck.

He took the great diamond which he had set firmly beforehand in a shellac mixture at the end of a little solder cup, or ' dop' as it is known. Before attempting the groove which would guide the knife along the cleavage plane, Asscher paused. He, more than anyone else, knew the consequences of an error of judgment: the diamond would shatter at the stroke of the cut and only a handful of powder would remain of one of the great wonders of the world.

For a moment the master craftsman held my grandfather's diamond pencil high, poised for the first cut. Unlike its twentieth-century counterpart (called a 'sharp') its diamond cutting tip could not be revolved to change its angle for, deeper or finer cuts. It was for 'sentimental reasons', said my grandfather, that Asscher had used the old tool. He never elaborated this remark.

Then Asscher gave a little sigh and leant forward and began the incision at the top of the hidden plane. There was no sound except the rasp of diamond upon diamond. A frost of diamond dust formed as the groove deepened. Asscher ran a finger along this 'millionaire's ice', sweeping it away into a tin box below.

He then placed the cleaving knife with its specially tempered blade in the groove, holding it between his left thumb and forefinger, while his other fingers rested loosely across the 'dop'. A wooden mallet or short steel rod is used as a striker. Asscher chose the rod.

Like a marksman who fears to dwell too long on his aim, Asscher struck.

Two fragments fell into the box below — but they were not diamond. The ultra-hard steel blade had shattered. The Cullinan sat in its 'dop' — unmarked.

As if in a trance Asscher reached for the second cleaver. He fitted it into the slot. For the second time he raised the short rod above his head. A muscle twitched from the point of his chin along the line of his jaw to his left ear. The rod fell. There was a firm, sensitive click.

The Cullinan dropped in two main halves and four fragments into the tin box, and Asscher to the floor in a dead faint.

One shot — followed by two in quick succession from the direction of The Hill — jerked me back to the hard realities of my present situation: a toughs breath-robbing slog; thirst; clutching sand; and a killer at large. I had long since lost the benefits of my kaftirtulp drink. My forehead throbbed and. my right-eye vision was hazed. I was worn out and in no shape to encounter Rankin. I was almost grateful to him for blasting off periodically but the fact that nearly an hour had elapsed since his previous shot showed the extent of his tenacity. The baobab now started to look invitingly near but I had some way still to cover through sand before I would hit the first hard slopes of K2.

I set off, flagging, on this final leg, each sand-filled boot a penance. Again I could not prevent thoughts of diamonds from pushing their way to the forefront of my mind: Rankin's diamonds had pitchforked me into my present crisis and my father's diamonds had shaped my life. It was no exaggeration to say that he had tried to mould me like one of his own blasted diamond facets. My education which, because of the family's continual travelling, had largely come from him, had all been diamond-orientated. To him (and therefore to me)" the heroes of history were the heroes of diamonds, the lines of my geography the courses of diamond-bearing kimberlite pipes, my mathematics the intricacies of metric carat measurement. Even my study of languages had been tainted with the jargonsmatterings of the diamond races — Yiddish, Hindustani, Persian and Arabic. Because twelve of the world's fifty major diamonds are South African, my father had indoctrinated me about South Africa. Its history, however, had no meaning for him before 1867 when two youths found a blink-klip on the banks of the Orange River near a one-horse village called Hopetown. It was inevitable that we should have made a sentimental journey to the place. There remain to this day on the window of a local store scratch marks which were made to test a diamond which was to rocket to world acclaim as the 83-carat Star of South Africa, and 'begin the country's diamond rush. My father carried his infatuation so far as to force me to study Alexander the Great's campaigns — not as campaigns but because he maintained that diamond mining had originated with Alexander the Great when he had ordered his soldiers to recover gems from a snake-guarded pit. The ingenious conqueror had used lanoline-soaked sheepskins to which the diamonds stuck. The modem vibrating-table with its grease-covered terraces over which diamond concentrate is sluiced was, in my father's eyes, merely a sophisticated development of Alexander's 330 BC idea.

My father's death came almost as a relief from this sort of thing and formal schooling in England made a welcome contrast. I did a lot of yachting and joined the Royal Navy at the outbreak of war. I was captured during a cross-Channel Combined Operations strike and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp. My mother was shot by the Gestapo in Amsterdam: I never heard why.

I shook my head like a punch-drunk boxer and cleared away the intruding cloud of memories. The ground began to rise and become harder — K2 at last. I got rid of the sand from my boots and paused before the final effort of the ascent. From where I crouched only the tabletop of The Hill lay open to my view, rather lovely but with that enduring air of watchfulness mysterious in its own way, like Nadine with the queen's ring. It brought to mind a final kickback of my night's diamond recollections: my father had an affectation of calling an engagement ring a Tower Ring because out-offavour Royal Favourites used the rings lovingly bestowed upon them to scratch messages before execution on the walls and windows of the Tower of London. I intended to find our love again in its own special context — damn all diamonds!

I pulled on my boots and started up the steep slope out of the bowl towards the rim, keeping below the skyline to avoid detection by Rankin. The wadi separating K2 from The Hill was deserted and the pinpoint of light from my fire had disappeared. There had been no shots for a long time; I took this at face value only because my mind and body were too fagged to make any effort beyond the last burst to reach the baobab. I arrived at a plateau on the top and trudged the few remaining yards to my target. Its massive trunk had (as I had hoped) a cool hollow in which I would be safe. I crawled thankfully into it and with the diamond pencil sliced a segment of pithy bark to suck and quench my thirst. The thin, acid sweetness tasted better than any drink I'd ever known.

I propped myself up against the cool wall of the interior, meaning to keep watch for Rankin. But my eyes grew heavier and my right one more painful until I could keep them open no longer. So I yielded and stretched out on the ground: the last thing I remembered was Charlie Furstenberg's doggerel:

'Winkel, winkel, little store.

I slept.