The Devil’s Kingdom

Chapter 33

The dust was settling on the row of parked vehicles by the time Jude and Rae clambered onto a flat rock at the top of a slope overlooking the main mineshaft entrance. They’d covered the last few hundred yards off-road, darting from cover to cover, working their way upwards onto higher ground.

The moment he took in the scene below, Jude wanted to double back. Now he understood why the rest of the labour camp seemed so deserted; it was because everyone was here. Whether all these extra soldiers had been stationed outside the mine due to Khosa’s unexpected visit, he couldn’t say. But there were at least sixty of them, all heavily armed, milling around the mine entrance. The shaft looked like the mouth of a cave tunnelling into the rock, one festooned with tons of scaffolding and massive iron railings and danger signs illegible with rust. Heavy plant machinery was everywhere. Trucks were coming and going every moment as the troops hurried back and forth. The whole scene was brightly illuminated by floodlights on masts. The only thing Jude couldn’t see was any sign of Khosa and Masango, aside from the dust-streaked Mercedes sitting empty among the hubbub.

As they watched, Rae wondering how the hell they could ever get inside and Jude wondering whether he’d taken leave of his senses in agreeing to this madness, a battered freight lorry rumbled to a halt under the glare of the floodlights. Soldiers jumped out of the front as more strode purposefully to the rear and flung open the tailgate to unload the truckload of mine workers, perhaps fifty or sixty souls, who were crammed into the back. The ragged slaves were made to disembark amid a lot of aggressive, pointless shouting and pointing of guns. This must be the night shift arriving for duty, Jude thought.

To him, the concept of slaves was something that belonged to a darker, historical past. But here they were, young and old, male and female, some so skinny that they looked like walking skeletons under their tattered clothes. They hadn’t even started their shift yet, and already many of them seemed ready to collapse with exhaustion. Even the more energetic and least malnourished-looking poor devils moved in a kind of shuffling gait, eyes locked down towards the ground, never daring to meet the impassive gaze of the guards who drove them from the truck like a herd of cattle. The slower ones were made to pick up their pace with whips and clubs.

Rae leaned close enough to Jude for him to feel her hair on his face. She whispered, ‘They’ll send them deep underground, into pitch blackness, to hack at the rock with blunt shovels and picks. The ones who are too weak to lift tools are made to sift through the rubble with their bare hands, looking for coltan. If they slow down or collapse, they’re either left down there to rot or brought up to the surface to be made an example of.’

‘It’s medieval,’ Jude said.

‘It’s Africa,’ she replied. ‘And it’s profitable. Wherever you find wealth and opportunity on this continent, you’ll find misery, exploitation, and suffering.’

‘Someone needs to do something to stop this.’

‘Then let’s do something,’ she said. And before he could stop her, she was up on her feet and scrambling down the slope on the soldiers’ blind side of the truck. Jude cursed at her recklessness, and went after her.

One of the slave women had dropped a dirty rag that was probably once a headscarf. Rae scooped it up off the ground as she passed the truck and quickly wrapped it around her head to cover her long black hair and most of her face. A guard yelled at her for lagging behind. She fell in with the crowd of slaves, matching their shuffling gait and slumped body posture.

‘This can’t really be happening,’ Jude thought. Horribly aware of how he must stand out, and certain that the guards would rumble him at any instant, he hustled in among the crowd. In a heart-stopping moment one of the soldiers actually looked right at him and then moved on. Jude realised that his face, clothes, and hair were all so caked with dirt from his escapades that night that, at a careless glance, he could blend in.

He kept his head down and focused on shuffling at enough of an accelerated zombie-gait to enable him to catch up with Rae. He tugged at her elbow and hissed furiously in her ear, ‘Are you out of your mind?’

‘Got us in, didn’t I?’ she whispered back with a crazy grin.

What kind of woman is this I’ve met? Jude asked himself.

The yells and cracking of whips began to resonate with echo as the slaves made their way into the dark, rough tunnel dimly lit every twenty paces by liquid fuel lanterns that emitted a guttering stink and belched smoke. A hundred or so yards into the shaft, someone stumbled and fell. The guards instantly waded in, clubs at the ready. Someone else let out a wail. In the commotion, Jude yanked Rae to one side while the soldiers were distracted. ‘We can’t do anything for them,’ he whispered, and pointed at the side tunnel whose entrance he’d spotted in the murk. ‘This way!’ Checking that none of the guards had noticed them pull away from the crowd, he plucked a lantern off the craggy wall and kept its light hidden with his body.

‘Where do you think it goes?’ she whispered as they ducked through the narrow opening in the rock.

‘Who cares? Come on!’

The tunnel was a third of the width of the main shaft, and wound and snaked much more steeply downwards. The echo of the crowd and the guards was soon out of earshot behind them. Jude lit the way by the paltry yellow glow of the lantern. It gave off choking fumes that smelled as if it was running on diesel oil. He had visions of them suffocating down here, or else of the tunnel narrowing to a stop and their having to retrace their steps, only to run into more guards. ‘Might have been a mistake,’ he admitted.

‘We can’t turn back now.’

They pressed on. One thing was for sure, they were no longer in a manmade tunnel. The natural fissure was leading them deeper below ground.

Just as Jude’s fears seemed about to come true and he was on the tip of saying, ‘It’s a dead end,’ the way ahead opened up radically and they saw that their cave shaft had rejoined some kind of much larger space. Jude twiddled the knob on the lantern to unwind a few more millimetres of wick and brighten the flame. By its flicker they could see the phosphorescent glitter of mineral deposits buried in the rock, the great jagged stalagmites jutting up from the floor and stalactites hanging in spikes overhead, like giant fangs and tusks inside the mouth of some vast creature that had swallowed them whole. It was like a scene from another world. Nobody might have set foot here in fifty thousand years.

Jude soon realised that wasn’t the case.

‘What’s that stink?’ Rae whispered.

He could smell it too, a foul sweetish odour like rotting fruit. ‘I don’t know,’ he whispered back. ‘Bats, maybe.’

‘Bats? Are you nuts?’

‘Bats, rats, how the hell do I know? It’s nasty, whatever it is.’

It was Rae who produced the first dry crunching, crackling sound as they made their uncertain way through the shadowy gloom. ‘I think I stood on something,’ she muttered. ‘Shine the light, will you?’

Jude was about to lower the lantern when he felt the brittle snap of something giving way under his own heel, like the crisp, thin ice of a frozen puddle on a wintry walk in the countryside. Somewhere, a million light years away, it was November in the familiar surroundings of rural Oxfordshire. Oh, to be there and not here!

Jude shone the lantern down at their feet and saw the crunched fragments of what had once been somebody’s head. Then he swept the light a little left, then right, and realised that it wasn’t just a couple of skulls that littered the floor of the cavern. ‘There are bloody dozens of them,’ he gasped, horrified.

‘No,’ Rae said, taking the lantern from him and raising it high, turning in a circle as she did it. ‘There are hundreds of skulls, Jude. They’re everywhere.’

Empty eye sockets stared at them, and lipless teeth grinned at them from all around. Skulls were crammed into crevices in the rock, piled in heaps on the floor. Many of them had still-recognizable faces, not yet decomposed all the way to bare bone, wearing hideous distorted expressions of terror and pain. Semi-skeletal corpses were impaled here and there on stalagmites, many of them still shrouded in tatters of clothing.

It was an open grave. The stink suddenly seemed fifty times worse, knowing what was causing it. ‘We have to get out of here,’ Jude muttered, choking up.

‘God, I wish I had my camera.’

He was about to say something else when she suddenly gripped his hand and squeezed it so tightly that it hurt. ‘Shhh!’ He listened, and heard what she’d heard. Voices. It sounded like two men talking, but their words were muffled and distant.

‘Look,’ she murmured, pointing. Up ahead, the cavern twisted around to the right. There was a soft glow of light shining from around the corner.

Jude took the lantern from her hand and quickly twiddled the knob to lower the wick all the way down. The lantern sputtered and died, leaving them in total darkness except for the strange glow up ahead. Jude took Rae’s hand again, and the two of them crept towards the sound of the voices, treading tentatively so as not to crunch any more skulls underfoot.

When they reached the corner, they were in for another surprise. The cavern narrowed sharply to a natural fissure no more than about three feet across; it was from there that the light was shining. Hardly daring to breathe, Jude and Rae moved towards the fissure and peered through.

Beyond it was a room, but it was like no room either of them had ever seen, or could have even imagined. It was a large chamber carved from solid rock deep under the ground, roughly square in shape, with a high ceiling that echoed the conversation of the two men inside, now clearly audible.

The strange light was coming from scores of candles that had been placed inside human skulls, making them glow like lanterns and shining from their eye sockets and open jaws. Fixed with iron clamps to the two walls that Jude could see, and perhaps the other two that he couldn’t, stood a pair of bleached-white skeletons which had been grotesquely wired up to clutch burning torches in their bony hands.

At the chamber’s centre was a broad stone slab raised on a plinth. The surface and sides of the slab were mottled with a dark stain that was black in places, brownish-purple in others, running down the craggy stone in dried rivulets. There was little doubt what had created the staining.

Neither of the two men inside the chamber was visible through the fissure, but Jude recognised both voices instantly.

They were those of Jean-Pierre Khosa and César Masango.