The tape-recorder whirred. It was the only sound in the room. It still holds that long silence. Then Shelborne squared his shoulders, as if this had been the moment he had been waiting for. The length of his neck was accentuated by the size of his head. There was no disproportion, but one sensed the physical and mental power of the man.
He said, That is correct. On 13 February 1930.'
He gripped the front of the witness-box when Shardelow began. The eyes of the courtroom were upon him.
'Mr Shelborne, why were you at Strandloper's Water?'
'As I said previously, Caldwell and I were on an expedition to try to find the Hottentots' Paradise.'
'You still believe in this so-called treasure trove?'
'No.' '
'No? Yet you set out…'
Shelborne's voice was deep, sure. 'Until diamonds were found in the Sperrgebiet the Namib desert was shunned, unknown. Prospectors then touched on the fringes, but even today it is largely unexplored. The desert became a mirror for men's greed. Upon it they projected their dreams. They said, the remoter the desert, the richer the strike. The diamond legend requires to be woven round something intangible, something wildly improbable and inaccessible, for it exists in the mind alone. The Namib has all the necessary qualities. The treasure trove existed in Caldwell's mind.'
'Yet you went with him.'
'We hired an old fishing-boat at Walvis Bay. There is what passes for a landing-beach. A couple of the mule-team were drowned. We pushed inland. The going was cruel. At Strandloper's Water I became convinced that it was madness to go on. But Caldwell was determined. I returned to the boat.'
'If Caldwell had not chosen so opportunely to buy your stores, what would you have done with them?'
'Taken them back to the boat, I suppose.'
'And left your comrade to die?'
'Of course not.'
'Could you have re-embarked the mules and wagon?'
'No. They were both expendable. We intended to shoot the mules and eat them, and to abandon the wagon later on.'
'But rather than take the risk, you abandoned your partner and friend with them, and in gratitude he signed away his undersea prospecting rights to the entire diamond coast?'
'Yes.'
'And he carried the document on his person? That was most considerate of Mr Caldwell.'
'He had it with him.'
'A document with a potential of millions? Surely a bank safe was the place for it?'
'He carried it.'
'What else?'
'A rifle, water-bottle, blankets — that sort of thing.'
'Nothing to prospect with? Come, come, Mr Shelborne!'
'We had a small portable trommel, or jig, a hammer, and some chemicals.'
'Than at Strandloper's Water you turned back because you funked it?'
A deep flush spread across Shelborne's face and neck and the veins knotted in his forehead, but he kept himself under control.
'I didn't funk it. I considered it inadvisable and hazardous in the extreme to continue.'
'Yet other notorious deserts like the Takla Makan and the Atacama held no such terrors for you?'
'The Namib is the worst…'
'Yes, yes. We have your unsupported assertion for that. When you considered it — I quote you — inadvisable to continue, in what terms did you put it to your partner that you were backing out — after you had planned it together for years?'
'Strandloper's Water is a sort of dry flat pan; ahead were the barchan dunes — they're the type which shift all the time. The mules could never have made it…'
'But you were fully prepared to trade them away, knowing that?'
'Caldwell was as well able to assess the risks as I was.'
'What did you say to him?'
'We had a discussion… an argument. I reckoned the boat would still be there because the wind was wrong…'
'Most peculiar, Mr Shelborne. What if the boat had gone? Your bridges both in front and behind you were burned.'
'Yes.'
'For a man of your intrepidity, and a collector of deserts to boot, you seem to have taken more chances than a greenhorn.'
'There are always risks in the desert.'
'Now — you had an argument. Whose idea was the bargain?'
'I don't remember.'
'No, I don't suppose you do. Was Caldwell fit when you parted?'
'What do you mean?'
'Simply, was he in good health, unhurt?'
Shelborne ran his tongue round his dry lips. 'Yes.'
'How did you finally separate?'
The young woman leaned forward, rapt.
'I wished him good luck and started for the coast.'
'Was it morning or afternoon?'
'Early morning.'
'Caldwell said nothing? He was still angry with you about your defection?'
'I did not say he was angry. He said, "Good luck to you, Shelley, perhaps my luck will change now".'
'You did not wait to see how far the mule-team went before it stuck?'
'No.'
'You had driven your bargain and were satisfied?'
Shelborne did not reply. Shardelow threw down his pencil with a clatter.
'Thus, then, died the diamond legend of our time.'
'I always hoped he would come back. No one knows where he died, or how.'.
Shardelow was easy, smooth. 'Is it not strange how mankind refuses to believe when one of its heroes vanishes: Lawrence of Arabia, Kitchener?' His words whipped across the court like a straight left. 'Perhaps Caldwell did not die, Mr Shelborne?'
'He is dead. Caldwell is dead.'
'Why are you so sure? Perhaps you saw him die?'
Shelborne was silent for a moment. He said steadily, 'I have told you how I left him.'
'Yes. You left him to die.'
'No. He elected to go on — against my judgement. That is all.'
'It was a shabby end to a great life, was it not?'
The tall man did not reply.
Shardelow went on. 'His signature — was it always shaky like this?'
'What do you mean…?'
'Yours is precise — it might have been written at your desk — but his… was he ill that his hand should shake so?'
Shelborne put up his right fist to wipe the sweat from his upper lip. It shook like a leaf.
'lust as your hand is shaking now, Mr Shelborne.'
'I had blackwater fever,' Shelborne retorted. 'It did this to me…' He gestured at his bald head. 'Even as a young man I was completely bald.'
Shardelow went in for the kill: 'You contracted black-water fever at Strandloper's Water, then?'
'I suppose I must have — I was taken ill on the boat going back…'
'So your partner might himself have died of blackwater?'
'Yes.'
Shardelow waved the deed of cession. 'Are you sure you did not obtain the shaky signature on this document from the hand of a man you knew was ill, so ill that he must die?'
'No! No!'
'Is that why you are so sure he did die?'
'No!'
'And you left him to die, having first extorted this vast potential wealth from him, under circumstances we shall never rightly know?' 'No! It wasn't like that…'
Then how was it, Mr Shelborne?'
'As I have told you.'
Shelborne's faded clothes were soaked with sweat under the armpits, and he wiped his hairless head with a crumpled handkerchief.
Shardelow merely stood and looked at him while the tape recorded only silence. Then he said in a matter-of-fact voice, 'We'll leave Caldwell's death and go on to the next point: it is particularly germane to my client's case.
I presume you began prospecting the sea-bed immediately?'
'No. I had no resources.'
Shardelow picked up Shelborne's affidavit. 'I see that on your return to Walvis Bay from Strandloper's Water you signed on in a deep-sea Swedish sailing ship.'
'That is correct.'
'Your first step towards becoming a master mariner in sail?'
'Yes.'
'How long did it take — from ordinary seaman to master mariner?'
'Close on ten years.'
'What was your first command?'
'I signed off before — in South America.'
'Remarkable! You were nearly ten years in sail — with no doubt poor food and a hard life — in order to achieve a master's ticket and then you signed off without trying for a ship. Why? On the run from your conscience?'
'I crossed the Atacama desert.'
That is in Chile, is it not?'
'Yes.'
'Just keeping your hand in with deserts?'
Shelborne grinned for the first time. 'You can call it that.'
Then?'
'I signed on as first mate in a Finnish windjammer loading nitrates in Valparaiso. We sailed across the Pacific to Vladivostok. From there I went inland and crossed the Takla Makan desert.'
That's Tibet — Turkestan, rather. The roof of the world.'
'Yes.'
'You successfully braved these two deserts, which are as remote as you could hope to find anywhere in the world, yet you were not prepared in 1930 to venture in companionship with an experienced man like Caldwell into a. small desert just over 100 miles wide because you thought the going would be too tough?'
Shelborne remained silent.
'Although a self-styled collector of deserts, you shrank from putting on the hook, so to speak, the gem of them all?'
'I returned to Mercury just before the outbreak of war. I have been there ever since.'
The guano islands are, geologically and geographically speaking, part of the Namib — the desert which is rich in diamonds?'
The tension seemed to have gone out of Shelborne. 'Yes.'
Then there must be diamonds on the islands?'
'By no means. Nowhere in South-west Africa are diamonds found more than twelve miles inland. The absence of diamonds in the desert — except for that twelve-mile coastal strip — is an undeniable fact; and an inexplicable one.'
Shardelow, in reply to the Judge, said that the Mazy Zed outfit intended to call expert evidence regarding the nature of the diamond deposits off the Sperrgebiet. The fudge glanced at the big wall clock. Shelborne had been questioned for more than three hours.
Shardelow said, 'One last point, Mr Shelborne: have you ever made use of your so-called right to prospect the sea-bed?'
'In a manner of speaking, yes.'
'Yes or no? Have you or have you not prospected the off-shore concession area?'
Shelborne seemed uneasy. 'It is one of the wildest coastlines in the world… It has a formidable reputation…'
'Answer the question!' snapped the Judge.
'I have prospected as best I could. My equipment was somewhat primitive — grabs and dredges, weighted buoys with grease-traps to bring up samples from the ocean floor.'
Rhennin pulled at Shardelow's sleeve and whispered urgently. Shardelow grinned and nodded.
'Remembering an old custom among prospectors never to visit another's claim unless invited, I shall not ask you what you found,' he said blandly. 'You did say, however, that your equipment was… er…?'
'Somewhat primitive.'
'Somewhat primitive.' He turned the phrase appreciatively over on his tongue. 'And in your opinion wholly inadequate for the immense task of prospecting a wild coastline of 250 miles?'
'Yes, wholly inadequate. You see…'
'Quite so, quite so. Suppose you were floating a company to mine undersea diamonds, what would you estimate to be the capital required?'
'Half a million sterling at least.'
Shardelow almost bobbed. 'Thank you, Mr Shelborne, thank you very much. That is all I wanted to know.'
The proceedings, when the court sat again after lunch, lacked the tense air of the morning. Shelborne sat near the young woman. Dr Clive Stratton, Chief Government Geologist for Northern Namaqualand (which included Oranjemund), was round, sun-tanned, didactic. The Judge listened patiently while he explained how a diamond was a piece of carbon which had crystallized under heat and pressure. There were, he said, three distinct types of diamonds in South Africa — the mined diamonds from famous places like Kimberley and Premier Mine, Pretoria; ordinary river alluvial stones; and South-west African stones. He paused as he drew this last distinction.
Shardelow was on to it at once. 'Why do you stop there, Dr Stratton? What is so different about Southwest African stones?'
'They are distinct in kind; in fact, they are unique, though there are similarities with Brazil diamonds…'
'They are neither alluvial nor mined diamonds?'
'No. They occur in marine terraces close to the sea.'
'What are marine terraces, Dr Stratton?'
'I'll put it this way: millions of years ago diamonds in the Sperrgebiet were deposited in rock which has since been covered with sand — up to forty feet of overburden, as we call it. The sand must be scraped away until the diamonds are exposed in gravel beneath or in rocky potholes. We know the approximate age of the diamond deposits because of the Oyster Line…'
The Oyster Line, Dr Stratton?'
The Oyster Line, Dr Stratton explained, had been named and discovered by a German-born geologist, Dr Hans Merensky, in 1927 at the Orange River mouth. Dr Merensky had a theory about the origin of diamonds, a revolutionary theory which was widely derided at the time — until he found the Oyster Line. Dr Merensky believed that diamonds on the Sperrgebiet would be found in conjunction with ancient fossilized oyster shells in marine terraces. Dr Merensky had traced a line of these ancient prehistoric shells on the seashore. He sank a trench a few feet long — and took from it a king's ransom in diamonds. He had discovered the greatest diamond field the world has ever seen.
Shardelow said, 'Might one therefore assume that the same agency which distributed diamonds in the marine terraces of the Oyster Line a million years ago also deposited them on the bed of the sea?'
Stratton looked uncomfortable. 'No, not quite… You see…'
The Judge interrupted: 'The court does not see, Dr Stratton. Are you trying to convey to us that the diamonds in the Oyster Line terraces had a different point of origin from those in the sea proper?'
Stratton became voluble. There had been conflict for over half a century about the origin of the South-west Africa diamonds. There were three main theories: first, that the diamonds had been released by weathering from the ancient crystalline rocks of the basement system, but this had been exploded when no gem stones showed up among the shoreline rocks. The second theory had likewise been exploded, namely, that the South-west Africa stones had come originally from deep within the South African hinterland, had been washed down by the Orange River to the sea, and then been scattered by the powerful Benguela current. A variant of this second theory placed the point of origin in South-west, rather than South Africa, but this did not hold water either, because no diamonds had been found along the course of the Orange or of any other of the ancient rivers.
'And the third theory, Dr Stratton?' Shardelow pressed. Stratton had hesitated, as if unwilling to present something damaging to his academic reputation.
'Some people think there is a diamond pipe or pipes — you could call it the fountainhead or parent rock — buried under the sea off the Sperrgebiet, from which all diamonds have for thousands of years been spread along the coast by the current.'
What do you, as an expert, think of that?'
'Frankly, I think it is nonsense…'
Shardelow wasn't having the Mazy Zed's chances spoiled by Stratton's academic sectarianism. He said, smoothly:
'But it was a view held — propounded even — by no less an authority than Dr Merensky himself, was it not?'
'Merensky held radical theories which have not been proved.'
'That is what the experts said about his Oyster Line theory — before he discovered Oranjemund.'
The Judge intervened: 'Has evidence been brought forward, one way or the other, to prove or disprove this idea of an undersea origin of all the diamonds?'
'No, my lord. I said at the outset, that there is considerable controversy about the origin of diamonds on the Sperrgebiet. But we who have worked here with them for a lifetime…'
'Thank you, Dr Stratton. To sum up, then, you would consider it not unlikely that there are diamond deposits on the sea-bed off the Sperrgebiet?'
'Subject to various qualifications, yes.'
Stratton stood down as the Judge nodded for the next witness.
The court orderly rose.
'I call Mary Caldwell.'