Men of Men Read Free Page A

shillings to farmer De Beer, the
digger received his written ‘briefie’ which entitled him to hold and work the claim in perpetuity.
    Before nightfall that first day the lucky diggers who had pegged the centre of the new rush had merely scratched the stony earth, but had turned up over forty stones of the first water; and
already horsemen were away southwards carrying the word to the world that Colesberg kopje was a mountain of diamonds.
    When Zouga Ballantyne’s single wagon creaked the last few miles down the rutted red earth track towards Colesberg kopje, it was already half demolished, eaten away as though by the maggots
in a rotten cheese, and men still swarmed over what remained. On the dusty plain below it were encamped almost ten thousand souls, black and brown and white. The smoke from their cooking fires
blurred the high china-blue sky with dirty grey, and for miles in each direction the diggers had almost denuded the plain of the beautiful camel-thorn trees to feed those fires.
    The settlement was strewn about under dirty weatherworn canvas, although already some sheets of the ubiquitous corrugated iron had been laboriously transported from the coast and knocked up into
boxlike shanties. Some of these, with a fine sense of order, had been arranged in an approximation of a straight line, forming the first rudimentary streets.
    These belonged to the ‘kopje-wallopers’, the previously nomadic diamond buyers who had until recently roamed the diggings, but who had now found it worth their while to set up
permanent shop below the crumbling remains of Colesberg kopje. According to the infant diamond laws of the Boer Free State, each licensed buyer was obliged to display his name prominently. This
they did in crudely lettered signs upon the little iron sweat-box offices, but most of them went further and flew a disproportionately large gaudy and fancifully designed flag from a mast on the
roof to announce to the diggers that the incumbent was in office and ready to do business. The flags lent a carnival air to the settlement.
    Zouga Ballantyne walked beside the offside lead ox of his team, following one of the narrow meandering rutted tracks that ran through the settlement. Occasionally the team had to be swung to
avoid the tailings that had spilled into the track from one of the recovery stations, or to avoid a deep morass formed by spilled sewerage and washings from the sorting tables.
    The settlement was densely crowded upon itself – that was the first impression that struck Zouga. He was a man of the plains and savannah forests, accustomed to long uninterrupted
horizons, and the crowding jarred upon his senses. The diggers lived within touching distance of each other, every man attempting to get as close to his claim as he could so that the gravel that he
won from it would not have to be carried too far to the place where he would process it.
    Zouga had hoped to find an open space upon which to outspan his wagon and erect the big bell tent, but there was no open space within a quarter of a mile of the kopje.
    He glanced back at Aletta on the box. She was sitting very still, moving only as the wagon jolted, looking straight ahead as though oblivious of the almost naked men, many wearing merely a scrap
of trade cloth about the loins, who milled the crunchy lumps of yellow gravel and then shovelled it into the waiting cradles. Swearing or singing as they worked, all of them oiled with their own
sweat in the cruel white sunlight.
    The filth appalled even Zouga, who had known the kraals of the Mashona in the north and had lived in a bushman settlement with the little creatures who never bathed in their entire
lifetimes.
    Civilized man generates particularly loathsome wastes, and it seemed that every square inch of the dusty red earth between the tents and the shanties of the settlement was covered with a litter
of rusty bully beef tins, broken fragments of bottles and porcelain that glittered in the