The Angels Weep Read Free Page A

the same place where
you killed the bull elephant – the tusks are on the stoep
at King’s Lynn.’
    ‘The ancient dump will be just ahead.’ Zouga
hurried forward.
    He found the low mound covered by grass, and went down on his
knees to scrabble amongst the grass roots, picking out the chips
of white sugar quartz, examining each one swiftly and discarding
it. Occasionally he wet one with his tongue, held it to the
sunlight to try and highlight the sparkle of metal, then frowned
and shook his head with disappointment.
    At last he stood and wiped his hands on his breeches.
    ‘It’s quartz all right, but the ancient miners
must have hand-sorted this dump. We will have to find the old
shafts if we want to see visible gold in the ore.’
    From the top of the ancient dump Zouga orientated himself
rapidly.
    ‘The carcass of the bull elephant fell about
there,’ he pointed, and to confirm it Jan Cheroot searched
in the grass and lifted a huge thighbone, dry and white as chalk,
and at last after thirty years beginning to crumble.
    ‘He was the father of all elephant,’ Jan Cheroot
said reverently. ‘There will never be another like him, and
it was he that led us to this place. When you shot him he fell
here to mark it for us.’
    Zouga turned a quarter-circle and pointed again. ‘The
ancient shaft where we buried old Matthew will be
there.’
    Ralph recalled the elephant hunt as his father had described
it in his celebrated book A Hunter’s Odyssey . The
black gunbearer had not flinched from the great bull
elephant’s charge, but had stood it down and handed Zouga
the second gun, sacrificing his own life for that of his master.
So Ralph understood and remained silent, as Zouga went down on
one knee beside the rock pile that marked the gunbearer’s
grave.
    After a minute, Zouga rose and dusted off his knee, and said
simply, ‘He was a good man.’
    ‘Good, but stupid,’ Jan Cheroot agreed. ‘A
wise man would have run.’
    ‘And a wise man would have chosen a better grave,’
Ralph murmured. ‘He is plumb in the centre of a gold reef.
We will have to dig him out.’
    But Zouga frowned. ‘Let him lie. There are other shafts
along the strike.’ He turned away, and the others followed
him. A hundred yards farther on, Zouga stopped again.
‘Here!’ he called with satisfaction. ‘The
second shaft – there were four of them
altogether.’
    This opening had also been refilled with chunks of native
rock. Ralph shrugged off his jacket, propped his rifle against
the bole of the nearest tree and climbed down into the shallow
depression until he stooped over the narrow blocked entrance.
    ‘I’m going to open it up.’
    They worked for half an hour, prising loose the boulders with
a branch of a leadwood and manhandling them aside until they had
exposed the square opening to the shaft. It was narrow, so narrow
that only a child could have passed through it. They knelt and
peered down into it. There was no telling how deep it was, for it
was impenetrably black in the depths and it stank of damp, of
fungus and bats, and of rotting things.
    Ralph and Zouga stared into the opening with a horrid
fascination.
    ‘They say the ancients used child slaves or captured
Bushmen in the workings,’ Zouga murmured.
    ‘We have to know if the reef is down there,’ Ralph
whispered. ‘But no grown man—’ he broke off and
there was another moment of thoughtful silence, before Zouga and
Ralph glanced at each other and smiled, and then both their heads
turned in unison towards Jan Cheroot.
    ‘Never!’ said the little Hottentot fiercely.
‘I am a sick old man. Never! You will have to kill me
first!’
    R alph found a
stump of candle in his saddlebag, while Zouga swiftly spliced
together the three coils of rope used for tethering the horses,
and Jan Cheroot watched their preparation like a condemned man
watching the construction of the gallows.
    ‘For twenty-nine years, since the