The Leopard Hunts In Darkness Part 86

"Still, five pints of diamonds is better than a poke in the eye with a rhino horn,"Tungata countered.

They had salvaged a dozen poles from the top section of the ladder work in the shaft and built a small fire on the cavern floor. As they squatted in a circle around the pile of stones, their damp clothing steamed in the warmth from the flames.

"If they are diamonds," Sally-Anne was still sceptical.

"They are diamonds," Craig declared flatly, "every single one of them. Watch this!" Craig selected one of the stones, a crystal with a knife edge to one of its facets. He drew the edge across the lens of the lamp. It made a shrill squeal that set their teeth on edge, but it gouged a deep white scratch in the gla.s.s.

"That's proof! That's a diamond!"

"So big!" Sarah picked, out the smallest she could find.

"Even the smallest is bigAr than the top joint of my finger." She compared them.

"The old Matabele labourers picked only those large enough to show up in the first wash of gravel," Craig explained. "And remember that they will lose sixty per cent or more of their ma.s.s in the cutting and polishing.

That one will probably end up no bigger than a green pea."

"The colours," Tungata murmured, "so many different colours." Some were translucent lemon-coloured, others dark r amber or cognac, with all shades in between, while again there were those that were un tinted clear as snow-melt in a mountain stream, with frosted facets that reflected the flames of the smoky little fire.

"Just look at this one." The stone Sally-Anne held up was the deep purplish blue of the Mozambique current when the tropic midday sun probes its depths.

"And this." Another as bright as the blood from a spurting artery.

"And this." Limpid green, impossibly beautiful, changing with each flicker of the light.

Sally-Anne laid out a row of the coloured stones on the cavern floor in front of her.

"So pretty," she said. She was grading them, the yellows and golds and ambers in one row, the pinks and reds in another.

"The diamond can take any of the primary colours. It seems to take pleasure in imitating the colours proper to other gems. John Mandeville, the fourteenth-century tray eller, wrote that." Craig spread his hands to the blaze. "And jj it can crystallize to any shape from a perfect square to octahedron or dodecahedron."

"Blimey, mate," Sally-Anne mocked him, "what's an octahedron, pray?"

"Two pyramids with triangular sides and a common base."

"Wow! And a dodecahedron?" she challenged.

"Two rhombs of lozenge shape with common facets."

"How come you know so much?" 41 wrote a book remember?" Craig smiled back. "Half the book was about Rhodes and Kimberley and diamonds."

"Enough already, "she capitulated.

"Not nearly enough," Craig shook his head. "I can go on.

The diamond is the most perfect reflector of light, only IL chromate of lead refracts more light, only chrysolite disperses it more. But the diamond's combined powers of reflection, refraction and dispersion are unmatched."

"Stop!" ordered Sally-Anne, but her expression was still interested, and he went on.

"It's brilliance is un decaying though the ancients did not have the trick of cutting it to reveal its true splendour.

For that reason, the Romans treasured pearls more highly and even the first Hindu artisans only rubbed up the natural facets of the Kohinoor. They would have been appalled to know that modern cutters reduced the bulk of that stone from over seven hundred carats to a hundred and six."

"How big is seven hundred carats?" Sarah wanted to know.

Craig selected a stone from the ranks that Sally-Anne had set out.

It was the size of a golf ball.

"That is probably three hundred carats it might cut to a paragon, that is a first, water diamond over a hundred carats. Then men will give it a name, like the Great Mogul or the Orloff or the Shah, and legends will be woven around it." Tobengula's Fire, Sarah hazarded.

"Good!" Craig nodded. "A good name for it. Lobengula's Fire!" "How much?" Tungata wanted to know. "What is the value of this pile of pretty stones?"

"G.o.d knows," Craig "khrugged. "Some of them are rubbish-" He picked out a huge amorphous lump of dark grey colour, in which the black specks and fleckings of its imperfections were obvious to the naked eye and the flaws and fracture lines cut ffirough its interior like soft silver leaves. "This is industrial quality, it will be used for machine tools and the cutting edges in the head of an oil drill, but some of the others the only answer is that they are worth as much as a rich man will pay. It wou impossible to sell them all at one time, the market could not absorb them. Each stone would require a special buyer and involve a major financial transaction."

"How much, Pupho?" Tungata insisted. "What is the least or the most?"

"I truly don't know, I could not even hazard." Craig picked out another large stone, its imperfect facets frosted and stippled to hide the true fire in its depths. "Highly skilled technicians will work on this for weeks, perhaps months, charting its grain and discovering its flaws. They will polish a window on it, so they can microscopically examine its interior. Then, when they had decided how to make" the stone, a master cutter with nerves of steel will cleave it along the flaw line with a tool likea butcher's cleaver. A false hammer stroke and the stone could explode into worthless chips. They say the master cutter who cleaved the Cullinan diamond fainted with relief when he hit a clean stroke and the diamond split perfectly." Craig juggled the big diamond thoughtfully. "If this stone "makes" perfectly, and if its colour is graded "D", it could be worth, say, a million dollars."

"A.

million dollars! For one stone!" Sarah exclaimed.

"Perhaps more," Craig nodded. "Perhaps much more."

"If one stone is worth that, Sally -Anne lifted a cupped double handful of diamonds and let them trickle slowly through her fingers, "how much will this h.o.a.rd be worth?"

"As little as a hundred million, as much as five hundred million," Craig guessed quietly, and those impossible sums seemed to depress them all, rather than render them delirious with joy.

Sally-Anne dropped the last few stones, as though they had burned her fingers, and she hugged her own arms and shivered. Her damp hair hung in lank strands down her face and the firelight underscored her eyes with shadow.

They all of them looked exhausted and bedraggled.

"Then as we sit here," said Tungata, "we are probably as rich as any man living and I would give it all for one glimpse of sunlight and one taste of freedom."

"Pupho, talk to us, , Sarah pleaded. "Tell us stories."

"Yes," Sally-Anne joined in. "That's your business. Tell us about diamonds. Help us forget the rest. Tell us a story."

"All right," Craig agreed, and while Tungata fed the fire with splinters Of wood, he thought for a moment. "Did you know that Kohinoor means "Mountain of Light" and that Baber, the Conqueror, set its value at half the daily expense of the entire known world? You would think there could be no other gem like it, but it was only one of the great jewels a.s.sembled in Delhi. That city outstripped imperial Rome or vainglorious Babylon in its treasures. The other great jewels of Delhi had marvelous names also. Listen to these: the Sea of Light, the Crown of the Moon, the Great Mogul___2 Craig ransacked his memory for stories to keep them from dwelling on the hopelessness of their position, from the despair of truly realizing that they were entombed alive deep in the earth.

He told them of the" faithful servant whom de Sang entrusted with the great Sang diamond, when he sent it to Henry of Navarre to add to the crown jewels of France.

"Thieves learned of his journey, and they waylaid the poor man in the forest. They cut him down and searched his clothing and his corpse.-When they could not find the diamond, they buried, him hastily and fled. Years afterwards, Monsieur de-So'ncy found the grave in the forest, and ordered the servant's decomposed body to be gutted.

The legendary diamond was found in his stomach."

"Ghastly," Sally-Anne shuddered.