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Автор Джеффри Дженкинс

Geoffrey Jenkins

The River of Diamonds

1

The Collector of Deserts

'East of the sea and west of the dunes. '

Whether it was the Miltonics inherent in the phrase which came so spontaneously from the lips of the tall man in the witness-box, or the chance ending of the tape-recording spool which underlined and gave weight to what he said, I am not sure; but I know that in my own mind I date the fate of the Mazy Zed from that instant.

I have read the court transcript since in order to be able to delineate, not chronologically but in its proper perspective, the figure which emerged as our enterprise progressed; I prevailed upon the authorities to give me the actual recording of his words, and it is now revolving slowly on my desk as I write. I still find in his educated, resonant English voice an indication of the well-springs of that drive which made him for so long an outlaw — in his own mind at least — from his friends, from the fellow prospectors who admired his work and hoped to avoid his fate, and most, God knows, from his family. It is easy, therefore, for me to set down exactly what he said, and although the picture of him that I give is taken from my mind's eye, that impress is no less strong upon me than upon anyone else with whom he came in contact. The sea and the dunes — those two were so much part of the man that my narrative starts naturally from the point at which he spoke of them to the court.

Fred Shelborne stood before the microphone at the end of the courtroom farther from the Judge and two assessors. Mr Justice de Villiers presided at the head of a horseshoe-shaped table; Younger and du Plessis, both barristers and diamond experts, flanked him. Their table was on a dais and below, at floor level, there was a double row of other tables, covered in green plastic, for counsel. The witness-box was between the two rows, so that Shelborne faced the whole room. Outside the door at his back was a lawn and bushes, as incongruously green as was the diamond town itself among the desert dunes.

A green pattern of lawns and bright cottages, with a swimming-pool and red-steepled church, lay branded, man-made, on the ochre surface of this, the richest diamond field in the world.

Shelborne was not on trial: the Government had set up a special court at Oranjemund, the only town of the Sperrgebiet, the forbidden diamond coast of South-west Africa, to hear the most radical prospecting application in the history of mining.

We wanted to mine diamonds from the sea.

We asked for the right to prospect for 250 miles along the Sperrgebiet from a point roughly 450 miles north of Cape Town. Along this savage, treacherous and mainly unexplored littoral lie a dozen small islands, close off shore, which are covered with the droppings of millions of seabirds — the 'white gold' of guano.

We had come to Oranjemund from Cape Town, 370 miles to the south, well prepared for our case. Presenting our application were three leading barristers, with supporting juniors. We had expected opposition — in the diamond game there are always the old-timers to stake a preposterous claim. Shelborne looked like one of them: an old sports jacket, shirt washed to the colour of bleached driftwood, blue trousers pale with wear, the ghost of some once-fashionable club in his tie's Windsor knot.