suddenly jumped to his feet, a smile on his face, and the up-turning of his lips made the livid scar across his chin ripple.
‘Tell me how you happened to go to work for Van der Merwe.’
‘On the day he came to the beach with his daughter – she was about eleven then – I suppose she got bored sitting around and she went into the water and the tide grabbed her. I jumped in and pulled her out. I was a young boy, but I thought Van der Merwe was going to kill me.’
Jamie stared at him. ‘Why?’
‘Because I had my arms around her. Not because I was black, but because I was a male. He can’t stand the thought of any man touching his daughter. Someone finally calmed him down and reminded him that I had saved her life. He brought me back to Klipdrift as his servant.’ Banda hesitated a moment, then continued. ‘Two months later, my sister came to visit me.’ His voice was very quiet. ‘She was the same age as Van der Merwe’s daughter.’
There was nothing Jamie could say.
Finally Banda broke the silence. ‘I should have stayed in the Namib Desert. That was an easy job. We’d crawl along the beach picking up diamonds and putting them in little jam tins.’
‘Wait a minute. Are you saying that the diamonds are just lying there, on top of the sand?’
‘That’s what I’m saying, Mr McGregor. But forget what you’re thinking. Nobody can get near that field. It’s on the ocean, and the waves are up to thirty feet high. They don’t even bother guarding the shore. A lot of people have tried to sneak in by sea. They’ve all been killed by the waves or the reefs.’
‘There must be some other way to get in.’
‘No. The Namib Desert runs right down to the ocean’s shore.’
‘What about the entrance to the diamond field?’
‘There’s a guard tower and a barbed-wire fence. Inside the fence are guards with guns and dogs that’ll tear a man to pieces. And they have a new kind of explosive called a land mine. They’re buried all over the field. If you don’t have a map of the land mines, you’ll get blown to bits.’
‘How large is the diamond field?’
‘It runs for about thirty-five miles.’
Thirty-five miles of diamonds just lying on the sand … ‘My God!’
‘You aren’t the first one to get excited about the diamond fields at the Namib, and you won’t be the last. I’ve picked up what was left of people who tried to come in by boat and got torn apart by the reefs. I’ve seen what those land mines do if a man takes one wrong step, and I’ve watched those dogs rip out a man’s throat. Forget it, Mr McGregor. I’ve been there. There’s no way in and there’s no way out – not alive, that is.’
Jamie was unable to sleep that night. He kept visualizing thirty-five miles of sand sprinkled with enormous diamonds belonging to Van der Merwe. He thought of the sea and the jagged reefs, the dogs hungry to kill, the guards and the land mines. He was not afraid of the danger; he was not afraid of dying. He was only afraid of dying before he repaid Salomon van der Merwe.
On the following Monday Jamie went into a cartographer’s shop and bought a map of Great Namaqualand. There was the beach, off the South Atlantic Ocean between Lüderitz to the north and the Orange River Estuary to the south. The area was marked in red: SPERRGEBIET – Forbidden.
Jamie examined every detail of the area on the map, going over it again and again. There were three thousand miles of ocean flowing from South America to South Africa, with nothing to impede the waves, so that their full fury was spent on the deadly reefs of the South Atlantic shore. Forty miles south, down the coastline, was an open beach. That must be where the poor bastards launched their boats to sail into the forbidden area, Jamie decided. Looking at the map, he could understand why the shore was not guarded. The reefs would make a landing impossible.
Jamie turned his attention to the land entrance to the diamond field. According to Banda, the area was fenced in with barbed wire and patrolled twenty-four hours a day by armed guards. At the entrance itself was a manned watch-tower. And even if one did somehow manage to slip past the watchtower into the diamond area, there would be the land mines and guard dogs.
The following day when Jamie met Banda, he asked, ‘You said there was a land-mine map of the field?’
‘In the Namib Desert? The supervisors have the maps, and they lead the diggers to work. Everybody walks in a single file so no one gets blown up.’ His eyes filled with a memory. ‘One day my uncle was walking in front of me and he stumbled on a rock and fell on top of a land mine. There wasn’t enough left of him to take home to his family.’
Jamie shuddered.
‘And then there’s the sea mis, Mr McGregor. You’ve never seen a mis until you’ve been in one in the Namib. It rolls in from the ocean and blows all the way across the desert to the mountains and it blots out everything. If you’re caught in one of them, you don’t dare move. The land-mine maps are not good then because you can’t see where you’re going. Everybody just sits quietly until the mis lifts.’
‘How long do they last?’
Banda shrugged. ‘Sometimes a few hours, sometimes a few days.’
‘Banda, have you ever seen a map of those land mines?’
‘They’re closely guarded.’ A worried look crossed his face. ‘I’m telling you again, no one can get away with what you’re thinking. Once in a while workers will try to smuggle out a diamond. There is a special tree for hanging them. It’s a lesson to everybody not to try to steal from the company.’
The whole thing looked impossible. Even if he could manage to get into Van der Merwe’s diamond field, there was no way out. Banda was right. He would have to forget about it.
The next day he asked Banda, ‘How does Van der Merwe keep the workers from stealing diamonds when they come off their shifts?’
‘They’re searched. They strip them down mother-naked and then they look up and down every hole they’ve got. I’ve seen workers cut gashes in their legs and try to smuggle diamonds out in them. Some drill out their back teeth and stick diamonds up there. They’ve tried every trick you can think of.’ He looked at Jamie and said, ‘If you want to live, you’ll get that diamond field off your mind.’
Jamie tried. But the idea kept coming back to him, taunting him. Van der Merwe’s diamonds just lying on the sand waiting. Waiting for him.
The solution came to Jamie that night. He could hardly contain his impatience until he saw Banda. Without preamble, Jamie said, ‘Tell me about the boats that have tried to land on the beach.’
‘What about them?’
‘What kind of boats were they?’
‘Every kind you can think of. A schooner. A tugboat. A big motorboat. Sailboat. Four men even tried it in a rowboat. While I worked the field, there were half a dozen tries. The reefs just chewed the
