The Angels Weep Read Online Free

under the sleeves of his thin cotton shirt,
as he lifted the Hottentot and his burden to the surface without
a pause, and when he had finished, Ralph’s breathing was
still even and quiet and there was not a single bead of
perspiration on his face.
    ‘So, Jan Cheroot, what did you find?’
    Jan Cheroot was coated all over with fine pale dust through
which his sweat had cut muddy runnels and he stank of bat guano
and the mushroom odour of long-deserted caves. With hands that
still shook with fear and exhaustion, he opened the flap of the
saddlebag at his waist.
    ‘This is what I found,’ he croaked, and Zouga took
a lump of the raw rough rock from him.
    It had a crystalline texture, that glittered like ice and was
marbled with blue and riven by minute flaws and fissures, some of
which had cracked through under the pounding of the iron adze
with which Jan Cheroot had hacked it from the rock face. However,
the shattered fragments of shining quartz were held together by
the substance that had filled every crack and fault line in the
ore. This cement was a thin malleable layer of bright metal, that
twinkled in the sunlight when Zouga wet it with the tip of his
tongue.
    ‘By God, Ralph, will you look at that!’ And Ralph
took it from his father’s hand with the reverence of a
worshipper receiving the sacrament.
    ‘Gold!’ he whispered, and it sparkled at him, that
lovely yellow smile that had captivated men almost from the time
they had first stood upon their hind legs.
    ‘Gold!’ Ralph repeated.
    To find this glimmer of precious metal they had laboured most
of their lives, father and son, they had ridden far and, in the
company of other freebooters, had fought bloody battles, had
helped destroy a proud nation and hunt a king to a lonely
death.
    Led by a sick man with swollen crippled heart and grandiose
dreams, they had seized a vast land that now bore that
giant’s name, Rhodesia, and they had forced the land to
yield up, one by one, its riches. They had taken its wide sweet
pastures and lovely mountain ranges, its forests of fine native
timber, its herds of sleek cattle, its legions of sturdy black
men who for a pittance would provide the thews to gather in the
vast harvest. And now at last they held the ultimate treasure in
their hands.
    ‘Gold!’ Ralph said for the third time.
    T hey struck
their pegs along the ridge, cutting them from the living acacia
trees that oozed clear sap from the axe cuts, and they hammered
them into the hard earth with the flat of the blade. Then they
built cairns of stone to mark the corner of each claim.
    Under the Fort Victoria Agreement, which both of them had
signed when they volunteered to ride against Loben-gula’s
impis, they were each entitled to ten gold claims. This naturally
did not apply to Jan Cheroot. Despite the fact that he had ridden
into Matabeleland with Jameson’s flying column and shot
down the Matabele amadoda at the Shangani river and the
Bembesi crossing with as much gusto as had his masters, yet he
was a man of colour, and as such he could not share the
spoils.
    In addition to the booty to which Zouga and Ralph were
entitled under the Victoria Agreement, both of them had bought up
many blocks of claims from the dissolute and spendthrift troopers
of Jameson’s conquering force, some of whom had sold for
the price of a bottle of whisky. So between them they could peg
off the entire ridge and most of the valley bottoms on each side
of it.
    It was hard work, but urgent, for there were other prospectors
abroad, one of whom could have followed their tracks. They worked
through the heat of noon and by the light of the moon until sheer
exhaustion forced them to drop their axes and sleep where they
fell. On the fourth evening, they could stop at last, content
that they had secured the entire reef for themselves. There was
no gap between their pegs into which another prospector could
jump.
    ‘Jan Cheroot, there