Blood Diamond Chapter 17

Tregoning was mad, Daniel decided, as he walked away from that slumped heap of bone and withered flesh beneath the shade tree. Too many years of fever and hardship and loneliness among the heathen had broken his mind. But Daniel saw, in that sad, frail old shadow of a man, his own future, and he knew that something would have to be done.

Something did happen, and it was not of Daniel’s planning. It was an opportunity and, when it came, he was ready for it. They had been passing westwards for some time. They had crossed a mighty river and walked between high hills and they were in a place where the air was clear and thin. The days were not so hot and close as before. They were camped beside a small river, a tributary of a mightier one, about which the men spoke around the campfire in tones of awe and reverence. All that day, great clouds had been massing in the sky, building from the south and the west, huge grey pillars of cloud, and there was a feeling of buzz and crackle as the sun set in glorious orange and purple, like the robes of an ancient Emperor. A storm was coming and there was a feeling of expectancy in the camp, as though some tremendous event were about to descend.

The talk around the night fire was subdued. The King did not join them, but the Princess did, sitting silent and inward, alone with her thoughts. After a time in which she ate but little, the Princess rose and took her leave. After she left, Daniel felt uncomfortable, alone among the closed, hostile faces of the men. He did not belong there. After a while he too rose and left, feeling eyes burning into his back as he walked away. A great peal of building thunder rolled across the sky as he walked toward his shelter, and a great sheet of white light lit up the horizon. In the moment of frozen illumination, he saw her.
She was standing below a wide, spreading tree which, in the daylight, was hot with red flowers. She was swathed in red cloth, wrapped and swaddled around so that nothing beneath was visible. Daniel stopped and looked at the Princess and, in the next shiver of white light from the heavens, he saw her green eyes. She waited until he walked near to her then she turned and – slow enough to indicate he should follow – she walked and he trailed behind her toward the place he knew she was taking him: the Temple of the Bird and the Stone.

As before, the guards watched them impassively. The Princess bowed her head as she passed into the entrance to the shrine and Daniel, trembling with many emotions, bowed in his turn. 
Inside, the room danced with golden light. More oil lights had been added, of a different kind, scented and coloured so that it seemed the room swum with honey and amber. The Bird was there, and the Stone was there, and Daniel’s heart simultaneously soared and lurched to see it. The Princess walked deeper into the shrine to stand beside the Bird. She turned to face Daniel, her eyes still the greener in the amber-honey flicker of the lights. Slowly, with an air of unstated ceremony, she reached to her neck and pulled out the long metal pin that held her cloth wrapping together. It unfolded slowly, falling off her body like a collapsing cocoon. Outside the thunder boomed.

The cloth fell away from the Princess and she stood facing Daniel, her chin held high and proud, her eyes unblinking, unflickering, upon his face. Daniel looked at her body and the breath caught in his chest.

Her chest was bare, and around her firm, slender neck, descending between the smooth bronzed fullness of her breasts, she wore a broad choker and a long thin necklace of the most dazzling beaten gold. Suspended from the golden chain was an oval stone - bluish, or black when it caught the light differently - that hung at the level of her navel. Her breasts and their dark nipples were sprinkled with what appeared to be gold dust, crushed to a powdery fineness.

Around her waist the Princess wore a skirt of thin golden plaques, suspended from another fine chain of gold. When she shifted her position, they tinkled and clinked against each other, parting and swaying together like fronds of grass. Her thighs and lower legs were sprinkled with the same golden powder – she might have been an idolatrous image, consecrated to some exotic and sensual god. 
Daniel was incapable of thought, incapable of movement. She stepped toward him with that same measured pace and, with fingers long and cool, stripped from him the loincloth of snow-white cow he had worn since being ushered into the tribe. He stood naked before her in the shrine of the Sacred Stone, and allowed her to run her cool fingertips over his thighs, his belly and chest. She placed her hands on his shoulders and he sank to his knees under the pressure of her touch. She stood before him and hitched to her waist the skirt of beaten gold. Beneath the skirt, in the dark secret of her thighs, she was as smooth and hairless as a high priestess, glinting with the dusting of gold powder. She spread her legs and reached between them, pulling lightly apart her swollen, glistening lips. Her eyes were on his but, for once, he could not meet them. She placed one long, brazen leg on either side of his body and bent at the knees, lowering herself, precisely, deliberately, unerringly, without need of a guiding hand.
There was a crack of thunder and, for Daniel, a lightning bolt descended to split open his skull and pour in all that belonged to the night sky – all the stars and suns and blackness and space, all the meteors and flashes, the thunder and rain. It felt as though it were all surging through him like a river, boundless, running untrammelled through the lightning rod of his sex and into the undying earth.
She raised herself and let herself fall, and the muscles of her smooth thighs clenched and released. He felt the swollen tip of himself dissolve into a hot continuity with her body. He felt as though he were everywhere inside her and nowhere. He left his body in those hours of slow, fast, urgent, languorous coupling. He lifted above himself, he moved to a different place, and yet never did he truly lose himself. For no matter what starry galaxies of the spirit he floated across that night, a thought, an image was never apart from him. And when they lay spent on the floor of the shrine, she lost to sleep with the storm breaking above, his hand still weakly clutching at her breast, the nipple between his fingertips, Daniel’s eyes could not stay long closed. They opened, and they were fixed on the low, throbbing red light of the Blood Diamond.

Copyright Ranulph Moore

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Ranulph Moore describes himself as an explorer, who became a writer to purge himself of the adventures that were crowding his life. He says he has seen it all, in a life spent observing the lives of others. He will travel anywhere – as long as he can make a decent cup of tea and launder a linen jacket. He describes Africa as one of his great loves. He has spent time in every country on the continent. If he can’t find a good champagne, he has been known to resort to gin. He has homes in Paris, Jura and Cape Town. At present, he lives in Madagascar, where he is researching his latest book.

Read an interview with Ranulph Moore.