Blood Diamond Chapter 11

It took them the better part of an hour to make their way down the side of that cliff. The King swung himself around to another shower of vine and creeper and, using the foliage and the fissures in the rock wall that allowed wedge-spaces for hands and feet, they managed to ease themselves painfully to the safety of the floor. Daniel’s muscles trembled like mercury in a bowl. Clinging to the vine in those first terrible moments, they had heard the fearful sounds of destruction above them. None of the initiates had survived the dreadful vengeance.

Once they reached the ground, the King turned to Daniel, looked him in the eyes and said something of slow, incomprehensible solemnity. Then the King took Daniel’s right hand, and placed it over his heart.

They gathered certain plants and bark from nearby trees and the King deftly made a fire in a hollow between the rocks. The bark and branches had been specially selected to send a great signal plume of lustrous white smoke into the blue skies. It was a beacon to the retrieval team, who arrived in hours and who, by the careful impassivity of their faces, were trained to show no signs of shock at the carnage. They hunkered to their jobs, cutting away long slices of elephant flesh that they would carry back to the royal camp for the ritual feast. The King had taken a skin of water from them, and a parcel of the dried white porridge wrapped in a parcel of broad leaves, and after they had eaten, Daniel and the King set out on the long walk back to camp.

They arrived as light was fading, to Daniel’s relief. There was no allure to walking that wild land in the hunting hours of the great cats, whose calls and growls echoed across the purple skies.

The next day the retrieval team returned with great strips of the dalovu’s flesh and, that night, tribespeople came from all the surrounding camps and a great feast was held, with ritual remembrance of the fallen and a benediction to the young men to follow in their footsteps. And during that feast, before all the chiefs and headmen, the King made Daniel rise. He cleared a place beside him at the fire, and Daniel was made to walk around and sit beside him.

Tregoning bent low behind Daniel and murmured in his ear: “Now you are a member of the Royal party. The King has officially acknowledged you as a member of his close retinue.”

Daniel wanted to turn and ask more, but Tregoning had melted away again and was paying obeisance to the Princess. As Daniel looked across, he noticed her eyes upon him, flashing that unearthly green in the firelight and he felt suddenly self-conscious, a heat rising under his cheeks. She was looking at him with a flat curiosity, as though she were staring at something she had sensed in him before, but only now began to notice.

Daniel’s life with the Annuba changed after that night. He moved his bed skins to the Royal camp, was given a place among them, and moved on northwards with them two days later. The Royals themselves travelled separately – carried on great litters made from lashed-together poles and hides and reed matting – but Daniel discovered another secret of the Royal camp that quite took his breath away. 

Slightly separate from the Royal litters, but accorded as much respect, pomp and care, another precious cargo had its own retinue. There was in the possession of the Annuba a magnificent casket, a chest of sorts, made from ornately-carved, heavy wood of ancient appearance, and decorated at each corner with moulded statues in shining gold in the forms of heavily beaked birds, their wings outspread. There were handles on the sides in thick, rounded gold, and inlay upon the lid in mother-of-pearl and a metal that shone like gold and silver combined. When first he saw it, Daniel gasped and had to steady himself with his hand against a tree-trunk. He had never seen so magnificent an object – to encounter it here, so far from the palaces and courts of Europe, was so unexpected as to belong to a dream.

The chest was affixed on long cross-poles, wound in silk, so it could be carried everywhere by four dedicated bearers. A length of cloth was draped over its top to prevent the sun flashing off the gold, which would have gleamed and shone like a lighthouse across the veld. The casket did not appear to be particularly heavy, but those same four bearers always bore the four corners of the litter-poles, and carried it everywhere. Before letting it rest on the floor, a small attending boy laid out a wide square of red cloth upon which the casket was placed. Completing the retinue, always walking one on each corner beside the bearer, was a party of four of the Royal guard, battle-axes gleaming, on permanent guard duty.

In the evenings or in camps, in addition to the shelters made for the Royals, it was the task of the four bearers to create a shelter – a large one, larger than those the men slept in, and higher - in which the carved, wooden box was placed. The four guards kept silent watch through the night, sleeping in shifts of two, to keep it safe.

Daniel tried, whenever he could, to get close enough during the day’s walk to study the markings and carvings of the wood, and to marvel at the wealth of the ornamentation. But it was discouraged, politely at first, then with the set jaws and threatening eyes of the Royal guard. Now that he was of the Royal party, Daniel had more opportunity to see Tregoning and, on one occasion, tried to ask him about the box, but Tregoning’s wizened face became instantly closed.

“There are matters,” he said abruptly, “better left alone.”

From time to time at night he would hear the sounds of distant low chanting, humming and controlled wailing, the low sound of a drum, the clinking, as of metal. On more than one occasion he went to investigate and thought the sound was coming from the large shelter, the shrine that held the casket. On one occasion, he took a casual stroll through the flickering light of the multiple camp-fires and flaming torches, past the box’s shrine. The dark eyes of the guards watched him expressionlessly, and he was sure he saw their grip on the battle-axes tighten. Short of risking his life, there seemed no way to gain entrance to the mystery of the casket until, all of an evening, quite unsought, the mystery was revealed to him.

It was another dark night, with the yellow African moon a sliver over the bush and passing behind high silver clouds. The hideous laughter of a night predator pealed across the black leagues. The night meal was concluded. The King had not left his enclosure that night – and indeed on many nights he did not. He was apparently of the long-proven regal conviction that distance and unfamiliarity is veneration’s best helpmeet. But the Princess Kamelka had taken the evening meal around the fire with the rest of the band. 

There had been little contact between them in the passing weeks, but from time to time during his daily round, Daniel had felt someone watching him, and had turned to catch a flash of her green eyes from the shade beneath a tree or beyond a crowd of tribesmen. Once he had been washing himself on the banks of a stream, eyes closed in pleasure at the cool water running over the muscles of his chest, and he had opened his eyes to see her standing further along the bank, ankle-deep in the stream, the water making ripples as it warped itself around her long, slim calves. She had held his gaze for a long moment, until he had averted his eyes and continued his washing, uncertain how to proceed. When he looked up again, she was gone.

So Daniel didn’t know where he stood with the Princess Kamelka. Of course she aroused and enflamed him, but there was something about her that disturbed him – and not just the danger implied in a commoner, and a stranger at that, thinking carnal thoughts above his station. No, there was something unworldly, other-worldly, about her. She had an air of being not quite human.

Not once during this evening meal, while they ate and drank the traditional wooden cup of thick fermented beer, had she looked in his direction. But later, as the party began to drift apart to their separate beds and shelters, she murmured something in the ear of Tregoning, - hovering as ever close to her side - and Tregoning came to Daniel.

“The Princess would have you go to her,” he said in an almost disapproving tone.

Daniel was surprised, and instantly apprehensive, but he went as he was bid. The Princess rose to her feet – Daniel was tall, even for a man, but she could look him quite coolly and squarely in the eye. Her green eyes were mesmeric. Daniel lost all notion of protocol – did one hold the gaze of a Princess, or look away in a show of obeisance? Daniel could not look away.

With a word, the Princess dismissed Tregoning, who took himself off, grumbling slightly and throwing curious looks back at them as he went. Then the Princess walked off. Daniel assumed he was expected to follow. She walked smoothly and with purpose and an evident destination in mind. Daniel’s mind raced and turned as he fell in step beside her. Were they going to her shelter? To some secluded place? To a dark hollow under a tree?

It was with a combination of excitement and disappointment that he realised she was taking him down the trodden corridor formed by two rows of flaming torches, to the site of his curiosity - to the shelter, the shrine in which lay, guarded and protected against the perils of the night, the fabulous golden casket.

Copyright Rannulph Moore

A PDF download of Blood Diamond is available in our shop.

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 Rannulph Moore.