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pegged the ancient workings I first stumbled on in the
sixties.’
    ‘The Harkness Mine,’ Rhodes nodded heavily, and
even Ralph was impressed by the range and grasp of his mind.
‘I remember your original description in The
Hunter’s Odyssey . Did you sample the reef?’
    In reply, Zouga placed a dozen lumps of quartz upon the table
in front of him, and the raw gold glistened so that the men
around the table craned forward in rapt fascination. Mr Rhodes
turned one of the samples in his big mottled hands before passing
it to the American engineer.
    ‘What do you make of these, Harry?’
    ‘It will go fifty ounces a ton,’ Harry whistled
softly. ‘Perhaps too rich, like Nome and Klondike.’
The American looked up at Ralph. ‘How thick is the reef?
How broad is the strike?’
    Ralph shook his head. ‘I don’t know, the workings
are too narrow to get into the face.’
    ‘This is quartz, of course, not the banket reef like we
have on the Witwatersrand,’ Harry Mellow murmured.
    The banket reef was named after the sweetmeat of toffee and
nuts and almonds and cloves which the conglomerated reef so much
resembled. It was made up of the thick sedimentary beds of
ancient buried lakes, not as rich in gold as this chip of quartz,
but many feet thick and extending as wide as the broad lakes had
once stretched, a mother lode which could be mined for a hundred
years without exhausting its reserves.
    ‘It’s too rich,’ Harry Mellow repeated,
fondling the sample of quartz. ‘I can’t believe that
it will be more than a stringer a few inches thick.’
    ‘But if it isn’t?’ Rhodes demanded
harshly.
    The American smiled quietly. ‘Then you will not only
control nearly all the diamonds in the world, Mr Rhodes, but most
of the gold as well.’
    His words were a sharp reminder to Ralph that the British
South Africa Company owned fifty per cent royalty in every ounce
of gold mined in Matabeleland, and Ralph felt his resentment
return in full force. Rhodes and his ubiquitous BSA Company were
like a vast octopus that smothered the efforts and the fortunes
of all lesser men.
    ‘Will you allow Harry to ride with me for a few days, Mr
Rhodes, so that he can examine the strike?’ Ralph’s
irritation sharpened the tone of his request, so that
Rhodes’ big shaggy head lifted quickly and his pale blue
eyes seemed to search out his soul for a moment before he nodded,
and then with a mercurial change of direction abandoned the
subject of gold and shot his next question at Zouga.
    ‘The Matabele indunas – how are they behaving
themselves?’
    This time Zouga hesitated. ‘They have grievances, Mr
Rhodes.’
    ‘Yes?’ The swollen features coagulated into a
scowl.
    ‘The cattle, naturally enough, are the main source of
trouble,’ Zouga said quietly, and Rhodes cut him off
brusquely.
    ‘We captured less than 125,000 head of cattle, and we
returned 40,000 of those to the tribe.’
    Zouga did not remind him that the return was made only after
the strongest representation by Robyn St John, Zouga’s own
sister. Robyn was the missionary doctor at Khami Mission Station
and she had once been Lobengula’s closest friend and
adviser.
    ‘Forty thousand head of cattle, Ballantyne! A most
generous gesture by the Company!’ Rhodes repeated
portentously, and again he did not add that he had made this
return in order to avert the famine which Robyn St John had
warned him would decimate the defeated Matabele nation, and which
would have surely brought the intervention of the Imperial
government in Whitehall, and possibly the revocation of the Royal
Charter under which Rhodes’ Company ruled both Mashonaland
and Matabeleland. Not such an outstanding act of charity, after
all, Ralph thought wryly.
    ‘After giving back those cattle to the indunas, we were
left with less than eighty-five thousand head, the Company barely
recouped the cost of the war.’
    ‘Still the indunas claim they