The covenant - James A. Michener [590]
Had he been married, his wife would probably have made him bathe, but he lived with a slatternly sister in a gypsy-type tin-walled house-wagon drawn by eight donkeys. He was seventy-one years old, toothless, bearded, stooped, with rheumy eyes and matted hair; he wore a flimsy undershirt, sagging pants, untied shoes with no socks and an oil-stained khaki hat. He had been haunting diamond fields since the age of ten.
He lived on canned foods, bits of meat and such mealie-pap as his slovenly sister bothered to make; his house-wagon was such a disgrace that other diamond hunters said, 'Even the bush lice won't go in.' Yet he lived in a kind of odoriferous glory, because on six mornings a week, year after fading year, he wakened with the conviction that on this day his luck was bound to change: 'Today I find that diamond as big as a fist.' After a swig of lukewarm coffee two or three days old, he would shuffle out the door of his house-wagon, stand in the dust, scratch himself under both arms and shout, 'Kom nou! Waar is die diamante?' And he would almost run to the spot where his five sieves waited and his pick and shovel rested against a tree. He was perpetually convinced that a day would come when he would find his diamond.
He had little cause for optimism. As a boy of fourteen he had been the main support of one of those marginal Afrikaner farms, and on this waterless land he had been expected to sustain himself and his sister. Four dreadful drought-ridden years passed as they fought to grub existence from the inhospitable acres, always urged on by their predikant, who cited various parables relevant to their condition. One Sunday, after returning from prayers for rain to a noontime meal of pumpkin and mealies, Pik and his sister concluded that God did not intend them to struggle with land to which He sent no water, so they abandoned the farm and acquired the house-wagon and eight mules.
In 1926, as a youth of eighteen, he searched for alluvial diamonds on the Lichtenburg diggings, following a tributary of the Vaal, and there he found his first profitable gem: a flawed stone of just under four carats for which he received the intoxicating sum of £47. That night he announced himself as a diamond digger: 'Pik Prinsloo, diamonds.'
His luck had not held. For five desolate years he trudged the Lichtenburg diggings without turning up another diamond of any size. He found chips. He found trivial stones of less than half a carat. But the diamond as big as a fist eluded him, as did those as big as the tip of his little finger, and in 1932 he experienced the indignity of having to quit the diamond fields to test his fortune in the eastern Transvaal gold fields, but even when he did pan a few payable nuggets he derived little satisfaction from them. He was a diamond man; the lure of those beautiful gems tantalized him, so back he went with his spinster sister, his mules and his sieves to probe the smaller streams of the north.
He had no luck whatever, and 1937 found him on the emerald fields near Gravelotte, at the western border of the Kruger National Park. Sometimes at night, sitting in his house-wagon in some lonely spot, he would hear the lions and hyenas, but unlike the other diggers, he never ventured into the park to see the great beasts. 'I'm a diamond man,' he growled. 'I oughtn't to be here at all. A bucketful of emeralds isn't worth one good diamond, and some day . . .'
No matter where he went, or how his fortunes decayed, he had one treasure which differentiated him from most other men, and on the rare occasions when he left his sister to join the other diggers in some rural bar and strangers would intrude, he would be apt to place upon the counter a small flat object wrapped in dirty canvas and say ominously, 'Look