Flight of the Diamond Smugglers Read online

  In ancient Egypt, pigeon excrement was a valuable commodity, responsible for a then-untold agricultural windfall due to the high nitrogen content in the resulting fertilizer. We’re eating rarefied food, pigeon meat being reserved, for centuries in Old England, for the plates of the aristocracy. For hundreds of years, all pigeon feces within English borders, by legal decree, was claimed as property of the Crown—a portion of it devoted to increasing the abundance of agricultural output, a portion of it used to fabricate saltpeter, an ingredient essential to the production of gunpowder, which was responsible for England’s swift and successful colonizing of much of the world. Without the shit of the birds we’re busy eating, history would be different, South Africa would be different, as would the mining industry, the schematics of this beach that we’re standing on, the character and number of the shipwrecks in that ocean over there, and the cargo and crew that went down with them. Would the British have been such atrociously effective imperialists, I want to ask these men, without it?

  Instead, I say nothing, and the men piss the heat out of the embers. Full, and a little nauseous, we pile into the truck and rove along the beach, collapsing the sand shelves, the ebb tidal deltas, the sheets and the shoals. A couple of them are taking bags of dead pigeons back to their families for supper.

  Inexplicably, someone has strung a length of barbed wire fence across a portion of the beach, hemming something in or keeping something out. The man in the passenger seat hops out to inspect it. Running along the top of the fence is a long string of pink yarn, hundreds of feet long, and the passenger, curious, begins to pull it from the barbs toward him. We wait for either the yarn to break, or its terminus, which is hidden in the distance, screened in mist. This yarn-pulling, arm after arm, an endless tug-of-war, the pink string spooling into the sand at his feet, seems to take forever. I’m eager to get back to Louisa, but also eager to see what’s at the end of the line.

  Finally, after about ten minutes of careful pulling, the passenger comes up with his catch, a crooked crucifix of plastic translucent pipe and hose, cinched with the fingers of a rubber glove and adorned in the crooks of the crossbars—the pits where the stipes meets the patibulum—with deliberately waxed and curled barbs of feathers. Surely, we’ve disturbed some sacred site. Desecrated some omen or idol.

  The silence of the men is unnerving. When they break their silence, they argue about whether or not to take this weird sculpture with us. In a lapse of judgment, I ask if I can photograph the thing, and they look at one another with faces I will not remember. The driver says, “I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t do that.”

  The passenger claims to have a “Coloured friend” who may know what this thing is. Reluctantly, the men succumb to their inquiring minds, and we bring the thing onboard. We recede into an introspective solemnity as we drive into the mist, looking for the street that will get us out of here.

  When we find it, the makeshift centerline is comprised of dead proteas, having been squashed, it seems, beneath ostrich feet. Still, in the low evening light, the sad bees try for fertilization, the mist settling in their fur, their long tongues reaching into the flowers’ tubes and finding nothing but road dust. At the shoulder, worker ants pour into a mussel shell. Should they fail to find food there, they will eat one another. To lighten the mood, to restore the sense of festivity that attended the pigeon shoot, the passenger passes around a wallet-sized picture of his two Pomeranians. When the picture is returned to him after having made the rounds, he kisses it before replacing it in his pocket. The driver keeps his eyes peeled for the female ghosts who are said to hitchhike this road, pointing downward at their bare feet, causing fatal accidents for whoever picks them up. Even they avoid us today.

  We drive through a pan filled with cairns of dried horseshit, but no horses—monuments to some dead ranch, the people and animals who once trotted and rode there. Another confounding clue for the aliens to rove among, and decode.

  We come to a shack of rusted sheet metal and burlap. The place is lit with purloined electricity, a complex jumble of spliced wires beneath the sand. A single, too-white bulb flickers inside. A man in blue reflective overalls sits in the dust out front, antagonizing an anthill with a pikestaff of petrified wood. It looks like the sort of rod that once urged water from rock. The ants are so huge, I can see them from the back of the Land Rover, the sand alive with black static. We stop the truck and this man stands, waves to the passenger. The ants attack his reflective pant cuffs and he pays them no mind. He’s wearing brown rubber gumboots. The passenger swings the piece of yarn, the pipe and rubber glove sculpture arcing toward this man like a lure. When it lands between his feet, he seizes up, and his hands, as if electrified, pop open, his fingers splayed like the feathers of an anhinga. His staff falls to the sand and, in a matter of seconds, it disappears beneath the swarm of ants. He stares at the thing between his feet, and the passenger asks him something in Afrikaans, but the man does not answer.

  The men shift uncomfortably in the Land Rover, whisper among themselves, and a few of them utter the word Tokoloshe, the name of the evil dwarf-like water sprite of Zulu mythology, an invoked harbinger of bad luck: financial ruin, lost love, illness, blindness, pain, and death. As the Tokoloshe is said to rape and bite off the toes of sleeping schoolchildren before jumping up and down on their chests, finally exhausting them to death, hordes of South Africans raise their bedframes up on bricks or stacks of wood, in order to prevent the diminutive spirit from reaching the mattress. Louisa, too, did this as a child.

  The passenger stands in the truck, impotently holding the pink yarn. The driver takes a puff from an asthma inhaler. As if defibrillated, the man in the blue overalls turns from the thing we cast between his boots and sprints away into the desert. The passenger, literally, and with a utility knife, cuts the line. The man runs until we can’t see him anymore, his path cartoonishly traced by a wyvern of accursed dust. I wonder if he’ll ever return home. The faceless men force their laughter, try to convince me that this is no big deal. There are bits of feather stuck to the toes of our shoes. Amoebas of sand on the vamps and welts, outsoles and tongues, pasted to drops of bird blood. Through the doorway of the shack, something is cooking on a hotplate. Whatever it is, it is boiling over.

  Chapter 6

  Driving to Kleinzee amid Shipwrecks and Snakes

  THE MEN IN THE YELLOW JUMPSUITS DROP ME BACK OFF IN PORT Nolloth. We have sobered up, and our goodbyes bear little enthusiasm. When I find Louisa at the motel, she is sitting on the bench outside reception, beneath the blue glow of the insect zapper, tossing cheese cracker crumbs to the pigeons. I try to tell her about the rest of my day. She says something to me about being careful, or taking care, and I consider the gulf between the acts of being and taking. She says little else. She empties the cellophane of the cheese crackers, and we go inside.

  That night, I dream mundane dreams. In them, Louisa and I sit up in this very motel bed in the desert, our hands out in front of us, fingers splayed. Our hands, waiting for the rest of our bodies to catch up. Our hands are the empty nests, the eggless zeros, reddening only because our hearts are beating with so many old sadnesses. We are ever circling our losses, trying to find the way into them, so we can find the way out. Always getting over, always recovering. We need salve. Medicine and diamonds. We need to convince ourselves that we are strong enough to carry the weight of a pigeon—their soft 9.3- to 13.4-ounce bodies. They will come to us as we’ve trained them to do. They will have popcorn skins in their throats. Ketchup in their feathers. We’ve trained them well, and they slither in the air above us, recalling their serpentine ancestors, counting the seconds until they can land.

  The next morning, we wake late, check out, get into the rental car and drive. The dirt road from Port Nolloth to Kleinzee is flanked by red sand on the ocean side, beige grassland on the other. Skeletal electric stations power places far from here, or no place at all, with their soft echoes and hiccups. Along the road’s edge, ditches protect rusty p
ipelines. A sign meant to educate God-knows-who about the Nama people rusts toward illegibility, tilts in the dust toward some idea of the ocean, the sole remaining readable sections proclaiming, “They were desert dwellers; Reform will come in the form of communal land tenure and land redistribution through the surface use of mining land and ownership of small mining operations; They poisoned the tips of their arrows with the latex of Euphorbias; Today some Nama men work on the diamond mines as contract labourers; Their dwellings today may be covered in sacking, cloth, or plastic . . .”

  Signs reading “Mining Area” and “African Star Minerals,” lone barrels, and abandoned whitewashed mining camps decorate the waste, all oxidizing amid tangles of forgotten razor wire, the things it was meant to protect no longer valuable, or usable. Offshore, bathymetric, echo-sounding side-scan sonar blasts reverberate from the ancient bays submerged beneath the sea, and the boats, concealed in fog, send their probes downward to poke among these gullies for diamonds. If they’re found, the stones will be sucked up by remote-controlled crawler robots, through slurry pipes and sorting screens, and hermetically sealed inside “fortune cans.” Deep below the surface, the tiny foraminifera fossils help map the way, guide the drills and the men who compel them.

  Once we get to Kleinzee, I intend to find Johann MacDonald, the elusive and (according to senior environmental manager Adele Wickens, my contact at the De Beers mine in Oranjemund, Namibia) “very cautious, very wary” mine manager of De Beers’s Namaqualand Mine. Weeks ago, I submitted fifteen copies of my passport to his office for the requisite background check on anyone who wants to come within a certain radius of the mine.

  Kleinzee is one of those towns along South Africa’s Diamond Coast that has been deemed “overmined.” MacDonald is now responsible for slowly laying off the workforce and shutting down the tremendous mine (and, to some degree, by extension, the entire town of Kleinzee). Once he is finished, the smaller Trans Hex company will take over and, with a bare-bones workforce, mine the estimated three million carats (an amount that De Beers feels is not worth their time, money, and effort) still left in the Kleinzee area, and attempt to rehabilitate the desert after the decades of environmental pillaging (something about which MacDonald, a former geologist, is rumored to be passionate).

  Also rumored (according to Wickens): Johann MacDonald has been known lately to take the occasional civilian onto the once pathologically secure and often violently restricted mine property, in order to share his knowledge, his burden. Wickens assures me that this is rumor only, and such a “tour” is “highly unlikely,” as certain higher-ups within the De Beers conglomerate, if they knew of such “tours,” such breaches of security, would not be pleased. I imagine Mr. Lester swooping into town like the mist, and “disappearing” Johann MacDonald. I want to find him before this happens.

  I struggle to hold onto the steering wheel. My hands tingle. Isolated rock monoliths press from the sand like molars. Hawks circle. Weavers build their tumorous nests onto the defunct telephone poles. Whistling rats take the few remaining plant seeds from the mine dump sites into their burrows, and fertilize them with their droppings. The sand is beautiful, because it too has rusted, in the end stages of decay. We pass a crooked sign reading:

  NAMAQUALAND MINES DIVISION

  WARNING

  PRIVATE ROAD OF DE BEERS

  CONSOLIDATED MINES

  FOR DE BEERS VEHICLES ONLY

  NO UNAUTHORISED ENTRY

  TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED

  On the other side of the sign, a skinny-legged emu threads through a flock of wild ostriches, head bowed to the sand, searching for food. I lean out the window and speak to the giant bird, and, to my surprise, it nods its head and stamps its three-toed foot listlessly into the sand.

  On this private road bisecting Die Sperrgebiet—the Forbidden Territory—is a white bygone church that once serviced the miners, doorless, the panes of its windows having long ago been punched out, its steeple having collapsed inward with the rest of the roof. Abandoned houses surround crumbling hospitals and schools, hyenas and jackals build dens amid the old desks and operating tables. The sand overtakes the old social clubs where dress codes once demanded that women wear long dresses and carry parasols, the men long pants and jackets with fat lapels. An upturned bathtub turns orange in the air, sheltering lizards and their insect meals. The wind briefly unearths an old pair of gumboots, and a hairbrush with a mother-of-pearl handle, before a new wind exacts the reburying. A set of three stairs rises out of the sand and crests at more sand. Something yelps out in the dunes. Louisa draws something with her index finger on the glove box. It is not a heart.

  *

  LAST NIGHT IN BED, TRYING TO UNWIND, I THUMBED THROUGH MY book on Cherokee legends, one of many I’ve packed that feature other stories in which pigeons and diamonds intersect. Now, driving to Kleinzee, one of these legends seems to manifest itself through the windshield. The wind draws sidewinding shapes onto the sand that recall the passage of the great mythical snake Uktena, the mere sight of which was sufficiently toxic to kill a human being. The serpent’s body was decorated with scales made of fire, horns of ice, and a diamond crescent at its forehead like a tiara, which emitted such a magnetic radiance that a human could not help but run toward the snake’s light, rather than attempt an escape. Even if one dreamt of the snake, this signified the demise of the dreamer’s entire family. Uktena had the circumference of a tree trunk, and it bore along its length luminous rings of many colors. The diamond crescent, known to the Cherokee as Ulunsuti, or “Transparent,” would bring untold luck, and the ability to work wonders, to anyone brave enough to capture it. To attain the crescent, one would have to get close enough to Uktena to shoot the giant snake in the seventh ring down from its head, the ring that contained its heart. Countless attempts to attain it were met with swift and brilliant death.

  In order to prove his worth as a Shawnee medicine man, and in order to end his torture as a prisoner of war by the Cherokee, Aganunitsi, or “Groundhog’s Mother,” was compelled to quest for the Ulunsuti diamond. “I will bring you the Ulunsuti, or die trying, or meet you back here in three moons to sing my death song,” Aganunitsi said.

  He was gifted by his captors with one ear of corn for his journey. Lesser snakes, an obese lizard, a frog the size of a bear, two turtles representing the angry sun and forgiving moon, and a confetti of leeches whirling like a dust storm, each, in turn, served as his guides. Eventually, he came to a mountain shaped like a diamond. His medicine pouch grew hot against his ribs, and burnt the flesh there. This burn was the talisman he needed to protect him from assured death. He rounded a bend in the trail and came upon Uktena who, as luck would have it, was in a deep sleep. Aganunitsi retreated downslope until he came to level soil. There, he dug a circular trench, surrounded it with pinecones, and lit the kindling aflame.

  Again, he ascended to the sleeping snake, aimed his arrow, and shot it in its seventh ring. The beast woke and chased Aganunitsi down the mountain, the Ulunsuti bursting with fire. Uktena, dying, spewed a mist of venom over the slope, which Aganunitsi escaped by leaping into the center of his circular trench. Only a single drop of venom leapt over the wall of flame and struck Aganunitsi between the eyes. The snake finally succumbed, its body impaled on a grove of trees.

  The medicine man exhaled, ate his corn, and summoned the birds of the forest who, for seven days, feasted on the great serpent’s corpse, the doves competing with the ravens for the meat. One of the ravens tried to make off with the Ulunsuti, but was foiled by a dove who alerted the medicine man with its cooing. Aganunitsi wrapped the diamond in a deerskin purse, and returned to the Cherokee, where he became a famed worker of wonders.

  The Ulunsuti grew within it an insatiable hunger, which took the form of a bloodred streak running through its center. In order for his magic to work, Aganunitsi had to feed the ravenous diamond the blood of doves, and so had to commit the sin of slaughtering the very birds who had helped grant the medicine man
his powers in the first place. Should Aganunitsi fail to feed the diamond, the gem would burst into flame, fly into the air, descend to the human settlements, and slit the throat of a child, slaking its thirst on the blood. The diamond demanded that even the conjuror who used its powers must forever live in fear of it. As the years passed, on the site where the blood of Uktena filled Aganunitsi’s trench, a doughnut-shaped lake formed, and the water was vermilion, and women would line its banks, waiting—sometimes for days and nights—for the chance to dye the cane splits of their baskets this impossibly beautiful red.

  *

  I RELATE THIS STORY TO LOUISA AS WE DRIVE. HER HEAD RESTS against the passenger-side window. I can hear the glass vibrating against her temple. “Those poor doves,” she says.

  The road to Kleinzee skirts the ocean, which entombs old shipwrecks. Over the years, many diamond rigs have run aground into this desert. In 1985, the 1,400-ton Poseidon (80 tons of which were diamond recovery equipment) crushed itself against the rocks 400 meters offshore from here, and began to tip into the sea. The ship’s captain, A. Baptista, issued panicked calls for help over the radio with a bloody mouth as the hull ruptured and ruptured. The engine room and fuel tanks filled with seawater, and the starving, injured crew of twenty-six were eventually hauled away to the same hospital by Consolidated Mine–owned helicopters, their diamonds left behind. The sign once necklaced over its flank—“This Vessel Is Operated By Dawn Diamond Co. Ltd. And Is Subject To Diamond Security Regulations. Admittance Aboard Is Strictly Prohibited. Personnel To Report To Duty Officer Or Watchman”—washed ashore to rust in the quicksand. The famed tug the Causeway Salvor was deployed from Cape Town to pull the boat free, but failed, and today the shell of the looted Poseidon still slumps off the Kleinzee shore, as yet unable even to disintegrate to the point of a merciful sinking.