Kruger's Alp

The chauffeur pointed to the grey Mercedes keeping discreetly behind them. ‘We’ll lose them,’ he promised.

The road ran for miles along the lakeside. The lower slopes of the mountain were thickly crammed with vines, every inch of land terraced to its very edges, the dense gree

And here was a grand house, a castle within its own walls, but no rearing bulk of dull stones, more of a Schloss, a château, whitewashed, trim and solid. Then they were driving through the great wrought-iron gates with their chevrons and swans intricately worked, along a gravel drive up to great oaken doors.

Their host in his big solid house at the end of a long drive, behind high walls and wrought-iron gates, awaited them on the steps. With his hand outstretched, wearing the dark business suit, the well-shaped smile so familiar from a thousand press photographs and television, with his head cocked to one side, sparse grey hair neatly combed, the round intelligent face with bright eyes that gave him the look of an intelligent gun dog, the characteristic quick shrewd glance from behind thick lashes, the quiet, formidable air of authority. It was very difficult for them to suppress their astonishment.

‘What? Himmelfarber, you!’ Blanchaille said.

Kipsel said, ‘It really is another bloody exodus. It’s a diaspora. If Himmelfarber the mine-owner has left, then it’s all finished. Everyone will leave. You won’t be able to move anywhere overseas for fleeing South Africans.’

‘But I haven’t left,’ said the mine-owner. ‘This is merely my summer place. I spend the African winter here.’

Blanchaille turned on his heel. ‘Have a happy holiday,’ he said.

‘I have a proposition,’ said Himmelfarber.

‘We’re not open to any proposals,’ Blanchaille said very firmly.

‘We may as well hear what he has to say,’ said Kipsel, ‘now that we’re here.’

‘Let’s talk inside,’ Himmelfarber led them through the house into an enormous lounge furnished in white leather with thick pink carpets on the floor, a large generous room looking through french windows onto the lawn and large circular lily pond. Himmelfarber stood at the bar at the far end and poured them drinks. A little fruit punch, he said, of his own making, light and refreshing.

On the walls of this room were blow-ups of black and white photographs of miners working below ground, drilling the rock face, or loading the ore, coming off shift. Happy pictures of a classroom full of new recruits learning Fanagalo. Other photographs, far more disturbing, showed men terribly mutilated, crushed and bleeding; they also saw corpses lying on sheets in what must have been a morgue, rows of them, they stared at the ceiling wide-eyed and with quite terrible, unfrightened detachment. Why should Himmelfarber keep these reminders about him?

Blanchaille considered the entrepreneur. Curtis Christian Himmelfarber was the brilliant son of a brilliant family. The family had been established by the remarkable Julius Himmelfarber, a pe

Frank Harris, the noted Irish philanderer on a visit to South Africa shortly before the Boer War began, had been favourably impressed.

Harris had met Julius Himmelfarber and liked him well enough to leave a portrait of him: ‘… cultured, urbane, very pointed in conversation, a gentle Croesus, a philosopher miner, a flower of the Semitic type, markedly superior to your Anglo-Saxon sportsmen.’ But then Harris, of course, had held a long-standing prejudice against the Anglo-Saxon sportsman, for, as he told Cecil Rhodes in a bizarre meeting which took place on top of Table Mountain while Rhodes presumably gazed from this fairest Cape in all the world towards distant Cairo, it was perfectly understandable that God in his youth should have chosen the Jews for his special people, for they were after all an attractive, lovable race. But that later he should have changed his mind in favour of the English, as Rhodes contended, showed that he must be in his dotage.

Curtis Christian Himmelfarber, who was now handing out drinks in the pink and white room to Blanchaille and Kipsel, would not have been described by Harris as the flower of the Semitic type. In any event, the Himmelfarbers had long since severed the co

The Himmelfarbers were the closest thing to a Royal family the country had. Each member of this family received adulatory notice in the media. Everyone in the country was familiar with the little vagaries of the Himmelfarbers. There was Waverley, C.C.’s wife, tall, ta