wanted,
and feeling somewhat tired, I sat down in the shade of a tree, when I
suddenly noticed in the glare of the strong sun a glittering pebble
some yards away.
"I
remember how he described it," Mr. Beet told me. "He said it blinked
like this." He spread his fingers, closed them into a fist, and
suddenly splayed them out again. Then he let me return to Jacobs:
I became curious and went and picked up this mooi klip [pretty
pebble]. It was lying between some limestone and ironstone. The spot
was quite a distance from our homestead, but only about a couple of
hundred yards from the bank of the Orange River. I, of course,
had no idea that the stone was of value. I was at the time wearing a
corduroy suit, and simply put the pebble in my pocket. I did not feel
at all excited at finding such a beautiful stone. . . . After reaching
home, I handed the pretty pebble to my youngest sister, who simply
placed it aside among her playthings. ... A month or two after
finding the stone, my two sisters and my brother and I were playing a
game known as "Five Stones"; one was the diamond and the others
ordinary river stones. Van Niekerk arrived during the game and greatly
admired the stone, and tried to scratch a windowpane with it. My mother
noticed that Mr. van Niekerk had taken quite a fancy to this "white
stone," so she gave it to him.
This
was one of the parts of the Jacobs story that Mr. Beet was unhappy
about. Schalk van Niekerk, who lived in a house on the Jacobs property,
was a divisional councilor, a sort of welfare officer appointed by the
farmers of the Hope Town
