The Tarantula Stone. Philip Caveney

called home. As Martin and his companions disembarked from the train, a little weasel-faced man in a filthy suit and a shapeless panama hat moved amongst them, announcing that he was the fazendeiro on whose land the garimpo was situated. If anybody wanted to dig here, they would have to pay him, Senhor Mirales, ten per cent of anything they found. The man was an irritating little insect and would normally have been swatted aside like a troublesome mosquito; but, predictably, he was backed up by three venomous-looking pistoleiros and the newcomers were too dazed and numbed from their journey to make much trouble. They milled about in confusion while specially appointed men moved amongst them, offering accommodation for hire. The prices demanded were exorbitant but nobody was in any position to refuse. Martin was billeted in a filthy little wooden shack with no windows, no door, no toilet, not even any running water. There was simply a rough bed made out of boards with a single filthy blanket lying on it. Water could be obtained from a hand-pump on the other side of the clearing or, failing that, from the stretch of muddy river that ran alongside the perimeter of the garimpo. Food could be purchased from the nearby barraca at about four times the going rate elsewhere and would have to be cooked on open fires outside the shelter. Also from the barraca would come any equipment that needed replacing and the cachaça with which a weary miner might drink away the misery of a long fruitless day’s work. For those with a little more money to spend, there was a brothel situated next to the store, haunted by a collection of dead-eyed, gaunt and miserable-looking Indian girls. They were plain and, for the most part, rife with venereal disease but, after a few months of unrelenting toil, it was surprising how attractive they could look.

      Martin threw himself into the work with silent dedication, rising every morning at first light to go and hack away the ground in the place which had been allocated to him. The first few weeks were terrible. His skin blistered in the sun, he was bitten half to death by a multitude of insects, he suffered a dose of malaria that turned his skin grey and racked him with uncontrollable bouts of shivering. His hands blistered and scarred against the hard wooden shaft of the pick and at night he staggered back to the stinking little shack to sleep only to find it crawling with rats and cockroaches. And, worst of all, in all this time he found nothing, not the smallest trace of a stone. Others found diamonds. Every few hours a wild shout would go up from some corner of the garimpo and there would be a sudden rush of men, anxious to see what had been discovered. A few moments later, the same men would trudge grimly back to their own claim and continue to hack at the hard, indifferent, unyielding soil. Men went down with the maculo, the debilitating diarrhoea that left them little more than weak skeletons. Others contracted typhoid. The sick who had any money left took the train back to Rio, the others simply died and were buried in shallow graves out in the scrub jungle by men who were well schooled in the art of digging and had no time for prayers.

      When a man did grub a diamond from the earth, the word spread like wildfire through the camp; and a short time later, a buyer – a comprador – would appear, a professional man usually employed by the patron or the fazendeiro. He would examine the stone with his eyepiece while the finder looked hopefully on; and then he would make his offer with calm, well-practised disdain. ‘It is not much of a stone; a good size, I grant you, but badly flawed. I could not offer you anything more than ten thousand cruzeiros for it.’ The price offered was always a fraction of the stone’s true value, but the presence of the ever-watchful pistoleiros in the background prevented any possibility of argument. The ‘lucky’ finder would take his share of the money and promptly go on a binge, getting blind drunk, spending a couple of nights fulfilling his tawdry fantasies in the brothel, brawling with his fellow garimpeiros; and a few days later he would be back at his accustomed place, hacking savagely into the soil, fuelled by the conviction that what had happened once could happen again. Sometimes really large diamonds were discovered, so big that even the comprador’s lousy offer would amount to a sizeable sum. Then all kinds of madness would break loose. Martin came to hate the garimpeiros and their stupid macho philosophy which dictated that it was a great loss of face not to squander any money that they had earned in the shortest possible time. One man who had found a good diamond went to the lengths of having a Cadillac shipped in from the United States, piece by piece, so that it could be brought in to the garimpo by train. Once everything had arrived, he had it put together and delighted for a few days in driving the expensive vehicle round and round the perimeter at breakneck speed, its interior packed with yelling drunken men who normally would not have bothered to talk to him. This went on until the car ran out of petrol and the owner was running short of money. Soon he was back at work and the rusting, dilapidated hulk of the car still stood at the edge of the jungle, an incongruous intruder in this remote corner of the world. Other diamond finders had more unfortunate ends. Sometimes a man was knifed in the back at the height of some drunken brawl and the remainder of his money appropriated by the killer. Others simply drank too much cachaça, went berserk and plunged yelling and shrieking into the jungle. Either the Indians got them or wild animals; they were never seen again.

      Eventually, Martin found a diamond; not a particularly big one, but a diamond nonetheless; and though he had sneered in the past at the brutish excesses of his workmates, he found himself acting in just the same way. Long months of loneliness and frustration spilled out of him and there was nothing he could do to stop himself. He drank himself insensible at the barraca, he beat up some man who was too slow to get out of his way and, that night, in one of the grubby beds of the brothel, he rutted with an Indian girl who barely acknowledged his presence. The next morning, sick at heart, ashamed of his stupidity and suffering from the worst headache in all of creation, he was back at work, ignoring the jeers of men working alongside him.

      Time passed with slow, relentless monotony. The long rains of his second year came, when there was nothing to do but lie in the shelter and stare out at the sorrowful yellow waters, swirling ankle deep around the garimpo and across the floor of the shack, bringing with it all manner of creatures – snakes, rats, scorpions. Vast swarms of mosquitoes and plague flies hovered in the air and fed on the abundance of human flesh. At a time like this, a man had to obtain credit to get those things that would keep him alive. There was always an interest rate and the next year was begun with the miner heavily in debt.

      Martin had worked on, stubborn, indefatigable. The third and fourth years, he did better, found six diamonds in all, a couple of them of reasonable size. This time he forced himself to follow some kind of a plan. From each sale he put a little money aside, hiding it in the heel of his boot, and then went ahead and squandered the rest, in the usual flamboyant style, managing to convince his workmates that he had spent everything. He dared not let anybody know he was keeping some back, because inevitably a greedy man would come in the night and take it from him with the blade of a knife. He feigned poverty, asking for credit at the store, even though he no longer needed it. His plan was simple. To amass enough money to escape from the garimpo to something better. It might take him years but there was always the chance that he really would make it good, that he might find a diamond that was big enough to risk running with.

      The news that the war had come to an end deepened his resolve. Now he should be able to get back to … or at least pass through, his homeland. The long rains came again. He bided his time. Sometimes, as he lay in the hammock he had constructed as a safer alternative to sleeping close to the water level, an image would come to his mind, an image of Charles Caine, fat and scented with lavender water, growing steadily rich on the proceeds he obtained by selling his diamonds on the international market; and a calm powerful hatred would come to Martin, a hatred and a hunger for revenge. But then he would remind himself that he had only himself to blame for this misery. He himself had wanted to become a garimpeiro; Caine had only provided the one-way ticket. There were men working at the garimpo who had been here for years and, what’s more, it was plain they would remain here till they died.

      ‘But not me,’ vowed Martin silently. ‘No, not me. I’m going to get out of this.’

      And so the sixth year had begun. Martin’s money stash had now become too big to keep in his shoe. Instead he had made himself a crude money belt out of a discarded piece of canvas, working at the dead of night by the light of a candle. He found another two diamonds that year and treated the money as he had done before, creaming off a little for his nest egg and frittering away the rest. He