Today is the most beautiful, perfect day of my life! Margo consulted her compass, corrected the direction of the propulsion fans, and came about on the right heading.
She thrilled at the touch of the controls. This was her airship, her expedition, her success come to life.
At last, something she had planned was going exactly as it should!
Finding the Seta gravel deposits Goldie had identified was so easy Margo spent the next several days gloating over her success. They anchored the balloon, broke out digging equipment, and busied themselves excavating ore from the potholes along the Limpopo River bank.
When she encountered her first inch-wide sapphire, Margo whispered, “Oh, my God…”Then at the bottom of the pothole, they hit diamonds. “Oh, my Gad…”
Even the Welshman grinned ear-to-ear as he worked.
They removed yard after cubic yard of matrix, piling it carefully onto the gondola platform, and began hauling it upriver to the site Goldie had marked on her map. Margo had trouble finding that spot. She hovered over the Shashe River, studying the lay of the land, trying to correlate what she saw with Goldie’s chart and navigational notations. She finally took an aerial snapshot with the digitizing camera that was part of her personal log, scanned in Goldie’s map, and made the best correlation she could.
”There,” she decided.
She took the airship down and they buried the first load. They made trip after trip, digging out pits on Goldie’s future landholding, seeding them with diamondiferous matrix and returning for another load. It was slow work, because the matrix was heavy They couldn’t lift much at one time. A week passed, blurred easily into two, then three. The January rains of summer hit, flooding their little camp and forcing them onto higher ground. The heat was stifling. Using filter straws which blocked out pathogens, they drank boiled water which had cooled enough to swallow, grinned like fools, and went back to work