Chapter Twenty-Four Summary

Peekay has now been on the grizzly job for eleven months, much to the delight of his driller and the dismay of everyone else around him. A notable exception is his crew, made up of black men from the Rhodesian jungles. The crews are formed around the grizzly men, and when a grizzly man dies the crew generally believe that they are destined for death as well and often quit the mines to hide in the forest once again. It is not uncommon, Peekay says, for the grizzly man to take his number one boy with him, as the two often work in close proximity in the dangerous situations that the grizzly man will find himself in.

For Peekay, his time comes after he receives a premonitory dream. He dreams that the piece of dynamite he is about to light turns...