At an apartment in Happy Valley, Bruce Bridges holds up a breathtakingly beautiful jewel worth HK$1.85 million. He's in Hong Kong to introduce private buyers to tsavorite, the radiant green stone his treasure-hunting father discovered 40 years ago, and which eventually cost him his life.
In August, Bruce's father, Campbell Bridges, fought off a gang of machete-wielding bandits on a dusty dirt track in a Kenyan town. The man known as the father of gemstone mining in Kenya died from injuries sustained in the attack. His son witnessed the assault, along with four employees of the Bridges family's mining company, two of whom also suffered appalling injuries. Bruce escaped with a wound to his neck - and memories that will haunt him forever.
CAMPBELL BRIDGES looked a lot like author Ernest Hemingway; a tall, rugged, broad-shouldered bear of a man with the flattened nose of a boxer and hands worn from decades of toiling in East Africa's unforgiving terrain. At 71, his salt and pepper hair was still thick and his beard full, his complexion bronzed from the scorching equatorial sun.
'My dad was a powerful man; physically robust,' says Bridges. 'He had been an amateur boxer when he was younger and I remember when I was a child he would bend a quarter [an American coin] in his fingers. I don't think there are too many people who are able to do that. He was immensely strong, even at 71. In his autopsy report, the doctor went on about how surprisingly physically well-built and strong he was for a man of that age.'
Campbell Bridges led a spartan existence. Although the family residence was a house built especially for them on a hilltop - which he named Leopard Hill, after the graceful animals who shared it with them - he preferred sleeping in a tree house nine metres above the ground.
'He didn't need many home comforts,' says Bridges. 'He just liked his tree house and the cool breeze of an evening and to watch the sunset. That's all he really needed in life.'
Bridges remembers growing up in Kenya as 'like living in a fairytale'.