Gold Rush

by Jim Richards

  I got talking to one of the diamond buyers and he invited me into his office to show me some of his goods. The Kurupung area had the largest diamonds in Guyana and I watched, captivated, as the buyer pulled out some beautiful stones. He finished up with a perfect, 8-carat octahedron, an absolute beauty. The diamond was about the size of a Malteser. My hand was shaking as I picked it up.

  Diamond fever was taking hold.

  I was subdued as we made our way back to the boat. I wanted to find something like that diamond. Badly.

  For the next few days we continued our mapping. We would often come across significant areas of old pits where the pork-knockers had worked, representing sites of previous diamond shouts. Some of these workings had large trees growing out of them and would have dated right back to the original diamond rushes of the 1920s.

  There were plenty of pork-knockers too, often in the most unlikely and hard-to-reach areas. They were always full of entertaining stories and useful information, except on one point:

  ‘How far is it to the river?’ I would ask.

  ‘Oh, not far,’ came the consistent reply.

  In the whole of my time in Guyana, I never heard a different answer. So I decided to test it out one day.

  ‘How far is it to Venezuela?’ I asked, knowing it was a distance of about 100 kilometres through mountains and jungle.

  ‘Oh, not far,’ I was told.

  During a stop-off at Eping Landing, I came across a modern-day diamond rush in full swing. There were about 200 men in a semi-wooded area roughly the size of a soccer pitch. Most were dressed only in underpants and were covered head to toe in mud and grime as they worked away, shovelling dirt into their sluice boxes.

  It was an impressive sight and reminded me once again of the descriptions of old gold rushes. This must have been pretty close to what it was like.

  These miners were a friendly bunch and there were quite a few Brazilians thrown into the mix. They were getting good diamonds just digging out the top 100 centimetres of dirt; below that it was dead.

  Possibly it was some kind of deflation deposit where the bulk of the softer and lighter material had been removed by wind or water, leaving behind an enriched relic of material containing the heavier diamonds.

  The younger guys were working in teams of three to eight and were shovelling the paydirt into 5-metre-long wooden sluice boxes. These sluices had inch-high, inclined steel riffles that ran perpendicular to the flow of water: the same type of riffles the gold miners used. Small, petrol-powered Honda water pumps sat in a nearby creek, providing a constant flow of clean water that ran through the sluices.

  The Guyanese old-timers were actually working in the creek, and I chatted to some of them. They all knew Uncle Benjy, so this common friend won me their trust.

  ‘Dem youngsters, dey losin’ diamond,’ a gnarly old Guyanese pork-knocker informed me. ‘Dat sluice for gold, not diamond.’ He proudly showed his own, most elegant, hand-made sluice box. ‘Dis is a diamond sluice, no need for pump nor nuthin.’

  The old-timer’s wooden box was narrower than the one the Brazilians had been using and the riffles were made of thin sticks from which the bark had been stripped. Interestingly, these riffles ran parallel to the flow of water, not perpendicular. The old man explained to me that the diamonds got trapped between the sticks and were caught on engine grease or animal fat, which was smeared there.

  Diamonds are hydrophobic (repelled by water) but stick to grease like glue. This device was an extremely clever bush version of a grease table, once used by diamond mining companies on large-scale operations.

  Also clever was the water flow. Set in the bottom of the creek, the sluice box was narrow but had a wide neck, which meant the water would speed up after it entered the box and be more effective at washing the gravels.

  I returned to the landing, where there was a makeshift shop with a blue tarpaulin for a roof, and the inevitable working girls. A music player powered by a car battery was blaring out Tom Jones and a couple of successful pork-knockers were drinking some rum.

  A feeble-looking Indian girl in her early twenties sidled up to me and smiled. Her eyes were the bloodshot yellow of the chronic malaria sufferer. She turned around and pushed her backside into my groin, writhing to the music. Backballing, as the Guyanese called it. On the back of her neck were ugly purple welts. I didn’t know it then, but this was Kaposi’s Sarcoma. It was 1991, and the deathly hand of AIDS had already made its way up the Mazaruni River.

  I delicately extricated myself and went over to talk to the diamond buyer. He showed me some of the goods from the rush, mainly quarter to half carat stones with rarer one carats. They were good, clear diamonds, a bit small, but there were lots of them. They were doing well in this rush, and it looked like a lot of fun. More fun than working for Golden Star, anyhow.

  We continued our informative trip up the Eping River. Above the landing our route became blocked with increasing frequency by partially submerged fallen trees, or tacoubas as the locals called them. Over time, massive forest trees had fallen into the river and had not decayed, due to their immersion in the fresh water.

  The regularly used waterways were cleared of tacoubas by the boatmen using chainsaws, but as we entered more remote country, these submerged trees presented a serious obstacle. We had to manhandle the boat over, under or around the tacoubas while perching precariously on their slippery trunks.

  The Eping River eventually began to get shallower and now we often had to jump out to push the boat over the increasing number of rapids, getting more soaked and colder in the process. As you pushed the boat, it was easy to lose your footing in potholes, which led to bloody and bruised shins and knees.

  Noticing that Mackie and Moses were extremely careful while pushing the boat so as not to put a foot into these holes, I asked them why.

  ‘These potholes have numbfish [electric eels]; very dangerous, Mr Jim,’ Mackie informed me helpfully.

  ‘Right, thanks a bunch for telling me. Anything else “very dangerous” around here I should know about, Mackie?’

  ‘Oh yes, plenty, Mr Jim.’

  Seth later told me these electric eels (not an eel at all, but a type of catfish) could grow up to 2 metres long and give out a shock of 600 volts – over double the voltage used in UK wall sockets. They had been known to kill a man.

  As we approached the sheer cliff face at the bottom of the tepui, we came to a halt at the boulder field that marked the edge of the escarpment. These boulders were the actively eroding material from the tepui high above which, geologically, was retreating.

  Despite Eping being a large river, you could not see any flow here, as the waterfall itself was covered by the massive boulders of sandstone-conglomerate, some as large as houses. You heard the water though, rumbling ominously under the rocks.

  Waterfalls make excellent trap sites for gold and diamonds, and there were the usual pork-knockers scratching around. I watched them as they crawled into holes in the boulder pile to get to the diamond-bearing gravels in the river at the base of the labyrinth. I chatted to a welcoming pair and they offered to show me how they were mining.

  Sunil and Sanjay were young, slim and wiry brothers from the sugar-producing Demerara region of Guyana. They were an entrepreneurial pair and wanted to get enough money together to open a rum shop in their hometown. They saw pork-knocking as a quicker alternative to years of cutting sugar cane.

  ‘Just keep behind us, man … and watch your head,’ was their safety briefing.

  Holding cheap Chinese torches and a hessian sack each, the brothers dropped into a crevice between two boulders and I followed them with my trusty Maglite. I looked around and saw I was in a tight, crescent-shaped, steeply inclined tunnel that was wet and smelled badly of rotting vegetation.

  Inside the boulder field was a chaotic warren of gaps, passages and dead-ends. The brothers agilely crawled and squeezed their way through this maze and I followed, hoping the boulders would not choose that moment
to move. You had to be slim, and a couple of times I was forced to fully exhale to squeeze through an opening. The sandstone boulders had been worn smooth by the wet season water flow, so you just caught the odd graze.

  As we descended, the weak daylight gave out and we relied totally on our torches. After a few winding minutes we stopped at a wedge-shaped hole about half a metre wide just above flowing water. It was now very noisy, with the sound of the river bouncing off the rocks all around us. I noticed some digging tools Sunil and Sanjay had stowed earlier.

  Guyana was always full of surprises, and to my amazement the two brothers now played rock, paper, scissors. They grinned at me.

  ‘For luck,’ shouted Sanjay. ‘We always find something when we do this.’

  Sunil lost, so he ducked first. He took his shirt and trousers off, grabbed his hessian sack in one hand and a trowel in the other and leant over the hole. Sanjay grabbed his legs and dropped his brother headfirst into the flowing water and counted to twenty. Then he pulled Sunil back up; he was gasping and holding his now partly filled sack.

  It wasn’t deep but it was dangerous; if Sanjay lost his grip, his brother would get swept away by the current to almost certain death by drowning in the subterranean river.

  They kept up this exhausting routine, swapping the role of diver when one tired. The only variation was the use of different digging tools to free up the gravels. After about half an hour both bags were half-filled and, shaking with cold, they called a halt. Both men were worn out and I helped carry out one of the bags, which weighed about 20 kilograms.

  Back at the surface, the daylight lifted our spirits and we carried the bags of gravel down the boulder field to the nearest pool of water. They retrieved their sarukas hidden in the bush and poured some of the bagged gravel into the top sieve. I eagerly leaned over to observe the saruka being thrown. In the first three loads, the brothers found a few small (about 0.2 carat) stones in the fine sieve. Not bad.

  On the fourth and last load, Sanjay was throwing the medium sieve when we all immediately saw it: a good-looking, yellow diamond about three quarters of a carat appeared in the centre of the saruka. They picked it out, whooping with delight.

  ‘Another five of dese and we have our rum shop,’ said Sunil, smiling broadly.

  ‘Yes, if you don’t spend it on dem girls at de landing like before,’ added Sanjay drily.

  I thanked them both for sharing their adventure with me and gave them some of our rice, for which they were most grateful.

  That diamond had got me going. I really needed to set my own operation up.

  The surrounding area had extensive workings, including one operating land dredge. This spot was right on the unconformity (interface) between the lower (older Archaean) granites and the higher (younger Proterozoic) sandstones and conglomerates.

  This unconformity represented a vast period of geological time during which any number of alluvial diamond deposits could have been laid down on the ancient Archaean land surface. Some of these deposits would have survived to be later covered by Proterozoic sediments. Subsequent partial erosion of these sediments led to the current situation of tepui mesas (the Proterozoic sediments) surrounded by lower jungle areas (the older Archaean granites). The ancient unconformable surface between the two rock types was exposed once more, complete with diamond deposits, still intact and waiting to be found.

  It was a classic zone to prospect. I speculated that if you tracked the unconformity from this location on the Eping River all the way around to the Kurupung River (which had the best diamonds in Guyana) – roughly a 20-kilometre walk – you could explore some extremely interesting country indeed.

  In the late afternoon we returned to our camp. You did not travel on the river after dark, for fear of hitting rocks. As the meat was running low, Mackie convinced me that a caiman would be worth catching, because they made a tasty meal. The caiman is the South American equivalent of a crocodile, a fish-eating reptile that lives in the river, and is shy and hard to catch.

  Mackie made a snare out of wire and suspended it on the end of a stick. After dark, I drove the boat with Mackie on the front shining a torch into the riverbank; we paralleled the shore until we saw a pair of scary-looking red eyes. Mackie kept the eyes in the beam of his torch, which seemed to mesmerise the caiman, and I manoeuvred the boat in until he could remotely place the noose around the animal’s snout using the stick.

  The unfortunate caiman went berserk, trying everything it could to get away, but Mackie brought it onto the boat. The noose was firmly clamped over its jaw and a set of mean-looking teeth.

  Mackie tied its jaw with rope and shoved a flour sack over its head and the caiman calmed down. It was a young one, only about 2 metres long. We motored back to the nearby camp and unloaded it.

  Once we had actually caught the caiman, I no longer felt like eating such a beautiful animal, and made Mackie and Moses let it go, which they were very annoyed about. The reptile slithered off with a splash.

  My expeditions were stimulating and varied. We were at the epicentre of an ongoing diamond rush and I would walk through solid jungle for half a day, seemingly into the middle of nowhere, and then stumble onto a group of pork-knockers working gravels.

  These men were often in poor shape, with malaria and lack of food taking a toll. But when they proudly showed me their diamonds, I could see what kept them going. There was plenty of small stuff, and also the occasional stunning larger stone. Their lives had to be better here than sitting around Georgetown doing nothing.

  One of the old-timers told me he had gone to the bush to mine diamonds the day after his wedding. He wanted to get some money together for him and his new bride to start a family. He had never returned to Georgetown and was now an old man. His bride had sensibly moved on after a few months. Diamonds could do that to people; they had an addictive quality that sucked you in. Whenever a man left for Georgetown with his stash, he always seemed to get waylaid at the various rum shops and brothels at the landings. The whole river was one big honey trap.

  I was fortunate to have Mackie and Moses with me on the reconnaissance trips. They were extremely observant, and caught any unfortunate turtle we came across, to be kept for a later meal; a bamboo stick was trussed onto its shell opening to prevent it getting away. They also gathered obscure leaves and plants for eating, or to use for first aid or medicine.

  One of these was a small vine whose sap you dripped into your eye to cure conjunctivitis. I tried it and it felt most refreshing to a tired eye. The larger capadulla vine delivered a stream of delicious, cool drink that could be poured directly into your mouth. Unfortunately this also had an aphrodisiac effect, which was not welcome in an all-male camp.

  Around midday we would stop for lunch – cold rice with fish or cabbage, which we carried with us. As we sat quietly eating we would listen to the various bird calls. The place was teeming with an endless variety of birds. Whatever call was being made, Mackie and Moses could mimic it perfectly.

  ‘This is how we hunt, Mr Jim,’ Mackie explained. ‘We answer the bird call and they come in to see. If they come close enough we kill um with arrow or village gun.’

  One lunchtime, Moses attracted a bird all the way into our picnic spot with his calls and the poor confused animal kept strutting around looking for its mate. It was an exquisite creature like an overgrown pigeon, about 30 centimetres long with brown feathers and strong, red legs. Finally it spied us and took off before Mackie could grab it.

  ‘Bush turkey, good eating, Mr Jim,’ said Mackie, most disappointed.

  It was the dry season now. On one of our traverses we came to a large stretch of standing water left behind by the falling water level of a creek. We stopped and I went to walk across the knee-deep water.

  ‘No, Mr Jim, that water have problem,’ Moses said, and he held out his hand to stop me.

  It looked innocuous enough to me. ‘What is it, Moses?’ I asked.

  Moses took out his lunch box and got a piece of
chicken breast, then ran a thin piece of vine through it and dropped it onto the surface of the still water. Nothing happened at first, then the water stirred and a school of large silver fish appeared; more and more arrived, attracted by the chicken, and a feeding frenzy broke out as Moses tugged the meat in and out of the water.

  It seemed about a hundred fish were all fighting for the scrap of meat: piranhas. But these piranhas were behaving quite differently from the ones in the main river; indeed, we bathed in the big river each night without a problem.

  ‘Why are the piranhas so dangerous here?’ I asked.

  ‘When the river drops, schools of piranha can get trapped in these pools. They become mad with hunger, and attack anything that enters the water,’ Mackie said.

  We walked around the perimeter of the pool warily and I contemplated what could have befallen me if Moses had not intervened.

  After lunch we kept on going; we were about halfway through our 10-kilometre traverse for the day.

  Suddenly, without warning, Mackie went flying past me.

  ‘Run, Mr Jim!’ he shouted.

  Then Moses came flying past me.

  ‘Run, Mr Jim!’ he shouted.

  What the heck? Some superstitious rubbish, no doubt. Then the bees hit me, and I ran. After we had shaken them off, we warily returned and Mackie and Moses smoked out the hive, which held half a kilogram of delicious honey.

  The bush seemed to have it in for us this particular day, and there was more to come. When we got back to the camp, the cook was looking stressed.

  ‘Marabunta, Mr Jim,’ he said. ‘Look.’

  I looked. There were large, black, aggressive ants everywhere: in our food, clothes, bedding. It was a full-scale invasion of marabunta, as they were locally known, and they had an excruciating sting.

  Even Mackie and Moses looked worried. We traced the lines of ants to a cleared area nearby. I realised why it was cleared of vegetation: the ants had done it.

  We were starting to get bitten and the poor cook, a black man from Georgetown who was not good with his fieldcraft, was going mad.