Gold Mine

by Wilbur Smith

  "come on, said rod.

  -there were men cluttering the lobby of 95 station, a hundred and fifty, perhaps two hundred of them.

  still filthy from their work in the stopes, clothing sodden with sweat, they were laughing and chattering with the abandon of men freshly released from frightful danger.

  in a clear space in the centre of the lobby lay five stretchers, on two of them the bright red blankets were pulled up to cover the faces of the men upon them. the faces of the other three men looked as though they had been dusted with flour.

  "two" grunted rod'so far." the station was a shambles, with men milling aimlessly; each minute more of them came back down the haulages as they were pulled out of the undamaged stopes, which were now suspect.

  quickly rod looked about him, recognizing the face of one of his mine captains.

  mcgee," he shouted. "take over here. get them sitting down in lines ready to load. we'll start hauling the shift out immediately.

  get onto the hoist room, tell them i want the stretcher cases out first." he paused long enough to watch mcgee take control. he glanced at his watch. two fifty-six. he realized with astonishment that only twenty-six minutes had passed since he felt the pressure burst in his office.

  mcgee had the station under a semblance of control.

  he was shouting into the hoist room telephone, on rod's authority demanding priority to clear 95 station.

  "right," said rod. "come on." and he led into the haulage.

  the dust was thick. he coughed. the hanging wall was lower here.

  as he trudged on once more, rod pondered the , unfortunate choice of mining terminology that had named the roof of an excavation "the hanging wall'. it made one think of a gallows, or at the best it emphasized the fact that there were millions of tons of rock hanging overhead.

  the haulage branched, and unerringly rod took the right fork. in his head he carried an accurate three dimensional map of the entire 176 miles of tunnels that comprised the sander ditch's workings. the haulage came to a t-junction and the arms were lower and narrower.

  right to 42 section, left to 43 section. the dust was so thick that visibility was down to ten feet. the dust hung in the air, sinking almost imperceptibly.

  "ventilations knocked out here," he called over his shoulder.

  "van den bergh!"

  "yes, sir." the leader of the emergency squad came up behind him.

  "i want air in this drive. get it on. use canvas piping if you have to."

  "right."

  "then i want pressure on the water hoses to lay this dust."

  "right." rod turned into the drive. here the foot wall, the floor was rough and the going slower. they came upon a line of steel trolleys filled with gold reef abandoned in the centre of the drive.

  "get these the hell out of the way," ordered rod, and went on.

  fifty paces and he stopped abruptly. he felt the hair on his forearms stand on end. he could never accustom himself to the sound, no matter how often he heard it.

  in the deliberately callous slang of the miner they called them "squealers'. it was the sound of a grown man, with his legs crushed under hundreds of tons of rock, perhaps his spine broken, dust suffocating him, his mind unhinged by the mortal horror of the situation in which he was trapped, calling for help, calling to his god, calling for his wife, his children, or his mother.

  rod started forward again, with the sound of it becoming louder, a terrifying sound, hardly human, sobbing and babbling into silence, only to start again with a blood chilling scream.

  suddenly there were men ahead of rod in the tunnel, dark shapes looming in the dust mist, their head lamps throwing shafts of yellow light, grotesque, distorted.

  "who is that?" rod called, and they recognized his voice.

  "thank god. thank god you've come, mr. ironsides."

  "who is that?"

  "barnard. "the 43 section shift boss.

  "what's the damage?"

  "the whole hanging wall of the stope came down."

  "how many men in the stope?"

  "forty-two."

  "how many still in?"

  "so far we've got out sixteen unhurt, twelve slightly hurt, three stretcher cases and two dead. "the squealer started again, but his voice was much weaker.

  "him?" asked rod.

  "he's got twenty ton of rock lying across his pelvis. i've hit him with two shots of morphine, but it won't stop him. "can you get into the stope?"

  "yes, there is a crawling hole." barnard flashed his lamp over the pile of fractured blue quartzite that jammed the drive like a collapsed garden wall. on it was an aperture big enough for a fox terrier to run through. reflected light showed from the hole, and faintly from within came the grating sounds of movement over loose rock and the muffled voices of men.

  "how many men have you got working in there, barnard?"

  barnard hesitated, "i think about ten or twelve." and rod grabbed a handful of his overall front and jerked him almost off his feet.

  "you think!" in the head lamps rod's face was white with fury.

  "you've put men in there without recording their numbers? you've put twelve of my boys against the wall to try and save nine?" with a heave rod lifted the shift boss off his feet and swung him against the side wall of the drive, pinning him there.

  "you bastard, you know that most of those nine are chopped already. you know that stope is a bloody killing ground, and you send in twelve more to get the chop and you don't record their numbers. how the hell would we ever know who to look for if the hanging fell again?"

  he let the shift boss free, and stood back. "get them out of here, clear that stope."

  "but, mr. ironsides, the general manager is in there, mr. lemmer is in there. he was doing an inspection in the stope." for a moment rod was taken aback, then he snarled. "i don't give a good damn if the state president is in there, clear the stope. we'll start again and this time we'll do it properly." within minutes the rescuers had been recalled, they came squirming out of the aperture, white with dust like maggots wriggling from rotten cheese.

  "right," said rod, "i'll risk four men at a time." quickly he picked four of the floury figures, among them an enormous man on whose right shoulder was the brass badge of a boss boy.

  "big king you here?" rod spoke in fanikalo, the lingua franca of the mines which enabled men from a dozen ethnic groups to communicate.

  "i am here," answered big king.

  "you looking for more awards?" a month before, big king had been lowered on a rope 200 feet down a vertical ore pass to retrieve the body of a white miner. the bravery award by the company had been 100 rand.

  "who speaks of awards when the earth has eaten the flesh of men?" big king rebuked rod softly. "but today is children's play only. is the nkosi coming into the stope?" it was a challenge.

  rod's place was not in the stope. he was the organizer, the coordinator. yet, he could not ignore the challenge, no bantu would believe that he had not stood back in fear and sent other men in to die.

  "yes," said rod, "i'm coming into the stope." he led them in. the hole was only just big enough to admit the bulk of rod's body. he found himself in a chamber the size of an average room, but the roof was only three and a half feet high. he played his lamp quickly across the hanging wall, and it was wicked. the rock was cracked and ugly, "a bunch of grapes" was the term.

  "very pretty," he said, and dropped the beam of his lamp.

  the squealer was within an arm's length of rod. his body from the waist up protruded from under a piece of rock the size of a cadillac.

  someone had wrapped a red blanket around his upper body. he was quiet now, lying still. but as the beam of rod's lamp fell upon him, he lifted his head. his eyes were crazed, unseeing, his face running with the sweat of terror and insanity. his mouth snapped open, wide and pink in the shiny blackness of his face. he began to scream, but suddenly the sound was drowned by a great red-black gout of blood that came gushing up his throat, and spurte
d from his mouth.

  as rod watched in horror, the bantu posed like that, his head thrown back, his mouth gaping as though he were a gargoyle, the life blood pouring from him. then slowly the head sagged forward, and flopped face downwards. rod crawled to him, lifted his head and pillowed it on the red blanket.

  there was blood on his hands and he wiped it on the front of his overalls.

  "three," he said, "so far." and leaving the dying man he crawled on towards the broken face of the fall.

  big king crawled up beside him with two pinch bars. he handed one to rod.

  within an hour it had become a contest, a trial of strength between two men. behind them the other three men were shoring up and passing back the rock that rod and big king loosened from the face. rod knew he was being childish, he should have been back in the main haulage, not only directing the rescue, but also making all the other decisions and alternative arrangements that were needed now. the company paid him for his brains and his experience, not for his muscle.

  "the hell with it," he thought. "even if we miss the blast this evening, i'm staying here." he glanced at big king, and reached forward to get his hands onto a bigger piece of rock in the jam. he strained, using his arms first, then bringing the power of his whole body into it the rock was solid.

  big king placed huge black hands on the rock, and they pulled together.

  in a rush of smaller rock it came away, and they shoved it back between them, grinning at each other.

  at seven o'clock rod and big king withdrew from the stope to rest and eat sandwiches, and drink thermos coffee while rod spoke to dimitri over the field telephone that had been laid up to the face.

  "we've pulled shift on both shafts, rod, the workings are clear to blast. except for your lot, there are fifty-eight men in your 43 section." dimitri's voice was reedy over the field telephone.

  "hold on." rod revolved the situation in his mind. he is worked it out slower than usual, for he was tired, emotionally and physically drained. if he stopped the blast on both shafts for fear of bringing down more rock in 43

  section, it would cost the company a day's production, 10,000 tons of gold reef worth sixteen rand a ton, the formidable sum of 160,000 rand or 80,000 pounds or $200,000 whichever way you looked at it.

  it was highly probable that every man in the stope was already dead, and the original pressure burst had de-stressed the rock above and around the 95 level, so there was little danger of further bumps.

  and yet there might be someone alive in there, someone lying pinned in the womb-warm darkness of the stope with a bunch of loose grapes hanging over his unprotected body.

  when they hit all the blast buttons on the sander ditch mine, they fired eighteen tons of dynagel. the kick was considerable, it would bring down those grapes.

  "dimitri," rod made his decision, "burn all long-walls on no. 2 shaft at seven-thirty exactly." no. 2 shaft was three miles away.

  that would save the company 80,000 rand. "then at precisely five-minute intervals burn south, north and west long walls here on no. 1 shaft."

  spreading the blast would reduce the disturbance, and that put another 60,000 rand in the shareholders" pockets. the total monetary loss inflicted by the disaster was around 20,000 rand. not too bad really, rod thought sardonically, blood was cheap. you could buy it at three rand a pint from the central blood transfusion service.

  "all right," he stood up, and flexed his aching shoulders.

  "i'm pulling everybody back into the safety of the shaft pillar while we blast."

  after the successive earth tremors of the blast, rod put them back into the stope, and at nine o'clock they uncovered the bodies of two machine boys crushed against the metal of their own rock drill. ten feet further on they found the white miner; his body was unmarked, but his head was flattened. " at eleven o'clock they found two more machine boys.

  rod was in the haulage when they dragged them out through the small opening. neither of them were recognizable as human, they looked more like lumps of raw meat that had been rubbed in dirt.

  a little after midnight rod and big king went into the stope again to take over from the team at the face, and twenty minutes later they holed through the wall of loose rock into another chamber that had been miraculously left standing.

  the air in here was steamy with heat. rod recoiled instinctively from the filthy moist gush of it against his face.

  then he forced himself to crawl forward and peer into the opening.

  ten feet away lay frank lemmer, the general manager of the sander

  ditch mine. he lay on his back. his helmet had been knocked from his head, and a deep gash split the skin above his eye. blood from the gash had run back into his silver hair and clotted black. he opened his eyes and blinked owlishly in the dazzle of rod's lamp. quickly rod averted the beam.

  "mr. lemmer," he said.

  "what the bloody hell are you doing with the rescue team?" growled frank lemmer. "it's not your job. haven't you learned a single god damned thing in twenty years of mining?"

  "are you all right, sir?

  "get a doctor in here," replied frank lemmer. "you're going to have to cut me loose from this lot." rod wriggled up to where he lay, and then he saw what frank lemmer meant. from the elbow his arm was pinned under a solid slab of rock. rod ran his hands over the slab, feeling it. only explosive would shift the rock. as always frank lemmer was right.

  rod wriggled out of the opening and called over his shoulder.

  "get the telephone up here." after a few minutes delay he had the receiver, and was through to the station at 95 level which had been set up as an advance aid post and rest station for the rescuers.

  "this is ironsides, get me doctor stander."

  "hold on." then moments later, "hello, rod, it's dan."

  "dan, we've found the old man."

  "how is he, conscious?"

  "yes, but he's pinned you'll have to cut." "are you sure?" dan stander asked.

  "of course i'm bloody well sure," snapped rod.

  "whoa, boy!" admonished dan.

  "sorry "okay, where's he caught?"

  "arm. you'll have to cut above the elbow." "charming!" said dan.

  "i'll wait here for you." "right. i'll be up in five minutes." "it's funny, you see them chopped time and again, but you know it will never happen to you." frank lemmer's voice was steady and even. the arm must be numb, rod thought as he lay beside him in the stope.

  frank lemmer rolled his head towards rod. "why don't you go farming, boy?" "you know why," said rod.

  "yes." lemmer smiled a little, just a twitching of the lips.

  with his free hand he wiped his mouth. "you know, i had just three months more before i went on pension. i nearly made it. you'll end like this, boy, in the dirt with your bones crunched up." "it's not the end, said rod.

  "isn't it?" asked frank lemmer, and this time he chuckled. "isn't it?"

  "what's the joke?" asked dan stander, poking his head into the tiny chamber.

  "christ, it took you long enough to get here," growled frank lemmer.

  "give me a hand, rod." dan passed his bag through, then as he crawled forward he spoke to frank lemmer.