Gold Mine

by Wilbur Smith

  the sander ditch might really belong to him soon. he dispatched the last problem and lay back in his swivel chair.

  his mind was clear of the last cobwebs of dissipation and, as always, he felt purged and cleansed.

  if i get her, i'll make her the star performer in the whole field, he thought greedily, they'll talk about the sander ditch from wall street to the bourse, and about the man who is running her. i know how to do it too. i'll cut the costs to the bone, i'll tighten her up solid. frank lemmer was a good man, he could get the stuff out of the ground, but he let it creep up on him. it cost him almost nine rand a ton to mill it.

  well, i'll get it out as well as he did and i'll get it out cheaper. an operation takes its temperament from the man at the head.

  frank lemmer would talk about costs every now and then, but he didn't mean it and we knew he didn't mean it. we have become a wasteful operation because we are on a rich reef, we have become big spenders.

  well, i'm going to talk costs, and i'll skin the arse of anybody who thinks i'm joking.

  last year hamilton at western holdings kept his working costs per ton milled down to just a touch over six rand.

  i could do the same here! i could jump our profits twelve million rand in one year, if only they give me the job i'll shout the sander ditch's name across the financial markets of the world.

  the problem that rod was pondering was the nightmare of the gold mining industry. since the 1930s the price of gold had been fixed at $35 a fine ounce. each year since then the cost of mining had crept up steadily. in those days they reckoned four penny-weights of gold in a ton of ore was payable value. now around eight penny-weights was the marginal value.

  so in the interim all those millions of tons of ore whose values fell between four and eight penny-weights had been placed beyond the reach of man until such time as they increased the price of gold.

  there were many mines with vast reserves of gold bearing ore, millions in bullion, whose values lay just below the magical number eight. those mines stood deserted and forlorn, rust reddening their head gears and the corrugated iron roofs of the buildings collapsing wearily. rising costs it had shot the guts out of them, they were condemned by the single word'llnpay'.

  the sander ditch was running twenty to twenty-five penny-weights per ton. she was fat, but she could be fatter, rod decided.

  there was a knock at the door.

  "come in!" called rod, and looked at his watch. it was nine o'clock already. time for the monday meeting of his mine captains.

  they came in singly and in pairs, twelve of them. these were rod's front-line men, his combat officers. they went down there each day, each to his own section, and directed the actual assault on the rock.

  while they chatted idly, waiting for the meeting to begin, rod looked them over surreptitiously and was reminded of a remark that herman koch of anglo american had made to him once.

  "mining is a hard game, and it attracts a hard breed of men.

  these were men of the hard breed, physically and mentally tough, and rod realized with a start that he was one of them. no, more than one of them. he was their leader, and with a fierce affection and pride he opened the meeting.

  "right, let's hear your gripes. who is going to be first to break my heart?" there are some men with a talent for controlling, and getting the very best results out of other men. rod was one of them.

  it was more than his physical size, his compelling voice and hearty chuckle. it was a special magnetism, a personal charm and unerring sense of timing. under his chairmanship the meeting would erupt, voices crackle and snap, then subside into chuckles and nods as rod spoke.

  they knew he was as tough as they were, and they respected that.

  they knew that when he spoke it made sense, so they listened. they knew that when he promised, he delivered, so they were placated. and they knew that when he made a decision or judgement, he acted upon it, so every man knew exactly where he stood.

  if asked, any one of these mine captains would have admitted grudgingly that "there was no bull dust in ironsides'. this was the equivalent of a presidential citation.

  "very well then." rod terminated the meeting. "you have spent a good two hours of the company's time beating your gums. now, will you kindly haul arse, go down there and start sending the stuff out." these men planned the week's operation, so their men were at work in the earth below them.

  on 87 level, kowalski moved like a great bear down the dimly-lit drive.

  he had switched off the lamp on his helmet, and he moved without sound, lightly for a man of such bulk. he heard their voices ahead of him in the dimly-lit tunnel, and he paused, listening intently. there was no sound of shovel crunching into loose rock, and kowalski's neanderthal features convulsed into a fearsome scowl.

  "bastards!" he muttered softly. "they think i am in stopes, hey?

  they think it all right if they sit on fat black bum, no move da bloody rock, hey?" he started forward again, a bear on cat's feet.

  "they find plenty different from what they bloody think, soon!" he threatened.

  he stepped round the angle of the drive and flashed his lamp.

  there were three men kowalski had put on lashing, shovelling the loose stuff from the footwall into waiting coco pans two of them sat against the coco pan smoking contentedly while the third regaled them with an account of a beer drink he had attended the previous christmas.

  their shovels and sledge hammers leaned unemployed against the side wall of the drive.

  all three of them froze into rigidity as the beam of kowalski's lamp played over them.

  "so!" the word burst explosively from kowalski, and he snatched up a fourteen-pound hammer in one massive fist, reversed it and struck the butt of the handle against the foot wall. the steel head of the hammer fell off and kowalski was left with a four-foot length of selected hickory in his hand.

  "you, boss boy!" he bellowed, and his free hand shot out and fastened on the throat of the nearest bantu. with one heave he jerked him off his feet onto his knees and began dragging him away up the drive. even in his rage, kowalski was making sure there were no witnesses. the other two men sat where they were, too horrified to move, while their companion's walls and cries receded into the darkness.

  then the first blow reverberated in the confined space of the drive, followed immediately by a shriek of pain.

  the next blow, and another shriek.

  the crack, thud, crack, thud, went on repeatedly, but the accompanying shrieks dwindled into moans and soft whimperings, then into complete silence.

  kowalski came back down the drive alone, he was sweating heavily in the lamp light, and the handle of the hammer in his hand was black and glistening with wet blood.

  he threw it at their feet.

  "work!" he growled, and was gone, big and bearlike, into the shadows.

  on 100 level, joseph m'kati was hosing down and sweeping the spillings from under the giant conveyor belt. joseph had been on this job for five years, and he was a contented and happy man.

  joseph was a shangaan approaching sixty years of age; the first frost was touching his hair. there were laughter lines around his eyes and at the corner of his mouth. he wore his helmet pushed to the back of his head, his overalls were hand-embroidered and ornament ally patched in blue and red, and he moved with a jaunty bounce and strut.

  the conveyor was many hundreds of yards long. from all the levels above the shattered gold reef was scraped from the stopes and trammed back down the haulages in the coco pans then from the coco pans it was tipped into the mouths of the ore-passes. these were vertical shafts that dropped down to 100 level, hundreds of feet through living rock to spew the reef out onto the conveyor belt. a system of steel doors regulated the flow of rock onto the conveyor, and the moving belt carried it down to the shaft and dumped it into enormous storage bins.

  from there it was fed automatically into the ore cage in fifteen-ton loads and carried at four-minute intervals to
the surface.

  joseph worked on happily beneath the whining conveyor. the spillings were small, but important. gold is strange in its behaviour, it moves downwards. carried by its own high specific gravity it works its way down through almost any other material. it would find any crack or irregularity in the floor and work its way into it. it would disappear into the solid earth itself if left long enough.

  it was this behaviour of gold that accounted in some measure for joseph m'kati's contentment. he had worked his way to the end of the conveyor, washing and sweeping, and now he straightened, laid his bast broom aside and rubbed his kidneys with both hands, looking quickly around to make certain that there was no one else in the conveyor tunnel. beside him was the ore storage bin into which the conveyor was emptying its load. the bin could hold many thousands of tons.

  satisfied that he was alone, joseph dropped onto his hands and knees and crawled under the storage bin, ignoring the continuous roar of rock into the bin above him, working his way in until he reached the holes.

  it had taken joseph many months to chisel the heads off four of the rivets that held the seam in the bottom of the bin, but once he had done it, he had succeeded in constructing a simple but highly effective heavy media separator.

  free gold in the ore that was dumped into the storage bin immediately and rapidly worked its way down through the underlying rock, its journey accelerated by the vibration of the conveyor and bin as more reef was dropped. when the gold reached the floor of the bin, it sought an avenue through which to continue its downward journey, and it found joseph's four rivet holes, beneath which he had spread a square of polythene sheet.

  the gold-rich fines made four conical piles on the sheet of polythene, looking exactly like powdered black soot.

  crouched beneath the bin, joseph carefully transferred the black powder to his tobacco pouch, replaced the polythene to catch the next filtering, , stuffed the pouch into his hip pocket, and scrambled out from under the bin.

  whistling a tribal "ranting tune joseph picked up his broom and returned to the endless job of sweeping and hosing.

  Johnny delange was marking his shot holes. lying on his side in the low stope of 27 section he was calculating by eye the angle and depth of a side cutter blast to straighten a slight bulge in his long-wall.

  in the sander ditch they were on single blast. one daily, centrally fired, blast. Johnny was paid on fat homage the cubic measure of rock broken and taken out of his stope. he must, therefore, position his shot holes to achieve the maximum disruption and blow-out from the face.

  "so," he grunted, and marked the position of the hole in red paint.

  "and so." with one bold stroke of the paint brush he set the angle on which his machine boy was to drill.

  "shaya, madoda!" Johnny clapped the shoulder of the black man beside him. "hit it, man." machine boys were selected for stamina and physique; this one was a greek sculpture in glistening ebony.

  "nkosi!" the machine boy grinned an acknowledgement, and with his assistant lugged his rock drill into position.

  the drill looked like a gargantuan version of a heavy calibre machine gun.

  the noise as the big bantu opened the drill was shattering in the low-roofed, constricted space of the stope. the compressed air roared and fluttered into the drill buffeting the eardrums. Johnny made the clenched-fist gesture of approval, and for a second they smiled at each other in the companionship of shared labour. then Johnny crawled on up the stope to mark the next shot hole.

  Johnny delange was twenty-seven years old, and he was top rock breaker on the sander ditch. his gang of forty-eight men were a tightly-knit team of specialists. men fought each other for a place on 27 section, for that's where the money was. Johnny could pick and choose, so each month when the surveyors came in and measured up, Johnny delange was way out ahead in fat homage here was the remarkable position where the man at the lowest point of authority earned more than the man at the top. Johnny delange earned more than the general manager of the sander ditch. last year he had paid super-tax on an income of 22,000 rand. even a miner like kowalski, who brutalized and bullied his gang until he was left with the dregs of the mine, would earn eight or nine thousand rand a year, about the same salary as an official of rod ironsides" rank.

  Johnny reached the top of his long-wall and painted in the last shot holes. down the inclined floor of the stope below him all his drills were roaring, his machine boys lying or crouching behind them.

  he lay there on one elbow, removed his helmet and wiped his face, resting a moment.

  Johnny was an extraordinary-looking young man. his long jet black hair was swept back and tied with a leather thong at the back of his head in a curlicue. his features were those of an american indian, gaunt and bony. he had cut the sleeves out of his overalls to expose his arms arms as muscular and sinuous as pythons, tattooed below the elbows, immensely powerful but supple. his body was the same, long and sinewy and powerful.

  on his right hand he wore eight rings, two on each finger, and it was clear from the design of the rings that they were not merely; ornamental. they were heavy gold rings with skull and cross-bones, wolves" heads and other irregularities worked into them, a mass of metal that formed a permanent knuckleduster. of the big eyes in the one skull's head rod ironsides had once asked: "are those real rubies, Johnny? "and Johnny had replied seriously: "if they aren't, then i've sure as hell been gypped out of three rand fifty, mr. ironsides."

  delange had been a really wild youngster, until eight months ago. it was then he had met and married hettie. courtship and marriage occupying the space of one week.

  now he was settling down very well. it was all of ten days since he had last fought anybody.

  lying in the stope he allowed himself five minutes to think about hettie. she was almost as tall as he was, with a wondrously buxom body and chestnut red hair. Johnny adored her. he was not the best speech-maker in kitchenerville when it came to expressing his affection, so he bought her things.

  he bought her dresses and jewellery, he bought her a deep-freezer and a fifteen cubic foot frigidaire, he bought her a chrysler monaco with leopard-skin upholstery and a kenwood chef. in fact, it was becoming difficult to enter the delange household without tripping over at least one of Johnny's gifts to hettie. the congestion was made more acute by the fact that living with them was Johnny's brother, davy.

  "hell, man!" happily Johnny shook his head. "she's a bit of all-right, hey!" there was an eye-level oven he had spotted in a furniture store in kitchenerville the previous saturday.

  "she'll love that, man," he muttered, "and it's only four hundred rand.

  i'll get it for her on pay day." the decision made, he clapped his helmet onto his head and began crawling out of the stope. it was time now to go up to the station and collect the explosives for the day's blast.

  his boss boy should have been waiting for him in the drive, and Johnny was furious to find no sign of him nor the piccaninny who was his assistant.

  "bastard!" he grunted, playing the beam of his lamp up and down the drive. "he's been acting up like hell." the boss boy was a pock-marked swazi, not a big man, but powerful for his size and highly intelligent. he was also a man of mean disposition; Johnny had never seen him smile, and for an extrovert like Johnny it was galling to work with someone so sullen and taciturn. he tolerated the swazi because of his drive and reliability, but he was the only man in the gang that Johnny disliked.

  "bastard!" the drive was deserted, the roar of the rock drills was muted.

  "where the hell is he? "Johnny scowled impatiently. "i'll skin him when i find him." then he remembered the latrine.