Gold Mine

by Wilbur Smith

He found with surprise that he was panting, as though he had run a long way. Johnny Delange leaned against the sidewall of the haulage, his hard helmet tilted at a jaunty angle and a cigarette dangling from his lips.

  Down at the face the shots began to fire. Johnny recognized each detonation, and when the last dull jar disrupted the air about them, he pushed himself away from the wall with his shoulder.

  "That was the lifters," he announced. "Come on Big King!" Not for Johnny Delange a thirty-minute waste of time.

  As he and Big King set off down the haulage together they were binding scarves over their noses and mouths. Ahead of them a blue-ey white fog of dust and fumes filled the tunnel, and Big King had the hose going, using a fine mist spray to absorb the fumes and particles.

  They pushed on up to the face, Johnny stooping over the safety lamp.

  Even he had a healthy respect for methane gas.

  "Bar boys!" he bellowed, not waiting for Big King to finish watering down. They came up like ghosts in the fog.

  Hard behind them the machine boys hovered with their drills.

  Taking calculated risks Johnny had his drills roaring forty-five minutes sooner than Davy Delange would have in the same circumstances.

  When he came back to the face from cutting fuses and priming his explosives, he found his lashing gang struggling with a massive slab of rock that had been blown intact from the face. Five of them were beating on it with fourteen pound hammers in an attempt to crack it into manageable pieces. As Johnny reached them, Big King was berating them mercilessly.

  "You look like a bunch of virgins grinding millet." The hammers clanged and struck sparks from the slab.

  Sweat oozed from every pore of the hammer boys" skin, greasing their bodies, flying from their heads in sparkling droplets with each blow.

  "Shaya!" Big King goaded them on. "Between you all you wouldn't crack the shell of an egg. Hit it, man! Hit it!" One by one the men fell back exhausted, their chests heaving, gulping air through gaping mouths, blinded by their own sweat.

  "All right," Johnny intervened. The rock was holding up the whole blast. It warranted drastic measures to break it up.

  "I'll pop her," he said, and any government inspector or mine safety officer would have paled at those words.

  "Stand far back and turn your faces away," Big King instructed his gang. From the forehead of one of his men he took a pair of wire mesh-goggles, designed to shield the eyes from flying splinters And rock fragments. He handed them to Johnny who placed them over his eyes.

  From the canvas carrying bag he took out a stick of Dynagel. It looked like a candle wrapped in yellow greased paper.

  "Give me your knife." Big King opened a large clasp knife and handed it to Johnny.

  Carefully Johnny cut a coin-shaped sliver of explosive from one end of the stick, a piece twice as thick as a penny.

  He returned the remains of the stick to the bag and handed it to Big King.

  "Get back," he said and Big King moved away.

  Johnny eyed the slab of rock thoughtfully and then placed the fragment of Dynagel in the centre of it. He adjusted the goggles over his eyes, and picked up one of the fourteen-pound hammers.

  "Turn your eyes away," he warned and took deliberate aim. Then with a smooth overhead two handed swing he brought the hammer down on the Dynagel.

  The explosion was painful in the confined space of the drive, and afterwards Johnny's ears hummed with it. A tiny drop of blood ran down his cheek from the scratch inflicted by a flying splinter. His wrists ached from the jolt of the hammer in his hands.

  "Gwenyama!" grunted Big King in admiration. "The man is a lion." The explosion had cracked the slab into three wedge shaped segments.

  Johnny pushed the goggles onto his forehead and wiped the blood from his cheek with the back of his hand.

  "Get it the hell out of here," he grinned, then he turned to Big King.

  "Come." He jerked his head towards the end of the tunnel. "Help me charge the holes." The two of them worked quickly, sliding the sticks of Dynagel into the shot holes and tamping them home with the charging sticks.

  For anyone who was not in possession of a blasting licence, to charge up was an offence punishable by a fine of hundred rand or two months" imprisonment, or both.

  Big King had no licence, but his assistance saved fifteen minutes on the operation.

  Johnny and his gang blew the face five times that day, but as they rode up in the cage into the cool evening air he was not satisfied.

  "Tomorrow we'll shoot her six times," he told Big King.

  "Maybe seven, "said Big King.

  Hettie was waiting for him in the lounge when he got home. She flew to him and threw her arms about his neck.

  "Did you bring me a present?" she asked with her lips against his ear, and Johnny laughed tantalizingly. It was very seldom that he did not have a gift for her.

  "You did!" she exclaimed, and began to run her hands over his pockets.

  "There!" She thrust her hand into the inside pocket of his jacket, and brought out the little white jeweller's box.

  "Oh!" She opened it, and then her expression changed slightly.

  "You don't like them? "Johnny asked anxiously.

  "How much did they cost?" she enquired as she examined the porcelain and lacquer earrings, representing two vividly coloured. parrots.

  "Well," Johnny looked shamefaced, "you see, Hettie, it's the end of the month, you see, and well, like I'm a bit short till pay day, you see, so I couldn't-"

  "How much?"

  "Well, you see," he took a breath, "two rand fifty." "Oh," said Hettie, "they're nice." And she promptly lost interest in them. She tossed the box carelessly onto the crowded mantelpiece and set off for the kitchen.

  "Hey, Hettie," Johnny called after her. "How about we go across to Fochvill? There's a dance there tonight. We go and twist, hey?"

  Hettie turned back, her expression alive again.

  "Gee, yes, man!" she enthused. "Let's do that. I'll go and change, hey!" And she ran up the passage.

  Davy came out of his bedroom, on his way to work.

  "Hey, Davy." Johnny stopped him. "You got any money on you?"

  "Are you broke again?"

  "Just till pay day."

  "Hell, man, Johnny, you got a cheque for eleven hundred the beginning of the month. You spent it all?"

  "Next month," Johnny winked, "I'm going to get a cheque for two or three thousand. Then watch me go! Come, Davy, lend me fifty. I'm taking Hettie dancing."

  or Rod the days flicked past like telegraph poles viewed from a speeding automobile. Each day he gained confidence in his own ability.

  He had never doubted that he could handle the underground operation and now he found that he had a firm grasp on the surface as well. He knew that his campaign to reduce working costs was having effect, but its full harvest would only be apparent when the quarterly reports were drafted.

  Yet he lay awake in the big Manager's residence on the ridge in which he and his few sticks of furniture seemed lost and lonely, and he worried. There were always myriad nagging little problems, but there were others more serious.

  This morning Lily Jordan had come through into his office.

  "Mr. Innes is coming up to see you at nine."

  "What's he want?" Herbert Innes was the Manager of the Sander Ditch Reduction works.

  "He wouldn't tell me," Lily answered. The end of the month had come and gone and Lily was still with him. Rod presumed that he had been approved.

  Herby Innes, burly and red-faced, sat down and drank a cup of tea that Lily provided, while he regaled Rod with the stroke by stroke account of his Sunday afternoon golf round. Rod interrupted him after he had hit a nine-iron short at the third and sanked his chip.

  "Okay, Herby. What's the problem?"

  "We've got a leak, Rod." "Bad?"

  "Bad enough," Herby grunted. To him the loss of a single ounce of gold during the process of recovery and refinement was catastrophic.r />
  "What do you reckon?"

  "Between the wash and the pour we are losing a couple hundred ounces a week."

  "Yes," Rod agreed. "That is bad enough." 20,000 rand a month, 120,000 a year.

  "Have you any ideas?"

  "It's been going on for some time, even in Frank Lemmer's day. We have tried everything." Rod was a little hazy about the workings of the reduction plant, not that he would admit that, but he was. He knew that the ore was weighed and sampled when it reached the surface, from this a fairly accurate estimate of gold content was made and compared with actual recovery. Any discrepancy had to be investigated and traced.

  "What is your recovery rate for the last quarter?"

  "Ninety-six point seven-three."

  "That's pretty good," Rod admitted. It was impossible to recover all the gold in the ore that was surfaced but Herby was getting most of it out. 96.73 percent of it, to be precise.

  Which meant that very little of the missing 200 ounces was being lost into the dump and the slimes dam.

  "I tell you what, Herby," Rod decided. "I'll come down to the plant this afternoon. We'll go over it together, perhaps a fresh eye may be able to spot the trouble."

  "May do." Herby was sceptical. "We've tried everything else. We are pouring this afternoon. What time shall I expect you?"

  "Two o'clock." They started at the shaft head, where the ore cage, the co pie arrived at the surface every four minutes with its cargo Of rock which it dumped into a concrete shute. Each load was classified as either" reef" or "waste".

  The reef was dropped into the massive storage bins, while the waste was carried off on a conveyor to the wash house to be sluiced down before going to the dump. Tiny particles of gold sticking to the waste rock were gathered in this way.

  Herby put his lips close to Rod's ear to make himself heard above the rumbling roar of rock rolling down the chute.

  "I'm not worried about this end. it's all bulk here and very little shine." Herby used the reduction plant slang for gold. "The closer we get to the end, the more dangerous it IS.

  Rod nodded and followed Herby down the steel ladder until they reached a door below the storage bins. They went through into a long underground tunnel very similar to the ore tunnel on 100 level. Again there was a massive conveyor belt moving steadily along the tunnel while ore from the bins above was fed onto it. Rod and Herby walked along beside the belt until it passed under a massive electromagnet.

  Here they paused for a while. The magnet was extracting from the ore all those pieces of metal which had found their way into the ore passes and bins.

  "How much you picking up? "Rod asked.

  "Last week fourteen tons," Herby answered, and taking Rod's arm led him through the door beside them. They were in an open yard that looked like a scrap-metal merchant's premises. A mountain of pinch bars jumper bits, shovels, steel wire rope, snatch blocks, chains, spanners, fourteen-pound hammers, and other twisted and unrecognizable pieces of metal filled the yard. All of it was rusted, much of it unusable. It had been separated from the ore by the magnet.

  Rod's mouth tightened. Here he was presented with indisputable evidence of the carelessness and it belongs to the company attitude of his men. This pile of scrap represented a waste that would total hundreds of thousands of rand annually.

  "We will see about that he muttered.

  "If one of those hammers got into my jaw mills it would smash it to pieces," Herby told him dolefully and led him back into the conveyor tunnel.

  The belt angled upwards sharply and they followed the catwalk beside it. They climbed steadily for five minutes and Herby was puffing like a steam engine. Through the holes in the honeycomb steel plate under his feet, Rod could see that they were now a few hundred feet above ground level.

  The conveyor reached the head of a tall tower and dumped its load of ore into the gaping mouths of the screeners. As the rock fell down the tower to ground level again it was sorted for size, and the larger pieces diverted to the jaw crushers' which chewed it into fistsize bites.

  "See anything?"Herby asked, barely concealing the sarcasm.

  Rod grinned at him.

  They climbed down the steel ladders that seemed endless. The screeners rattling and the crushers hammering, until Rod's eardrums pleaded for mercy.

  At last they reached ground level and went through into the mill room.

  This was a cavernous galvanized, iron shed the size of a large aircraft hangar. At least one hundred yards long and fifty feet high, it was filled with long rows of the cylindrical tube mills.

  Forty of them in all, they were as thick as the boiler of a steam locomotive and about twice as long. Into one end of them was fed the ore which had been reduced in size by the jaw crushers. The tube mills revolved and the loose steel balls within them pounded the rock to powder.

  If the noise before had been bad, it was hideous in the mill room.

  Rod and Herby made no effort to speak to each other until they had walked through into the comparative quiet of the first heavy-media separator room. "Now," Herby explained. "This is where we start worrying." He indicated the rows of pale blue six-inch piping that came through the wall from the mill room.

  "In there is the powdered rock mixed with water to a smooth flowing paste. About forty percent of the gold is free."

  "No one can get into those pipes and you've checked for any possible leak?" Rod asked. Herby nodded.

  "But," he said, "have a look here. Along the far wall was a series of cages. They were made of heavy steel mesh, the perforations would not allow a man's finger through. The heavy steel doors were barred and locked. Outside each battery of cages stood a Bantu attendant in clean white overalls. They were all concentrating on the manipulation of the turricock that obviously regulated the flow of the powdered ore through the pipes.

  Herby stopped at one of the cages.

  "Shine!" He pointed. Beyond the heavy guard screen the grey paste of rock powder was flowing from a series of nozzles over an inclined black rubber sheet. The surface of the rubber sheet was deeply corrugated, and in each corrugation the free gold was collecting, held there by its own weight. The gold was thick as butter in a Dagwood sandwich, greasy yellow-looking in the folds of rubber.

  Rod laid hold of the steel screen and shook it.

  "No," Herby laughed. "No one will get in that way."

  "How do you clean the gold off that sheet? Does someone have access to the separator?" Rod asked.

  "The separator cleans itself automatically," Herby answered. "Look!"

  Rod noticed for the first time that the rubber sheet was moving very slowly, it was also an endless belt running round two rollers. As the belt inverted, so fine jets of water washed the gold from the corrugations into a collection tank.

  "I'm the only one who has access. We change the collection tanks daily," said Herby.

  It looked foolproof, Rod had to admit.

  Rod turned and glanced down the row of four Bantu attendants. They were all intent on their duties, and Rod knew that each of them had a high security rating. They had been carefully selected and screened before being allowed into the reduction works.