A Rock and a Hard Place

by George Zelt PhD

  “It doesn’t hurt to be late for such meetings and elusive with details,” he said with sparkling eyes. “It promotes the perception you are in no hurry to sell, and that implies you really have something worth selling. Some initially express great annoyance,” he said with a wily grin, “but they warm rapidly when presented with opportunity.”

  George’s mother, who must have been in her mid-seventies, lived with him. “Ma” was a pioneer of sorts, like George. She would spend extended periods watching him, as if waiting for her son to do something that warranted her comment. Then the two would bicker loudly about the improbability of each other’s stance.

  George appreciated me as someone who went to the field and slept on the ground as geologists sometimes do. He welcomed me into his home, where some of his native assistants ate—like family. He was not normally singled out or commented on by the surrounding community for his illegal association with coloreds. The locals couldn’t shun him, as he didn’t join their society or go to their church, as far as I could tell. He kind of willingly acted as if shunned himself, while presenting his smiling mask-face and greeting all with resigned pleasantry. In short, he was tolerated but occasionally he overstepped the line.

  Once, when George and I sat talking in his living room, he fed one of his several huge dogs—which also had the run of his house—by dumping leftovers directly on the linoleum floor. There was no dog dish. “Why do I need a dish?” he asked rhetorically. “The dog will lick the floor cleaner than it was before. However,” he said as he looked up at me, “Ma has slipped from time to time.”

  One of his dogs, referred to as Rat because he bared his teeth when he defended his food, had a stump tail. The deformity occurred, as the story goes, when he couldn’t get inside a car quick enough one dark night as he and George were hastily leaving a local establishment. The tail, caught in the car door, prompted Rat to howl as he pulled frantically inward. Unfortunately, several colored ladies were also in the car. Doors flew open and all of the women ran out in various directions, screaming. Rat yanked himself free (less the very end of his tail) and chased after them. Witnesses impugned George’s already fragile reputation, which he could only defend by looks of perfected righteous indignation.

  When not eating, Rat lay looking as if he had done something wrong. It was kind of a common expression in George’s home.

  * * *

  One of the more interesting mineral claims George had was a vein deposit of what he identified as blue lace agate. “The blue,” as George called it, was a typical agate in that it was composed of mostly silica dioxide, a variety of quartz. The chemical, carried in water of varying geothermal temperatures, crystallized on the sides of rock cavities through which it percolated. In the case of the blue, the stone became beautifully, delicately layered, like lace, in colors ranging from white to blue to purple, depending on the additional chemicals the water also carried. George said it was a unique rock; nothing like it existed anyplace else in the world. While he could stretch the truth, he wasn’t stretching it this time.

  Although George didn’t take many people to his precious stone claims, he asked if I would like to see where “the deposit of blue” originated. At that time he kept the location confidential, as it came from neighboring South West Africa—and perhaps involved tax and security concerns.

  “We’ll make a stop on the way,” he said. I think he just wanted to use my Land Rover; he’d apparently lost his driving license. Also, he was trying to get me interested in his work, and this find was stimulating and real.

  We drove a considerable distance to see the deposit. It was exposed by a long trench some twelve feet deep and wide enough for several men to dig in. The edge of the sheet-like agate, about three or four inches thick, projected upward into the trench on a 30-degree angle or so, like a plate. Over the years, George’s motley crew of Khoikhoi helpers in their tattered clothes had climbed down into the hole and broken off large chunks of the delicately layered rock, which they handed upward. They slept in lean-to shelters next to the diggings. Most of these harvested rocks were reduced further to inch-size pieces by hitting them with a sledgehammer and then either sold as they were or polished and sold as a rarity with various accompanying stories.

  While I was there, George tried to get several international breakfast-cereal people interested in putting a little piece of the blue rock in each cereal box, as they would a toy or some other trinket. It seemed like a good idea, and he bullshitted about the stone’s rarity and beauty. However, there could be millions of boxes requiring a piece of the agate, and the cereal people, it seemed, probably didn’t think it would be economical.

  Another time, unrelated to the cereal effort, George read how NASA’s Apollo 17 module pilot, Dr. Harrison Schmitt, described the earth as seen from space. George realized that narrative, and the associated pictures that showed swirling white clouds and blue water, could easily describe his blue lace agate. George pursued the idea by presenting a piece of the blue, polished to the size of a hard ball, to a high-powered ecological fund-raising group in California that had on its board US First Ladies from Eisenhower on, plus the governor of California, Ronald Reagan. The similarities were indeed remarkable, and the blue won several contests from that point on. It became a symbol of the earth to many, and was, George said, featured in both Time and Life magazines. I don’t remember the details, but George did show me a brochure concerning an awards ceremony he and his mother attended. On one such occasion he gave a ring made of blue lace to Clark Gable’s glamorous widow, Kay Spreckles, who, being a spirited swinger, suggested to the audience they were now married! It was a brilliant marketing move and orders poured in for the blue. To this day, the blue remains a unique rock that is tied forever to George’s name.

  As usual with attractive rocks like blue lace agate, people assigned them special qualities. For example, some believed the blue lace could activate inner knowing, perform miracles, and lessen anger, as well as provide confidence and cure nervous speech habits. I often wondered what the half-dressed little Khoikhoi thought in the 90-degree heat as they beat the crap out of that “magical” rock.

  One day at dusk after discussing the blue with George—he was always looking for ideas to sell more of it—I met another geologist who worked for him. He introduced me to a beautiful colored girl. She was seventeen and entering her prime—with black hair, lovely strong legs, a youthful figure, and apricot skin. Such a meeting in the 1970s was strictly illegal due to apartheid. Her father was a mine captain, a position of importance, so she attended the local high school for Khoikhoi but could not speak English, only Afrikaans. Her high-school uniform was a short dark dress, white blouse, white socks, and black shoes. I understood she had not been with a man before and, offering her a hard-to-find lollypop, did not tamper with that too much.

  * * *

  After visiting George for a few days, I towed my one-man trailer to a new location in my field area. In winter when the nights were colder, I slept and cooked inside and then lay reading under a large blanket. A Coleman gas lantern provided ample light. Although small and smelling of sweat, this trailer became home to me.

  One night I began reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. As I read, Namaqualand’s vastness and isolation, unconventional vegetation, and strange topography seemed to be applicable to Hobbit adventures. It inspired my imagination as I prowled the barrenness, looking for rocks.

  A few days later, when I was quite far to the north of my field area, I saw huge termite nests, some taller than six feet. Cone-shaped, they rose from the sand and bush like miniature cathedrals and were occupied by hundreds of thousands of parishioner termites living very close together and worshipping one queen. The tapering spires, constructed of sand grains and soil glued together with saliva, thrust themselves upward from the flat sand. Baked hard by the sun, they had withstood years of annual heavy rains and winds striking at them. Those that had succumbed looked like the pinnacled ruins of medieval c
astles. Who could understand how these blind creatures—vulnerable, sensitive to sunlight and temperature, poorly adapted to life on earth—were able to join in an effective whole and become a very successful species on our planet? Their undeveloped individual brains were somehow linked together like separate cells into one working, collective brain that was programmed to construct their homes in much the same way humans work together to build skyscrapers.

  As I continued walking in the heat and desolation, I saw that some nests had a six-inch-round hole close to the ground. Made by foraging long-nosed, ungodly-looking ant bears, the holes looked like round Hobbit doors to me. Could, by some extraordinary chance, Tolkien have gotten the idea of the round door from this? As I wandered in the heat, I even compared the ugly ant bears to Tolkien’s wingless dragons.

  Years after this experience I read with great amazement that Tolkien had been born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, a few hundred miles away from where I’d come across those enormous termite nests. He could indeed have seen these nests in southern Africa. I also read he left South Africa for England when he was young, so perhaps my theory was wrong. Still, he could have—after all, look at the story George created out of his blue lace.

  Chapter 5

  I Know What I’m Getting

  Collecting rock specimens for more than a month while talking to people gave me a good idea of my study area as well as the overall geology. I was beginning to know what I was getting into. Now it was time to go just beyond “The Oasis” farm to the dry inland Swartlintjies River, which, according to my map, roughly paralleled the road that led through the sand-covered coastal area all the way to the Atlantic Ocean.

  The Namaqualand wind obliterates such remote roads to the point of becoming little more than indistinct elongated depressions, or even nothing at all. During this process, as vehicles pass over them the sand is compacted into washboard-like surfaces at right angles to the track, causing considerable jarring to take place. I had learned from seasoned drivers it was best to speed up and theoretically “skip” from one crest of the corrugations to the next. That’s what I was doing now, roaring along the disappearing road and gripping the wheel.

  Several times a year, the road has to be maintained and the washboard bumps flattened. Traditionally, a dust-covered enormous yellow grader—the large kind normally used for construction work—is employed for this. Like bottom-feeding carp, the grader’s bladelike lower lip pushes slowly forward, leaving a flat, deep ribbon of roadway in the sand.

  Late in the day I came up behind one of these graders. Its diminutive colored helper—with his light-brown skin and characteristic almond-shaped face—walked in its wake, roughly dressed with a complementary drooping hat. The assistant was doing his best to keep up with the machine, shoveling away bits of rock and piles of sand misplaced by the grazing blade.

  A large wooden compartment, teetering on wheels like an old-time circus wagon or train caboose, was dragged behind the grader. This was the “home” of the white driver.

  It was exactly five o’clock. The grader and its straining, creaking caboose abruptly rolled over the sand-track confinement wall it had created and stopped. Often, not even a thorny acacia tree or any other such landmark will influence a worker’s decision, just the time.

  I knew from past experiences that once parked, the (usually) Afrikaner driver retires to his mobile home to freshen up. Both he and the Khoikhoi have eaten and breathed sand dust all day, so how he cleans up is a mystery. To make the task even more remarkable, the trailing wagon has been engulfed in churned-up sand dust all day; it must have been sucking it in like a vacuum cleaner. Nothing keeps sand dust out.

  During refreshment time, the Khoikhoi, without the benefit of washing, cooks a campfire dinner for two. If the wind blows too aggressively, he cooks near, if not under, the bone-dry wooden wagon. This, to my mind, should be of concern to the white man inside.

  On that day, the driver waved. He may have seen only a few lone vehicles that whole day, so I decided to ram my Land Rover over the foot-high sand wall. Perhaps he’d seen black rocks somewhere as he drove?

  The old, unshaven Afrikaner baas1 dressed in washed-out gray pants and a red shirt greeted me with a handshake while his helper busied himself near the fire.

  “Goeienaand Meenheer,” he greeted me in Afrikaans.

  “Good evening to you,” I responded as he took his meerschaum pipe out of his mouth. “My name is George. May I join your campfire?”

  “Ach, ja. I’m Heinrich. I can’t offer you much; my boy is making biltong now.”

  “Biltong?” I replied, knowing it was hard, dried meat like jerky. “Did you shoot something?”

  “No, but we found a young springbok that had just run into a cattle-wire fence. The sun must have blinded him. The wire broke his neck. Joseph here”—he referred to his helper, who looked to be in his mid-thirties—“supports his mother, sister, and her two children, as well as his own family. Every once in a while we find some fresh meat, and he makes biltong for them. I keep a bit for myself, too, but I chew slowly.”

  He said this with a grin that displayed an array of worn teeth, several of which looked wooden and badly fitting.

  We chatted a bit more. I asked him about rocks; he said they were only in the riverbed I would find farther west. And then I asked how the biltong was prepared.

  “Come and I’ll show you, George.”

  We moved to where Joseph squatted.

  He stood. “Hello, massa,” Joseph said, yanking off his well-worn cap and nodding rapidly while staring at the ground.

  I didn’t offer my hand, as it was not custom and would have embarrassed everybody.

  “Hello,” I replied. “It looks good.” He had been cutting the leanest and best meat into long, thin strips. All around him on the sand were various containers full of ingredients. I saw a wooden tub containing liquid in which the meat would be marinated. “What’s in there?”

  “Five pounds of Swartop slat—Blackhill salt,” Heinrich answered, “with about eight or ten ounces of sugar, a quarter pound of saltpeter, and a quarter pound of ground coriander seed.”

  “What else, Joseph?” I asked, smiling and wondering about his life.

  Joseph reluctantly grinned, clearly not sure if he was supposed to, and pointed to a bottle of vinegar and a bag of pepper. He was shy and not used to speaking to strange white men. He pointed to another collection and said it was a mixture containing leaves and herbs.

  Just to the side of the wooden tub was a brown paper bag formed to the shape of a bottle. I assumed it was alcohol—not related to the discussion.

  “He rubs the meat with the ingredients, and then the whole lot is marinated in the tub,” Heinrich continued. “Every so often he stirs the mixture to make sure each strip is well penetrated. We leave the tub in the wagon two or three days, and it shakes itself as we move along. After that, he washes the meat off in brine, one pound of salt to three gallons of water, and hangs the strips up to dry.”

  “How can you hang them when you’re grading?”

  “We string them to the sunless side of the wagon and try to cover them just as we do when we find a springbok carcass. There’s not enough circulating air inside.” Heinrich shrugged. “Birds can be a problem, though. Several times we’ve had birds circling the wagon.” He stood silent, shaking his head. “Can you imagine us out here alone, pushing sand, and a vulture circling above?”

  “Would you like a cold beer?” I offered, hoping to lighten the mood. “I have some in a cooler.”

  He looked at me with wonder in his weathered face. “Cold? Sure! Never get anything cold out here.”

  Later, we sat by a campfire while Joseph served a large platter of biltong they’d been saving. It was excellent—not too tough, just a bit soft with fat attached for taste. Sunset came and the colors of the land slid into blackness very fast while the fire gave off sharp points of colored light.

  “Once a year, I travel to Johannesburg to sell mealie
sacks to the gold miners.”

  I nodded, knowing that the black miners made clothes from the corn sacks.

  “The great stores and masses of people are frightening,” Heinrich continued. “I don’t feel comfortable at all there.”

  “You were born here, in Namaqualand?”

  “Ag, man, I have its sand in my skin.”

  “People like to stay where they started. Fifty percent of all Americans spend their entire lives living within fifty miles of where they were born.”

  “I’m living more than fifty miles from where I was born . . . actually it increases some days as I drive.”

  “Then you’re more of a traveler than most Americans.”

  He smiled at the thought. “Well, I know what I’m getting here and I prefer it that way.”

  Later, I took my blanket from the Rover and curled up on the still-warm sand not far from Joseph, while Heinrich retired to his quarters. Life just went on, no matter who you were or what you did. Sometimes the idea was just to pass each day as best as you could.

  Morning came and I was off, full of ambition, headed along the sand road to where it, according to my map, paralleled the Swartlintjies River. After some time I stopped and parked, intent to walk the half mile to find it.

  The river’s name means “black rock” because isolated and unusual black rocks are found within the riverbed. Geologically, they are called metabasites. They would form major pieces of the geology puzzle I was putting together and help me draw a clear picture of what took place over time.

  Although infrequent, the metabasites did indeed pop out like prominent blackheads from the river rocks of white granite gneiss. Generally, they were oblong like partially flattened wagon wheels, with their long axis orientated east-west. Together the minerals in the rock types had adjusted to changing metamorphic and deformational conditions deep within the earth a billion years ago, before they both rose to the earth’s surface. Both rock types—the granite gneiss and the metabasites—were of Precambrian age, but the metabasite rocks were more important, as their color meant they contained the kind of dark minerals that could provide specific evidence of their origin. The trick was to find enough metabasites sequentially exposed along the entire length of the river so that I could determine and record any changes in their mineralogy and chemistry.