Golden Soak

TWO

There were no trees where they dumped me, just the dark outline of low hills and stars brilliant in the still, arid air. There was a big anthill close by — magnetic ants, the pointed side facing north. I sat down with my back against it, still hearing their drunken laughter as they dropped me over the side on to the edge of the Highway and Westrop saying, ‘Just keep going south an’ you’ll arrive at Kalgoorlie an’ don’t let me set eyes on yuh again.’ Somebody — Lenny, I think — had had the decency to dump my suitcase on the gravel beside me, and then the Chev roared off up the side track to Grafton Downs, the red tail lights and their laughter fading in the distance until they were lost behind the dark shoulder of a hill and I was alone with only the silence of the night for company.

I closed my eyes, a little sobered now, but still feeling sore at being made to look such a fool, cursing all Australians for their crude sense of humour. And thinking about it there in the stillness, remembering the violence in Westrop’s voice, the trembling of his hand on my shoulder, I wasn’t at all sure he had meant it as a joke. More like a warning, it seemed.

I was still thinking about that, my back against the hard-baked surface of the anthill, when the lights of a vehicle appeared over a rise, coming from the direction of Nullagine. It was already slowing down, the headlights catching me in their glare as I stood waiting beside the road. It was a Toyota and when it stopped Prophecy put her head out of the window. ‘I came into the bar just as you were driving off with those jokers. Thought I’d better come and pick you up.’ She was grinning as though she, too, saw the humour of it.

Thanks,’ I said and retrieved my suitcase. Then, as I got in beside her, she said, ‘I got a full tank.’ She was watching me, her eyes gleaming black in the dashboard light. ‘Yuh ever been down Golden Soak?’

I shook my head.

‘Well, now’s your chance to have a dekko before Phil Westrop. After all the questions you bin asking, he’ll be down there at the weekend for sure and Ed’ll have a fight on his hands if he tries to run him off the property again.’

I didn’t know whether it was the thought that Ed Garrety might get hurt or whether it was simply that Prophecy infected me with her own curiosity, but I said okay and we started driving south. ‘How do you think I’m going to get down the shaft?’ I asked. But she had rope, torches, a miner’s helmet, everything we’d need in the back. She always carried them, she said. And then we were talking about Westrop and what it was he was after. But it seemed she knew no more than I did. ‘Looking for McIlroy,’ she said. ‘That’s a bloody odd thing for him to say.’ But she’d no idea why he’d said it and the noise and the heat of the truck made talking very tiring. With all the beer I’d drunk, my head began to nod and soon I was asleep. Even the jolts as we crossed the creek beds didn’t waken me.

It was almost two when we reached the turn-off to Jarra Jarra and at Prophecy’s suggestion I took over the driving. I had to concentrate then, for in places the track was difficult to follow and in the hill country there were the gullies to watch for. It was still dark when we came to the paddock fence and I felt like a thief in the night coming back to Jarra Jarra uninvited in a borrowed truck with a woman like Prophecy lolling in a whisky-loaded daze in the seat beside me. I saw the outline of The Governor humped against the stars, and then I had crossed the Mt Newman track and was on to the back trail that led down to Golden Soak.

The first pale light of dawn was seeping into the sky behind us as I turned the red outcrop and saw the chimney thin as a pencil above the rusted mine buildings. I was driving without lights then, feeling my way, with Prophecy awake and sitting bolt upright. I stopped by the mine office, switched the engine off and got out. There was no wind, everything still and very quiet. The dawn was brightening, a thin line to the east, and I stood there on the threshold of the day, listening. Prophecy joined me, a hag in the pallid light, her eyes gummed and her blown hairy dry as furze. No jingle of a bit, no exhaust blown whisper of the engine — no sound except the soundless promise of heat to come. ‘Yuh expecting somebody?’ Prophecy asked.

‘No.’ The gully closed around us. Dark now, no sign of the dawn and the place eerie in the headlights, a gaping mouth with quartz like ivory molars showing through the earth’s red gums. I reached the old mine workings, and where they’d once loaded the tip trucks, I was able to back and turn so that the Toyota faced downhill. I switched off the engine and sat there for a moment, listening.

‘Wot’s s’matter — scared?’

Her face was a dark blur, her voice a little sharper.

‘Perhaps,’ I said, thinking of Ed Garrety and his father and the dead miners. Bad spirits all longa that mine. A cold shiver ran through me, though it was hot as an oven here with the day’s heat trapped by the rocks. Hard gnarled fingers touched my bare arms. ‘Yuh goin’ down?’

‘That was the idea.’

I saw the dark shape of her head nod. ‘Just be careful, that’s all.’ The fingers were stroking my arm, a caressing touch. ‘Ed’s never been down. He told me that once. Nobody’s been down since it was closed.’

She took her hand away and reached into the back, passing to me the miner’s helmet with its lamp and the battery attached to a belt. She had a geological hammer, too, and a haversack for rock samples. We also took a coil of nylon rope with us and a powerful hand torch. Then, as we started up, picking our way round the black gaping holes of the early workings, she gave me the lay-out of the mine as near as she could remember it from listening to old-timers in the bar. There were four levels at approximately one hundred feet intervals, the lowest, at four hundred feet, being the one that had been flooded following the cave-in. The reef itself more or less followed the fault line that had formed the gully. It was between four and eight feet wide and went down at a fairly steep angle, about 40° she thought. At the eastern end it petered out. At the western end it was badly faulted, and it was at this end that the cave-in had occurred.

‘And nobody’s been down since then?’

‘Not as far’s I know.’ She was short of breath now, her voice wheezing.

‘Too dangerous, is that it?’

She turned her head and looked at me. ‘Want to go back?’

‘What about the ladders? There are ladders in the main shaft, aren’t there?’

‘That’s how the survivors got out.’

‘But that was thirty years ago. They’ll all be rotten by now.’

‘Wood don’t rot so easy in this climate.’

We reached the rock outcrops and the beam of the torch picked out the heavy boarding of the door, new screws gleaming bright against the rusted metal of the bolt. The piece of timber Garrety had jammed across the entrance the previous night lay discarded on the ground. Some time during the day he had been back and secured the door. But with a screwdriver from the truck’s tool kit it was a simple job to release the bolt, and then we were inside the mountain, walking along the adit tunnel, which was just wide enough to take the tip trucks. The walls were rock, a brownish red colour and soft enough to show the marks of the miners’ picks. Red dust covered the tramlines scuffed by the feet of last night’s intruders, the air warm and slightly humid, a musty smell.

I counted 217 paces before the adit opened out into a man-made cavern with a gaping hole in the floor and timber supports for the hoist. A bucket hung there on rusted wires that ran over a pulley and down to the drum of a coal-burning steam engine with its chimney running up into the roof. It was all very primitive and entirely derelict.

Prophecy shone the torch down into the shaft, the two of us hanging on to the baulks of timber and peering into the depths. The shaft went straight down, a rope ladder falling to the staging of the first level, then wooden ladders continuing on down to what looked like the gleam of water at the bottom. Nothing seemed to have changed since the mine had been abandoned, except for that rope ladder secured to one of the timbers of the hoist. The other ladders seemed all right. It was only this first section that had gone and I wondered about that as Prophecy began to pull the rope ladder up. ‘Seems sound enough,’ she said. ‘Home-made, by the look of it.’

The ladder was formed of two lengths of rope, knotted at intervals to support the slats of wood that formed the rungs. The rope was old, but it was good thick manilla, and it wasn’t frayed or rotten. The slats, too, were sound, though they were of several types of wood. It looked as though it had been made on the station and I was thinking of Ed Garrety going down alone as I lowered it back into the shaft.

‘Yuh’d better tie the nylon round you just in case.’

I could feel the tension growing in me as I put on the helmet and buckled the belt around my waist, easing the lead from the battery up to the back of my neck and switching it on to test. The light from the reflector on my helmet was bright on the rock walls. ‘Battery all right?’ I asked.

She nodded. ‘One thing Nobby taught me. I always keep it charged.’ She handed me the end of the nylon rope and I tied it round my chest under the armpits. She had already passed the coil round one of the wooden timbers. She knew what she had to do and I slipped the haversack on and tucked the geological hammer into my belt. ‘I’ll be two or three hours at least,’ I said. ‘But I’ll call to you up the shaft. If a whole hour goes by without my calling, then you’d better go for help.’

She nodded, and I ducked under the timbering and lowered myself into the blackness of the hole, feeling with my feet until I had found the first of the slats. I saw the ropes take the strain as my full weight came on the ladder, then I was moving cautiously down it, my face close to the rock and Prophecy paying out the nylon safety rope from above. The ladder hung close against the rock wall of the shaft and I had to kick it out at each step, to get a foothold on the slats. The staging at the first level was still sound and I swung myself into the cavity, slipping out of the nylon rope and using the end of it to secure the ladder to the wooden frame. Then I started along the narrow tunnel.

It was a cross-cut and quite short. In a moment I was in the main gallery and had turned east along the line of the sloping. At this level the technique was crude, large pillars of gold-bearing quartz having been left to support the over-lying rock. It was safe and with proper shoring the pillars could have been mined. After about two hundred yards the pillars became shorter, the reef gradually narrowing to the point where it was no longer workable. I went back then, past the cross-cut to the shaft, the going gradually becoming more difficult as I encountered roof falls. The rock at this western end was badly fractured with areas of definite instability, and the reef came to an abrupt end at a point of major faulting.

I went back to the shaft, called up it that I was okay, and then I took a chance and went scrambling down the sloping itself. Beyond the second level the roof pillars became fewer, the overburden supported by hand-built walls of red rock. The air had got to it, of course. It was quite humid at this depth, with moisture glistening on the walls, and this had helped the process of oxidization.

Those two levels were enough to convince me that the mine was valueless. Prophecy’s information was largely correct. The reef had had a width of between four and eight feet, inclining down at an angle of roughly 40°. At the eastern end it virtually petered out and at the western end it ran into very heavy faulting.

There was granite here, but in the main the overlay was a mixture of iron and silica with some shale, and it was this the miners had used to shore up the roof. Even supposing the reef continued at depth, the place was about as safe as a derelict coal mine with all the pit props rotted. Start drilling and shot firing anywhere underground and the whole thing would collapse.

I was at the third level then, the ground under my feet no longer dust, but packed firm, and damp in places. Tramlines showed intermittently, twin lines of rusted iron, and suddenly in the light from my lamp I saw the outline of a heel, hard and clear. A little further on, where the floor was almost mud, the imprint of rubber-soled shoes was quite distinct. It gave me an uncanny feeling, alone down there in the bowels of that abandoned mine and knowing that somebody else had been down there recently, might still be down there. No, that was ridiculous — pure imagination. But there was no doubt. Those footprints were quite fresh.

I had passed the cross-cut to the shaft and was nearing the westward end of the reef where it would finish at the fault. A drift opened up to my left, the floor slippery with damp and more footprints. They pointed both ways. He had gone into the drift and come out again. How long ago?

I squatted, peering at them closely. The mud was soft, the edge of the prints blurred. Water was seeping from a nearby crack in the rocks. Water in a land so dry! It couldn’t have been long ago that he’d been here. Ed Garrety probably when he was fixing the bolt on the entrance door. Or had Westrop already been down when Garrety found him? Or was it somebody else, somebody I didn’t know about — somebody who was still down here? I swung my head, directing the beam of the lamp along the gallery. Nothing, just the arched rock with a view of the stoping beyond, and on the floor, not two yards away, another footprint, very clear.

I took my helmet off, straightening up and swinging round to flash the lamp back down the way I had come. But there was nothing, of course, and I stepped into the drift. It turned out to be nothing more than a probe. About forty feet in it suddenly ceased. No quartz. No gleam of gold. Just iron-dark rock rusted in streaks by the moisture. What had decided the miners to give up that precise point?

I went back down the drift, towards the heading where it entered the main gallery, my helmet still in my hand. I didn’t care that my head was bare to any falling rock. With the lamp in my hand I could flash it quickly left and right as I stepped out into the gallery. It may seem silly — my nervousness. But an abandoned mine is a strange place. It has its own sort of atmosphere. I’ve been down quite a few in my time, but never anything as remote and unstable as Golden Soak, and never before or since with that strange sense of somebody watching me, a sort of presence. It wasn’t just those footprints. I’m certain of that. Those were physical. This was something quite insubstantial and rather queer. And it was only here on the third level — I hadn’t noticed it on the first two.

I don’t believe in ghosts, I never have. Certainly not the ghosts of dead miners. If I believed in that sort of nonsense I wouldn’t have gone into mining. There aren’t many mines that haven’t suffered some loss of life and in one or two of the old Cornish mines I’d been down…. Good God! if you believed in ghosts you’d be meeting the dead round every turn and twist of the narrow workings. But that doesn’t mean I’m insensitive to the feel of a place. Old mines, like old houses, have their own atmosphere — a feel, an aura compounded of many things, but chiefly of the way men have handled the problems of working underground. It’s there in the construction of the galleries, the cross-cuts, drifts and winzes, the way they have sloped and handled the ore. But here, on the third level of Golden Soak, it was something different, as though the rock itself had absorbed such a radiation of human fear that it could still infect the atmosphere of the place.

All this flashed through my mind as I moved slowly towards the western end of the reef, an attempt to rationalize the growing sense of unease. Another drift probing to the left and ending, like the first, at a bare rock face. I was into the faulted area then. No more stoping and the miners searching desperately for the new line of the reef. A third drift, to the right this time, and then my lamp was shining on the end of the main gallery, the roof so low it was no more than a hole, and to the left a final probe, damp seeping and a melee of footprints all made by the same person.

It was here in this final drift that I found what he had been looking for. It was a very narrow passageway, barely wide enough to swing a pick in, the roof all faulted, lumps of rock littering the floor. It reminded me of Balavedra — the older workings. I put my helmet on, the lamp showing rubble ahead, water dripping from the roof. It wasn’t level like the others, but descended steeply, an angle of about 20°. It was more like a winze, and it was a deeper probe. I didn’t like it. The roof was unstable and there was water in pools among the fallen rocks. About seventy yards in I was clambering over rubble, my head bent so that I could see where I was treading. And then suddenly I stopped. The rubble under me was no longer composed only of that dull red iron ore streaked with rust. Mixed with it were small jagged pieces of rock so white and coarsely crystalline that it looked like Parian marble. I picked up a piece and caught the gleam of gold in the lamplight.

It was quartz.

They had found the reef again. That was my first thought. Then I raised my head, the lamplight showing piled-up rubble half blocking the passage and the roof above it still the same red rock.

I stood there for a moment, puzzling over it. And then I was crawling on my hands and knees over the rubble, peering ahead down the drift to see the reef quartz showing white in the dark recess of it. Quartz in fragments was mixed with the piled-up granite of the fall, a shovel lying on the debris, and in the cleared space, between the jagged rock face and the rubble pile on which I crouched, a pick was propped against the wall.

I didn’t go any further, I didn’t need to. The pick and that shovel told their story. They belonged with the footprints I had been following. Garrety? Westrop? Somebody had discovered that the reef continued. Or was it an entirely new reef? I picked up a piece of quartz and examined it more closely. The glitter of the gold was clear to the naked eye. There were specks of black, too, and the white of the quartz was smudged with grey.

Gold in antimony?

I looked again at the gaping hole torn out of the roof of the gallery by the rock fall, probing with my lamp. The reef showed as a narrow band of jagged quartz. No way of telling what its width was or how far it extended into the rock. And this wasn’t a recent fall. Damp had discoloured the exposed surfaces of the iron formation above and the rubble under my feet showed the rusty discoloration of water seepage from the porous iron ore. Whoever had been working down here recently certainly hadn’t caused it. The fall had happened a long time ago.

And then, of course, it came to me — this was the 1939 cave-in. This was where the rock and water had poured in upon the miners Ed Garrety’s father had employed in a last desperate attempt to find the reef again. And they had found it. But they hadn’t known that as they ran for their lives. The only one who knew was the man whose footprints I had been following.

The atmosphere of the place seemed stronger then and I hastily filled the haversack with samples of quartz and scrambled back over the heaped-up pile of rubble, conscious of the irony of it. To find the reef again and not to know, and all so pointless, the mine uneconomic anyway.

Beyond the rock pile the footprints showed again in the beam of my lamp, and I stared at them as I moved on down the narrow tunnel of the drift, wondering about the man who had made them, why he had opened up the drift so laboriously, worked alone down here with nothing more than a pick and shovel. As Kadek had said, if the mine was uneconomic thirty years ago it would be doubly so now. So what was the point, unless the ore content….’ I stopped then, I was almost back at the main gallery and I stood there, one of the samples in my hand, looking at it closely. The grey smudges. … It wasn’t the content that had changed, it was the price. The price of antimony.

Gold and antimony. I stared at the smudged white glitter of the sample in my hand, excited now, seeing suddenly the solution to my own problems, as well as those of Jarra Jarra. But I would need to get it chemically tested, the gold assayed, also the antimony content, if it was antimony. And then we’d have to test drill. A lot of time, a lot of money. I dropped the fragment back into the haversack and stood for a moment staring down at a damp patch that showed the imprint of the man who had discovered it clear and sharp, the whole foot. It was the right foot and I put my own alongside it. A little longer, a little broader; a big man then, and Westrop hadn’t been big. Whoever it was, he wasn’t here now and I went back down the main gallery, found the cross-cut to the shaft, and then I was leaning out from the staging, the lamplight shining on the water and the ladder running straight down into it. The shaft was like a well. Water here in abundance and cattle dying on the surface. It didn’t make sense, this crazy, empty, burned-up country. I called up to Prophecy, and when she answered, her voice echoing and swelling in down the shaft, I swung myself out on to the ladder and started slowly up it. The wooden rungs were still solid, but the iron fastenings that held it to the rock were loose in places, and though I kept my body pressed against it, that ladder scared me, so that I was relieved to find the one leading up to the first level more secure. But it was still good to switch to the rope ladder and the security of the nylon safety rope.

‘Yuh bin a long time on that third level.’ She was leaning down towards me. ‘Find anything?’ I was almost level with the top of the shaft, and looking up at her, the beam of my lamp showed her eyes bright as beads. I heaved myself out, glad to be on firm ground again. ‘Well, what did yuh find?’ She had seen the bulging haversack and her voice had a grasping urgency.

I handed her a piece of the quartz and she picked up her torch, bending over it, examining it eagerly. Her hands trembled, the glitter of the gold exciting her. ‘Where did yuh find this — On the third level?’ She looked up at me, her thin dry hair in wisps across her face and her eyes gleaming. ‘Is this from the reef?’

I knew then that I wasn’t going to tell her what else I’d found, the footprints, the evidence of work in that gallery. ‘Yes. There’s a section of the reef exposed. But it’s quite unworkable.’ And I explained about the state of the mine.

It took a little time to convince her. Gold still had a powerful attraction, and having made money out of one claim, she was eager to peg another, insisting that we try our luck higher up the gully. Even when I told her what the grey smudges in the quartz could mean, I don’t think she really believed me — she didn’t want to. ‘Yuh get it analysed,’ she said finally. ‘Then we’ll see.’

This was obviously the next stop, and when I asked her where the nearest laboratory was she said, ‘Kalgoorlie.’

We collected our gear then and went back down the adit to the mine entrance. The sun was already well up and the heat hit us as we went out into the red glare of the gully. I closed the door and screwed the bolt back into place. It was just after eight as we drove down the tramline track to the mine buildings. ‘If wot yuh say is true and it is antimony in that quartz then it explains why they never made any money out of the mine.’

‘Yes.’

She had obviously been thinking it over.

‘And I bet that sample runs out at near on six ounces to the ton.’

She was a woman who didn’t give up easily and she was talking about it all the way to the cut-off by the paddock fencing. I didn’t say much, for I was driving and wondering what I’d tell Ed Garrety if I met him coming down the track from Jarra Jarra. But we didn’t meet a soul and shortly after nine-thirty we pulled into Lynn Peak, a mobile drilling rig the only vehicle there. We were both of us very tired by then and I was glad Andie was out seeing to one of his wind bores. His wife cooked us breakfast and while we were waiting for it I picked up a copy of the West Australian somebody had left and turned to the financial page. It gave the London price of antimony — £1130 per ton. Only a few months ago it had been £340.

The bacon and eggs came and we ate it with the children on the floor at our feet and the four drillers at the next table. They were ‘dust’ drillers and their rig was a rotary percussion drill, a May hew 1000 that relied on compressed air instead of mud to bring the rock chips to the surface. They were on their way from Mt Goldworthy to a temporary job at Mt Newman. Georges Duhamel, the owner of the rig, had been born in the French island of New Caledonia and all through breakfast he was telling me how important it was for Britain to retain her Pacific colonies. ‘Some day Australia will need those islands as bases against the pressure of Asiatic populations — the Chinese, the Japanese, mebbe the Philippines, too. You give everything away. Why? Do you no longer believe in the future? Perhaps you think there is no future, hnn?’ He was a wiry, dynamic little man with wild penetrating eyes under a thick dark thatch of hair, and a quick, explosive way of speaking. Listening to him, I felt that being an Englishman in Australia had its disadvantages; I seemed to be a target for everybody who had a gripe against the Old Country. But at least he could tell me something about the cost of drilling in this part of the country. It worked out at around £6.50 a foot dust drilling and went up to about £16.50 if he used a diamond drill.

Later, two drivers came in. They had a refrigerator truck loaded with fish from the coast and were headed for Perth by way of Meekatharra and Mt Magnet. From Meekatharra Prophecy said I should have no difficulty in getting a lift to Kalgoorlie, and shortly after eleven I left her sitting there in the Andersons’ diner clutching the samples I’d given her, a dreamy look on her face. I had asked her to say nothing to anybody until I had had the analysis done, but as we started out on the long haul south, three of us crammed into the stifling heat of the truck’s driving cabin, I thought it was too much to expect that she’d be able to keep her mouth shut.