Smokescreen

Chapter Nine

You can’t keep a good Dakota down.

There were two of them waiting at the small Rand Airport near Germiston racecourse, sitting on their tail wheels and pointing their dolphin snouts hopefully to the sky.

We onloaded one of them at eight on Monday morning, along with several other passengers and a sizeable amount of freight. Day and time were unkind to Roderick, making it clearer than ever that letting go of a semblance of youth was long overdue. The mature man, I reflected, was in danger of wasting altogether the period when he could look most impressive: if Roderick were not careful he would slip straight from ageing youth to obvious old age, a mistake more often found in show business than journalism.

He was wearing a brown long-sleeved suede jacket with fringes hanging from every possible edge. Under that, an open-necked shirt in an orange-tan colour, trousers which were cut to prove masculinity, and the latest thing in desert boots.

Van Huren, at the other end of the scale in dark city suit, arrived last, took control easily, and shunted us all aboard. The Dakota trip took an hour, and landed one hundred and sixty miles south, at an isolated mining town which had Welkom on the mat and on practically everything else.

The van Huren mine was on the far side from the airport, and a small bus had come to fetch us. The town was neat, modern, geometrical, with straight bright rows of little square houses and acres of glass-walled supermarkets. A town of hygienic packaging, with its life blood deep underground.

Our destination looked at first sight to be a collection of huge whitish grey tips, one with its railway track climbing to the top. Closer acquaintance revealed the wheel-in-scaffolding at the top of the shaft, masses of administration buildings and miners’ hostels, and dozens of decorative date palms. The short frondy trees, their sunlit leaf-branches chattering gently in the light breeze, did a fair job at beating the starkness, like gift-wrapping on a shovel.

Van Huren apologised with a smile for not being able to go down the mine with us himself: he had meetings all morning which could not be switched.

‘But we’ll meet for lunch,’ he promised, ‘and for that drink which you will all need!’

The guide someone a couple of rungs down the hierarchy had detailed to show us round, was a grumpy young Afrikaaner who announced that he was Pieter Losenwoldt and a mining engineer, and more or less explicitly added that his present task was a nuisance, an interruption of his work, and beneath his dignity.

He showed us into a changing room where we were to sink all differences in white overalls, heavy boots, and high-domed helmets.

‘Don’t take anything of your own down the mine except your underpants and a handkerchief,’ he said dogmatically. ‘No cameras.’ He glowered at the equipment Conrad had lugged along. ‘Camera flashes are not safe, And no matches. No lighters. When I say nothing, I mean nothing.’

‘How about wallets?’ Danilo demanded, antagonised and showing it.

Losenwoldt inspected him, saw a better looking, richer, more obviously likeable person than himself, and reacted with an even worse display of chips on shoulder.

‘Leave everything,’ he said impatiently. ‘The room will be locked. Everything will be quite safe until you get back.’

He went away while we changed, and came back in similar togs.

‘Ready? Right. Now, we are going four thousand feet down. The lift descends at 2,800 feet a minute. It will be hot in places underground. Anyone who feels claustrophobic or ill in any way is to ask to return to the surface straight away. Understand?’

He got five nods and no affection.

He peered suddenly at me, speculating, then dismissed the thought with pursed lips and a shake of the head. No one enlightened him.

‘Your light packs are on the table. Please put them on.’

The light packs consisted of a flat power pack which one wore slung over the lumbar region, and a light which clipped on to the front of the helmet. A lead led from one to the other. The power packs fastened round one’s waist with webbing, and were noticeably heavy.

Much like the seven dwarfs we tramped forth to the mine. The cage we went down in had half-sides only, so that the realities of rock burrowing hit at once. No comfort. A lot of noise. The nasty thought of all that space below one’s booted feet.

It presumably took less than two minutes to complete the trip, but as I was jammed tight between Evan, whose hot eyes looked for once apprehensive, and a six-foot-four twenty-stone miner who had joined with several cronies at the top, I couldn’t exactly check it by stop-watch.

We landed with a clang at the bottom and disembarked. Another contingent were waiting to go up, and as soon as we were out, they loaded and operated the system of buzzers which got them clanking on their way.

‘Get into the trucks,’ said Losenwoldt bossily. ‘They hold twelve people in each.’

Conrad surveyed the two trucks, which looked like wire cages on wheels with accommodation for one large dog if he curled himself up, and said sideways to me. ‘Sardines have struck for less.’

I laughed. But the trucks did hold twelve; just. The last man in had to sit in the hole that did duty as doorway, and trust to what he could find to hang on to that he didn’t fall out. Evan was last in. He hung on to Losenwoldt’s overalls. Losenwoldt didn’t like it.

Loaded to the gunnels, the trucks trundled off along the tunnel which stretched straight ahead for as far as one could see. The walls were painted white to about four feet: then there was a two inch deep bright red line, then above that the natural grey rock.

Conrad asked Losenwoldt why the red line was there: he had to shout to be heard, and he had to shout twice, as Losenwoldt was in no hurry to answer.

Finally he crossly shouted back. ‘It is a guide to the tunnellers. When the tunnel is painted like this, they can see that they are making it straight and level. The red line is an eye-line.’

Conversation lapsed. The trucks covered about two miles at a fast trot and stopped abruptly at nowhere in particular. It was suddenly possible to hear oneself speak again, and Losenwoldt said, ‘We get out here, and walk.’

Everyone unsqueezed themselves and climbed out. The miners strode purposefully away down the tunnel, but there was, it seemed, a set pattern for instructing visitors. Losenwoldt said ungraciously (but at least he said it), ‘Along the roof of the tunnel you can see the cables from which we have the electric lights.’ The lights were spaced overhead at regular intervals so that the whole tunnel was evenly lit. ‘Beside it there is a live electric rail.’ He pointed. ‘That provides power for the trucks which take the rock along to the surface. The rock goes up in a faster lift, at more than 3,000 feet a minute. That big round pipe up there carries air. The mine is ventilated by blowing compressed air into it at many points.’

We all looked at him like kids round a teacher, but he had come to the end of that bit of official spiel, so he turned his back on us and trudged away down the tunnel.

We followed.

We met a large party of black Africans walking the other way. They were dressed as we were except that they were wearing sports jackets on top of their overalls.

Roderick asked, ‘Why the jackets?’

Losenwoldt said, ‘It is hot down here. The body gets accustomed. Without a jacket, it feels cold on reaching the surface. You can catch chills.’

Evan nodded wisely. We went on walking.

Eventually we came to a wider space where a second tunnel branched off to the right. Another party of Africans was collecting there, putting on jackets and being checked against a list.

‘They have finished their shift,’ Losenwoldt said, in his clipped way, hating us. ‘They are being checked to make sure none of them is still underground when blasting takes place.’

‘Blasting, dear boy?’ said Conrad vaguely.

The expert eyed him with disfavour. ‘The rock has to be blasted. One cannot remove it with pickaxes.’

‘But I thought this was a gold mine, dear boy. Surely one does not need blasting to remove gold? Surely one digs out gravel and sifts the gold from it.’

Losenwoldt looked at him with near contempt. ‘In California and Alaska, and in some other places, this may be so. In South Africa the gold is not visible. It is in minute particles in rock. One has to blast out the gold-bearing rock, take it to the surface, and put it through many processes, to remove the gold. In this mine, one has to take three tons of rock to the surface to obtain one ounce of pure gold.’

I think we were all struck dumb. Danilo’s mouth actually dropped open.

‘In some mines here in the Odendaalsrus gold field,’ Losenwoldt went on, seeming not to notice the stunned reaction, ‘it is necessary to remove only one and a half tons to get one ounce. These mines are of course the richest. Some need more than this one: three and a half or four tons.’

Roderick looked around him. ‘And all the gold has been taken from here? And from where we came?’

His turn for the look of pity-contempt.

‘This tunnel is not made through gold-bearing rock. This tunnel is just to enable us to get to the gold-bearing rock, which is in this part of the mine. It can only be reached at more than 4,000 feet underground.’

‘Good God,’ Conrad said, and spoke for us all.

Losenwoldt plodded grudgingly on with his lecture, but his audience were riveted.

‘The reef... that is to say, the gold-bearing rock... is only a thin layer. It slopes underground from the north, being deepest beyond Welkom, further south. It extends for about eight miles from east to west, and about fourteen miles from north to south, but its limits are irregular. It is nowhere more than three feet in depth, and in this mine it is on average thirteen inches.’

He collected a lot of truly astonished glances, but only Danilo had a question.

‘I suppose it must be worth it,’ he said doubtfully. ‘All this work and equipment, just to get so little gold.’

‘It must be worth it or we would not be here,’ said Losenwoldt squelchingly, which I at least interpreted as ignorance of the profit and loss figures of the business. But it must be worth it, I reflected, or van Huren would not live in a sub-palace.

No one else said anything. Seldom had cheerful casual conversation been more actively discouraged. Even Evan’s natural inclination to put himself in charge of everything was being severely inhibited; and in fact, after looking apprehensive in the lift he now seemed the most oppressed of us all at the thought of millions of tons of rock pressing down directly above our heads.

‘Right,’ said Losenwoldt with heavy satisfaction at having reduced the ranks to pulped silence. ‘Now, switch on your helmet lights. There are no electric lights further along there.’ He pointed up the branch tunnel. ‘We will go to see the tunnelling in progress.’

He strode off without checking to see that we all followed, but we did, though Evan gave a backward glance in the direction of the shaft which would have warned a more careful guide not to take too much for granted.

The tunnel ran straight for a while and then curved to the right. As we approached the corner we could hear a constantly increasing roaring noise, and round on the new tack it noticeably increased.

‘What’s that noise?’ Evan asked in a voice still the safe side of active anxiety.

Losenwoldt said over his shoulder, ‘Partly the air-conditioning, partly the drilling,’ and kept on going. The spaced electric light bulbs came to an end. The lights on our helmets picked the way.

Suddenly, far ahead, we could discern a separate glimmer of light beyond the beams we were ourselves throwing. Closer contact divided the glimmer into three individual helmet lights pointing in the same direction as ours: but these lit only solid rock. We were coming to the end of the tunnel.

The walls at this point were no longer painted a comforting white with a red line, but became the uniform dark grey of the basic rock, which somehow emphasised the fanaticism of burrowing so deep in the earth’s undisturbed crust, in search of invisible yellow dust.

The air pipe stopped abruptly, the compressed air roaring out from its open mouth. Beyond that the noise of the drilling took over, as aggressive to the eardrums as six fortissimo discotheques.

There were three miners standing on a wooden platform, drilling a hole into the rock up near the eight-foot-high roof. Our lights shone on the sweat on their dark skins and reflected on the vests and thin trousers they wore in place of everyone else’s thick white overalls.

The racket came from a compressor standing on the ground, as much as from the drill itself. We watched for a while. Evan tried to ask something, but it would have taken a lip reader to get anywhere.

Finally Losenwoldt with a tight mouth and tired eyelids, jerked his head for us to go back. We followed him, glad about the lessening load on our ears. Walking last, I turned round where the air pipe ended, switched off my helmet light for a moment, and looked back. Three men on their scaffolding, intent on their task, enveloped in noise, and lit only by the glow-worms on their heads. When I had turned and gone, they would be alone with the primaeval darkness closing in behind them. I was left with a fanciful impression of a busy team of devils moleing along towards Inferno.

Once back in the wider section Losenwoldt continued our instruction.

‘They were drilling holes about six feet deep, with tungsten drills. That,’ he pointed, ‘is a pile of drills.’

We looked where he pointed. The horizontal stack of six-foot rods by the tunnel wall had looked more like a heap of unused piping before: but they were solid metal rods about two inches in diameter with a blade of tungsten shining at the end of each.

‘The rods have to be taken to the surface every day, to be sharpened.’

We nodded like wise owls.

‘Those three men have nearly finished drilling for today. They have drilled many holes in the face of the tunnel. Each hole will receive its charge of explosive, and after the blasting the broken rock will be removed. Then the drillers return and start the process again.’

‘How much tunnel can you make in one day?’ Roderick asked.

‘Eight feet a shift.’

Evan leant against the rock wall and passed a hand over a forehead that Clifford Wenkins could not have bettered.

‘Don’t you ever use pit-props?’ he said.

Losenwoldt answered the face of the question and didn’t see the fear behind it.

‘Of course not. We are tunnelling not through earth, but though bedrock. There is no danger of the tunnel collapsing inwards. Occasionally, loosened slabs of rock fall from the roof or the wall. This usually happens in areas recently blasted. Where we see such loosened rocks, we pull them down, if we can, so that there is no danger of them falling on anyone later.’

Evan failed to look comforted. He dug out his handkerchief and mopped up.

‘What sort of explosive do you use,’ Danilo asked, ‘for blasting?’

Losenwoldt still didn’t like him, and didn’t answer. Roderick, who was also interested, repeated the same question.

Losenwoldt ostentatiously stifled a sigh and replied in more staccato sentences than ever.

‘It is dynagel. It is a black powder. It is kept in locked red boxes fastened to the tunnel wall.’

He pointed to one of them a little further on. I had walked past two or three of them, padlocks and all, without wondering what they were for.

Danilo, with sarcasm, said to Roderick, ‘Ask him what happens when they blast,’ and Roderick did.

Losenwoldt shrugged. ‘What would you expect? But no one sees the blasting. Everyone is out of the mine before the charges are detonated. No one returns down the mine for four hours after blasting.’

‘Why not, dear boy?’ drawled Conrad.

‘Dust,’ Losenwoldt said succinctly.

‘When do we get to see this gold rock... this reef?’ asked Danilo.

‘Now.’ Losenwoldt pointed along the continuation of the main tunnel. ‘Further down there it will be very hot. There is a stretch with no air-conditioning. Beyond that there is air again. Leave your helmet lights on, you will need them. Take care where you walk. The floor of the tunnel is rough in places.’

He finished with a snap and as before set off with his back to us.

Again we followed.

I said to Evan, ‘Are you O.K?’ which irritated him into straightening his spine and flashing the eyes and saying of course he damn well was, did I think he was a fool.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Right then.’ He strode purposefully past me to get nearer to the pearls spat from Losenwoldt’s lips and I again brought up the rear.

The heat further on was intense but dry, so that although one felt it, it produced no feeling of sweat. The tunnel at this point grew rough, with uneven walls, no painted lines, no lights, and a broken-up floor: it also sloped gradually downhill. We trudged on, boots crunching on the gritty surface.

The further we went, the more activity we came across. Men in white overalls were everywhere, busy, carrying equipment, with their helmet lights shining on other people’s concentrated faces. The peak of each helmet tended to throw a dark hand of shadow across every man’s eyes, and once or twice I had to touch Roderick, who was in front of me, so that he would turn and reassure me that I was still following the right man.

At the end of the hot stretch it felt like stepping straight into the Arctic. Losenwoldt stopped there and consulted briefly with two other young miners he found talking to each other.

‘We will split up here,’ he said finally. ‘You two with me.’ He pointed to Roderick and Evan. ‘You two with Mr Anders.’ He assigned Conrad and Danilo to a larger version of himself. ‘You,’ he pointed at me, ‘with Mr Yates.’

Yates, younger than the others, appeared unhelpfully subservient to them, and spoke with a slight speech impediment in the order of a cleft palate. He gave me a twitchy smile and said he hoped I wouldn’t mind, he wasn’t used to showing people round, it wasn’t usually his job.

‘It’s kind of you to do so.’ I said soothingly.

The others were moving off in their little groups and were soon lost in the general crowd of white overalls.

‘Come along then.’

We continued down the tunnel. I asked my new guide what the gradient was.

‘About one in twenty,’ he said. But after that he lapsed into silence, and I reckoned if I wanted to know any more I would have to ask. Yates did not know the conducted tour script like Losenwoldt, who in retrospect did not seem too bad.

Holes appeared from time to time in the left-hand wall, with apparently a big emptiness behind them.

‘I thought this tunnel was through solid rock,’ I observed. ‘So what are those holes?’

‘Oh... we are now in the reef. The reef has been removed from much of that portion behind that wall. In a minute I’ll be able to show you better.’

‘Does the reef slope at one in twenty, then?’ I asked.

He thought it a surprising question. ‘Of course,’ he said.

‘That tunnel which is still being drilled, back there, where is that going?’

‘To reach another area of reef.’

Yes. Silly question. The reef spread laterally for miles. Quite. Removing the reef must be rather like chipping a thin slice of ham out of a thick bread sandwich.

‘What happens when all the reef is removed?’ I asked. ‘There must be enormous areas with nothing holding up the layers of rock above.’

He answered willingly enough. ‘We do not remove all supports. For instance, the wall of the tunnel is thick, despite the holes, which are for blasting and ventilation purposes. It will hold the roof up in all this area. Eventually, of course, when this tunnel is worked out and disused, the layers will gradually close together. I believe that most of Johannesburg sank about three feet, as the layers below it closed together, after all the reef was out.’

‘Not recently?’ I said, surprised.

‘Oh, no. Long ago. The Rand gold fields are shallower and mining began there first.’

People were carrying tungsten rods up the tunnel and others were passing us down it.

‘We are getting ready to blast,’ Yates said without being asked. ‘All the drilling is finished and the engineers are setting the charges.’

‘We haven’t very long, then,’ I said.

‘Probably not.’

‘I’d like to see how they actually work the reef.’

‘Oh... yes. Just down here a bit further, then. I will take you to the nearest part. There are others further down.’

We came to a larger than usual hole in the wall. It stretched from the floor to about five feet up, but one could not walk straight through it, as it sloped sharply upwards inside.

He said, ‘You will have to mind your head. It is very shallow in here.’

‘O.K.,’ I said.

He gestured to me to crawl in ahead of him, which I did. The space was about three feet high but extended out of sight in two directions. A good deal of ham had already gone from this part of the sandwich.

Instead of a firm rock floor, we were now scrambling over a bed of sharp-edged chips of rock, which rattled away as one tried to climb up over them. I went some way into the flat cavern and then waited for Yates. He was close behind, looking across to our right where several men lower down were working along a curving thirty-foot stretch of the far wall.

‘They are making final checks on the explosive charges,’ he said. ‘Soon everyone will begin to leave.’

‘This loose stuff we are lying on,’ I said. ‘Is this the reef?’

‘Oh... no, not exactly. These are just chips of rock. See, the reef used to lie about midway up the stope.’

‘What is the stope?’

‘Sorry... the stope is what we are now in. The place we take the reef from.’

‘Well... down there, in the part which is not blasted yet, how do you tell which is the reef?’

The whole thing looked the same to me. Dark grey from top to bottom. Dark grey uneven roof curving down in dark grey uneven walls, merging into dark grey shingle floor.

‘I’ll get you a piece,’ he said obligingly, and crawled crabwise on his stomach over to where his colleagues were working. It was barely possible to sit up in the stope. Just about possible to rise to hands and knees, if one kept one’s head down. I supported myself on one elbow and watched him borrow a small hand pick and lever a sliver of rock out of the far wall.

He scrambled back.

‘There you are... This is a piece of reef.’

We focused both our lights on it. A two-inch-long grey sharp-edged lump with darker grey slightly light-reflecting spots and streaks on its surface.

‘What are those dark spots?’ I said.

‘That’s the ore,’ he said. ‘The paler part is just ordinary tock. The more of those dark bits there are in the reef, the better the yield of gold per ton of rock.’

‘Then is this dark stuff... gold?’ I asked dubiously.

‘It has gold in it,’ he nodded. ‘Actually it is made up of four elements: gold, silver, uranium and chrome. When the reef is milled and treated, they are separated out. There is more gold than silver or uranium.’

‘Can I keep this piece?’ I asked.

‘Certainly.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I am sorry, but they have a job for me to do down there. Could you possibly find your own way back up the tunnel? You cannot get lost.’

‘That’s all right,’ I said. ‘You go on, I don’t want to interfere with your job.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, and scrambled away in haste to please the people who really mattered to him.

I stayed where I was, for a while, watching the engineers and peering into the interminable dug-out space uphill. The light of my helmet couldn’t reach its limits: it stretched away into impenetrable blackness.

The workers below me were thinning out, returning to the tunnel to make their way back towards the shaft. I put the tiny piece of reef in my pocket, took a last look round, and began to inch my way back to the hole where I had come in. I turned round to go into the tunnel feet first, but as I started to shuffle backwards I heard someone begin to climb into the stope behind me, the light from his helmet flashing on my overalls. I stopped, to let him go by. He made a little forward progress and I glanced briefly over my shoulder to see who it was. I could see only the peak of his helmet, and shadow beneath.

Then my own helmet tipped off forward and a large chunk of old Africa clobbered me forcefully on the back of the head.

Stunned, it seemed to me that consciousness ebbed away slowly: I fell dizzily down endless mine shafts with flashing dots before my eyes.

I had blacked out completely long before I had hit the bottom.