‘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.’