‘Mr Lincoln... are you all right?’ one of them asked anxiously.
‘Sure,’ I said. It didn’t sound right. I said it again. ‘Sure.’ Much better.
‘How did you get left behind?’ Losenwoldt said reprovingly, shifting all possible blame from himself. Not that I would have allotted him any: he was just forestalling it.
I said, ‘I’m sorry to have been such a nuisance... I think I must have hit my head and knocked myself out, but I can’t actually remember how...’ I wrinkled my forehead. ‘So damned stupid of me.’
One of them said, ‘Where were you, exactly?’
‘In the stope,’ I said.
‘Good grief... You probably lifted your head too sharply... or maybe a piece of rock fell from the roof and caught you.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
Another of them said, ‘If you were unconscious in the stope, however did you get back here?’
I told them about the stones. They didn’t say anything. Just looked at each other.
One of them walked round my back and after a moment said, ‘There’s some blood on your hair and down your neck, but it looks dry... I don’t think you’re still bleeding.’ He came round to my side. ‘Do you feel all right to walk to the trucks? We brought a stretcher... just in case.’
I smiled. ‘Guess I can walk.’
We walked. I asked, ‘How did you discover I was down here?’
One of them said ruefully, ‘Our system of checking everyone is out of the mine before blasting is supposed to be infallible. And so it is, as far as the miners are concerned. But visitors... you see, we don’t often have small groups of unofficial visitors, like today. Mr van Huren seldom invites anyone, and no one else is allowed to. Nearly all the visitors we have here are official tourist groups, of about twenty people, and the mine more or less stops while we show them round, but we only do that every six weeks or so. We don’t usually blast at all, on those days. Today, though, one of your party felt ill and went back before the others, and I think everyone took it for granted that you had gone with him. Tim Yates said when he last saw you, you were just about to return up the tunnel.’
‘Yes...’ I agreed. ‘I remember that.’
‘The other three visitors went up together, and the checkers accounted for every miner, so we assumed everyone was out, and were all set to detonate...’
A tall thin man took up the story. ‘Then one of the men who counts the numbers going up and down in the lift said that one more had gone down than had come up. The shift checkers said it was impossible, each group had been checked out by name. The lift man said he was sure. Well... that only left the visitors. So we checked them. The three in the changing room said you hadn’t changed yet, your clothes were still there, so you must be in the first-aid room with one called Conrad, who had not felt well.’
‘Conrad,’ I exclaimed. I had though they meant Evan. ‘What was wrong with him?’
‘I think they said he had an attack of asthma. Anyway, we went and asked him, and he said you hadn’t come up with him.’
‘Oh,’ I said blankly. Certainly, if I had been with him I would have gone up, but I hadn’t seen him at all after we had separated at the beginning of the reef.
We came to the trucks and climbed in. A lot of space with only five people instead of twelve.
‘The one who was ill,’ Losenwoldt stated virtuously, ‘the stout one with the droopy moustache, he was not with me. If he had been, of course I would have escorted him back to the trucks, and of course I would have known you were not with him.’
‘Of course,’ I said dryly.
We clattered back along the tunnel to the bottom of the shaft, and from there, after the exchange of signal buzzes, rose in the cage through three-quarters of a mile of rock up to the sunlight. Its brilliance was momentarily painful, and it was also cold enough to start me shivering.
‘Jacket,’ exclaimed one of my escorts. ‘We took down a blanket... should have put it round you.’ He hurried off into a small building by the shaft and came back with a much used tweed sports coat, which he held for me to put on.
There was an anxious looking reception committee hovering around: Evan, Roderick, Danilo, and van Huren himself.
‘My dear fellow,’ he said, peering at me as if to reassure himself that I was real. ‘What can I say?’
‘For heaven’s sake,’ I said, ‘it was my own fault and I’m terribly sorry to have caused all this fuss...’ Van Huren looked relieved and smiled, and so did Evan, Roderick and Danilo. I turned back to the three strangers who had come down for me: Losenwoldt had already gone. ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much.’
They all grinned. ‘We want payment,’ one said.
I must have looked bewildered. I was wondering what was right. How much.
‘Your autograph,’ one of them explained.
‘Oh...’ I laughed. ‘O.K.’
One of them produced a notebook, and I wrote a thank-you to each of them, on three separate pages. And cheap at the price, I thought.
The mine’s doctor swabbed stone dust from the cut on my head, said it wasn’t deep, nothing serious, didn’t need stitching, didn’t need a plaster, even, unless I wanted one...
‘I don’t,’ I said.
‘Good, good. Swallow these, then. In case you develop a headache.’
I swallowed obediently. Collected Conrad, now breathing normally again, from a rest room next door, and followed directions to the bar and dining-room for lunch. On the way, we swopped operations, so to speak. Neither of us felt much pleased with himself.
The five of us sat at a table with Quentin van Huren, plus two other senior executives whose names I never learned. My narrow escape was chewed over by everyone all over again, and I said with feeling to Roderick that I would be much obliged if he would keep my embarrassment out of his inky columns.
He grinned. ‘Yeah... Much better copy if you’d been blown up. Not much news value in a checker doing his job properly.’
‘Thank God for that,’ I said.
Conrad looked at me sideways. ‘There must be a jinx on you in South Africa, dear boy. That’s the second time you’ve been close to extinction within a week.’
I shook my head. ‘No jinx. Just the opposite. I’ve survived twice. Look at it that way.’
‘Only seven lives left,’ Conrad said.
The talk worked back to gold. I suspected that in Welkom it always did, like Newmarket and horses.
‘Say, how do you get it out of the rock?’ Danilo demanded. ‘You can’t even see it.’
Van Huren smiled indulgently. ‘Danilo, it is simple. You crush the rock in mills until it is powdered. You add cyanide of potassium, which holds the gold particles in solution. You add zinc, to which the gold particles stick. You then wash out the acid. You then separate the zinc from the gold again, using aqua regia, and finally you retrieve the gold.’
‘Oh simple,’ Conrad agreed. ‘Dear boy.’
Van Huren warmed to him, and smiled with pleasure. ‘That is not exactly all. One still has to refine the gold... to remove impurities by melting it to white heat in giant crucibles, and pouring it out into bricks. The residue flows away, and you are left with the pure gold.’
Danilo did a rapid calculation. ‘You’ll have gotten around three thousand five hundred tons of reef out of the mine, for one little old brick.’
‘That’s so,’ agreed van Huren, smiling. ‘Give or take a ton or two.’
‘How much do you bring out in a week?’ Danilo asked.
‘Just over forty thousand metric tons.’
Danilo’s eyes flickered as he did the mental arithmetic. ‘That means... er... about eleven and a half gold bricks every week.’
‘Do you want a job in the accounting department, Danilo? asked van Huren, much amused.