But Danilo hadn’t finished. ‘Each brick weighs 72 lbs, right? So that makes... let’s see... around 800 lbs of gold a week. Say, what’s the price of gold per ounce? Gee, this is sure the right business to be in. What a gas!’ He was deeply stimulated, as he had been by the whole trip, with a strong inner excitement shining out of his eyes. An attraction towards money-making, and the calculations needed to work out estate-duty dodging, seemed to me to be all of a piece.
Van Huren, still smiling, said, ‘You’re forgetting the wages, the maintenance, and the shareholders. There are only a few grains of dust left after they’ve all taken their cut.’
Danilo’s curving mouth showed he didn’t believe it. Roderick shot an orange cuff out of the brown suède sleeve to reveal half a ton of tiger’s eye doing duty as a cufflink.
‘Don’t you own the mine altogether, then, Quentin?’ he asked.
The executives and van Huren himself both smiled indulgently at Roderick for his naïvety.
‘No,’ van Huren said. ‘My family own the land and the mineral rights. Technically, I suppose, we do own the gold. But it takes an enormous amount of capital, many millions of rands, to sink a shaft and build all the surface plant needed. About twenty-five years ago my brother and I floated a company to raise capital to start drilling, so the company has hundreds of private shareholders.’
‘That mine doesn’t look twenty-five years old,’ I objected amiably.
Van Huren shifted his smiling eyes in my direction and went on explaining.
‘The part you saw this morning is the newest tunnel, and the deepest. There are other tunnels at higher levels... in past years we have taken out all the up-slope areas of the reef.’
‘And there’s still a lot left?’
Van Huren’s smile had the ease of one who would never be short of a thousand. ‘It will see Jonathan out,’ he said.
Evan chose to find the mechanics and economics less interesting than the purpose, and waved his arms about as he pinned every gaze down in turn with the fierce eyes and declaimed with his usual intensity.
‘What is gold for, though? This is what we should be asking. What everyone should be asking. What is the point? Everyone goes to so much trouble to get it, and pays so much for it, and it has no real use.’
‘Gold plated lunar bugs,’ I murmured.
Evan glared at me. ‘Everyone digs it out of the ground here and puts it back underground at Fort Knox, where it never sees daylight again... Don’t you see... the whole thing is artificial? Why should the whole world’s wealth be based on a yellow metal which has no use?’
‘Good for filling teeth,’ I said conversationally.
‘And for pure radio contacts in transistor units,’ Roderick added, joining the game.
Van Huren listened and watched as if he found the entertainment a nice change for a Monday. I stopped baiting Evan, though, because after seeing the mine I half held his views.
I travelled back to Johannesburg in the Dakota that evening sitting next to Roderick and feeling a trifle worn. A hot afternoon spent walking round the surface buildings of the mine, watching gold being poured from a crucible, seeing (and hearing) the ore being crushed, and visiting one of the miners’ hostels, had done no good at all to a throbbing head. Half a dozen times I had almost dropped out, but, especially with Roderick’s ready typewriter in the background, I hadn’t wanted to make a fuss.
The visit to the hostel had been best: lunch was being cooked for the next surface shift off work, and we tasted it in the kitchen. Vast vats of thick broth with a splendid flavour, vegetables I couldn’t identify and hadn’t the energy to ask about, and thick wads of cream-coloured mealie bread, a sort of fat-less version of pastry.
From there we went next door into the hostel’s bar, where the first of the returning shift were settling down to the serious business of drinking what looked like half-gallon plastic tubs of milky cocoa.
‘That’s Bantu beer,’ said our afternoon guide, who had proved as sweet as Losenwoldt was sour.
We drank some. It had a pleasant dry flavour but tasted nothing like beer.
‘Is it alcoholic, dear boy?’ Conrad asked.
The dear boy said it was, but weak. Considering that we saw one man dispatch his whole tubful in two great draughts, the weakness was just as well.
Our guide beckoned to one of the men sitting at a table with his colleagues, and he got to his feet and came over. He was tall and not young, and he had a wide white grin which I found infectious.
The guide said, ‘This is Piano Nyembezi. He is the checker who insisted we had left someone down the mine,’
‘Was it you?’ I asked with interest.
‘Yebo,’ he said, which I later learnt meant yes in Zulu. (‘No’ turned out to consist of a click, a glottal stop, and an ‘aa’ sound. As far as a European was concerned, it was impossible to say no in a hurry.)
‘Well, Piano,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much.’ I put out my hand and he shook it, an event which drew large smiles from his friends, an indrawn breath from our guide, a shake of the head from Roderick and no reaction whatsoever from Evan, Conrad or Danilo.
There was a certain amount of scuffling in the background, and then one of the others brought forward a well thumbed copy of a film magazine.
‘It is Piano’s paper,’ the newcomer said, and thrust it into his hands. Nyembezi looked embarrassed, but showed me what it was. Full page, and as boring-looking as usual.
Wrinkling my nose I took the magazine from him and wrote across the bottom of my picture, ‘I owe my life to Piano Nyembezi,’ and signed my name.
‘He’ll keep that for ever,’ the guide said.
Until tomorrow, perhaps, I thought.
The Dakota droned on. The evening sun fell heavily across my eyelids as we banked round on to a new course, and I gingerly lifted my head off the seat-back to put it down the other way. The cut on my head, though not deep, was sore.
For some reason the small movement triggered off a few sleepy nerve cells, and in a quiet fashion I remembered that there had been someone with me in the stope.
I remembered I had been turning round to leave feet first, and had stopped to let someone else in. I remembered that I hadn’t seen his face: didn’t know who he was.
If he had been there when I bashed my head, why on earth hadn’t he helped me?
Such was my fuzzy state of mind that it took me a whole minute more to move on to the conclusion that he hadn’t helped me because he’d applied the rock himself.
I opened my eyes with a jolt. Roderick’s face was turned towards mine. I opened my mouth to tell him. Then I shut it again, firmly. I did not in the least want to tell the Rand Daily Star.
Chapter Eleven
I used a lot of the time I could have more profitably spent sleeping that night in coming to terms with the thought that someone might have tried to kill me.
Didn’t know who. Couldn’t guess why. And still was not certain whether my memory was complete: perhaps the other man in the stope had gone away again, and I had forgotten it.
Also, even if I had been a hundred per cent certain, I didn’t know what I should do about it.
Telephone van Huren? Start an investigation? But there had been so many people down the mine, all dressed alike, and half in darkness. Any investigation was going to produce more talk and doubt than results, and ‘Lincoln complains of attempted murder’ were gossip-column snippets I could do without.
Twice within a week, Conrad had said, ‘Close to extinction.’
It didn’t make sense. It was only in films that the chaps I played got threatened and attacked, and made miraculous escapes.