symmetrical sloping sides.
What kind of mountain is this? Hendrick marvelled.
A mountain taken from the belly of the earth, Moses told him. 'That is a mine dump, my brother, a mountain built by men from the rocks they dig up from below. Wherever Hendrick looked there were these flat-topped shining dumps scattered across the undulating grassland or standing along the skyline and near each of them stood tall giraffes of steel, long-necked and skeletal with giant wheels for heads, that spun endlessly against the pale highveld sky.
Headgears, Moses told him. Below each of those is a hole that reaches down into the guts of the world, into the rock bowels that hold the yellow Gold! for which the white men sweat and lie and cheat, and often kill. As the train ran on they saw wonder followed by wonder, taller buildings than they had ever believed possible, roads that ran like rivers of steel with growling vehicles, tall chimneys that filled the sky with black thunderclouds, and multitudes upon multitudes, human beings more numerous than the springbok migrations of the Kalahari, black men in silver helmets and knee-high rubber boots, regiments of them, marching towards the tall headgears or, as the shifts changed, wearily swarming back from the shafts splashed from head to foot with yellow mud. There were white men on the streets and platforms, white women in gaily coloured dresses with remote disdainful expressions, human beings in the windows of the buildings which crowded wall to red brick wall right to the verge of the railway tracks. It was too much, too huge and diffuse for them to assimilate at one time and they gaped and exclaimed and pressed to the windows of the coach.
Where are the women? Hendrick asked suddenly, and Moses smiled.
Which women, brother? The black women, the women of our tribe? 'There are no women here, not the type of women you know. There are only the Isifebi, and they do it for gold.
Everything here is for gold. Once again they were shunted off the main line into a fenced enclosure in which the long white barrack buildings stood in endless rows and the signboard above the gates read: WITWATERSRAND NATIVE LABOUR ASSOCIATION CENTRAL RAND INDUCTION CENTRE From the coaches they were led to a long shed by a couple of grinning boss-boys and instructed to strip to the buff.
The lines of naked black men shuffled forward under the paternal eyes of the boss-boys, who treated them in a friendly jocular fashion.
Some of you have brought your livestock with you, they joked. 'Goats on your scalp, and cattle in your pubic hairs, and dipping the paint brushes they wielded into buckets of bluebutter ointment, they plastered the heads and crotches of the recruits.
Rub it in, they ordered. We don't want your lice and crabs and itchy crawlies. And the recruits entered into the spirit of the occasion and roared with laughter as they smeared each other with the sticky butter.
At the end of the shed they were each handed a small square of blue mottled carbolic soap.
Your mothers may think you smell like the mimosa in flower, but even the goats shudder when you pass upwind. The boss-boys laughed and shoved them under the hot showers.
The doctors were waiting for them when they emerged, scrubbed and still naked, and this time the medical examinations were exhaustive. Their chests were sounded and all their bodily apertures probed and scrutinized.
'What happened to your mouth, and your head? one doctor demanded of Hendrick. No, don't tell me. I don't want to know. He had seen injuries like these before. Those bloody animals in charge of the trains. All, right, we will send you to the dentist to have those stumps pulled, too late to stitch the head, you'll have a couple of lovely scars!
Apart from that, you are a beauty. He slapped Hendrick's hard shiny black muscles. We'll put you down for underground work, and you'll get the underground bonus., They were issued grey overalls and hobnailed boots, and then given a gargantuan meal, as much as they could eat.
It is not like I thought it would be. Hendrick spooned stew into his mouth. Good food, white men who smile, no beatings, not like the train. Brother, only a fool starves and beats his oxen, and these white men are not fools. One of the other Ovambo men took Moses empty dish to the kitchen and returned with it refilled. It was no longer necessary for him to give orders for such menial services.
His wants were taken care of by the men around him as if by birthright. Already the death of the white overseer, Tshayela, the striker, had been embroidered and built into a legend by many repetitions, reinforcing the stature and authority of Moses Gama and his lieutenant; men walked softly around them and inclined their heads respectfully when either Moses or Hendrick spoke directly to them.
At dawn the next morning they were roused from their bunks in the barrack rooms and after a huge breakfast of maize cake and maas, the thick clotted sour milk, they were led to the long iron-roofed classroom.
Then of forty different tribes come from every corner of the land to Goldi, men speaking forty different languages, from Zulu to Tswana, from Herero to Basuto, and only one in a thousand of them understands a word of English or of Afrikaans, Moses explained softly to his brother as the other men respectfully made room for them on one of the classroom benches. Now they will teach us the special language of Goldi, the tongue by which all men, whether black or white, and of whatever tribe, speak to each other here. A venerable old Zulu boss-boy, his pate covered with a cap of shining silver wool, was their instructor in the lingua franca of the gold mines, Fanakalo. The name was taken from its own vocabulary and meant literally like this, like that', the phrase that the recruits would have urged upon them frequently over the weeks ahead: Do it like this! Work like that! Sebenza fanakalo! The Zulu instructor on the raised dais was surrounded by all the accoutrements of the miner's trade, set out on display so that he could touch each item with his pointer and the recruits would chant the name of it in unison. Helmets and lanterns, hammers and picks, jumper bars and scrapers, safety rails and rigs, they would know them all intimately before they stood their first shift.
But now the old Zulu touched his own chest and said: AUna! Then pointed at his class and said: Wena! And Moses led them in the chant: The! You! Head! said the instructor and Arm! and Leg! He touched his own body and his pupils imitated him enthusiastically.
They worked at the language all that morning and then after lunch they were divided into groups of twenty and the group that included Moses and Hendrick was taken to another iron-roofed building similar to the language classroom. It differed only in its furnishings. Long trestle tables ran from wall to wall, and the person that welcomed them was a white man with peculiar bright ginger-coloured hair and mustache and green eyes. He was dressed in a long white coat like those the doctors had worn, and like them he was smiling and friendly, waving them to their places at the tables and speaking in English that only Moses and Hendrick understood, although they were careful not to make their understanding apparent and maintained a pantomime of perplexity and ignorance.
All right you fellows. My name is Dr Marcus Archer and I am a psychologist. What we are going to do now is
