it was more than his physical size, his compelling voice and hearty chuckle. it was a special magnetism, a personal charm and unerring sense of timing. under his chairmanship the meeting would erupt, voices crackle and snap, then subside into chuckles and nods as rod spoke.
they knew he was as tough as they were, and they respected that.
they knew that when he spoke it made sense, so they listened. they knew that when he promised, he delivered, so they were placated. and they knew that when he made a decision or judgement, he acted upon it, so every man knew exactly where he stood.
if asked, any one of these mine captains would have admitted grudgingly that 'there was no bull dust in ironsides'. this was the equivalent of a presidential citation.
'very well then.' rod terminated the meeting. 'you have spent a good two hours of the company's time beating your gums. now, will you kindly haul arse, go down there and start sending the stuff out.' these men planned the week's operation, so their men were at work in the earth below them.
on 87 level, kowalski moved like a great bear down the dimly-lit drive.
he had switched off the lamp on his helmet, and he moved without sound, lightly for a man of such bulk. he heard their voices ahead of him in the dimly-lit tunnel, and he paused, listening intently. there was no sound of shovel crunching into loose rock, and kowalski's neanderthal features convulsed into a fearsome scowl.
'bastards!' he muttered softly. 'they think i am in stopes, hey?
they think it all right if they sit on fat black bum, no move da bloody rock, hey?' he started forward again, a bear on cat's feet.
'they find plenty different from what they bloody think, soon!' he threatened.
he stepped round the angle of the drive and flashed his lamp.
there were three men kowalski had put on lashing, shovelling the loose stuff from the footwall into waiting coco pans two of them sat against the coco pan smoking contentedly while the third regaled them with an account of a beer drink he had attended the previous christmas.
their shovels and sledge hammers leaned unemployed against the side wall of the drive.
all three of them froze into rigidity as the beam of kowalski's lamp played over them.
'so!' the word burst explosively from kowalski, and he snatched up a fourteen-pound hammer in one massive fist, reversed it and struck the butt of the handle against the foot wall. the steel head of the hammer fell off and kowalski was left with a four-foot length of selected hickory in his hand.
'you, boss boy!' he bellowed, and his free hand shot out and fastened on the throat of the nearest bantu. with one heave he jerked him off his feet onto his knees and began dragging him away up the drive. even in his rage, kowalski was making sure there were no witnesses. the other two men sat where they were, too horrified to move, while their companion's walls and cries receded into the darkness.
then the first blow reverberated in the confined space of the drive, followed immediately by a shriek of pain.
the next blow, and another shriek.
the crack, thud, crack, thud, went on repeatedly, but the accompanying shrieks dwindled into moans and soft whimperings, then into complete silence.
kowalski came back down the drive alone, he was sweating heavily in the lamp light, and the handle of the hammer in his hand was black and glistening with wet blood.
he threw it at their feet.
'work!' he growled, and was gone, big and bearlike, into the shadows.
on 100 level, joseph m'kati was hosing down and sweeping the spillings from under the giant conveyor belt. joseph had been on this job for five years, and he was a contented and happy man.
joseph was a shangaan approaching sixty years of age; the first frost was touching his hair. there were laughter lines around his eyes and at the corner of his mouth. he wore his helmet pushed to the back of his head, his overalls were hand-embroidered and ornament ally patched in blue and red, and he moved with a jaunty bounce and strut.
the conveyor was many hundreds of yards long. from all the levels above the shattered gold reef was scraped from the stopes and trammed back down the haulages in the coco pans then from the coco pans it was tipped into the mouths of the ore-passes. these were vertical shafts that dropped down to 100 level, hundreds of feet through living rock to spew the reef out onto the conveyor belt. a system of steel doors regulated the flow of rock onto the conveyor, and the moving belt carried it down to the shaft and dumped it into enormous storage bins.
from there it was fed automatically into the ore cage in fifteen-ton loads and carried at four-minute intervals to the surface.
joseph worked on happily beneath the whining conveyor. the spillings were small, but important. gold is strange in its behaviour, it moves downwards. carried by its own high specific gravity it works its way down through almost any other material. it would find any crack or irregularity in the floor and work its way into it. it would disappear into the solid earth itself if left long enough.
it was this behaviour of gold that accounted in some measure for joseph m'kati's contentment. he had worked his way to the end of the conveyor, washing and sweeping, and now he straightened, laid his bast broom aside and rubbed his kidneys with both hands, looking quickly around to make certain that there was no one else in the conveyor tunnel. beside him was the ore storage bin into which the conveyor was emptying its load. the bin could hold many thousands of tons.
satisfied that he was alone, joseph dropped onto his hands and knees and crawled under the storage bin, ignoring the continuous roar of rock into the bin above him, working his way in until he reached the holes.
it had taken joseph many months to chisel the heads off four of the rivets that held the seam in the bottom of the bin, but once he had done it, he had succeeded in constructing a simple but highly effective heavy media separator.
free gold in the ore that was dumped into the storage bin immediately and rapidly worked its way down through the underlying rock, its journey accelerated by the vibration of the conveyor and bin as more reef was dropped. when the gold reached the floor of the bin, it sought an avenue through which to continue its downward journey, and it found joseph's four rivet holes, beneath which he had spread a square of polythene sheet.
the gold-rich fines made four conical piles on the sheet of polythene, looking exactly like powdered black soot.
crouched beneath the bin, joseph carefully transferred the black powder to his tobacco pouch, replaced the polythene to catch the next filtering, , stuffed the pouch into his hip pocket, and scrambled out from under the bin.
whistling a tribal 'ranting tune joseph picked up his broom and returned to the endless job of sweeping and hosing.
Johnny delange was marking his shot holes. lying on his side in the low stope of 27 section he was calculating by eye the angle and depth of a side cutter blast to straighten a slight bulge in his long- wall.
in the sander ditch they were on single blast. one daily, centrally fired, blast. Johnny was paid on fat homage the cubic measure of rock broken and taken out of his stope. he must, therefore, position his shot holes to achieve the maximum disruption and blow-out from the face.
'so,' he grunted, and marked the position of the hole in red paint.
'and so.' with one bold stroke of the paint brush he set the angle on which his machine boy was to drill.
'shaya, madoda!' Johnny clapped the shoulder of the black man beside him. 'hit it, man.' machine boys were selected for stamina and physique; this one was a greek sculpture in glistening ebony.
'nkosi!' the machine boy grinned an acknowledgement, and with his assistant lugged his rock drill into position.
the drill looked like a gargantuan version of a heavy calibre machine gun.
the noise as the big bantu opened the drill was shattering in the low-roofed, constricted space of the stope. the compressed air roared and fluttered into the drill buffeting the eardrums. Johnny made the clenched-fist gesture of approval, and for a second they smiled at each other in the companionship of shared labour. then Johnny crawled on up the stope to mark the next shot hole.
Johnny delange was twenty-seven years old, and he was top rock breaker on the sander ditch. his gang of forty-eight men were a tightly-knit team of specialists. men fought each other for a place on 27 section, for that's where the money was. Johnny could pick and choose, so each month when the surveyors came in and measured up, Johnny delange was way out ahead in fat homage here was the remarkable position where the man at the lowest point of authority earned more than the man at the top. Johnny delange earned more than the general manager of the sander ditch. last year he had paid super-tax on an income of 22,000 rand. even a miner like kowalski, who brutalized and bullied his gang until he was left with the dregs of the mine, would earn eight or nine thousand rand a year, about the same salary as an official of rod ironsides' rank.
Johnny reached the top of his long-wall and painted in the last shot holes. down the inclined floor of the stope below him all his drills were roaring, his machine boys lying or crouching behind them.
he lay there on one elbow, removed his helmet and
