climbed out.
leaning against the bonnet he lit a cigarette, grimacing at the taste, and looked down at the valley.
there was no natural surface indication of the immense treasure house that lay below. it was like any of the other countless grassy plains of the transvaal. in the centre stood the town of kitchenerville, which for half a century had rejoiced in the fact that lord kitchener had camped one night here in pursuit of the wily boer: a collection of three dozen buildings which had expanded miraculously into three thousand, around a magnificent town hall and shopping complex. dressed in public lawns and gardens, wide streets and bright new houses, all of it paid for by the mining houses whose lease areas converged on the town.
out of the bleak veld surrounding the town their head gears stood like colossal monuments to the gold hunger of man. around the head gears clustered the plants and workshops. there were fourteen head gears in the valley.
the field was divided into five lease areas, following the original farm titles, and was mined by five separate companies.
thornfontein gold mining, blaauberg gold mining, west tweefontein mining, deep gold levels, and the sander ditch gold mining company.
it was to this last that rod naturally directed his attention.
'you beauty, he whispered, for in his eyes the mountainous dumps of blue rock beside the shafts were truly beautiful.
the complex but carefully thought out pattern of the works buildings, even the sulphur-yellow acres of the slimes dam, had a functional beauty.
'get it for me, manfred,' he spoke aloud. 'i want it. i want it badly.' on the twenty-eight square miles of the sander ditch's property lived 14,000 human beings, 12,000 of them were bantu who had been recruited from all over southern africa. they lived in the multi-storied hostels near the shaft heads, and each day they went down through two small holes in the ground to depths that were scarcely credible, and came up again out of those same two holes.
12,000 men down, 12,000 up. that was not all: out of those two same holes came 10,000 tons of rock daily, and down them went timber and tools and piping and explosive, ton upon ton of material and equipment.
it was an undertaking that must evoke pride in the men who accomplished it.
rod glanced at his watch, 7.35 a.m they were down already, all 12,000 of them. they had started going down at three-thirty that morning and now it was accomplished.
the shift was in. the sander ditch was breaking rock, and bringing the stuff out.
rod grinned happily. his loneliness and depression of an hour ago were gone, swallowed up in the immensity of his involvement. he watched the massive wheels of the head gears spinning, stopping briefly, and then spinning again.
each of those shafts had cost fifty million rand, the surface plant and works another fifty million. the sander ditch represented an investment of 150 million rand, 220 million dollars. it was big, and it would be his.
rod flicked away the butt of his cigarette. as he drove down the ridge, his eyes moved eastward down the valley.
all mining activity ceased abruptly along an imaginary north-south line, drawn arbitarily across the open grassland.
there was no surface indication why this should be so, but the reason was deep down.
on that line ran a geological freak, a dyke, a wall of hard serpentine rock that had been named 'the big dipper. it cut through the field like an axe stroke, and beyond it was bad ground. the gold reef existed in the bad ground, they knew this; but not one of the five companies had gone after it. they had prospected it tentatively and then shied away from it, for the boreholes that they sank were frightening in their inconsistency.
a big percentage of the sander ditch lease area lay on the far side of the dipper, and there was a diamond-drilling team working there now.
they had already completed five holes.
rod could remember accurately the results.
borehole sd no. 1. abandoned in water at 4,000feet.
sd no. 2: abandoned in dry hole at 5,250 feet.
sd no. 3: intersected carbon leader reef at 6,600 feet.
first deflection. 6,212-inch penny-weights.
second deflection. 2,'4- inch penny-weights.
sd no. 4. abandoned in attensian water at 3500 feet.
sd no. 5. intersected carbon leader at 8116 feet.
and they were drilling the deflections on that one now.
the problem was to build up a picture from results like that. it looked like a mess of faulted and waterlogged ground with the gold reef fragmented and fluky, showing unbelievably high values at one spot, and then more than likely pinching out fifty feet away.
they may mine it one day, thought rod, but i hope to hell i'm on pension by the time they do.
in the distance beyond the slimes dam he could just make out the spidery triangle of the drilling rig against the grown grass.
'go to it, boys,' he muttered. 'whatever you find there won't make much difference to me.' and he went in through the imposing gates at the entrance to the mine property, halting carefully at the stop sign where the railway line crossed the road and he forked two fingers at the traffic policeman lurking behind the gates.
the traffic cop grinned and waved; he had caught rod the previous week, so he was still one up.
rod drove down to his office. -'that monday morning allen popeye'
worth was preparing to drill his first deflection 'on the sd no. 5. borehole. allen was a texan not a typical texan. he stood five feet four inches tall, but was as tough as the steel drill with which he worked. thirty years before he had started learning his trade on the oilfields around odessa and he had learned it well.
now he could start at the surface and drill a four-inch hole down 13,000 feet through the earth's crust, keeping the hole straight all the way, an almost impossible task if you took into account the whippiness and torque in a jointed rod of steel that long.
if, as happened occasionally, the steel snapped and broke off thousands of feet down, allen could fit a fishing tool on the end of his rig, and patiently grope for the stump, find it, grapple it and pull it out of the borehole. when he hit the reef down there, he could purposely kick his drill off the line and pierce the reef again and again to sample it over an area of hundreds of feet. this was what was meant by deflecting.
allen was one of the best. he could command his own salary and behave like a prima donna, and his bosses would still fawn on him, for the things he could do with a diamond drill were almost magical.
now he was assessing the angle of his first deflection.
the previous day he had lowered a long brass bottle to the end of his borehole and left it overnight. the bottle was half filled with concentrated sulphuric acid, and it had etched the brass of the bottle.
by measuring the angle of the etching he knew just how his drill was branching off from his original hole.
in the tiny wood and iron building beside the drilling rig he finished his measurements and stood back from the work bench, grunting with satisfaction.
from his hip pocket he drew a corncob pipe and pouch.
once he had stuffed tobacco into the pipe and lit it, it became very clear as to why his nickname was 'popeye'. he was a dead ringer for the cartoon character, aggressive jaw, button eyes, battered maritime cap and all.
he puffed contentedly, watching through the single window of the shack as his gang went about the tedious business of lowering the drilling bit down into the earth.
then he took the pipe from his mouth and spat accurately through the windows replaced the pipe and stooped to minutely check his measurements.
his foreman driller interrupted him from the doorway.
'on bottom, and ready to turn, boss.'
'huh!' popeye checked his watch. 'two hours forty to get down, you don't reckon to rupture a gut do you?'
'that's not bad, protested the foreman.
'and it sure as hell isn't good either! okay, okay, cut the cackle and let's get her turning.' he bounced out of the shed and set off for the rig, darting quick beady little glances about him. the rig was a fifty-foot-high tower of steel girders and within it the drill rod hung down until it disappeared into the collar. the twin 200 horsepower diesel engines throbbed expectantly, waiting to provide the power, their exhausts smoking blue in the early morning sunlight.
beside the rig lay a mountainous heap of drilling rods, beyond them the 10,000-gallon puddling reservoir to provide water for the hole. water was pumped into the hole continuously to cool and lubricate the tool as it cut into the rock.
'stand by to turn her,' popeye called to his gang, and they moved to their stations. dressed in blue overalls, coloured fibreglass helmets, and leather gloves, they stood ready and tensed. this was an anxious moment for the whole team: power had to be applied with a lover's touch to the mile and a half length of rod, or it would buckle and snap.
