great curved dome of rock almost four acres in extent. I took one look at it, at the lines of shallow rounded holes that dimpled the entire surface, and I let out a whoop of joy. Suddenly I no longer needed Louren’s support, and both of us ran down onto the stone floor, chortling with glee, as we examined the regular lines of worn depressions.
‘It must have been a big one, Ben,’ Louren exulted, he made a guess at the number of holes. ‘A thousand?’
‘More!’ I said. ‘More like two thousand.’
I paused then, imagining the long regular lines of naked slaves kneeling on the rock floor, each beside one of the smooth depressions, each of them linked to his neighbours by the iron slave chains, each of them with a heavy iron pestle in his hands, pounding away at the gold-bearing ore in the stone mortar between his knees.
I saw in my imagination the slave masters walking along the lines, the leather whips in their hands as they checked that the rock was crushed to a fine powder. I saw the endless columns of slaves with ore baskets balanced on their heads coming up from the workings. All this had happened here nearly 2,000 years before.
‘I wonder where the mine is.’ Louren was paralleling my thoughts.
‘And the water?’ I added. ‘They’d need water to wash the gold out.’
‘The hell with the water,’ Louren shouted. ‘It’s the mine I want, those old boys only worked values of three ounces and over and they stopped at water level - there’s a bloody treasure house around here somewhere.’
This was how all the ancient mines had been destroyed. It was a credit to the skill of the ancient metallurgists that the site of nearly every modern mine in central Africa had been discovered by them 2,000 years before. The modern miners ripped out all trace of the ancient workings in their haste to expose the abandoned reef. I made a vow that at the least I would be first into this one, before the vandals with their drills and dynamite.
The water was at the bottom of a fifty-foot well, cut cleanly through the living rock, its walls lined with masonry. It was the finest example of an ancient well I had ever seen; clearly it had been kept in good repair by the bushmen, and I gloated over it while Xhai fetched a raw-hide rope and leather bucket from a hiding place among the rocks. He brought the bucket up brimming with clear water in which floated a few dead frogs and a drowned bush rat. I made a resolution to boil every drop before it passed my lips.
Louren spent a full thirty seconds in admiring the well, before he set off into the narrow valley between the two ridges of granite. I watched him disappear amongst the trees searching diligently, and twenty minutes later his faint shouts drifted up to me.
‘Ben! Come here! Quickly!’ I dragged myself off the coping of the well and limped down into the valley.
‘Here it is, Ben.’ Louren was wild with excitement and I was struck again by the power that gold has to quicken the most sluggish pulse, and to put the glitter of avarice in even the most world-weary eye. I am not a materialistic person, but the lure and magic of it quickened my own breathing as I stood beside Louren and we looked upon the mine of the ancients.
It was not an impressive sight in itself, a shallow depression, a trench sunk about three or four feet below the level of the surrounding earth, its banks gently rounded, it meandered away amongst the trees like a footpath that had been worn into the earth.
‘Open stope,’ Louren told me. ‘They followed the strike of the reef.’
‘And back-filled.’ I commented on the peculiar habit that the ancients had of filling in all their workings before abandoning them. This shallow trench was caused by the subsidence of the loose soil with which they had filled it.
‘Come on,’ said Louren. ‘Let’s follow it.’
For a mile and a half we followed the old stope through the forest before it petered out.
‘If only we could find one of their dumps,’ Louren muttered as we searched the rank vegetation for a pile of loose rock. ‘Or at least a piece of the ore that they overlooked.’
My back was hurting so I sat on a fallen log to rest, and left Louren to continue the search. He moved away through the trees leaving me alone, and I could enjoy the sense of history which enveloped me when I was alone in a place such as this.
The water level in the well was fifty feet, so I guessed that this was the depth to which the ancients had worked their stope. They did not have the pumps or equipment to evacuate the workings, and as soon as water started pouring in they refilled it and left to find another reef.
This mine had been an open trench, one and a half miles long and fifty feet deep by six feet wide, hacked from the earth with adzes of iron and iron wedges pounded into the grain of the rock with stone hammers. When the rock was hard enough to resist this method, then they built fires upon it and poured water mixed with sour wine on the heated surface to shatter it. This was the same method that Hannibal used to break up the boulders that blocked the passage of his elephants across the Alps - a Carthaginian trick, you might call it. From the sheet of reet they prised lumps of gold quartz and packed it into baskets to be hauled to the surface on raw-hide ropes.
Using these methods they removed an estimated 700 tons of fine gold from workings spread over 300,000 square miles of central and southern Africa, together with vast quantities of iron and copper and tin.
‘That’s 22 million ounces of gold at $40 an ounce, 880 million dollars.’ I worked it out aloud, then added, ‘And that’s a big loaf of bread.’
‘Ben, where are you?’ Louren was coming back through the trees. ‘I found a piece of the reef.’ He had a lump of rock in his hand and he handed it to me.
‘What do you make of that?’
‘Blue sugar quartz,’ I said. And I licked at it to wet the surface, then held it to catch the sunlight. ‘Wow!’ I exclaimed as the native gold sparkled wetly back at me, filling the cracks and tiny fissures in the quartz like butter in a sandwich.
‘Wow, indeed!’ Louren agreed. ‘This is good stuff. I’ll send a couple of my boys in to peg the whole area.’
‘Lo, don’t forget about me,’ I said, and he frowned quickly.
‘You’ll be cut in on it, Ben. Have I ever tried—’
