by Matthew Hart
How many quests start this way? The hero finds a map and off he goes. There was no Ophir on contemporary maps. Nathanson traveled through western Mali searching for towns that a cartographer 300 years ago might have labeled with the name of the legendary city. In that part of Mali artisanal miners were still producing small amounts of gold. Itinerant gold buyers regularly visited the area. Nathanson decided that if he were stopped by the authorities and questioned about his travels, he would say that he was scouting for things to buy, including gold.
Nathanson based himself in western Mali’s provincial city, Kayes, a sweltering town of 100,000 surrounded by iron hills and baked at temperatures that often rise above 100°F. From Kayes he headed into the countryside along the Falémé River, the border with Senegal. On trips that lasted months, he visited the scattered villages. He inspected gold digs, hoping to find the remnant of a mine that might have once been rich enough to attract the name Ophir. In village after village he saw miners grubbing for small amounts of gold, with no sign that they had ever produced more.
With no particular expectation, Nathanson came to a village called Sadiola, an unpromising collection of farmers’ huts. Scrawny cattle competed for grazing with scrawny goats. There was no other sign of village wealth. Nathanson explored the vicinity anyway. There was a hill nearby, and he set out to climb it. As he went up the slope he noticed an indentation. He stopped to investigate, and realized that the depression was the mouth of an adit, a horizontal mine tunnel. It was blocked with debris. No other signs of mining disturbed the hill, only the single adit closed by rubble. He returned to Sadiola with his guide, and learned the story of the hill.
There had indeed been gold mining at Sadiola. The villagers’ ancestors had mined it for centuries. But about a hundred years before, the adit had collapsed, killing every man inside and decimating the local population. Mining had ceased from that day, the hill declared forbidden. No local person would dig there. The adit was what Nathanson had been looking for: evidence of large-scale mining, possibly important enough to have suggested the name Ophir to a European who had heard of it. Moreover, the tragedy and subsequent forbidden status of the ground explained why no one worked it now. To a gold seeker, Sadiola cried out for a drill.
But Nathanson kept quiet. With Soviet influence still strong in Mali, he knew that any discovery would end up in Russian hands. He bided his time. When the Soviet Union crumbled, Mali’s government went looking for investors. And so did Nathanson.
“The first I heard of it,” said Larry Phillips, a Toronto lawyer who became part of what its members called the Mali syndicate, “was a phone call out of the blue in late 1989. It was Bill Pugliese, one of my clients, and he was calling from Switzerland. He was on a ski holiday, but he had this deal that he wanted to proceed with. He sketched it out to me. A gold prospect in Mali. He wanted to buy exploration rights in western Mali. The Mali government was asking for a $2.2 million letter of credit from his bank, and Bill wanted me to examine the letter.
“I sort of panicked,” Phillips said. “I thought—I hope he hasn’t written a check! Then I thought, where’s Mali?”
Soon Phillips was battling his way through the challenging due diligence of a deal with a country that had no advanced business infrastructure. Legal drafts flew back and forth across the Atlantic. Mali is a French-speaking country, and Phillips needed the help of French law firms with African expertise. As he learned more about Mali and its past, he got hooked. He read the journals of the eighteenth-century Scottish explorer Mungo Park and French colonial accounts of the region. He learned about the scale of the early gold mines. In the end, he found the prospect irresistible. “So I joined the syndicate myself,” he said, “and we went to Africa to take a look.”
One of the most important business practices of a small exploration company is secrecy. Big companies prey on little ones. From its earliest tactics the Mali syndicate showed how thoroughly they understood the need for stealth. To disguise the location of their target, they took a 500-square-mile exploration license—a massive package that a junior company could never explore properly. If pressed about the size of the license they wanted, they would say that they had multiple targets. Protecting their target became even more important when the government launched a program to promote exploration.
When the Russians had left, Mali had taken advantage of European Union development money to conduct a large-scale geophysical survey of the country. They wanted to locate mineral formations that would attract foreign explorers. The survey had identified the Kédougou-Kéniéba Inlier, where Sadiola lay, as a gold-prospective zone. Exploration companies arrived to take a look. The syndicate’s large land position concealed its discovery. “We had all that land,” said Phillips, “but really, the main target was always Sadiola, and that’s what we did not want to advertise.”
At Sadiola they found the galleries of a mine that had been worked for 900 years. By 1992 the syndicate had outlined a reserve of 3 million ounces. The mine went into production in 1996, planning for 285,000 ounces a year and an eight-year life of mine. Instead they got 400,000 ounces a year for twice as long, and have since found another 5 million ounces that will extend the mine life by a decade.
The discovery at Sadiola ignited an exploration rush on the Mali side of the inlier. Randgold Resources, a Channel Islands–based gold miner, found the Morila and the Loulo deposits, which together contained 15 million ounces of gold. With the liberalization of Senegal’s mining code in 2003, the search swarmed across the Falémé River into Senegal. Teranga’s Australian owners discovered Sabodala, and Randgold found a deposit at Massawa. As the gold price rose, this search intensified, and a day after leaving Dakar, Pawlitschek and I drove into the bamboo forest and reached Dalato camp.
THE CAMP SAT ON A high bank of the Falémé River. A row of square, white-painted concrete sleeping cottages with thatched roofs stood along one side of a central plaza. Construction workers swarmed around the concrete shell of a new accommodation building. The camp teemed with geologists and exploration crews, and was so overcrowded that drillers were spilling out of the cantonment into tent camps in the bush.
As we parked, the stocky figure of Donald Walker, the chief geologist on site, exploded into view. Walker and Pawlitschek plunged into a discussion of the day’s complexities. Teranga had a 328,000-acre land package that stretched for sixty miles along the Falémé River. It was a largely trackless waste of choppy hills and rock and scattered villages. Lions and leopards patrolled the bamboo thickets. Onto this landscape the explorers were superimposing the logic of a gold search.
In the camp’s main office, charts covered the walls. Cabinets with narrow drawers held maps and diagrams and drill plots. The geologists swept some Styrofoam cups from a counter and Walker spread out a chart that Pawlitschek wanted to examine.
The exploration of a large gold prospect typically begins from the air. A plane tows a pod containing a magnetometer, a device that scans the upper levels of the crust and measures the relative abundance of magnetic materials, such as iron oxide and magnetite. Because different rock types contain different amounts of these minerals, a map of the magnetism shows geologists where different rock types meet. Since the hydrothermal flows that carry gold from the mantle to the surface exploit such weaknesses as these meeting places, the mapping shows geologists where to look.
Another type of airborne survey narrows the search. Radiometrics measures the radioactive emissions from the surface that result from the decay of isotopes. This information helps date the rock. Geologists already know from regional experience the age of the local rock most likely to hold gold. This new data further help target the drills.
Geologists had already identified 10 million ounces of gold in eastern Senegal. Teranga had drilled hundreds of thousands of feet of exploration holes, and sampled and trenched throughout its license. It had twenty-seven priority targets. Late that night we went to see the richest one—the Gora target.
We le
ft camp and drove past the sleeping village and into the bamboo forest. The trees beside the road were covered in dust and in the headlights looked like a forest of white trees. A panicked squirrel shot across the road, trailing a plume of dust, like snow. After a while a distant light came into view, and we made our way toward it, following the twists and turns of the track until we reached the fantastic scene where the drill rig hissed and roared.
Covered in white rock powder, the Ghanaian drillers looked like ghosts. They moved with an alien deliberation, like astronauts on the moon, filling plastic bags with chips of rock that gushed from the drill. They wore bandannas to keep from breathing dust. The drill was white and the men were white and the ground was white, and all around was the thick black night. A Senegal bush baby—a small, nocturnal primate—sprang from the darkness through the light, a pair of astonished eyes.
The Gora target was a gigantic block of buried quartz that poked out at that single point—like the tip of an iceberg. Gold-bearing “pay veins” ran through the quartz. One was thirty feet thick. The quartz went down in to the surrounding rock at a steep angle. The drillers had tracked it for about a mile. They knew where the gold veins pinched and swelled, but not where they ended.
The deeper they drilled, the more they found. On the night I was there the drills had outlined 70,000 ounces. At that night’s gold price, the deposit would be worth $100 million. A few months later they had more than doubled the estimated gold to 156,000 ounces. Now it’s 374,000 ounces—enough for a five-year mine, and, as I write, more than a half a billion dollars worth of gold. In the forest, a rival army was watching to see what Pawlitschek had found, so they could find it too.
IN THE MORNING I RETURNED to the forest on a mapping trip with a short, grizzled geologist named Michel Brisebois, a Quebecer who had started out in life as a lumberjack. He’d developed a taste for roaming the world, and decided that the profession of geology offered the best way to finance it. We rode up with a camp employee, a South African army veteran who droned on and on, like a radio that could not be turned off. The program that morning was Horrible Things That Different Kinds of Ammunition Can Do to Your Body. He dwelt long and lovingly on the holes made by certain bullets: tidy hole at entry; messy hole at exit. Then the program switched to snakes and scorpions. In that part of Senegal they have the emperor scorpion and the black-necked spitting cobra. “But the worst is the puff adder,” he said cheerfully as Brisebois and I piled out at our starting point. “The toxin of the puff adder is a cytotoxin. It attacks your cells. People do not always die, but they are never the same again.” He gave us a smile like a bandolier loaded with white bullets.
Brisebois shot him a sour look and struck off into the bamboo. “That guy is an asshole,” he said when we were in the thicket, “but I’ll tell you something. Watch an African in the bush. He looks at the ground, because that’s where the danger will come from. And don’t walk too close to me. If I surprise a snake, you are right there on top of him before he has a chance to get away, and it’s you who will get bit.”
Brisebois wore a tan vest that bristled with pens. A compass dangled from his neck. His graph-ruled notebook filled with tidy entries as we picked our way among GPS coordinates. The day was fresh and the forest suffused with a straw-colored light. A faint smell of wood smoke lay on the air from farmers clearing land. As we made our way through the greening thickets, charred branches striped my shirt with ash.
“The burnt area is very efficient because you can walk quickly through it and see the rock,” Brisebois said when we reached a formation. “Other than these outcrops, we are walking on a thick cap of laterite. Beneath that lies the gold host. This ridge marks a shear zone. The sedimentary rock sheared and these quartz ridges popped up through it, giving evidence that more of them must lie below.”
Brisebois loved to handle rock. He picked up a piece and opened it with the barest tap of his pick. “You see these boxlike shapes?” The pale gray rock was speckled with faint, rust-red outlines winking with tiny flakes. “They are an iron sulfide called pyrite—the fool’s gold that many people recognize. In this deposit, the real gold is associated with the fool’s gold.”
On the ridge, the bamboo broke the sunlight into splinters. A drill roared nearby. A backhoe had made a trench in the hill we were exploring, and there we chanced on an outpost of the competition. At the bottom of the trench gaped a deeper hole, about a yard square; but this one had been dug by hand. A well-made buttressing of logs kept it from collapse. The shaft penetrated too far down for me to see the bottom. The local people who had sunk the hole had viewed the backhoe trench as a free head start. They had reasoned that if the geologists thought there might be something there, it was worth a look. Sometimes the reverse happens—explorers sample where the local people have been digging. A cat-and-mouse game had developed in the forest as each of the two bodies of experienced gold searchers, the new and the old, circled each other. That afternoon I drove out of camp with Djibril Sow and Thierno Mamadou Mouctar, Senegalese geologists on Teranga’s staff, to see if we could find where villagers were digging.
We followed a red road that rose and fell through the hilly forest until it climbed to a plateau and brought us to the village of Bondala. Most of the houses were small and round, covered in a stucco of mud and topped by conical roofs of trimmed thatch. Decorative patterns of twine, ornate and beautiful, held the thatch in place. Bamboo fences encircled the village and divided it into compounds. The only exceptions to the mud construction were a pair of concrete structures—the village school, and the house of a villager who had found a one-pound lump of gold. Bondala was a mining town.
A rough track from the village led into a bamboo thicket. The truck plunged and bucked through crater-sized holes, throwing up clouds of powdery dust that billowed across the hood and covered the windshield. The driver put the wipers on to clear the dirt. We rolled up the windows, but soon our clothes were coated with a fine dust. The geologists said it was a kind of silt, evidence of the sedimentary soils that host the gold in some parts of the prospecting area.
Termite mounds ten feet high rose in the thin wood. Baked hard by the sun, the mounds are made of excavated earth carried up from the termites’ tunnels. The deep systems can extend to sixty feet below the surface. Geologists regularly sample termite mounds to see what lies below. Teranga’s field workers had sampled 20,000 mounds. One of the richest mineral discoveries in history, Botswana’s Orapa diamond pipe, was located with the help of mineral clues carried up by termites. Sampling insect hills may be an ancient practice. In the fifth century BC, Herodotus recorded a story about ants “bigger than a fox” that excavated gold-rich sand in the deserts of Afghanistan.
We came to a place where Teranga crews, investigating reports of local gold digs, had come in and trenched with a backhoe. Gravel lay in heaps, and the tattered forest showed where tracked vehicles had blundered through. Finding nothing promising, the crews had left. But trenching prompted the villagers to investigate in turn. They had put up bamboo sunshades to shield the trench, and dug a few holes. They had not found anything worth pursuing either, and all that remained of their activity was a broken calabash and some poles.
There was not a soul in sight. Djibril Sow was certain there was mining somewhere near. He pointed to fresh tire tracks that led down a narrow track. “Their water truck,” he said.
A cyclist came wobbling along from the direction of the village. We called out but he pedaled away into the bush, ignoring us. We left our truck and followed him on foot. Soon we saw the water truck, more bicycles, and came to the dig. At first I saw only a few dozen people working around six or seven holes, but as we walked into the site, I saw that it stretched much further, as far as I could see into the thin wood. The whole village was out digging for gold.
Clearly they resented and distrusted me, and would not even look at me until my companions explained that I didn’t work for the company and was not a geologist. It would have been hard to mist
ake me for one. I wore an old tennis hat. My hands were as red as lobster claws and my snowy outfit, fresh from the hotel laundry in Dakar, was striped with ash from top to bottom. The kids thought I was hilarious. They would dash up and shout at me from a few feet away, and when I looked at them, they would whirl away and race off squealing. I jumped at one, and the whole pack went shrieking into the trees; but I was fair game after that.
I watched one man scuttle down a hole at least twenty feet deep. He had no ladder or rope, but went down by bracing himself against the shaft wall. With a few quick movements he was at the bottom, where he disappeared. A network of deep tunnels ran beneath the wood. A steady feed of ore came up in baskets. The women panned it in their shallow calabashes. They manipulated these with mesmerizing skill, swirling the water and soil around and tipping off the lighter particles until they had a residue of heavy grains, and sometimes, sparkling among them, a globule of gold. “They call it in their tongue nara,” said Djibril Sow. “It means nugget.”
GOLD IS ITS OWN COUNTRY. One morning on the bank of the Falémé River I watched a motorcycle buzz into view from the bush on the Mali side. The rider navigated down the muddy slope, bounced across the shallows and tore off into Senegal, headed for a sprawling artisanal minesite at a place called Soreto. It dwarfed the forest digs at Bondala, and miners from Mali commuted to it every day.
The mine was a fairground of men and women, laborers and vendors, miners, children, dogs. The women and girls blazed with gold earrings. People greeted us with shouts. “Bonjour! Ça va?” A woman sipping from a glass of yellow liquid raised it to us in a toast and scorched us with her smile.