Wilbur Smith - Gold Mine

by Gold Mine(Lit)

  "Will you credit us bonus fat homage while we fiddle around with this?" he asked.

  "Four fathoms a shift." Rod agreed to pay them for the removal of fictitious rock.

  "Eight?" said Davy.

  "Hell, no!" Rod exclaimed. That was robbery.

  "I don't know," Davy murmured, watching Rod with sly ferrety little eyes. "Maybe I should talk to Brother Duivenhage, you know, ask his advice." Duivenhage was No. 1 shaft shop steward for the Mine Workers" Union. He had driven Frank Lemmer to the edge of a nervous breakdown and was now starting on Rodney Ironsides. Rod was pleading with Head Office to offer Duivenhage a fat job in management to get him out of the way. The last thing in the world that Rod wanted was Brother Duivenhage snooping around his drive on the Big Dipper.

  "Six," he said.

  Well. Davy hesitated.

  "Six is fair, Davy," Johnny interrupted, and Davy glared at him.

  Johnny had snatched complete victory from his grasp.

  "Good, that's agreed." Quickly Rod closed the negotiations. "You'll start drilling the matt right away." Rod's design demanded Nearly 1,200 shot holes to be filled with two and a half tons of explosive. It was 1,000 feet down the drive from the main haulage on 66 level to where the matt began.

  The drive now was a spacious, well lit and freshly ventilated tunnel, with the vent piping, the compressed air pipe, and the electrical cable bolted into the hanging wall, and a set of steel railway tracks laid along the floor.

  All work on the face ceased while the Delange brothers set about drilling the matt. It was light work that demanded little from the men. As each hole was drilled, Davy would insert his charging rod to check the depth and then plug the entrance with a wad of paper. There was much time for drinking Thermos coffee and for thinking.

  There were three subjects that endlessly occupied Davy's mind as he sat at ease, waiting for the completion of the next shot hole. Sometimes for half an hour at a time Davy would hold the image of that 50,000 rand in his mind. It was his, tax paid, painstakingly accumulated over the years and lovingly deposited with the local branch of the Johannesburg Building Society. He imagined it bundled and stacked in neat green piles in the Society's vault. Each bundle was labelled David Delange.

  Then his imagination would pass automatically on to the farm that the money would buy. He saw how it would be in the evenings when he sat on the wide stoep, with the setting sun striking the peaks of the Swart Berg across the Valley, and the cattle coming in from the paddocks towards the homestead.

  Always there was a woman sitting beside him on the stoep. The woman had red hair.

  On the fifth morning Davy drove home in the dawn, he was not tired. The night's labours had been easy and un exacting The door of Johnny and Hettie's bedroom was closed.

  Davy read the newspapers with his breakfast; as always the cartoon strip adventures of Modesty Blaise and Willie Uarvin intrigued him completely. This morning Modesty was depicted in a bikini and Davy studied her comparing her to the big healthy body of his brother's wife. The thought of her stayed with him as he rolled onto his bed, and he lay unsleeping, daydreaming an adventure in which Modesty Blaise had become Hettie, and Willie Garvin was Davy.

  An hour later he was still awake. He sat up and reached for the towel which lay across the foot of his bed. He wrapped the towel around his waist as he went down the passage to the bathroom. As he reached for the handle of the bathroom door, it opened under his hand and he was face to face with Hettie Delange.

  She wore a white lace dressing-gown with ostrich-feather mules on her feet. Her face was innocent of make-up and she had brushed her hair and tied it with a ribbon.

  "Oh!" she gasped with surprise. "You gave me a fright, man."

  "I'm sorry, hey." Davy grinned at her, holding the towel with one hand. Hettie let her eyes run quickly over his naked upper body.

  Davy was muscled like a prizefighter. His chest hair was crisp and curly. On both arms the tattoos drew attention to the thickness and weight of muscle.

  "Gee, you are built," Hettie murmured in admiration, and Davy sucked in his belly reflexively.

  "You think so?" His "grin was self-conscious now.

  "Yes." Hettie leaned forward and touched his arm. "It's hard too!"

  The movement had allowed the front of her dressing gown to gape open.

  Davy's face flushed as he looked down into the opening. He started to say something, but his voice had dried up on him. Hettie's fingers stroked down his arm, and she was watching the direction of his eyes.

  Slowly she moved closer to him.

  "Do you like me, Davy?" she asked, her voice throaty and low, and with an animal cry Davy attacked her.

  His hands ripping at the opening of her gown, pinning her to the wall of the bathroom with his mouth frantically hunting hers. His body pressing hard and urgent, his eyes wild, his breathing ragged.

  Hettie was laughing, a breathless gasping laugh.

  This was what she loved. When they lost their heads, when they went mad for her.

  "Davy," she said, jerking loose his towel. "Davy." She kept wriggling away from his thrusting hips, knowing that it would inflame him further. His hands were tearing at her body, his eyes were maniacal.

  "Yes!" she hissed into his mouth. He threw her off balance and she slid down the wall onto the floor.

  "Wait," she panted. "Not here the bedroom." But it was too late.

  Davy had spent the afternoon locked in his bedroom, lying on his bed in an agony of black all-pervading remorse and guilt.

  "My brother," he kept repeating. "Johnny is my brother." Once he wept, each sob tearing something in his chest.

  The tears squeezed out between burning eyelids, leaving him feeling exhausted and weak.

  "My own brother," he shook his head slowly in horrified disbelief "I cannot stay here," he decided miserably. "I'll have to go." He went to the washbasin and washed his eyes. Stooping over the basin, water still dripping from his face, he decided. ""I will have to tell him."

  The burden of guilt was too heavy. "I'll write to Johnny. I'll write it all, and then I'll go away.

  Frantically he searched for pen and paper, it was almost as though he could wipe away the deed by writing it down.

  He sat at the table by the window and wrote slowly and laboriously.

  When he had finished it was three o'clock. He felt better.

  He sealed the four closely written pages into an envelope and slipped it into the inside pocket of his jacket. He dressed quickly, and crept out of the house, fearful of meeting Hettie, but she was nowhere about.

  Her big white Monaco was not in the garage, and with relief he turned out of the driveway and took the road out to the Sander Ditch. He wanted to reach the mine before Johnny came off shift.

  Davy listened to his brother's voice, as he kidded and laughed with the other off-duty miners in the company change house. He had locked himself in one of the lavatory closets to avoid meeting his brother, and he sat disconsolately on the toilet seat. The sound of Johnny's voice brought his guilt flooding back in its full strength. His letter of confession was buttoned into the top pocket of his overalls, and he took it out, broke open the flap and reread the contents.

  "So long, then." Johnny's voice sang out gaily from the change room.

  "See you bastards tomorrow." There was an answering chorus from the other miners, then the door slammed.

  Davy went on sitting alone for another twenty minutes in the stench of stale bodies and urine, dirty socks and rank disinfections from the foot baths. At last he tucked the letter away in his pocket and opened the closet door.

  Davy's gang were at their waiting place at the head of the drive. They were sitting along the bench laughing and chatting. There was a holiday spirit amongst them for they knew it would be another shift of easy going.

  They greeted Davy cheerfully, as he came down the haulage. Both the Delange brothers were popular with their gangs and it was unusual that Davy did not reply to the choruse
d greeting. He did not even smile.

  The Swazi boss boy handed him the safety lamp, and Davy grunted an acknowledgement. He set off alone down the tunnel, trudging heavily, not conscious of his surroundings, his mind encased in a padding of guilt and self-pity.

  A thousand feet along the drive he reached the day's work area.

  Johnny's shift had left the rock drills in place, still connected to the compressed air system, ready for use.

  Davy came to a halt in the centre of the work area, and without a conscious command from his brain his hands began the routine process of striking the wick of the safety lamp.

  The little blue flame came alight behind the protective screen of wire mesh, and Davy held the lamp at eye level before him and walked slowly along the drive. His eyes were watching the flame without seeing it.

  The air in the tunnel was cool and refrigerated, scrubbed and filtered, there was no odour nor taste to it. Davy walked on somnambulantly. He was wallowing in self-pity now. He saw himself in a semi-heroic role, one of the great lovers of history caught up in tragic circumstances.

  His brain was fully occupied with the picture. His eyes were unseeing.

  Blindly he performed the ritual that a thousand times before had begun the day's shift.

  Slowly in its wire mesh cage the blue flame of the safety lamp changed shape. Its crest flattened, and there formed above it a ghostly pale line. Davy's eyes saw it, but his brain refused to accept the message.

  He walked on in a stupor of gilt and self-pity.

  That line above the flame was called "the cap', it signified that there was at least a five percent concentration of methane gas in the air.

  The last shot hole that Johnny Delange's gang had drilled before going off shift had bored into a methane-filled fissure. For the previous three hours, gas had been blowing out of that hole. The ventilation system was unable to wash the air fast enough and now the gas had spread slowly down the drive. The air surrounding Davy's body was heavy with gas, he had breathed it into his lungs. It needed just one spark to ignite it.

  Davy reached the end of the drive and snapped the snuffer over the wick, extinguishing the flame in the lamp.

  "All safe," he muttered, not realizing that he had spoken.

  He went back to his waiting men.

  "All safe," he repeated, and with the Swazi boss boy leading them the forty men of Davy Delange's gang trooped gaily into the mouth of the drive.

  Moodily Davy followed them. As he walked he reached into his hip pocket and took out a pack of Lexington filter tips. He put one between his lips, returned the pack and began patting his pockets to locate his lighter.

  Davy went from team to team of his machine boys, directing them in the line and spot to be drilled. Every time he spoke, the unlit cigarette waggled between his lips. He gesticulated with the hand that held his cigarette-lighter.

  It took twenty minutes for him to set all his drills to work. And he stood and looked back along the tunnel.

  Each machine boy and his assistant formed a separate sculpture. Most of them were stripped to the waist. Their bodies appeared to be carved and polished in oiled ebony, as they braced themselves behind the massive rock drills.

  Davy lifted his cupped hands, holding the cigarette lighter near his face, and he flicked the cog wheel.

  The air in the tunnel turned to flame. In a flash explosion, the flame reached the temperature of a welding torch. It seared the skin from the faces and exposed bodies of the machine boys, it burned the hair from their scalps. It turned their arms to charred stumps. It roasted their eyeballs in their sockets. It scorhed their clothing, so as they fell the cloth smouldered and burned against their flesh.

  In that instant, as the skin was licked from his face and hands, Davy Delange opened his mouth in a great gasp of agony. The flame shot down his throat into his gas, drenched lungs. Within the confines of his body the gas exploded and his chest popped like a paper bag, his ribs fanning outward about the massive wound like the petals of a sunflower.

  Forty-one men died at the same moment. In the silence after that whooshing, sucking detonation, they lay like scorched insects along the floor of the drive. One or two of them were moving still, an arched spine relaxing, a leg straightening, charred fingers unclenching, but within a minute all was absolutely still.

  Half an hour later Doctor Dan Stander and Rodney lronsides were the first men into the drive. The smell of burned flesh was overpowering.

  Both of them had to swallow down their nausea as they went forward.

  an Stander sat at his desk and looked out over the car park in front of the mine hospital. He appeared to have aged ten years since the previous evening.

  Dan envied his colleagues the detachment they could bring to their work. He had never been able to perfect the trick.

  He had just completed forty-one examinations for issue of death certificates.

  For fifteen years he had been a mine doctor, so he was accustomed to dealing with death in its more hideous forms.

  This, however, was the worst he had ever encountered.

  Forty-one of them, all victims of severe burning and massive explosion trauma.

  He felt washed out, exhausted with ugliness. He massaged his temples as he examined the tray of pathetic possessions that lay on the desk before him. This was the contents of the pockets of the man Delange.

  Extracting them from the scorched clothing had been a filthy business in itself. Cloth had burned into the flesh, the man had been wearing a cheap nylon shirt under his overalls. The fabric had melted in the heat and had become part of his blistered skin.

  There was a bunch of keys on a brass ring, a Joseph Rogers pen-knife with a bone handle, a Ronson cigarette lighter which had been clutched in the man's clawed and charred right hand, a springbok skin wallet, and a loose envelope with one corner burned away.

  Dan had already passed on the effects of the Bantu victims to the agent of the Bantu Recruiting Agency, who would send them on to the men's families. Now he sighed with distaste and picked up the wallet. He opened it.

  In one compartment there were half a dozen postage stamps, and five rands in notes. The other flap bulged with paper. Dan glanced through salesmen's cards, dry-cleaning receipts, newspaper cuttings offering farms for sale, a folded page from the Farmer's Weekly on the planning of a dairy herd, a JBS savings book.

  Dan opened the savings book and whistled when he saw the total. He fanned the remaining pages.

  There was a much-fingered envelope, unsealed and tucked behind the cardboard cover of the savings book.

  Dan opened it, and pulled a face. It contained a selection of photographs of the type which one found offered for sale in the dock area of the Mozambique port of Lourenqo Marques. It was for this type of material that Dan was searching.

  When the man's possessions were returned to his grieving relatives, Dan wanted to spare them this evidence of human frailty. He burned all the photographs and the envelope in his ashtray and then crushed the blackened sheets to powder before spilling it into his waste-paper bin.

  He went across to the window and opened it to let the smell of smoke escape. He stood at the window and searched the car park for joy's Alfa Romeo. She had not arrived as yet and Dan returned to his desk.

  The remaining envelope caught his eye and he picked it up. There was a smear of blood upon it, and the corner was burned away. Dan removed the four sheets of paper and spread them on the desk: Dear Johnny, When Pa died you were still little and I always reckoned you were more like my son, you know, than my brother.

  Well, Johnny, I reckon now I've got to tell you something... Dan read Slowly, and he did not hear joy come into the room. She stood at the door watching him. Her expression fond, a small smile on her lips, shiny blonde hair hanging straight to her shoulders. Then she moved up quietly behind his chair and kissed his ear. Dan started and turned to face her.

  "Darling," joy said and kissed him on the mouth. "What is so interesting that you igno
re my arrival?" Dan hesitated a moment before telling her.

  "There was a man killed last night in a ghastly accident.

  This was in his pocket." He handed her the letter and she read it slowly.

  "He was going to send this to his brother?" she asked, and Dan nodded.

  "The bitch, Joy whispered, and Dan looked surprised.

  "Who?" the girl it's her fault, you know. "Joy opened her purse and took out a tissue to dab her eyes. "Damn it, now I'm messing my make-up." She sniffed, and then went on. "It would serve her right if you gave that letter to her husband."

  "You mean I shouldn't give it to him?" Dan asked. "We have no right to play God." "Haven't we?" asked joy, and Dan watched quietly as she tore the letter to tiny shreds, screwed them into a ball, then dropped them into the waste bin.