The Golden Soak

by Innes, Hammond;

  I went back to the shaft, called up it that I was okay, and then I took a chance and went scrambling down the stoping itself. Beyond the second level the roof pillars became fewer, the overburden supported by hand-built walls of red rock. The air had got to it, of course. It was quite humid at this depth, with moisture glistening on the walls, and this had helped the process of oxidization.

  Those two levels were enough the convince me that the mine was valueless. Prophecy’s information was largely correct. The reef had had a width of between four and eight feet, inclining down at an angle of roughly 40°. At the eastern end it virtually petered out and at the western end it ran into very heavy faulting. There was granite here, but in the main the overlay was a mixture of iron and silica with some shale, and it was this the miners had used to shore up the roof. Even supposing the reef continued at depth, the place was about as safe as a derelict coal mine with all the pit props rotted. Start drilling and shot firing anywhere underground and the whole thing would collapse.

  I was at the third level then, the ground under my feet no longer dust, but packed firm, and damp in places. Tramlines showed intermittently, twin lines of rusted iron, and suddenly in the light from my lamp I saw the outline of a heel, hard and clear. A little further on, where the floor was almost mud, the imprint of rubber-soled shoes showed for about five yards. The pattern of the soles was quite distinct. It gave me an uncanny feeling, alone down there in the bowels of that abandoned mine and knowing that somebody else had been down there recently, might still be down there. No, that was ridiculous – pure imagination. But there was no doubt. Those footprints were quite fresh.

  I had passed the cross-cut to the shaft and was nearing the westward end of the reef where it would finish at the fault. A drift opened up to my left, the floor slippery with damp and more footprints. They pointed both ways. He had gone into the drift and come out again. How long ago?

  I squatted, peering at them closely. The mud was soft, the edge of the prints blurred. Water was seeping from a nearby crack in the rocks. Water in a land so dry! It couldn’t have been long ago that he’d been here. Ed Garrety probably when he was fixing the bolt on the entrance door. Or had Westrop already been down when Garrety found him? Or was it somebody else, somebody I didn’t know about – somebody who was still down here? I swung my head, directing the beam of the lamp along the gallery. Nothing, just the arched rock with a view of the stoping beyond, and on the floor, not two yards away, another footprint, very clear.

  I took my helmet off, straightening up and swinging round to flat the lamp back down the way I had come. But there was nothing, of course, and I stepped into the drift. It turned out to be nothing more than a probe. About forty feet in it suddenly ceased. No quartz. No gleam of gold. Just iron-dark rock rusted in streaks by the moisture. What had decided the miners to give up at that precise point?

  I went back down the drift, towards the heading where it entered the main gallery, my helmet still in my hand. I didn’t care that my head was bare to any falling rock. With the lamp in my hand I could flash it quickly left and right as I stepped out into the gallery. It may seem silly – my nervousness. But an abandoned mine is a strange place. It has its own sort of atmosphere. I’ve been down quite a few in my time, but never anything as remote and unstable as Golden Soak, and never before or since with that strange sense of somebody watching me, a sort of presence. It wasn’t just those footprints. I’m certain of that. Those were physical. This was something quite insubstantial and rather queer. And it was only here on the third level – I hadn’t noticed it on the first two.

  I don’t believe in ghosts. I never have. Certainly not the ghosts of dead miners. If I believed in that sort of nonsense I wouldn’t have gone into mining. There aren’t many mines that haven’t suffered some loss of life and in one or two of the old Cornish mines I’d been down.… Good God! if you believed in ghosts you’d be meeting the dead round every turn and twist of the narrow workings. But that doesn’t mean I’m insensitive to the feel of a place. Old mines, like old houses, have their own atmosphere – a feel, an aura compounded of many things, but chiefly of the way men have handled the problems of working underground. It’s there in the construction of the galleries, the cross-cuts, drifts and winzes, the way they have stoped and handled the ore. But here, on the third level of Golden Soak, it was something different, as though the rock itself had absorbed such a radiation of human fear that it could still infect the atmosphere of the place.

  All this flashed through my mind as I moved slowly towards the western end of the reef, an attempt to rationalize the growing sense of unease. Another drift probing to the left and ending, like the first, at a bare rock face. I was into the faulted area then. No more sloping and the miners searching desperately for the new line of the reef. A third drift, to the right this time, and then my lamp was shining on the end of the main gallery, the roof so low it was no more than a hole, and to the left a final probe, damp seeping and a mêlée of footprints all made by the same person.

  It was here in this final drift that I found what he had been looking for. It was a very narrow passageway, barely wide enough to swing a pick in, the roof all faulted, lumps of rock littering the floor. It reminded me of Balavedra – the older workings. I put my helmet on, the lamp showing rubble ahead, water dripping from the roof. It wasn’t level like the others, but descended steeply, an angle of about 20°. It was more like a winze, and it was a deeper probe. I didn’t like it. The roof was unstable and there was water in pools among the fallen rocks. About seventy yards in I was clambering over rubble, my head bent so that I could see where I was treading. And then suddenly I stopped. The rubble under me was no longer composed only of that dull red iron ore streaked with rust. Mixed with it were small jagged pieces of rock so white and coarsely crystalline that it looked like Parian marble. I picked up a piece and caught the gleam of gold in the lamplight.

  It was quartz.

  They had found the reef again. That was my first thought. Then I raised my head, the lamplight showing piled-up rubble half blocking the passage and the roof above it still the same red rock.

  I stood there for a moment, puzzling over it. And then I was crawling on my hands and knees over the rubble, peering ahead down the drift to see the reef quartz showing white in the dark recess of it. Quartz in fragments was mixed with the piled-up granite of the fall, a shovel lying on the debris, and in the cleared space, between the jagged rock face and the rubble pile on which I crouched, a pick was propped against the wall.

  I didn’t go any further. I didn’t need to. The pick and that shovel told their story. They belonged with the footprints I had been following. Garrety? Westrop? Somebody had discovered that the reef continued. Or was it an entirely new reef? I picked up a piece of quartz and examined it more closely. The glitter of the gold was clear to the naked eye. There were specks of black, too, and the white of the quartz was smudged with Grey. Gold in antimony?

  I looked again at the gaping hole torn out of the roof of the gallery by the rock fall, probing with my limp. The reef showed as a narrow band of jagged quartz. No way of telling what its width was or how far it extended into the rock. And this wasn’t a recent fall. Damp had discoloured the exposed surfaces of the iron formation above and the rubble under my feet showed the rusty discoloration of water seepage from the porous iron ore. Whoever had been working down here recently certainly hadn’t caused it. The fall had happened a long time ago.

  And then, of course, it came to me – this was the 1939 cave-in. This was where the rock and water had poured in upon the miners Ed Garrety’s father had employed in a last desperate attempt to find the reef again. And they had found it. But they hadn’t known that as they ran for their lives. The only one who knew was the man whose footprints I had been following.

  The atmosphere of the place seemed stronger then and I hastily filled the haversack with samples of quartz and scrambled back over the heaped-up pile of rubble, conscious of the irony of it. T
o find the reef again and not to know, and all so pointless, the mine uneconomic anyway.

  Beyond the rock pile the footprints showed again in the beam of my lamp, and I stared at them as I moved on down the narrow tunnel of the drift, wondering about the man who had made them, why he had opened up the drift so laboriously, working alone down here with nothing more than a pick and shovel. As Kadek had said, if the mine was uneconomic thirty years ago it would be doubly so now. So what was the point, unless the ore content.…’ I stopped then. I was almost back at the main gallery and I stood there, one of the samples in my hand, looking at it closely. The grey smudges.… It wasn’t the content that had changed, it was the price. The price of antimony.

  Gold and antimony. I stared at the smudged white glitter of the sample in my hand, excited now, seeing suddenly the solution to my own problems, as well as those of Jarra Jarra. But I would need to get it chemically tested, the gold assayed, also the antimony content, if it was antimony. And then we’d have to test drill. A lot of time, a lot of money. I dropped the fragment back into the haversack and stood for a moment staring down at a damp patch that showed the imprint of the man who had discovered it clear and sharp, the whole foot. It was the right foot and I put my own alongside it. A little longer, a little broader; a big man then, and Westrop hadn’t been big. Whoever it was, he wasn’t here now and I went back down the main gallery, found the cross-cut to the shaft, and then I was leaning out from the staging, the lamplight shining on water and the ladder running straight down into it. The shaft was like a well. Water here in abundance and cattle dying on the surface. It didn’t make sense, this crazy, empty, burned-up country. I called up to Prophecy, and when she answered, her voice echoing and swelling in down the shaft, I swung myself out on to the ladder and started slowly up it. The wooden rungs were still solid, but the iron fastenings that held it to the rock were loose in places, and though I kept my body pressed against it, that ladder scared me, so that I was relieved to find the one leading up to the first level more secure. But it was still good to switch to the rope ladder and the security of the nylon safety rope.

  ‘Yuh bin a long time on that third level.’ She was leaning down towards me, ‘Find anything?’ I was almost level with the top of the shaft, and looking up at her, the beam of my lamp showed her eyes bright as beads. I heaved myself out, glad to be on firm ground again. ‘Well, what did yuh find?’ She had seen the bulging haversack and her voice had a grasping urgency.

  I handed her a piece of the quartz and she picked up her torch, bending over it, examining it eagerly. Her hands trembled, the glitter of the gold exciting her. ‘Where did yuh find this – on the third level?’ She looked up at me, her thin dry hair in wisps across her face and her eyes gleaming. ‘Is this from the reef?’

  I knew then that I wasn’t going to tell her what else I’d found, the footprints, the evidence of work in that gallery. ‘Yes. There’s a section of the reef exposed. But it’s quite unworkable.’ And I explained about the state of the mine.

  It took a little time to convince her. Gold still has a powerful attraction, and having made money out of one claim, She was eager to peg another, insisting that we try our luck higher up the gully. Even when I told her what the grey smudges in the quartz could mean, I don’t think she really believed me – she didn’t want to. ‘Yuh get it analysed,’ she said finally. ‘Then we’ll see.’

  This was obviously the next step, and when I asked her where the nearest laboratory was she said, ‘Kalgoorlie.’

  We collected our gear then and went back down the adit to the mine entrance. The sun was already well up and the heat hit us as we went out into the red glare of the gully. I closed the door and screwed the bolt back into place. It was just after eight as we drove down the tramline track to the mine buildings. ‘If wot yuh say is true and it is antimony in that quartz, then it explains why they never made any money out of the mine.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She had obviously been thinking it over.

  ‘And I bet that sample runs out at near on six ounces to the ton.’

  She was a woman who didn’t give up easily and she was talking about it all the way to the cut-off by the paddock fencing. I didn’t say much, for I was driving and wondering what I’d tell Ed Garrety if I met him coming down the track from Jarra Jarra. But we didn’t meet a soul and shortly after nine-thirty we pulled into Lynn Peak, a mobile drilling rig the only vehicle there We were both of us very tired by then and I was glad Andie was out seeing to one of his wind bores. His wife cooked us breakfast and while we were waiting for it I picked up a copy of the West Australian somebody had left and turned to the financial page. It gave the London price of antimony – £1130 per ton. Only a few months ago it had been £340.

  The bacon and eggs came and we ate it with the children on the floor at our feet and the four drillers at the next table. They were ‘dust’ drillers and their rig was a rotary percussion drill, a Mayhew 1000 that relied on compressed air instead of mud to bring the rock chips to the surface. They were on their way from Mt Goldsworthy to a temporary job at Mt Newman. Georges Duhamel, the owner of the rig had been born in the French island of New Caledonia and all through breakfast he was telling me how important it was for Britain to retain her Pacific colonies. ‘Some day Australia will need those islands as bases against the pressures of Asiatic populations – the Chinese, the Japanese, mebbe the Philippines, too. You give everything away. Why? Do you no longer believe in the future? Perhaps you think there is no future, hnn?’ He was a wiry, dynamic little man with wild penetrating eyes under a thick dark thatch of hair, and a quick, explosive way of speaking. Listening to him, I felt that being an Englishman in Australia had its disadvantages; I seemed to be a target for everybody who had a gripe against the Old Country. But at least he could tell me something about the cost of drilling in this part of the country. It worked out at around $6.50 a foot dust drilling and went up to about $16.50 if he used a diamond drill.

  Later, two drivers came in. They had a refrigerator truck loaded with fish from the coast and were headed for Perth by way of Meekatharra and Mt Magnet. From Meekatharra Prophecy said I should have no difficulty in getting a lift to Kalgoorlie, and shortly after eleven I left her sitting there in the Andersons’ diner clutching the samples I’d given her, a dreamy look on her face. I had asked her to say nothing to anybody until I had had the analysis done, but as we started out on the long haul south, three of us crammed into the stifling heat of the truck’s driving cabin, I thought it was too much to expect that she’d be able to keep her mouth shut.

  Four

  ORA BANDA

  ONE

  There has never been anything quite like it in Australia, probably never will be again. Gold rushes, yes. But the nickel boom is something different. Poseidon, its symbol, was rocketed from 7s. 6d. to £112 on the London market, and gamblers in faraway Britain caught nickel fever, calling it the Windarra Wonder and rushing to buy the shares of any company with a hole in the ground and the faintest whiff of ultrabasics. So many claims have been pegged recently that mining registrars have been unable to cope and rumour has it that the Perth Government’s Minister of Mines is considering a ban on further pegging until the backlog has been cleared. The Windarra Range is not much more than a hundred miles north of Kalgoorlie, and with Western Mining’s Kambalda nickel mine already in production twenty miles to the south, this old gold town became the focal centre of the boom. When I arrived there late on the Saturday afternoon the place was seething with scouts and newspaper men, stockbrokers, business executives, survey parties, crooks, drillers, gamblers, anybody with money enough and a place to lay his head.

  The hub of all this feverish activity was the Palace bar. In quieter days it was no doubt adequate enough, but now it overflowed on to the pavement, a mob of men in every conceivable garb, talking, arguing, drinking in the slanting sunlight. The survey truck in which I had travelled the last stretch from Leonora had dropped me at the corner of Hannan and Marit
ana, and as I crossed the broad intersection the roar of voices almost drowned the traffic. It was the same across the street outside the dark cavern of a bar where a florid Edwardian design in frosted glass proclaimed it Church’s Exchange Hotel – The Young Jacksons of Kalgoorlie. It was a town of white-wood buildings with verandahed sidewalks, and Hannan Street, with brothels virtually at one end of it and the Mt Charlotte gold mine at the other, was wide enough for camel trains to turn in. The whole place was a municipal monument to Hannan’s discovery of 1893 and the Golden Mile.

  The Palace was half wood, half brick, and extended through several buildings of different vintage. The main entrance was in Hannan Street, in the wooden section, the door to the bar on the left and Reception a dark cubby-hole of a room below the staircase with its balustrade ending in a poor digger’s version of the Statue of Liberty. A tired girl stood at the phone, fanning herself against the overpowering stuffiness, and when at last I managed to catch her eye she shrugged her shoulders helplessly at my request for a bed. The hotel was full. They had men sleeping two and three to a room and it was the same all over town. I left my suitcase with her and fought my way into the bar. Ceiling fans stirred the turgid air without cooling it.

  I was tired and hot and dusty. But at least the beer when I got it was cold. I drank it watching the hot animated faces reflected in the mirrors behind the bar. ‘The London price closed at 106½.’ Two men talking about Poseidon close beside me, one of them a youngster in a starched white shirt, the other in bush khaki. Between the mirrors were faded prints of old-timers and wagons and camel trains, a pictorial record of the first rush, when it had been gold, not nickel. ‘Newmetals is a better bet – or Tasminex. What about Tasminex?’ The beer had disappeared into me like water into parched earth. I ordered another and asked the barmaid if she knew Chris Culpin. Her tired eyes ranged the smoke-filled bar as she filled my glass again. ‘Chris is over there talking to Smithie.’ She indicated a heavily-built man in a faded shirt with a sweat-grimed hat thrust on the back of his head.