A Rock and a Hard Place

by George Zelt PhD

  The falls mark an edge of the great central plateau of Africa. It was the border of darkest Africa. It was a place where something began or ended; there was no middle.

  As I stood staring, I noticed a statue in the thicket to my left. It was of David Livingstone. A plaque read he had first seen the falls from the point where I stood. I looked at him as he stared with the deep eyes of an owl; a man of unbelievable if not appalling determination, who lived mostly in his own world as he pursued his goals, even going somewhat mad. Thinking of myself, I wondered if following dreams with such conviction was good. Maybe it was better to know when to stop?

  Our plan was to travel south to Bulawayo on the two-lane macadamized road. Due to guerrilla activity, the only way to do that was by joining a convoy. The idea was that a fast-moving target was harder to hit than a slow one.

  So we joined one. In our convoy, the lead and last vehicles were open-back pickup trucks. A helmeted and sweating main gunner stood in the rear of each truck, clutching the pistol grips of a pole-mounted, chest-high M60 machine gun. Unfortunately, our Land Rover, placed last in line in front of the armed pickup, could not maintain the convoy speed, so we held the others back.

  “Give it stick, Marcus!” Patrick said, as our engine roared to full capacity and the trailing gunners waved at us to hurry. So concerned were they that at one point they pulled up next to us. The Land Rover rattled. Baling wire that held on a fender was coming loose. It was like being in an old washing machine. The tension increased proportionally.

  “Lord Jay-sus help us now!” Patrick yelled. Marcus said his leg muscles hurt from trying to pin the gas pedal flat to the floorboard.

  There was nothing to do but watch uncomfortably with fisted hands as we roared forward, the main gunner training his weapon on successive clusters of rocks and trees dotting the adjacent hillsides. Death could be behind any of those hiding places. His partner, also clad in brown camouflage fatigues, crushed the butt of his cigarette to powder between his thumb and forefinger. He reduced his profile by kneeling at the gunner’s side. Poking what looked like a lightweight semiautomatic over the side of the pickup, he watched in the distance for anyone suspicious.

  These men were part of the citizen army, essentially composed of any adult male available and willing to take their turns (six months army, six months at home) to help keep the country from falling into lawlessness. I wondered how good a shot they were.

  Eventually, with the caravan speeding ahead, we neared Bulawayo. The armed pickup again pulled alongside us, but this time it kept going—leaving us behind like horse manure in a circus parade. Bravely, we chugged and rattled our way into the city.

  Where to go next? We all were thinking the same thing: We would look for gold. The rest of life, our duties and problems, could wait.

  At the same time, my desire to continue my studies burned inside me. It just wouldn’t let go, wouldn’t let me say the hell with it.

  Chapter 18

  Gold in a Gully, Vultures in a Tree

  Over a beer, I told Patrick and Marcus again how the old Rhodesian described the southern route from Bulawayo to the “gold stream” he had found some fifty years earlier.

  “Some of the richest gold mines in the world are to the south, around Jo’berg,” Patrick said, “and gold workings have been found in Rhodesia as far back as the 1860s. I used to study them during my gold-prospecting days in Botswana.”

  I thought back to the afternoon I’d sat with the old prospector, in the shade of the hotel porch in Springbok. “The gold is near a distinctive granite exfoliation dome,” he’d told me. I listened intently as he went on to describe what the structure looked like. The old hunter finished by saying, “I don’t want to take its location to my grave—I’d rather share it with others.” Such stories of lost treasure told by men facing the end of their lives are not unusual in untamed Africa. Some say these men are chasing their own shadows, their own dreams. But others—like me—believe them.

  I was familiar with the kind of dome structure he described from my travels in Namaqualand. I’d read that in the area around Filabusi, just off the main road from Bulawayo south to Fort Victoria, there were hills described variously as granite domes and polyps. And indeed, in these hills gold had been discovered.

  “It’s quite possible,” I told the others, “it all happened as he said.”

  After some rest and optimistically “overhauling” the Land Rover, which essentially meant tightening the baling wire around the fender, Patrick, Marcus, and I decided to follow the old hunter’s route. However, the civil war situation in this area of Rhodesia was deteriorating by the day. It was really scary.

  Some good news was that the Filabusi area—the nearby Doro Mountains—created a sort of natural division of forces in white-controlled Rhodesia. To the south, where we were going, was primarily a white area. To the north, ZANU guerrillas were active, though they had not yet moved appreciably south. ZAPU guerrillas from the west had not yet infiltrated the Filabusi area to any great extent. Thus, the artificial boundaries allowed us some temporary youthful optimism.

  The main roads going south to South Africa were sometimes watched by the guerrillas. The white farmers who traveled the roads armed themselves with all types of weapons. One vehicle we saw had a wheel-shaped arrangement of shotguns attached to its roof, pointing outward like a porcupine’s quills. If alarmed, the farmer could pull a chain, and the guns would discharge simultaneously.

  Eventually, we decided to leave the major roadway whenever we could, entering dry streambeds that were recessed due to erosion. Our dirty white Land Rover was essentially hidden, popping up only occasionally. The beds were cut by an array of old hunting tracks and game trails that we also followed from time to time. In and out of shadows, we moved south, following our compass and maps we had as members of a research unit.

  Water sometimes accumulated beneath flat rocks in the sandy riverbeds, so when we drove over them, the front wheels kept going but the rear wheels sank with alarming determination. One morning, with a jolt, we felt the carriage hit sand as the back wheels sank.

  “We’re stuck?” Patrick asked, waking from a doze. Staying awake in a slow-moving Land Rover when the temperature was 89 degrees Fahrenheit was difficult.

  “Very.” Marcus’s head rested on the steering wheel.

  I staggered out from the backseat and focused on the wheels. “She’s really in; I mean resting flat on the carriage and glued to the river. We’re going to have to work our asses off. This will take hours.”

  “I’ll get the shovels and board from the roof rack,” Patrick grumbled.

  Two hours later, we were still at it. The Rover kept sinking. At least there were three of us. As we jacked the vehicle up, we pushed in rocks; but they disappeared in a pocket of water that was like quicksand. They were too small.

  Humped vultures had noted our dilemma. They stared at us from the bare branches of a nearby acacia tree.

  “What’s wrong with them, George?” Patrick squinted in the sun, working on the opposite wheel. “You’d think we were lying belly up and raving.”

  “We are on their sandy plate,” I said. “Perhaps you should dig at your wheel with a bit more enthusiasm, so they’ll reconsider.”

  “I’m digging like a dog now. If I go any faster in this heat, they will have me all the quicker. God knows Marcus would leave me here to placate them. Do you know the first thing those savages do is tear open your stomach, insert their heads, and then peck away with their disgusting beaks at the soft parts? You don’t have to be a cadaver, either. They’ll do it while you’re alive, as long as you can’t fight them.”

  “Is your wheel free yet, Patrick?” I asked, not wanting to think about this image.

  “The fucking axle is still kissing the sand, as we will be.”

  I wondered if there were guerrillas in the area, and if they’d see the vultures circling and wonder what was dying. More vultures were landing. The goddamned tree was filling up l
ike bleachers.

  Marcus appeared thirty yards away or so, bent over and rolling a huge oblong rock. Patrick and I went to help him.

  “Marcus found his occupation,” Patrick mumbled.

  About halfway there, my Irish friend stopped and whispered between unmoving lips, “Don’t move.”

  Alarmed, I froze and saw a snake some yards in front of us. A long, shiny, slippery green piece of thick rope with a flared hood swayed, coiled and seemingly ready to strike. “Let’s run together now?”

  “No,” Patrick—the animal expert—said. “It’s an Angolan cobra. He may chase. Better to stay still until he wanders off.”

  I watched the snake shift from side to side, noting he was in an “up” position. “He’s not wandering, Patrick.”

  “Just don’t move. He’s more than two yards long. He’s concentrating.”

  “Why are we whispering?” I whispered. “Snakes can’t hear.”

  “Are you sure?”

  The reptile had stopped swaying, its beady eyes locked on my lips.

  “Look, he’s lowering himself. Maybe he will come for us now or go away.” Patrick paused. “Just a minute more and we’ll find out.”

  “Find out? Find out what, that he can kill us?” I replied slowly between my teeth.

  “Not me. I’m wearing knee-high snake boots under my jeans. He can’t penetrate them or strike any higher.”

  “You bastard . . .”

  Marcus looked up from his wobbling rock, swearing with exertion, and saw us. “Oh shit. A snake.” He focused on it. “Is that an Angolan cobra?”

  “For the love of God, what does it matter, Marcus?” I snarled.

  “Aren’t they rare?” he asked, continuing to shove the rock forward three feet at a time.

  “Shit, Marcus, don’t piss him off,” I said.

  The snake turned toward the advancing rock. It hissed loudly. I leaped away. After a moment of hesitation it slithered off, apparently disgusted.

  I took a ragged breath. “Jesus. I should have run.”

  “No, you would have run toward the Land Rover with him following. He would have likely crawled under it to hide. Then what would we do? It was better we all stayed where we were until he moved off on his own.”

  “Awwww, shit, you just enjoyed seeing me stand there, Patrick.”

  He turned away from me, smiling.

  With the new rock we jacked up one side of the Rover, rolled the rock under it, and then jacked up the other side and got our board under the wheel. Finally, three hours after the Rover had sunk, we rolled it out of the pool of sand and water and onto one side of the dry stream.

  The vultures made strange noises, apparently booing despondently. We climbed in the Rover as Patrick showed his middle finger to the birds while muttering something in Gaelic and then drove away.

  Toward evening a running river intersected our dry stream.

  “This must be it,” Patrick said looking at our map. “There isn’t too much else around here, just thorn bushes and Mopani trees.”

  “Let’s give it a try,” I replied.

  “The prospector said follow this river until we reach an exfoliation dome he called Backside Buff, which from his anatomical comment should be rather unmistakable,” I said. “I suppose it’s three stories high or so.”

  As we followed the winding and mostly dry river through a valley, exfoliation domes of various sizes came into view.

  “The only thing that matches up to an ass around here is us,” Patrick remarked.

  Suddenly, as we rounded an elbow in the river, the anatomical feature we sought appeared. A fair-sized crack possibly due to a fault had, over centuries, widened and deepened to such an extent that it vertically bisected the lower portion of an exposed dome. The weathering process had touched up the image by smoothing and rounding off the buttocks. In a stroke of continued creativity, the crack had been progressively widened as it reached the base of the dome. It definitely looked like someone’s ass. If that wasn’t enough to trigger the analogy bell, there were two round boulders very near the crack.

  “Damn,” I said, “would you look at that!”

  “The boulders look like turds,” Marcus marveled.

  “Only you would think like that,” Patrick said.

  “But as a white hunter, he was used to following turds!” Marcus said, correcting Patrick with a smirk.

  “Actually, that does make sense,” I added, and looked at Patrick.

  “Bejesus, you’re both daft.”

  We drove as close to the dome as we could and then walked to the crack. A small but deep stream flowed out of the surrounding ridges, just as the old prospector had said.

  Had we really found the place?

  “Patrick, you’ve looked for gold before,” I said. “What do you think about this?”

  “I read that over the past fifty years there have been many small mines dug into granite hillsides around here, mostly useless. The actual money is made in some nearby bar where the miners go to drown their delusions. However, our hunter found a nugget. That’s not an illusion.”

  Geologically, gold can be associated with milk-white quartz in a fissure or crack within the granite-gneiss bedrock. Over millions of years, heavy spring floods and wind will slowly free bits of gold and quartz and steadily wash them down to the stream. From there, the fast-moving waters will pick up the gold, break it free from the brittle quartz, and deposit a train of flakes and nuggets all down its course.

  Patrick looked around, scratching the back of his neck. “If we find some flakes in this area here, where the old man claims he found his nugget, we’ll have to backtrack the trail of gold up to the point where the flakes entered the stream. Then we follow the trail into the hills to where it was eroded out of the mother lode.”

  “So to follow the trail upstream, we’ll have to pan for the gold at intervals,” I said. “The mother lode, if there is one, will be difficult to locate in those wrinkled-looking hills.”

  “But we have a nugget for inspiration,” Patrick reminded us.

  Marcus was worried. “The longer we’re here, the less safe we are. Can we speed up the panning process?”

  I took off my hat and looked at my friends. “It’s slow work, but there are three of us.”

  We collected our equipment, then hid the Land Rover behind rock hills.

  “Where shall we look first?” Marcus asked.

  The undulating water would cause the heavier minerals to sift down through whatever sediments were there until they reached the underlying bedrock. Even at that level they might continue to slide along on the smooth rock until some irregular feature stopped them.

  “So we look for an elbow in the stream’s channel or the downstream side of large boulders,” I surmised.

  With the molten sun beating down, a shovel over each shoulder, and the heavy gold pans we purchased before we left in tow, we inched across the cool, waist-deep stream until we reached quiet places. Dazzling light played on the water’s surface. Patrick bent down and shoveled sand into our large frying pan–size container until it was about three-quarters full and covered with water. Keeping the sand just below the water’s surface, he stirred the mixture thoroughly with his fingers and then shook the pan with quick clockwise and counterclockwise motions. Gradually the residue of blond sand and larger pebbles found their way over the rim, and the pan got lighter. It was tedious, hard work.

  Marcus leaned over to look. Patrick tapped with his finger to spread out what was left. Several specks of bright yellow flashed in the sun.

  “Is it gold or pyrite?” Marcus asked as Patrick fumbled in his pocket for his hand lens, which all field geologists normally carry.

  He cleaned the lens on his shirt and gave it to me. I touched the magnified specks gently with my knife point and watched them give way and bend around the steel. They were malleable.

  “Yes!” I yelled. “Yes! There’s nothing else they could be! Yellow fool’s gold—pyrite—is too hard to bend.”


  “Bless them, bless them”—Marcus danced with outstretched hands—“they are as bright as butter.”

  “It doesn’t mean there’s a mother lode anywhere, but it does mean there might be,” I cautioned.

  Without discussion, we worked our way upstream the rest of the day and found a few specks here and there, just enough to say we hadn’t passed the point it began entering the stream. Unlike pyrite, gold shines in the fading light, so we were able to continue panning until shadows stretched far across the valley.

  We panned for two days and paid the price for our greed; our hands blistered and sand grains worked their way into the raw areas, cutting even deeper. Too tired and sore to cook in the evening, we ate our tinned food cold under a honey-colored hunter’s moon. Africa’s baking heat seemed to grow fiercer each day, radiating back from the water and sandy ground. By noon, our energy was halved.

  “My whole body feels as if it’s decaying, falling apart,” Marcus moaned.

  Lethargic but still filled with hope, no one replied.

  Several hours later that day, as we plodded upstream, the extent of rough and sharp edges on the tiny flakes we found had increased. That meant they had tumbled less and therefore were closer to their source than the round-edged ones.

  “Let’s give it one more day,” Patrick suggested.

  As we worked, oblivious to our surroundings, a twig snapped on the opposite bank. We briefly looked at each other, and I felt the color drain from my face. We slid behind boulders and hid, waiting, lying on our stomachs. Minutes passed under the pitiless sun.

  It was quiet. Fear hung in the air. All sound stopped. Any second we could be sprayed with bullets. Something edged out toward the water. I held my breath. It was a zebra.

  I heard my friends exhale with relief. The animal bolted when Marcus cursed.

  “He’s probably very old, couldn’t keep up with his herd, and needed water,” Patrick rasped.