Morning folks – lots of interest in my gold mining piece so will fling back the curtains of opportunity and drag in all my readers before they up sticks and run for the Aspirin bottle. Could rattle on forever, but don’t want to bore those of you whose interests lie elsewhere; so will keep an eye on my Facebook ‘like’ button and current Blog stats. Me? I love it – prospecting for gold has literally held me captive since my first, mineralogical discovery and subsequent embarrassing trip to the claims register office in the sixties; guarded bag of raw gold clutched close to my naive heart.
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Going off at a vicious tangent here but can’t help myself – chose, ‘Schoolboy Prospector Strikes it Rich?’ as a fair title for this next bit...
Snuck my old man’s rifle out from his wardrobe along with a full box of Super X .22 solids, loaded my haversack with a day’s worth of cheese sarnies, rusty hammer and bottle of Mazoe orange juice. With dog in tow I went down into the wilderness.
Striking eastwards across The Great Rift (stream at the back of our house, couldn’t afford the fare to Kenya) and after a half day’s gruelling trek through the Mountains of the Moon (kopje behind the stream), I eventually reached the far horizon. Not without trepidation did I step beyond the boundaries of recognition and like the intrepid explorers, Speke and David Livingstone, for one last time I gazed back upon familiar territory; then boldly did I go where no other boy and his pooch had ever gone before.
Down we went, without compass, phone or Medicare, down inside that ancient valley. The path I had been following petered out; the last signs of civilisation fell behind – we were truly on our own. Time to look for gold; somewhere close at hand, hidden by thick jungle and protected by lion, leopard and marauding Matabele lay my Eldorado. However, my stomach reminded me that it was time to eat; so down we sat, me and my dog for a slug of juice and a cheese sandwich. That’s when I saw the trench; a deep scar on the hillside, a leftover from Rhodesia’s early mining days. All that reading I had done on quartz reefs, igneous rock formations and prospecting was about to pay dividends. I abandoned my half-eaten sandwich to the dog and scrambled for the trench.
Fixed between serpentine and some funny looking soft stuff was my quartz reef – black as burnt iron. Wreaking of vast fortunes it lured me onwards. Out came my trusty, rusty hammer and within minutes the ground about my feet was littered with broken rock. I dropped the hammer; the dog watched me, one ear up one ear down, bewildered by my antics. Then I found it; black quartz, harder than a witch’s heart, peppered through with bright stars of yellow metal. When I held it to the sunlight my hand trembled; the fever was upon me – I had found my Eldorado...
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Me & Roger Bacon; continued from last blog post – Gold & Ancient Workings!
... But up we went; me, my old man, twenty Shona labourers of dubious descent and with Roger Bacon leading the way; blasting through the undergrowth, four kilo’s of volatile attitude bundled up in black fur, spoiling for a run-in with the first leopard foolish enough to block his way. At regular intervals the quiet of the hillside would be blown apart by squawking partridge and Bacon’s jaws snapping shut on their tail feathers.
Our camp was pretty basic; nope, that’s not true – our camp was less than basic and though blessed with threats of betterment, less than basic it would stay – forever.
Night time was a mixing of fun and curse time; built on an unavoidable slope, our accommodation offered little in the way of rest, let alone sleep. Our home was a hut; no other word for it and what breeze, venom or lion breath there was found little difficulty in sliding in through gaps between the timbers. Spiders, scorpions and a hundred other creepy-crawlies moved in with us and through a generous gap in the thatch we watched the heavens wheel their way from left to right. Whenever my father spotted a jet-streaming Boeing flying northwards he would swear on his mother’s grave that one day he would be on it; followed by the usual, ‘should have drowned you in a bucket when you were born.’
Roger-of-the-Royal-Bacon got a slap for his amorous advance on my un-blanketed foot and spent the rest of his night sulking...
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Sons of Africa; an extract:
... ‘She had a child.’
‘You have spoken to her?’ said Mathew.
Bent shook his head; ‘A small village, east of the ruins; the headman works for me. He swears she poisoned her own baby, a few days after the infant was born.’
Mathew felt his gorge rise. ‘Why in God’s name would she poison her own child?’
‘Apparently, one of your Irish fossicker friends was the father.’
Mathew looked away. ‘Have you seen her?’
‘No,’ said Bent, ‘but she’s here. Mabel caught a glimpse of the girl; less than a week ago, no longer.’
‘From the hill fortress,’ Mabel related the event, ‘I was sketching a view of the valley when I saw her, but only for a moment before she disappeared. Apart from a fragment of beadwork to hide her modesty she appeared to be naked. More like a wild animal than a girl.’
Bent excused himself from the table. ‘Humour our reasoning, Mathew, there’s something I would like you to see.’
They waited in silence for Bent’s return to the fireside. Small sounds drifted out from the forest and at odds with them, men’s laughter from a temporary labour compound further around the hillside.
‘The headman brought this for me, only a few days ago’
Composed of natural stone it had been sheered as a single piece from the rock face. Mathew held it to the firelight, it was the size and thickness of a child’s scribbling slate, one side rough and misshapen from it having been prised free of the living granite; the reverse, smooth as polished alabaster. Bent gave Mathew time to realise what he was holding.
‘Throughout my travels in Africa and the Aegean Archipelago, I have never witnessed anything that has proven more fascinating,’ Bent reached out and traced the artwork with his finger tip, ‘more so here, where the images have been overlaid with gold...’
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