Matthew Hart - Gold: The Race for the Worlds Most Seductive Metal

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for Terry

Not all that tempts your wandring eyes

And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;

Nor all that glisters, gold.

T HOMAS G RAY

And was Jerusalem builded here

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

William Blake

A SAFFRON LIGHT WAS SEEPING onto the veld when I drove out to the gates of hell. The midwinter air was dry and sharp. The silhouettes of headframes made blue shapes against the dawn. Forty miles from Johannesburg I turned off the highway at Mponeng mine, the deepest man-made hole on eartha vast, stifling oven of toiling men, thousands of them, buried miles underground as they blasted and scraped for the metal that has bewitched and harassed man for 6,000 years. What else but gold.

Picture Manhattan Island sliced in half at the waist, and the top part set up on its end. Mponeng mine would fill the grid between 59th Street and 110th Street, its tunnels and shafts exposed like a giant ant colony. The half-lit streets would tower into the sky before you, block upon block, to an altitude of almost three miles. You could stack ten Empire State Buildings on top of each other in the distance from the bottom of the mine to the surface. This gargantuan warren devours as much electricity as a city of 400,000. Rivers of water pulse through its plumbing. Its maze of passageways howls with the noise of ventilation. Two hundred and thirty-six miles of tunnels lace the rockthirty miles longer than the New York City subway system. Every morning 4,000 men vanish into its subterranean web of shafts, ore chutes, and haulage tunnels, and the narrow slots called stopes where miners crouch in the oppressive heat to drill the gold.

Their target was a thirty-inch-wide strip of ore. Considered against the immensity of the mine, as thin as a hair. But on the July morning in 2012 when I went down Mponeng mine, the gold price was $1,581 an ounce. That wisp of rock was spilling out $948 million worth of gold a year.

The world is awash in gold. Never has there been so much to buy and such a frenzied trade. We buy it and sell it and buy it again. In 2011 the London bullion market discovered that its members were trading as much gold every three months as had been mined in all of history. We are on the biggest gold binge ever, a scramble for gold ignited by a mouthwatering price, by the click-of-a-mouse simplicity of buying bullion, and by the sense of looming apocalypse that stormed through financial markets in the banking crisis and sent people hurrying for cover into gold.

As the gold price soared it swept up legendary billionaires. George Soros had $663 million in a single fund. John Paulson, the hedge-fund wizard, was reported to have made almost $5 billion personally on his gold bets. Fear drove the price. Banks tottered and currencies shrank, and in the three years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers the gold price gained $1,000. Spurred by the rising price, explorers ransack the planet in the greatest gold rush ever. At the bottom of Mponeng mine, in the brutal closeness, where the ore plunges steeply down into the rock below the deepest level, they are chasing it with drills. Certainly they will go down and get it.

I JOINED A SMALL GROUP that was going down. We met in a thatched reception hall. A table was spread with a breakfast of sweet pastries, little tubs of yogurt, and a steaming tray of boerewors, a pungent, coarse-cut country sausage that South Africans extol but do not always eat. A group of sturdy males from the mines underground management stood growling among themselves and eyeing us with pleasure, as if we were Christians that they thought the lions might enjoy. Then they sat us in folding chairs to tell us about the dangers of the world we were about to enter.

Deep mining destabilizes rock. Six hundred times a month, they said, a seismic event will shudder through Mponeng mine. Sometimes the quakes cause rockbursts, when rock explodes into a mining cavity and mows men down with a deadly spray of jagged rock. Sometimes a tremor causes a fall of groundthe term for a collapse. Some of the rockbursts had been so powerful that other countries, detecting the seismic signature, had suspected South Africa of testing a nuclear bomb. You will certainly feel a little shake when you are down there, Randel Rademann, the mines general manager, rumbled in his gravelly, Dutch-inflected English. A leetle shike, it sounded like. He was an enormous man in a plaid shirt, with hands like shovels and a beard that looked as if it would score glass.

After Rademann, a safety officer showed us how to use the Drger Oxyboks self-rescuer, a device that came in a small, frail-looking aluminum case. Self-rescue was not an idea I had grappled with, and now that I was forced to, did not like. In an emergency, you were supposed to open the little case and inflate the rubber bag inside by blowing into it, then strap the bag into place like a gas mask. The device would filter out toxic gases. It would keep you alive for thirty minutes.

We changed into white overalls and steel-toed rubber boots and buckled on heavy belts. They gave us miners hats and lamps. I attached the heavy lamp battery to my belt, threaded on the Oxyboks, and went clumping down a sort of cattle chute to the cage.

Each cage, or elevator car, holds 120 people in a three-deck stack. When the first deck has filled with its load of forty miners, the car descends ten feet and stops, and the deck above it fills in turn with another forty.

The hoisting apparatus for a cage that carries people instead of rock is called a man winder. Sometimes it winds men to their death. On May 11, 1995, in the Vaal Reefs gold mine, ninety miles south of Mponeng, an underground railway engine broke loose. Pulling rail cars after it, the engine plunged 7,000 feet down a shaft onto a two-deck cage, killing the 105 men who were returning to the surface at the end of shift. On May 1, 2008, nine miners died in a sub-shaft at Gold Fields South Deep mine, when a winder rope broke and the cage fell 196 feet.

Once our cage was full, a dispatcher signaled with a sequence of electric bells. Slowly, very slowly at first, the cage crept down. The bright tunnel disappeared and the light faded and the black rock closed in. Almost imperceptibly the speed increased, until at last the operator, controlling the cage from a distant room in a separate building, took off the brake and dropped us down the shaft at forty-six feet a second.

My stomach sailed into my ribs. My ears blocked. Air whistled in the wire mesh. The cage squeaked and rattled as it plummeted down the shaft. Water collected on the metal frame and dripped on our heads. It was pitch dark: the only illumination came from a lamp that someone held in his hand; in its light I could see water falling like a light rain. Sometimes the light of a tunnel flashed by.

As the cage hurtled down the shaft, the suspended weight increased. The cage by itself weighed 20,000 pounds, and a full load of men roughly doubled that. Then there was the weight of the steel rope that held the cage. The rope was two and a half inches thick and weighed twelve pounds a foot. That meant that for every thousand feet we dropped, the rope added six tons to the weight it had to holdan extra ton every 3.6 seconds. I pictured the steel rope unspooling in a blur, packing steel onto our plummeting car.