Synopsis: Scott descends 6554 feet to the working level of the Vlakfonein gold mine in South Africa. Here he sets the stage for the working conditions and in his next article will  go further  into depth regarding the exploitation facing the workers who labour in these mines. 

Gold Mine Mile Underground

Gold Mine Mile Underground

SPRINGS, South Africa, April 2nd  – There was a wise-cracking American tourist aboard the cattle when we descended more than a mile into the hot South African rock of the famed Witwatersrand Reef to see what a gold mine looks like from down below. He was wonderful for morale. 

As the iron cage began its rattling, banging descent into pitch blackness with a touring party of a dozen, all more or less petrified and feeling the cold fingers of claustrophobia up and down our spines, the American called out, "Let me off at ladies' ready-to-wear." For a lousy joke it got a big hand. 

Again when we had disembarked at the first level, 4981 feet, and transferred to another cage to be lowered down to the main working level of 6554 feet, the American broke the awful hush by singing, "Don't Go Down in the Mine, Daddy." Groucho Marx was never so funny. 

There were two signs at the pit-head. One said, "Look out for frozen explosives." The other said, "Horse play in cage strictly prohibited." 

"One sort of cancels out the other, y'know," observed a Britisher, getting his modest share of laughs. 

We were all attired in white rubber coats buttoned to the neck and aluminum helmets, but at the working level the heat was so intense we gladly took the risk of falling rock in favour of the risk of perishing from a built-in steam bath. 

New native labor is given 14 days of acclimatizing in this fierce heat, about as close to hell as you can safely get, and I came up convinced that there must be easier ways of earning a buck. 

We were visiting the Vlakfonein mine near Springs, which is in the rolling green hills 30 miles to the south of Johannesburg. It is one of the highest grade gold pits in what is known as the Main Reef, a 30-mile long belt from the Boksburg Gap to Witpoortjie Fault. (I just happen to have this down in my notes.)

I had never visited any sort of mine before and it amazed me to find out how much trouble they take to get the stuff. It is the most complicated and laborious process I've seen since I visited a distillery and discovered how they cook whisky. 

Our guides, all amiable patient men, showed us the process from the beginning (the blazing in the deep shafts) to the finished product (a thousand-ounce bar of solid gold that would bring the roses to the cheeks of any normally greedy man.)

When the very rock is brought to the surface it is first put through crushers and reduced to chunks of about a half-inch in size. It then goes to the mill where it is reduced to something that looks like battleship grey pain, so fine that it will sift through a screen with 40,000 holes to the square inch. 

About 48 per cent of the potential gold is retrieved from the paint (or "the slim" as our guides contemtusouly call it) by various sitting and sporting processes and it is then treated with cyanide to recover the remaining 52 per cent. 

When the slime is finally piped out to the surrounding fields as waste material there isn't enough gold left in it to fill a midget's tooth. 

This particular mine has been extracting gold this way for 20-odd years around the clock and its back yard is naturally cluttered with what was left over. In a ton of ore there is rarely more than six or seven pennyweight of the shiny metal, even in a high-grade mine such as the Vlakfonein. 

But nowadays the mine managers are looking mighty fondly on those dumps of what was thought to be waste. Contains uranium, you see, and many mines are starting all over agin to put the left overs through the wringer once more and at considerable saveings, too, since, of course the slime is already on the surface. 

A very small amount of the gold mined here goes into the making of jewelry, but not enough to make much impression on the profit sheet. 

That comes, of course, from our old friend, the United States of America. 

As our guide said to us when bidding us farewell, "We pull it out of the ground here and they put it back into the ground at Fort Knox and what it's all about I simply wouldn't know."