The lives of thousands of men hang on this bloke's attention span and his reactions to a complex series of Morse whistles that come from deep underground. He is the winch man, the winder. He plummets the double-decker wire cages packed with men down into the earth, so that they can mine gold.
The lift doors clang shut. Daylight slides up the cage; we start to fall. It feels like someone losing their grip over a cliff. The lift vibrates and judders, down, down, gathering speed. After mere seconds we're in the Cenozoic era, past the Holocene epoch; instantly past the time of the first whites in South Africa; past the first black tribes to migrate from the north's steamy forests; past the Pleistocene, Pliocene, Oligocene, Eocene and Paleocene epochs. Down, down past the time of the super-mammals; down past the first hominoid; down past the Sahara as a jungle; into the Mesozoic era, past the Cretaceous, Jurassic and Triassic periods. Down past the first dinosaurs, the reptiles and amphibians, the land plants, down past the continental separation; down into the Palaeozoic era, the Permian period, past the Carboniferous epoch, past the Devonian and Silurian periods; down to Protoerozoic rock that is 2¾ billion years old, two kilometres beneath today's sunlight.
High above, the man in the hut watching fortune's needle fall pulls a switch. The lift jars to a halt. The door shudders open, and I step out into the hot, damp air that doesn't belong down here any more than I do.
South African gold mines are not at all what I expected. I was looking for some approximation of a northern English pit village with better weather. But they sit alone in the beautiful country of the rolling high veld. Their headgear stands like castle keeps or campanili. The mines look a bit like futuristic Tuscan hill towns; there are no shanties, no bustling camps of shebeens, markets and brothels, just suburban back roads with municipal flowerbeds and alleys of trees punctuating miles of discreet razor-wire fence.
The gold mines might almost be deserted; only the arc lights and complex security at the gate betray their importance in the land. Gold mines, like icebergs, hide their power beneath the surface. The reason for South Africa is the cold comfort of gold. This reef of ore was discovered in the 1880s on farmland in the Boer homeland of the Transvaal. The area, Witwatersrand, gave its name to the currency. The discovery started a rush of prospectors, first from the Cape and then from all over the globe. Out of the mining camp grew Johannesburg — a city the Zulus call Egoli, the place of gold. And out of the ground came money.
Inconceivable amounts of cash, to pay for the most successful country in the world's most unsuccessful continent. The gold was formed by a great inland sea, washed up on its tide line. As the sea dried up, the gold was covered by new formations of sediment and rock, and then the old sea bed was tilted sideways — one edge touching the surface, the rest falling away in a great arc underground. It was, and is, by far and away the largest deposit of gold ever discovered.
But gold has its curse. It paid for the apartheid regime. It bought injustice and torture, it paid for clandestine wars in at least three neighbouring countries, and it financed the southern hemisphere's first and only nuclear bomb (in 1993, South Africa abandoned its secret nuclear-weapons programme). This gold should now be making amends and helping pay for a new rainbow South Africa, but just when it's needed the most, mining gold has faltered. It is, they say, a sunset industry. It may only last another 15 years, perhaps another 50.
Having once accounted for half of South Africa's economy, it's now down to 12%. And the mines are prone to strikes. Their history and ownership make them unpopular with the ruling ANC government. Gold Fields, which owns the Kloof mine I'm going down, is at the moment resisting tooth and nail an asset-liposucking, hostile bid from the ironically named Harmony Gold Mining Company — a smaller, loss-making outfit. It's an expensive and desperate raid to dig the deepest grave in Africa for one or other of them. Troubled Harmony needs a rich seam of gold to mine, or else its future looks bleak; Gold Fields would be devalued by association.
The high value of the rand against the weaker dollar makes deep mining an unprofitable business at the moment. Gold stands at 2,633 rand ($427.70) an ounce, but only needs to go to 2,643.80 rand for it to be very profitable; at 2,799.31 rand, they are drowning in money. Mining is cyclical, but the cycle is emotional, not economic. There's nothing rational about the value of gold — a war, a disaster, a dramatic shift in geopolitics, a frisson of unease and the world runs to the security of gold as it always has. They're planning even deeper mines, perhaps six or seven kilometres deep. The technical problem is the lift rope. It becomes too heavy to support its own weight. But they're working on it.
It's not what I'm thinking about as I start to walk down the tunnel towards the stope, the gold face. What I'm thinking of are earthquakes. This part of Africa is low-risk for tremors, but the constant blasting deep underground slaps the face of Hades; it teases and irritates the silent, blind rock, which twitches and shudders. Two days ago a quake that broke windows on the surface trapped 42 miners. The last I heard, they were still down there in the fetid blackness. Do you worry about quakes, I ask the guy next to me. "Ach, they happen most days." Aren't you frightened? He looks at me sideways. "Yes, very, but what can you do? Where can you go?"
And I'm thinking about my outfit. A one-piece cotton overall that was laid out in the VIP changing room, along with a pair of woolly socks and wellington boots. Rubber knee and elbow pads (made by crippled miners), a white plastic hard hat, a pair of rubber gloves — one red, one green — and some second-hand red pants. I draw the line at the pants. If I'm going to be buried for ever, or brought back up in a bag, I'm not meeting my maker, or the surgeon, in a pair of someone else's puce Y-fronts.
At the mine head I'm given a belt with a heavy battery pack, a lamp that clips to the helmet, and a silver box with breathing apparatus in case we hit methane or CO2. "It'll give you half an hour's breathable air, as long as you stroll and don't panic," says the cheery miner who offers the unnervingly sketchy health-and-safety talk, which mostly boils down to "no worries, trust us and look where you're going". Smilingly they make me sign in triplicate 15 pages of medical legalese that indemnifies them from having to have the remotest concern for my wellbeing.
