Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,209

television personality.

A left-wing writer, taking up a sense of unfortunate duty to speak out on such paradoxes, wrote a stinging article noting sentimentality over a homeless animal, while – she gave precise figures – hundreds of thousands of black people had no adequate housing and were bulldozed out of the shelters they made for themselves. Some people of conservative views had a different attitude which nevertheless also expressed irritation with animal lovers and conservationists, who were more concerned about the welfare of a bloody ape than the peace and security one paid through the nose for in a high-class suburb well isolated from the other nuisances – white working-class, black, Indian or coloured townships. The monkey or whatever it was was in self-imposed exile. If it had been content to stay chained in a yard or caged in a zoo, its proper station in life, it wouldn’t have had to live the life of an outlaw. If one might presume to do so without making oneself absurd by speaking in such terms of something less than human – well, serve the damn thing right.

Charles had found the cave. He had searched the veld within three or four kilometres of the power station, carrying a mining geologist’s hammer and bag as the perfectly ordinary answer to anyone who might wonder what he was doing.

And he had found it. They called it ‘the cave’, right from the first night he took them there to see if it would do, but it wasn’t a cave at all. It was the end of a rocky outcrop that sloped away underground into the grassland of the Highveld, sticking up unobtrusively from it like part of the steep deck of a wreck that is all that remains visible of a huge submerged liner of the past. Some growth had huddled round for the shelter of the lion-coloured rocks in winter, and the moisture condensed there in summer. In daylight, they saw the covering of leathery, rigid, black-green leaves, with a rusty sheen of hairs where the backs curled; to Charles, whose taxonomic habit would always assert itself, no matter how irrelevantly, wild plum in a favourite quartzite and shale habitat. Another muscular rope of a tree with dark thick leaves had split a great rock vertically but held it together; the rock fig. All this tough foliage, exposed to heat and frost without the protective interventions of cultivation, more natural than any garden growth, looked exactly like its antithesis – the indestructible synthetic leaves of artificial plants under neon lights. Hidden by it was a kind of shallow dugout which Charles thought to have been made by cattle (who will easily form a depression with the weight and shape of their bodies) at some time when this stretch of veld had been farmed. But when, those nights between midnight and dawn, he and Vusi and Eddie had used their picks to dig a pit, they had fallen through into what was (Charles saw) unmistakably an old stope. There were rough-dressed eucalyptus planks holding up the earth that sifted down on their heads as they tunnelled on a bit. Eddie found a tin teaspoon, its thickness doubled by rust. Vusi’s pick broke an old liquor bottle; there was a trade name cast in relief by the mould in which the bottle had been made: Hatherley Distillery.

Charles had never heard of it: must be a very old bottle. ‘Ja . . . So somebody worked a claim here, once . . . Long ago. I’d say round about ninety years. They came running from all over the world, and worked these little claims.’

‘White men.’ Eddie confirmed what went without saying.

‘Yes. Oh yes – Germans and Frenchmen and Americans and Australians. As well as Englishmen. After the discovery of gold they poured into the Transvaal. Digging under every stone, sifting gravel in every river bed. But in the end only the financiers with capital to buy machinery for deep-level mining had a chance to get rich, eh.’

Eddie, by the hooded light of one of those lamps truck drivers set up when their vehicles break down on a freeway, patted the dust out of his thick pad of hair. ‘D’you think there’s still gold in this stuff?’

‘Not in commercially viable quantities.’ Charles wore a mock-shrewd face. ‘Looks more like iron ore, to me, anyway . . .’

‘Man, I never thought this thing would end up landing me working in the mines.’

Vusi stopped digging and grinned slowly, over Eddie’s charm, gave