Fool's Gold

Lloyd arrived last night and this morning we went out to the tailings dams to do some sampling. The tailings dams are made up of the waste material that is left after the rock we dig up out of the ground is put through the extraction process. The nice thing about our tailings dams is that they actually still have a decent amount of gold in them. So Lloyd had me organise a group of six guys to sample the 3 main tailings dams at the mine. These are fairly large, trapezoidal piles of stratified mud that sit in a small valley on the side of the mountain that the mine is on. The biggest one is about 25 meters high, 60 wide, and 150 long. The smallest one is a quarter of that size.

In the misty, damp drizzle that has now descended on Klipwal just two days after it was 100 degrees here, my team and I sampled a total of 500 kg or about 1,100 pounds of this mud from all across the three tailings dams. It was a great workout carrying buckets full of 20 kg of clay over hundreds of yards, and an extreme test in balance when trying to carry the buckets down the steep slopes of the highest dam.

After the material was loaded into the truck, I drove back to the plant, where it was poured over a James table. A James table is a large sloped table with a constant flow of water over it that separates the gold and heavy metals from the rest of the material. There are parallel ridges and and troughs and the gold is separated out with the help of the vibrating table and gravity. I guess you could just look it up on wikipedia, but in simpler terms, it's basically a high-tech version of panning for gold.

Today, however, we were panning for pyrite. That's right, fools gold! We aren't foolish, of course (I hope), because the majority of the gold in these samples is actually invisible gold, which is locked up inside the pyrite crystals. Lloyd has the technology to get this gold out of the pyrite, hence we will now be taking apart the tailings dams piece by piece and extracting all of the pyrite from it.

One fun part of today was working with my team of local Zulus, which gave me an opportunity to learn more of the language with Philemon and Leonard there acting as interpreters. "laba" means "here" and "nalaba" means "there". I used those words quite often today. Later this afternoon I was back in the office with Leonard and Philemon when Patience, our receptionist came in and began talking to them in Zulu. Leonard started laughing and so did Patience, but Philemon look uninterested. When I asked them what they were laughing about, Philemon came out with a cracker of a line:

"You know all the women, they are always opening their mouths and saying too many things which I do not wish to hear."

That made me laugh. I'm definitely getting to know my co-workers over the past few weeks.

To close on a completely unrelated note, I noticed for the first time today that there is a page I can view which has comprehensive statistics for the people looking at this blog. No personal information is given obviously, but it shows where the hits are coming from, and according to the stats page, I got 11 hits from Japan and 9 from South Korea yesterday. I guess I'm on my way to Asian internet super-stardom.