PROLOGUE

February 1887

There are other blink klippies, other shining stones, besides diamonds. The reflection of light from a gold nugget caught in a stream, the glint of gold peeping from a band of quartz, the glimmer of a gold strain peering from a stratum of rock…

Men have searched for gold throughout recorded history and before, and they have searched for it in every corner of the earth. The legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece was supposedly based on a true expedition that took place a millennium and more before the birth of Christ, to find gold washed down from the rivers of what is now Armenia, gold particles that were caught from the rushing waters by the fleece of skinned sheep. Gold brought the Conquistadores to Mexico and Central and South America; it brought the covered wagons to California and the dogsleds to Alaska. Gold has been sought and found in almost every country, nor was South Africa an exception.

At a place called Pilgrim’s Rest, in the Boer Republic of the Transvaal, there was a flurry of mining for gold as far back as the early eighteen-seventies, and Pilgrim’s Rest enjoyed a brief moment in the sun, only to disappear as a town when the single seam of gold-bearing rock ran out. A decade later, some distance farther to the east in the De Kaap Valley but still in the Transvaal, gold was discovered in the small town of Barberton. Once again men poured in with their picks and shovels; hotels were quickly constructed, brothels and bars hastily established, claims offices sprang up, homesite speculation was rife—until the gold at Barberton also ran out and the town soon became a deserted monument to the evanescent character of that most elusive but enticing of metals.

Then, early in the year 1886, an itinerant down-at-the-heels miner named George Harrison came wandering up from Kimberley with his ox wagon and supplies, to a part of the Transvaal known as the Witwatersrand, or White Water Ridge, about thirty miles south of Pretoria, the capital of the Transvaal Republic. Harrison was admittedly a failure, partly—as he would have put it—because of bad luck, but largely, it seemed, because he was a nomad at heart. He liked to move on, nor could success in any mining venture keep him in one place. He had found diamonds in Kimberley early in the game, not many but enough to have kept a less restless digger at work, but he had forgone his claim in the Dutoitspan hole to visit Pilgrim’s Rest. He had returned to Kimberley to abandon a claim in the Bultfontein mine and try his luck with gold once again at Barberton, only to return for the third time to Kimberley when the bonanza was over. This time his departure from Kimberley was to bring him to the Witwatersrand, or the Rand, as it became more familiarly known. Here, on the farm of the widow Oosthuizen, Harrison found an outcropping that showed gold, and which eventually would have made him a very rich man, but the wanderlust called again and he sold his claim for ten pounds to a couple of brothers named Struben, who had been prospecting in the area without luck. Not only were the Struben brothers content to remain and work the rich claim, but they were not averse to advertising the fact that gold existed on the Rand, and apparently in large quantities. Whatever happened to George Harrison remains a mystery, but he never returned to the goldfield he had accidentally discovered, nor was he ever seen again in Kimberley.

The propaganda of the Strubens bore rapid fruit, for had they mentioned the presence of gold on the Rand for the purpose of gaining companionship they were eminently successful. Within a few months over three thousand miners were digging away at outcroppings they could easily expose with a little pick-and-shovel work on the rolling hillsides, shalelike strata that could easily be crushed with relatively simple equipment and washed in crude rockers to extract the retained gold. And the three thousand diggers became ten, and the ten thousand diggers became thirty, and they spread themselves across the Reef—not the barren reef of the diamond mines, the edge that was nonproductive and that could and often did fall in on the diggers below and kill them—but the Reef! It was the main lode, the center of the seam, the backbone of the goldfields, the spine that ran for thirty miles from east to west and was several miles wide, and nobody even dared to dream how deep it might be. A mountain beneath the surface, and all of it gold! George Harrison had stumbled on the major gold deposit of the world.

And in a short time the place resembled Kimberley as Kimberley had been fifteen or eighteen years before, a city without ever having been a town or even a village, a city mainly of tents or corrugated iron shanties, a scattering of miserable dwellings over miles of barren soil with neither a tree nor a bush to break the monotony; with the same sanitation pits to be covered when full, if time were found from the endless digging, from the constant search for wealth; with the seemingly same dogs fighting over the offal of slaughtered oxen or cattle, with all the sickening odors and miasma of the earlier Kimberley, and with none of the amenities of decent life that Kimberley had managed to carve out for itself from its diamonds. And in December of 1886 they named the place Johannesburg in honor of a man all of the diggers hated profoundly, the President of the Republic of the Transvaal, Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger.

But while the Reef was demonstrably full of gold, the easily worked outcroppings ran out, and the crude equipment of the individual digger no longer served to bring the metal to the surface and drag it from the rock in which it was imbedded so tenaciously. And so slowly the miners were forced to admit failure; they packed their gear and moved on; and then some of the hotels began to close, and a good portion of the brothels were without custom and soon without girls, and the least secure bar owners nailed boards across the door and packed their kegs and their bottles into wagons and left. For not only were the easily worked outcroppings disappearing, but the gold brought up from the depths was in hard rock, and even when this rock was finally crushed, only a small fraction of the gold it contained could be recovered. And it appeared that, like Pilgrim’s Rest and Barberton, the town of Johannesburg was doomed to disappear into the mists of mining history; and everyone agreed that it was a bloomin’ pity, because the gold was actually there. Except nobody knew how to get it out.

And in this situation, with the gold-mining industry of Johannesburg in a profound depression, and with no solution in sight that anyone could see, Barney Barnato arrived back from England. He had been away almost five years and while Fay had enjoyed the refinements of England, and the meeting of Barney’s family, the miscarriage she had suffered there, losing what both Barney and Fay had hoped would be their first child, had put a pall over the trip that the Grand Tour of the continent had failed to remove. Now both were pleased to be back in South Africa and on their way back to Kimberley. Fay was once again pregnant, and Barney was sure that here at home, among friends and in the country they both loved, there would be no further trouble in the childbearing business.

And Barney was also sure that it was time to be getting back to work. They were saying that the gold business was finished up in Johannesburg, that people were selling out, and that the city would soon die as Pilgrim’s Rest and Barberton had died. It was precisely the type of challenge that Barney Barnato enjoyed; this business of gold, apparently, needed looking into …