First things first: Sorry this has been so long in coming. Here it is, with a proper explanation of my remissness in the postscript.
~
The theoretical introduction went on to cover different aspects of the enterprise, yet my eyes and mind could behold nothing but the staggering scale of what was going on beneath our feet as revealed by this model.
Introductions concluded, we proceeded to a locker room where we were kitted out with miners' jumpsuits, hardhats, gumboots, safety harnesses and headlamps.
~
Half an hour later, we are at the scene of our imminent descent: We are milling around the shaft entrance waiting for our elevator to be ready to take us down. There is one elevator for personnel, and two for equipment. The shaft gates are old and bent, their coating of paint flaking and worn as if from many collisions. The lifts are powered by a gigantic electric motor whose enormous spindle winds up and pays out the braided steel cable from which the elevators hang. The cables come off the shaft at a 45 degree angle to the earth, where they break for the enormous wheelhouse. There are many signs pertaining to safety all around. One says: Notice—any person presenting himself to the cage for traveling in the shaft will fall under the direct control of the cagetender. Another advises its readers of the mine's strictly defined hierarchy, from bottom to top: 1. Scraper drivers & trammers. 2. Machine men. 3. Survey, u/g planning, vent. 4. Shift bosses & foremen. 5. Cave control & geology. 6. MIC, top officials and engineers. Another somewhat mysteriously demands: Have you constructed a dam in the drift? Safety first!
Out here, up here, on the surface, there is very little to indicate what awaits below, whether of its magnitude or its quality. The grounds of the mining complex, though well-tended, are somewhat faded and dusty—a quality exacerbated by the dry season, which is now halfway through. The only hint of what we are to see is evident in the faces of the miners around us. Some are tense with anticipation of the unpleasant and dangerous drudgery before them, others plastered by dust and sweat into near-caricatures of cruel fatigue. There may also be fear in any of a variety of states of congealment and dissolution. The lift surfaces, empty. It consists of 3 stacked man-moving boxes whose latticed look makes me think of cheese graters. The ZESCO trainees eye our ferry into the underworld nervously. We are given assurances as to the competent professionalism of the lift operator and cagetender. Suddenly the gate and door are opened for us, and we file in, maybe 20 souls in total. The door closes and for some moments we just stand quietly, suspended in silence. Then the electric motor in the wheelhouse begins to hum. The cage is lowered, slowly at first, then with a speed that gathers until it becomes almost alarming. For the slightest of seconds I can feel a hint of weightlessness. I am looking through the chinks in the cage lattice the entire time, in the grip of a rapt and watchful silence. Any dim light from the surface washing down the walls of the shaft is soon gone, and there is nothing to see but an eternally distended muscle of inky black undulating into the imagined depths. After maybe a minute our descent slows and we come to a stop at the first subterranean level at something like 1,200 feet below surface. But the cagetender does not open the door, and we are soon on our way again. Our onward descent takes us past additional levels, but we do not stop, and they appear to us as no more than the streaky ebb and flow of fluorescent light. There is nervous laughter between us. I say that if we go much farther we'll pop out somewhere in the western Pacific. Yet we finally do come to another stop as a faint and slowing whine sounds from somewhere far above. The door is slid open by the cagetender. A sign on the wall opposite informs us that we are 2,200 feet below surface. I try to think of the weight of a given section or core of the rock piled overhead by all those millions of years of geologic force, and cannot. We step out into a large room at whose end there is a sliding door. The space has a fairly high ceiling, and is soaked in fluorescent light. And yet there is an inescapable feeling of darkness, oppressiveness.* The atmosphere is neither hot nor cold, but it is very still and somehow lifeless. We are met by our guide. He is an impressive-looking middle-aged Zambian with a face at once commanding and kind. His name is Milanzi, which sets him apart from the bulk of Zambians, who have English given names.
Milanzi led us to the sliding door at the end of the space. Through it we entered another, smaller room. It was an interlock chamber through which we could feel great billowy draughts of air seeking escape up the shaft, first when the outer door was opened, and then, once slid to, when the inner door was opened to let us into the great tunnel. The tunnel was a space wide enough to accommodate an ore train on the tracks running along its center, and for pedestrian miners to walk along on either side of it. There were at least 12 feet of headroom in the center of the tunnel. At first I could not appreciate its enormity, since the initial prospect gave onto a fork, both of whose branches were closed off from view. We walked up to the fork and took the path that veered right. A pump churned to life somewhere near us with a deafening rattle. I could not hear anything Milanzi was saying. The tunnel was lined on either side with niches, or "refuges" in which pedestrians could shelter from passing trains. Just a few steps down this new tunnel, it became clear that there was no end in sight. The tunnel’s caged fluorescent lights seemed to march down into an endless rebate, their glow twinkling duskily at the limits of vision, as if we had entered another universe and these were the stars defining our new horizons. Looking back, I think that attribute of endlessness was somehow comforting, I suppose in that it defused the underworld’s associations with claustrophobia and entrapment.
We walked. And our guide Milanzi talked, but I was trailing behind with my startling new impressions for company and caught very little of what he said. Ten or fifteen minutes into our walk, we had to shelter from a passing ore train. I recall the train having 7 cars, and its conductor with his mine-battered outfit and bright sclera looking for all the world like a purgatorial penitent or a deputy to the devil himself. The electric engine sounded a tenuous and almost failing honk as the train trundled past. The procession of ore rounded the corner and was seen no more. We walked on.
My feet, which I’d wedged into gumboots a size too small, had begun to hurt. My head, too, hurt from a bug I’d caught the day before, and my stomach was unsettled. We had walked about 4 kilometers down the tunnel's ever receding length when we branched off into another tunnel, this one quite a bit narrower, and sloping down at perhaps 15 degrees. We walked down, this time in single file. In this tunnel there was not enough space between the rail ties and the walls to accommodate a man’s tread, so we had to pick our way along on the irregularly spaced ties. I fell into conversation with Milanzi. I asked him how long he had been working in the mine, and he said just a few months short of 20 years. 20 years was a long time to be working in such oppressive and dangerous conditions. I asked if they were going to give him a gold watch. No, he said, they would recognize his efforts with a bonus of a million kwacha. Which, readers, is about $250. I looked at him. His face was noble, his physique Olympian. I could read no sign of resentment in his expression. I said at least it would be enough to throw a braii and get all his friends good and drunk. There was nothing for either of us to do but break into a sort of convulsive, rueful laugher. I asked about the mine's ownership. An Indian outfit, he said, named Vedanta. And had the owners ever been down into the mine? As far as he knew, he responded, the owners had not been down once during the years of private ownership.
There was a loud noise in the tunnel swelling at our approach. As it peaked he pulled me aside into a little alcove from which there came what had resolved into a clattering. It was an ore elevator, and it was hauling what appeared to be an endless procession of copper up along a long incline to a distant surface. From my perspective it had no origin, and its destination seemed equally obscure. Milanzi yelled that we were going down to see where that ore was being obtained. As we continued our descent, the air got hotter, stickier, more tropical. At length we veered off our course and entered another tunnel. Not only was there the heat, but this tunnel was both narrower, winding and disorienting. We had very little headroom, and pneumatic, hydraulic and electric lines ran in haphazard bundles at our feet. Milanzi said that we would soon be moving into the orebody.
Sweatstains were beginning to bloom through my jumpsuit. We wound and descended. With some twenty inexperienced people in our number, our progress was slow, determined as it was by the pace of the most hesitant straggler—the least common straggler as it were. There was a “stream" flowing at the floor of tunnel. The water ran along our feet and made the stone surface slippery to my tread. Where the footing was particularly dangerous we would have to reach up for support from a braided steel cable that hung from the ceiling in lengths undulating down into the invisibility. At some point my feet slipped out from under me just after I seized the line. I dangled in space, and had to acknowledge to myself that I was feeling slightly nervous.
But it only went on for some more minutes before we turned off into another tunnel, this one without a slope. It was very close, and the ceiling was shot through everywhere with bolts driven from the other side to support its friable structure. Our guide was beginning to explain the nature and function of this tunnel, but his words were interrupted by a percussive blast that left my ears ringing. My feet also somehow rang with the memory of the blast's brief tremble. We milled about uneasily. There was nervous laughter coming from the ZESCO men. I looked up at the rivets in the ceiling. Milanzi's booming voice filled the void left by the blast: “They’re collapsing ore down to where it can be reached and put on the conveyor!” Motioning for us to follow, he began walking toward the source of the blast. Then the walls shook with a new dynamite thunderclap. And another. By now there were grumbles about wanting to go back to the surface. Someone yelled something from up ahead and Milanzi gave the signal to stop. He told us to lean against the wall. There was a blast, and then we pressed on. We turned a corner and were in the brief tunnel where the blasts had been shaking the ore out of cavities driven up into and hollowed down out of the orebody. Milanzi wanted to show us the process of setting and setting off a charge. I was keen. At his yelled prompting, a blasting technician emerged from the darkness at the far end of the tunnel with an explosive charge in a plastic bag. Between it and the fuse lay an accelerator tube of ammonium nitrate. With little further ado, he pushed it up into the cavity we had assembled, using a stick to get it in there as far as he could. Half the men had begun scrambling back the way we had come by the time the technician put his lighter to the fuse. The technician was laughing. He said that we had 45 seconds, there was no cause for alarm. It was an attitude that set me scrambling for cover with the rest of the group. I scraped my knee on something turning the corner. When the blast came, we were all crouched in attitudes of tense anticipation. It was louder than the blasts we had heard from farther out, but it did not feel more dangerous or violent.
The tepidness of the blast when it finally came may have emboldened us somewhat, but the balance of this brave euphoria was drawn down quickly by what followed. The next item on the tour was a visit to a space directly adjacent to the diagonal shafts into the orebody where the blasting was being done. This was accomplished by taking several snaking turns and then climbing one by one up a rickety ladder that fed through a hatch and onto a landing of 2 x 4s. I was the first to go up and in after Milanzi, and it took nearly a quarter of an hour before all 20 or so of the men had made it up. Milanzi swept his hand in an arc to indicate a wide chunk of the space we were occupying. He instructed us not to venture into that arc, as the floor was weak there and was in danger of collapsing. He was delivering a speech about the quality of the ore in that particular seam when a blast from somewhere within the surrounding stone dislodged a few small rocks from the ceiling. My breath caught in my throat.
Getting down and out of the space in the orebody took at least as long. With blasts going off in the rock around us the entire time, it was a trying wait. Once we’d all assembled in the tunnel below, I asked what the plan was from there. We’d already been underground for over 4 hours, and I’d told my driver Fabian to expect me after about that long. Milanzi cracked a wide grin as he looked down the steep pitch of the tunnel running down from where we stood. We go down. The descent was our steepest yet. Water rushed along our path and made every step difficult. The heat and humidity were those of a tropical forest, but there was no smell of life, just the sharp tang of cupric central African earth. And down we walked. After ten minutes or so someone tried to stop us, saying that there was a problem with the shafts ahead that would make our passage dangerous. Milanzi told us to stay put while he went up to investigate. He'd have to talk to a structural engineer to see if we should turn around. Waiting, we talked of the surface. Of food, plants and animals, women. One of the men laughed loudly and said that women could never make it down here. They would just refuse to go on. They would faint. I wasn't so sure. Women are the guardians of life. So often one hears of them staring mortal danger in the sclera without blinking. They are also strongly associated with the generative powers of the earth. I secretly thought that the mine would be less scary if there could be some women gracing its caverns.
After some time, Milanzi returned and said that we could go on. I asked him what the issue had been, and he said that there had been some doubt about the ladder-linked platforms we were about to use to make our descent into the transport tunnel just below us. Someone had taken a nasty fall there recently, and they didn't want it happening again. But it was OK. Our passage would be safe. There was a bracing confidence in his grin. We proceeded, and soon got to the mouth of the staged shaft through which we would be making our final descent. Near the opening was a man quite casually operating a jackhammer. We made our way around him and gathered. One at a time, Milanzi yelled at us over the beat of the jackhammer, his face grave. There could only be one person per ladder and platform at any given time. He would go first, and would call out when he had completed his descent down the first ladder and onto the first platform. As he got onto the second ladder, the next man in line would begin descending the first. Understood? We nodded our assent, and he disappeared from view. The all clear call came. I, intrepid mzungu, was next in line. The ladder wobbled as I put my weight on it. I clomb down, and when my head cleared the hatch, I could see that I had entered a vertical space at least 25 feet in height. Aside from the rungs, there was no purchase. I concentrated on my footing and made the descent quickly and methodically. I reached the landing. When I was clear of the ladder I looked down and could see that the ladder-linked landings numbered at least five. That would be a hundred or more feet to fall in the event of a serial collapse. And the weight of the descending men would be amassing above me as I proceeded. Hearing Milanzi's call, I wasted no time in getting onto that the second ladder. And so on it went to six ladders and six platforms spaced out over that murky 150 foot shaft, until at last I spilled out, with a great breath of relief, onto the floor of a principal, rail-lined transport artery 3300 feet below surface. I sat and waited for the other men to complete the climb-down. I was contemplating the situation of the miners. These were men who for every day of their working lives were expected not only to make the journey that I was making this day as a one-time research assignment or exercise in titillating horror, but to do backbreaking work while down there, and to be compensated a pittance for their efforts to boot. These were men in the properly Christian figuration of mankind as a brotherhood united in forbearance and suffering. These were people for whom such work and conditions had long ago assumed a veneer of normality. They even considered themselves lucky to be employed as they were. As I considered what the conditions must have been like further down, where it was hotter, and where there were gigantic tractors and boring machines excavating new tunnels and roaring out clouds of stinging diesel as they did, my feelings were equal parts awe of the men and terror at their fully accepted and accustomed daily conditions of work.
Once all the men had safely descended, we paused for a moment to take group pictures. The photo shoot played out the way they often do when I’m in them and I’m in Zambia: Everybody wanted a turn next to the white man. A funny predilection, but who was I to say no? We snapped and smiled away. I hadn’t brought a camera, thinking that they weren't going to allow them anyway, and as none of theirs were digital, I doubt I'll ever be able to feast my eyes on an image to remember the mine by. Which I’ve accepted and hope will merely make the searing images in my memory stronger.
With the image-keepsake formalities taken care of, we began the final leg of our journey. It was a long, sweaty three-mile walk to the tunnel, and we spent it in a kind of stunned, reverential silence. As we moved from the tunnel to the elevator loading area there was that same rush of equalizing pressure in the interlock chamber. We ascended, again in silence. When I saw the light of day break the monotony of darkness, it marked a kind of personal dawn. When the cagetender let us out, I got onto my hands and knees and kissed the ground. Then I thanked Milanzi for the experience from the bottom of my heart. When I shook the hands of the men with whom I'd shared the tour, I felt a rare and strong warmth of companionship. We all agreed that it had been a privilege, and that henceforth, we would all be linked by the bond that had joined us underground. It was an entirely fitting moment of gravity.
I had a last look around the surface before going off to find Fabian and head back to Ndola. In contrast to what I had felt while down in the mine, what struck me now was the everydayness of the scene. People were milling about absently and importantly and dejectedly, just as they do at every workplace. There was little to indicate the tremendousness of the operations that went on underground. And no one else seemed animated by the sense of wonder that linked us, the visitors. Which of course is entirely understandable for the simple twofold reasons that what for us was a rare privilege was for them an occupational hazard, a curse; and that, as experience has shown me time and again, the psyche soon grows accustomed, even inured, to almost anything. Are there any extremes that can leave us in that suspended state of wonder that Carlyle mentions, and that writers and adventurers propose to chase? Or could it be that even a life of hallucination and universal spacefaring would be a banal enterprise in the end? Perhaps, perhaps—but I intend to chase the feeling.
~
Postscript: I realize that it’s been a month or more since I tempted my readership with the line I'd never used before. You know—nothing could have prepared me for... I realize further that I’ve been grossly remiss in backing up my promise of to be continued with the goods you see here. But I hope that you'll forgive me on the strength of a well-crafted explanation. You see, I had most of this typed up (or at least scrawled) for a long time. And yes, I’ve been both lazy and caught up with other things. But there was something bothering me, some aspect of incompletion in my reckoning with this experience. It had to do with time, and a kind of feeling of vacuity in the wake of my experience in the mine. I recognized that there had been an attenuation of time for me while down there, and I wanted to express that, but whenever I began to think about it, I couldn't really find the right way to approach it. Simply to say that 'time swelled until it had grown large enough to be commensurate with the experience’ seemed a bit hackneyed, as well as insufficient. Something quite significant had altered my appreciation of time while down there. Even though over a month has passed, I can recall nearly every minute of it with a sort of vividness of detail that would not apply to my recollection of much more recent days.
And then, as I was making a hair-raising crossing of the Atlantic, I had it. It came in the form of words penned by the South African-born author Laurens van der Post, about a journey he had made in a very different time and place, but which stirred in him precisely the feelings about time that the mine had stirred in me. Having lent his book out to a friend, I’ll have to content myself with paraphrase for now: He said that both the beginning and the end of a great journey are marked by banality and sadness, and that if it is a properly great journey, the time of its duration, while it is being experienced, expands into a sort of miniature lifetime, sufficient unto itself—such that, once it has ended, the act of remembering it and accounting for it becomes one of some sadness and inexpressibility.
As this inability to get down to business and render an account was bothering me and frustrating my efforts, I tried to express my difficulty to some friends. Though sympathetic, at least two of my friends thought I had missed my opportunity to render a vivid account by waiting so long. I hope that Van der Post's words will go some way toward showing that this simply isn’t true. There are memories that survive degradation at the hands of linear time. This was one.craf6tedl-craf6ted mine, rare privilege was for them sitors. wer, and sloping down at perhaps 15 degrees
