Making the Site Boil Like a Blast Furnace
What made the site seethe like a blast furnace was—
Creeeeak— creeeeak— creeeeak— creeeeak—
The sound of the winch winding up the wire rang out into the dawn sky.
“······.”
I was sitting on a folding chair set up in front of the site office, staring at the drilling rig.
The gold vein we had seen with our own eyes in yesterday’s tunnel survey.
But seeing it wasn’t enough.
To develop the mine properly, we had to go through a formal step called core sampling.
A core sample was a pillar of rock drilled out from deep underground with a cylindrical bit.
Only after analyzing several of those samples could we prove, in numbers, the vein’s exact grade—in other words, how many grams of gold were contained in a ton of ore.
There were three reasons this procedure mattered.
······First: bank loans.
Obviously, financial institutions didn’t believe, “Well, I saw it with my own eyes, and I’m telling you it’s there!”
They would only recognize collateral value if there was a grade report issued by a certified assay lab.
I was planning to use the gold that was certainly buried in that mine as collateral, take out a loan, and then pour that money into new fields, multiplying it dozens, hundreds, even thousands of times over.
Theoretically, if I levered the hell out of this mine and used the borrowed money to shake up the world financial markets, I could even wipe out a small country in Southeast Asia overnight.
It would give me the capital strength to do that.
······Second: mining permits.
To apply for extraction rights from the federal and state governments, an estimated reserve report was essential.
And the basis for that report was the core sample analysis.
Of course, there would probably be plenty of lobbying involved in the process, but that was a separate matter, one I planned to handle later.
······Third: attracting investment.
Developing a large-scale mine cost tens of millions of dollars.
To prove the business’s value to investors, I needed objective data.
In short, without core samples, even the gold in front of your eyes was nothing more than a pretty rock.
Just as I was deep in thought—
“Boss! Sample collection is complete! We gathered plenty, enough to establish objectivity!”
Armstrong came up beside me.
It had taken two days to drill through the groundwater layer and reach the quartz vein.
All the while, Armstrong had stayed on site for a single moment, even with his injured body.
···Thud! ···Thud! ···Thud! ···Thud! ···Thud! ···Thud!
The core barrels hauled up from 350 meters underground were set down on the workbench.
A core barrel was a hollow steel cylinder.
The three-meter-long tube was lowered underground to cut through the rock, then brought back up carrying the cylindrical rock pillar inside it.
In simple terms, it was like using a giant straw to “suck up” the rock beneath the earth.
Then, by looking at the rock layers that had come up inside the straw, you could clearly observe which elements each layer contained.
A drilling assistant released the barrel locks.
Clack-clack— thud!
As the bolts came free and the barrel split open, the cylindrical core inside was revealed.
The rock pillar known as the core was about as thick as a palm across its diameter.
It was smeared with gray mud and drilling slurry, so at first glance it looked like nothing more than a stone dragged up out of a swamp.
I used high-pressure wash water to rinse the sludge off the sample.
Splatter! Splatter! Splatter! Splatter! Splatter!
As the mud peeled away, the core’s true form emerged.
A mass of pale gray quartz.
Between the seams, something foreign glinted.
Like thick walnuts embedded here and there in a giant gray cylindrical block of cheese.
In the cracks of the quartz, dense chunks of yellow metal were packed tightly together.
This wasn’t dust.
From pieces the size of fingernails to thumb-sized nuggets and even fist-sized lumps, metal fragments of all different sizes clung to the rock as though they were one body.
They flashed, dazzlingly, in the rising sunlight beyond the horizon.
A low murmur of awe spread through the workers standing around us.
What we had seen from far away in the tunnel yesterday and what was now in our hands were two completely different shocks.
Armstrong took a small metal tool from inside his jacket.
It was a folding magnifier.
On-site, it was called a loupe—a ten-power lens used by jewelers and mineral appraisers.
He unfolded the lens, held it to his eye, and leaned in close to the surface of the core.
The purpose of this step was to observe the mineral surface in precise detail.
It let him distinguish, more accurately than by naked eye, whether it was gold, pyrite, or some other mineral.
The key thing was the crystal form and the luster of the surface.
Pyrite has geometric crystal shapes like cubes or pentagonal dodecahedrons, and its surface shines with a sharp metallic mirror sheen.
Natural gold, by contrast, has an irregular crystal form and a softer luster.
“······Then let’s confirm it,”
the veteran engineer with thirty years of experience said, scanning the rock through the lens.
His gaze grew more and more serious, and before long his fingertips began to tremble slightly.
“The crystal form is irregular. As expected, it’s not pyrite.”
Armstrong didn’t stop there.
He pulled another tool from his pocket.
A small instrument with a pointed metal tip at the end of the handle.
A hardness pick.
It was used to measure a mineral’s hardness, and the principle was simple.
You scratched the mineral’s surface with the sharp tip to see whether it left a mark.
Different minerals had different hardness levels, and pyrite’s was 6 to 6.5.
It was extremely hard, so when scratched, it would throw off powder or chip at the surface.
Pure gold, on the other hand, was only 2.5 to 3 on the scale.
It was so soft that even a human fingernail with a hardness of 2.5 could scratch it.
So if it was real gold, it wouldn’t crumble when scratched; it would be marked or dented.
Armstrong pressed the tip against the yellow metal part of the core and gently applied pressure.
Grkk······
The sharp tip slid across the surface.
No powder flew.
Instead, it gave softly under the pressure, leaving a mark as if someone had pushed a butter knife through butter.
Malleability—the property of metal deforming instead of breaking—had been confirmed.
Pure gold is so malleable that a single gram can be beaten into a thin sheet covering a full square meter.
Pyrite and chalcopyrite have none of that quality.
“One last check, just one more. There’s no harm in being careful.”
By this point there was no need to confirm anything further, but Armstrong’s meticulous nature still wasn’t satisfied.
He reached for yet another item from his belt.
A white ceramic plate about the size of a palm.
The tool known as a streak plate was the final word in mineral identification.
The principle was this.
If you scrape the mineral hard against the rough underside of the ceramic plate, powder comes off.
The color of that powder differs from mineral to mineral.
Pyrite leaves a dark green streak, chalcopyrite leaves a black streak tinged with green, and pure gold leaves a vivid yellow streak.
That was the fingerprint of gold—impossible to fake.
Armstrong picked up a small fragment of metal that had flaked off the core and scraped it hard against the back of the ceramic plate.
Swish—
A line was drawn across the porcelain.
It wasn’t black. It wasn’t green.
It was a clear, deep yellow.
A color unchanged even under daylight, the color only pure gold could leave behind.
Armstrong slowly lowered the loupe.
His hand was shaking violently.
“Boss······”
“Yes?”
“I don’t think this is an ordinary gold mine.”
“?”
If what had been dug out was gold, then gold was gold—so why would he say the mine itself was unusual? As if reading my confusion, Armstrong continued.
“Ordinary gold mines measure grade in grams per ton. If you dig one ton of rock and get five grams of gold, that’s considered a pretty good mine. Ten grams is excellent.”
His finger pointed at the metallic lumps on the core’s surface.
“But this isn’t in grams. You see this? Nearly half of the rock’s volume is metal. This is in percentage terms. Forget the purity of the recovered gold—just the ratio in this sample tells you this mine is no ordinary thing.”
“Hmm. Can we really make that judgment from the samples we’ve pulled so far?”
“Yes. You can judge from the cross-section of the core. The ratio of quartz to gold is clear enough to see with the naked eye······ and with this much experience, you can get a rough estimate.”
The faces of Armstrong and the other workers were lit with feverish excitement.
“Even the Witwatersrand mine in South Africa, called the world’s highest-grade gold mine, averages around ten grams per ton. The Red Lake mine in Canada is considered ultra-high grade at twenty grams per ton.”
Spittle flew from his mouth as he explained.
“But this······ this has to be several hundred grams per ton. Maybe even several thousand. It’s absurd. Boss, yesterday in the tunnel we confirmed that the quartz vein was two meters thick, right?”
“I think so. It might have been thicker.”
“And we also confirmed that the vein extended vertically for at least several dozen meters.”
“That’s right.”
“If we assume the vein is two meters thick, fifty meters high, and one kilometer long in strike extent······”
Strike extent meant the horizontal length the vein stretched across.
No matter how thick or tall a vein was, if it ran only ten meters before ending, it was just a small mine.
But if it continued for hundreds of meters, or kilometers, the story changed completely.
“As of 1992, the Carlin Mine in Nevada is the largest gold mine in the United States, producing about a million ounces a year.”
There was a tremor in Armstrong’s voice.
“Its total reserves are around thirty million ounces. It’s the biggest gold mine in American history.”
All our gazes turned to the cores at once.
With a trembling hand, Armstrong swept his fingers over the golden nuggets embedded in the quartz pillar.
“But if you plug in the scale and grade of this vein and make a rough estimate······”
“Rough estimate?”
“At the very least, several million ounces. We’d need a precise assay to know exactly, but based on my thirty years of experience, ten million ounces is not impossible.”
Ten million ounces.
That came to about 311 tons by troy ounce.
With gold at around $350 an ounce in 1992, that was $3.5 billion by the simplest calculation.
Far more than the total gold holdings of most countries.
Armstrong’s estimate is pretty much in line with the number I remembered. He really does seem like a trustworthy expert.
As I was thinking this to myself, another foreman standing nearby spoke up.
“Boss······ if this mine goes into full operation, the ranking of gold production in the United States will change. No, not just the United States. This will go down in the history of gold mines worldwide.”
I knew that.
And because I knew it, I gave a suitably measured reaction.
“This is thanks to everyone. You can all look forward to this quarter’s bonus.”
“Yeeeeah!”
Every worker on site erupted in cheers.
The other workers, too far away to hear my exact words, saw the commotion and lifted their arms anyway, cheering along without knowing why.
“Lee! San! Ha! Lee! San! Ha! Lee! San! Ha! Lee! San! Ha!”
I laughed as the workers chanted my name.
Until just a few days ago, I had probably been nothing more than a brash young boss from the East, impossible to read and easy to underestimate.
But now their eyes had changed.
The man who had found a bonanza in a mine everyone else had given up on.
And the man who made sure that reward was divided fairly and clearly.
In the midst of a vicious recession, they had lived as unemployed men with wages withheld from them, and in their eyes now was something close to reverence.
One of the old laborers took off his helmet and pressed it to his chest.
Then, in a trembling voice, he murmured softly, “God bless you······ boss······”
One by one, the other workers began wiping at their eyes as well.
I clapped my hands.
“All right! The exploration stage is over, so from here on out we’ve got extraction, refining, and sales left! That’s what’ll let me give all of you your bonuses too!”
Needless to say, nothing motivates workers quite like that.
The look in everyone’s eyes changed.
Seasoned veterans, family men who had to carry their households on their backs.
They prepared to refine and smelt the gold they had dug up into ingot form.
Standing before them, I raised the megaphone and shouted, “All right! Let’s move straight to the next stage! Just a little more, give me a little more strength! I’ll repay you with a fat envelope too! Fighting!”
Already, the heat of the site was beginning to run like molten metal.