John Simpson - Change of Course

We flew high to maximise our range of vision and we had only been airborne for a few minutes when I saw a reddish-brown discolouration in the river water.

‘Over there! Look!’ I pointed towards it. ‘We haven’t any plants near there – it’s got to be illegal washing, garimpeiros!’

Morgan, sitting next to the pilot, jabbed his finger towards the dirty water and nodded vigorously. The helicopter swooped like a peregrine and its prey panicked.

‘Shit. There’s hundreds of the bastards!’ Thys shouted incredulously. Men, women and children scattered like shrapnel into the scrubby woodland, disappearing in seconds. All that remained were piles of muck, shovels, buckets and boxes.

Thys’s request to land produced a withering stare from Morgan.

‘They’ll have AK–47s stashed close by. If we go down …’ Morgan caught the pilot’s eye and pointed up. I picked up flashes in my peripheral sight as the helicopter ascended rapidly: sun in the rotors, or was it a tracer? Either way, no one spoke for several minutes.

Eventually, Thys asked about the illegal miners. ‘The garimpeiros? How many are there in the area?’ he said.

‘A couple of hundred,’ Morgan replied.

I suppressed a laugh as my estimate was much higher. There might be two hundred men, but there were women and children too. I described to Thys how they dug gravel and dirt out of the riverbank and carried it to a washing area, usually upstream, in buckets and sacks. ‘They shovel the muck into screens with wire mesh bottoms and immerse them in water to wash away the silt and sand. Any worthwhile diamonds are in the stones left behind; they sort through them and sometimes they get lucky.’

‘All the illegals I’ve come across before have been after gold,’ said Thys. ‘That kit we saw … It looked the same as for gold to me. Are you sure they’re after diamonds?’

‘There is no gold around here. That’s right isn’t it, Geoff?’ I said.

‘Yeah, the geology’s wrong,’ Morgan confirmed.

‘Anyway,’ I continued, ‘for gold, they’d use pans and sluice boxes. What we saw were screens; they’re a different shape. Sluice boxes are troughs, much longer than screens, and they have carpet or sacking in them, as a lining. The gold gets caught in the lining. Sluice boxes are not the best way to recover diamonds, but they’ve been used for thousands of years for gold. They reckon Jason’s Golden Fleece was probably a box lining.’

‘Who’s Jason?’ asked Thys.

After a few more minutes Morgan bellowed into the intercom, ‘I want to call in here.’

We were close to one of the Mumbulo Mine’s open pits where we could see yellow machines, like a colony of termites, working at various tasks. Shallow-gradient roads skirted the pit, easing their way down to where the excavators and loaders worked, filling the trucks that supplied the pre-treatment plant.

A brown stain in the river, like an arrowhead, pointed accusingly at the Cambunda pre-treatment plant; I could see it was running. The plants were my responsibility.

‘I want to show Thys the new river diversion,’ said Morgan. ‘It’s just about finished, and we should be ready to start mining it in the next day or two. While we’re there, David, you could make yourself useful by checking on the plant,’ he added, wryly.

In the distance, we could see that the river split into two channels. One carried the flow and the other was almost dry. Morgan, a mining engineer himself, boasted about the mining department’s achievement; completing the excavation of the new river course before the end of the dry season, and then breaking it through into the natural river. ‘We’ve just about finished pumping out the old course,’ he said. ‘There should be a nice production bonus next month if Jim’s instincts are right. I say instincts,’ he mused, ‘because all the other bloody geologists, with the same information, find next to nada. I reckon that bugger can smell diamonds.’

Morgan instructed the pilot. He landed us at the helipad two hundred yards from the plant. We all clambered out and shuffled around, stretching and kneading muscles to loosen up after being in the cramped cockpit. A mechanic was working at the plant workshop close by, servicing a haul truck. He wasn’t using his Land Rover, so Morgan commandeered it to take Thys to the river diversion. I set off on foot to check on the Cambunda pre-treatment plant. The air smelled clean, refreshed by the rains; it had been heavy with dust when I went away.

A loader was shovelling ore from the stockpile and tipping it into the feed hopper where a jet of high-pressure water from the monitor gun drove it down into the plant. A little Angolan man, partially obscured by water spray, was operating the gun, carefully directing it for best effect. When he turned off the water, I recognised him as Armando, the shift foreman. I smiled and waved at him. Armando and I had established an instant rapport when we’d first met, six months earlier. He was eager to learn everything he could from me about the plants and he had made it his duty to help me with my Portuguese and teach me a few words of Chokwe, the local tribal language.

Armando gestured for a colleague to take over at the monitor, then he ran over to greet me, grinning hugely. We shook hands.

‘Como está, Engineer David? Is your family well?’ I nodded and confirmed that my parents were in good health then I asked after his family. He seemed to inflate with pride as he told me that his wife, Esther, was pregnant with their first child. He had known about it for some time but had said nothing before because she had previously miscarried several times.

‘Congratulations,’ I said warmly. We shook hands again, then I remembered something odd, ‘– but I thought you already had three sons.’

‘Ah! Those are my brother’s boys. In our society, my brothers’ and sisters’ children are my children, but …’ he chuckled, ‘some will be more mine than others.’ Then his grin unfolded into something more sombre and he told me that one of his sons, a nephew really, had died of malaria a week before. I was saddened by the news. We talked about his excitement at the prospect of the new baby, and then I told him about some of my exploits while on leave. After a while, my conscience finally stirred me to suggest that we inspect the plant together.

We worked systematically down from the top, following the material flow, checking equipment for wear and tear. We had just reached the bottom and were checking the pumps when we heard a shout that told us Morgan was back from the river. We climbed back up the steps to where Morgan and Thys were standing yards apart, near the feed hopper. Morgan seemed very agitated. He was staring down at the plant screwing up his eyes, but I could tell he wasn’t focusing on anything physical. I knew that any comment would only draw fire, so I kept quiet.

‘There’s fuck all in that river diversion!’ he snarled, breaking his stare. ‘Bedrock and sand, bugger all else; like an itchy arse, gritty, no real substance.’

I said nothing and Thys kept quiet too; he’d obviously read the situation accurately.

Morgan turned his back on us and wandered over to the stockpile; his manner did not invite company. I gave Thys an inquisitive look. He waited until Morgan was out of earshot before telling me that Morgan had been in high spirits on the short drive to the river, excited at the prospect of seeing for the first time what lay at the bottom of the new diversion.

His mood had changed as soon as they crested the hill overlooking it, and they had their first clear sight of it. He’d stopped the Land Rover and they both got out. All they could see were small patches of what looked like sand in expanses of grey bedrock. Morgan went silent, his face lost all colour, and he started hurling stones in the general direction of the river. When he had calmed down, they climbed back into the Land Rover and Morgan drove them the rest of the way to the river where he just sat and stared at it for several minutes without uttering a word. He eventually got out and spoke to the mining engineer supervising the pumping operations.