Page:Letters from New Zealand (Harper).djvu/133

Rh above your head, the other leg hanging, you dangle down into darkness, bumping against the sides of the shaft, until the ground below suddenly seems to rise up and hit you, and you find yourself in a heap on the bottom. There a miner in a drive five feet high, with a lighted candle end stuck in his cap, welcomes the visitor, gives him a candle end, and guides him, both crouching, to a place where the drive opens out a little, several men sitting there, and working with pick and shovel. They show you the wash-dirt, composed of gravel, small quartz pebbles, bits of granite, little morsels of ironstone, with occasional tiny garnets. The dirt is wheeled to the shaft in very small trucks on a wooden tram-line, about two barrow loads to a truck. It is then hauled up to the surface, and once a week the dirt is washed, being passed through wooden channels; the gold, being heavier than the stones and gravel, sinks to the bottom of the channel, and is caught by rough battens; the extreme end of the channel covered with a piece of plush retains the very fine gold brought down by the rush of water. From all I can gather, gold costs a considerable percentage of its value, but it has the advantage of being always saleable at a fixed price. Alluvial gold is got with much greater ease than gold in quartz, and is much more profitable. But the work is always a kind of gamble, very attractive and uncertain; men make for weeks merely good wages, then their luck turns, and they make their "pile." Providentially, it seems that alluvial gold, easily got, is usually the first discovered, leading to the colonization of many parts of the Earth which otherwise would remain waste.

After many invitations to come again, we ascended,