THE GOLD QUEST.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 209, 3 September 1932, Page 8 (Supplement)

THE GOLD QUEST.

WORLD'S EAGER APPETITE. OUD SEARCH WTTH NEW ZEST. LURE FOR MODERN JASONS. Almost since man was man one lure above all others has-made him abandon his own hearthside, plunge into deserts and jungles, cross unknown seas and mountains,' and brave ■ human enemies, wild beasts, and death by. hunger and thirst. One object of possession has brought out .his most heroic qualities and his ' most perocious. Virgil long ago sang of" the cursed lust for gold, and rriany poets since, and no doubt many earlier, have harped on the same universal theme. . . But the quest goes on, now like a recurrent madness, now in a spirit of grim and desperate determination. It was so in the days of .Jason and the Argonauts, it has been so in every age when mankind became conscious of its yearning for gold—often of its dire need for gold; and it is so in 1932, when every commodity in*the world except gold lias deflated in price like a pricked bubble. AVhen the machinery of industry slows down, when ships lie idle at thqir docks, when clocks tick slowly and loudly in half-empty offices,' then the royal metal comes into its own again. Let twenty countries disown it—and moro than twenty have done so —and it loses not a whit of its dignity. Last year more than 21,000,000 ounces, more, than £80,000,000 wor,th, was -wrested from the earth, and with infinite pains and ingenuity divorced from the baser elements. This year it will be more. It must be more, for the commerce of tho world languishes for the stimulation of golden wine. Pageant of the Ages. The pageant of gold begins to march again, not in its ancient fashion—for railways, automobiles, and even aeroplanes carry its armies now—but in its ancient mood and with its ancient purpose. And what a pageant it is, and has been, and will be! There is no aspect of humanity that does not cross the mighty stage of gold; no baseness, no dauntlessness, no glorious excess of intellect or imagination. Hero comes .the almost legendary Cadmus, prospecting in Thrace 15 centuries, before tho Christian era, and stumbling upon pay dirt at last. Here come the slaves of Queen Hatshepsutof Egypt, a. century later, loading her ships with,bags of gold from mines in what is now Somaliland. Here are Jason and his companions, searching not golden fleece, but ileece in .which, primitive gold-washers have managed to catch flakbo of the precious metal. Here are tho Phrygians, working the sands .of Pactolus thirty centuries ago. Here are tho Phoenicians, a hundred generations back, washing the sands of what is now tho Guadalquivir .in Spain. Here are the ancient miners'of Samos, cramped and stooped from working in shafts only two feet wide.

Hero come the Conquistadores, flaming with a zeal half religious, half avaricious, ransacking Mexico, Brazil, and Peru, looting treasures, forcing chiefs by hideous tortures to reveal the locations of their mines, tramping over half of North America in search of the land of Quivira, where the kings ate from golden dishes and were lulled to sleep by the music of golden bells—and missing altogether the golden wealth of California and Colorado. The ranks become more crowded and the names more familiar—the American River, the Big Blue Lead, the Mother Lode, which drew tens of thousands to California; Virginia City; Ballarat, Bendigo and the golden mile of Kalgoorlie, in Australia; the incredible wealth of the Rand, in South Africa, the greatest concentration of gold known to man; the. Klondike; Goldfield and Tonopath. . The Golden Flood. The characteristics of a gold rush, ae suggested by these and many another colourful name, are almost ae definite as the symptoms of a fever. Someone finds gold. Perhaps it is James .Marshall, digging a flume for Sutter's lumber mill in California, and suddenly coming on shining particles. Perhaps it. is the Hargreavee, washing the sands of the Macquarie in New South Wales in'lssl. Perhaps it is the Morgan brothers, "fossicking" in Queensland, in 1882. Perhaps it is. Arnold, three years later, prospecting on the Witwatersrand in .South Africa and uncovering the first tiny specks of gold in a reef from which perhaps £1,000,000,000 has been taken out. , . One of the world's. newest and probably, richest gold mines, the Boliden of Northern Sweden, in which the ill-fated match king, Ivar Kreuger, had staked a large part of his fortune and his-hopes offered no surface indications on the spot where it was dug. It was a geologist, not a. prospector, who turned the first spadeful-of earth; it has been chemists and metallurgists who have struggled with the problems caused by the presence of large quantities of arsenic in close association with the gold. Perhaps it is fitting that gold and arsenic should . lie together, for one-at times can be as poisonous as the other.

It ie the fate of mines, as of men, to grow old and die. Look at the goldbearing map of the would., On it there are new mines, middle-aged mines, mines which are nearing their last stages. First come the great mines of the Rand, producing last year more than £80,000,000 worth of gold. Miners and, economists in every country watch them with anxious eyes. The comparatively recent opening of the Eastern Rand'raised new