Digging for gold

Forty miles from Johannesburg, I turned off the highway at Mponeng mine, the deepest man-made hole on earth: a vast, stifling oven of toiling men, thousands of them, buried miles underground as they blasted and scraped for the metal that has bewitched and harassed man for 6,000 years. What else but gold. Picture Manhattan Island sliced in half at the waist, and the top part set up on its end.

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