Quartz and Gold

It is no secret that Austria is a mountainous country. It is warm there. A very good climate. Magnificent air. Excellent ecology. But the soil lets it down: it is extremely stony. Boulders turn up even where they seemingly shouldn't, as I found out personally when I started planting fruit trees. Before you dig a hole of the required size, you sweat seven sweats and collect a whole sack of stones. That is why Austrians spread a layer of black earth over the garden and sow lawn grass. They don't like planting raspberries, currants, gooseberries and the like, and consider it a hassle. Even though the specialist markets are simply stuffed with every kind of sapling and seedling! If they grow anything at all, it is tomatoes, salad leaves, some seedlings. But they plant them not in the ground, out in the open, so to speak, which still strikes me as strange, but in big boxes of black earth where you won't find a single pebble.

They fertilise without fail. They keep an eye on the harvest. It is a special point of pride for the host when, in front of many guests, after a glass of wine, he says:

- Now for a bite I'll fetch some greens from my own vegetable patch.

Such a phrase, even when said with deliberate indifference, carries real weight. The guests, naturally, duly appreciate the host's business acumen and praise him in every possible way.

And if he brings tomatoes too! Then the talk of home-grown vegetables will eclipse the most important Austrian political news.

The most amazing thing is that the fertiliser and soil will cost ten times more than the tomatoes themselves.

But that is how Austrians are made.

They bring huge quantities of fertiliser, humus and black earth to their plots, so that the grass grows thicker and greener and the cucumber seedlings feel more at ease.

I often watch the scene when Austrians, whole families of them, come up to our fence and, pointing out the grown bushes to their little ones, say:

- Look, children, this Russian has raspberries growing!

To be continued

I confess we too brought black earth to our plot. We spread it in an even layer over the whole plot and sowed lawn grass. After a couple of weeks the grass had come up as a beautiful, even, dark-green carpet. All that remained was to plant the fruit trees, and here a difficulty emerged... The black earth promptly vanished somewhere, and boulders came pushing up out of the ground like one big happy family. I started putting them into the big yellow bags meant for plastic. I ended up with about six sacks...

Two sacks were taken by the refuse collectors by mistake (I can imagine their surprise as they bent under the weight). I palmed off another two on the Croat who was building our fence. That left two more to dispose of... Not an easy task, considering that you can't just dump them by the road. The fines for such an offence are large. And there are plenty of volunteers to report your uncultured behaviour.

I had to think of something...

And then I found a brilliant solution!

I could line the big stones around the trees and shrubs. All the more so since the stones are very beautiful and varied. Among them are rounded conglomerates and breccias, which look especially inspiring.

I laid stones around a couple of trees, stepped back a few metres, looked at the result and thought: "Well, does such beauty really exist?"

Soon the stones ran out, and I had only just acquired the taste for it. Where could I get stones for the remaining trees?

And then an idea came to me: I could collect stones from the little river that flows half a kilometre from our house.

I took a rucksack, got on my bike and rode to the river.

And what stones you can find there!

Red ones, blue ones, green ones. Pegmatites, gneisses, quartzes...

My eyes simply ran wild.

I immediately wanted to carry all this beauty off to my garden.

To be continued.

While gathering igneous rocks of various colours, I noticed that there was a great deal of quartz in the river. And as is well known, quartz is a gold-bearing mineral.

When I worked in Chukotka after my third year, at Cape Schmidt, particular importance was attached precisely to quartz, of which there was a great deal there.

Geologists recorded even the most insignificant outcrop of quartz. In Chukotka the quartz was mostly a beautiful white colour and very dense. I still have a piece brought from there in my collection. From the standpoint of mining, by general indications such quartz is not the most promising, though it is very beautiful.

But there was also leached, iron-stained quartz, where gold really did occur and could be seen with the naked eye.

I found one such piece with a golden vein when, having found the time, I decided to collect material for my course paper. In an excess of feeling I boasted of the find to the geologists, and it was immediately taken from me. After that I showed them nothing more.

As a grade 2 labourer, I walked with a radiometer, measured the radioactivity of rocks and did sampling and route panning of heavy-mineral concentrates. Loose rock is washed in special pans, where heavy metals eventually remain. And in them I came across grains of gold, and quite a few at times! I'll put it this way: it rarely happened that there was no gold in the pan. What amazed me was that the grains of gold were not yellow at all. They were green and red and did not resemble the noble metal in the least.

To be continued

Soon I became so skilled that I panned gold almost like a professional prospector.

And whenever I had free time (it came only during drizzling rain, because they didn't work in such weather), I would take a pan and wash out gold to bring to the faculty and later write a good course paper.

I don't mean to say I panned all that much gold, but I did have a tiny paper packet of the noble metal...

Once I left it in my anorak during the rain, and the thin paper tore and the gold grains spilled into the pocket.

It was a great pity.

Though on the other hand, border guards could have detained me with a strange packet in my suitcase or pocket, which promised no joy. Of course they would hardly have held me as a gold smuggler, since they know perfectly well that a student is travelling home from field practice (they record everything), but they could have pulled me off the plane for further explanation. They could have sent an unpleasant paper to the university.

I don't think I would have been expelled, but at the department they might have reproached me... as if to say, why were you so careless with that bit of gold?

Chukotka was a border zone and things were quite strict there.

To be continued

For my field placement after my fourth year I went to Sakhalin. Here I was considerably promoted. If in Chukotka I had been a grade 2 labourer, on Sakhalin I was already a technician-geologist. A minor post, usually given after finishing a technical college.

I had six workers under me.

To be honest, I didn't want to become a team leader. I had counted on earning a bit extra by digging test pits alongside the workers (that work paid well), and said so to the head of the party.

- Why do you need money?

The question was, of course, more than strange, but I had to answer:

- I wanted to go to Peter to see my father. Buy a motorcycle...

But he decided otherwise:

- We have four students. You're a senior. You have more experience. And in build you're more presentable too. The people in the team are not easy. So forget the pits! I'm appointing you team leader.

Here we were already engaged in industrial coal prospecting.

I must say we managed to work on both the western and the eastern coast of Sakhalin. I especially liked the eastern one. It took your breath away to think that ahead lay thousands of kilometres of solid ocean without a scrap of land.

Here I was the one teaching the workers how to use the pan. And, sitting on a rock with a wise air, I described what remained in the grey heavy concentrate. Of course, I was supposed to pay attention to coal outcrops and record them carefully in the field diary.

All the workers had criminal pasts. Among themselves they immediately established some informal rules, which did not concern me at all.

To be continued

It should be noted that in all geological parties a very large percentage of the workers had served time.

Why?

There are many reasons. First, an ex-convict will not be hired for a good, well-paid job. Second, they won't go to a factory of their own accord. Discipline is high there. With geologists it is somehow simpler: you're out in nature, and food is at hand. Geologists too don't have much choice, so they take practically anyone who can hold a shovel.

I had money in my field bag, small but always there. I didn't particularly hide the bag, and there was nowhere much to hide it, yet my cash never went missing, though among them were people who had served time for theft.

Once, in the Poronaysk area, a worker asked to join our party. A man two metres tall, broad-shouldered but very bony.

The head of the party asks him:

- Have you done time?

- It happened. Served fifteen.

- I can't take you now. The staff is full. But in a week one worker is leaving. Then I'll take you.

- Understand, boss, I need it now. My wife nags me. I need money.

Glancing at me, the head of the party said:

- If you beat him at arm wrestling, then I'll take you.

- And will you pay an advance?

- You'll get the advance too.

We put our elbows on the table. We clasped palms, and after some effort I pressed the bony man's arm to the surface of the table.

The man's disappointment knew no bounds.

- Don't take it hard. We'll take you on the way back.

When we were returning, we were told that the bony man had badly beaten his wife. The woman was taken to hospital, and he was taken into custody.

To be continued

During the field placement I managed to travel all over southern Sakhalin. We once stopped at Korsakov, not far from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. We needed to receive some cargo at the airport.

We see some twenty men sitting in the shade. Next to them were several forty-litre milk cans. Suddenly they stood up and poured the contents of the cans onto the ground. The smell of beer spread across the whole airfield.

I had never before seen three hundred litres of beer flowing over asphalt. It turns out that's quite a lot. Almost a whole river.

I couldn't help myself, went up to them and asked why they were pouring out the beer, and in such quantity. It seemed rather wasteful...

One of them looked at me as if I had the plague and said:

- We're taking beer to the guys on Iturup. We're on a rotation shift. - Noticing the bewilderment in my eyes, he explained: - This is the third time we're pouring it out. The weather isn't fit for flying. We've been waiting a day already. And the guys asked for fresh, cold beer. We can't bring them piss! Now we'll buy some more.

Picking up the cans, they headed toward the exit.

The placement was over. Time to go home.

I gave away my things: my anorak, my hat, even my belt.

All I had left was a flare gun (needed to scare off bears, and there are quite a few on Sakhalin. Sometimes I saw trees scored by claws at a height of three metres or even higher), which I had deliberately not used up and wanted to take home.

And then my worker begged:

- Give me the flare gun!

What do you need it for?

- I walk home, and they keep hauling me off to the drunk tank.

- Are you going to shoot back with it?

- My flat is on the second floor, and the drunk tank is on the first. I'm walking home perfectly fine, and they grab me and drag me in there! One day as I pass by I'll fire into their window! I'll set them on fire to hell! I've lost so much money because of them!

I had to oblige. I gave it to him.

I wonder what became of that flare gun...

To be continued

Once, having made a pan out of sheet metal, I tried panning for gold on the Volga. Not on the beach, where the water is calm, but where the current is strong and there is a chance of finding something. I was not even particularly surprised when, after gruelling panning, I found grains of gold.

I told one docent whom I respect about my prospector's luck. He was not surprised by my discovery and simply said:

- Nothing special. In the Gorky region I tried panning too. I found a few tiny diamonds.

A serious man, he wouldn't be crafty or deceive.

And so I thought, why not try panning for gold in Austria?

All the signs are there. The quartz alone is worth something!

It is known that Austria once had gold-bearing diggings. But they were worked out centuries ago.

What if I get lucky and find something profitable?