I have a slender ring with a glowing nugget of Guyana gold, accented with pale side slips of grooved platinum, a poignant parting girlhood gift from my older sister as she tearfully left our Georgetown home permanently, decades ago, for a new life in the Netherlands. Glance at wedding bands, the shining studs in the ears, the tack on a tie or the thin bracelet you may dare to wear, and stop to consider its real remarkable origins.
In the hinterland, where acres of trees once stood, the precious substance may have been water-blasted from a wasted, pockmarked landscape of slippery pits and stagnant pools, plucked as a dull, tiny fragment from a meandering muddle of mud and sand by an artisanal miner’s weary, wrinkled fingers. If mere dust, it would have likely been mixed with slithering quicksilver to form an amalgam, then heated and the toxic mercury vaporised, leaving behind a little lump of gold.
