Forty percent of the world’s gold formed in the Witwatersrand reef, a stretch of barren, sulfur-capped hills separating the open air townships from the glittering skyscrapers of Johannesburg. Low-lying hills surround the city, and form the boundaries of what was once a lake basin, into which were carried the immeasurable gold deposits by rivers to the north. That gold built the Republic of South Africa, and each hilltop seems to buttress the very sky, as finely-shaven as if every last fleck of gold was accounted for and plucked like the violet flowers adorning the hills, highways, and ev
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