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Perhaps the most colorful of these prospectors was a once-wealthy Northerner named Sayer who had died
in the town some years before our debut, though the monuments to his follies still stand and his little
Dutch house—built in defiance of tropical heat—still faces the public square. He had spent fifty
thousand dollars, twenty years, and finally his life, in his search for metallic sunshine, but we were
heartily assured that only his own foolishness had prevented him from uncovering a vast fortune.
Don Martin spoke excellent Castile, and I was not too tried in understanding him, but Don Jose had lost
his teeth back in the early days of his prospecting career, and the hillman language lisped would have
been impossible had it not been for the arm waving and excruciating pantomime which accompanied each
of his stories. In Jose’s stories of Sayer, he would imitate the Americano’s method of speech,
and as Sayer had forgotten most of the English language during his long stay in Corozal, the result was
ear-splitting.
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In company with Jose and Martin we inspected the concrete dams—now almost demolished—which Sayer had erected for his sluices, and we heard how rain would invariably drive the river over its banks to sweep away the workings just before any gold could be recovered.
After locating a likely spot, Carper built a test sluice from discarded boards, and we began the task of sluicing the Negro in hope of fabulous riches. The sluice itself was a simple affair—a twenty-foot box without a top, a foot deep and a foot wide, with riffles inserted at four-inch intervals crosswise down its entire length. The most work associated with this sluice fell on my shoulders, for no one would expect an engineer to stoop to common labor, and the natives were not quite strong enough to play beanbag with four hundred pound gunnysacks. I constructed a long dam across the river by laying these sacks end to end, three high, in such a way that the required amount of water—six inches of drop to every twelve feet of sluice to a depth of seven inches—would flow through our box.
Six natives at fifty cents apiece per day heaved gold-bearing gravel into that box while a gasoline pump kept their pit dry of the water which seeped in from the river.
It was not too much to expect that we would uncover quantities of gold dust, for on our way to the sluice each morning we passed the famous graveyard of Corozal where alluvial gold exists in abundance. When one dies in the village his only expenses are his priest and coffin, for the grave will be dug in return for the privilege of washing the extracted dirt for gold. And it is claimed that six thousand dollars in nuggets were once found in a single grave.
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