Little is more coveted than gold. It has been that way for thousands of years and it will continue that way. Man’s attraction seems genetic.
Civilizations and people have risen to great prominence with it and an equal number of societies and people have been destroyed by it.
Gold infects fever on first discovery and does not leave. `
Further discoveries set a miner’s path. A miner may know family, work, love. But distant hills and streams now command a melancholy, unfulfilled longing.
As Kipling put it in The Explorer:
Till a voice, as bad as Conscience, rang interminable changes
On one everlasting Whisper day and night repeated—so:
“Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the Ranges—
“Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you. Go!”
The miner goes. If only in their mind, they go. Their last discovery may be two months old and two thousand miles away. But gold fever still burns.
That miner may now be at a desk or talking with friends at a restaurant, however, they are still in those hills or on the banks of that river. Hold a miner as friend. But understand they want to leave, if at least for a while. If they aren’t already gone.
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