Out walking near Bawdie, Dr. Sarpong paused next to a river turned sand-coloured by people dumping mining waste and stirring up river sediment to pan for gold.
“This is water people are drinking,” he said.
It would not surprise me in the least if this material, gold, plays an important function in the earth, and the evident hysteria around it, the curses that come with having it in your possession (like a slit throat), may be in some mysterious way connected to the greedy manner in which it is extracted and coveted.
Although, this would be called animism. I don't know. If there is some curse attached, it might be explained with a quasi-cosmic-horror type narrative, interconnected with the fuel sucked from the earth, as well as water itself. The water is "polluted." What is going on here "metaphysically"?