She was aware that in a few years time she would die a slow horrible death. All her childhood from dawn until dusk had been spent knapping ultra-pure silica. Silica dust produces bleeding, lithification of the lungs, loss of lung capacity, coughing and a slow painful death while drowning in blood. She had seen women in her village die this way.

Even if she could read, she wouldn’t have read Agricola’s 1556AD book De Re Metallica translated by Herbert Hoover from Latin to English. Hoover worked in the mines of Broken Hill (NSW), Gwalia (WA), Bawdwin (Myanmar) and various places in China as a mining engineer before becoming one of the less illustrious presidents of the USA. However, unlike later presidents, he could read and understand Latin. By contrast, the current partially monolingual president and VP have difficulty stringing two words together or following a coherent train of thought.

Agricola wrote:

‘…some mines are so dry that they are entirely devoid of water and this dryness causes the workmen even more harm, for the dust, which is stirred and beaten up by digging, penetrates into the windpipe and lungs and produces difficulty in breathing… it eats away the lungs and implants consumption in the body.’

She wouldn’t have been aware of Calvert Holland’s 1843 AD description of the working conditions of cutlery-grinders in Sheffield who used silica-rich rocks for grinding and polishing:

‘The dust, which is thus every moment inhaled, undermines the vigour of the constitution, and produces permanent disease of the lungs, accompanied by difficulty of breathing, cough, and a wasting of the animal frame, often at an early age of twenty five.… Grinders’ asthma in its advanced stages admits neither of cure nor of any material alleviation.’

Large volumes of silica-laden steam some 20 million years ago ascended fractures in the volcanic rocks of Western Anatolia, Turkey. The fluid stripped minerals from the volcanic rocks and left behind porous silica pipes. Small amounts of alum (şap) and gold-bearing microcrystalline silica were also deposited. The silica was so pure, hard, even-textured and of such ultra-fine grain size that it was prized as grinding blocks for clay in ball mills at ceramic factories.

The silica mines were perched beneath the alum cliffs of the mountain called Şapdağ. Mining by men was by drilling and blasting with sizing by sledgehammer. Water cooled the drill bit. It also kept down the dust and, as a result, the men did not inhale silica dust. A group of girls and women sat in a circle on boulders on the edge of the cliff underneath a bamboo-and-reed hut knapping the sized boulders down to small cubic blocks. Knapping produced dust and sharp fragments of silica.

We went to the pine-slab hut and had çay with the foreman. The hut had a pot-belly stove in the centre for cooking, making tea and warmth. Around the pot-belly stove were four-gallon drums for seats, some wooden benches and a warped trestle table. Pinned to the wall were three home comforts. The then-statutory photograph of Kemal Ataturk, last year’s calendar from a ceramic company in Bursa and a large, faded colour photograph of all the mine workers.

One face on the photograph had been cut out. There was just an oval hole in place of the face of a woman. It appears that she was a young married woman who had the misfortune to be looked at by another man. That man was not her husband. Her head was lifted high enough for another man to look into her eyes. She now no longer works at the mine and all memory of this sinful woman had been erased. Another face in the photograph attracted my attention. It was that of a strikingly beautiful teenage girl, maybe eighteen years old, who had a great sense of presence. Her cotton-print pantaloons were tied at the waist and feet, she had a floral blouse and was partially covered by robes and a head scarf. In my mind, I called her the Şapdağ girl.

After a few cups of sweet çay, we climbed the cliff to inspect the geology of the silica mine. I asked the foreman if I could take photographs. The men posed for still-life photographs in their dirty ragged clothes. Such photographs could have been taken in the goldfields of California or Victoria in the mid-late 19th century. The miner’s clothing, footwear and lack of safety equipment were no different. No steel-capped boots, no long sleeves and trousers, no hard hats, no gloves, no dust masks, no eye protection and no spats. After long bitter strikes, especially the spud-and-onions strike in Broken Hill in 1919-1920, the mining unions in Australia forced changes now enshrined in state occupational health and safety acts and a minimum wage. The unions have now done their job. Time to say goodbye. (They now, of course, have far better things to worry about such as gender-bending, dividing the country by race, profiting from wind turbines, thuggery and supporting genocidal Hamas.)

The women looked on while the photographs were taken. They talked, laughed and tried to avoid eye contact. I noticed that the Şapdağ girl was among them. Many of the women had a rasping cough, including the Şapdağ girl. She was still in the same clothes from the photograph in the hut, was a little taller and older, maybe now in her early twenties. She was even more beautiful than in the photograph and her poise suggested that she was just not aware of how beautiful she was. She was confident and challenging and her brownish skin was covered in grey silica dust.

To my surprise, the foreman suggested that I photograph the women. One of them must have asked him. I suspect that because I was no threat to the social stability of the village and their women, he gave me permission. They wanted a group photograph. After the group photograph, the Şapdağ girl asked to be photographed alone. She removed her headscarf for the photographs and actually looked into my eyes. She smiled. Her greenish-blue eyes were piercing me, they followed me round like the eyes of the Mona Lisa. They never left me. What was she thinking?

It was fortunate that there was some employment for her within walking distance of her village she had to work and would have kept her extended family fed. Maybe she had even gone to school for a short time. Marriage would have been arranged but not to a young mine-worker who only had eyes for her and, if she didn’t die in childbirth, then the silica dust in her lungs would leave young orphans to repeat the cycle. She would have known this and accepted her fate, as is common in the Islamic world. A portrait photograph would be her immortality.

I returned to the Şapdağ silica mines after an absence of a few years. My photographs were hanging in the çay hut and the pit had advanced one more bench into the cliff. There were still young women knapping silica into cobbles. Some of them had the same rasping cough I had heard on my previous visit.

The Şapdağ girl was not there.

She would have been, if a watery mist for dust suppression had been used or if she had worn a 50-cent dust mask.