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DIAMOND MINES OF SOUTH AFRICA 229
States,
served for years as a doorstep for a native, until a passing stranger
saw the possibility and got out the fortune which lay under it.
Van
Niekirk's offer to buy the stone is also suggestive. A Boer does not
often offer money for a thing unless it is worth money. His
consultation with his friend, and the sending of it to an expert,
indicates that he had heard of diamonds in that section.
Whenever
the first stone was found and by whomsoever, the notoriety gained by
that exhibited at the Paris Exhibition, turned the faces of adventurers
toward the interior of South Africa and they began to drift that way.
This
was in 1867. There was at that time a Moravian Mission at a place
called Pniel on the southern banks of the Vaal river. On the opposite
side was a settlement known as Klipdrift which has since become Barkly
West. It was about these two places, but chiefly at Pniel, that the
first diggers gathered. Most of them were from Cape Colony. A knowledge
of things was disseminated more rapidly there, and the people were
quicker to respond to an enterprise which took one from home, than the
Boers.
Imagine
the country. Far from civilization. A great plateau of warty kopjes
among barren mountains; the wide stretches of stone and gravel, hidden
in spots by a sparse vegetation of brush and grass. Here and there,
many miles apart, Boer farm houses, or kraals of the natives. Wandering
wide, sheep and cattle on occasional acres; the springbok and other
wild game browsing unmindful over unmolested square miles. A borderland
between a new Boer settlement and the
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