mines
ever dug by man. There is no digging in any of the pits these days, and
hasn't been for half a century or more, but beneath three of them there
are active mines, with shafts and tunnels and trams and all the other
paraphernalia of modern mining. The most famous of the pits, the
abandoned Kimber-ley Mine, also known as the Big Hole, which lies on
the northwestern outskirts of the town, is about thirteen hundred feet
deep; it is half full of water now, and even the surface of the water
looks, and is, a long way down. The years have modified what must have
been the supreme ugliness of the land around the Big Hole and the
lesser holes, and the town is now reasonably full of tree-lined
avenues, flowers, and little ornamental pools, but the greenness is of
that precarious, stubborn kind familiar to people who live in the drier
regions of our West. The tailings—waste rock and earth—from the
enormous cavities were piled up over a wide area spreading out from
their rims. Tailings are a familiar part of any mine landscape; after
all, one has to put the stuff somewhere. The flat-topped mounds from
the gold mines have long been a vexation to Johannesburg, but
Kimberley has been luckier. Cyanide is used in the extraction of gold,
and nothing will grow on gold tailings until it is leached out—an
arduous and expensive process—but diamond tailings aren't banen, and
the ground around the Kimberley mine has been taken over by
camel's-thom trees and scrubby grass. It is a pleasant, parklike region
of small hills that you can drive through without ever suspecting that
every cubic inch of earth for many feet down was hauled out of the
nearby pit, and weathered, and crushed, and sifted, and scrutinized,
before it was thrown aside. The streets of central Kimberley are broad
and well paved,
Flickr
Stumbleupon
Scribd
