acquired enough pumps to take care of all the mines in the area.
On
its fourth birthday—July 16, 1875—the Kimberley Mine was flourishing as
never before. The diggers kept hauling out the yellow earth, diamond
brokers and buyers, financiers, and merchants kept arriving, and the
settlement, with its tents and iron shacks and brick houses, kept
growing, until it merged with the settlements around the De Beers Mine,
Buitfontein, and Dutoitspan. Kimberley was no longer merely a camp; it
was a town. But it was like no other town on the earth—a town where, as
one observer put it, "deep kaffir songs, laughter, the crowing of
cocks, an occasional shot, all echoed with eerie distinctness about
(an) eccentric stage on which a great play was being so inexorably
enacted." And then, at the height of Kim-berley's prosperity, the
diggers ran into something that they had feared all along. At a depth
of about seventy feet, they came to the bottom of the yellow soil.
Under it was a greenish-blue ground that seemed hard, and this, they
were convinced, was bedrock; as each man reached it, he packed up and
moved off; if he wasn't bothered by scruples, he might cover it with
yellow earth and sell his claim to an unsuspecting newcomer before
departing. The days of the Kimberley Mine, Dutoitspan, Buitfontein—all
of them—seemed numbered.
Then,
in 1876, a tremendous discovery was made. The credit for it belongs to
Dr. W. Guybon Atherstone, of Grahamstown, who had assured Jack O'Reilly
that his klip was a diamond. Atherstone reasoned that since the
yellow soil wasn't alluvial it must be of volcanic origin, and that the
diamonds in it must have come from deep underground with other molten
rock. Therefore, he felt, the blue ground might be worth digging into.
A few diggers tried their picks on it, and it turned out not
