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56
DIAMOND
stretches. But that had been built and used for years, and I.D.B. people don't drag down quite such long sentences any more; it was obviously not what Mr. Van der Westhuizen meant. I decided to wait and not interrupt him. He was still talking about digging.
"It's a good, healthy life, as you'll see for yourself," he said, "and there's always a chance of making a find. That's the ex­citing thing about digging; there's always a chance. Remember the Jonker diamond? That was found by a digger."
We were approaching a strange setup near the road; in fact, it was so near that it would have stood in our way if we had gone straight ahead. The road obligingly deflected, however, and swung around it in a wide detour.
"That's the way it is in the fields," said Mr. Van der West­huizen, stopping the car where the road started to turn. "You turn around a minute and take your eye off the path you came in by, and ten to one you find a ditch there when you start back."
We got out and stepped over various piles of rubble, and made our way to the edge of a pit in the bare red earth. Three natives were busily employed in it, digging deeper with a small mechanical shovel, swinging it around by hand and cranking the arm. As the shovel's jaws bit into the ground it encountered a boulder too large to shift. Shouting at each other, the men stopped cranking and began to wrestle bodily with the rock. It all seemed to go rather slowly and inefficiently in the baking sun, and I looked with mild wonder at a great heap of similar boulders that had been piled up around the diggings. The ex­cavation was already six or seven feet deep and clearly repre­sented a vast amount of toil.