near
the excavation. We drove over and jolted to a stop there. "I'll just
ask this fellow," said Mr. Van der Westhuizen. A mongrel dog came out
and yapped at us, and a tan-colored man followed. He knew Mr. Van der
Westhuizen, and they conversed for a while in Afrikaans.
Mr.
Van der Westhuizen came back and reported: "He says they've all gone;
they went to the new diggings in that fissure Mr. Bishop was talking
about. That's the way they are, you know; they chase around after the
latest find." He climbed into the car, waved to the colored man, and
backed out to the road. "Some of these fellows haven't got the money to
outfit themselves, you know, but they have friends. Diggers stick
together. If a man makes a good strike he often backs other diggers; he
buys their outfits for them and pays his share of the boys and water,
in return for half the takings out of the claim. A digger can get
through a lot of money that way. In fact, that's what usually happens
to it."
He
talked some more about Lichtenburg. The diamond market was dangerously
low in 1927 when that big discovery was made, and De Beers was not
overjoyed, to put it mildly. But for the ordinary digger the name
Lichtenburg still has a special luster that only the bigger strike at
Alexander Bay, in South-West Africa, has ever dimmed. Of all the men
Mr. Van der Westhuizen knew who made fortunes at Lichtenburg, he could
think of only one still alive and in possession of a fair amount of his
money.
"His
family put it into a farm at the Cape," he said. "The rest—well, they
kept on looking for diamonds, and every single one, if he's dead, died
broke, and the rest are broke as well, you can bet, wherever they are."
