taught
boxing, and tried his hand at running a cabaret. As the market
improved, however, he became what was known as a "kopje-walloper," a
man who traveled from one digger's house to another, buying stones. He
earned a reputation for keen judgment and intelligence. At the time
when the yellow ground, which was believed to be the best pay dirt, was
exhausted and gave way to harder blue ground underneath, Bar-nato was
one of the first to figure that this wasn't necessarily the end of the
diamond mines. He listened to arguing geologists, and it seemed to him
that Dr. Guybon Atherstone of Grahamstown made the most sense. You will
recall it was Atherstone who argued that since the yellow soil was
obviously not water-laid it must be of volcanic origin; the diamonds in
it must therefore be the result of volcanic activity. Barnato told
himself that there was then no reason why more diamonds shouldn't occur
farther down, either actually in the blue ground or underneath it.
While
the savants wrangled, he began buying claims as near as he could get
them to the middle of the tube, or pipe, of ground that made up the
Kimberley Mine. He had formed a private theory to add to Atherstone's
which as it happened didn't work out quite so conclusively; since the
stones found in the yellow ground were often bigger and better than
those the diggers had scratched earlier out of water-laid deposits, it
followed that this was because they were nearer the center of the world
and so under greater pressure. Therefore, the deeper one dug, the
bigger they were sure to be. (Here, for once, his shrewdness failed
him.) By the time the blue ground was discovered to be productive, and
when the individual diggers gave up because of the depth problems,
Barney already had a lot of
