which
the workers made tunnels, or drifts, straight in to the blue ground.
Some people tried drilling and blasting the blue ground as fast as
possible in order to get it out before the reef fell. None of this was
of any avail in the long run; it cost too much. By 1881 the landslides
in the Kimberley Mine were becoming so catastrophic that a man who
went down into the pit was taking his life into his hands, and it
seemed, indeed, that all Barnato's money and drive had been wasted.
Then,
in 1883, the Kimberley Mine made the most spectacular of its repeated
comebacks. For years there had been talk in the diamond fields about
underground mining, and now Kimberley Central had no choice but to try
it. The company sank great shafts into the ground surrounding the pit,
and it dug tunnels leading from the shafts into the heart of the blue
ground under the mine. There was a good deal of trial and error, but by
the end of 1884 Kimberley Central was running a scientific underground
mining operation, resembling, in all its important particulars, the
method used for mining diamonds today. In all this, Bamato, not Rhodes,
led the way. Landslides did not become a crucial problem at the De
Beers Mine until 1886, and it was in that year that Rhodes sank his
shafts and dug his tunnels.
By
1887, Rhodes and Barnato were fully established as the two big men of
Kimberley. Rhodes was thirty-four years old, and Barnato thirty-five.
Rhodes, as chairman of the De Beers Mining Company, was in full control
of the De Beers Mine. Barnato wasn't that firmly in the saddle, and his
fingers were itching to take over the remaining companies in the
Kimberley Mine. As for Rhodes, his fingers were now itching to take
over all the mines in and around the town of Kimberley—primarily
