the farm, was much more reasonable. Cullinan finally got it for fifty-two thousand pounds.
It
is worth noting, however, that Prinsloo's spirit is far from dead among
his fellow Afrikaners; their process of reasoning still shows signs of
similarity to his. One of the De Beers geologists told me a story he
heard just before the last World War: it still haunts him. There was a
farmer who set out to drill a well. Much to his disgust—for well
drilling is very costly—he didn't strike water. All he got was oil. He
swore, and capped the borehole, and went away to look for water
elsewhere.
Two
years after the Premier was opened, in 1905, it was being worked as an
open pit, seventy-five acres in area and thirty feet deep. Late one
afternoon in June the manager, Mr. Frederick Wells, happened to notice
something glittering in the sun's slanting rays, high up in the side
wall of the crater, nearly at the surface. He climbed up and dug the
thing out of the earth with his penknife, growing more incredulous with
every jab of the blade. Even for South Africa, where stupendous finds
are not uncommon, Wells's was enough to make anybody question its
possibility—a great heavy chunk of blue-white diamond so big that he
couldn't close his hand over it. He made double-quick time to the
office to test and weigh it. It was a stone of 302434 carats, much the
biggest diamond that had ever been seen. Mr. Wells received two
thousand pounds as a bonus, and the diamond was named the "Cullinan."
As everybody in the diamond world knows, the giant was bought in 1907
by the government of the Transvaal for a hundred and fifty thousand
pounds and presented to King Edward VII. The King had it cut into nine
main stones. The biggest of these is set in the royal scepter of
Britain's crown jewels, where it holds first place.
