of
flooding, the railways; they were all the paraphernalia of a mine de
luxe, as long as we walked along the tunnel walled in by reef. Where
the blue ground began and blasting was being carried on, the impression
was different. Here it was dark except for the lanterns carried by the
workers. Here, in spite of air-conditioning, was a smell of explosives
and wet ground. Here it was possible, looking down at the grizzly
through which the hunks of rock were dropped, to believe at last that
we were hundreds of feet down in the earth.
Because
the Premier is the pet mine of the De Beers group it has a final touch
of elegance the others cannot claim: a crusher inside the mine instead
of out in the open. Grounded in the bedrock a thousand feet below the
surface, foundations reinforced by concrete, it does its mighty work
without producing any vibration, and considering the noise it makes,
this seems very unnatural. It is possible by standing on a platform
close to the machine to see part of the crushing process. Great jagged
lumps fall into the hopper and gradually disappear; there is an
incredibly loud crunching, and the gravel that results is carried off
on an endless belt in immense containers, or skips, and hoisted through
the main shaft to the plant outside. It is hard to realize that this
dark green-blue stuff is diamond-bearing, or even if one grants that,
it is still hard to suppose that the crystals can be extracted. The
statistics, too, are discouraging; nearly four tons of blue ground must
be crushed and washed and screened and all the rest of it to produce
one carat of diamond. Nevertheless, even at this rate, diamond mining
pays. Once that idea is firmly fixed in the mind one begins to mistrust
the efficiency of this admirably efficient method at the Premier. In
vain the officials assured me that recovery was quite adequately
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