comes
down and rubs along the grease it is caught and held. Each blow from
passing gravel only shoves it deeper into its bed. Most diamonds are
caught and held as soon as they fall from the hopper, and if you have a
rich concentrate it is not long before there is a whole ridge of
crystals, big and little, burrowing down into the grease and showing as
glassy specks in the yellow. A few of the bigger ones go down to the
second step before they get stuck. The third and last step is the
widest and is only there to make quite sure; very few diamonds get as
far as that. Every so often the flow is stopped so that a worker can
scrape off the grease, diamonds and all, and put it into a fine-wire
basket. This is placed in another bigger container and put over a hot
fire, where it is all boiled in water until the grease can be skimmed
off and the diamonds alone are left—a small handful out of a great mass
of rock. Four tons to a carat.
Throughout
the entire process, from mine to boiling pot, the diamonds have been
accompanied on their journey by natives. Natives cart supplies to the
mine lifts; the tools and sticks of dynamite and the spare parts for
machinery. Natives stand by respectfully while whites adjust the
explosives, and they hurry forward to help break up recalcitrant blocks
after the blast. They swarm over the grizzly, relieving jams and
coaxing the lumps through into trucks, and then they drive the trucks
through the long, dimly lit corridors. Two thousand natives man the
mines, and when their shift is over they are brought out by special
passages into their own shower rooms, and thence back to the compounds.
By special arrangement, very ingenÂiously, they have not gone out of
doors once. This is an im-
