crystal
which he hastily took to a buyer. The buyer looked at it closely,
sneered, put it on one of his metal weights, and brought down another
weight on it with a great blow. The fact that the crystal splintered
was proof to both of them that it hadn't been a diamond. In view of
what is known today about diamonds, Mr. Cohen may have been grievously
wronged.
There was a
narrow squeak at the Premier in June 1954, 1 learned; a diamond
weighing four hundred and twenty-six and a half carats appeared on the
grease table, nipped and gnawed slightly at one end by the machinery
but miraculously whole. It was strange that such a whopping stone
should have come through intact; anything of that size really has no
business escaping the jaws of efficiency in the journey from mine to
grease table. The officials at the Premier showed me the diamond. It is
gloriously clear and a pure blue-white, but, like its distinguished
predecessor the Cullinan, it is not a perfect octahedron. It is a good
deal longer than it is thick, and one end is smaller than the other,
which may be one reason it survived the machine. Luckily, only the
small end was caught in the crusher.
A
few years ago, the Premier people had a less fortunate experience;
some fragments that appeared pretty much all at once on the grease
table brought the men in charge to the melancholy conclusion that a
very large diamond of superior quality had been crushed, and they were
able to reconstruct enough of it to get a fairly good idea of the
tragic loss they had incurred. It fell to the lot of the engineer who
told me about the incident to break the news to Sir Ernest Oppenheimer.
Sir Ernest loves diamonds with a passionate fervor, and he took it hard.
"He said, 'Do you realize your machines have destroyed one of the noblest things in nature?'" the engineer recalled. "So I
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