that there wasn't a scrap of paint left on the front of the car; it was all naked metal, including the front license plate.
When
Merensky found diamonds in his test pit he was luckier than he knew,
as were the prospectors who first turned up gem stones on the Lüderitz
beaches. They might have stumbled instead on the beaches near
Oranjemund where sand dunes lie on top of the diamondiferous gravel,
and a test pit would have to be sunk thirty or forty feet to reach it.
The diamonds of Oranjemund, in gravel which has sometimes been
cemented into a conglomerate in the course of time, lie buried under
sandy mountains. Moreover, because dunes are dunes and shift their
position with every sandstorm, it is impossible to guess, going from
one location to another, how deep pay dirt may lie.
Small
wonder that the gentlemen on the board of the Syndicate found it hard
to readjust their ideas back in 1929 and accept the terraces of
South-West Africa as bona fide mines. They are in no way similar to the
conventional blue-ground pipes of Kimberley, because they are opencast
mines and no tunneling is required to reach the deposit. An average of
twenty feet, and sometimes as much as forty feet of sand must be
stripped off before the rock is reached. When production first started
up in 1935 the sand was taken off by the sort of steam shovels that are
used in building operations: dredgers and scoops. Today these scoops
have vastly increased in size and elevation. I saw them at work,
mounted on Sherman tanks that serve both for foundation and transport:
as the ground is stripped the machinery moves forward, and all the
while the sand is being run off by conveyer belt. Two million tons a
