month are shifted in this manner, and for every two million tons of sand, thirty pounds of diamonds are recovered.
Some
of the land when it has been stripped looks extraordinary; cut and
carved like old clay roads in the country that have been deeply rutted
in wet weather and then hardened in the sun, all this magnified as if
seen by Lilliputian eyes. This gray, dead, grooved earth was once the
floor of the sea. In the deep grooves, boulders and heavy pebbles
collected, and some of the heaviest of these pebbles were diamonds that
had been rolled along river bottom for many years, emptied into the
sea, and finally deposited on the terraces by wave action in shallow
water. Laid down in long beds along the grooves, this mixture of
pebbles filled up the irregularities of the sea floor and the chinks
between the boulders. Flat beds of gravel then covered the whole
system, sorted and re-sorted by underwater action of the waves. When
the terraced surface of the sea bottom was brought up and exposed to
air, it soon became covered by sand, blown about into dunes, and
ultimately stripped off by C.D.M.'s scoops. Now the bottom is laid
bare, and native workers follow in the wake of the scoops, scraping the
last of the gravel from the crevices and leaving the rock as naked to
the wind as it was eons ago.
A
large stretch of this stripped earth gave me one of the strangest
impressions I have ever had. It recalled feelings I used to get when I
looked at a picture in a geology textbook, by some imaginative artist
portraying the Jurassic period. He had got the same vast, gray, empty
feeling into his picture. The palm trees he had sketched sparsely in
the distance and the dinosaurs feeding on them did nothing to change
the atmosphere of
