PARADISE —LIMITED	295
	lonely space, and slow, inevitable time, and massive moving water over the gray ground. The miners dig trenches, occasionally pausing to blast the gravel where it is cemented too strongly for simple digging. In the trenches I was taken to see there were natives carefully digging out gravel, which may have been diamondiferous, from between the great boulders exposed in the slit, and throwing it into small cars that took it up to an extempore washing plant rigged up nearby. The washing process for the test was the primitive method used by the early Vaal River diggers, rather like "panning" for gold. The gravel was sieved and put into a rotary separator. Everything was done by hand, though the largest and most elaborate plant money could supply was within a few miles of the site. This was a simple trench, dug to prove whether or not it was in diamondiferous land, and in hunting for diamonds nothing can take the place of the human eye. Where a trench is already known to be productive, special precautions are taken; every bit of gravel must be got out of the crevices. When the bulk of it has been shoveled out the rest is swept up with small brooms, and every tiny pothole, too, must be emptied and swept clean. Workers who come across diamonds during this delicate process are given bonuses pour encourager les autres. C.D.M. are not overly fussy about searching their boys at that stage, but when the time comes for them to leave the compound it is different. I saw a contingent of workers preparing to be flown home to Ovamboland after their tour of duty. Their persons and their luggage were fluoro-scoped just in case they were trying to take diamonds out, but nobody was caught. White workers, too, are fluoroscoped when they take their leave of Oranjemund. It is not easy to smuggle