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CHAPTER XV
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THE MINING TOWNS
Kimberley
IMBERLEY,
the largest of the cluster of diamond towns on the Fields, is, like
the rest, the natural efflorescence of the mines near which it is
situated, and from which it derives its birth and being. Its mushroom
growth must have withered like so many other pretentious upstarts from
the mining fields, had it not been for the fact of its rising on ground
of such sustained richness and promise. While the diamond-studded blue
ground continues to show a persistent extension in depth and in
richness, and while man's energy and art avail to pierce and extract
it, the Kimberley of the surface will surely continue to flourish.
It
might indeed be said, without any stretch of imagery, that the modern
Kimberley is literally as well as essentially built up on the yield of
the mines. This has been brightly noted by the late Rev. James Thompson
in his pleasing sketch of the modern Kimberley. "Kimberley, as we know
it," he says, "with its streets and warehouses, and shops and schools
and churches, is largely built upon that strange mixture known as
debris, every atom of which has a story to tell if it could only speak.
As in any English town you can go down foot after foot through the
different strata representing the pavements or pathways upon which
successive generations of ancestors pressed their feet; so in Kimberley
we have beneath the present surface of our roadways the red soil on
which our fathers pitched their tents, and which their labor soon
covered up by spreading out all around them the heaps thrown out of
that great hole which now looks
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