18 THE DIAMOND MINES OF SOUTH AFRICA
the days of Tavernier's travels (1669 a.d.). Here
was the famous mine, " Gani-Coulour," that he saw, where sixty
thousand natives were then at work, and " Gani-Parteal," and twenty
more of lesser note.1 Gani-Coulour has probably been
identified with the modern Kolur on the Kistna, Gani being simply a
slight change of the Persian " Kan-i" or " mine of," so that
Gani-Coulour is the mine of Kolur as Gani-Parteal is the mine of
Parteal.2 The surface ground of this district along the
rivers is a black " cotton soil" washed down by floods, and underlying
this at an average depth of twenty feet is a layer of broken sandstone,
quartz, jasper, flint, and granite, interspersed with masses of
calcareous conglomerate, forming the stratum in which the diamonds were
embedded. When the black soil had been dug up laboriously and carried
away, the diamond-bearing layer was exposed, and was removed,
piecemeal, to level stretches of ground or prepared floors, where it
was scraped and picked over by hand to find the diamonds.
The
whole of this rich mining district and a tract stretching for many
miles away was loosely called Golconda, or the Kingdom of Golconda, by
foreign traders and travellers, because the town of Golconda was its
capital and the trading centre where the diamonds from the mines were
chiefly bought and sold. The only mark of this old mart to-day is a
deserted fort near Hyderabad, but its fame will endure until
traditionary Golconda ceases to be a standard of riches.
Next
in importance and prestige to the mines of Golconda was the diamond
field of Sumbulpur, in the Central Provinces, between the rivers
Mahanadi and Brahmini. The diamonds of this district were remarkable
for their purity and beauty, though no very large crystals have been
traced to this region, and the few which the washings still yield rank
with the finest of the Indian stones. Here the precious stones were
found chiefly along the course of the Mahanadi, in a stratum of tough
clay and pebbles stained reddish by iron oxide. At the opening of
1 "Voyages en Turquie, en Perse et aux Indes," Tavernier, Paris, 1676.
2 " Manual of Geological Survey of India," Vol. III.
