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THE ANCIENT ADAMAS
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the
dry season, thousands of villagers, men, women, and children, began to
search every cleft and cranny in the river beds for diamonds. With
ankovas, or light picks, the men broke and scraped out the
diamond-bearing bed and piled the broken ground on the river bank. Then
the women scooped up ground from the heaps with their daers. These were
shovel-shaped boards, about five feet long, with ridged sides and
hollowed in the centre. Resting one end of the daer on the ground and
tilting the other slightly, they washed away the clay and sand and
picked off" the rock splinters and larger pebbles. After this rude
sorting they spread out the finer gravel on a smaller board, the
kootla, and scraped it over very carefully to separate the diamond
crystals and grains of gold. When there was a level stretch along a
bank, the native workers would sometimes make an enclosure on this
flat, with a low wall pierced at several points by small waterways.
Then they would dump the diamond-bearing ground into this shallow basin
and wash away the clay and dirt with running water. After two or three
washings they would pick out the larger stones from the cleaned gravel,
and dry the remainder, to be picked over on their kootlas or on any
smooth, hard flooring.
Perhaps
the most laborious diamond digging in India has been in the pits of
Panna and neighboring villages in the Province of Bundelkhund. Here
the diamond-bearing conglomerate was buried under a cover of heavy
ground, ranging in places over thirty feet in thickness. To reach the
diamond strata large pits were dug, with inclines leading to the bottom
in or below the conglomerate. There was no drainage, and the diamond
diggers were forced to work in the rainy season knee-deep in water,
breaking the conglomerate, and filling baskets which were hauled by
hand to the top of the pits. In this primitive fashion the diamond beds
of India were opened, and diamonds are to-day won by these simple
methods or others essentially similar.1
1
"A Treatise on Diamonds and Precious Stones," John Mawe, London, 1813.
" A Treatise on Gems," Feuchtwanger, New York, 1867. "Precious Stones
and Gems," Streeter, London, 1892.
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