|
THE RUSH TO KIMBERLEY
|
165
|
||
|
|
|||
|
His
neighbors nocked first to the farm, and the thrifty widow Visser was
pleased to welcome them, and permitted them to dig in her spruit, on
allotted patches of twenty feet square, for which each paid her a
license fee of £2 a month. The
phlegmatic Boers were not wildly excited by the prospect of fortune hid
in the spruit, but diamond hunting was an agreeable diversion from dull
farming, and they came with their wives and children in their big
canvas-covered wagons, and spread out through the green valley like
country folk at a picnic. The children delighted in their search for
pretty pebbles and soon filled their pockets with garnets and agates ;
but the digging in the spruit was often so laborious that the farmers
were content to squat on the ground and puff their long pipes while
their black servants did the digging and rock heaving. When natives
were not engaged as diggers, the farmers and their sons indolently
shovelled out the gravel in heaps to be sorted by their wives and
children.
Underneath
the red surface soil filled with pebbles, there was a layer of
calcareous clay, varying in thickness from a few feet to twelve or
more, covering drifts and pockets of gravel thickly sprinkled with
heavy boulders of greenstone and basalt. It was necessary to pry up and
tug out these boulders in order to reach the underlying gravel, and
this task was no child's play. Then the gravel was pitched out of the
holes, rudely sorted by dry sifting in sieves, and picked over by hand
in search of the precious stones. In some pockets there was quite a
sprinkling of diamonds, garnets and peridot, mixed with coarse gravel,
and the returns far exceeded the license charge; but the diamond
deposit was scattered as irregularly as that of the Vaal River field,
and many of the workers toiled for weeks on their claims without
finding anything more precious than the jawbones and teeth of a hyena
or jackal.1
Attention
had hardly been called to the diggings at Jagers-fontein when a still
more remarkable discovery was made in the month of September, 1870, at
Dutoitspan,2 on the farm of Dorst-
1 "Among the Diamonds," 1870-187 I.
- The
original and correct form of this name was " Du Toit's Pan," or the pan
or pond of du Toit, the name of the man who first owned the farm. Both
Du Toit's Pan and Dutoitspan are now used.
|
|||
|
|
|||