170 THE DIAMOND MINES OF SOUTH AFRICA
no
prospect to him that the Dutoitspan ridge still held anything to reward
the labor of penetrating a rock bed. But after many prospectors had
ransacked the soil of their claims and abandoned them, one of the
workers on the ridge or elevated land had the fancy to see what might
possibly lie under the stratum of limestone, and determined to cut a
few feet, at least, through the rock. He found that the limestone soon
grew so soft and rotten that it could be split easily by the stroke of
a pick and the lumps crushed by the blow of a shovel. This rotten rock
fused soon with a curious decomposed breccia of a yellowish color, and
the sifting of this ground showed, to his amazed eyes, the presence of
diamonds sparkling on his sieve or on the sorting table.1
With
the spreading of this discovery there came another rush of diggers to
the ridge that soon covered every patch of unoccupied ground on its
slopes. Foot after foot the mining pits sunk through the soft cement,
which was often so decomposed that the point of a pick pierced it like
a mass of dried mud. Instead of decreasing in number, the quantity of
gems in a claim often increased with the deepening of the pits, and the
proportion of large rough diamonds was far greater below the depth of a
fathom than in the surface soil or the crust of the limestone stratum.
Payton says that fragments of volcanic rocks — green trap and basalt
chiefly—were scattered through the limestone and yellow ground ; but
there were very few large boulders, and the work of mining was far less
laborious than any pit-driving in the river bank at Klip-drift and
Pniel."
Some
cut adits at varying angles in the slope of the ridge, and carried out
their ground in buckets or wheelbarrows. This method of mining shunned
the toil of lifting heavy buckets out of the pits, but it was dangerous
from the frequent ground slides and rock falls, and caused many a
wrangle when adit lines crossed or pits met the tunnels. Others opened
their claims by cutting a series of descending stages, diminishing in
size step by step, so that the pit bottom was reached by passing down a
1 "The Diamond Diggings of South Africa," Payton, 187Z. 2 Ibid.
