or
main street there were three hotels, several diamond merchants'
offices, a wholesale spirit and provision store, a bakery and
confectioner's shop, a drug dispensary, butchers' shops, eating
houses, bars, club and billiard rooms, and other miscellaneous shops
and resorts. On the edge of these white-walled cities, and on the
slopes of all the neighboring hills, were scattered the huts of wood or
dirty canvas or mud-plastered stones, where the native blacks huddled
together. When even this cover was lacking, some slept in tents, or in
burrows scraped in the hillsides. How many diamond seekers were massed
in these camps at the height of the rush can hardly be reckoned with
any approach to exactness. There may have been fifty thousand whites
and blacks on the Fields, for the flow to Dutoitspan is said to have
mounted as high as forty thousand shortly after the opening of the
Vooruitzigt farm mines.
