274 THE DIAMOND MINES OF SOUTH AFRICA
ground for diamonds. See illustration between pages 274 and 275.
So
unknown to each other and blind to their future clash and union, Cecil
John Rhodes, the clergyman's son, and Barney Barnato, the London
shopboy, started abreast in the race for fortune on the same track. An
ordinary observer of the two young men would probably have picked
Barnato as the winner on such a track as the new Diamond Fields. Any
one could see at a glance that the young Hebrew was unsinkable, and
peculiarly fitted to make a good living in the stirring towns by his
business training, quick wit, and racial genius for trade, while the
English college student had no apparent fitting for success either as a
digger or a business man. Kipling has told of the straining of the new
ship, as a living thing, in the trial to find herself, and this fine
conception has literal truth in the application to young manhood. So
Cecil John Rhodes was forced to find himself, as he did, when he put
away his books to plunge into the whirling life of the Great White
Camps.
Tall,
gaunt, shy, the stripling sat at the diamond sorting table, overseeing
the Kafirs who scraped over the pebbles from his brother's claim, on a
little " floor " near the edge of the big Kimberley pit. Roughly
dressed, coated with dust, disdainful of any foppish touch, peculiarly
self-contained, full of novel ideas and aspirations rising, turning,
and shaping themselves in his mind, he was not one to mingle, like
Barnato, in every stir of the froth in the camps, or ready to jump,
like the London shopboy, into any gush of speculation, from a bet at
cards to an auction sale. Externally the two young men could scarcely
be more unlike than the little, chunky, bullet-headed, near-sighted,
mercurial Hebrew, taking a hand in current sport or traffic, and the
tall, thoughtful, young overseer, sitting moodily on a bucket, deaf to
the chatter and rattle about him, and fixing his blue eyes intently on
his work, or on some fabric of his brain.
Yet
both were alike in their expanding ambition and power to grapple and
mould in their distinctive ways the opportunities about them. Both had
keen foresight, and extraordinary com-
