I Break Three Times Into Diamonds 157
monds.
He laughed. "Third time lucky," he said. "This time you are going to
hit the sky." But that is a story I must reserve for a later chapter.
What
is this diamond, this substance of great price, in which so much
capital is sunk and which has captured the imagination of the world?
Every schoolboy knows that chemically it is pure carbon, like graphite,
or black-lead, and charcoal. It is the crystalline form of carbon
produced at great pressures and high temperatures in the bowels of the
earth. But a diamond crystal in the rough, before it is faceted and
polished, is not attractive unless you know its cash value.
Apart
from being practically the hardest substance known, topping the scale
with the number 10—one degree harder than sapphire—diamond is also the
most imperishable of all substances and the most lustrous when cut and
polished. And yet it was almost unknown in Europe until comparatively
recent times. The Greeks had an "adamas", or diamond, literally
"the invincible substance". But it was a name they applied to anything
very hard, some metals, for instance, or the emery stone, and the first
specific reference to the diamond as the adamas is encountered in the writings of Manilius (a.d. 16), who speaks of it as being more valuable than gold.
Eighty
years later Pliny the naturalist speaks of diamond as being the most
valuable gem known. He names several varieties, but only one, coming
from India, can have been a true diamond. India, indeed, as far as we
can tell, was the principal ancient source of diamonds, and even India
