Chapter Eleven.
A Visit to a Diamond Mine.
As Dainty Laure and Kate Darcy stood on the edge of the Kimberley Mine, it was with a feeling of awe that Kate looked down into its depths filled with Kafirs and their white overseers, and saw those endless cable wires extending from the brink to the bottom of the mine. The huge buckets resembled spiders at work, ascending until they reached the edge of the bowl, when they would drop their spoils into cars which stood waiting for them, and which in turn would crawl off and away to the “floor,” where they deposited their load, leaving the spiders to return to their task in the bottom of the mine.
On the arrival of Donald, Schwatka, and the ladies at the Company’s office, they were conducted to the brink of the shaft sunk by a countryman of Kate’s, which was the first successful attempt made in that direction.
Entering an elevator about six feet square, which was waiting to receive them, they slowly descended to the depth of two hundred feet. The earth had been probed to three times that depth, but the shaft had not as yet been sunk deeper. From the bottom of the shaft was a tunnel reaching to the mine, a distance of two hundred feet. It seemed like looking through an inverted telescope.
In this tunnel was laid a tramway, on which cars were constantly going to and from the mine.
They walked through the tunnel until an opening was reached, then stepped out on a ledge, and found themselves in the mine, on the precious blue soil; with hundreds of Kafirs working below, under the inspection of overseers, who would occasionally draw a gem from under the spade of one of the delvers. From there they looked upward to the sun, glaring hot and bright over them, and then to the brink of the mine, where men seemed like small boys moving about.
It was a strange sensation to stand and gaze around on this comparatively recent discovery, and contemplate what had been accomplished, and reflect on the strange chance that had unearthed so much magnificent wealth.
“Mr Laure, how has this bed of diamonds been formed?” asked Miss Darcy.
“The mine is thought to be the ‘pipe’ of an extinct volcano, and it is supposed that the diamondiferous soil containing garnets, ironstone, crystals, and diamonds, has been thrown up by the action of the great heat of this volcano,” replied Donald, “and there seems to be no end of the glorious riches of this bed of diamonds.”