‘Why, Kinghart, you are as mad as Mr. Sternworth,’ said Hamilton. ‘All savants have a craze for impossible discoveries. How can there be gold here?’
‘I took Mr. Hamilton to be a gentleman of logical mind,’ said the Englishman quietly. ‘Why should not the sequences from geological premisses be as invariable in Australia as in any other part of the globe. The South Pole does not invert the principle of cause and effect, I presume.’
‘I did not mean that,’ explained Hamilton, with something less than his ordinary decisiveness, ‘but there seems something so preposterous in a gold-field in a new country like this.’
‘It is not a new country, it is a very old one; there was probably gold here long before it was extracted from Ophir. But your men, in digging holes yesterday for the posts of that new hut, dislodged fragments of hornblendic granite slightly decomposed and showing minute particles of gold. I had not time to examine them, but I noted the formation accurately.’
‘What then?’ said his male hearers in a kind of chorus.
‘What then? Why, it follows inexorably that we are standing above one of the richest goldfields in the known world!’
‘But assuming for a moment, which God forbid,’ said Hamilton, ‘that gold—real gold—in minute quantities could be extracted from the stone you picked up, does it follow that rich and extensive deposits should be contiguous?’
‘My dear Hamilton, you surely missed the geological course in your college studies! Gold once found amid decomposed hornblendic granite, in alluvial drifts in company with water-worn quartz, has never failed to demonstrate itself in wondrous wealth. In the Ural Mountains, in Mexico, and most likely in King Solomon’s time, there were no little mines where once this precise formation was verified.’
‘I devoutly trust that it may not be in our time,’ said Argyll. ‘What a complete overturn of society would take place; in Australia, of all places! I should lose interest in the country at once.’
‘There might be inconvenience,’ said Mr. Kinghart reflectively, ‘but the Anglo-Saxon would be found capable of organising order. We need not look so far ahead. But of the day to come, when the furnace-chimney shall smoke on these hillsides, and miles of alluvial be torn up and riddled with excavations, I am as certain as that Glossopteris, of which I have seen at least three perfect specimens in shale, denotes coal deposits.’