“Lucky baby,” he said. The men who do this work are called “jiggers” and they call the sieves “baby.”
We watched his every move. Around and around the sieve went. He paused. We stretched our necks to see but he merely scooped off the lighter top gravel that his circular motion had forced up, then continued.
Over and over he repeated this, for about an hour, continually washing it, the water dripping through the fine mesh of the sieve. Then it was ready. With a final “swish” of the sieve and another washing, with the last handful of gravel brushed off, the contents, just a few handfuls of material, were dumped on a crude table and spread out with a sweep of the hand.
“Here’s one!”
It looked bright enough, but Lewis, who had been prospecting there and had seen them mine diamonds, had learned the difference between the dull sparkle of ordinary quartz and the brilliant sheen of diamonds; he took up the particle, pressed it between two knife blades and crushed it.
“Everything here except diamonds can be crushed by that sort of pressure,” he said.
“Here’s one!” I picked it out. It would not crush.
“Yes. That’s a diamond. About half a carat,” said Lewis.
I have that tiny glittering pebble now and hope to always keep it. The first diamond from our mine! We found a few more in that lot, none very large, but all of them of value. None are too small, in fact, to be of some value. We find them in various colors, pure white, which is the average sort; brilliant blue white, the most valuable and rare; pink or rose, also quite valuable; and yellow, not so valuable. Also a few green and black. Most of the stones we get down there are too small for jewelry, and are used in commerce. Drills are made of them and machinery for boring, and for probably a hundred different uses in manufacture.
