Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/481

Rh carats, and in the jewel-case of the Countess of Dudley, is valued at £25,000. Upon the news that such a gem as this had been found, which was spread in 1869, a "rush" of diggers took place to the Orange River. It was on the Vaal, however, that they found the diamonds, and they scattered their camps for a hundred miles or so along its course, where the washings still yield more or less satisfactory returns. The importance of this district was destined to be speedily eclipsed by the discovery, in 1871, of the famous Kimberley mine—first known as the "Colesberg Kopje," or Colesberg Hill, because it was discovered by three men from Colesberg, afterward by the suggestive name of "De Beer's New Rush," and finally by its present title—and its companion mines De Beer's, Bultfontein, and Dutoitspan. These mines are situated some twenty miles south of the river-mines, in a sandy, treeless country, that contrasts most unfavorably with the green and shady valley of the Vaal, and are so placed with reference to one another that a circle three and a half miles in diameter will inclose them all.

The Kimberley mine was opened to the public on the 21st of July, 1871, the allotments being made in claims thirty-one feet square. Any one could take one or two claims, but no more, for himself, on the payment of thirty shillings a month. If the claim remained unworked for a month, it could be allotted to another applicant on the same terms. A strip of seven and a half feet on one side of each claim was reserved for roadways, of which some fourteen or fifteen, each fifteen feet wide, were provided. But as the claims were worked, forming pits of greater and greater depth, the roadways soon became unsafe and began to cave in, and they eventually had to be abandoned. But the scene while they were in operation is described by Mr.Theodore Reunert, in the "Hand-Book" of the colony, which was published in connection with the recent Indian and Colonial Exhibition, as having been most picturesque: "Hundreds of carts and wheelbarrows careering along the roads, bearing their precious freight of excavated ground clear of the mine to be sorted; down below, at all distances from the surface, a succession of rectangular ledges, representing the various working-levels of different claims, where thousands of diggers and native laborers, crowded together on the narrow working-spaces, were busy picking and shoveling the ground and filling it into the original tubs and buckets of all sorts and sizes employed for conveying it to the surface; some of these were hauled up by ropes and tackle, others carried by hand up inclined planks and staircases cut in the perpendicular walls; each man worked on his own device, without regard to his neighbor, the only general rule being that the roadways must be kept intact."

After the roadways collapsed, the problem was presented of finding a way to work the large number of successive holdings, so as to preserve free access to each, and still let no claim-holder encroach or