 69. An absorbing novelty, the Kimberly-Diamond Mines, discovery of diamonds, the wronged stranger, where the gems are, a judicious change of boundary, modern machinery and appliances, revealing excitement in finding a diamond, testing a diamond, fences, deep mining by natives in the compound, stealing, reward for the biggest diamond, a fortune in wine, the great diamond, office of the De Beers Company, sorting the gems, Cape Town, the most imposing man in British provinces, various reasons for his supremacy, how he makes friends. The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice, Puddinhead Wilson's new calendar. There isn't a parallel of latitude but thinks it would have been the equator if it had had its rights. Puddinhead Wilson's new calendar. Next to Mr. Rhodes, to me the most interesting convulsion of nature in South Africa was the diamond crater. The rand gold fields are a stupendous marvel, and they make all other gold fields small, but I was not a stranger to gold mining. The belt was a noble thing to see, but it was only another and lovelier variety of our great planes. The natives were very far from being uninteresting, but they were not new, and as for the towns I could find my way without a guide through the most of them, because I had learned the streets, under other names, in towns just like them in other lands. But the diamond mine was a wholly fresh thing, a splendid and absorbing novelty. Very few people in the world have seen the diamond in its home. It has but three or four homes in the world, whereas gold has a million. It is worthwhile to journey around the globe to see anything which can truthfully be called a novelty, and the diamond mine is the greatest and most select and restricted novelty which the globe has in stock. The Kimberley diamond deposits were discovered about 1869, I think. When everything is taken into consideration, the wonder is that they were not discovered five thousand years ago and made familiar to the African world for the rest of time. For this reason the first diamonds were found on the surface of the ground. They were smooth and limpid, and in the sunlight they vomited fire. They were the very things which an African savage of any era would value above every other thing in the world excepting a glass bead. For two or three centuries we have been buying his lands, his cattle, his neighbor, and any other thing he had for sale, for glass beads, and so it is strange that he was indifferent to the diamonds, for he must have picked them up many and many a time. It would not occur to him to try to sell them to whites, of course, since the whites already had plenty of glass beads and more fashionably shaped, too, than these. But one would think that the poorer sort of black, who could not afford real glass, would have been humbly content to decorate himself with the imitation, and that presently the white trader would notice the things and dimly suspect and carry some of them home and find out what they were and at once empty a multitude of fortune-hunters into Africa. There are many strange things in human history. One of the strangest is that the sparkling diamonds laid there so long without exciting any one's interest. The revelation came at last by accident. In a boar's hut out in the wide solitude of the plains, a travelling stranger noticed a child playing with a bright object and was told it was a piece of glass which had been found in the belt. The stranger bought it for a trifle and carried it away, and being without honour made another stranger believe it was a diamond, and so got a hundred and twenty-five dollars out of him for it, and was as pleased with himself as if he had done a righteous thing. In Paris the wronged stranger sold it to a pawn shop for ten thousand dollars, who sold it to a countess for ninety thousand dollars, who sold it to a brewer for eight hundred thousand dollars, who traded it to a king for a dukedom and a pedigree, and the king put it up the spout. And written note from the Greek meaning pondit, mt. I know these particulars to be correct. The news flew around, and the South African diamond boom began. The original traveller, the dishonest one, now remembered that he had once seen a boar teamster chalking his wagon-wheel on a steep grade with a diamond as large as a football, and he laid aside his occupations and started out to hunt for it. But not with the intention of cheating anybody out of a hundred and twenty-five dollars with it, for he had reformed. We now come to matters more didactic. Diamonds are not embedded in rock ledges fifty miles long, like the Johannesburg gold, but are distributed through the rubbish of a filled-up well, so to speak. The well is rich, its walls are sharply defined. Outside of the walls are no diamonds. The well is a crater, and a large one. Before it had been meddled with, its surface was even with a level plain, and there was no sign to suggest that it was there. The pastureage covering the surface of the Kimberley Crater was sufficient for the support of a cow, and the pastureage underneath was sufficient for the support of a kingdom. But the cow did not know it, and lost her chance. The Kimberley Crater is roomy enough to admit the Roman Colosseum. The bottom of the crater has not been reached, and no one can tell how far down in the bowels of the earth it goes. Originally it was a perpendicular hole packed solidly full of blue rock or cement and scattered through that blue mass, like raisins in a pudding, were the diamonds. As deep down in the earth as the blue stuff extends, so deep will the diamonds be found. There are three or four other celebrated craters nearby. A circle three miles in diameter would enclose them all. They are owned by the De Beers Company, a consolidation of diamond properties arranged by Mr. Rhodes twelve or fourteen years ago. The De Beers owns other craters. They are under the grass, but the De Beers knows where they are, and will open them some day if the market should require it. Originally the diamond deposits were the property of the Orange Free State, but a judicious rectification of the boundary line shifted them over into the British Territory of Cape Colony. A high official of the Free State told me that the sum of four hundred thousand dollars was handed to his Commonwealth as a compromise, or indemnity, or something of the sort, and that he thought his Commonwealth did wisely to take the money and keep out of a dispute, since the power was all on the one side and the weakness all on the other. The De Beers Company dig out four hundred thousand dollars' worth of diamonds per week now. The Cape got the Territory, but no profit. For Mr. Rhodes and the Rothschilds and the other De Beers people own the mines, and they pay no taxes. In our day the mines are worked upon scientific principles under the guidance of the ablest mining engineering talent procurable in America. There are elaborate works for reducing the blue rock and passing it through one process after another until every diamond it contains has been hunted down and secured. I watched the concentrators at work, big tanks containing mud and water and invisible diamonds, and was told that each could stir and churn and properly treat three hundred carloads of mud per day, one thousand six hundred pounds to the carload, and reduce it to three carloads of slush. I saw the three carloads of slush taken to the pulsators, and there reduced to a quarter of a load of nice, clean, dark-colored sand. Then I followed it to the sorting tables, and saw the men deftly and swiftly spread it out and brush it about and seize the diamonds as they showed up. I assisted, and once I found a diamond half as large as an almond. It is an exciting kind of fishing, and you feel a fine thrill of pleasure every time you detect the glow of one of those limpid pebbles through the veil of dark sand. I would like to spend my Saturday holidays in that charming sport every now and then. Of course there are disappointments. Sometimes you find a diamond which is not a diamond. It is only a quartz crystal or some such worthless thing. The expert can generally distinguish it from the precious stone which is his counter-fitting, but if he is in doubt he lays it on a flat iron and hits it with a sledgehammer. If it is a diamond it holds its own. If it is anything else it is reduced to powder. I liked that experiment very much, and did not tire of repetitions of it. It was full of enjoyable apprehensions, unmarred by any personal sense of risk. The De Beers Concern treats 8,000 carloads, about 6,000 tons, of blue rock per day, and the result is three pounds of diamonds. Value, uncut, $50,000 to $70,000. After cutting they will weigh considerably less than a pound, but will be worth four or five times as much as they were before. All the plain around that region is spread over a foot deep with blue rock, placed there by the company, and looks like a plowed field. Exposure for a length of time make the rock easier to work than it is when it comes out of the mine. If mining should cease now, the supply of rock spread over those fields would furnish the usual 8,000 carloads per day to the separating works during three years. The fields are fenced and watched, and at night they are under the constant inspection of lofty electric search light. They contain fifty or sixty million dollars worth of diamonds, and there is an abundance of enterprising thieves around. In the dirt of the Kimberley streets there is much hidden wealth. Some time ago the people were granted the privilege of a free wash-up. There was a general rush. The work was done with thoroughness, and a good harvest of diamonds was gathered. The deep mining is done by natives. There are many hundreds of them. They live in quarters built around the inside of a great compound. They are a jolly and good-natured lot and accommodating. They performed a war dance for us, which was the wildest exhibition I have ever seen. They are not allowed outside of the compound during their term of service, three months I think it is, as a rule. They go down the shaft, stand their watch, come up again, are searched, and go to bed or to their amusements in the compound. And this routine they repeat, day in and day out. It is thought that they do not now steal many diamonds successfully. They used to swallow them, and find other ways of concealing them. But the white man found ways of beating their various games. One man cut his leg and shoved a diamond into the wound. But even that project did not succeed. When they find a fine, large diamond, they are more likely to report it, than to steal it, for in the former case they get a reward, and in the latter they are quite apt to merely get into trouble. Some years ago, in a mine not owned by the De Beers, a black found what has been claimed to be the largest diamond known to the world's history, and, as a reward, he was released from service and given a blanket, a horse, and five hundred dollars. It made him a Vanderbilt. He could buy four wives and have money left. Four wives are an ample support for a native. With four wives he is wholly independent, and need never to do a stroke of work again. That great diamond weighs 971 carats. Some say it is as big as a piece of alum. Others say it is as large as a bite of rock candy. But the best authorities agree that it is almost exactly the size of a chunk of ice. But those details are not important, and in my opinion not trustworthy. It has a flaw in it, otherwise it would be of incredible value. As it is, it is held to be worth two million dollars. After cutting it ought to be worth from five million to eight million dollars. Therefore, persons desiring to save money should buy it now. It is owned by a syndicate, and apparently there is no satisfactory market for it. It is earning nothing. It is eating its head off. Up to this time it has made nobody rich but the native who found it. He found it in a mine which was being worked by a contract. That is to say, a company had bought the privilege of taking from the mine five million carloads of blue rock for a sum down and a royalty. Their speculation had not paid. But on the very day that their privilege ran out, native found the two million dollar diamond and handed it over to them. Even the diamond culture is not without its romantic episodes. The co-innure is a large diamond and valuable. But it cannot compete in these matters with three, which, according to legend, are among the crown trinkets of Portugal and Russia. One of these is held to be worth twenty million dollars, another twenty five million dollars, and the third something over twenty eight million dollars. Those are truly wonderful diamonds, whether they exist or not, and yet they are of but little importance, by comparison with the one wherewith the boar wagoner chocked his wheel on that steep grade as Heretofore referred to. In Kimberley I had some conversation with a man who saw the boar do that, an incident which had occurred twenty seven or twenty eight years before I had my talk with him. He assured me that that diamond's value could have been over a billion dollars, but not under it. I believed him, because he had devoted twenty seven years to hunting for it, and was in a position to know. A fitting and interesting finish to an examination of the tedious and laborious and costly processes whereby the diamonds are gotten out of the deeps of the earth and freed from the base-stuffs which imprison them, is the visit to the De Beers offices in the town of Kimberley, where the result of each day's mining is brought every day, and weighed, assorted, valued, and deposited in safes against shipping day. An unknown and unaccredited person cannot get into that place, and it seemed apparent from the generous supply of warning and protective and prohibitory signs that were posted all about, that not even the known and accredited can steal diamonds there without inconvenience. We saw the day's output, shining little nests of diamonds, distributed a foot apart along a counter, each nest reposing upon a sheet of white paper. That day's catch was about seventy thousand dollars' worth. In the course of a year, half a ton of diamonds pass under the scales there and sleep on that counter. The resulting money is eighteen million dollars or twenty million dollars, profit about twelve million dollars. Young girls were doing the sorting, a nice, clean, dainty, and probably distressing employment. Every day, ducal incomes sift and sparkle through the fingers of those young girls, yet they go to bed at night as poor as they were when they got up in the morning. The same thing next day and all the days. They are beautiful things, those diamonds, in their native state. They are of various shapes, they have flat surfaces, rounded borders, and never a sharp edge. They are of all colors and shades of color, from dewdrop white to actual black, and their smooth and rounded surfaces and contours, variety of color, and transparent limpidity, make them look like piles of assorted candies. A very light straw color is their commonest tint. It seemed to me that these uncut gems must be more beautiful than any cut ones could be. But when a collection of cut ones was brought out, I saw my mistake. Nothing is so beautiful as a rose diamond with a light playing through it, except that uncostly thing which is just like it, wavy sea water with a sunlight playing through it and striking a white sand bottom. Before the middle of July we reached Cape Town and the end of our African journeyings, and well satisfied, for towering above us was Table Mountain, a reminder that we had now seen each and all of the great features of South Africa, except Mr. Cecil Rhodes. I realize that that is a large exception. I know quite well that whether Mr. Rhodes is the lofty and worshipful patriot and statesman that multitudes believe him to be, or Satan come again, as the rest of the world account him, he is still the most imposing figure in the British Empire outside of England. When he stands on the Cape of Good Hope, his shadow falls to the Zambezi. He is the only colonial in the British dominions whose goings and comings are chronicled and discussed under all the globe's meridians, and whose speeches, unclipped, are cabled from the ends of the earth, and he is the only unroyal outsider whose arrival in London can compete for attention with an eclipse. That he is an extraordinary man, and not an accident of fortune, not even his dearest South African enemies were willing to deny, so far as I heard them testify. The whole South African world seemed to stand in a kind of shuddering awe of him, friend and enemy alike. It was as if he were Deputy God on the one side, Deputy Satan on the other. Proprietor of the people, able to make them, or ruin them by his breath, worshipped by many, hated by many, but blasphemed by none among the judicious, and even by the indiscreet and guarded whispers only. What is the secret of his formidable supremacy? One says it is his prodigious wealth, a wealth whose drippings in salaries and in other ways support multitudes and make them his interested in loyal vassals. Another says it is his personal magnetism and his persuasive tongue, and that these hypnotize and make happy slaves of all that drift within the circle of their influence. Another says it is his majestic ideas, his vast schemes for the territorial aggrandizement of England, his patriotic and unselfish ambition to spread her beneficent protection, and her just rule over the pagan wastes of Africa, and make luminous the African darkness with the glory of her name. And another says he wants the earth and wants it for his own, and that the belief that he will get it and let his friends in on the ground floor is the secret that rivets so many eyes upon him and keeps him in the zenith where the view is unobstructed. One may take his choice. They are all the same price. One fact is sure. He keeps his prominence and a vast following no matter what he does. He deceives the Duke of Fife, it is the Duke's word, but that does not destroy the Duke's loyalty to him. He tricks the reformers into immense trouble with his raid, but the most of them believe he meant well. He weeps over the harshly taxed Johannesburgers and makes them his friends. At the same time he taxes his charter settlers fifty percent, and so wins their affection and their confidence that they are squelched with despair at every rumour that the charter is to be annulled. He raids and robs and slays and enslaves the Matabelle, and gets worlds of charter Christian applause for it. He has beguiled England into buying charter waste paper for Bank of England notes, tongue for tongue, and the ravish stillburn incense to him as the eventual god of plenty. He has done everything he could think of to pull himself down to the ground. He has done more than enough to pull sixteen common-run great men down, yet there he stands to this day upon his dizzy summit under the dome of the sky, an apparent permanency, the marvel of the time, the mystery of the age, an archangel with wings to half the world, Satan with a tail to the other half. I admire him, I frankly confess it, and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake. I have travelled more than any one else, and I have noticed that even the angels speak English with an accent. Puddin had Wilson's new calendar. I saw Table Rock, anyway, a majestic pile. It is three thousand feet high. It is also seventeen thousand feet high. These figures may be relied upon. I got them in Cape Town from the two best-informed citizens, men who had made Table Rock the study of their lives, and I saw Table Bay so named for its loveliness. I saw the castle, built by the Dutch East India Company three hundred years ago, where the commanding general lives. I saw St. Simon's Bay, where the admiral lives. I saw the Government, also the Parliament, where they quarreled in two languages when I was there, and agreed in none. I saw the club. I saw and explored the beautiful Seagirt Drives that whined about the mountains and through the paradise where the villas are. Also I saw some of the fine old Dutch mansions, pleasant homes of the early times, pleasant homes to-day, and enjoyed the privilege of their hospitalities. And just before I sailed, I saw in one of them a quaint old picture which was a link in a curious romance, a picture of a pale, intellectual young man, in a pink coat with a high black collar. It was a portrait of Dr. James Barry, a military surgeon who came out to the Cape fifty years ago with his regiment. He was a wild young fellow, and was guilty of various kinds of misbehavior. He was several times reported to headquarters in England, and it was in each case expected that orders would come out to deal with him promptly and severely, but for some mysterious reason no orders of any kind ever came back. Nothing came but just an impressive silence. This made him an imposing and uncanny wonder to the town. Next he was promoted, a way up. He was made medical superintendent general, and transferred to India. Presently he was back at the Cape again and at his escapades once more. There were plenty of pretty girls, but none of them caught him. None of them could get hold of his heart. Evidently he was not a marrying man. And that was another marvel, another puzzle, and made no end of perplexed talk. Once he was called in the night, an obstetric service, to do what he could for a woman who was believed to be dying. He was prompt and scientific, and saved both mother and child. There are other instances of record which testify to his mastership of his profession, and many which testify to his love of it and his devotion to it. Among other adventures of his was a duel of a desperate sort fought with swords at the castle. He killed his man. The child here to forementioned, as having been saved by Dr. Barry so long ago, was named for him, and still lives in Cape Town. He had Dr. Barry's portrait painted, and gave it to the gentleman in whose old Dutch house I saw it, the quaint figure in pink coat and high black collar. The story seems to be arriving nowhere. But that is because I have not finished. Dr. Barry died in Cape Town thirty years ago. It was then discovered that he was a woman. The legend goes that inquiries, soon silenced, developed the fact that she was a daughter of a great English house, and that that was why her cape wildnesses brought no punishment and got no notice when reported to the government at home. Her name was an alias. She had disgraced herself with her people, so she chose to change her name and her sex and take a new start in the world. We sailed on the fifteenth of July in the Norman, a beautiful ship perfectly appointed. The voyage to England occupied a short fortnight, without a stop except at Madeira. A good and restful voyage for tired people, and there were several of us. I seemed to have been lecturing a thousand years, though it was only a twelve-month, and a considerable number of the others were reformers who were fagged out with their five months of seclusion in the Pretoria prison. Our trip around the earth ended at the Southampton Pier, where we embarked thirteen months before. It seemed a fine and large thing to have accomplished the circumnavigation of this great globe in that little time, and I was privately proud of it, for a moment. Then came one of those vanity-snubbing astronomical reports from the observatory people, whereby it appeared that another great body of light had lately flamed up in the remoteness of space which was travelling at a gate which would enable it to do all that I had done in a minute and a half. Human pride is not worthwhile. There is always something lying in wait to take the wind out of it. End of Following the Equator by Mark Twain. This is John Greenman.