Barney was thinking of it, thinking of it very hard. “So, if the diamonds are there—” he said slowly.
“Oh, they’re there, all right, in that good old, dear old, sweet old yellow soil,” Harry said with a grin, and did a soft-shoe shuffle in the dust of the roadway. Then his smile faded a bit ruefully and he kicked at the dust. “The only trouble,” he said more softly, “is that it costs more to dig out a carat of diamonds than the kopje wallopers or even the so-called honest traders will pay for it. So some of the miners are giving up and going home. And so are the traders.”
“What’s a kopje walloper?”
“He’s a— Wait a second. There’s the mine.”
They had come through the shacks on the edge of a reef and were staring down at an incredible sight. The mine that had begun as a small hillock rising a few feet above the flat surface of the northern Cape had changed considerably. The hillock had long since disappeared, trees and all; now the hole that had replaced it had been dug to a depth of over a hundred feet in places; and from each tiny square that represented a single claim, several steep cables ran up to the rim of the huge excavation. Tiny carts, foreshortened by distance, could be seen traveling up these cables, carrying the yellowish earth to the rim and beyond to the crushing and the sorting piles. Barney, staring in awe, could see a network of at least a thousand of the cables glinting in the late-afternoon sun; the creak and groan of the small cradles climbing and descending the steel ropes; the cries of men directing, warning, shouting; the whinnying of horses working to turn some of the large wheels on top of the monstrous crater to winch the larger buckets of earth up the steel ropes, all combined to give him an unearthly feeling. It looked like a picture Barney had once seen of a bloke named Gulliver tethered to earth with stringlike ropes, only what was locked to the earth here was the earth itself. And the uneven layers of the mine! And the men swarming below like ants; they could have been the tiny people sweating to tighten the cables on Gulliver! It looked unreal; it looked almost like the etchings he had once seen of the Egyptian slaves — Jews, they was, now he remembered — building the pyramids. The mine was huge beyond anything Barney had ever seen or even dreamed about; it was almost beyond his imagination to think of himself down in that abyss, that inverted anthill, himself, working in that confused disorder.
“Good God!” he said in awestruck tones. “How many bloody men are down there?” He had to raise his voice to be heard over the noise rising from the depths of the mine itself and from the whims and the other lifting wheels and mechanisms arranged around the rim.
Harry smiled broadly, pleased that his Kimberley mine had received the startled adulation he had expected and which it obviously deserved. He raised his voice as well.
“Well,” he said, “figure it out. Each claim is thirty-one feet by thirty-one feet, African measure — which is almost the same as English measure — and the mine is roughly round in shape and about a quarter of a mile across. So figure it out. And each claim may be being worked by as many as six men, maybe one white man to direct and keep an eye open for thieves and maybe five natives to do the real work of digging and shoveling the dirt into the buckets to be hoisted to the surface. Thirty-one feet square,” he said, almost with satisfaction, “hardly enough room to swing a pick or a shovel without hitting somebody in the head!”
Barney still could scarcely comprehend the confusion of the scene below. Who could do any decent work — digging, whatever — in that maelstrom? “But there has to be some sort of bloody organization, or you’d think there would be bloody anarchy—!”
“There is. Or as close to it as you might want,” Harry said quietly, and pointed. “There used to be roads running across the mine to carry the dirt out in wagons pulled by horses — those are the parts of the big hole you see that aren’t as deep as the rest of the mine. But they simply fell in when the diggers started to dig deeper on either side of them. Men, horses, they’ve all been killed falling in. They still get killed. Say one claim is fifty feet lower than the claim next to it. A man goes down his ladder to his claim and starts to dig, all aboveboard, all on his own claim.” He made a chopping motion with a hand. “Bam! First thing he knows his neighbor’s claim falls in on top of him. And then they get into a great argument — if either one of them is still alive — as to who has the right to the earth that fell in.” Harry grinned at his brother. “Still want to be a digger?”
“How do you go about getting a claim?”
“I’ll tell you later. Seen enough for a day?”
“Why? Where do you want to go?”
“Why,” Harry said lightly, almost as if he hadn’t been thinking about it for the past hour, “I imagine after two months on the trail, eating biltong and mealies, you could stand some rib-sticking food. One thing we have in Kimberley is good food. When and if you can afford it,” he added under his breath, and spoke up again. “What would you say to a broth to put the hair on your chest, a big juicy joint to add muscle to your elbows, two or three vegs — not mealies — to remind you of what we used to ramp off the wagons in Covent Garden when we were kids, and a bottle of real African beer?”
“I’d say it was what I could stand,” Barney said with a grin, and was about to turn away from the edge of the huge hole when a disturbance in the mine caught his attention. He looked down. A fight of some sort seemed to have broken out on a claim almost directly below them and no more than fifty or sixty feet from the surface. Two white men were pummeling a black unmercifully. The black had no place to go even had he been able to break loose; the sheer cliff of the reef prevented escape on one side, and below him the claims on that side contained men staring upward and he apparently felt he could look to small sympathy or help from them. With a sudden twist he broke free and dashed for the ladder on one side of the claim that led upward and eventually to the surface, but he had no more than started to climb when one of the men had him by the ankle and dragged him back. The black seemed to lose spirit at this defeat; he merely sat on the ground while the two men kicked and beat at him. At last he turned and spat. One of the white men ran his boot sole over the spittle and then bent to pick something from the ground. The black merely sat until the men dragged him to his feet and shoved him hard against the ladder. He stood there for a moment until one of the white men kicked him; then he dispiritedly began to climb. He came to the rim, pulled himself over within feet of Barney and Harry, and limped away, bleeding.
Barney had been staring in surprise. “What was that?”
“Someone trying to steal a diamond. Sometimes they stick right out of the soil, almost asking to be picked up.” Harry shrugged. “That one was lucky they didn’t beat him more. He’s lucky to walk away.”
Barney took a deep breath, remembering. It also brought back memories of Fay with her arms around him. He put that thought away. “We saw some men on horses kill a black near the river. They shot him. Andries — he was the driver of the ox wagon — said it was for stealing diamonds.”
“That’s the worst crime there is around here, stealing anything, but especially diamonds. Even trading in stolen diamonds is asking for a few years on the Cape Town breakwater,” Harry said. “But they rarely kill anyone for it. Those men you saw were probably from Klipdrift or Pniel or one of the other river diggings. Here they just beat them up — pretty bad — but they seldom kill them. If they’re white they get beat up and kicked out of town; word gets around and a man might as well go home. They won’t let him near the other mines, either. But very few get shot or killed. The Miner’s Committee doesn’t like guns; you don’t see anyone carrying them. This isn’t like America.”