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FIRE IN THE EARTH
How
many carats in diamonds have come out of the earth? since man began
mining them is a question whose answer is anybody's guess. The first
great producing center, however, undoubtedly was in the region of
Golconda. There never were mines in Golconda itself; this now ruined
city, a few miles from Hyderabad (and some say that Golconda and
Hyderabad were one and the same) was really the trading center for the
diamonds found over a vast area in the gravels of the Kistna, Penner,
and Godavari rivers in Hyderabad and Madras in southern India. A group,
of workings was along and between the Ken and Son rivers in
Bundelkhand, also, and to the east there were more in the Mahanadi and
Brahmani valleys in what are called Bihar and Orissa.
The
"workings" were not only in the recent gravels in the beds and banks of
the present-day rivers, but also in older high-level gravels deposited
by earlier rivers. The diamonds in the recent gravels had been partly
derived from the older gravels; and in turn these had been derived from
still older rocks in which the gravel beds are now consolidated into
what science calls conglomerates. These older rocks are supposed to be
of Pre-Cambrian age, which means something like a thousand million
years old. Whence the rocks got their diamonds no one knows, for no
trace has been found of the original deposits; also, the native
methods of mining have always been primitive and the deposits are too
poor and scattered for any systematic mining on a large scale.
But
there was a man named Jean Baptiste Tavernier, a wealthy French
traveler of the seventeenth century, who made a hobby of collecting,
describing, and trading in diamonds. While visiting the Indian fields
in the year 1665, he found the Parteal and Kollur districts, both
located on
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