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MEN AND MINES
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and prepared by the Messrs. Austin and Mercer previously referred to in this book.
They
use the famous and now idle Kimberley mine of South Africa as an
example. The town of Kimberley, by the way, sprang up as a shanty town
of ten thousand people, all engaged in digging for diamonds. It was
found that a certain type of ground, in the great circular deposits
found in that vicinity, could be worked to unheard-of depths. Fifty,
one hundred, two hundred feet they went down—each digger working in a
little claim thirty-one feet square and washing fortunes from the
dirt. Kimberley Mine was to become the greatest of all of them. By the
year 1889 it had grown to be an abyss a quarter of a mile across at the
rim and 300 feet deep.
Working
in the bottom of this pit was extremely dangerous. Slides of rock
already had cost scores of lives. But still the "blue ground" lay
within a 500-foot circle at the bottom and still it bore diamonds.
There seemed to be no end to it. Geologists had decided that this
deposit was the neck, or root, of an old volcano—a mountain stripped
away ages ago by the relentless hand of Time and leaving no vestige of
its presence except this "pipe" of blue rock underneath.
Before
the Kimberley pit had reached such a great depth, the,owners decided
that the open style of mining was doomed. So they started a shaft, a
thousand feet from the rim, where the rock was hard and would not cave.
Straight down they blasted, driving the opening a few feet farther each
day. Fifteen hundred feet—two thousand feet—twenty-five hundred
feet—month after month the work went on, lengthening into years, At
intervals tunnels were bored into the pipe, below the bottom of the
pit; and patient black
(29)
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