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MEN AND MINES
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daily
trained Alsatian dogs, which know whom to tackle and how to bring down
intruders without inflicting physical harm, are maintained. In
addition, there is an elaborate method of searching miners.
The
visitor is admitted to the company's property only after a careful
questionnaire. Affable Englishmen talk to him at the office, satisfying
themselves that he has come as an "interested visitor" only. Once
inside, he is taken to a great steel headframe which stands over a deep
shaft. From a near-by building comes the chugging of a huge steam
engine. Thick, trembling steel cables, vanishing into the shaft, begin
to roll smoothly over the big wheels on top of the frame—high above the
head. One cable goes up; the other down.
A
square steel cage is drawn out of the darkness. The visitor is ushered
into it. After a clanging of safety gates and a ringing of bells, the
descent begins. Men once wore lamps on their hats. Now electric lights
flash briefly as another "level" is passed. Then the swift descent
slows up, there is more clanging of gates and ringing of bells, and the
visitor is two thousand feet down.
Immediately
he sees and hears activity. A long line of steel cars, each loaded with
blocks of diamond-bearing blue ground stretches away on a little track
into a rocky tunnel. Alongside it is another train—"empties." Black men
wheel np the loaded cars, one at a time, and dump them down a broad
iron chute with a thunderous roar of falling rock, adding the empty
"trucks" to the string on the other side. At intervals a new train
arrives, rolling down the gentle incline of the tunnel. From the chute,
the rock is dumped into "skips." These are big steel buckets about the
size of the "elevator" cage. But only the rock rides in the skips, for
they
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