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FIRE IN THE EARTH
bench—enabling him to bring the greatest pressure to bear on both diamonds. The shaft makes about 1000 revolutions a minute and the operation has to be stopped frequently to prevent the shellac from melting in the dops.
When that operation is finished the stone, still an un­polished, filmy thing, has taken on a little semblance of beauty in form: You can see that it is rounded, that it has the outlines of a table and a girdle and a culet. Not very distinct, yet, but the polishers (who also are known as loppers and brilliandeerers, and whose duties are known variously as polishing, lopping, brilliandeering, and faceting —virtually one and the same operation) will see to it that the stone takes on its real hidden beauty.
In the polishing room, behind roaring machines, covered in the front with large screens to prevent diamonds from popping out all over the place, are grimy, overalled men. They are men who sing and shout while, they work, not for the pleasure of it but because they are under a severe tension. All day, for seven hours, with a half-hour interval for lunch- during which they eat in front of their own machines, they are concentrated upon a wheel that looks like a phonograph record and a diamond, at which they peer every thirty seconds through a magnifying glass to ascertain that the facets are shaping up well.
Another term for this wheel is horizontal lap, but it still looks like a phonograph record. It is composed of soft iron, soaked in diamond powder and olive oil and measuring about a foot in diameter and half an inch thick. It rotates at a speed of about 2500 revolutions a minute, and when it gets through with work on a diamond its surface has been worn away, so powerful is the diamond itself.
A dop is used here, too, similar to the rounding opera­tion. But the heat developed at the high rate of rotation of the wheel by the friction between it and the diamonds is
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