Race for Diamonds

Thirty South African college youths, track athletes all, raced for diamonds last week. Ungallant they raced against 120 women, two expectant of motherhood, most clad in running skirts in one piece bathing suits. Raced also some 15,000 professional diamond prospectors. At the crack of a South African police rifle they strained legs, lungs, hearts, in a wild scramble to stake out claims in a newly opened sector of the Transvaal diamond district.

More than 25,000 claims were pegged out in a few hours. Overnight 50,000 persons, prospectors and their families, settled down in a district until recently boastful of 300 inhabitants. During the week diamonds valued at $180,000 were discovered or unearthed. Itinerant prospectors were vexed when it was touted that the 30 athletes who sprinted ahead of them to richest pay dirt, were employed by a mining syndicate.

The South African mining areas, notably that at Kimberly, occur in the form of a huge vertical funnel or crater of "pay dirt" descending into the earth to a depth of half a mile or more. At first the area can be worked from the surface by the individual prospector. Later, as the pay dirt funnel is excavated, disastrous slides begin to occur and corporations must be organized to undertake expensive subsoil mining, which has been carried to a depth of 2600 ft. in some instances. Great diamond mining fortunes, like that of the late Cecil Rhodes, are usually made by the astute organizers of such corporations, which are able to buy the "worked out" surface properties of small prospectors for a pittance.

At present diamond mining is carried on by the large companies chiefly with automatic machinery. The final operation of separating out the diamonds is performed by flowing diamond-pregnant mud over greased tables of corrugated iron. While the mud and such other minerals as it contains flow on over the tables, the diamonds are caught and held by the grease.