by Frank Norris
Barring the ostriches and sand spouts, the Karoo is wonderfully like the country about Ogden. There is the same dry, red earth, the same low hills with their outcrop of reef and dyke, the same sparse growth of gray bush, the same burnt-out blue of a cloudless sky, growing white toward the horizon; the same rare towns, which in South Africa are built of mud, but which are precisely like the adobe houses of the West. Thus far the resemblance goes. If one saw only the earth and sky, the gray bush, and the clay-built towns, one might easily fancy one’s self in Utah or in western Colorado. But every now and then the progress of the train (and an exasperatingly slow progress it is) brings to view the sight of things unmistakably African: a herd of ostriches trotting away from the track with outstretched necks and half-open wings, flocks of long-eared sheep feeding on heaven knows what, and above all sand spouts, wavering pillars of red cloud with funnel-shaped bases and capitals. You reach Kimberley the forenoon of the next day.
Kimberley is a dead town. I think this impression of abandonment, of incipient decay, is one of the strongest impressions I have retained of the town itself. That, and its abject forlornness, its mournful, God-forgotten air, its unspeakable hideousness, a hideousness, a rampant shrieking deformity, an ugliness beyond words. It is a town built upon the open plain, treeless, dusty. The combination of abnormally wide streets and abnormally low houses gives a marvellous impression of flatness. It is built entirely of tin. Tin, in South Africa, means galvanized, corrugated sheet iron. With the exception of the De Beers office and the government buildings, I cannot remember a single house in Kimberley that was not made of this abominable stuff. The railroad station is tin, the hotels are tin, you buy your clothes, your groceries, your boots in tin stores, you play billiards in a tin club, you mail your letters in a tin post office, and you — yes, you do — you even worship in a tin church. Imagine the reverberation of heat from all this mass of tin when the thermometer is at 120 degrees. Imagine, if you can, the gay, diversified aspects that the streets present, with never even a sidewalk to break the harrowing monotony of the view, with never a tree, never a vine, never so much as a geranium growing in a tomato can to hide the staring ugliness.
You begin to see the natives here, the real pure-blooded stock — Kaffirs, Basutos, Shangans — not the mongrel Hottentot-Dutch-Malay of the Cape; and splendid-looking fellows they are, too. You see them in all degrees of barbarianism, from the compound Basuto of the mine, gambling furiously at a curious and savage variation of the game of checkers, and kept a practical prisoner during the period of his contract, to the little pickaninny of the later generation on his way to school whistling “Daisy Bell” and carrying his books, his geography, slate, etc., on his head.
It is a cosmopolitan place. It has not grown; it has been built. All the extremes of civilization have been dumped down together upon this last corner in the vast Karoo, and they have not as yet blended to form any distinctive feature, anything characteristic or typical except that this want of anything characteristic is, perhaps, the best characteristic of all. For instance, in one’s hotel bedroom one sees the printed announcement that “Tiffin” is at such and such an hour, while at the same time one’s washstand is decorated with blue tiles representing the birthplace of Oliver Wendell Holmes. The Englishman has brought over his polo ponies and his trap, and in the market square in the centre of the town they are jostled against and crowded by the enormous clumsy bullock wagons of the Kaffirs from the surrounding country.
The bullock wagon, by the way, is a feature of South Africa. One meets with them continually, crawling along the old trade route by the side of the railroad or crowded into the market squares of all the larger towns. They are immense wagons of English make, half their length covered by a hood of canvas and drawn by no less than eighteen lean, muscular oxen, with horns of enormous length; at the side walks the driver, a Kaffir, with a long whip on the end of a bamboo pole, while a second called the foreloper leads the first pair. Just what purpose is served by these huge carts is not easily discoverable, for as yet I have never seen them carry so much as a wisp of hay. When three of these carts get together in a market place it is as though one were looking out upon a herd of oxen.
“Ven you shall see die olt Kimberley” (he pronounced it Camerlay) “mine, den shall you see die grossest hole ever in die ground ge-dug.” The old Boer trader of the Norham Castle had thus spoken weeks before, and the ink of my signature was not yet dry on the pages of the hotel register before I went out to look for the biggest hole in the ground in the world. One does not have far to go. It is in the heart of the town, if such a cheerless, gloomy town as Kimberley can be said to have a heart, and you come upon it all at once and long before you are expecting it.
It is better than Niagara, better than the Coliseum, one of the biggest things imaginable. Conceive of a pit, a gulf, with sides perpendicular as those of a house, suddenly yawning at the end of a street, deep as an ocean. Figures can give one but a poor idea of the kopje. Even the very sight of it, big as it appears, is deceptive; one-half way down the sides of this gulf, this extinct crater (for it is abandoned now), is the shaft house of the De Beers mine, and while I stood leaning over the rail that has been very thoughtfully put around the kopje, I was watching what I thought to be the head of a Kaffir moving to and fro about the machinery of the hoisting gear, but as I watched the head divided itself, as it were, in two, and on a sudden I realized that what I thought was the head of one man had been the bodies of two; and this was only half the way down the pit.
One of these men travelled up the sides of the kopje to its lip, and the hoisting gear brought into use during the transit was unique. It was a car, a large four-wheeled flatcar, drawn up and let down by a wire cable, but instead of running upon solid tracks it ran upon two cables admirably answering the same purpose. Indeed, the whole affair was a compromise between an inclined railway and an elevator.
Aside from its immensity the kopje has another attraction. This lies in the colour of its earths. Diamonds are found in what is called “blue dirt,” which lies beneath strata of yellow sand and white limestone; seen at close quarters this blue dirt is not blue at all, but a nasty slate gray; across the gulf of the kopje it becomes the colour of distant mountains, the colour of lakes and gray October days. The earths in the kopje are of all colours. The white, yellow, and blue of the “pay.” The deep red of the surface ground. The green of the rotten quartz. The ochre and burnt sienna of the deep levels, and the bright orange of the sands. Fancy for yourself the walls of a bottomless pit built of all these crowding colours that at such distance blend and harmonize and run into each other like the bitumen end of an artist’s palette. Fancy them all shimmering together under an African sun, under a deep blue sky rimmed about by vivid green patches of sourgrass and trailing vines, and I think you will agree that you have a scene that is unique among the sights of the world.
But after you are gone away and the effect of the thing has lost its edge a bit, you fall to wonder over an entirely new aspect of the great Kimberley kopje, and you ask, first yourself and then other people, the question, “What did they do with all the dirt that they dug out?”
San Francisco Chronicle, January 26, 1896.
IN THE COMPOUND OF A DIAMOND MINE
JOHANNESBURG, December 16, 1895 — There can be no doubt that the most interesting sight in the great De Beers mine at Kimberley is the compound.
The compound of a South African mine, be it a gold or a diamond mine, is the place where the miners live, the miners being the Kaffirs of the native tribes.
You are reminded at once of the Ashantee village at the World’s Fair. The De Beers compound is a vast triangular space, inclosed on each side by a long, mud-built shed of one story, furnished with an overhanging roof to keep off the sun, and cut up into innumerable little rooms. In the centre is a huge bathing tank, while overhead, from side to side and from end to end of the compound, is a network of wires, the meshes being not more than an inch in width.
One fellow that I was shown was drumming upon something that looked and sounded very like a xylo-phone, little sticks of wood strung upon wires, and I declare the monotonous sequence of little clear liquid notes sounded very well indeed; another one, very old, his beard braided into the score of stiff little pigtails, was making anklets, rolling one bit of wire around another; for six pence he gave me as many as I wanted to carry away. A third was smoking. Observe the manner of it. He had cut off about four inches of bullock’s horn, bored a hole near the tip, in which he inserted the mouthpiece, and had filled up the horn with some fearful unknown weed which sputtered and reeked when he drew upon it. As the smoke filled his throat and lungs he would cough and cough till the tears came into his eyes. “Unless it makes them cough,” explained the timekeeper, who was my guide, “they don’t like it.” After each inhalation the smoker would eject the saliva in surprising quantities through a long, grooved reed, one end of which rested upon the ground before him. Some of the Kaffirs, a very few, however, were smoking cigars, and I saw one fellow, a young giant he was, too, thrust his cigar into an enormous hole in the lobe of his ear, so as to give his hands a moment’s freedom.
A little farther on, where the Basutos were quartered (for the tribes affect different corners of the compound and rarely if ever mingle with each other), some great game was going on. “They get very excited over this game,” said the timekeeper, “and gamble over it, but no white man has ever been able to learn it.” It looked very much like a variation of checkers. They had cut regular hollows, some fifty I should say, into a heavy board; about half a dozen were playing, and as far as we could see the game consisted of removing certain handfuls of pebbles from one hollow to another.
But one of the most surprising things about these Kaffirs, especially those that were of Zulu origin, was their cleanliness. Fancy eight hundred Chinamen huddled together, or even the same number of the lower class of almost any nationality. It would go hard if the place did not reek of vermin and disease, if one was not overcome with all manner of abominable smells. But among these eight hundred Kaffirs there was nothing of the sort. They were ragged; they were (some of them) nearly naked. They lay prone upon the ground in the sun, and they cooked and ate some very queer-looking dishes, but they were wonderfully cleanly. A throng of them (especially such as had just come up from the mine) continually gathered about the great bathing tank in the centre of the compound, and upon going into the sheds, in each of which some half a dozen slept, there was no perceptible odour, not even that of stale bedding. But think of the underground dens in our own Chinatown, think of the condition of the tenements in which people who claim to belong to the civilized nations dwell. I believe I said as much to the timekeeper.
“Ah, but you know,” he answered, “the Zulus are a very superior race; they are much more intelligent than the Dutch Boers you will find in Johannesburg. Cleanly? I should say so. Here’s something you can tell your paper. You’ll never see a Zulu finish a meal without washing his teeth very carefully afterward.”
I answered that the detail would be duly reported, but that I would not answer for its acceptance as truth.
But the compound Kaffirs of the De Beers are human, sometimes, like Arthur Jones’s Cabinet Ministers, very human, and they will steal diamonds if they can get the chance. The mine regulations, however, governing the labourers would seem to have reduced the opportunities for theft to a minimum.
The Kaffir who is taken on as a miner at the De Beers signs a contract whereby he allows himself to be kept practically a prisoner for the period covered by his contract — a month. During this time he is not allowed to pass beyond the limits of the mine, or to hold communication with any outsider. He is restricted rigidly to the precincts of the mine itself and to the compound, an underground passage connecting the two places having been constructed for this especial purpose. He is allowed to use only “compound money,” brass tickets, each good for a shilling’s worth of provisions, clothes, tobacco, “ginger pop,” etc., at the compound store. The overhead wire netting prevents him tossing diamonds over the walls of the compound to be picked up by a confederate or by the nefarious “I. D. B.” (illicit diamond buyer). During the time he is in the service of the company he is fed and clothed at the company’s expense. If he falls sick he is cared for at the hospital (and an admirable hospital it is), and if he is hurt in the mine his wounds are dressed and his welfare looked after by the company’s surgeon.
At the end of his month he has the option of renewing his contract or throwing it up. If he throws it up he goes into what is called the “detention house.” Here he is stripped to the skin and remains in that condition under constant surveillance for a week. Every act of his daily life is performed under the eye of the guards. Stealing diamonds by swallowing them is the most difficult and hazardous method a Kaffir miner can employ.
The pulsator, where the “pay dirt” is treated, and where the diamonds are found, is about a quarter of a mile away from the mine itself, and the work here is done by convict Kaffirs and a few white men. The pulsator is a contrivance that by a constant oscillating motion sifts out the heavy diamonds from the gravel and sand and rotten quartz. As a matter of course, a great deal of worthless chaff, bits of gravel, pyrites, crystals, and thousands of garnets pass through the pulsator along with the diamonds, and all this stuff has to go through a final process of sorting, where the diamonds have to be picked out by hand. This is the most interesting process of all, for you can stand at the sorter’s elbow, and see him pick up the diamonds with as much unconcern as if they were bits of iron.
I had been told all my life that diamonds in the rough looked like ordinary brown pebbles, that the inexperienced observer would pass them by without a second look, and that only an expert could tell a rough diamond when he saw one. It is not so at all. After watching the sorters five minutes I would undertake to change places with any one of them, and in a little while pick out diamonds as well as the best. A child could do the same. The diamonds of the De Beers may not look like the cut diamonds in Tiffany’s or Shreve’s windows, but they certainly do not resemble the brown pebbles that you had been told you must expect to see. They are brilliant enough. I don’t think any American debutante would take them for glass, and the only difference I could note between them and the finished stone was in the bluntness of the edges and in an occasional irregularity of shape.
That same afternoon I went down into the mine itself. The entrance to the shaft is halfway down the tremendous Kopje, that I spoke of in my last letter. You are let down over the edge of the enormous pit in a flat car running on an inclined (horribly inclined) railway, with wire cables for tracks, and you try to talk of something else on the way down and endeavour to seem interested in the machinery, while all the time you are looking out for soft spots on which you can jump if the cable should part.
The mine itself does not impress one as particularly interesting, being precisely like other mines that you may have visited. There is the same velvet — almost palpable — darkness, the same mud and water underfoot, the same dripping rocks on the walls and roof, the same queer-tasting atmosphere, the same odd smell of condensed air from the pneumatic drills.
Cars of wet, gray mould and rock pass you from time to time, trundling heavily over the rails, pushed along by a Kaffir, naked to the belt, his perspiring skin gleaming like wet silk as the candles flash upon it, or now and again you come upon a group of them toiling in an open chamber at the end of a gallery, boring their laborious way through the earth, li
ke so many worms in the heart of an oak tree.
But we had an accident that day. In one of the chambers the Kaffirs had stopped work and were gathered about one of their number, silent and interested. A man had been hurt by a boulder which had fallen from the roof of the chamber, and the shift boss of his gang had him underneath a water faucet, binding wet rags about his arm. His head was bruised, and the skin of his back scraped to the raw. The worst wound, however, was in his arm. Some jagged corner of the rock had dug through the biceps, gouging a fearful hole, laying bare the bone. Did you ever notice how a shot bird or rabbit will be, as it were, struck dumb by the wound, will suddenly become passive, inert, stupefied? So it was with this Kaffir: he made no sound, he hardly moved, merely turning his head from side to side, rolling his eyes about vaguely, now staring at his bandaged arm, now looking stupidly into the circle of faces about him. No one spoke. We could hear him drawing long breaths through his nose.
We took him back on a flat car to the cage at the shaft and telephoned up for a stretcher. The poor fellow was perfectly docile, doing everything that he was told to do without question or comment. Once only he spoke: it was when we were going up in the cage with him; then he turned to the miner who had been my guide and said in broken English, “Rock come pumzie,” and immediately relapsed into silence again. At the top, a little group had gathered since the message for the stretcher had spread the news that a man was hurt. They looked at him silently. He was taken away toward the hospital. Just as I lost sight of him I saw him turn over upon his face and put his head down in the crook of his arm.