The introduction of an abundant supply of good water wrought a wonderful transformation. Outside the business section the desert was made to blossom with flowers in gardens surrounding the hitherto bleak homes. Lawns were laid out and vines and trees planted about the houses, making the dusty, wind-swept expanse a thing of beauty and comfort. At length prospectors learned that the diamond-bearing earth was confined chiefly to several oval-shaped funnels, ranging in area from ten to twenty acres, and that outside these few diamonds were to be found. Now these huge funnels, or pipes, are nothing more or less than extinct volcanic craters. The walls, or casings, of these pipes are chiefly of shale and basalt filled with hard earth, yellow near the surface and bluish deeper down. The latter is called "blue-stuff" and is very prolific in diamonds. The diamonds found outside the rim wall must have been washed out of the craters or perhaps were thrown out by the eruption. At first it was customary to pulverize the blue-stuff at once, but experience showed that a more satisfactory way to work it was to expose it for several months to the action of the weather. By this process it readily crumbled. Various devices were used by the different miners to raise the earth out of their claims. Some used windlasses; others carried the earth up in buckets and tubs, some even by climbing ladders. Surrounding the funnels were carts, wheelbarrows, etc., for carrying away the material to the depositing grounds, where it was dried, pulverized, and sifted. Many of the miners found it desirable to employ the native Kafirs to work in the pits, since neither the scorching sun nor clouds of dust seemed to trouble them. The deeper the pits were sunk the greater the difficulty became in raising the blue-stuff. To add to the difficulties the rim wall of shale and basalt began to fall in, and the rain made the claims muddy and slippery or filled them with water. At a still greater depth water began to seep through the shale wall, and great masses of the rim occasionally fell in endangering life and almost precluding further mining unless concerted action were taken. So, in order to effect more economical methods of working, a consolidation of claims began to take place. At the Kimberley mine a double platform with staging was built around the pit, and a series of wires running from the different claims served as trackways on which buckets of the blue-stuff were drawn up by means of ropes and windlasses located on these platforms.