The men themselves look like so many flies as they dig away at the blue soil, and the thousands of wire ropes extending from every claim to the depositing boxes round the edge have the appearance of a huge spider's web, while the buckets perpetually descending empty and ascending full might well represent the giant spiders. The mine having recently been worked by companies owning large blocks of ground, there could still be traced the individual claims of the original diggers, some carried down to a great depth and others left standing like square turrets with the ground all dug away round them. The effect is weird in the extreme, and it does not require any very great stretch of fancy to imagine these isolated claims to be the battlemented castles of the gnomes who inhabit the underground regions. As we were gazing down the mine, the whistles from the engine-houses began simultaneously to shriek out the signal that it was time for men to cease working and come up from the mine for dinner. The buckets ascended for the last time and stood still; the tiny ants at work below threw down their picks and shovels and began to toil up the sides of the hole. Gradually they grew larger and larger till the ants became moles, till the moles looked like rabbits, then larger till the rabbits became boys, and finally emerged full-grown men. They were principally Kafirs, with very little clothing beyond a cloth round their loins; some sported old red military jackets, and the appearance of their bare black legs beneath was comical in the extreme. Every thirteen or fourteen Kafirs at work in the mine have a white overseer, to prevent as much as possible that wholesale robbery which goes on amongst them. One would think they would find it rather hard to steal, and still more difficult to conceal a diamond on their naked persons under the eye of the overseer; but, despite all precautions, they do steal a vast number of stones, picking them up and carrying them away in their mouths or between their toes. The largest diamonds are usually unearthed in the mines before the stuff is washed, and an overseer must keep his eyes well open, for he cannot be sure of the honesty of any one of his "boys." CHAPTER TEN. Diamonds are mostly found in a hard, bluish-green rock which has to be blasted, the safest time for doing this being the noon or midnight hour. The noise of it sounds like an enemy bombarding the camp. We stood on the edge of the mine and saw a solitary man down below, who looked as big as a rabbit, light a fuse and then run from it for his life, when, with a report like a thousand cannons, the earth rose two hundred feet in the air and then fell to ground again, probably dropping a Koh-i-noor on a neighbouring claim.