In a very few years, however, the open pit mining was rendered impossible by the mud rushes, by the falls of the masses of barren rock known as “reef,” which were left standing in the mine, and by landslips from the sides, so that in 1883, when the pit had reached a depth of about 400 ft., mining in the Kimberley crater had become almost impossible. By 1889, in the whole group of mines, Kimberley, Dutoitspan, De Beers and Bultfontein, open pit working was practically abandoned. Meanwhile mining below the bottom of the pits by means of shafts and underground tunnels had been commenced; but the full development of modern methods dates from the year 1889 when Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Beit, who had already secured control of the De Beers mine, acquired also the control of the Kimberley mine, and shortly afterwards consolidated the entire group in the hands of the De Beers Company. (See Kimberley.)
The scene of native mining was now transferred from the open pit to underground tunnels; the vast network of wire ropes (Plate II. fig. 12) with their ascending and descending buckets disappeared, and with it the cosmopolitan crowd of busy miners working like ants at the bottom of the pit. In place of all this, the visitor to Kimberley encounters at the edge of the town only a huge crater, silent and apparently deserted, with no visible sign of the great mining operations which are conducted nearly half a mile below the surface. The aspect of the Kimberley pit in 1906 is shown in fig. 13 of Plate II., which may be compared with the section of fig. 8.
In fig. 13, Plate II., the sequence of the basalt, shale and melaphyre is clearly visible on the sides of the pit; and fig. 8 shows how the crater or “pipe” of blue ground has penetrated these rocks and also the underlying quartzite. The workings at De Beers had extended into the still more deeply seated granite in 1906. Figure 9, Plate I., shows the top of the De Beers’ crater with basalt overlying the shale. Figure 8 also explains the modern system of mining introduced by Gardner Williams. A vertical shaft is sunk in the vicinity of the mine, and from this horizontal tunnels are driven into the pipe at different levels separated by intervals of 40 ft. Through the blue ground itself on each level a series of parallel tunnels about 120 ft. apart are driven to the opposite side of the pipe, and at right angles to these, and 36 ft. apart, another series of tunnels. When the tunnels reach the side of the mine they are opened upwards and sideways so as to form a large chamber, and the overlying mass of blue ground and débris is allowed to settle down and fill up the gallery. On each level this process is carried somewhat farther back than on the level below (fig. 8); material is thus continually withdrawn from one side of the mine and extracted by means of the rock shaft on the opposite side, while the superincumbent débris is continually sinking, and is allowed to fall deeper on the side farthest from the shaft as the blue ground is withdrawn from beneath it. In 1905 the main shaft had been sunk to a depth of 2600 ft. at the Kimberley mine.
For the extraction and treatment of the blue ground the De Beers Company in its great winding and washing plant employs labour-saving machinery on a gigantic scale. The ground is transferred in trucks to the shaft where it is automatically tipped into skips holding 96 cubic ft. (six truck loads); these are rapidly hoisted to the surface, where their contents are automatically dumped into side-tipping trucks, and these in turn are drawn away in a continual procession by an endless wire rope along the tram lines leading to the vast “distributing floors.” These are open tracts upon which the blue ground is spread out and left exposed to sun and rain until it crumbles and disintegrates, the process being hastened by harrowing with steam ploughs; this may require a period of three or six months, or even a year. The stock of blue ground on the floors at one time in 1905 was nearly 4,500,000 loads. The disintegrated ground is then brought back in the trucks and fed through perforated cylinders into the washing pans; the hard blue which has resisted disintegration on the floors, and the lumps which are too big to pass the cylindrical sieves, are crushed before going to the pans. These are shallow cylindrical troughs containing muddy water in which the diamonds and other heavy minerals (concentrates) are swept to the rim by revolving toothed arms, while the lighter stuff escapes near the centre of the pan. The concentrates are then passed over sloping tables (pulsator) and shaken to and fro under a stream of water which effects a second concentration of the heaviest material.
Until recently the final separation of the diamond from the concentrates was made by hand picking, but even this has now been replaced by machinery, owing to the remarkable discovery that a greased surface will hold a diamond while allowing the other heavy minerals to pass over it. The concentrates are washed down a sloping table of corrugated iron which is smeared with grease, and it is found that practically all the diamonds adhere to the table, and the other minerals are washed away. At the large and important Premier mine in the Transvaal the Elmore process, used in British Columbia and in Wales for the separation of metallic ores, has been also introduced. In the Elmore process oil is employed to float off the materials which adhere to it, while the other materials remain in the water, the oil being separated from the water by centrifugal action. The other minerals found in the concentrates are pebbles and fragments of pyrope, zircon, cyanite, chrome-diopside, enstatite, a green pyroxene, mica, ilmenite, magnetite, chromite, hornblende, olivine, barytes, calcite and pyrites.
In all the S. African mines the diamonds are not only crystals of various weights from fractions of a carat to 150 carats, but also occur as microscopic crystals disseminated through the blue ground. In spite of this, however, the average yield in the profitable mines is only from 0·2 carat to 0·6 carat per load of 1600 lb, or on an average about 112 grs. per ton. The annual output of diamonds from the De Beers mines was valued in 1906 at nearly £5,000,000; the value per carat ranging from about 35s. to 70s.
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| From Gardner Williams’s Diamond Mines of South Africa. Fig. 8. |
Pipes similar to those which surround Kimberley have been found in other parts of S. Africa. One of the best known is that of Jagersfontein, which was really the first of the dry diggings (discovered in 1870). This large mine is near Fauresmith and 80 m. to the south of Kimberley. In 1905 the year’s production from the Orange River Colony mines was more than 320,000 carats, valued at £938,000. But by far the largest of all the pipes hitherto discovered is the Premier mine in the Transvaal, about 300 m. to the east of Kimberley. This was discovered in 1902 and occupies an area of about 75 acres. In 1906 it was being worked as a shallow open mine; but the description of the Kimberley methods given above is applicable to the washing plant at that time being introduced into the Premier mine upon a very large scale. Comparatively few of the pipes which have been discovered are at all rich in diamonds, and many are quite barren; some are filled with “hard blue” which even if diamantiferous may be too expensive to work.
The most competent S. African geologists believe all these remarkable pipes to be connected with volcanic outbursts which occurred over the whole of S. Africa during the Cretaceous period (after the deposition of the Stormberg beds), and drilled these enormous craters through all the later formations. With the true pipes are associated dykes and fissures also filled with diamantiferous blue ground. It is only in the more northerly part of the country that the pipes are filled with blue ground (or “kimberlite”), and that they are diamantiferous; but over a great part of Cape Colony have been discovered what are probably similar pipes filled with agglomerates, breccias and tuffs, and some with basic lavas; one, in particular, in the Riversdale Division near the southern coast, being occupied by a melilite-basalt. It is quite clear that the occurrence of the diamond in the S. African pipes is quite different from the occurrences in alluvial deposits which have been described above. The question of the origin of the diamond in S. Africa and elsewhere is discussed below.
The River Diggings on the Vaal river are still worked upon a small scale, but the production from this source is so limited that they are of little account in comparison with the mines in the blue ground. The stones, however, are good; since they differ somewhat from the Kimberley crystals it is probable that they were not derived from the present pipes. Another S. African locality must be mentioned; considerable finds were reported in 1905 and 1906 from gravels at Somabula near Gwelo in Rhodesia where the diamond is associated with chrysoberyl, corundum (both sapphire and ruby), topaz, garnet, ilmenite, staurolite, rutile, with pebbles of quartz, granite,