ining Company (which now owns nearly all the
mines), has reduced the output of diamonds to just such an annual amount
as experience has proved that Europe and America--the United States is
the chief market--are able to take at a price high enough to leave a
large profit. By this means the price has been well maintained. This
policy, however, has incidentally reduced the population of Kimberley.
One powerful corporation, with its comparatively small staff of
employees, has taken the place of the crowd of independent adventurers
of the old days, and some of the mines have been closed because the rest
are sufficient to produce as many diamonds as it is deemed prudent to
put upon the market. Thus there are now only about 10,000 people in the
town, and some of the poorer quarters are almost deserted, the stores
and taverns, as well as the shanty dwellings, empty and falling to
pieces. In the better quarters, however, the old roughness has been
replaced by order and comfort. Many of the best villas are embowered in
groves of tall Australian gum-trees, while the streets and roads are
bordered either by gum-trees or by hedges of prickly-pear or agave. The
streets are wide, and most of the houses are detached and of one story,
built like Indian bungalows; so the town covers an area quite
disproportionate to its population, and gives the impression of an
extensive city. For the residence of the Europeans employed in the two
great mines which the Company works, a suburb called Kenilworth has been
built by Mr. Rhodes, where neat houses of four, five, or six rooms each
stand in handsome avenues planted with Australian trees, the so-called
"beefwood" and the red gum. They are not beautiful trees, but they have
the merit of growing very fast, and any shade is welcome.

The diamonds are found in beds of clay, of which there are two: a yellow
and softish clay, lying on or near the surface, and a hard blue clay,
lying deeper. These clays, which are usually covered by a thin layer of
calcareous rock, are supposed to be the remains of mud-pits due to
volcanic action, such as the so-called mud-volcanoes of Iceland, near
Namaskard, on the banks of Lake Myvatn, or such as the similar boiling
mud-pits of the Yellowstone Park country, called from their brilliant
colours the "Paint-pots." It is, at any rate, from circular clay basins,
inclosed within a harder rock (basalt, black shale, and quartzite) that
the stones are obtained. Some of the mine