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Show i TRANSVAALTREASURfcT Iff.-' - ' V ' i i u . - i : -"NX" -V j I v x - I Native "Digging" South African Gold. Prepared hv National Georraphlc Society. Washlnjtou. L). C. WNU Service. AFTER 29 years' search, the Transvaal, South Africa, has given up what is believed to be the "other half" of the famous Culllnan diamond, the largest diamond ever found. The "other half was picked up in two parts; one a 500 carat diamond of good quality, and the other a 72G-carat stone which is flawless. The Transvaal rightly has been called the treasure-house province of South Africa. It has earned the right, as well, to be called a famous treasure treas-ure region of the world, for out of Its hills and plains have come billions of dollars worth of gold and diamonds, not to mention other valuable minerals. min-erals. The Transvaal Is young ln history. Its oldest town, Potchefstroom, now an Important South African educational educa-tional center, will not round out Its first century until 1939. One has but to glance at Johannesburg, Johannes-burg, the province's capital, to get the spirit of the Transvaal. Strangely Impressive, Im-pressive, as one approaches the city, are miles of mine dumps surrounding the WItwatersrand, the mountainous backbone of the province. Across the vast plain they stretch like avenues of mammoth monuments, as if promising promis-ing a climax of prehistoric grandeurs. Yes, grandeurs but of what land? For sometimes they align themselves I In a great wall, recalling China's. Or, again, you catch in their outflnng vista a resemblance to Egypt's pyramids or to Mesopotamia's ziggurats. Or, yet again, their sloping, sand-hued massifs mas-sifs suggest military fortifications on a scale the world has never known. The colossal picture tempts one's fancy. If the Rand's gold mines crumbled crum-bled to nothingness, leaving only the dumps, some writer a millennium hence might conceivably describe them as "those mighty works, reared perhaps per-haps as defenses or patriotic monuments monu-ments by the ancients of the Twentieth Twen-tieth century." If you ask a local statistician to give you some approximate idea of the dumps' tonnage, he may ask In turn : "Would you prefer It ln ocean greyhounds or In Egyptian pyramids? Twenty thousand Mauretanias would about equal and 12.000 Leviathans would somewhat exceed the dumps' tonnage. Or, shifting the comparison, that tonnage would be approximated by aligning across the Rand 102 replicas rep-licas of the great pyramid." Stumbled on Ten Billions. Stubbing one's toe against a ten-blllion-dollar gold reef is an experience experi-ence reserved to the few. It was in 18S0 that George Walker,- out for a stroll, accidentally kicked into a gold-bearing gold-bearing outcrop of what proved to be the main reef of the Witwatersrand. Here, shaped like a vast bowl imbedded imbed-ded face-upward, was a 70-mile stretch of gold-impregnated rock that. If you believe In Kismet, had awaited George Walker's Intrusive toe ever since early geologic times. And now upon that treeless, uninhabited unin-habited no man's land there appeared a tawdry mining village of tents and covered wagons. Telegraph wires hummed and the village became a raw. tin-shack town of 3.000 people. The prevailing crude process lost half the gold worked. Yet who cared, since the reef seemed Inexhaustible? Supplies Sup-plies were teamed from 300 miles away. Yet who minded fancy prices? And. as to the water shortage, "All right; let's bring in champagne!" Thus began the babyhood of Johannesburg, Johan-nesburg, which today, though a mere youth In years, Is a giant in achievement. achieve-ment. The largest African town south of Cairo and chief commercial plexus of the Union's hinterland, "Jo'burg" has a municipal area of nearly 82 square miles and some 300,000 people. In the Deep Mines. The Witwatersrand mines, whether at work or play, present a unique sight. Here one is in work hours descending de-scending by "skip" (lift) into the Interior In-terior of the earth at the speed of an express elevator. Johannesburgers dig holes as grandiosely grandi-osely as Americans rear skyscrapers more grandiosely, ln fact for your alighting point proves to be one and one-third miles below the earth's surface. sur-face. Your Impression of this subterranean subter-ranean electric-lit town, with Its avenues ave-nues and cross-streets, where thousands thou-sands of men are drilling or ltmding the auriferous conglomerate. Is one of cleanliness, neatness, and thanks to the giant ventilators of a not-too-uncomfortable warmth. You stay long enough to watch a surface hoist start off with its OU-ton OU-ton load, which It will lift up that mile or more of shaft, to the crush ing and reduction- plant, ln about two minutes. Then you regain the skip and ascend once more to what, measuring holes by skyscrapers, the cable operator oper-ator might conceivably announce as "Two hundredth floor, last stop 1" That which you have glimpsed Is but a tiny corner of what Is, in effect, ef-fect, a vast subterranean city, whose axis measures 70 miles, whose workers work-ers number 190.000, and whose shafts, avenues, and streets total 4,000 miles, or approximately the length of the African continent. And the business of this super-mole city Is to disgorge over one-half of the world's annual gold production. How to handle that grand total of 212,000 men, 90 per cent of them Bantu, who, either above ground or under It, work on the Rand? Recreation whether golf, tennis, bowls, swimming, or native dances Is universal, with lnter-mlne sports as a corollary. As to health and safety, safe-ty, each man regularly undergoes medical med-ical examination, first aid Is taught to many thousands, while that cheery organ, the reef, advises you on everything, every-thing, from keeping fit to giving accident-prevention tips to American visitors vis-itors In what Is thought to be Amer-lcanese, Amer-lcanese, as thus : "Say, folks, we're right here at a real slap-up gold mine. Lady from Memphis, please don't eject your gum down the shaft. That pellet will ac-. complish a velocity of 5,000.000 miles per second and give some one a headache." head-ache." Huge Cost of Supplies. Whoever presides over the mines' commissariat must at times develop a genuine housewife's headache. Let us Imagine a symbolic Mr. and Mrs. Transvaal Goldmines making up their household books at the close, of 1928: "Hum ! Six millions of dollars' worth of food for our native boys. Rather steep, my dear 1" "Let me look, papa. Oh, 23,000 tons of meat, beans, and fish that accounts ac-counts for It." "Hum 1 I suppose 400 tons of soap for haths and 3,000 tons of candles can-dles are correct? . . . Here's $200,000 for the boys' clothing, slickers, and boots. Hum 1 Spring cleaning that's the paint and tar SI 80,000. But what's this extra $20,000 for?" "Salt, papa. The boys love their pinch of salt, and " "Salt! Just salt! Why, mamma, do you realize that our little household Is costing us ln stores, $74,000,000 a year?" As to recreation, the "boys' " weekly week-ly war dance rivals a circus, a rodeo, and a football match combined. Here Is a native compound disgorging Its thousands of black Shangaans who are welcoming other thousands of black M'chopis, the former tribe's Invited In-vited guests. Intriguing, too, are such borrowings of white man's "medicine" as armlets of Red Cross buttons, fountain pens thrust through ear lobes, and medical charts stuck on like mustard plasters. But the Transvaal, like South Africa Afri-ca in general, Is as varied in respect to treasure houses as was ancient Delphi, with its "treasuries." In the Pretoria region, and also near Rusten-burg Rusten-burg and in the "Bushveld Complex," there are apparently unlimited iron resources, while the last-named region promises to yield one of the greatest platinum deposits ln the world. The Transvaal's annual production values In gold, silver, platinum, and the base metals total something like $15,000,-000. $15,000,-000. Diamonds May Be Anywhere. And then there are the ever-crop-plng-up diamonds one might almost say, those irrepressible South African diamonds. Really, one never knowg where they will turn up next. Here is the Transvaal's famous Premier mine, an even larger crater than its defunct forerunner at Klm-berley. Klm-berley. In about a quarter of a century cen-tury the Premier has produced some 6 tons of diamonds, including thu famous Cullinan. It3 longest dimension dimen-sion was 4 inches, Its shortest was 2 Inches, and It was cut Into nine large stones and scores of smaller ones. Blasting hour at the Premier, as beheld from the crater's edge, Is a striking sight At the given moment a red flag flutters, a bell clangs, and antlike multitudes of workmen are seen scurrying for shelter. There ensues a veritable barrage of some 2,000 dynamite charges, hurling successive suc-cessive masses of blue earth ln air1 then the explosions die down, the workers reappear to load the debris on trucks that ascend to the crushing crush-ing plant, and the day's big diamond "offensive" Is over. |