The daily morning journal and courier., 1896-02-18

is as though one were looking out upon 6 herd of oxen.
 Ven you shall see die olt Kimberley den shall you see die grossest hole ever in die ground ge-dug," The old Boer trader of the "Norham Castle" had thus spoke weeks before, and the ink of my signature was not yet dry on the pages of the hotel register before went out to look for the biggest hole in the ground in the world. One does not have far to go, It is in the heart of the town, if such cheerless, gloomy town as Kimberley can be said to have a heart and you come upon it all at once and long before you are expecting it.
 It Is better than Niagara, better than the Coliseum, one of the biggest things imaginable. Conceive of a pit, gulf, with sides perpendicular as those of a house, suddenly yawning at the end of a street, deep as an ocean. Figures can give one but a poor idea of the kopje. Even the very sight of 1t, big as it appears, is deceptive; one-half way down the sides of this gulf, this extinct crater for 1t Is abandoned now), is the shaft house of the De Beers mine, and while I stood leaning over the rail that has been very thoughtful ly put around the kopje I was watching what l thought to be the head of a Kaflir moving too and fro about the machinery of the hoisting gear but as watched the head divided itself, as it were, in two, and on a sudden I realized that what I thought was the head of one man had been the bodies of two; and this was only half the way down the pit.
 One of these men travelled up the sides of the kopje to its lip, and the hoisting gear brought into use during the transit was very unique. It was a car, large four-wheeled flat car, drawn up and let down by wire cable, but instead of running upon solid tracks it ran upon two cables admlra bly answering the same purpose. h. deed, the whole affair was compro- mise between an inclined railway and an elevator.
 Aside from its immensity the kopje has another attraction. This lies in the color of it's earths. Diamonds are found in what is called "blue dirt" | WillCH lleS DSlSdLA ldtd Ol SClioW sand and white limestone; seen at close quarters this blue dirt is not blue at all, but a nasty slate gray; across the gulf of the kopje it becomes the color | of distant mountains, the color of lakes on gray October days. The earths in the kopje are of all colors; the white, yellow and blue of the ''pay;" the deep red of the surface ground; the green of
 the rotten quartz; the ochre and burnt sienna of the deep levels, and the bright orange of the sands Fancy for yourself the walls of bottomless pit built of all these crowding colors that at such distance blend and harmonize and run into each other like the bitu- men end of an artists palette. Fancy them all shinmering together under an African sun, under deep blue sky trimmed about by vivid green patches of sourgrass and trailing vines, and I | think you Will agree that you have a scene unique among the sights of the | world.
 | But, after you are gone away and the effect of the thing has lost it's edge a bit, you fail to wonder over an entirely new aspect of the great Kimberley
 kopje, and you ask, first yourself and
 then other people, the question: l What did they do with all the dirt | that they dug out?''