DIAMONDS

Some more: square pink diamond, princess cut, princess cut diamond, carrot dimond, pink diamond, pink diamond band, pink diamond engagement ring, pink diamond engagement rings, pink diamond jewelry, pink diamond ring, pink diamond rings.

Princess cut diamond earrings are presently the most popular diamond  earrings. The choice is princess cut diamond earrings with a colored diamond or a pure white diamond. Some smaller diamonds could be set around the center diamond. It also could be mixed with some emeralds, looks real great.

Naturally the larger the diamonds the more expensive the princess cut diamond earrings are. That means make sure there is enough cash on your account, its getting expensive, trust me. 

After finding the right princess cut diamond earrings ask the jewelry shop if they can

Some more: Diamonds carat, diamonds Chicago, diamonds clarity, diamonds club, diamonds cut, diamonds de beers, diamonds earrings, diamonds emeralds, diamonds engagement, diamonds exchange, affordable diamonds, African diamonds, antique

The crystal forms of the diamonds cover a familiar range: there are simple diamond octahedrons, cubes and dodecahedrons, and there are combinations of these; there are single crystals and clusters of crystals, and there are the characteristic, flattened triangular shapes of "made" spinel-law twins. Some of the diamond crystal faces are convex to varying degrees, some are slightly rough, and inspection with a loupe reveals growth trigons on some. A few diamond crystals are highly lustrous and gemmy while others are duller; inclusions may or may not be naked-eye visible.

The physical appearance of diamonds, even large ones, is predictable in many ways, and yet their historical/cultural and even geological histories always have a special fascination. We are talking, after all, about diamonds: adamas was the Greek root word, always carrying connotations of magic powers, invincible strength and the workings of strong, brazen gods.
Before looking specifically at the localities for the 52 diamonds pictured here from the collection, a brief historical overview of diamond mining and a summary of the exotic geological "story" that all localities have in common is in order.

Some History of Diamonds

Very few modern mineral collections can boast diamond crystals from India, and yet the roots of diamond romance and diamond commerce lie unmistakably there. The world's "first" diamonds were taken from Indian riverbeds as long ago, perhaps, as 800 B.C. (www.diamondcutters.com); a Sanskrit manuscript, the Artha-Sastra, mentions a king of the Maurya dynasty (320-298 B.C.) who regulated an active local diamond trade (Maillard, 1980). Legends associated with the invasion of India by Alexander the Great speak of a "Valley of

Diamonds," narrow and deep but laden with gems: men would kill and flay sheep, cast quarters of raw flesh into the chasm, let birds of prey eat the flesh, then kill the birds when they soared out of the chasm, collecting the diamonds

The ancient Romans loved Indian diamonds, and traded for them with native merchants around the "Gulf of Cambay" (today, the Gulf of Khambat, above Mumbai)

From the days of the Roman Republic, through the centuries of the Empire, the medieval period, and into the Renaissance, diamonds were brought from India to Europe via two main trade arteries: an overland route, passing through Persia and Byzantium to Rome or Venice, and a southern route, traversing the Indian Ocean and running up through Arabia to Alexandria, and thence to Italy.

In the 17th century, the French traveler Jean-Baptiste Tavernier visited some of the Indian diamond mines and brought back much valuable information including legends, already richly textured, about the fabulous Kohi-Noor ("Mountain of Light") diamond.

This, the first of the world's major named diamonds, reportedly weighed 600 carats originally, and is now to be seen, facet-cut, in the crown of the English Queen Mother.

The great blue "Hope" diamond, now in the Smithsonian, was also found in India, and is likewise couched about with ancient mythic tales, mostly involving the bad luck it brought to its owners.

Most Indian diamonds were harvested from alluvial deposits in the gravels of stream beds, possibly very far from the primary kimberlite pipes. However, some also were probably found in loose eluvium just above a pipe or in colluvial ground adjacent to it. One Greek account of about 120 B.C. speaks tantalizingly of underground diamond mines with deep galleries (Maillard, 1980); these were probably not mines in kimberlite but deep diggings in diamond-bearing conglomerates, called "the pits of Panna" by Williams (1905).

Five areas in India produced diamonds, and one, the largest and richest, became famous under the name "Golconda diamond mines," or "the Kingdom of Golconda," since the town of Golconda was its capital and the center of a large diamond trade (Williams, 1905; Harlow, 1998). all that remains of the opulent "Kingdom" today is a ruined fort near Hyderabad, and the only modern producing diamond mine in India exploits the Majhgawan lamproite pipe near Panna, producing annually about 20,000 carats-0.2% of world output (Levinson et ai, 1992).

During the European Renaissance, Dutch and Portuguese traders competed for Indian diamonds, while at the same time the Portuguese, from their infant colonies on the African coasts, attempted to penetrate the African interior. The Portuguese hoped to find the wealth of "Ophir," the legendary home of the biblical Queen of Sheba and of King Solomon's mines, whence had supposedly come the diamonds on the breastplate of the High Priest of ancient Jerusalem. Nothing came of these early African quests, but Indian diamonds meanwhile poured into Europe along the main internal trade routes running at first from Venice to Antwerp, and then later from Lisbon to Amsterdam.

Around 1464 the "Sancy" diamond from India, then owned by Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, was refashioned as a fine facet-cut gem by "the true artist Louis de Berquem of Bruges," in modern Belgium (Williams, 1905), and by the early 16th century a diamond-cutting industry was beginning to flourish in Antwerp. Between the 16th and 18th centuries, first Amsterdam, then London, became the capital of the diamond world. Although Dutch merchants kept investing heavily in the Indian diamond trade, the English by the early 18th century had acquired near-monopoly control of Indian diamonds, and had supplanted the Dutch-by which time, however, the discovery of Brazilian diamonds brought Portugal once more into the game. For a full account of these early-capitalistic maneuvers involving diamonds, and their entwinements with European power politics, see Maillard.

The era of Indian diamonds ended in 1725, when some shiny stones found by Brazilian garimpeiros in an alluvial gold deposit near the town of Tejuco (now Diamantina), in Minas Gerais, proved to be diamonds. The Brazilian era continued until the South African discoveries of the 1860's, and South African diamond production monopolized the field until the first decades of the 20th century. South Africa is still a significant producer, but since about 1920 Zaire (now the Congo Republic), Angola, Botswana, Russia and Australia, in that chronological order, have all surpassed it in annual output. Zaire produces mainly industrial diamonds, and has been doing so since the First World War, when the country was known as the Belgian Congo. Zaire's diamondiferous region lies near the Angolan border, where crystals are found in alluvial gravels and mined from a large kimberlite pipe at Mbuji-Mayi. This country has been so prolific since about 1920 that, surprisingly, it leads the world in total production, as measured by carat weight, for the entire period from antiquity to 1990. Zaire's total all-time figure is 718,117,000 carats, and South Africa, with 446,856,000 carats, comes in second (Levinson et al, 1992).

Kimberlite pipes were first prospected in the Yakutia Craton of northeastern Siberia, Russia, after World War II. There are three major diamond-producing fields here: the adjacent Daldyn and Alakit

fields and, about 400 km to the south, the Malaya Botuobiya field. In the summer of 1955, within ten days of each other, the Udachnaya ("success") kimberlite was discovered in Daldyn, and the Mir ("peace") kimberlite was discovered in Malaya-Butuobiya.

These diamond occurrences have become fairly well known to mineral collectors, as small numbers of their matrix specimens of diamond crystals in kimberlite have reached western collector markets (Sullivan, 1978; Moore, 1995). The mine at Mir is now idle and flooded, but Udachnaya continues to produce diamonds, as does a very large pipe called jubilileynaya ("Jubilee").

The Yakutia Craton is now the world's second most productive geological province for gem-quality diamonds, after the Kalahari Craton in southern Africa (Harlow, 1998).

Diamonds from the United States have been nothing more than small

sideshows on the world scene. The "Crater of Diamonds" at Murfreesboro, Arkansas remains a popular site for tourist diggers in loose "dry ground"; diamonds were first found there in 1906, above what was first called a kimberlite, but is now known to be a lamproitc diatreme (Kidwell, 1990). In the early 1960's, some kimberlite diatremes in Laramie County, Colorado and adjacent parts of Wyoming were found to be diamondiferous (Collins, 1982), and 327 carats' worth of small octahedral crystals were recovered in the early 1990's (Moore, 1997). California also hosts at least one primary deposit, at Leek Springs near Jamestown.

Vastly more promising for the future are the diamonds of Canada a country which bestrides the enormous North American cratonic region, and where, given the vastness of the potential ground, exploration still must be said to be in its early stages. Kimberlite swarms have been located in Saskatchewan and Alberta, but the real excitement during the late 1990's was occasioned by the discovery of diamondiferous diatremes lying around and under Lac de Gras, in the Arctic wilderness of the central Northwest Territories: see Kevin Krajick's recent book Barren Lands (2001) for an exciting account of events leading to the opening of the Ekati diamond mine there, in 1998. Beautiful flower design of a diamond brooch at the picture. Presently Venezuela, Guyana, Indonesia, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Lesotho and Swaziland all produce some diamonds; and alluvial mining in the northwestern part of Hunan Province, China has recently yielded a beautiful 1.2-cm made twin which appeared in Tucson around ten years ago (Moore, 1993). The Origins of Diamonds Before the latter half of the 19th century, all diamonds were mined from alluvium: the antique crystals from India and Brazil had been found in sediments, loose or lithified, and science had no idea of how the mineral formed in its native rock, or indeed what that rock might be. But the great South African diamond discoveries in the 1860's revealed the rare rock type kimberlite to be the true home of diamonds. The first gem crystals were found loose in the so-called "yellow ground" of weathered kimberlite, and soon the unaltered "blue ground" below was found to contain riches too.

Diamond brooch flower design

Kimberlite is typically a greenish gray, chowdery-looking igneous rock formed from a magna very rich in volatiles (chiefly CO2 and H2O). The rock is composed of large, irregularly shaped fragments chaotically mixed in a fine-grained groundmass. Whether these "fragments" are phenocrysts crystallized directly from the kimberlite melt or xenolithic inclusions of other rock types was a question which went unresolved for some decades.

Round brilliant rings

Kirkley et al. (1991) define kimberlite as follows:

A hybrid, volatile-rich, potassic, ultramafic igneous rock derived from deep in the earth (>150 km below the surface) which occurs near the surface as small volcanic pipes, dikes and sills [the latter two structures are very rare]. It is composed principally of olivine . . . with lesser amounts of phlogopite, diopside, serpentine, calcite, garnet, ilmenite, spinel, and/or other minerals; diamond is only a rare constituent. Research eventually established that diamonds come from the included bodies in kimberlite, not from the groundmass; that these bodies are xenoliths, not phenocrysts; and that the xenoliths (and, therefore, the diamonds) are much older than the kimberlite which carried them to the surface.

A deep-seated origin for kimberlite was suspected by early investigators, not only because of its composition, but also because it was found in South Africa as great, carrot-shaped "pipes," the point of the carrot connecting with a system of "feeder" fissures reaching to unknown depths.

Of the South African kimberlites exploited by the first mines, some were much more deeply weathered than others, but the general shape of these peculiar structures soon became apparent by comparing what could be seen in the various workings.

Three general zones of a typical kimberlite pipe have been distinguished. (1) The root zone, from the point of the carrot two or three kilometers down and below, generally marks the lower limit of economically profitable mining (even when erosion has brought the root near the surface, the volume of ore is scant). But the pinch-out of the structure is never quite complete; the feeder system is now believed to reach to depths of at least 150 km, i.e. well into the upper mantle. (2) The main body of the pipe widens upwards, and is composed of highly brecciated kimberlite and other rock types. The breccia fragments come from the country rocks through which

hard results in the 1970's, with the attainment of required levels of sophistication in X-ray diffraction techniques, electron and ion microprobe analyses, and the dating of trace isotopes (Meyer, 1985; Kirkley et al., 1991). These minute inclusions (mostly around 1 µm, or 0.001 mm), having been shielded from later changes by the enclosing diamond, represent our best and most pristine samples of mineral suites from upper mantle rocks. Although most diamonds show inclusions of only one mineral species, polymineralic inclusions are (fortunately) also found. Thus far, 22 mineral species (including diamond itself) have been identified as inclusions in diamonds, and although six of these may be found either in eclogite or peridotite, detailed analyses have revealed two mutually exclusive assemblages of included minerals, making it possible to assign 98% of all included diamonds to either the E (eclogite) or the P (peridotite) categories (Meyer, 1985).

It has also been possible to draw some inferences about the temperature and pressure conditions, and therefore the depths of diamond formation, in these two rock types. Correlating with these results are the isotopic age-dating studies of the tiny inclusions, which have led to the approximate dating of the formation of the host rocks, and therefore the ages of their diamonds (it is not yet possible to age-date diamonds directly).

Both of these lines of research indicate that upper-mantle eclogites and peridotites formed at different times and by different processes in the deep earth, and that kimberlite melts at depth may have taken up diamond-bearing xenoliths from either environment (or from both), for transport to the surface. It remains to consider the nature of these two environments, and to summarize current thinking which seeks to correlate the distribution of diamondiferous diatremes with plate-tectonic processes.

Geothermal and geobarometric studies of e-type diamonds have shown that these diamonds have a higher temperature of crystallization, and form at greater depths, than P-type diamonds (Meyer, 1985; Kirkley et al, 1991). Eclogite, as already mentioned, is characteristic of very deep parts of subduction zones, well within the upper mantle below continental platforms, where the subducted basalt of the former sea floor metaphorphoses to eclogite. P-type diamonds, on the other hand, are believed to form in peridotites of the shallower upper mantle; they come from depths in the range of 150-200 km below the surface, whereas E-type diamonds from one South African mine, for example, have been assigned depths of formation of more than 300 km. Radiometrie dating of trace isotopes of Rb-Sr, Sm-Nd, and U-Pb in the inclusions has revealed that all of the diamonds occurring in the peridotite xenoliths are around 3 billion years old. This theme of immense age was also sounded quite early in the modern history of diamond studies, for it was realized early that most of the earth's swarms of kimberlitepipe intrusions occur in stable continental cratons of Archaean age.

[delta]^sup 13^C distribution across a broad range. This is to say that the carbon in P-type diamonds had a uniform and stable source in the upper mantle: it is thought to be "primitive" carbon which accumulated in a stable convective zone perhaps 4.5 billion years ago, at the time when the first continental cratons were forming. (One intriguing modern theory suggests also that some of this "primitive" carbon may have come from convection cells transporting liquid metallic C to the upper mantle from the lower mantle-Meyer, 1985.)

Illicit or Blood diamonds: Africa's curse

Just as the history of Arab States is intimately tied to the discovery of oil in the region, the discovery of diamonds in Africa has not only impacted the continent's history, but has been one of the leading causes of conflict.

The link between 'blood diamonds' and conflict in Africa and the role of international players in the illicit diamond trade were recently discussed at a seminar in Nairobi, Kenya, on resource-based conflicts organized by the Society for International Development's East Africa Chapter. It is interesting to note that Africa's most conflict-ridden countries--Angola, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo--are also the most diamond-rich countries on the continent, as well as the most poor and under developed. Conflict or "blood" diamonds have fuelled wars and led to the massive displacement of civilian populations in many African nations. While conflict diamonds represent a small proportion of the overall diamond trade, illicit diamonds constitute as much as 20 per cent of the annual world production. The level of illegality gives an opportunity and a space for conflict diamonds.

The link between 'Blood Diamonds', poverty and conflict is evident in countries such as Sierra Leone, where the rich alluvial diamond fields of the Kono District and Tongo Field were among the most prized targets of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF). In 2000, Partnership Africa. Canada (PAC) published a report entitled "The Heart of the Matter: Sierra Leone, Diamonds and Human Security", which placed much of the blame for the civil war in the country on diamonds, describing them as "small bits of carbon that have no intrinsic value in themselves, and no value whatsoever to the average Sierra Leonean beyond their attraction to foreigners".

The report on 'Blood Diamonds' recounts the corrupting of Sierra Leone's diamond industry, from peak exports of 2 million carats a year in the 1960s to less than 50,000 carats by 1998. The country's despotic President during much of this time, Siaka Stevens, had tacitly encouraged illicit mining by becoming involved in criminal or near-criminal activities himself. When the RUF began waging a war in 1991, Liberian leader Charles Taylor acted as mentor, trainer, banker and weapons supplier for the movement. The RUF also took on the role of diamond supplier to the illicit international trade. "It is ironic", says the report, "that enormous profits have been made from diamonds throughout the conflict, but the only effect on the citizens of the country where they were mined has been terror, murder, dismemberment and poverty".

The PAC report supports the idea that there was virtually no oversight of the international movement of diamonds. In the 1990s, for instance, billions of dollars worth of diamonds was imported into Belgium from Liberia, even though the latter produces very few diamonds. This can only be explained by the fact that big and small companies were colluding in the laundering of diamonds in West Africa, using Liberia as the conduit country. Much of the laundering was done by local Lebanese traders who have been living in West Africa for over a century.

Lebanese immigrants began arriving in West Africa as refugees fleeing the hardship caused by the silk-worm crisis which struck Lebanon in the mid-nineteenth century. Among the earliest recipients of those immigrants were Senegal and Sierra Leone, then under European colonial rule. According to Lansana Gberie, a researcher who has written about the Lebanese connection in Sierra Leone's diamond trade, since the 1950s, "diamonds have been the linchpin of Lebanese business and a range of subterranean political activities".

In her paper, "War and Peace in Sierra Leone: Diamonds, Corruption and the Lebanese Connection", published by the Diamonds and Human Security Project in 2002, Gberie describes the beginnings of the Lebanese trade in diamonds: "Diamonds were discovered in Kono District, in eastern Sierra Leone in 1930, and that same year, as word of the discovery spread, the first Lebanese trader arrived in Kono and set up shop, ahead of colonial officials who did not want to establish a district office there until two years later. They were also ahead of the British-owned Sierra Leone Selection Trust, which was granted exclusive diamond mining and prospecting rights for the entire country in 1935. From that time until 1956, when an alluvial diamond mining scheme was enacted, it was illegal for anyone not working for the Trust to deal in any way with diamonds. However, illicit mining activities were rampant, with many Lebanese subsequently settling in Kono and funding Africans to mine and sell their finds to them."

In the 1950s, the illicit diamond mining and smuggling increased dramatically, and it was estimated that 20 per cent of all diamonds reaching the world's diamond markets were smuggled from Sierra Leone, largely through Liberia and mainly by Lebanese and Mandingo traders. In later years, civil war often revolved around the control of this illicit trade. In 2002, a UN Expert Panel reported that the then "interim" leader of the RUF, Issa Sesay, had flown to Abidjan late in 2001 with 8,000 carats of diamonds that he had sold to two traders of undisclosed identity, who were apparently using a Lebanese businessman to run errands for them between Abidjan and the Liberian capital, Monrovia. Some reports suggest that the UN peacekeeping force in Sierra Leone may have also become involved in the RUF illicit diamond trading.

In 2001, shortly after the 11 September attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., the Washington Post found another link in this most secretive and highly lucrative trade--that of international terrorists. In an article published on 2 November 2001, war correspondent Douglas Farah stated that the Al Qaeda network "reaped millions of dollars in the past three years from the illicit sale of diamonds mined by rebels in Sierra Leone" and that three senior Al Qaeda operatives had visited Sierra Leone at different times in 1998 and later. He further claimed that the West African Shi'ite Lebanese community was sympathetic to Hezbollah and often served as a link between the RUF rebels and Al Qaeda. However, according to Gberie, much of the evidence linking West Africa's Lebanese community to global terror networks is largely "anecdotal and circumstantial".

Democratic Republic of the Congo might affect the legitimate trade in other diamond-producing countries, more than 35 nations have been meeting on a regular basis to develop the system, which was established in 2003. In Sierra Leone, the diamond certification system was instituted in October 2000, four months after the UN Security Council passed a resolution that banned diamond exports until a certification system was set up. In the twelve months after the system was introduced, legal exports rose from $1.3 million to $25.9 million worth of diamonds. However, PAC believes that many of the better quality diamonds are still being smuggled and are not going through the official certification system. In other words, the illicit diamond trade continues to operate through informal agreements that are sealed with a nod, a wink and no paper trail.
Author Rasna Warah, a freelance writer based in Nairobi, is a Board member of the East Africa Chapter of the Society for International Development. COPYRIGHT United Nations Publications, COPYRIGHT Gale Group
 

Diamonds are forever - and greed -

MANY SEE EXPENSIVE diamonds as the perfect gift for their significant others. Yet, couldn't some other gem have the same impact? There is an extraordinary logic to the diamond trade: Diamonds are presumed of value because they are pricey. Consumers are told they are pricey because they are rare and expensive to cut. Are they really? After all, flawless diamonds can be produced in a laboratory. A "mined" diamond and a "lab" version are tough to tell apart. Little wonder, since both are crystallized carbon. Of course, concern over the price of gems pales in comparison to the horrible sight of children whose arms have been amputated by the thugs who tam diamond mines in West Africa, or the knowledge that Al Qaeda trades in diamonds purchased from these same mines.

Responding to the outcry of its citizens, Congress passed the Clean Diamond Trade Act in 2003 to guarantee that gems purchased in the U.S. be free from all human rights abuse. Is this legislation working? Are the diamonds in our stores guaranteed to be clean? I set out to answer these and other questions using the Freedom of Information Act. I searched the records of the Justice and State Departments for information on this lucrative trade and on De Beers, the company that controls 65% of the world's diamond supply. In 1942, the Justice Department began an investigation of De Beers that is still ongoing. I went through thousands of pages of intercepted cables, spy reports, Nazi documents, and eye-opening mail. These brutal diamond wars have been going on fur decades. Moreover, terrorists have long used the precious stones to fund their egregious activities.

Documents reveal highly secretive price-fixing operations that run rings around the Justice Department, Congress, and the White House. The strategy is quite simple, actually: American diamond merchants pick up their supply from De Beers in London where U.S. laws banning exploitative price fixing do not apply. De Beers moves diamonds along clandestine routes used by drug barons and arms merchants. I traced these trails, I found De Beers has its own area in Switzerland's Zurich Airport where, as a customs official explained to me, it can fly in a diamond from Africa, and, within a day, legally arrange for it to be given papers identifying it as Canadian. The United Nations claims that this tactic makes it near impossible to trace terrorist-linked diamonds. De Beers, incidentally, is controlled by a family company registered in Liberia.

International trading statistics show that diamonds sent from Switzerland to the United Kingdom surprisingly multiply by three times en route. In 1982, for example, UK customs recorded 10 times more stones arriving from Switzerland than Switzerland said it had sent. Some years, by similar means, thousands of gems vanish into thin air. As for the diamond-producing countries of South Africa, Namibia, and Botswana, their gems may seem to disappear from international circulation overnight.

After reviewing documents and traveling around the world to investigate the many leads they supplied, I wrote a proposal fix a television special called "The Diamond Empire." It appeared in 1994 as a feature-length "Frontline Special" on PBS and as a three-part BBC series. Filming was not an easy project to complete. Everywhere I went. De Beers had phoned merchants telling them not to speak with me. Gradually, though, I untangled The diamond cartel's web, shooting footage in India, Europe, and the U.S. Then a gang broke into my home and assaulted me, shattering several of my facial I bled heavily from the wounds head. The next day, there was a surprise attempt to take over the documentary I withstood this, but medical complications soon set in. I spent two months in the hospital. For two of those weeks, I was in critical condition. I could not edit the film myself. PBS cut it to my script, but the BBC censored its version under heavy pressure from De Beers. When I came out of the hospital, I was determined to complete my investigation and publish the findings uncensored.

Diamonds once were genuinely rare--about 140 years ago--after the diamond mines practically ran dry in India. Then diamonds were discovered by the thousands literally sparkling in the moonlight in southern Africa. Merchants who had invested huge sums of money in the few remaining diamond mines in India panicked. They feared their investments would plummet in value. So, they funded South African politician Cecil Rhodes to set up De Beers. He had all the cash needed to buy up the diamond deposits of South Africa. In return, he agreed to sell the entire output to the "Diamond Syndicate" comprised of these same merchants. Thus, they kept the price high. In the 1930s, the Oppenheimer family gained control over De Beers and the Diamond Syndicate.

I first became interested in diamonds in 1979. I was working on civil rights issues with Aborigines in the far northwest of Australia when a major diamond deposit was found nearby in a sacred valley called Barramundi Dreaming, where for centuries women had gone to pray and meditate. Some of these women took me to see the site before it was destroyed by the diamond rush. There was a beautiful, sparkling stream surrounded by fat-trunked boab trees. When I looked into the water, there were hundreds of diamonds, lying like glossy pebbles in its bed. Later, I learned from local geologists that there were up to 27 carats of diamonds in every ton of rock underlying the stream's headwaters. Today, this locale is an enormous pit, full of excavators and tracks. It is producing up to eight tons of diamonds a year at a cost of less than $10 a carat.

Supposedly, De Beers was reaping a mere one-fifth of a carat for every ton of mined rock in Africa. However, Canada has diamond deposits with four carats per ton, and some Russian mines produce 10 carats a ton. Why then were the South African mines doing so poorly? I met a diamond prospector who had worked as an overseer in De Beers' mines. He told me that sometimes they broke into pockets where gems were so plentiful that they would tumble out onto the ground. When this happened, the overseers literally would shovel up the diamonds into buckets.

Was I being spun a story? I went to South Africa to investigate and met with miners and geologists working for De Beers. They confirmed the details. In fact, I heard tales of more than 3,000 carats of diamonds tumbling out of the rocks within the De Beers mines. In Kleinzee, I visited a vast mine on the wild Atlantic coastline, where diamonds lie under giant sand dunes roamed by ostriches and edged by fierce surf. The wife of the mine's chief geologist took me on a tour. She commented on the fine gems under the dunes and on the nearby sea floor, washed from dormant volcanoes that hi ancient times spilled diamonds onto the Earth's surface. Offshore, De Beers' vessels were sucking up gems from the seabed. On its first trip, one vessel grabbed up nearly 5,000 large stones in a week. These are canned like peas to keep them secure. The head of the South African Diamond Board imparted, "We do not shout it from the rooftops, but diamonds are not rare, except for some qualities."

I watched the mineworkers dig. Giant excavators removed the sand. Some laborers used vacuum hoses connected to large yellow safes on wheels to swallow up exposed diamonds. Others formed lines, bending over to examine every tiny crevice in the rocks. In one hand they held a brush, in the other a metal prong, thus earning the nickname "bedrock cleaners." They are paid so little that De Beers calculates that it costs a mere 40 cents a yard to clean a beach. The company recently agreed to pay a minimum of $50 a week, but not for long. It is replacing the union mineworkers with subcontracted laborers to be paid only $20-30 a week. De Beers officially calculates that each one of its 3,000 miners at Kleinzee produces, on average, over $1,600 worth of diamonds every seven days. Many maintain that this estimate is quite conservative.

I asked a group of black diamond mineworkers if they bought their loved ones en gagement rings. They laughed. "De Beers brings us divorce, not love!" they claimed. They explained that since they were in the lowest wage bands, they were not entitled to married housing. Instead, they lived in single men's barracks. If their wives got a job in the mining town, say as a cleaner or cook, they had to stay in the single women's quarters. They were punished if found to be sleeping with their partners. This comes as no surprise. Remember, De Beers helped create apartheid in order to gain control over its workforce.

The mine has very tight security. If an ostrich accidentally is killed on the grounds, its corpse has to go to company security to make sure it has not swallowed a diamond. The man who operates the X-ray machine revealed that he had to give workers a whole-body scan every day in order to ensure that nothing was smuggled out. He confessed he concealed the health danger by not recording all the X-rays in the mine's records. I subsequently investigated a larger coastal mine--covering hundreds of square miles--in Namibia, known historically as "The Forbidden Zone." I found working conditions there much the same.
I visited De Beers' inland mines as well, including one where diamonds literally were pic