'Gentleman's mining'

When I first heard that my trip to Africa would include a visit to one of De Beers' mines, my first thought was that it was sure to be a dark, dirty and claustrophobic, albeit interesting, experience. I was right about everything but the claustrophobia.

Finsch Mine was dark and, in parts, dusty. The experience was interesting. But the underground shafts of the mines themselves were huge. We were not crawling around in a tunnel like we were filming the fifth Indiana Jones movie. I was relieved but, at the same time, a touch disappointed. I didn't get to live out any fantasies of pulling a Harrison Ford-like stunt deep in the bowels of an underground mine.

But I digress.

The No. 1 rule of the mine that was stressed to us, and illustrated on signs posted around mine property, was safety first. A sign on mine grounds illustrated how high a priority De Beers makes mine safety (shown left). It read that as of February 2008, there had not been a lost-time injury at the mine since Oct. 16, 2007. Non-lost-time injuries for the first two months of the year numbered 48, according to the sign.

After donning what felt like a ton of gear and descending into the mine (shown right), we were taken on a tour of Block 4 of the Finsch Mine, located in South Africa's Northern Cape province. The tunnels were much wider, and the ceilings much higher, than I had envisioned. It was its own little underground world, with offices that had computers and telephones. As a child of the 1980s, I dare say it reminded me of the HBO show Fraggle Rock. But there were no Fraggles, Doozers, and none of the workers were eating the infrastructure, at least that I saw. (If you didn't grow up in the 1980s watching Fraggle Rock, you won't get this reference.)

And, to everybody's disappointment, diamonds weren't embedded in the walls. Instead, there were just piles of what looked like a light gray, powdery rock: kimberlite. Huge trucks were used to haul the kimberlite out of the mine. After that, this seemingly innocuous rock has a long journey of being shifted, sorted and sifted to extract the rough diamonds.

I never realized how much went into actually getting the diamonds out of the ground until I visited Finsch.

During our visit, one