ROUGHING IT IN SOUTHERN INDIA 165 



yields a scanty profit to the finders compared with the day- 

 long labour involved in searching for it — so scanty, indeed, 

 that Europeans concern themselves with the matter not at 

 all, or perhaps I should say rather with those methods. 

 One day, however, a worn-out coffee estate, planted up 

 on a precipitous rocky hillside on account of the owner's 

 lack of funds or judgment to buy a better site, and now, 

 almost denuded of soil, yielding him but a bare bread-and- 

 cheese subsistence, was found quite accidentally to be a 

 veritable gold-mine. This occurred when blasting for the 

 making of a new road was going on. That the estate was 

 subsequently sold for a fabulous sum I know for a fact, 

 and also that the discovery was only the first of a series. 

 On the other hand, in many more instances than all these 

 put together, flourishing estates were mined and under- 

 mined, and the entire surface, if rocky, blasted and 

 destroyed, only to reveal the thinnest vein of gold, and 

 perhaps never another. Tons of quartz were crushed by 

 means of expensive machinery, and but a few pennyweights 

 of gold to show as the result. Thousands of pounds were 

 spent in this way, and rich men brought to poverty. 



I myself possess to this day the mining rights over a quite 

 respectable area. It came about thus. Some ground was 

 about to be cleared and opened up for cultivation. In the 

 way were some rocks which had to be removed ; therefore 

 dynamite was brought for blasting them, and the China- 

 men to do it. No men so handy or so daring for such a 

 job ; they seemed to delight in it for the sheer danger's 

 sake, having to be forcibly prevented from lying down at 

 the very end of the fuse ! 



I liked to watch what was being done, and after one 

 explosion, on pulling up a tuft of grass from a cleft in the 

 riven rock, I actually found two or three specks of gold 

 adhering to the roots ! 



That was the beginning of it with us. The mining rights 



