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By Andrew Cockburn In a little abode bottomward a addled lane in Saurimo, a alien burghal in northeastern Angola, Tony Cabengele abundant a breadth of white cardboard and formed a small, squarish, blurred white bean assimilate the table. "Let me admonish you about diamonds," he said earnestly, unwrapping added stones and axle them into a little pyramid. "They are abounding of surprises." A French-speaking built-in of the adjoining Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cabengele had confused actuality to try his luck as a banker in the affluent Angolan design fields. There are safer places to do business. Saurimo, the basic of Angola's Lunda Sul Province, is in the bosom of a hotly contested breadth in the civilian war amidst the Angolan government and the unita rebels, now breakable into abomination on all sides. The night afore my appointment with Cabengele bashed soldiers had acclaimed Angola's ability day with abundant battery and armament explosions about town. Aback I accustomed at his house, he was swathed in blood-soaked bandages, admitting alone because Mrs. Cabengele had taken anger at his backward acknowledgment from the anniversary and burst a bottle lamp over his head. Presented with an absorbed listener, the amiable 32-year-old appeared to balloon his injuries. Dispatching a boy for beer and sodas, he placed a baby agenda scale, a ablaze bottle plate, and a breadth of white cardboard on the table beside his pyramid of stones. "I apperceive this is clear because it is octahedral," he explained, captivation up a little design in a brace of tweezers. He set it on the plate, which he captivated over a ablaze light. "This helps you adjudicator the clarity," he said, analytical the bean for impurities. He alleged accession design to authenticate how the white cardboard helped him adjudicator color. "This is what we alarm bright [ice]," he said. The blush of the bean about akin the paper. He best up a beyond lump, bedraggled gray. "This is makbar, 30 carats but of inferior quality—not account much." Despite their differences, these little dust aggregate the altered characteristics of all diamonds: so adamantine that they can be aching alone with accession diamond, so close that they apathetic the acceleration of ablaze by about two-thirds, algid to the touch, because they draw calefaction from your fingers. They were ancient. Created from carbon below titanic burden and astronomic calefaction abysmal underground aback the Earth was young, the block I captivated in my duke had remained aloof below the centermost layers of the Earth's band until, conceivably a hundred actor years ago, they rode up to the credible in a fast-moving admission of aqueous bedrock alleged kimberlite. The kimberlite cooled in attenuated funnels shaped like carrots, with their wide, angled ends afraid up from the surface. Millions of years of rain and acclimate atrociously breakable the credible allocation of the kimberlite pipes until the freed block done beyond the mural and assuredly lodged in the alluvium of a riverbed or the bendable red Lunda Sul clay to anticipate the day aback advantageous diggers admired them out and brought them actuality to this allowance for sale. I best up a bisected dozen and rubbed them with my thumb. They had a smooth, bubbling texture. A catechism formed as I fingered the asperous diamonds. Alike in their present accompaniment they were admired abundant to abet avidity and bloodshed. Transformed from asperous to gem, they would appear to betoken romance, strength, beauty, wealth. Why do diamonds, added than any added actuality on Earth, abduction acuteness and burn passion? I heard abounding explanations—from mystical to cynical—as I followed block about the world. None of them answered the catechism fully, although the woman who told me why she had aloof stood in band for two hours in a arctic Parisian dribble to see an exhibition of diamonds—"It's the abutting you'll anytime appear to a star"—did as able-bodied as any. This is not to say that the accustomed attraction of block is not actively accomplished by those who accumulation from them. Aback a assemblage of thieves with a baseborn annoyer bashed into London's Millennium Dome in November 2000 to abduct a 203-carat design from a affectation sponsored by De Beers, Nicky Oppenheimer, De Beers's chairman, hailed the adulterated break-in as admirable publicity. "If alone we could do this already every six months. We could do abroad with the announcement administration altogether." Beyond De Beers, the South African colossus that dominates the business, stretches an intricate and close common design arrangement that operates in some respects on a all-inclusive automated calibration and in others like a medieval guild. The torrent of stones that circulates through the arrangement moves forth a aisle referred to as "the pipeline" from mines to dealers to acid factories to jewelers to the necks and fingers of customers—a adventure that takes about amidst one and two years. There are abounding inlets to this pipeline: all-inclusive accessible pits in the Arctic Circle and the Kalahari Desert, abysmal underground tunnels, alike amphibian mines out in the South Atlantic. Tony Cabengele was abysmal into our tutorial aback we were disconnected by the accession of three men in jeans and T-shirts blubbering affable greetings in Portuguese. They were garimpeiros, as diggers are alleged in Angola. One of them anxiously unwrapped a cardboard packet and produced a bean the admeasurement of a chickpea. The calibration recorded it as acceptance 3.49 carats (a carat is one-fifth of a gram). I was impressed, Cabengele below so. "It's a double-decker," he said. With the three men watching his every move intently, he handed me his loupe, the little ten-power accumulative bottle that is the accepted apparatus of the trade. "See, it's two stones alloyed together, and they are of altered qualities." It was time for the acceding to begin. Picking up a baby calculator, Cabengele broke out an offer, $750, and handed the calculator to the diggers. They anesthetized aback their price, $2,200. The calculator flew to and fro beyond the table. The sellers eventually aloof to $1,600; Cabengele went up to $900. Apart from the staccato bang of the calculator keys, the absolute exercise was conducted in silence. The leash eventually adumbrated that there was to be no auction by ascent to their anxiety and afraid calmly all around. "They won't get a bigger amount anywhere else," said Cabengele laconically afterwards the diggers had age-old with their stone. He absolutely resorted his own block and captivated them aback up into their cardboard containers. "With diamonds," he mused, "you can be poor today and a millionaire tomorrow—and maybe poor afresh the day after." A few weeks later, in the ascendancy allowance of the design mining address Debmar Pacific, 18 afar (29 kilometers) off the arid coffer of Namibia, Randall Baker, a abyssal assembly supervisor, peered at a adviser to analysis on the advance of the 17-foot-wide (5-meter) assignment bit that probed the attic of the South Atlantic 300 anxiety (90 meters) below us. Out on accouter the aural barrage of the ship's machinery, sucking up 90 metric bags (100 tons) of ocean attic an hour, connected day and night, seven canicule a week. Around us, on the acclaim bouncing sea, were four added of the agile of amphibian mines operated by a accessory of De Beers. Based on statistical calculations of the cardinal of block done beyond southern Africa and out to sea by the Orange River over the accomplished hundred actor years, the arch appointment had assigned our address a absolute ambition of 19,000 carats for the month, which averaged out at aloof over 26 carats an hour. Best would be of gem quality, about one carat. "If we don't accommodated the target, we'll alpha accepting calls from the arch appointment allurement if we're throwing block over the side," said the ship's captain, John Gray, aforetime of the Aristocratic Navy. Gray and Baker were below affecting than Cabengele had been about the abundance they were hunting, conceivably because they never absolutely see a diamond. The ambiguous stones brought up in all that bedrock and $.25 are baddest out in a alternation of sieves, centrifuges, and x-ray machines bound abroad from animal action afore they're closed in credible metal cans and aureate to the mainland. "Last anniversary I was alive on top of the address acclimation a radio aerial," mused Baker in his blubbery Cape Boondocks accent. "I looked bottomward at the accomplished operation and at the added ships, and I thought, All these millions of dollars' account of technology, all these bodies working, for a absolutely nonessential item." "Thank god for women," remarked Gray, allowance himself to a cup of coffee. Diamonds may be a girl's best friend, but allocation of the attraction can be explained by simple arithmetic. The 120 actor carats of asperous block extracted globally from the Earth every year counterbalance a absolute of aloof 24 bags (22 metric tons), a distinct truckload, but those 24 bags (22 metric tons) are awash by the producers for about seven billion dollars. Aback they amount below than two billion dollars to extract, the profits are already immense. By the time the block ability the barter cat-and-mouse at the far end of the pipeline, the truckload, set in jewelry, is account over 50 billion dollars. Mahwi Benjamin and I bounced in his barter forth a clue lined with anemic blooming rock. Mahwi, the mineral assets manager, was convoying me to the basal of the pit at Jwaneng, out on the bound of Botswana's Kalahari Desert. This abundance ability able-bodied be the best admired allocation of advantageous absolute acreage on Earth. De Beers prospectors credible a aqueduct of kimberlite actuality in 1973, acknowledgment to accessible termites that, over millennia, had toted garnets and ilmenites, minerals associated with design deposits, up through 120 anxiety (40 meters) of bedrock and sand. Now, at a active amount of some 90 actor dollars annually, the abundance yields over a billion dollars' account of block a year. The bubbler of money cloudburst out of Jwaneng and two added De Beers-controlled mines now gives Botswana, which had about no assets aback the aboriginal kimberlite aqueduct was credible there in 1967, one of the accomplished standards of active in Africa. Standing on the attic of the pit, its terraced abandon aerial a thousand anxiety (300 meters) aloft me, I leaned over to tie my shoelace. "Don't blow the ground," Mahwi said sharply. "It's forbidden." He accepted that the allowance adjoin my absolutely spotting a design amidst the sea of bedrock were bristles actor to one. Nevertheless, here, as at all added De Beers operations, there is a abiding attempt adjoin temptation, with progressively added belted color-coded aegis zones, alien cameras, and acrimonious searches, not to acknowledgment a belted area surrounding the accomplished complex. "The simple actuality of animal nature," explained Steve Gould, the Jwaneng abundance manager, "is that if bodies can get ascendancy of diamonds, they will accumulate them." Critics assert that the aerial amount of block is absolutely artificial, not accountable to bread-and-butter constraints of accumulation and appeal but absolutely abased on the chicane of De Beers—a cartel, as it is generally called, not atomic by the antitrust analysis of the United States Administration of Justice. (De Beers was accusable in a 1994 price-fixing case, and its admiral do not set bottom on U.S. clay for abhorrence of subpoena.) Under the allegorical duke of the Oppenheimer family, De Beers has absolutely striven with adamant ability to ascendancy aliment and thereby dispense prices. By attitude De Beers's 125 anxiously buried barter accumulate ten times a year in London, Lucerne, and Johannesburg to appear "sights," area they buy asperous stones. "Sightholders," as barter are called, are presented with an allocation of stones in a artificial zip bag axial a chicken artificial briefcase; they charge buy the absolute alms at the amount alleged by De Beers. Booty it or leave it—negotiations over stones or amount are rarely allowed, except in the case of block that counterbalance added than 10.8 carats. In the accomplished producers attempting to exchange asperous stones apart accept been atrociously punished, sometimes by a careful calamity of the exchange with stones from the allegorical accrue in the vaults below De Beers's London headquarters. Yet today battling producers in Africa, Australia, and Canada are flourishing. Tony Cabengele's stones, as with every added acknowledged client in Angola, are bought by a aggregation controlled by Lev Leviev, an Israeli administrator who, in the 30 years aback he emerged from the Tashkent ghetto, has appear far abundant to drive De Beers into abrupt retreat from Angola and abuse its acceptable ascendancy of Russian production. Changing its action in the face of the new competition, De Beers awash off bisected its five-billion-dollar accrue in 1999-2000. (Last year the Oppenheimers angry De Beers into a clandestine aggregation and accomplished absolution such information.) Prices accept burst although they accept not collapsed, suggesting that accumulation and appeal do absolutely administer to the design exchange afterwards all. In actuality in backward 2000 the De Beers sales aggregation faced a curtailment of asperous stones and had to chase for emergency supplies. "Diamonds are not absolutely a article like gold or silver," a arch New York banker explained to me one day. "You won't buy a bean from a jeweler and afresh advertise it aback to him for the aforementioned price—he's not activity to accordance up his profit. But they are absolutely the easiest way to move amount around. I apperceive a guy who had to leave Iran at a moment's apprehension during the anarchy there. No time to advertise his abode or get to the bank, but he had time to aces up 30 actor dollars' account of block and airing away." "They are a anatomy of currency," remarked Mark van Bockstael of the Design Aerial Council in Antwerp. "They aback all-embracing loans, pay debts, pay bribes, buy arms. In abounding cases they are bigger than money." Monrovia, basic of Liberia, for example, is accepted as a mecca for money launderers gluttonous to about-face ambiguous banknote assets into block that can afresh be calmly confused and awash elsewhere. There accept been bottomless letters that Osama bin Laden's agitator organization, al Qaeda, fabricated use of this operation. As van Bockstael expounded on his admired subject, we were aimless to cafeteria from his appointment in the city's design district, the affection of the world's design bazaar. Eighty percent of the world's asperous gem-quality block are traded every year forth three abbreviate streets abutting to the Antwerp railroad station. The Antwerp commune has extensions in abounding cities: West 47th Avenue in New York, London's Hatton Garden, the high-rise offices of Ramat Gan in Tel Aviv, not to acknowledgment the Opera Abode commune in Mumbai (Bombay) and the added "diamond cities" of India, where, in a abutment of avant-garde technology and arrangement labor, 800,000 workers ability stones acceptance a atom of a carat into able gems. Anniversary of these business centers revolves about claimed acquaintance and connections, thrives on rumor and gossip, and cherishes secrecy. Multimillion-dollar deals are clinched with a handshake and the chat mazal, Hebrew for "good luck." "So abounding secrets," sighed van Bockstael as we skipped to abstain a cyclist in a continued atramentous covering and a broad, flat, fur-trimmed hat. "Nothing is what it seems in the design business, and bisected the time you don't alike apperceive if that's true." Diamonds are accessory to secrets. With alone some exceptions, they accordance no clue as to area on or in the Earth they originated. Although the industry is affective against a arrangement for certifying the antecedent of every diamond, the hundreds of millions of stones affective through the activity today are anonymous, address their history as they canyon from asperous to polished. But not always, as I credible one afternoon in New York at the aback of a well-guarded branch in the affection of the design commune in midtown Manhattan. There a adept ass-kisser alleged Motti Bernstein was working, angled over a scaife, a spinning deejay that looks abundant like an age-old almanac turntable. The credible of the scaife was coated with oil and design powder, and comatose on the scaife as it spun was an egg-shaped design clamped at the end of a automated arm alleged a dop. Two months before, aback this design aboriginal accustomed in the workroom, it had been an opaque, semirectangular slab, fatter at one end than the other. In accession the bean had been "frosted," acceptation that its interior—and any imperfections it ability contain—was hidden until the aboriginal cut had been made. Bernstein aerial the dop and looked at the bean through his loupe. He did this every few minutes, as he has done with tens of bags of stones in 30 years of alive as a adept cutter. Calculating the appearance and admeasurement of able gems that can be carved from a asperous bean afterwards accident too abundant actual is the accurate art in acid and polishing. For added than a ages Bernstein had been patiently abstraction this design into its present form, crafting its 58 facets so that ablaze would reflect both from its credible and its heart. This was no accustomed diamond. "Never in my activity did I assignment on article like this," he said as he captivated it up for me to see. The design was enormous—just over 102 carats, the admeasurement of an egg and the bigger absolute oval-cut design in history. "It's candied material, bendable on the wheel," purred William Goldberg, Bernstein's bang-up and a acclaimed banker in the New York design business. "Sometimes a bean will cry as you put it on the scaife," said Goldberg, uttering a plaintive, arrest babble in illustration. "But not this one. God," he declared to the allowance at large, "is on our side." Goldberg had bought the design over the buzz from Tel Aviv. Aback it arrived, he had taken it out on his terrace so he could be photographed captivation it. Block can blast if addled in the amiss place, so one man had lain abounding breadth on the flagstones below Goldberg's ample hands, a animal beanbag in case Goldberg alone the asperous stone. Eloquent on the accountable of its abstract qualities, Goldberg was now acknowledgment accessible names for the egg-shaped design Bernstein was polishing, one of four gems ultimately cut from the asperous bean that had accustomed from Tel Aviv. "Maybe the Beluga," he mused, "because it's the best of the best." He had no abstraction area the bean had originated afore it alike on the Israeli design market. I asked him what the uncut design had advised aback he bought it, and he replied, "265.82 carats." The penny dropped. I had activate an old friend. Eight months before, in the backward bounce of 2000, a accumulation of design miners had been adamantine at assignment in a wide, albino pit south of the burghal of Mbuji-Mayi, the affection of design country in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The pit was honeycombed with aboveboard shafts hardly added than a grave and as abysmal as 20 anxiety (10 meters). The clay was hauled in buckets on ropes to the surface, washed, sieved, and best over. It was backbreaking and alarming labor, and sometimes weeks or months went by afterwards any reward. Most of the stones the diggers activate were small—less than a carat. The few dollars they brought had to be disconnected up amid the abundant interests complex in the dig, including the client of the land, the financier who supplied the food, the guards, and the creuseurs, as diggers are alleged in Congo. Afresh at the end of May one of the creuseurs accomplished into the clay and pulled out a bean acceptance an astonishing 265.82 carats. Their troubles were over—at atomic for a while. The creuseurs who had activate what anon became accepted as the "big stone" were bent to drive a adamantine bargain. Afterwards acute negotiations, they fabricated a accordance with a stocky, 37-year-old banker alleged Alphonse Ngoyi Kasanji, a able force in the bounded design business. Rumor put the amount at three actor dollars, although Kasanji would never affirm to me how abundant he'd paid, conceivably because some amid the aboriginal aggregation of diggers ability not accept gotten their fair share. But he did accept to accompany in ally and banknote from his all-encompassing backdrop about the burghal to accommodated the allurement price. Confident that he would be able to compensate his investment, he began to attending for buyers. Bewitched by the stone's astronomic size, he put it about that it ability be account as abundant as 20 actor dollars. His troubles were aloof beginning. In October 2000 Kasanji appear that the big bean had been awash to a German client for 17.9 actor dollars—a amount aggrandized abundant to accession a few eyebrows in the industry. Surrounded by an acquisitive associates of partners, family, and altered hangers-on, he was a connected attendance in the antechamber of the Hotel Memling in Kinshasa, the basic of Congo, cat-and-mouse for account that the money had accustomed in the bank. "Is it here, Monsieur Kasanji?" I would alarm out to him in the morning. "Today," he would acknowledgment confidently. But the money never did arrive, and eventually Kasanji absitively to set off for Antwerp and advertise the bean there. Unfortunately for him there was accession amateur in the game. At the time the big bean was discovered, Congo had been bound for two years in a civilian war in which both abandon were costs themselves with diamonds. The government in Kinshasa relied heavily on its acquirement from Mbuji-Mayi's diamonds, about 25 actor dollars a month. At the aforementioned time, the government's Zimbabwean aggressive allies were gluttonous to about-face a accumulation on their action by demography shares in a new Mbuji-Mayi mine. And in the eastern bisected of the country rebels and their sponsors from the Rwandan and Ugandan armies were either siphoning off block themselves or demanding those that did. Back in August 2000, atrocious for accoutrements to area off a insubordinate offensive, Laurent Kabila, afresh Congo's president, had awash the absolute appropriate to buy block in Congo to an Israeli close for 20 actor dollars. Bounded dealers anon began smuggling stones over the bound to balk the advancing Israelis and the low prices they were paying. But poor Kasanji and his abundance were already too aerial contour to blooper abroad unobserved, so at the administration of Kabila and the Israeli firm, he took the bean not to Antwerp but to Tel Aviv, area it ultimately bent the absorption of Gerry Rubens and David Delevi, William Goldberg's Israeli partners. For the bean Kasanji had claimed would accompany 20 actor dollars, Goldberg agreed to pay a added bashful eight million. Diamond wars are not a new phenomenon. Continued ago in southern India able kingdoms fought for ascendancy of the mines that fabricated them rich. Both abandon in the alone Lebanese civilian war of the 1970s and 1980s were subsidized by Lebanese traders and smugglers in the design fields of Sierra Leone. In those canicule no one alfresco the design business paid abundant absorption to this trend, nor did the actualization in the aboriginal '90s of the Angolan insubordinate baton Jonas Savimbi as a aloft supplier of asperous stones accelerate actual outrage, admitting the annihilation that bound ensued. In 1992, afterward the breakdown of a accordance accord with the Angolan government, Savimbi beatific his unita army to appropriate the diamond-rich Cuango basin in arctic Angola. Over the abutting seven years, acknowledgment to the efforts of 100,000 semi-enslaved diggers, he extracted conceivably as abundant as four billion dollars' account of stones. The after-effects of Savimbi's admission to design money are abundantly credible today. "Diamonds accept been a anathema on Angola. Afterwards block the war couldn't aftermost so long," said Jeremias Belino as he stood in the accident of Kuito, his home burghal in the axial highlands, burst into ruin by Savimbi's assaults and accoutrements barrages. De Beers's anniversary letters from the aboriginal '90s accommodate abrupt acceptance of this belief, abstemious as they are with complacent references to the company's success in affairs up the stones marketed by Savimbi and thereby alienated a excess on the market. For years there were few complaints from the UN or any added ascendancy about the trade's abutment of Savimbi. In December 1998, however, All-around Witness, a baby accumulation of British ecology and animal rights activists, entered the fray. Operating on an anniversary account of below than $500,000, from a accommodation appointment in arctic London, the accumulation appear "A Asperous Trade," a able and anathema arbitrary of the design industry's albatross for Angola's misery, quoting, amid added accessible sources, De Beers's audacious reports. Nevertheless it was not the war in Angola but the abominable atrocities of a insubordinate accumulation in accession African country that assuredly put "conflict" or "blood" block on the map, aggressive the industry with disaster. In the mid-1990s the richest digging fields in Sierra Leone fell below the ascendancy of a insubordinate accumulation alleged the Revolutionary United Advanced (RUF), led by a aloft army anatomical alleged Foday Sankoh. By 1999 Sankoh and his men were smuggling tens of millions of dollars' account of stones a year out of Sierra Leone through adjoining countries. The RUF forces, abounding of them forcibly affected boys, maintained ascendancy of their operation by overextension alarm amid the bounded population. In a horrifically analytical address Sankoh's soldiers ordered men, women, and accouchement to band up with both accoutrements outstretched, afresh afraid off the victims' calmly or legs and hauled them abroad in sacks. As a way of advisedly panicking civilians it was added able than bald slaughter. As letters of the RUF's abominable attacks spread, the alfresco apple began to anticipate a affiliation amidst block and accouchement with missing limbs. All-around Witness appear the barrage of Fatal Transactions, a attack by several organizations to active consumers to the blood-soaked ancillary furnishings of the design business, aloof in time for the 1999 Christmas season. "That admirable design chaplet you buy for that appropriate addition at a chichi Fifth Avenue adornment abundance may be allotment the activities of a aborigine assemblage in Sierra Leone," declared the New York Post in November 1999. This array of talk, with intimations of worse to come, threw the industry and those who depended on it into panic. "If there is a avoid of diamonds," said Nelson Mandela, "the economies of Botswana and Namibia will collapse." Block from the Ekati abundance in Canada, a new and aloft source, were marketed as advancing "from a acreage as authentic as the apprenticed snow" in advertisements assuming maidens continuing on icebergs—an adumbrated adverse to the sweaty, war-torn jungles of Africa. The U.S. Congress began the action of creating legislation that would authorization acrimonious acceptance of all alien block as "clean." As it angry out, barter appeared audacious by the controversy. The feared avoid did not materialize, and sales for 2000 were the accomplished on record. Nevertheless De Beers, gluttonous to afford at atomic its angel as a cartel and to acquaint its own band of branded gems, appear that it would no best be affairs any African stones from mines it did not own. "Diamonds accept to be ethically correct," Tracey Peterson, a De Beers spokesperson, abreast me as we stood on the Debmar Pacific's atrociously agitation accouter in the South Atlantic. "They are about adulation and emotion, bendable issues." Associating block with adulation and affect has continued been the key business action for De Beers. Fundamental to the attack is the acclaimed byword "A Design Is Forever"—embracing the accompanying notions of abiding adherence and abiding value. Sometimes De Beers advertisements are added absolute about the role of its artefact in the alliance game: "Of advance there's a acknowledgment on your investment," ran one full-page alms aloof afore Christmas 2000. "We aloof can't book it here." De Beers may be alone amenable for prompting, in below than a century, American, European, Japanese, and, increasingly, Chinese women to apprehend the "traditional" allowance of a design assurance arena as a amount of right. But belief that accessory block with adulation and adherence go aback continued afore De Beers's business campaign. In Indian belief gems are advised to accept a catholic ability in and of themselves. Astrologers admonish audience on which gems to abrasion in adjustment to adapt their destinies, and diamonds, according to one practitioner I consulted in Hyderabad, affectation able furnishings on love, procreation, and, by extension, immortality. Given their abnormal powers, it is not hasty that jewels accept abysmal religious acceptation in India. Thus it was that in a gold-plated Hindu altar aerial in the hills aloft Tirupati northwest of Chennai (Madras), I activate a god adorned in diamonds. The age-old idol, nine anxiety alpine and carved of atramentous stone, stood at the end of a attenuated passageway. This was Balaji, fast acceptable the best accepted celestial in all India. In the band abaft me, addition aback miles, tens of bags of aflame worshipers chanted his name, the complete aggressive with the barrage of adjacent machines allocation the donations—destined to be acclimated for the temple's accommodating enterprises—that caked into accumulating sacks at the entrance. Balaji wears a colossal ablaze acme of diamonds. It weighs about 60 pounds (30 kilograms) and contains no below than 28,000 stones. His calmly are covered with added diamonds; his aerial action massive design earrings. Close by are a diamond-encrusted conch carapace and discus, his acceptable accessories. As Nanditha Krishna, an affected Chennai administrator and agog Balaji devotee, explained somewhat superfluously, "He brand diamonds." Amid added examples, she cited the acquaintance of a acquaintance who had promised Balaji a admired design arena and afresh anticipation bigger of it, alone to accept the arena berserk sucked off his feel and into the accumulating sack by an concealed force as he entered the shrine. Deposited in the awash abundance vaults of the temple, the arena would accept abutting priceless charcoal of an era aback India was the world's sole antecedent of diamonds. Southern Indian kingdoms and empires grew able on the abundance cloudburst out of the alluvial mines of the eastern Deccan Plateau, abundant of which was deposited at Tirupati and added temples as offerings from adherent rulers. Their religious obligations fulfilled, kings and princes advantaged themselves with alien adornment in forms and settings agnate to those ancestral to the gods. Travelers from abroad Europe marveled at the alone affectation of abundance at the aristocratic courts. According to one afraid 16th-century visitor, alike the baron of Vijayanagar's horse wore a "city's worth" of jewels. High on a bedrock on the bend of Hyderabad stands the aerial fortress-palace of the rulers of Golconda, sacked and broke by the Mogul emperor added than 300 years ago and alone to the kites and kingfishers that arise over the bashful battlements. Of all the old design kingdoms, this was the best famous, its actual name still a analogue for abundance centuries later. The Koh-i-Noor, the Hope Diamond, the Regent, and added stones acclaimed for their affecting and frequently blood-soaked histories—the aboriginal battle diamonds—passed through actuality afore afloat to the alfresco apple by way of purchase, bribery, theft, or conquest. The amazing "old-mine" design cuts and settings admired by India's now blank aristocratic families—and the anew fashionable adaptations by avant-garde jewelers—give a adumbration of aloft times. In an acrid about-face of the wheel, continued afterwards the Indian mines were played out and the aftermost banker alone Golconda, best of the world's gem block already afresh canyon through India. Of the 800 actor stones broken out of the world's design mines every year, best are tiny, a atom of a carat. Until 30 years ago they were advised advantageous alone for automated purposes such as acid edges and assignment bits. Activity costs in the acceptable acid centers of New York, Antwerp, or Tel Aviv fabricated it big-ticket to about-face them into gems. Then in the 1970s a accumulation of Jains, associates of a baby but admirable Indian religion, set up boutique in Mumbai and began to cut and brightness actual baby block for export. As time went by, they confused their accomplishment operation to Surat and a few added bigoted cities. A bendable currency, some advantageous tax breaks, bargain labor—"we adopt to say economical labor," one of them acclimatized me—and deeply affiliate ancestors networks all formed to the Jains' advantage. These new arrivals on the design arena activate aliment accessible to appear by. Not alone did De Beers activate auction its banal of baby stones, which came to be accepted as Indian goods, but the U.S. government additionally started to advertise off its accrue of automated diamonds. The all-inclusive achievement of the Argyle mine, credible in 1979 in northwestern Australia, consists about absolutely of actual baby stones. A added antecedent opened up in 1996 aback Boris Yeltsin awash a block of the Russian accrue to accession banknote for his reelection campaign. Jewelers, decidedly in the U.S., bound acclimatized to booty advantage of this new antecedent of arrangement gems, business them for use in bargain settings. So it is that abounding of the world's asperous block acquisition their way to India, and so it was that I activate myself in Old Surat affairs block in a avenue so awash with traders that four-wheeled cartage has continued aback been banished. All about me serious-looking men were negotiating deals in accelerated Gujarati, while at my anxiety a adolescent beggar anxiously swept the dust in hopes of award devious stones. Amidst the barrage of the Surat avenue exchange I was offered block of every appearance and color. Addition flashed a cardboard aboveboard of agleam table-cut atramentous stones at me. Accession showed me some bare yellows. Abaft me there was an aflame bark from the crowd: "Hey, accompany your stuff, this guy's affairs everything!" I appear that I was attractive accurately for "small whites," and anon I was clearing axial an accessible storefront, analytical at a little accumulation of what looked like blithely agleam grains of sand. Magnified ten times by the dealer's loupe, the beach angry into a abundance of altogether cut "round brilliants," anniversary one with 58 anxiously able facets. It was hardly a below absorbing afterimage than the abundant multimillion-dollar orb I had handled at Motti Bernstein's board aback in New York. "Six and a bisected thousand rupees a carat," said the dealer. That would be aloof below $140. Afterwards some accelerated negotiations the amount came bottomward to 6,000 rupees, $125, and I was the appreciative client of a bankrupt aboveboard of cardboard absolute 168 absolute little works of art. Anniversary one had taken three hours to make, with the activity subdivided amid three altered workers. I acquainted that the craftsmen, recruited from a abandoned acreage commune in the autogenous and earning about $80 a week, adapted added acclaim for these miracles of miniaturization. I had apparent the all-inclusive De Beers mines in South Africa and Botswana, the trading centers of Antwerp, New York, and Tel Aviv, not to acknowledgment absolute countries busted by design wars, but annihilation absolutely so afflicted on me the calibration of the all-around design business as black blitz hour on Varachha Road. This is the capital avenue of the Surat design branch district, and at 8 p.m. it is a clamor of honking cars, accommodation rickshas, motorcycles, and hundreds of bags of bicycles accustomed bisected a actor design workers. The carefully attentive factories in which these bodies accept been at assignment all day ("If bodies can get ascendancy of block . . .") alter from airless sweatshops to added flush establishments. One, Blue Star Diamonds, alike dresses its workers in identical gray-blue uniforms and insists they esplanade their bicycles neatly, advanced auto all pointing in the aforementioned direction. In the Blue Star appointment allowance proprietors Anuj and Akshay Mehta were cogent me of their aggressive move upmarket into beyond and added admired stones aback I produced my little packet and asked their opinion. The brothers aerated out their loupes and began analytical the diminutive gems as actively as if they had been ten times larger. Finally, afterwards assessing blush and quality, they gave their best estimate: "Ten thousand rupees?" Smugly, I told them how abundant I had paid. They beamed at me approvingly. "Excellent price. You are a design banker now! Why don't you go aback to the exchange and accomplish a acceptable profit?" I was tempted, but in the end I kept my little cache, aloof to pore over from time to time. They are abounding of surprises.
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