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Gold!
It used to be said there was a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, though no one has ever found it. Yet men have left their business and their families and homes and gone to the ends of the earth in search of goldand to find a short cut to riches, for gold is used for money all over the World, though small coins are notmade of it because they would have to be too small and would easily be lost.
The largest gold mines in the World are in South Africa, and more than half of the gold in the World comes from gold mines near a city there called Johannesburg.
Gold is called the king of metals, for though platinum is more valuable, gold can be used for money and for ornament and for other things, and most people think it more beautiful. Pure gold is stamped 24 karat, but pure gold is so soft it wears away too easily and some other metal is usually mixed with it to make it harder. The finest rings and jewelry are usually 18 karat, which means that eighteen parts are of pure gold and six parts are of another metal. Look on a ring or watch and see if you can find the figures 18 K or 14 K stamped there.
Sometimes gold is found in little lumps which are called nuggets, but usually it is mixed through the rock and doesn’t show at all. The rock has to be ground to powder and then the gold separated from the powder.
Almost every family has at least one thing that has come from South Africa—a very small thing but a very valuable one. Can you guess what it is? The diamond in your mother’s ring. Nearly all the diamonds in the World come from a place called Kimberley in South Africa. They are found in a kind of blue clay in what used tobe volcanoes.
Most of the diamonds used to be sent to Amsterdam in Holland to be cut and polished. The reason they are sent there rather than to some other country is because the diamond mines were first discovered by Dutch peopleliving in South Africa.
