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The best sold at two shillings the pound, the inferior for eighteen pence. The Virginians dropped all thought of sassafras and clapboard. Tobacco only had any flavor of Golconda. At this time the rich soil, composed of layer on layer of the decay of forests that had lived from old time, was incredibly fertile. As fast as trees could be felled and dragged away, in went the tobacco.
The beggarly country, as it had been insolently called by the inhabitants of warmer and more fruitful regions, would be the great mart for the choicest luxuries, sugar, rum, coffee, chocolate, tobacco, the tea and porcelain of China, the muslin of Dacca, the shawls of Cashmere, the diamonds of Golconda, the pearls of Karrack, the delicious birds' nests of Nicobar, cinnamon and pepper, ivory and sandal wood.
All the world-famous Borghese jewels were hers to deck her beauty with a small Golconda of priceless gems; there was gold galore to satisfy her most extravagant whims; and she was still young only twenty-five and in the very zenith of her loveliness.
At Timber the time was passing with discouraging rapidity. Nothing they could do seemed to have any beneficial effect on Baldy's legs the legs that had been such a matter of pride to the boy in the old Golconda days.
The bride, instead of being disguised in tawdry stuffs of gold and silver, and sweating under a harness of diamonds, according to the elegant taste of the times, appeared in a negligee of plain blue satin, without any other jewels than her eyes, which far outshone all that ever was produced by the mines of Golconda.
The first mine visited by Tavernier was that of Raolconda, a five-days' journey from Golconda. The manner of trading there he thus describes: "A very pretty sight is that presented every morning by the children of the master-miners and of other inhabitants of the district.
Three million francs, when we can not pay eighty millions annual interest on our debts!" "'Tis as you say, somewhat expensive," said Law. "Naturally, for I say to you that this stone had never parallel in the history of the world. It seems that this overseer in the Golconda mines got possession of it in some fashion, and escaped to Europe, hiding the stone about his person.
Towards the end of the seventeenth century the great Moghul Emperor Aurangzeb dethroned the lord of the soil, the King of Golconda; and, although the Portuguese were not turned out of San Thomé, it was now a part of the Moghul Empire, and was put in charge of a Moslem ruler.
Her delicately formed ears, her vermilion hands, her little feet, curved and tender as the lotus-bud, glitter with the brilliancy of the loveliest pearls of Ceylon, the most dazzling diamonds of Golconda.
The Golconda mines eventually ceased to be productive, and Jewish diamond merchants are no longer to be seen in the city, and the Jewish colony has long since disappeared.
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