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It will be remembered that the miners first found the gold in flakes, then farther up in nuggets, then that the nuggets had to be pursued to pay-dirt beneath gravel and clay. This meant shafts, tunnels, hydraulic machinery, stamp-mills.
But in other places, where the quartz veins outcrop, there are scores of stamp-mills at work, night and day, pounding out the gold. Some of the mines have been sunk more than a half mile into the earth, and the gold is still as abundant as ever. In some portions of the mountains hydraulic mining is more common than quartz-mining.
"No." "Nine." Echo, "Nine." "Ten." "Pitcairn says, somehow or other, there's been gold-washin' goin' on up here pretty well ever since the world began." "Indians?" "No; seems to have been a bigger job than even white men could manage. Instead o' stamp-mills, glaciers grindin' up the Mother Lode; instead o' little sluice-boxes, rivers; instead o' riffles, gravel bottoms.
It would take the pen of a master to paint the blue labyrinth of mountains heaped up on all sides and beyond the long, winding city in the narrow gorge far below, up out of which came with each puff of wind the muffled sound of stamp-mills and smelters. As I sat, the howling of three drunken peons drifted up from the road below.
There's the deep blue sky blue like nothing you ever saw in any other sky, and the stars so bright and big, and so near, that you feel you could reach up and pluck one with your hand; and just over the little hill are the lights of the stamp-mills, the smoke and the mad red flare, the roar of great hammers as they crush, crush, crush; while the vibration of the earth makes you feel that you are living in a world of Titans."
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