934 Dumping site
Kelly, a black woman who became the star of the park, returned again after locking the diamond in the park's safe. She came back to continue her work.
After she appeared, many treasure hunters gathered around her and reached out to shake her hand. This was a tradition in the park. If you touched the hand of the lucky treasure hunter, you were supposed to gain luck.
Everybody kept talking to Kelly and asking about diamond searching tips.
Kelly, now in a state of calm, answered the continuous inquiries patiently. Then she carried her buckets and tools and walked towards Li Du's gang.
Sophie smiled and said, "Congratulations, Mrs. Andelat, it is an enviable thing that fortune has shown you."
Kelly took her hand and smiled excitedly. "Yes, yes, I got the eye of God and took the chance. Do you know how I named the diamond?"
"How?" Sophie asked curiously.
"Esperanza. It's my daughter's name. It's Spanish, and means hope. She is my hope, and this diamond is my hope," Kelly said cheerfully.
"It is a good name," said Li Du.
Kelly said, "Indeed! Indeed! It is the stone of hope!"
Kelly started talking about her situation to Sophie. "My daughter went to New York University. She chose law, but I didn't have the money to send her. She does not have a scholarship, and it is difficult to apply for one. And my two sons are so considerate that they want to quit school and work to help their sister."
"Well, now there's hope. I've got the diamonds. At first, I did not come here with much hope. I just wanted to make a few thousand dollars by digging up two small pieces of diamond.
"But I had been working 20 hours a day for ten months and couldn't find anything. Every day, my daughter encouraged me, she said I would find a diamond sooner or later, and thank God, I did find one…"
Recalling all that, her eyes turned red and she began to cry.
Sophie consoled her and introduced her to Li Du, saying that he could help her sell the diamond.
Kelly, apparently unconvinced, muddled through, telling Sophie that she had the contact information of a local diamond buyer and that the diamond would sell for a good price.
At the same time, she told Sophie, "Nobody here believes there's a big diamond, but I found one. Faith, confidence, and persistence are the keys. There may still be big diamonds in the big rocks."
Her words sent Li Du's mind spinning. Previously, Li Du had focused his attention on the soil. He subconsciously ignored the larger stones and looked for the smaller stones, searching for gems in them.
This was a common practice for everyone in the park, as no one except Kelly has found more than five carats over the past eight years.
Perhaps he could take note of the park's dumping site, the gravel disposal section.
People looked for gems in stones; first, they would find some stones, and these stones were mixed with gems, but also obstruced them and interfered with finding them.
As a result, after filtering stones without diamonds in a sieve, the people would gather and throw them into the fixed area at the northwest corner of the park.
Over time, a large amount of rubble appeared in the northwest corner, which was the place selected by the diggers. There were no diamonds in the rubble, and it was full of worthless small gravel, so it was called the dump site.
Li Du thought there might be diamonds in this dump site.
Of course, everyone is very careful when choosing stones, and even small broken diamonds and gemstones will be selected. What people looked for were the small stones. The larger ones were not selected, they were basically thrown away directly from the top of the sieve.
So he thought there might be no small diamonds in the trash, but big ones.
Rather than moving, Li Du led Godzilla through the park toward the northwest dump site, ready to search it carefully.
The dump site, which covered about half an acre, was like a gravel-ground, a mass of high little stones that rise and fall like graveyard mounds.
There were many people looking for gems elsewhere in the park, fewer people here, but there were people working as well. Apparently, Li Du was not the only one to come up with this idea.
There was no need to use running water to wash the soil here, they just need to pick up the stones.
But there are too many stones and the diamonds are too small, which makes it more difficult than looking for a fire opal in the Petrified Forest National Park.
Most people who came here looking for diamonds were those who had the same sudden idea as Li Du. They came up with the thought, went on to work for a while, and soon they'd realize that it's impossible to find diamonds in this place, and they'd leave.
Too many stones and diamonds tend to be small. Therefore, people may be able to search no more than a small area in a day, and finding a diamond would be less likely.
A Mexican man with green hair searched in the pile and found nothing. He kicked the rocks in anger and called out, "F**k, there is not a damn thing here. Damn, let's not waste time on this place..."
The man next to him complained, "Ha, you regret it, don't you? I told you in the beginning, more than once, don't come here. Look at that fella Rodin, how long has he been here? What has he found?"
The man motioned forward as he spoke. Li Du looked in the direction his arm was pointing and saw a bald black man with rough skin sitting among the rocks, looking for something.
"There are too many stones here," the green-haired Mexican man explained. "If there were fewer, we might find something. I'm sure there are diamonds here, but there are too many stones!"
His friend rolled his eyes and said, "Of course! There are loads of gravel brought here every day, all from the park, and they secretly throw stones into the ground every night. It's really bad!"
The park, which covered only 37 acres, had been excavated by what was estimated to be hundreds of millions of people over the centuries. Even if this place were just a sandy lot, it might all have been dug and all valuable contents found by people.
By the time the Arkansas government took over the park in 1972, it had been reduced to an empty mine.
Since then, the government has taken a series of steps to save the park's appeal, such as advertising the diamonds found in it and refilling the rubble.
It was common knowledge to look for diamonds among the stones. The park manager was very smart at that time. He thought that, rather than coming to find diamonds, the people came to dig in the gravel.
So every once in a while the park management would throw a lot of rubble into the ground, increasing the amount of work and fun it took to find diamonds.
There's always rock to be dug up, which means there are always diamonds to be found, and that's the real attraction.