Acres of Diamonds | Page 5

Russell H. Conwell
to my mind, at the Mountains of the Moon.
Afterward he came around into Palestine, then wandered on into
Europe, and at last when his money was all spent and he was in rags,
wretchedness, and poverty, he stood on the shore of that bay at
Barcelona, in Spain, when a great tidal wave came rolling in between
the pillars of Hercules, and the poor, afflicted, suffering, dying man
could not resist the awful temptation to cast himself into that incoming
tide, and he sank beneath its foaming crest, never to rise in this life
again.
When that old guide had told me that awfully sad story he stopped the
camel I was riding on and went back to fix the baggage that was
coming off another camel, and I had an opportunity to muse over his
story while he was gone. I remember saying to myself, ``Why did he
reserve that story for his `particular friends'?'' There seemed to be no
beginning, no middle, no end, nothing to it. That was the first story I
had ever heard told in my life, and would be the first one I ever read, in
which the hero was killed in the first chapter. I had but one chapter of
that story, and the hero was dead.
When the guide came back and took up the halter of my camel, he went
right ahead with the story, into the second chapter, just as though there
had been no break. The man who purchased Ali Hafed's farm one day
led his camel into the garden to drink, and as that camel put its nose
into the shallow water of that garden brook, Ali Hafed's successor
noticed a curious flash of light from the white sands of the stream. He
pulled out a black stone having an eye of light reflecting all the hues of
the rainbow. He took the pebble into the house and put it on the mantel
which covers the central fires, and forgot all about it.
A few days later this same old priest came in to visit Ali Hafed's
successor, and the moment he opened that drawing-room door he saw
that flash of light on the mantel, and he rushed up to it, and shouted:

``Here is a diamond! Has Ali Hafed returned?'' ``Oh no, Ali Hafed has
not returned, and that is not a diamond. That is nothing but a stone we
found right out here in our own garden.'' ``But,'' said the priest, ``I tell
you I know a diamond when I see it. I know positively that is a
diamond.''
Then together they rushed out into that old garden and stirred up the
white sands with their fingers, and lo! there came up other more
beautiful and valuable gems than the first. ``Thus,'' said the guide to me,
and, friends, it is historically true, ``was discovered the diamond-mine
of Golconda, the most magnificent diamond-mine in all the history of
mankind, excelling the Kimberly itself. The Kohinoor, and the Orloff
of the crown jewels of England and Russia, the largest on earth, came
from that mine.''
When that old Arab guide told me the second chapter of his story, he
then took off his Turkish cap and swung it around in the air again to get
my attention to the moral. Those Arab guides have morals to their
stories, although they are not always moral. As he swung his hat, he
said to me, ``Had Ali Hafed remained at home and dug in his own
cellar, or underneath his own wheat- fields, or in his own garden,
instead of wretchedness, starvation, and death by suicide in a strange
land, he would have had `acres of diamonds.' For every acre of that old
farm, yes, every shovelful, afterward revealed gems which since have
decorated the crowns of monarchs.''
When he had added the moral to his story I saw why he reserved it for
``his particular friends.'' But I did not tell him I could see it. It was that
mean old Arab's way of going around a thing like a lawyer, to say
indirectly what he did not dare say directly, that ``in his private opinion
there was a certain young man then traveling down the Tigris River that
might better be at home in America.'' I did not tell him I could see that,
but I told him his story reminded me of one, and I told it to him quick,
and I think I will tell it to you.
I told him of a man out in California in 1847 who owned a ranch. He
heard they had discovered gold in southern California, and so with a
passion for gold he sold his ranch to Colonel Sutter, and away he went,

never to come back. Colonel Sutter
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