midday
By the time that the wagon arrived and the tent had been pitched the day was too far advanced to make it worth while for work to be started . It was , therefore , decided to give the workers a good long night 's rest after their wearisome tramp from the king 's village , and an hour after sunset saw the entire party wrapped in profound sleep . But with the appearance of the sun above the sea 's rim , on the following morning , everybody was once more astir ; and after an early breakfast a general adjournment was made to the mine , where , under Dick Maitland 's superintendence , a dozen parties of the Makolo were soon actively engaged with their native mattocks and shovels in excavating the soil in search of the precious stones , one-half of each party being employed upon the work of digging , while the other half turned over the excavated soil and extracted from it all the stones which it happened to contain , Dick and Grosvenor employing themselves meanwhile in passing from party to party and sorting out the rubies from the worthless stones upturned . In this way considerable progress was made , and by midday a very handsome pile of rubies had been accumulated , consisting , however , for the most part of relatively small stones . It was not , however , until late in the afternoon that their real good luck came to them , and then it came all in a moment . A party of the natives who had for some time been left to themselves had excavated quite a little cavern in the side of the pit , and , as might have been expected , this mode of working ultimately resulted in a `` cave-in '' . Fortunately for them , the workers who were responsible for it detected the signs of the approaching fall in time to avoid being buried by it ; and when the dust-cloud occasioned by it presently subsided , and the new face thus laid bare came to be examined , it was discovered that a veritable `` pocket '' of rubies had been exposed , the stones -- every one of them of large size and especially fine fire and colour -- being so numerous that almost every shovelful of earth turned over contained one or more !