The little spring wasted down the slope, and they
thought it would be a good plan to dig a pit in the clay
so as to reservoir a few barrels of water. They began
this early in June, and here, at a depth of four feet,
they came upon a deposit of the same sort of dark heavy
soil that had been fou.nd at Gold Hill. It was even
darker, and sparkled with minute flakes of gold. Eun-
ning swiftly to the mining trench fifty feet distant,
one of them brought a pan and tested the new find.
The bottom of the vessel seemed fairly covered with
precious metal as soon as the gravel, clay, and " black
stuff" were stirred up and allowed to slide over the
edge.
This was the top of the world-famous Ophir, the
north end of the Comstock. The main masses of the
mighty fissure vein extended in parallel lines of frag-
mentary projections from the black mound of the
Ophir south to the black mound of Gold Hill. At some



4:0 THE STOEY OF THE MINE.
remote period, ages before, the great lode had risen
hundreds of feet higher; uncounted centuries of
chemical and physical action had worn and broken it
until thousands of tons of the hardest of quartz
was as soft as clay and as fine as sand. This is what
miners mean by " decomposed quartz " ; it can be
panned out or washed in a rocker, long torn, or sluice
box.
