The Evangelist

In all of Venezuela's diamond-rich Guiana, no prospector was more given to the feverish, carousing miner's life than Agustin Martinez. For months he would pan the sandy river bottoms; finding a few diamonds, he would load his canoe with rum and float downriver, happily strumming the cuatro, his four-stringed guitar. Then some missionaries showed Agustin the error of his ways. "I put the cuatro and the rum in a sack and threw them into the Caroni River," he reported.

The other miners nicknamed him "the Evangelist." But faith and sobriety made Agustin a more diligent prospector. Early this year, panning in the remote Paragua River, he found an egg-size black stone "that shone like a diamond." Agustin thankfully put it in his pocket and paddled away. But joy soon changed to anxiety. For some of the miners who saw the stone said it was a rare gem worth $600,000 or more, but others scoffed that it was only an industrial diamond worth a bare $4,000. Afraid to test his luck, Agustin kept his big stone for two agonizing months. Word of the find spread. Newspapers debated names for a gem destined to rank with the Cullinan and the Hope; they settled on the Evangelist.

Last week Agustin finally turned the stone over to a government geologist in Ciudad Bolivar. The expert weighed and measured, tested and probed. At length he announced that the Evangelist was 698 carats--of almost pure iron.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.