Lapidarium, p.10
Lapidarium, page 10
The closest source of turquoise was in Cerrillos, New Mexico, about 120 miles to the east, a substantial journey. Chaco Canyon may have been a site of pilgrimage, and, as at Avebury in England, the labor of constructing clan houses, kivas, and monumental approaches, a devotional activity in itself (see also: Sarsen, p. 103).ix Turquoise from Nevada and Colorado found its way here too suggesting a flow of people exchanging valuable materials, perhaps in return for participation in rituals in the turquoise-infused structures.
Ancestral Puebloans had a long-distance trade network extending all the way to the Gulf of Mexico and Gulf of California: turquoise from the Southwest made its way down Mesoamerica and in return came scarlet macaws from tropical forests; various shells used for jewelry; copper; and distinctive ceramic cylinder jars used for the mixing, foaming, and ritualistic consumption of cacao, the first such to be found north of the Mexican border.x The Ancestral Puebloans were the first North Americans to consume chocolate, and they paid for it in turquoise.
STONES AND STORIES
#01 Calaverite
#02 Chrysoberyl
#03 Diamond
#04 Dolerite
#05 Lapis Lazuli
#06 Moldavite
#07 Moon Rock
#08 Opal
#09 Phonolite Porphyry
#10 Pumice
#11 SPINEL
STONEs ANd STORIEs
Fairy stories are full of stones. The everyday environment furnishes our fantasies, dreaming or awake, and there is often a rock in easy reach. In the Brothers Grimm’s brutal tales, stone is the source of both salvation and false hope: rubble is sewn into the stomach of a goat-gobbling wolf, and bright pebbles show a shining path in the forest of the night. In his scientific memoir The Periodic Table (1975), Primo Levi reminds us that every mine is magic, its dark recesses populated by kobolds, gnomes, and goblins, supernatural beings that dance in the corner of the eye.
The long tradition of creatures born from the rock beneath the mountain laid the foundation for J. R. R. Tolkien’s diabolical orcs. “It was in fairy-stories that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone, and wood, and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine,” he explained.i The trolls of Middle-earth, petrified by daylight, join a long lineage of crouching boulders and standing stones with legends of their own: in Cornwall, the megaliths known as the Merry Maidens were wicked girls who danced on the Sabbath; the rounded Moreaki Boulders on Koekohe Beach in New Zealand are gourds that washed ashore from an ancestral canoe.
The stony world is full of suggestion. The remains of sea creatures found in rocks high in the mountains have inspired a remarkable coincidence of stories across cultures. The earliest written tale of a great deluge appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh, written over 4,000 years ago. The biblical story of the great flood remained in currency until well into the nineteenth century. Found embedded in the earth, stone tools knapped to the shape of water droplets were surely cast from the heavens by a god whose fury could be heard in the roar of thunder: “thunderstones” are part of British and German folklore, but were also treasured in the ancient Benin Empire, placed on ancestral shrines and used for foretelling, as objects to swear by or with which to curse.ii
Great gems are valued for gossipy, scandalous history as well as their beauty. Jewelry collectors thrill to stones once worn by the beautiful and famous, the powerful and despotic—Mary Tudor’s pearl, Elizabeth Taylor’s sapphires, Marie Antoinette’s diamonds—and, oh, the delectable scandal of treasures cursed, chased, stolen, or concealed! As with the ruins of ancient sites, these mute stones are witnesses to history: “if stones had eyes” we say, “if stones could speak.”
Stones do have tales to tell if you know how to read them. The story of the Earth and beyond is still being pieced together from fragments of drama recorded in its rock. Geology is a story-telling science, requiring great leaps of poetic imagination. For geologists, the story of stone is a detective mystery in which the great question is not whodunit, but how. Starting from the present moment we are unpicking mysteries and piecing together clues, gradually working ourselves backward through time across four and a half billion years. It is an extraordinary saga.
#01
CALAVERITE
The Australian outback city of Kalgoorlie takes its name from a vine of many edible parts, among them dark green pods with the savor of snowpeas. In English, the vine is evocatively known as silky pear. This is Wongatha country, and here the indigenous name is Karlkurla or Kurgula—pronounced gull-gurl-la.i With some Anglophone mangling, 130 years ago, Kurgula became Kalgoorlie.
Today the town is less associated with natural delicacies than with the adjacent Super Pit. The title is winningly literal—the Super Pit is a truly enormous hole in the ground that, until 2016, was the largest open-cut gold mine in Australia. One of the area’s top attractions is the Super Pit Lookout, from which visitors can survey the enormous excavation site and, on most days, watch a controlled blast. If you’re lucky, you’ll visit on International Women’s Day, which since 2019, Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mines has honored with a pink pit blast, with explosives arranged in the circle and cross of a Venus symbol.ii
The Super Pit sits on the Yilgarn Craton, a chunk of the Earth’s crust thought to contain as much as 30 percent of the world’s known gold reserves. In the 120 years since European prospectors first laid claim to it, the deposit has yielded 3.7 million pounds of gold. Until the 1980s, there were dozens of individual mines working Kalgoorlie’s “Golden Mile,” and over 18,000 miles of underground workings, but they were all done away with, amalgamated into the Super Pit.
European prospectors first found gold in Western Australia in the 1880s, but it was Paddy Hannan and Tom Flanagan’s discovery at Mount Charlotte in Wongatha country in 1893 that sparked a gold frenzy for real. The following year 25,000 men joined the rush to the gold fields. Water was scarce, and the better equipped prospectors traveled with camels brought over from India. Well suited to carrying supplies over great distances in arid conditions, the camels made their way across Western Australia with their handlers from Afghanistan and territories in present-day Pakistan.iii
* * *
• • •
Over the next decade, 100,000 more people would follow that first rush, and the informal tent cities gradually transformed into a sizable town. The earlier prospectors had arrived in the area without European-style infrastructure: there was a lot of building to be done, and the most readily available material for walls and roads was the stone dug up by the gold miners.
If you’re on the hunt for gold, there are a few basic things you’ll know before you start digging. Gold is commonly found together with quartz. It’s heavy. It’s soft. It’s also inert—aloof, a bad mixer, one of the least reactive chemical elements. So, unlike other metals, which tend to present as ores, gold typically sits underground refusing to form compounds. In technical terminology, gold is usually mined as a pure native element.iv
In the back of your mind, too, you’ll remember those tales of dunderheads that lost fortune and reputation digging up “fool’s gold”—crystalline rocks of brassy-yellow iron pyrite. Best leave that stuff alone unless you want to become the punchline in a barroom yarn. During the rush of 1893, prospectors found a lot of bulky pyrite-type rock, which was thrown onto waste heaps and often went on to be used as filler in the new buildings and roads that were by then coalescing into the new town of Kalgoorlie.
Despite its standoffish reputation, gold does actually form a stable compound with the rare element tellurium, forming gold telluride—the mineral calaverite. Of the vast golden riches held in the Yilgarn Craton most—about three-quarters—is deposited as native metal. About 5 or 10 percent of the gold is essentially invisible—present only as tiny particles or bound into the crystal structures of other minerals. A full 20 percent occurs as calaverite.
Three years after the first gold rush at Kalgoorlie, on May 29, 1896, laboratory analysis of pyritic material found alongside the native gold leaked out to the miners: that stuff that looked like iron pyrite? It turned out to be calaverite and worth a fortune. It precipitated a second gold rush—this one to the dumps, walls, and pavements of the new town. A 1912 report in Mining magazine told of “blocks of ore, assaying at 500 oz gold per ton,” which had been used “to build a rough hearth and chimney in a miner’s hut.”v For three years, Kalgoorlie had been that mythic oddity: a prospector’s town where the streets had indeed been paved with gold.
#02
CHRYSOBERYL
Among the many exercises in excess confected by Joris-Karl Huysmans for his intoxicating, decadent novel À Rebours (Against Nature or Against the Grain, 1884), perhaps the most notorious is an aesthetic standoff between a Persian rug and a tortoise. Allowing his eyes to meander along the silvery glints of a carpet of iridescent yellow and plum, Jean des Esseintes—an anemic, high-strung young duke—decides the pattern might be enhanced by a dark object moving across its surface. He purchases a large tortoise and submits it to the rug, but is horrified to observe the raw sepia tone of its shell saps the carpet’s brilliance. “Trying to discover a way of resolving the marital discord between these tints and preventing an absolute divorce,”i he decides to have the creature’s shell gilded. Des Esseintes thrills to the effect, but decides this “gigantic jewel” is only half finished, and sets to designing a floral motif for it, to be executed in precious stones.
A character of such exquisite and perverse sensibilities that he once held a funerary banquet for the demise of his own virility, des Esseintes was never likely to be satisfied with run-of-the-mill gemstones. Not the diamond, which had “become terribly vulgar now that every businessman wears one on his little finger.” Otherwise prized stones are likewise dismissed: rubies and emeralds remind him of the headlamps of the Paris buses; topaz, whether yellow or pink, is “dear to people of the small shopkeeper class”; sapphire refuses to perform in artificial light. Des Esseintes turns instead to “more startling and unusual gems,” presenting his astonished lapidary with a list commencing with “asparagus green chrysoberyls.”ii
A chrysoberyl, too, captivates Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray when his journey through the beautiful, rare, and exotic brings him, for a phase, to the study of jewels. “He would often spend a whole day settling and resettling in their cases the various stones that he had collected, such as the olive-green chrysoberyl that turns red by lamplight.”iii Like des Esseintes, Gray reserves these stones for private luxuriance. The lists of the two characters’ favored gems read like a knowing parody of the litany of jewels in sacred texts. In place of the Biblical—“the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle”iv—des Esseintes prizes the chrysoberyl, peridot, olivine, almandine, uvarovite, cat’s eye, cymophane, and sapphirine. For both, the preference is for gems of unsettled appearance, deceitful and mysterious.
Fit for deceitful purposes, chrysoberyl—meaning “golden beryl”—is not a beryl at all. The pale “asparagus green” variety is but the drab cousin to two flashier manifestations. Dorian Gray’s miraculous gem, which transforms from green to red under artificial light, is a rare chrysoberyl named Alexandrite after Tsar Alexander II, who came of age in 1830 on the day the stone was discovered at the Takovaya emerald mines in the Urals. Des Esseintes’s cat’s eyes are also chrysoberyls, formerly known as oculus solis—“eye of the sun”—for the blaze of light sparking from inclusions within the stone.v Mineralogists describe the cat’s-eye effect rather deliciously as “chatoyancy.”
In her essay “Dandyism, Visuality and the ‘Camp Gem,’ ” Victoria Mills notes how “Des Esseintes and Dorian Gray reject those collections that could be found in the typical bourgeois male household (insects, stamps, coins) and prefer gender-bending accumulations of flowers, jewels, perfumes and textiles.” She suggests that both men see themselves as jewel-like objects: perfected, sparkling, refined.vi Chrysoberyl, with its hidden secrets, its perceptual play, its restlessness, is an apt alter ego.
Wilde revered Huysmans’s work, and the “yellow book” that poisons Dorian Gray’s soul is assumed to be À Rebours (at the time, naughty French novels were sold in yellow wrappers). Reading the “yellow book,” Gray notes its “curious jeweled style, vivid and obscure at once.” The rare and brilliant chrysoberyl also embodies the aesthete’s commitment to a vivid life of intense sensation, epitomized by nineteenth-century essayist Walter Pater’s exhortation “to burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy.”vii
Des Esseintes’s tortoise returns with its shell inlaid with chrysoberyls and the rest, and resumes its position on the rug, but the weight of its own brilliance is too much to bear, and the poor creature expires. Before À Rebours was published, Huysmans sent a copy to his friend Émile Zola, whose commitment to (at times grim) naturalism was quite polar to such dandy decadence. Zola’s letter in reply, contained, among other critical swipes, “A very bourgeois thought . . . It’s lucky the tortoise died, because it would have crapped on the carpet.”viii
#03
DIAMOND
The titular gem of Wilkie Collins’s novel The Moonstone (1868) is a diamond. Huge and yellow, cool and enigmatic, like the orb in the night sky it exerts uncanny power. Described as “the first, the longest and the best of modern English detective novels,”i The Moonstone caused a sensation on publication and whetted the public appetite for tales of bewitched gems.
Collins was not the first to spin a tale of cursed jewels. As long as gemstones have been associated with magic, silver-tongued storytellers have attributed powers both for good and ill. In his preface Collins admitted The Moonstone was indebted to the stories of two royal diamonds, both of which followed a troubled route from India to the palaces of Europe. The first was the Orlov, set in the Russian royal scepter. The shape and size of a bisected hen’s egg, it was a placatory gift from Prince Grigory Grigoryevich Orlov to his former lover Catherine the Great.
The second was the Koh-i-Noor, surrendered by the Maharajah of Lahore to Queen Victoria at the end of the Second Anglo-Sikh War in 1849. The enormous diamond, explained Collins, was one of the “sacred stones of India” said to bring “certain misfortune to the persons who should divert it from its ancient uses.”ii
The presentation of the Koh-i-Noor marked 250 years since Queen Elizabeth I had granted trade monopolies to the British East India Company (see also: Alunite, p. 16; Ruby, p. 54). The diamond was put on public display during the Great Exhibition of 1851, and recut according to European taste the following year. Far from marking a conclusion to hostilities, the period after the surrender of the Koh-i-Noor was bloody and unstable. In 1858, after violent revolts and reprisals, the governance of India was transferred from the East India Company to the British Crown.
Such was the context in which Collins worked on The Moonstone. Sixty-five years earlier, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1803) had suggested Britain was no place for horrid intrigue: there was no space for the Gothic in a country “where every man is surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies.” In the early years of the British Raj, Collins instead found the corruption of Empire spreading like a stain behind the superficial politesse of Victorian society.
The moonstone of the book’s title was supposedly plundered during the looting of the royal palace of Seringapatam in 1799 (a real event so violent that men of the East India Company were punished by hanging and flogging). The diamond carries its curse back to England, exposing, as it goes, a seeming wealthy elite who turn out to be living on borrowed funds, self-interested do-gooders, merciless and judgmental Christian evangelists, and entitled aristocrats blind to the feelings of the lower classes.
For millennia, India was the source of diamonds in Europe and Asia, dug from shallow mines in alluvial deposits into which they had washed from their mother rock. The earliest European reference to Indian diamonds appears in the writings of Theophrastus in 315 b.c.e.iii
Diamonds are lipophilic—they are attracted to fat and grease—an unusual quality that furnished legends of a “Valley of the Diamonds,” found in texts from China, Persia, and Europe. The valley was an inaccessible crevasse into which gem hunters threw chunks of raw meat to attract eagles. The birds swooped down to pick up the meat, then carried it to the cliffs to eat, bringing the diamonds up with them stuck to the fat. The distinctive iconography of eagles dining on gem-encrusted flesh was used in texts as late as the sixteenth century to represent India.iv
The Koh-i-Noor and Orlov were not the only great Indian diamonds to make their way by fair means or foul to Europe. In parallel, a narrative tradition emerged of “idols” ransacked for their (often cursed) gems.
The Regent Diamond—now in the Louvre—was acquired in 1701 by Thomas “Diamond” Pitt, president of the East India Company in Madras. Pitt insisted he came by the diamond in honest trade, but rumors, as they tend to, proliferated. One story had the diamond smuggled by an enslaved miner out of Golconda, hidden in a wound on his leg.v
In 1717 Pitt’s diamond was bought for King Louis XV, who carried it in his coronation crown, and subsequently wore it pinned to his hat. It later made its way into the hilt of Napoleon’s sword. Pitt, meanwhile, had bought land in England with his Indian wealth: a family seat from which first his grandson and then his great grandson gained a parliamentary seat and went on to become British prime minister.vi
