Xinjiang, October 1 2000
So, there I was, sort of poking around among tables laden with not very antique and not very local porcelain bowls and jade buddhas, when I stopped dead. Towering up above a heap of beads was the most magnificent cluster of amethyst I had ever seen! Unlike most amethyst masses, encrustations on the walls of geodes or veins, this was a free-standing cylinder almost a foot tall, composed of gleaming lavender pyramids like a glittering rocket ship, with two shorter cylinders, sort of boosters, on the side. “How much, how much,” I gibbered to the (Chinese) salesgirl. “One thousand yuan,” she replied, adding quickly, “but you can bargain!” One hundred and twenty dollars for a piece easily worth 10 to 50 times as much! I had my mouth open to tell her to wrap it up when Enid hit me with a body block. “Just shut up!” she hissed. “Go over there and look at bowls, for heaven’s sake, and stop drooling!” It took her only a few ritual scoffs to bring the price down to 500. Then the girl said, “Would you like see nother? We have.” Reaching under the counter, she hauled forth a specimen that made the first look like a tinkertoy. “Cost more,” she said. “More heavy.” I nearly died. This one was completely unlike the first, consisting of a huge solid mass of deep purple crystal, twinned and intergrown with the same facets glinting simultaneously from all corners of the mass, topped by four huge crystals sort of tipped into one another. “Both, both, both,” I gasped in Enid’s ear. “You sure?” she said. “Could they have carved them? They must weigh 30 pounds, have you thought about that?” “Both, both, both,” was all I could say.
So, we bought them both, for $140. At the end, I had the wit to ask where they were from, and was informed they came from Lake Karakury (she said “Kalikuli”), in the desert mountains up near the Tibetan border. Back at our hotel – the former Russian consulate, built in 1880 -- where I showed off the prizes to our group, the experienced travellers and collectors were unanimous that I dared not entrust such specimens as these to mailmen or baggage handlers. This was early in our trip, so from that point on, from bus to hotel to bus again, and eventually into overhead baggage racks and down endless airport corridors, I lugged those rocks -- lovingly wrapped in our sweatshirts despite the cold and packed round with socks and scarves and whatnot – in our big overnight bag, switching from shoulder to shoulder every few steps.
After a final, sweating traverse across city streets to get it to the Museum, looking out for robbers who might descend to strip me of my treasures, I triumphantly set the specimens down on a table in front of my friend George, the mineralogy curator. “My gosh,” he murmured. “I never saw amtheyst like that.” And three heartbeats later, "John, I don't suppose you noticed that these hexagonal amethyst crystals are square, did you?” Consternation!
Well, you simply cannot imagine how stupid I felt. Amethyst is just a tinted form of quartz, and quartz crystals are in your first tray of specimens in Mineralogy 101. Quartz makes up half of the mineral grains in granite, and every blasted crystal fetched to you by eager students is quartz. Quartz is ALWAYS instantly recognizable by its invariably six-sided outline. I have even collected amethyst in California, Colorado, and Namibia. For a geologist to mistake a lavender tetragonal mineral for amethyst quartz is roughly comparable to mistaking a head of broccoli for a string bean, just because they are both green.
“Hmm,” said George, turning the rocket specimen this way and that. “Hmm,” and he licked its base. “Aha.” “Aha what?” “Aha, it's alum." I never subjected a mineral to a taste test before, but always a first time. Sure enough, a whisper of salty flavor that puckered me right up. “Never saw purple alum before,” George mused. “Leave it here and we'll put a bit in the X-ray diffractometer.” The results came back yesterday - hydrous ammonium aluminum sulfate. “It’s not common alum,” George told me on the phone. “That has potassium, not ammonium. The X-ray pattern matches, fairly closely, to stuff sold by Baker Chemicals for Little Scientist crystal growing kits.” I died further. “On the other hand -- in fact there is a mineral with this composition in nature. Tschermigite. But it’s only known as efflorescences in brown-coal mines.” Not, I asked faintly, in Tibetan lakes? Could there be tschermigite hot springs? “Well, I suppose it's always possible,” he agreed reluctantly (geologists always speak as if overcoming grave reservations). “But it's more possible that you were suckered. Of course, it would take somebody a lot of work and trouble to grow crystals that big, and they said it came from a lake, and you say you didn't see any more of it around on the souvenir stands. I wouldn't throw them out.”
Well, is my face lavender! Yet, I can always dream. New occurrences of minerals in unheard-of environments are regularly reported, and until I return to Xinjiang – a fine idea, actually - and seek out the purple-encrusted shores of Karakury Lake itself, there's always a chance! Meanwhile – any crystal that you can lick is not going to last through many seasons of humid New York summers, so I will have to buy bell jars like the ones the Victorians put their stuffed birds in, to house my naughty but mysterious beauties.
John