Jewelry Lovers

A few years ago a hitherto unknown and unusually interesting occurrence was discovered in Tanzania supplying green, so-called prase, opal, which owes its color to a small nickel content derived from weathered serpentine. Since the opal here, as in all the other localities, crops out relatively near the earth’s surface in fairly easily workable rocks, it is merely quarried out by human muscle power with crowbars or picks, and then broken up into smaller pieces with a rock hammer.

Wherever opal occurs it is universally a secondary mineral—that is, deposited in the rocks long after they were formed—in contrast to the majority of other gemstones which crystallized out at the same time as the rock consolidated. This explains why opal occurrences are never found at great depths and do not attain a high geological age. For the same reason opals are never found in alluvial gem gravels but are everywhere mined solely from their primary matrix rocks. Opal is, consequently in no need of high specific gravity (2.o) which, in secondary deposits, would help it to sink into concentrated pockets. It can do without the high optical properties of other gemstones; its refractive index, at 1.45, is little higher than that of water (1.30); if it were higher, it would only impair its harmonious play of flaming color.

Thus every gemstone, through Nature’s wise foresight, was given the requisite properties to make it some day a jewel for mankind.

The story of opal’s origin, like its name—from the Sanskrit word upala = precious stone—turns one’s thoughts to India. There, endless ages ago, the Eternal changed a glamorous woman, wooed by three gods, into a phantom cloud, in order to check their jealous rivalry. So that they might recognize the bewitched beauty, Brahma sent her his heavenly blue, Vishnu the sun’s golden light, and Siva his fiery red. The Eternal therefore granted the phantom a new form, of striking appearance, as opal. Pliny wrote that opal was the goblet of union from which the carbuncle had drunk its smoldering glow, the amethyst its deep purple, the emerald its joyous sea green, the topaz its golden yellow, and the sapphire its deep blue.

In order to define the difference between the various waxing and waning patterns of fire, they are labelled mosaic, flash, and pin-fire. Among them the design of the valuable harlequin opal occupies a coveted, unique position, with its entire surface divided up into a checkerboard pattern, from which, with changing incidence of light, each of the colored squares sparkles into a new fiery color. It seems almost incredible that an orange-red gemstone of clear transparency is also numbered among the opals. This is the fire opal, tinted by iron in graded reddish hues, the best specimens of which blaze in purest orange, but lack the changing, spontaneous play of color of the precious opal.

Prized by orientals since time immemorial as the “anchor of hope” and symbol of purity, whose wearer is held in the hand of God and has nothing to fear from illness, the opal fell into disfavor in the Western world as a victim of superstition. Even today one hears the notorious words “Opals bring bad luck.” But rational people will not allow themselves to be influenced in the slightest degree by the alleged magic powers of a gemstone; on the contrary, they are wholeheartedly enchanted by the darting colored lightning and iridescent beauty of opals.

These flickering flashes of color from a petrified rainbow induced in the people of past centuries a shiver of awe, as indicated in the romantic novel Anne of Geierstein by Sir Walter Scott, when the heroine’s maid recounts the superstitious legends (later factually explained) surrounding the opal handed down to the former by her Persian grandmother. The foolish desire to classify gemstones into good and evil was thus stirred up again. Being wiser, the Romans considered the so-called opthalmos (from the Greek ophthalmos = the eye) stone as a universal remedy against eye diseases as well as a good luck charm, withal, and an infant Cupid, a “child lovely as love,” as they prettily named it. For Mark Anthony, too, a costly opal ring became the proof of his love for Cleopatra. But the owner of the opal as large as a hazelnut, the Roman Senator Nonius, preferred to go into exile rather than part with it.

The well-known Hungarian opals in the crown jewels of the Viennese Hofburg, where the Belgian Princess Stephanie’s extensive set of opal jewelry may be seen—girdle, bracelets, earrings, hairpins, necklaces—were no less famous than the ten bangles in Queen Victoria’s choice collection. As ruler of the British Empire, to which Australia with its incomparable black opals belonged, she had access to the most precious stones. Not only did she in her time have the British crown jewels embellished with her favorite stone, but she also gave luxurious opal jewelry to her daughters and granddaughters in their turn.

No other gemstone sets ablaze, as opal does, the splendor of the entire color spectrum of the other precious stones—the glowing red of ruby, the soothing green of emerald, the meditative blue of sapphire, and the scintillating gold of yellow diamond—in such a twinkling, colorful ballet suite.

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