95g Mozambique Agate – petrified giant

Before the Cape of Storms, the sky darkened over the Vasco da Gama fleet, and from a cloud rose a giant: Adamastor. This is how Luís de Camões tells it in his epic Os Lusíadas from 1572. Once Adamastor had been one of the giants who fought against the gods. He fell in love with the sea-nymph Thetis, but when he finally embraced her, he clung to a hard mountain instead of her. As punishment the gods transformed his flesh into hard earth and his bones into cliffs. Thus he himself became the cape, the stone boundary between two oceans. Whoever sailed past him left the familiar sea behind and crossed into a new one. This threshold carries the skull within it. It is bluish-gray and profoundly transparent like water in the twilight. At one point a clear boundary runs through, and beyond this transition a new level opens up, as if one had left one sea and reached the other. On one side sits a red-and-white, stone-like patch, like a piece of fossilized giant. On the other gleams a delicate speckling that recalls Sakura agate. Agate grows from the outside in: layer by layer silica accumulates on the walls of a rock-hollow space. Each sharp boundary marks a moment when the solution changed and a new phase of growth began. The piece originates from Mozambique, where Camões lived penniless around 1569 and worked on the Lusíadas. Material: Mozambique agate – chalcedony (cryptocrystalline quartz) Origin: Mozambique Dimensions: 5.1 x 3.9 x 3.3 cm Weight: 95 g Special features: pronounced semi-transparency; sharply defined transition zone with its own depth effect; red-white, stone-like inclusion on one side, delicate sakura-like speckling on the other

Estimate:£1.69

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