Stone of Kings by Gerard Helferich

Author:Gerard Helferich
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2011-12-06T05:00:00+00:00

It was December in the Sierra de las Minas. The rains had ended and with them the cool season known in Guatemala as el invierno, “winter.” The heat had resurged, with punishing sunshine and temperatures close to a hundred degrees. Shaded only by their broad-brimmed hats, three figures were walking single-file along a narrow hillside trail, through spindly cacti and thorny acacia trees. Every so often, they would stop, incline their ear to a stone, and take a sharp swing with a hammer. Then they would straighten up and trudge on. Jay Ridinger had gotten his wish: He was finally prospecting for jade.

With Jerry Leech focused on the venture’s business affairs, the brunt of the search fell to Ridinger and Johnson. Unlike gold, their friend the geologist Josh Rosenfeld had explained, jade wasn’t generally located by panning or digging. It would most likely be found in long, roundish pieces called “pods,” sitting in riverbeds or on the ground, or jutting from outcrops. But this didn’t mean it was in plain sight. When jade is exposed to the elements for long periods, its surface weathers to form a generic brownish crust, or “rind,” which gives no hint of the stone’s true color—one of the reasons jade was so devilishly difficult to locate. So, the first clues that they had found jade wouldn’t be visual, but aural and tactile: Struck by a hammer, it wouldn’t produce a flat thud as lighter rocks did, but an almost metallic ping, and the hammerhead would recoil with a snap they could feel in their wrist. If a stone seemed promising, the next step was to break off a chip with a glancing hammer blow, which required some practice to master. Finally, they would drop the piece into a vial of bromoform for the density test.

They’d driven east from Antigua, through Guatemala City and up the Atlantic Highway. Not far outside the capital, they’d gotten a glimpse of the Motagua. Rising in Guatemala’s western highlands, near the ancient market town of Chichicastenango, the Motagua sweeps eastward for almost three hundred miles to the Gulf of Honduras. En route, it incorporates nearly forty tributaries and drains some five thousand square miles, more than any other waterway in the country. To Ridinger and Johnson, the river appeared as a broad ribbon at the bottom of a broad valley. Or at least its course was wide, scoured by the inundations of the rainy season. Now, in the dry time, the Motagua was a meager thread twisting through sandy flats. But over millennia, its floods had deposited millions of tons of rich soil along its banks, and on either side were stands of melons, beans, and corn—and the tomato field where Robert Leslie had run a cultivator over his jade boulder. To the south could be seen a line of violet peaks some 6,000 feet high; to the north was the even more foreboding Sierra de las Minas, jutting nearly 10,000 feet above sea level.

To Johnson, it was a landscape seething with history.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.