1.29 kg Angolan Quartz Female Alien – Krystallos

The Greeks called it krystallos, ice. Pliny the Elder was convinced that rock crystal was hardened by excessively strict frost. It is found only where the winter snow freezes most thoroughly, and it is formed from the moisture of the sky that falls as pure snow. For vessels made of this ice, Rome paid fortunes: a Roman lady gave 150,000 sesterces for a single crystal goblet. When Nero learned that the other legions had fallen away from him as well, he tore up the letters, knocked the table over, and smashed two precious cups to the ground. Pliny calls them cups made of crystal. In his last fury, Nero supposedly wanted to punish his entire era, he writes: no one should ever drink again from them. This head looks as if it were hammered from that ice and then leaped into such a rage, never to crumble. It resembles wild, cursed Crushed Ice that carries the stories of prehistory within it. Each groove, every fault line inside it tells a story that was born, lived, died, and tore apart. In many of these cracks, light refracts in rainbow colors, as if it were shining one last time in farewell. From this ice, two Labradorite eyes look out, utterly unlike one another. The right eye is deep and dark and glows only on its underside in dark blue, yellow, green, and orange, like fire beneath an ice cover. The left eye is bright and shines in metallic light blue at the top, cool and alert like polished steel. Pliny was not entirely wrong, for this stone truly contains water. Its milky white hue owes to countless microscopically small inclusions of water and gas. They were trapped as the crystal grew from hot solutions deep underground. To this day, geologists read how hot the waters of the ancient era were from which a crystal formed, and what they consisted of, by such inclusions. Thus this ice, which never thaws, really carries its stories within it: in drops older than any legend. Material: Quartz (rock crystal, predominantly milky white); Eyes: Labradorite (plagioclase feldspar) Origin: Angola Dimensions: 10.2 x 8.4 x 10.0 cm Weight: 1.29 kg Special features: Feminine-appearing alien form with large, almond-shaped eyes; numerous internal cracks and bands in a “Crushed Ice” look with multicolored iridescence; inserted Labradorite eyes of clearly different character: right eye dark with blue, yellow, green, and orange iridescence on the underside, left eye bright with metallic light blue iridescence in the upper area; natural external cracks and seams, especially on the left half of the skull (including from the left eye across the cheek), partly difficult to discern in the photos.

Estimate:$1.12

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