94g Mozambique Agate Skull – Featherlock

Over the Strait of Messina, between Calabria and Sicily, on quiet days towers, palaces and entire cities rise from the water and melt away as you come closer. For centuries people attributed these phenomena to the fairy Morgana. The enchantress of Arthurian legend is described in a French 13th-century novel as the Lady of the Fairies of the salty sea. Her dreamlike castles, so it was said, were mirages of her magic that captivate the eyes of sailors. To this day the phenomenon bears her name: Fata Morgana. Some of that magic lingers over this skull as well. Creamy and silky it glides around the gaze. Its face is cloudy, almost ghostly, a milky white that seems to hover like a phantasm over the stone. Toward the jaw the fog gathers into clear bands in peach, smoky gray and cool blue, layered like the air above the sea when the fairy builds her castles. Down there the agate darkens and sinks deeper, like the somber fog of another world. Agate forms when silica-rich solutions fill the cavities of volcanic rocks layer by layer. Each clear band boundary marks a moment when the solution changed. The cloudy white in the upper part is opaque chalcedony with fine, feather-like structures that scatter light. The bands at the jaw, on the other hand, crystallized translucently. Fata Morgana is also a work of overlapping layers, but made of air: when warm air sits above cold sea, it refracts light so strongly that compressed and stretched images appear one over the other. Material: Mozambique Agate – Chalcedony (cryptocrystalline quartz) Origin: Mozambique Dimensions: 5.1 x 3.9 x 3.3 cm Weight: 94 g Special features: Creamy-white, cloudy-feathered chalcedony on the skull cap and face; clear layering in peach, smoky gray and translucent blue toward the jaw; finely glittering crystal layers in the jaw area; isolated tiny dark inclusions

Estimate:$1.12

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