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The Beautiful Blonde Liked Emeralds 111
this in itself is sufficient to assign the emerald to third place. And if you consider beauty and rarity, it is second to none.
The
emerald is a variety of beryl. All beryls have the approximate hardness
of 8, but they vary somewhat, some being much softer than others. Both
the aquamarine and the euclase belong to this family of stones. But
whereas the aquamarine, as its name reveals, is sea-green and the
euclase varies from yellow to something like sea-green, due to the
presence of small quantities of oxide of iron, the colour of the
emerald is a bright lustrous green, derived from its chromium content.
Speaking historically, emeralds were already being mined in Upper Egypt in 1650 b.c., and
the Greeks, in the days of Alexander the Great, were still tapping the
same source of supply. Cleopatra, extravagant queen and lover of the
exquisite, revelled in the emeralds of Egypt, and some of her most
famous gems were dug from Egyptian soil.
The name for emerald in many languages is a mispronunciation of the Arab "Zummurud". Spanish "Esmeralda", French "Emeraade", German "Smargd", English
"Emerald", are all lovely variations on a name that is pure music.
Emeralds have been loved and prized throughout medieval and modern
times as much as in the ancient days, but it was only in 1817 that a
Frenchman named Caillioud rediscovered the remains of the extensive
emerald workings of Egypt in Northern Etbai. Cleopatra's mines are
located in Jebel Sikait and Jebel Zabara, near the Red Sea coast east
of Aswan, and the emerald crystals found there were embedded in mica
and talc schists. In
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