PACTS AND FANCIES ABOUT PRECIOUS STONES 401
were named nir puce by
the Malabars. As a test of their fineness, the Hindus would touch them
with the tip of the tongue, the coldest (densest) being the best. When
a superior ruby was thus picked out, the examiner would attach a
little wax to its finest point, and so pick it up and look through it
against a bright light; by this means any blemish would immediately
become apparent. These rubies came not only from the river of Pegu but
from other parts of the land of the same name, often being discovered
in deep mountain clefts. However, they were not cut and polished in
that country, but were merely cleaned and sent for cutting to "Palecote
and the country of Narsynga."43
The
balas-ruby (originally a spinel from Badakshan) was one of the most
admired precious stones in medieval times, before the diamond was
helped to its proud preeminence by having its beauties revealed through
the exercise of the diamond-cutters' skill. Almost all the large
"rubies" of which we read, those of Europe at least, were balas-rubies,
as were also by far the greater part of the so-called rubies in
Oriental royal collections of that and later times. The great Italian
poet Dante uses this stone (balascio) as a symbol of the glowing radiance of divine joy in the following liries from the Divina Commedia (Paradiso, ix, 67-69) :
L'altra letìzia, che m'era già nota Preclara cosa, mi si fece in vista Qual fin balascio in che lo sol percota.
In very ancient times as well as at the present day (if we admit that the anthrax of
Theophrastus really was ruby and not a pyrope garnet), the ruby was the
most valuable of all precious stones, the Greek writer stating that at
the time he wrote, about 260 b.c., an exceedingly small speci-
*
" A Description of the Coasts of East Africa and Malabar in the
Beginning of the Sixteenth Century, by Duarte Barbosa, a Portuguese,"
trans, by Henry E. Staney, London, 1866, p. 208; Hakluyt Soc. Pub.,
vol. xxxv.
