Hope Adventures of a Diamond

NATURE Framed in the prodigality of nature. William Shakespeare, Richard III, act 1, scene 2 Around the Diamond, as provocative as a woman's perfume, as protective as a force field, there has always been mystery. It was present at the very beginning to hide the jewel's conception and swaddle its birth. After five hundred years of studying diamonds, geologists can make informed speculations but still can't determine the exact de- tails of their genesis. The one in this story has proved more intract- able than most, for it contains none of the inclusions of other mineral crystals that would help to determine its age. Like a great many beauties, our protagonist guards the secret of how old it isas well it might, since it is far older than those primitive forms of life that first crawled on the ocean's floor. The amazing truth is that the Diamond, much more beautiful now than in its early years and still ut- terly desirable, isdon't shout it from the rooftops but whisper it discreetlybetween one and three billion years old. It was conceived when Earth itself was still a hot young planet, when time had no past tense. If we can't fix the date of its creation except vaguely, give or take a billion years, we do know the place. The Diamond formed in the southern, peninsular part of India, which is now bounded on both seacoasts by ranges of hills (the Western and Eastern Ghats) and is known as the Deccan plateau. Its four-billion-year-old spine makes it India's oldest part. The gem originated about 120 miles below the Deccan plains, not in the Earth's crust, which is only about 25 miles thick, but in the fiery caldron of the mantle beneath, which goes down 1,750 miles. The upper mantle was incredibly hot and turbulent, where gases roared and reservoirs of molten rock rippled and heaved. Nothing in the Diamond's future would be half so cataclysmic as its beginnings. Its creation required what geologists call "a special melting event" with a heat between 1300 and 4500 degrees Fahrenheit to liquefy the dark, heavy rock called peridotite, combined with a pressure somewhere between 0.5 and 1.3 million pounds per square inch. There in that tremendous heat and pressure, in one of the great cosmic coincidences that, thus far in human history, has yielded man only forty tons of diamonds, crystallization began. Like every crystal, be it snowflake or gemstone, this one would be unique, its own self, as different from other diamonds as one human is from another. The growing process was probably quite gradual, for the larger the crystal, the slower its forming must be. While the Diamond was getting bigger, the great pressure of the carbon dioxide gas below the layer of slowly cooling molten peridotite containing it had to remain equal to the pressure of the layers of rock above. Although it was the rarest prize in nature, it was made of the most ordinary matter, namely, carbon. This exists in our own bodies, in the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the fuels we burn: wood, coal, oil, gasoline. One might say that the Diamond then coming into being was both high class and low, aristocrat and commoner. The magic was in the making. Eighteen atoms of carbon darted together into a minute cube, an isometric cell, a diamond's basic building block. The cubes in turn multiplied into a regular latticework. The shape evolving basically conformed to the one diamonds prefer, an octahedron, which looks like two pyramids joined base to base. The Diamond's cubic structure was probably taking on the contours to be seen in the first extant drawing we have of it, done in the seventeenth century. This shows a rough stone that, if held with its broader end as base, resembled a giant teardrop; if reversed, it looked like a heart; it could, therefore, deFowler, Marian is the author of 'Hope Adventures of a Diamond' with ISBN 9780345444868 and ISBN 0345444868.