(This blog inspired by Gail's post "Great music, Great art, Great minerals?")

I remember one of the first things that began to stimulate my interest in minerals was when I was about 10, travelling through the bush in Kenya when my Dad stopped the car for a break in a road cutting (partly to let the engine cool down!) Whilst sitting in the shade listening to the cicadas, we noticed that the rocks in the cutting contained what appeared to be pieces of broken glass, shimmering in the sunlight. When I became bored with turning over rocks to see how many scorpions were beneath each of them, I wandered over to have a look at the "glass", to find that it was actually a mass of coarse muscovite flakes. The cutting had exposed a pegmatite; I didn't know what they were then, but I was fascinated by their flexible nature, and the fact that I could peel them into such thin sheets.

Even now there are several mineral pieces I keep simply for their aesthetic or sensual appeal, even though I don't know their localities, and they are of minimal scientific interest. For example a large piece of creamy-white massive talc which is a joy to handle; a mass of galena about the size of a brick which still amazes me by its weight every time I lift it; a large block of iceland spar calcite which I have used to demonstrate double refraction to family and friends who have wondered how anyone could ever become fascinated by such a dry subject as crystal optics.

Some people end up as mineralogists via an interest in gemstones or chemistry; I think I ended up with an interest in geology and mineralogy originally stimulated partly by the appeal of such things as the mica flakes described above, the sweeping curves of folded rocks in a mountainside, the view across the savannah from the top of a bald dome of an ancient granite inselberg, and the mysteries of the coral reefs off the Kenya coast.

Music? How about sitting for a picnic lunch under a thorn tree in a gorge at the foot of a volcano in the Kenya Rift Valley, while you eggs boil in a basket suspended in a spitting, bubbling hot spring, surrounded by an almost deafening chorus of chicadas, only interrupted by the screech of an excited monkey who has just got his lunch by a daring lightning raid on your fruit basket, and even in the shade, the heat off the rocks is so intense it's like sitting in front of a large barbeque*. Then later in the day, swapping the smell of the sulphur fumarole for soda encrusted mudflats, and hearing your feet crunch through the white crust along the lakeside, accompanied by the call of a bell-bird, with a hundred thousand flamingoes, shimmering as a blurred pink mass because of the heat haze, cackle in the background? It may not be Mozart, but I wouldn't mind hearing that concert again!

* I am not sure how much of that heat was coming from the sun, and how much from the ground below us - It's ironic that about 30 years later I was involved in a project investigating the potential of that exact area as a source of geothermal energy. Unfortunately only as UK-based laboratory input. I didn't get offered the chance of any field work - perhaps the project leader was afraid I'd never come back if I ever returned to Kenya! (The locality is known as "Hell's Gate" for obvious reasons!)

Pete N.

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