Clear Quartz
krystallos — “ice too deep to melt”
The Greeks believed rock crystal was ice the gods had frozen too deep to ever melt. Grown one molecular layer at a time in mountain veins, a cluster of this clarity is geology’s plainest sentence — pure silica, pure light. Every scratch test on Earth measures against this stone; every bead cut from it carries that stillness.
“It is a kind of ice, frozen by cold too intense to ever melt.”Pliny the Elder · Naturalis Historia, AD 77