opal-gems from the Danakil desert in Ethiopia

delicious milc drops from the deep sky

"There will be some water just over there"!

They hadn't spoken to each other for hours, tongue dried up somewhere behind clenched lips. With the outstretched arm that had peeled out of the shapeless silhouette of black cloth, the old man pointed far away towards the horizon. You couldn't see anything. Stones, only stones, dark and forbidding, they lay strewn side by side, in some places piled up in smaller heaps, round, endless crests that lay side by side like the backs of fallen enemies, sometimes cracked, suddenly formed into sharp edges by the blaze of the pitiless sun here in the Danakil Desert in the east, on the Horn of Africa.

Stunned, the boy looked him in the eye, which lay far in the dark under the veil of the hood. How could this old fool be so sure out here in the middle of nowhere with the sun beating down vertically from overhead? No shadow between the stones could reveal the cardinal direction. Why had he, the young warrior, allowed himself to run after this doddering old man, who had already been considered more than just a little blinded and unpredictable in the Afar tribe?

The other old men had said he should go west if he wanted to find work in Adis Ababa. Maybe in the tourism industry, he had been daydreaming! Tourists were wealthy and could easily afford the long journey to Lake Tanna and the city of cave churches, Lalibela. Why shouldn't he simply be able to share in this wealth, the colorful images of which he had seen on Italian television? In the next larger town they had gotten an old television that, powered by a solar cell, kept flickering and started telling stories about the world beyond the great seas. That was nice! And now he should probably vaporize here in the fiery hell for his stupidity!

"Here!" As if from a dark cave, the old man's hand appeared in front of his face and pulled him out of his thoughts. A few bright little stones lay on the open palm. They shimmered white like the cool milk of the camel mares and yet seemed to hold all the colors of the world within themselves. So that's what the old man must have gotten out from under the rocks when he had kneeled down so heavily before. As if to show him what he wanted from him, the old man put his hand to his mouth and seemed to be taking one of those strange pieces between his lips, which had split from the heat. "When you suck stones in your mouth, the thirst isn't so great," he recalled of the teacher who had led him through the initiation.

Despite all the hardships, he almost had to smile. These little stones, one of which he now put in his mouth, not without examining it carefully again, felt strangely cool. Maybe it was all just imagination, but they actually reminded him, dazzling and mysteriously white as they lay there in the palm of his hand, of that short sequence on television that everyone in town had been discussing for so long. Would there really be such a thing: "Gelato" was flickering in the headline on the colorful screen? “Petrified water”, explained the boy from Adis, who was visiting at the time, “You can see that in our tourist hotel. They have a display case where you keep it. But you can only open the lid very briefly so that it doesn’t fly away.”

The old man was already a bit further when he finally woke up from the pleasant memories in the middle of this hell. Sullenly he trudged behind….

... how did this water good. He didn't notice the dark, dirty cloudiness, so dark that his face was reflected in the water. What did it matter now that he let this refreshment run down his face and into his swollen lips. They both made it! After the old man had also drunk, they sat down in the shade of one of those umbrella-like acacia trees near the pond and the old man began to talk at length after the water had soon loosened his tongue again:

"You know," he began, "these little stones that I gave you to quench your thirst are drops of spilled milk from our moon goddess Al-lat, who feeds animals, plants and people with her dew and this valuable refreshment. Sometimes one finds such treasures, the petrified drops of milk, in the east of the Danakil Depression very close to the saving mountains. Let me tell you how to find the water: If they are only clear and transparent, then the saving water is still far away. But if they are the color of mare's milk and shimmer in all colors, then the night dew that rises from the water was not far away, and they sucked it up greedily, like hungry children. So water has to be in the immediate vicinity. If our women wear them as amulets, They are nourished by the moisture of their skin and play all the colors of the rainbow on a milky white background. If you leave them lying around carelessly, they will die of thirst and become worthless pieces of glass. Our Islamic relatives say they are like the djinnis, like the vampires who suck strength from women in the form of moisture. But that's not true, because they don't know the story of the night goddess, who was worshiped in the big white stones before the religion of the only one in Mecca, before the prophet brought us the only true religion and walled the black stone in the Kaaba there let. And so there were many of their temples throughout the land of the Arabian tribes long before the era, and the largest of them at Palmyra. they die of thirst and become worthless pieces of glass. Our Islamic relatives say they are like the djinnis, like the vampires who suck strength from women in the form of moisture. But that's not true, because they don't know the story of the night goddess, who was worshiped in the big white stones before the religion of the only one in Mecca, before the prophet brought us the only true religion and walled the black stone in the Kaaba there let. And so there were many of their temples throughout the land of the Arabian tribes long before the era, and the largest of them at Palmyra. they die of thirst and become worthless pieces of glass. Our Islamic relatives say they are like the djinnis, like the vampires who suck strength from women in the form of moisture. But that's not true, because they don't know the story of the night goddess, who was worshiped in the big white stones before the religion of the only one in Mecca, before the prophet brought us the only true religion and walled the black stone in the Kaaba there let. And so there were many of their temples throughout the land of the Arabian tribes long before the era, and the largest of them at Palmyra. because they don't know the story of the night goddess, who was worshiped in the big white stones before the religion of the only one in Mecca, before the prophet brought us the only true religion and had the black stone walled into the Kaaba. And so there were many of their temples throughout the land of the Arabian tribes long before the era, and the largest of them at Palmyra. because they don't know the story of the night goddess, who was worshiped in the big white stones before the religion of the only one in Mecca, before the prophet brought us the only true religion and had the black stone walled into the Kaaba. And so there were many of their temples throughout the land of the Arabian tribes long before the era, and the largest of them at Palmyra.

Incidentally, the Europeans behind the mountains and waters are wild about them, although they don't know their meaning. They call them opals. They grind them into round beads and hang them on their wives, like the ornaments on the Christmas tree stand at home in the small mission church. Too bad! Because these small stones are a reminder of those old times when the sun prince drove the night woman away. He ate all his children except for the black-clad Afar, who lay down on the ground between the dark rocks so he couldn't see them. And the night woman, the mother of all of us, scattered the last drops of her saving milk between the big stones for us Afar, the knowing people who also honor your mother, in the midst of trouble. This gives rest and refreshment to the unsteady wandering. But the sun prince is greedy in search of the white drops. If he finds one, his gaze burns him to orange gleaming embers, the fire opals, of which there are rather many in the Danakil. These, however, make us Afar bloodthirsty warriors. So think long and choose well what you intend to do now as a knower.”

The opal from the Danakil desert has been processed into jewelry as milk opal and as fire opal for a few years now in Europe. If it is not worn for a long time or stored in a warm, dry room, it loses its iridescent refraction for a while. Worn around the neck again, it absorbs moisture through the skin and begins to come alive again in the play of colours. The crystallurgists interpret this as partial molecular changes through elementary storage of water.
In the House of Cultures in Diedorf we can offer a few of these opals for sale. Our silver and goldsmith Michael Hinterleitner (o17672222844) also offers in-house courses on how to make jewelry yourself:
http://www.michael-hinterleitner.de/all/kurse.html