Malachite Banded Palm Stone

Bands of green, some the color of moss and others nearly black, ring across the face of this polished palm stone like rings inside a felled tree. The surface takes a high shine — malachite is soft as stones go, easy to scratch, so this piece is kept for the hand and the shelf rather than the pocket. It sits comfortably in the curve of a palm, cool and a little heavier than its size suggests. Malachite has been carried as a protective stone since antiquity, ground for eye paint along the Nile and later set into brooches and cradle charms across Central Europe, where mothers pinned it to a child's clothing against illness and the evil eye. Old belief held that the stone would crack or dull if danger drew near, taking the blow, in a sense, before it ever reached the person wearing it. This piece was cut from banded rock out of the Democratic Republic of Congo, now the source of most of the world's malachite since the old Ural Mountain deposits at Gumeshevsky were largely exhausted by the nineteenth century — those Russian mines once supplied the vast malachite rooms of the Tsars, a scale of use no single find could support today. A stone for the shelf, the desk, or the mantel, not for water or tea — malachite dust is genuinely toxic, so the polish should stay intact and dry. Set it somewhere it will be seen and handled; the shine only deepens with wear.