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The Maecenas
It looks like a fairy tale. So let it be a tale.
In the beginning it was a very pleasant place for
all three of them. They were watching the hunting falcons and the running
mountain-brook from a high peak. Then one day frost loosened their "home"
and with a piece of rock they all fell into the brook. The water rolled
them lower and lower with every melting of the snow, the piece of rock
getting thinner and rounder all the way through. Soon they found themselves
in a big river where things started to go faster. In a few years they -
or what remained of them - reached the bottom of the sea. They three -
the galenite, sphalerite and antimonite - were good friends, and stayed
together in the sediment as well. They were together when the colliding
continents pressed them against each other, then, along with the oceanic
plates they started out downwards where it had no importance where one
came from and where great pressure and temperature would melt everything.
Perhaps the water-content of their original sediments saved them, perhaps
something else. God knows. All of a sudden, at a high speed, they broke
out of the deep towards the surface. As they were advancing, rocks opened
before them. At first they dissolved many a thing around themselves, but
energy was running out. Finally, just a few hundred meters below the surface,
they got stuck. The fluid they were travelling in slowly turned cool, and
the three good friends came across each other anew. They decided to get
crystallized as one mineral. Everyone put something into it: lead, antimone,
sulphur.
Science calls this mineral of nine lead-, eight
antimone- and twenty-one sulphur-atoms "semseyite". It is a grey,
externally nothing special, yet useful mineral. In such configuration these
elements rarely form any crystal-system.
This mineral is like its eponym: plain-looking,
still rare and of great use. Yet, Andor Semsey's oeuvre is of more standing
value than ore. He covered one eighth of the construction expenses, which
in itself is an enormous sum, but his act of generating the events had
a greater power, it was the basis to start from. Without it the building
of the Institute could not have been finished.
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