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.