The Voice of the Xenolith (10 page)

Granite is known for its strength and hardness, and this has led to the word ‘granite’ being used in an idiomatic way, to indicate strength of character, or hard-heartedness. Perhaps even hard-headedness.

Sometimes I think that I am a bit like granite. Hard-headed. Or at least that is what is sometimes said about me. I know when I am told this that it is not meant as a compliment, but I haven’t yet decided whether I am pleased about being compared to granite, or not.

Because granite is so strong and so hard, it is sometimes used as blocks and as flooring tiles in public buildings. There is a city in Scotland, the city of Aberdeen, where nearly all the main public buildings are made of granite.

Granite is also used for tombstones, monuments and memorials because it is so long-lasting. I like to think of memorials being made to last, because I think it is important that the names of people who are now dead are never forgotten. You can’t remember someone if you don’t know their name, and engraving a name on a granite memorial is one way to help people remember them. Names are important.

The particular granite my mom and dad chose for our kitchen has big chunks of blue feldspar crystals, which reflect the light where the stone has been polished. It is called Blue Pearl granite, because of the blue feldspar, but the background is almost black. My mother says she chose it because it is beautiful but also because of its strength.

When I asked my father for the scientific name of this particular granite he told me it is actually not a granite but a syenite, and this means that it is almost the same as granite but only has small amounts of quartz in it. The fact that they chose syenite for the kitchen is important because it is an example of how a detective may find a kind of clue when he is searching to link up facts which don’t seem to go together. I will tell you in a little while why syenite is, for me, a clue.

My favourite piece of granite is Cleopatra’s Needle, which is strangely named, because it is obviously not a needle, and it also had nothing to do with Cleopatra. It is an obelisk: a huge vertical column of rock, twenty one meters high, engraved with hieroglyphics. It now stands in London on the bank of the river Thames, close to Embankment Tube station.

An obelisk is a tall, four-sided column, narrowing as it gets higher, and forming a pyramid shape at the top. Because I like words and I think names are important, I will tell you what this kind of monument was called by the Ancient Egyptians who created it: ‘tekhenu.’ The Ancient Greeks called them ‘obeliskos’ and our English word is derived from Greek.

I said previously that it was relevant that my parents chose syenite for their kitchen countertop, and now I will tell you why I think that it is a kind of clue, if you are the kind of person who likes tracking and searching for information. Cleopatra’s Needle is actually not made of granite but of syenite. Most people wouldn’t know or care about this; to them granite is granite if it looks like granite. Most information you read about Cleopatra’s Needle says it is made of granite, and I thought so too, until I did some more research. But words are important, and being accurate is important, if you are a scientist.

In Egypt today, near Aswan, you can still see an unfinished obelisk at the syenite quarry. This obelisk was apparently abandoned when a crack appeared in its surface, and it was never completed. It is still lying there, horizontal, connected to the surrounding rock. We went there on one of our desert trips with my dad, a few years ago.

The origin of the word syenite is the ancient name for Aswan, the city in Egypt where the quarries are to be found. Aswan used to be called Swennet in ancient Egyptian and Syene in ancient Greek. That may be a completely irrelevant and boring fact for most people, but for me it is the kind of coincidence that leads me to new discoveries. I am like a detective: no information is too irrelevant, and chance discoveries can lead to you finding the answer to a problem. The fact that our countertop, which was so carefully chosen, and the obelisk at Embankment, which is my favourite piece of large rock, are both made of the same stone, is an important coincidence. Maybe all it shows is how a child’s personality and tastes can be influenced by their parents, even if they are not aware of it. Or maybe it is telling me that there is something important about that syenite obelisk in the quarry – perhaps there is a message there that I need to be able to find the meaning of.

Maybe there is no such thing as a chance coincidence.

Cleopatra’s Needle was carved in Egypt around 1500 BC but at some stage it fell over, with the hieroglyphic writing face down, into the dry desert sand. It was a kind of burial which preserved it, and protected the hieroglyphs from being worn away. It is in a way similar to how fossils are preserved in sandstone, or how human bodies can be preserved in peat, like the 2000-year-old ‘Lindow Man’ who was found preserved in a peat bog in Northwest England. Even though fossils and Lindow Man are preserved by completely different kinds of processes.

This obelisk was presented to Britain in 1819 by the ruler of Egypt, but for some reason it was only brought to the UK in 1878.

So the hieroglyphs were protected by the desert sand and climate until the obelisk came to England. Things have not been so good for it since then, because on this piece of rock you can see that even though granite is a very hard material, suitable for monuments and memorials, which need to last, it can be damaged and worn away. This is called weathering. The minerals react to acids in polluted rain, and both granite and syenite will eventually erode.

I think it is very sad that the hieroglyphs engraved on this stone lasted for thousands of years while being preserved in the dry unpolluted sand of the Egyptian desert, but in less than two hundred years the British pollution and acid rain have been eroding the engraving. Maybe a change of place is not a good thing; perhaps things should stay where they originally were and not be damaged by moving them around the world.

There is something else which I love about Cleopatra’s Needle, and that is the number of stories it can tell us. Some of the stories are ancient, and some are more recent.

There is the story of the rock itself, as ancient as the earth: the story about how it was formed, and about its qualities and how it lasts, or how it weathers.

Then there is a second story, which is about the people in Egypt who created this obelisk, who cut the stone and shaped it, and who engraved it over three thousand years ago. This story is told by the hieroglyphic writing: it tells us about the people who lived there at that time, what they thought and believed.

Then there is the more recent story, a third story, about how this obelisk was finally brought to London, because it took years of argument about how to transport it and who would pay for it. And when it was finally being brought here, the ship was damaged in a storm and several of the crew were drowned. There is a brass plaque at the base of the pedestal which tells that story and commemorates those sailors.

So the stone, which was originally created as a tribute to two Pharaohs, so that they would be remembered, became a triple memorial: to the age of the stone, to the stone masons who carved it, and to the sailors who brought it here.

Perhaps you should count the tribute to the two Pharaohs as a story too, so that makes four.

But there is more to it; there is another story. The fifth story is this:

When the obelisk was put up in London, in 1878, a time capsule was hidden in the pedestal. It contains a very strange collection of things: some photographs of people, including a portrait of Queen Victoria, some cigars, some toys, some bibles, a map of London, a railway timetable, as well as a written version of the story of the complicated and disastrous transport of the monument from Egypt to England.

So that makes Cleopatra’s Needle a quintuple memorial.

I wonder who it was who chose which objects to bury in the time capsule. Whoever it was must have thought that these represent everything you need to know about what people were thinking and doing in 1878. Just as the hieroglyphs help us know what people were thinking around 1500 B.C.

And I wonder if, in maybe a thousand years’ time, some archaeologist will come and dig it up and try to make sense of the objects, because by then the hieroglyphs will have eroded completely, and people will have to judge what this memorial was for by the strange collection of objects buried underneath it. Whoever digs it up would be someone like me, a person who likes to find buried treasure and to learn about the past from what can be found.

This is how memory works. Memory is usually thought of as something we carry in our minds. But things can carry a memory too; they can tell a story long after the people involved are dead.

Mrs. E. asked me to bring her a copy of a paper I was writing for the English teacher, so that we could talk about whether I wanted her to help me with written work or whether we should work on something else. She asked me what I thought, but I didn’t actually know what to suggest, because it wasn’t my idea to come and see her and I really didn’t feel like talking any more about my problems, my Attitude, my sullen face or anything else that everyone was bugging me about.

So I gave her my paper on granite, and I played Codewords on my phone while she read it.

“Hmm,” she said. “Granite. This is very new to me, I didn’t know anything about granite. Is geology something you know quite a lot about?”

Well, surely she knew that my dad is a geologist.

“Does Jasper know as much about it as you do?”

“No, he is interested in his own things, his computer and maths and magician’s tricks.”

“So you have a special interest in this subject. I suppose not many students of your age know this much about rocks?”

I thought, you could say that again. But I didn’t say it.

She went on. “You wrote about how strong granite is, and that is why your mother chose it for her countertop, and that is why it is used for memorials. And you also said – now where is it? Oh, here it is: ‘
Sometimes I think that I am a bit like granite. Hard-headed.
’ Now, I am curious… could there possibly be other ways to use the word ‘granite’ to describe people?”

I didn’t know what she meant.

“I mean about its being hard as well as strong. Are all strong things also hard things? Is there a difference between hard and strong?”

I thought about that and said yes, but she wanted an example. So I said, “Like a person being able to lift weights, he is strong, but he may also be kind, or friendly, so he is not a hard person.”

Then Mrs. E. said, “You say here in your paper that some people call you hard-headed. But I wonder if maybe the other quality of granite, its strength, might describe you too?”

I said nothing, just looked at her. What was she getting at?

“Do you think you are strong? Can you think of something you do that shows how strong you are?”

“Well, I am not giving in to the geography teacher, I am not going to do homework for him, I don’t care what punishment the school gives me. I am strong that way,” I said.

I know I have told you that Mrs. E. is not like other teachers, and in fact she isn’t really a teacher at all, she is a speech therapist and a coach and a counsellor. And she just didn’t seem to care if I did homework or not, and she didn’t try to persuade me to do geography homework; in fact she seemed to be encouraging me not to do it, because she said, “Yes, I can see that you are strong in that way, a person does need to be quite strong to resist the demands of teachers and their punishments. Any other examples of being strong?”

I thought and thought. I know it was physical strength and fitness that got me to finish the cross-country run ahead of some of the boys in my class, but I didn’t think Mrs. E. was talking about physical strength now.

I remembered how I stood up for Jasper once, a few years ago, when some boys in the playground were bullying him. Mrs. E. made me explain exactly what happened: who was there, how it felt, and how I got the boys to leave Jasper alone, not just on that day but for weeks and months afterwards.

“Hmm,” she said, chin on hand, “so your strength helps you do some things. What does that say about what is important to you, about what your strength helped you to do? What was it you were doing for Jasper?”

“I was protecting him.”

“So maybe this is what is going on at school. It seems that protecting is something you are rather good at, something that is really important for you to do. So I am wondering, what other things do you protect?”

I thought about my fossils, my Moleskine books of ideas, my dictionary. What did that have to do with all the fuss the teachers were making, what did that have to do with anything? Anyway I like to keep my school problems separate from everything else in my life.