1.71 kg Chinese Leopard Skin Jasper – Octopus

"These animals are as ghosts as monsters. They are the amphibians of death." Thus Victor Hugo wrote in 1866 about the Kraken, in his novel The Toilers of the Sea, written in exile on Guernsey. In it, the loner Gilliatt toils for weeks alone on a reef in the English Channel to recover the engine of a wrecked steamer, until a Kraken grabs him in a flooded grotto. He kills it with his knife. Deeper in the cave, he discovers a skeleton: a man the creature had gripped before him. Gilliatt leaves the carcass among the crabs, the Kraken’s remains beside it. On this skull the Kraken no longer lies beside the bones; it has inhabited them. It sits on the crown, its mantle arches over the dome of the skull like a second helmet, its arms flow over temples and occiput, and two of them probe down over the brows into the eye sockets. The skull, symbol of transience, is not left bare: the Kraken does not adorn it, it occupies it and fills it piece by piece with its own life, a being between life and death, just as Hugo described. Across bone and kraken’s body runs the same cloak of raven-black and almost pumpkin-orange rings, many two-tone or multi-toned, with gray and brown shadows and ocher-gold fields edged in brick red. The mouse-gray ground makes every speckling stand out even more, and the whole pattern is as alive as something stirring beneath it. These rings are older than any legend. Each of them is the cross-section of a bead that once rolled through the warm, carbonate-saturated waters of an ancient sea with the swell, layer upon layer, around a tiny core of calcite. Geologists call such grains Ooids, after the Greek word for egg; in German the rock is also called Rogenstein, after the fish spawn it resembles. Thus this Kraken guards a brood of stone laid on the floor of a sea that no longer exists. Material: Oolitic-pisoidal limestone (trade name “Chinese Leopard Skin Jasper”) – Sedimentary rock composed of concentrically crusted lime–grains (ooids/pisoids) with dark rims and partly gold-orange, iron oxide–colored cores in a fine gray matrix Origin: China Dimensions: 13.0 x 9.2 x 12.4 cm Weight: 1.71 kg Features: Carved Kraken atop the skull cap, its arms flowing over temples and occiput and reaching into both eye sockets; ring patterning in black, gray, brown and gold-orange on a mouse-gray ground; ocher fields with brick-red borders at the forehead and eye area; natural rock seam across the crown of the Kraken mantle (rear side) as well as fine natural hairlines in the ocher forehead area

Estimación:€1

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