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March 28, 2015
Here we go again, another short story. This one involves a small group of people on an island in the South Atlantic following the death of Napoleon on St Helena. The island -- which is called Desolation Island -- sounds a lot like Tristan da Cunha, but isn’t quite. He gives this story the title “Mercury” because it ultimately deals with the recovery of quicksilver following an eruption of the volcano that is the core of the island. I would have called it “Five Wives For Five Castaways.”
p97 It is the loneliest island in the world. It was discovered more than once, by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and even before that by savages who carved signs and idols in the rocks of Mount Snowdon; but nobody has ever stayed on, because it rains here half the year and the soil is good only for sorghum and potatoes...
Soon it’s just the narrator and his wife, Maggie, left on the island, but then two Dutch -- a man and practically a boy -- and two Italian men find themselves stranded there as well.
p100 ...He [the Dutchman Hendrik] and Maggie took long walks together, and I heard them talk about the seven keys, Hermes Trismegistus, the union of contraries, and other rather obscure matters... They would also go to the cave [in Mount Snowdon, the volcano] and return with colored stones, which Hendrik called “cinnabars.”
[After an eruption of the volcano they inspect the cave] p103 ...drops were falling from it [the roof of the cave] but not of water: shiny, heavy drops, which plunked on the rock floor and burst into a thousand spattering drops that rolled far away. A little lower down a pool had formed, and then we understood that it was mercury. Hendrik touched it, and I did too: it was a cold, lively material, which moved in small, irritated, and frenetic waves.
Hendrik seemed transfixed. He exchanged swift glances with Maggie whose significance I could not catch, and he said some obscure, mixed-up things to us, which, she seemed to understand: that it was time to initiate the Great Work; that, like the sky, the earth too has its dew; that the cave was full of the spiritus mundi. ["spirit of the world"] Then he turned openly to Maggie and said to her: “Come here this evening; we will make the beast with two backs.” He took from his neck a chain with a bronze cross and showed it to us: on the cross a snake was crucified, and he threw the cross on the mercury in the pool, and the cross floated.
If you looked around, mercury was oozing from all the cracks of the new cave, like beer from new vats. If you listened you heard a sonorous murmur, produced by thousands of metallic droplets which fell for the cave’s vault and splattered on the ground...
p104 ...He [Hendrik] scurried about the cave like a ferret, dragging Maggie by the wrist, plunging his hands into the pools of mercury, spraying it over himself and pouring it on his head, as a thirsty man would do with water...
[It comes out that he fled Holland after his alchemist scheme to turn sand into gold was exposed as a fraud] ...He had in his trunk his alchemists’ paraphernalia. As for the beast, he said it was not something that could be explained in a few words. Mercury, for their work, would be indispensable, because it is a fixed volatile spirit, that is, the female principle, and combined with sulfur, which is hot male earth, permits you to obtain the philosophic Egg, which is precisely the Beast with Two Backs, for in it are united and commingled male and female...
p105 ...he... explained to me that raw mercury like ours is not worth much , but that it can be purified by distilling it, like whiskey, in cast-iron or terracotta retorts; then the retort is broken and in the residue you find lead, often silver, and sometimes gold...
p106 ...It [mercury] is truly a bizarre substance: it is cold and elusive, always restless, but when it is quite still you can see yourself in it better than in a mirror. If you stir it around in a bowl it continues to twirl for almost half an hour. Not only does Hendrik’s sacrilegious crucifix float on it but also stones, even lead. Not gold: Maggie tried it with her ring, but it immediately sank to the bottom, and when we fished it up again it had turned into tin. [See amalgams below] In short, it is a material I do not like...
The story ends with a surprisingly humorous marrying off of the men with women bought for them by a whaling captain with the proceeds of their mercury enterprise. The twist is that the narrator lets Maggie go off with Hendrik (remember the fate of the gold wedding ring) and he marries himself to a another woman with two kids. Knowing Levi’s interest in Mann -- though this was supposedly written prior to Doctor Faustus -- I couldn’t help noticing this line:
p108 ... Then it popped into my head that the two children could help me take care of the pigs... and that the girl with the gray eyes did not displease me, even if she was much younger than I; on the contrary, she made me feel gay and light-hearted, like a tickle, and brought to mind the idea of catching her on the wing like a butterfly...
That this suggestive butterfly line (see Hetaera Esmeralda in Doctor Faustus -- Here near the end) is in the chapter where he uses mercury to talk about alchemy certainly makes me wonder how much this has been edited since 1942.
Mercury (Hg 80)
“It is commonly known as quicksilver and was formerly named hydrargyrum....[3] A heavy, silvery d-block element, mercury is the only metallic element that is liquid at standard conditions for temperature and pressure; the only other element that is liquid under these conditions is bromine, ”
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“Mercury occurs in deposits throughout the world mostly as cinnabar (mercuric sulfide). The red pigment vermilion, a pure form of mercuric sulfide, is mostly obtained by reaction of mercury (produced by reduction from cinnabar) with sulfur. ”
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“A complete explanation of this delves deep into the realm of quantum physics, but it can be summarized as follows: mercury has a unique electron configuration where electrons fill up all the available 1s, 2s, 2p, 3s, 3p, 3d, 4s, 4p, 4d, 4f, 5s, 5p, 5d, and 6s subshells. Because this configuration strongly resists removal of an electron, mercury behaves similarly to noble gas elements, which form weak bonds and hence melt at relatively low temperatures.”
...
“Mercury dissolves many other metals such as gold and silver to form amalgams. Iron is an exception, and iron flasks have been traditionally used to trade mercury.”
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“Mercury readily combines with aluminium to form a mercury-aluminium amalgam when the two pure metals come into contact. Since the amalgam destroys the aluminium oxide layer which protects metallic aluminium from oxidizing in-depth (as in iron rusting), even small amounts of mercury can seriously corrode aluminium. For this reason, mercury is not allowed aboard an aircraft under most circumstances because of the risk of it forming an amalgam with exposed aluminium parts in the aircraft.[11]”
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“Alchemists thought of mercury as the First Matter from which all metals were formed. They believed that different metals could be produced by varying the quality and quantity of sulfur contained within the mercury. The purest of these was gold, and mercury was called for in attempts at the transmutation of base (or impure) metals into gold, which was the goal of many alchemists.[19]
Hg is the modern chemical symbol for mercury. It comes from hydrargyrum, a Latinized form of the Greek word ὑδράργυρος (hydrargyros), which is a compound word meaning "water-silver" (from ὑδρ- hydr-, the root of ὕδωρ, "water," and ἄργυρος argyros "silver") – since it is liquid like water and shiny like silver. The element was named after the Roman god Mercury, known for his speed and mobility. It is associated with the planet Mercury; the astrological symbol for the planet is also one of the alchemical symbols for the metal; the Sanskrit word for alchemy is Rasavātam which means "the way of mercury".[20] Mercury is the only metal for which the alchemical planetary name became the common name.[19]
The mines in Almadén (Spain), [I hadn’t realized this was the origin of the place name New Almaden in Santa Clara county. Or of the importance of The New Almaden Quicksilver mine.] Monte Amiata (Italy), and Idrija (now Slovenia) dominated mercury production from the opening of the mine in Almadén 2500 years ago, until new deposits were found at the end of the 19th century.[21]”
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“Mercury ores usually occur in very young orogenic belts where rocks of high density are forced to the crust of Earth, often in hot springs or other volcanic regions.[24]
Beginning in 1558, with the invention of the patio process to extract silver from ore using mercury, mercury became an essential resource in the economy of Spain and its American colonies. Mercury was used to extract silver from the lucrative mines in New Spain and Peru. Initially, the Spanish Crown's mines in Almadén in Southern Spain supplied all the mercury for the colonies.[25] Mercury deposits were discovered in the New World, and more than 100,000 tons of mercury were mined from the region of Huancavelica, Peru, over the course of three centuries following the discovery of deposits there in 1563. The patio process and later pan amalgamation process continued to create great demand for mercury to treat silver ores until the late 19th century.[26]” -Wiki
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