Galena

Silvery cubes stepping down a face of white crystalline gangue, freshly broken and already starting to dull. Galena is lead sulfide, it is the ore of lead, and every hole in this fellside was driven looking for it. Everything else in this register is a by-product of somebody else’s disappointment.

It is also the one specimen here that is straightforwardly what it appears to be. The lump is lead grey, the powder is lead grey, the streak sits at L* 57 with a chroma of 1.2, and there is nothing to reveal. What it gives you instead is weight: it is over seven times as dense as water and you know that from your hand before you know anything else about it.

The cleavage is the pleasure of it. Galena breaks along three planes at right angles, so what comes off a hammer is not a fragment but a smaller cube, and it does that all the way down until the pieces are too small to see doing it. I have a matchbox of the debris from this specimen and every grain in it is a cube.

A fresh face is bright and it does not stay bright — a fortnight in ordinary air and it has gone to the flat pewter you see on this page. The photograph is of the specimen as it is now, not as it was when it came out, and I have not polished it. Every photograph on this site is of the thing in the state it is in, on the same plate, in the same light, with the same nothing done to it.