Desert stone

In August 2012, I saw the one of the medical staff at my local GP practice was collecting funds for charity.
Sue was planning to trek through the Sahara in Morocco and raise funds for The Great Ormond Street Hospital.

I made a donation on condition she brought back a small stone for me from the desert.

Lo and behold, she has done the walk through rain (it seems they are not immune to storms either), floods and sand storms and raised £2700 for G.O.S.H.

What a feat (and what feet!)

Congratulations and thank you for remembering me.

This is my stone (photographed on one side and then the other), an amazing looking piece, in the shape of a cross, with a line of quartz crystals running through it, again in the shape of a cross.

I sent the above photograph to my friend Russell, a retired Professor of Geology in the hope that he would be able to provide further scientific data.

This is what he wrote

"Could this be the Philosopher's stone? No, perhaps not.

Anyway, the peculiar cruciform shape of the two specimens is almost certainly the result of crystal twinning and I would suggest staurolite, a complex alumino-silicate often reddish in colour.

Staurolite is a low-grade metamorphic mineral.

Another possibility is Phillipsite, commonly found in lava flows and associated basalts.

The specimens you have photographed are far from being anything close to decent crystals, however, and one would have to look at crushed fragments under a polarising microscope or better still do an X-ray powder diffraction analysis"



In a cruel twist of fate, both my polarising microscope AND my X-ray powder diffraction analysis equipment are both out of order.