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 Wilbur Smith - B2 Men Of Men
 
 This book is for my wife, Danielle, with all mylove for everIt had never been exposed to the light of day, notonce in the 200 million years since it assumed itspresent form, and yet it seemed in itself to be adistilled drop of dirtied sunlight.it had been conceived in heat as vast as that ofthe sun's surface, in those unholy depths below theearth's crust, in the molten magma that welled upfrom the earth's very core.in those terrible temperatures all impurity hadbeen burned from it, leaving only the unadulteratedcarbon atoms, and under pressures that would havecrushed mountains these had been reduced in volumeand packed to a density beyond that of any othersubstance in nature.This tiny bubble of liquid carbon had been carriedup in the slow subterranean river of molten lavathrough one of the weak spots in the earth's crust,and it had almost, but not quite, reached thesurface before the laval flow faltered and finallystopped.The lava cooled over the ensuing millennium, and italtered its form and became a mottled bluish rock,composed of gravelly fragments loosely cemented ina solid matrix. This formation was naturallyunassociated with the country rock which surroundedit, and filled only a deep circular well whosemouth was shaped like a funnel almost a mile indiameter and whose tail descended sheer into theuncounted depths of the earth.While the lava was cooling the purged bubble ofcarbon was undergoing an even more marvellous
 
transformation. It solidified into an eight-facedcrystal of geometrical symmetry the size of a greenfig, and so thoroughly had it been purged ofimpurity in the hellish furnace of the earth's corethat it was transparent and clear as the sun's ownrays. So fierce and constant had been the pressuresto which the single crystal had been subjected andso evenly had it cooled that there was no crackingor shearing within its body.It was perfect, a thing of cold fire so white thatit would appear electric blue in good light, butthat fire had never been awakened, for it had beentrapped in total darkness across the ages, and nosingle glimmer of light had ever probed its luciddepths. Yet for all those millions of years thesunlight had been no great distance away, a matteronly of two hundred feet or less, a thin skin ofearth when compared to the immense depths fromwhence its journey to the surface had begun.Now, in the last wink of time, a mere few years outof all those millions, the intervening ground hadsteadily been chipped and whittled and hacked awayby the puny, inefficient but persistent efforts ofan antlike colony of living creatures.The forebears of these creatures had not evenexisted upon this earth when that single purecrystal achieved its present form, but now witheach day the disturbance caused by their metaltools set up faint vibrations within the rock thathad been dormant so long; and each day thosevibrations were stronger, as the layer between itand the surface shrank from two hundred feet to ahundred and then to fifty, from ten feet to two,until now only inches separated the crystal fromthe brilliant sunlight which would at last bring tolife its slumbering fires.
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09 / 11 / 2010This doucment made it onto the Rising List!
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