Word: opalized
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...afternoon, and after pulling an all-nighter in his home studio, Marc Anthony, 33, appears at his front door--not in one of his signature Armani suits, but barefoot, in striped drawstring pants and a white undershirt, with a Jesus scapular hanging down his neck. His wide opal eyes are beaming. "You want to talk about my new salsa album?" he says. "Nah, you need to hear...
...middle distance the red hue brightened into gold through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal...
...with pick, shovel and explosives--backbreaking work. Now there are circular drills mounted on caterpillar treads, which lurch forward chewing at the soft rock, making a hellish racket that changes to a shrill glass-crunching scream when the teeth hit a pocket of "potch" (the gray waste near opal that runs in veins through the matrix). These drills are 4 ft. in diameter, and they create vaults in the tunnel roofs--beautiful, arched Romanesque spaces cut in the creamy pink-veined stone. It is troglodyte architecture: dense, theatrical and intensely moving, infinitely better than anything built above ground...
...after we shot some walk-and-talk through the tunnels, during which I was interviewing John about luck and hardship and the resemblance between opal mining and professional gambling (which is very strong), the director Chris Spencer asked John to go at a face with the air hammer. He obligingly did, talking meanwhile about how he hadn't found an opal in weeks. Then he asked me if I'd like to have a go. I took the air hammer and started ripping some sandstone off the wall. And then, suddenly, there was a shrill noise, somewhere between a crunch...
...Opal is a silicate fossil. It comes in "shells"--seashells originally, for this whole desert was once a vast inland sea--or more rarely in "pipes," or tubes, the fossilized backbones of archaic freshwater squid. The paradox of the stuff is that although it is so brilliantly colored, it has no color of its own. It's a solid diffraction grating, and the color you see is the light dispersed and reflecting through it. John Smart, the miner in whose mine we filmed, waxes reflective about this. "The opal's just a bloody illusion. It's as though...