It was the setting for a grey, gritty, Scandinavian myth. Out of Finland’s Lusoto we drove, through an icy drizzle, to a bleak and rocky hill. Ari, our driver-guide, geared into his four-wheel drive and we ground, groaned and churned shards of slate from our wheels before reaching the top. Dark wooden shacks loomed out of a rubble-strewn field and a few ghostly conifers stood like spectral sentinels. The only spot of colour was a tall man in a red parka. He strode up to us, crunching rubble and frost under his sturdy boots, and said, “I’m Fred. Welcome to the Arctic Amethyst mine of Lampivaara!”
Both his voice and his handshake were warm and his accent had a slight Afrikaans ring. We didn’t dwell on that, preferring to hurry into a log hut where a fire blazed in a stove. It was warm and there was a faint fragrance of resin. Fred hung up his parka, gave us a hot berry drink and wove the Saga of the Shaman’s Stone. While a knife-edged Lappish wind keened outside, we fled back four milliard — four thousand million — years when the world was very young and very violent. Deep below the surface of the earth, two great tectonic plates, churning on their oceans of molten magma, collided. “It pushed up mountains four to five kilometres high,” Fred’s voice was suitably hushed at the enormity of it all. The berry juice was sweet and tart and we unzipped our anoraks. “Now, 10 Ice Ages followed covering all this where we are sitting, under two or three kilometres of ice. It wore down the high mountains till, today, Lampivaara is only 400m high.”
The warmth and the berry juice, fermented perhaps, had made us feel a bit drowsy. “Now, the amethysts began to form!” Our drowsiness vanished. “The melting ice had minerals in it. Silica in the water crystallised into quartz, often called Mountain Crystal. It’s used in TV sets, watches and solar panels. In the 1800s they made spectacles of it.” This is probably why spectacle lenses are sometimes referred to as ‘pebbles’.
Fred refreshed our mugs. We sipped warily. He reached behind him and held out chunks of rock. “When the radiation is high, the quartz turns black and is known as Smoky Quartz.” The quartz sat in our palms, winking in the light. Sci-fi tales created ET beings of crystal. We recalled reading that when viruses are dormant, they are crystalline waiting for a living host to propagate. In our flights of fantasy we had lost some of his words. He was now saying “When the spirit doctors, the Shamans, discovered that sparks fly when crystal is rubbed and that there is a smell like the odour of a thunderstorm, they said such crystals were a gift of the Thunder God, Ukko.”
Fred’s words wove magic. “Traditionally” he said. “Bishops wear amethyst rings to guard against temptation!” He grinned, finished his drink and said “Come, we will see the mine”
We stepped out. The berry juice must have worked its spell; we didn’t feel so cold now, though it still seemed like a setting from Macbeth . The stones and slivers of rock moved under our feet, as we trudged across the exposed crest of Lampivaara to a wooden arch leading into a corridor built into the side of a quarry. Wooden stairs, rafters, led down the rocky hillside. We turned into a narrow passage and saw an uncovered spot where visitors toiled to find their own amethysts. A basin sat on a table, a chipping hammer beside it. There were rough lumps of matrix looking like glistening chunks of nutty toffee: the mother rock holding amethysts in its grasp.
That’s when it dawned on us. The owners of this mine did not have to employ miners to dig out the magical stones of the shamans. There were hordes of tourists eager to flock in and pay to work in the mine. We were in Lapland, after all: legendary home of Santa Claus. Things here are not always what they seem to be as we recorded in our travel diaries.
The tall guide stood framed in the door as we walked away, his figure blurred by drifting veils of mist. He said, “I must let you into a secret. I’m not Finn. I’m from the Netherlands.”
“What made you come here?”
“What makes many men come here: beautiful, blonde, Finnish girls!”
Amethysts were supposed to save senior prelates from temptation. Clearly, they had not affected Fred.
