Stone of Kings

by Gerard Helferich

  Mary Lou Johnson and Jay Ridinger were beginning their search six years after Mein’s assassination. The campo, though less violent than the capital, was still tense. So, when it came to the hazards of prospecting, Jay Ridinger was as vigilant as Mary Lou Johnson was carefree. It was Ridinger who insisted that they never do anything to attract the attention of rebels or government troops, bandits or machete-wielding campesinos. Not that it was easy to keep a low profile, with the pale foreigners towering over the locals and with Ridinger sporting his trademark safari suit and bush hat.

  Though gringos, the prospectors were protected by the fact that they were civilians, with no vested interest in the war. They were also shielded by their patent insanity. With the exception of the loyal Isaac, everyone they came across, from farmers and ranchers to villagers and storekeepers, told them the same thing. They were wasting their time looking for jade. “No hay,” they heard dozens of times, “There isn’t any.” And when the couple refused to listen, the campesinos realized the truth—the strangers were idiotas, outlandish but harmless. Many of Ridinger and Johnson’s expat friends had already come to the same conclusion.

  SIX

  Jadeite

  Jay Ridinger and Mary Lou Johnson had been prospecting around the Motagua for slightly more than a week. Today, December 31, 1974, they were working a parched hillside near a tributary about a two-hour walk north of the river. As always, they filed along in the heat, tapping their geologist’s hammers on stones beside the trail. They weren’t sure what the ping of a jade outcrop would sound or feel like, but whenever a rock seemed to ring a little differently from the others, they’d stop, chip off a piece, and drop it in their vial of bromoform. All the chips had floated today, like the dozens of others they had tested. They decided they would stay in the field one more day, working through New Year’s, then head back to Antigua and the girls.

  Walking in the lead for once, Mary Lou Johnson brought her hammer down on a partially exposed stone. The steel head recoiled with particular force, she thought, and the ring seemed a bit higher in pitch than the others. As she tried to remove a chip, the rock seemed more tenacious than most. When she finally freed a piece, she fished her vial of bromoform out of the leather saddlebag they used to carry their equipment. She dropped the chip into the container. It sank.

  She called to Jay. The fact that the stone was heavier than the test liquid didn’t guarantee it was jade, but she had a sense that something was different about this rock, perhaps from her experience testing all those chips from Jean Deveaux. This one was a freestanding boulder weighing about twenty pounds, and they decided to lug it back to the workshop for closer inspection. They dispatched Isaac to find the landowner, a farmer who knew nothing of jade or the sweet-smelling liquid in their vials. No, he told them, he didn’t mind if they took the rock.

  In Antigua, they sawed into the boulder. Beneath the dull exterior, the stone was a mottled gray-green, similar to what Foshag and Leslie had discovered in nearby Manzanal. They shipped specimens to three different labs in the States. Finally, the typed reports came back: After only one week of prospecting, they had found jade.

  True, it wasn’t the first jade deposit discovered in Guatemala; Foshag and Leslie, British archaeologist Norman Hammond, even Jean Deveaux had beaten them to that distinction. It wasn’t the most desirable shade of the stone, either. But Ridinger and Johnson were ecstatic. They’d done what they’d said they would do, what Jay Ridinger had devoted himself to achieving more than a year ago. Though they found no other jade nearby, they figured that where there was one pod there must be others, so Ridinger and Johnson bought a hundred acres surrounding their find. They also taught the campesino to work with a geologist’s hammer and the bromoform and hired him to prospect on the rest of his land.

  Ridinger and Johnson continued prospecting in the coming weeks and months, sometimes staying at the Longarone, sometimes sleeping in the Travco. They would generally limit their forays to three or four days, so as not to leave Jay’s daughters too long in the care of the housekeeper. On school vacations, the girls would come with them, splashing in the motel pool. And so they came to associate jade prospecting not with deprivation, but with amenities they didn’t have at home.

  On a ridge about a hundred yards from their strike, on the other side of the tributary, Ridinger and Johnson came across a pre-Hispanic worksite. The ground was littered with jagged bits of jade and even a few ancient stone hammers. Ridinger was excited, thinking there might be more jade deposits nearby. But as Johnson closed her fist around the fragments of stone, she was more stirred by the tug of history stretching back a millennium or more, by the thought that she and Jay were just two more in a long line of seekers striding onto this same scene, all searching for jade.

  Several weeks later, Isaac led them to a place about half an hour’s walk south of the Motagua and showed them what he’d discovered. It was a partially buried pod of jade twice the size of a living room sofa and set in white, crusty albitite. The stone was an eye-catching mélange of dark and light green that Ridinger christened “Maya Foliage Jade.” Nearby was more, in an extraordinary spectrum of colors—black, white, gray-green, blue-green, even a little bright green. Ridinger and Johnson bought this land, too, and their workers broke the stone with gasoline-powered drills and hauled it out of the mountains on donkeys.

  Throughout the spring, Ridinger and Johnson returned to the Motagua and purchased more parcels of land from the cash-strapped campesinos. In the end, they had bought 180 acres and rented another four hundred. But even after taking possession, they asked the previous owners to remain on the land, planting it and prospecting for more jade. Partly, the Americans didn’t want to disrupt the campesinos’ lives or livelihood, and partly, they hoped to discourage outsiders from poaching any jade that might be found. Ridinger recalled how easy it had been to hire the invaluable Isaac away from Deveaux. Despite Mary Lou’s urging, Jay still hadn’t severed his relationship with the Belgian. But now that they had their own jade to safeguard, he resolved never to allow anyone, no matter how well trusted, to visit their source or to meet their pickers.

  Of course, Deveaux and Leech also had to agree never to divulge the whereabouts of their find. But while commerce dictated secrecy, science demanded transparency. Mary Lou Johnson knew that no academic journal would accept an article about a pre-Columbian jade mine or workshop without a location stipulated—how else could the report be verified or expanded? If she couldn’t publish her findings, it would mean the end of her career as an archaeologist. She hesitated, but Jay was adamant. Finally, she consented.

  And so, for the first time, the search for the sources of pre-Hispanic jade became the sphere of capitalists rather than enthusiasts and scholars. Most archaeologists and geologists never knew of Ridinger and Johnson’s discovery, and those who did generally discredited it—because it hadn’t been reported in the scholarly literature. If academics did mention the couple’s find, it was usually passed off as unsubstantiated hearsay and the pair described as “entrepreneurs,” the term delivered with disdain. When an international archaeology meeting was held in Antigua, Mary Lou Johnson was pointedly excluded. If she happened to run into academics when they came to Guatemala, they greeted her coolly. Some scholars speculated that the couple were dealing in looted antiquities; others accused them of carving their jade into pre-Columbian forgeries.

  To a degree, the entrepreneurs were victims of guilt by association. In those days, the forging of artifacts was rife in Guatemala, and some people even suspected Jean Deveaux of such activities. When the motive was lucre rather than learning, the scholars seemed to regard the unethical or illegal as only one slippery step from the merely marketable or profitable. And mixed with that distrust was a generous helping of resentment that the entrepreneurs’ secrecy was frustrating the academics’ research. As Michael Coe told me, in defense of Edward H. Thompson, the great sin was not to publish. B
ut that was precisely the offense that Mary Lou Johnson was committing, one her former colleagues couldn’t forgive. Even David Sedat found himself falling under the suspicion of his peers because of his friendship with Johnson and Ridinger.

  And so, Mary Lou Johnson turned away from archaeology and archaeologists and dedicated herself to the new enterprise. Now that she and Jay Ridinger finally had a supply of jade worth carving, their next task was to learn to do just that.

  In his Mineralogical Studies on Guatemalan Jade, William Foshag had described the ancient methods of working the stone. Though some of these techniques had been reported by the conquistadors, most were inferred from studying old jades and the detritus found in pre-Hispanic workshops.

  The all-consuming challenge that jade presented to the early stoneworkers stemmed from one of its most desirable characteristics: its extraordinary hardness. As master jade carver Bob Terzuola explains to me, softer stone such as marble can be chiseled into shape, but a hard stone such as jade (or any gemstone) will shatter under such treatment. In fact, carving jade isn’t a matter of chipping the stone but of scratching it. This scratching goes by different names—sawing, drilling, grinding, polishing—but for each stage of the process, the artisan needs a substance at least as hard as the jade itself. For the ancient carvers, that material could have been more jade—or garnets, which were collected from the Motagua and its tributaries as pebbles. The pebbles were then ground into an abrasive grit, which was relatively easy because their very hardness made them prone to shattering. (Garnets are still commonly used as an abrasive on sandpaper, and 3M operated a garnet plant in the Motagua Valley for many years.)

  The first step in producing plaques, beads, celts, ear ornaments, and most other items was generally sawing. A narrow blade was fashioned of a hard wood such as lignum vitae, so dense that it sinks in water. The blade was dipped in rendered animal fat and coated with abrasive. Then the implement was worked back and forth, scratching the stone again and again until the saw eventually penetrated. It might seem that even an exceptionally dense wood would quickly wear away under this labor, but particles of abrasive lodged in the saw’s edge, shielding it from direct contact with the jade and extending its life. Progress was glacial, though: Bob Terzuola had experimented with wooden saws, finding that, using animal fat and abrasive, he could cut through two millimeters (about 8/100 of an inch) an hour; with just water and abrasive, the headway was only half that rate. After sawing, the plaque had a whitish cast, evidence of the violence inflicted on its crystals.

  When the ancient carver’s blade was halfway through the stone, after perhaps days of effort, he would turn the rock over and begin sawing from the other side. Then, when only a thin bridge remained between the two cuts, he would snap off the plaque, leaving a telltale edge. The two-hundred-pound jade boulder from Kaminaljuyu and smaller pieces from the Terzuola Site had been sawed in just this way. Sawing was also accomplished with string, animal fat, and abrasive; owing to their greater maneuverability, string saws were ideal for intricate work, such as in the exquisite pre-Hispanic plaques of birds, jaguars, and other creatures found in Costa Rica.

  The ancient artisans could have engraved jade with a pointed piece of that stone or some other very hard rock, gradually scratching their design into the surface. Or they may have used a sharp piece of wood covered with animal fat and an abrasive powder. To create the holes for stringing beads, they fitted a stone tip to a wooden shaft or used a wooden bit and abrasive. In either case, the shaft was spun by hand or bow. Small beads might be drilled from one side only, but thicker ones were penetrated first from one direction then the other, the way saw cuts were made. Wider openings, such as those for rings, were made with a blunt tip and abrasive. Hollow drills of bamboo, reeds, or bird’s bones, again used with an abrasive grit, were an efficient way of making holes. Such drills were apparently also employed to cut circular designs and to fashion the round stems for ear ornaments.

  Once a piece was cut to shape, it would have to be ground, that is, rubbed with stone or stone powder until the coarse scratches left after carving were replaced by finer scratches, giving a smoother edge and surface. Finally, the artisan would polish his creation, perhaps the most demanding part of the entire process. The polishing may have begun by rubbing a hard stone, such as a jade celt, over the piece. But, judging from the high polish found on some artifacts, the ancient stone workers also used a stone dust as fine as talcum powder, which couldn’t have appeared in nature but must have been manufactured especially for this purpose.

  The modern-day carvers had electric saws, drills, and grinders to work their jade. Yet, despite all their technology, the process still consisted of making incremental scratches in the stone, just much more quickly than could be done by hand. Whereas the ancients had used loose abrasive, the modern equipment was fitted with blades, tips, and belts to which abrasive was already bonded. In the beginning, the Ridingers’ carvers used silicate carbide, which was relatively inexpensive; but before long, they switched to harder (but much more costly) diamond as their abrasive of choice.

  Despite coaching from Bob Terzuola, it took months for the carvers to learn how to work the stone. As in ancient times, the first step was generally to saw a flat plaque from a rock, like a piece of bread sliced from a loaf. For this, they used a circular saw mounted in a metal box. Beneath the abrasive-coated blade was a pan filled with lubricant; as the blade spun, it would pick up the liquid, which eased the saw’s passage against the stone. Whereas it could take pre-Hispanic workers days to cut through a good-sized rock, the modern equipment performed the same feat in a couple of hours—although, even with the lubricant, the saw sometimes had to be shut down for thirty minutes or so to keep the blade from overheating. A diamond blade could cut for only about 250 hours before needing to be replaced.

  The next step was to trace onto the plaque the object to be carved—say, a simple round pendant. Eventually, they discovered that a thin bronze rod was ideal for this, because its yellowish line stood out against the stone; although the jade remained unscathed, the softer bronze wore down like the tip of a pencil. The drawn outline was sprayed with lacquer so it wouldn’t rub off before the cuts were made; then the plaque was placed on a diamond-tipped table saw with a reciprocating blade. Beneath the cutting platform was a tank of water, which the blade would dip into on its down stroke. The water acted as a lubricant, but it splattered everywhere, requiring the operators to wear goggles and rubber aprons.

  As the workers followed the outline with the saw, at times their fingers would come within millimeters of the oscillating blade, and it seemed that a slip would result in a severed finger. But this was an illusion: The edge of the saw was coated with diamond dust, but the blade was perfectly smooth, since teeth wouldn’t have survived more than a couple of seconds against the stone. So even modern sawing was a process of incremental scratches. And paradoxically, though the blade could penetrate one of the hardest stones known, since it had no teeth, casual contact presented no danger to delicate human flesh. More prolonged contact would produce not a cut, but a burn.

  After the piece was cut out, it was pressed against a metal wheel coated with diamond dust to grind down its edges. Then came the final step, polishing, which, as in ancient times, proved one of the most tedious and challenging, mastered only after long experimentation and the use of machines fitted to Bob Terzuola’s specifications.

  The process of polishing takes the scratches that have been made in the course of carving and grinding and gradually replaces them with finer and finer scratches until they’re no longer visible to the human eye. The key word is gradually. Whereas softer stones such as marble take a polish relatively quickly, jade, thanks to its great density, must be coaxed to a luster. At the beginning, the carvers used abrasive powder and some polishing bits that Terzuola fashioned from lignum vitae, whose resin produced a honey-like aroma as the wood warmed to its task. Later, they substi
tuted metal bits electroplated with abrasive. And for the final polish, they used a series of five consecutively finer leather wheels smeared with an abrasive paste of chrome oxide or aluminum oxide. Terzuola instructed the workers not to quit polishing until they could hold a lightbulb to the piece and read the wattage reflected in its surface; only then would the jade shine like the gemstone it was. There’s nothing more “heartbreakingly beautiful,” Terzuola tells me, than the polish on a piece of jade, and its ability to take such a sheen is one of the reasons that the stone is “the king of gems.” And diamonds? As far as he’s concerned, the best use for them is to carve jade.

  If a hole were needed in an item, such as a bead, it was drilled with a diamond-tipped bit about the size of a sewing needle. This proved a surprisingly expensive part of the process, because the delicate bits needed to be replaced after only an hour or two of use. As Terzuola pointed out to the partners, in a sense they weren’t in the jade business but the business of drilling holes. The holes went by different names, according to whether they were round (circles), or curved (crescents), or tube-shaped (grooves), but they were all created by removing material. There was an old adage among Chinese jade carvers: “Our job is to subtract; we cannot add.” And now the entrepreneurs discovered for themselves how arduous this subtraction could be, burning expensive blades and bits.

  The more material to be removed, the more costly the item to produce. Even making a plain round bead was deceptively demanding, consisting of sawing a cube from a plaque, then rounding its eight corners on the grinding wheel, drilling a hole in the center, and finally polishing it. But the most expensive items to produce were hollow, such as bowls, with a tremendous volume of material to be extracted and only a thin shell of jade remaining. (Perhaps this was one reason why the ancient Maya generally produced life-size masks not from a single piece of stone but from a mosaic of thin plaques affixed to a wooden or plaster base.) One of the first items Ridinger and Johnson made was a set of poker chips, as a gift for Jay’s uncle. All those round edges ate up lots of diamond, and in the end they figured their expenses in the thousands of dollars, not even counting the value of the stone.