Chalcedony hills and opal oceans

Years ago I read this attractive Pushkin Press paperback which, unusually for a 19th century novel, comes with no introduction or footnotes. The publisher's website provides a brief summary of this 'little known' 1864 novel by George Sand, translated by Sue Dyson: 

While working in a small geological museum, Alexis Hartz meets his cousin Laura, who has discovered a way to enter a geode. Travelling through a vast and glittering landscape of brilliant crystals, Alexis falls passionately in love with Laura. But when they return to the ordinary world, only friendship remains. He yearns for the perfect world of the crystals, and returning there becomes a perilous obsession. 

I am fascinated by the idea of crystal landscapes, maybe because J. G. Ballard's Crystal World was one of my favourite books as a teenager. Here I thought I would extract some sentences from an early part of the book describing what Alexis is shown by Laura, and provide some appropriate illustrations. 

I was with Laura in the centre of the amethyst geode which graced the glass case in the mineralogical gallery; but what up to then I had taken blindly and on the faith of others for a block of hollow flint, the size of a melon cut in half and lined inside with prismatic crystals of irregular size and groupings, was in reality a ring of tall mountains enclosing an immense basin filled with steep hills bristling with needles of violet quartz, the smallest of which might have exceeded the dome of St Peter's in Rome both in volume and in height. 

An amethyst Geode
Image: Wikimedia Commons - Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg)

We were soon on the tallest summit of the great ice peak, which was in reality just a colossal prism of milky hyaline quartz, as was borne out, on a manageably small scale, by the geode which I held as a point of comparison, and just as Laura had declared to me; but what a grandiose sight came into view again from the very summit of the great white crystal! At our feet, the circle of amethyst, drowned in its own reflections, was now only a small element of the picture, agreeable because of the melancholy sweetness of its lilac tints, the elegance of its shapes contributing to the harmony of the whole. 

Hyaline Quartz
Image: Wikimedia Commons - Rama

"Further off, [Laura said,] you can see the valleys where amber-coloured chalcedony is rounded into powerful hills, while a chain of dark, glowing-red zirconium completes the illusion of a limitless blaze. The lake which half-reflects them at its edges, but whose centre presents a surface of slackly lapping waves, is made up of indeterminate shades of chalcedony, whose nebulous fleeciness reminds one of white horses on the sea when there is a steady breeze."

Chalcedony
Image: Wikimedia Commons - Koltovoi

"As for these masses of beryls and sapphires, a material whose rarity is so prized among us, they have no more importance here than God's other works. They stretch out to infinity in slender colonnades which you take perhaps for far-off forests, as I wager you take those slender, tender stems of green chalcedony to be thickets, and those crystalline efflorescences of pyromorphite for carpets of velvety moss caressing the edges of the many-coloured agate ravine..." 

Pyromorphite
Image: Wikimedia Commons - Koreller

"Let us go on a little, you shall explore the opal oceans where the sun, that blazing diamond whose creative power is unknown to me, plays in all the reflections of the rainbow. Do not linger on these islands of turquoise, further on are those of tender lazulite and of lapis, run through with veins of gold. Here is mad labradorite, the reflections from its facets by turns colourless and pearly, and aventurine with silver rain that displays its polished flanks, while the fires of red, warm almandine, whose praises were once sung by a seer called Hoffmann, are concentrated around the centre of its austere mountain. As for me, I love those humble rose gypsums forming long walls, piled on top of each other, right up to the skies, and those fluorites lightly tinted with the freshest colours, or then again those blocks of feldspar, which we call moonstone, because it has the smooth reflection of that heavenly body's rays..."

Labradorite

Image: Wikimedia Commons - Parent Géry