A Young Prospector

My affinity with dwarves can perhaps be traced back to my early obsession with shiny things. As a kid, I would always find coins on the street (I must've been a magpie in a past life), and whenever we would go to a river in Switzerland, I would search for gold in the water, as if it were the Gold Rush of 1848. Eventually, I begrudgingly accepted the unattainability of my gold-finding goal, but I was not long in despair; a book at my school's library in Bangkok exposed me to something no less precious and much more accessible: crystals.

When I shared my newfound ambition of fathering a crystal collection with my friend, he revealed to me that he already had his own and would happily give me one as my first. I was beside myself with excitement. The following day at school, he kept his promise and brought me an amethyst stone, which I proceeded to wash every hour at the water fountain. Thus began my days of crystal hunting.

(The very same amethyst crystal)

In Switzerland, I almost never returned from a hike without some rock that I saw and fancied, and our cabin is filled to brimming with stones, all stuffed in drawers and scattered across shelves and deposited upon windowsills. I even discovered tiny crystals in a hollow at the bank of the Soia, which I painstakingly extracted with crude tools from one of those dinosaur fossil kits. Almost every souvenir shop in the country sells crystals, though I valued them less than the ones I found myself. Even so, I was not opposed to buying them, if I had the pocket money for it.

Now, in my late 20s, my appetite for crystals has long been sated, and I have amassed a humble collection, which I keep locked up in a Chinese chest in the attic of our cabin. I still like to look at them every now and again, and sometimes I feel the 'love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and a jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves.'