Not to totally dispute this, as anything is possible. But I traveled this planet chasing down all the Topaz I could buy during the boom. Never heard of any Topaz coming from Namibia"......
Not to totally disagree with Mr. Liccini but,
The well known Spitskope or Spitzkope location in the Namib desert
area of central Namibia produces spectacular topaz crystals and has
done so for more than 100 years. Being the collecting haunt of
Europeans, few of these extraordinary specimens ever made it to the
US. I too have serious doubts that Namibia produced such a large
piece of rough, I’ve seen single crystals here that are +/- 500 grams
but rarely. In fact I just acquired four pieces of natural blue facet
grade with hair thin needles of schorl (fairly common in this
locality) that weigh over 200 grams. Big for here, but certainly not
for world class bombers.
There is a river here that ultimately will become an important source
for accelerator topaz once some of the better known sources are
depleted. It full of rounded water worn, generally water clear topaz
chunks in the “walnut” size range. Pretty good percentage of it is
clean.
Namibia has to my knowledge never been a commercial exporter of topaz
to the nuke centers, plenty of people cut it and sell it in the local
market as Silver Topaz, interesting if you are a tourist… What I
have seen that is cool are necklaces with drilled tumble polished
natural chunks with similarly prepared aqua, nice actually.
The finest topaz specimen I have seen with a certain Namibian
location was about 10cm long “twinned” with a 15cm long smoky quartz
point, truly wondrous thing. It was stolen from a local tourist
center about three years ago never to be seen again…
** Hanuman Notes **
I will upload to the Orchid FTP some picture of the Siam Akaramanee,
the winer for this round is Byzantia byzantia@earthlink.net
Now who is going to post the next Trivia question?
Hanuman