"What!" I cried, "an amethyst."
"Yes, a melancholy stone and unlucky. Do you think it is a genuine antique?"
He called for a magnifying glass. And now I was better able to admire the carving of the intaglio. It was obviously a masterpiece of Greek glyptography dating from the early Empire. Among all the precious stones in the Museum at Naples I had never seen anything more beautiful. With the glass it was possible to distinguish on the pillar an emblem often found on monuments dedicated to some subject of the Bacchic cycle. I pointed it out to him.
He shrugged his shoulders and smiled. The gem was in an open setting. It occurred to me to examine the reverse; and I was very surprised to find thereon an inscription of a clumsy crudity dating evidently from a period much less remote than that of the intaglio. In a measure these signs resembled the engraving on those Abraxas stones[1] so familiar to antiquaries. In spite of my inexperience I believed them to be magic signs. That was also my friend's opinion.
- ↑ Stones so called because they bore the mystic words Abraxas, Abrasax, known also as Basilidian stones because they were the symbol of the Basilidians, a gnostic sect.
