Recollections of mineral collecting and dealing in India

It was my old mentor, Darashah Wadia, who had first fired my imagination by mentioning the term `Jewel Tunnels', and by describing to me the cavities he had himself examined on the Bhor Ghat section of the railway line. Now that I was living in Bombay, I simply had to see them for myself. By a stroke of luck, my old hiking buddy, Vijay Kumar, was also posted to Bombay. So, during the monsoon season of 1956 we made a plan to walk the PoonaBombay railway track from Khandala at the top of the ghat to Karjat at the bottom, a distance of approximately 21 km, in order to traverse the `Jewel Tunnels' and inspect them for ourselves, en route.

We caught a train from Bombay to Khandala, alighted, and began our trek down the railroad tracks one drizzly morning. I don't recall precisely how many tunnels we trudged through with flashlights and pick during that endeavor, but Fasi Makki, one of the longest-standing mineral dealers in Maharashtra, assured me in a recent personal conversation that there are a total of 26 railway tunnels on Bhor Ghat. Almost all the tunnels, long and short, exhibited cavities, though their abundance and size varied dramatically between individual volcanic layers (flows). Many, but by no means all, of the tunnels contained crystals of zeolitic minerals of imposing size.

One cavity, about 6 feet wide, was just a few feet higher than the railway track. Kumar and I were able to actually climb into it while a couple of trains thundered past in the tunnel's darkness. Though the crystal surfaces were entirely covered with a sooty coating, a century in the making, from the smoke of coal-fired locomotives, it was still easy to identify the prismatic and pyramidal faces on blocky apophyllite crystals up to 8 cm across, accompanied by equally well-developed stilbite sheaves. When broken open with a pick, the larger apophyllite crystal interiors proved to be pale glassy green in color. The stilbite exhibited a creamy to salmonpink hue. Only a few smaller, narrower, deeper cavities had escaped the ravages of engine smoke sufficiently to reflect our flashlight beams from facets of crystals ... the original "jewels."

But this turned out to be one of those rare mineral outings in Maharashtra that did not yield even a single specimen worth keeping. As we caught the train home from Karjat, I had nothing to show for the trip except our experiences. It would have struck me as wildly, hilariously improbable that more than 25 years later, my verbal description (to Phil Scalisi) of this very excursion of ours would one day provide the evidential basis for a description of The "Jewel Tunnel" in Classic Mineral Localities of the World: Asia and Australia (Philip Scalisi and David Cook, 1983).

Fortunately, it was not necessary for me to depend on selfcollected material from the `Jewel Tunnels' to get an idea of how the zeolites appeared in their original pristine state. Hundreds of large plates from these railway tunnel cavities were saved, most rather carelessly, in displays in the geology departments of almost all the older established universities and colleges, where the "zeolite" crystals on matrix were, and perhaps still are, a common sight. Since that first slew of specimens appeared in the 1860's, periodic new railway construction and tunnel excavations, notably around 1890, through several sections of the Western Ghats, have provided a vast outpouring of ungainly specimens studded with oversized zeolite crystals. Almost none of these would qualify as collecting material by today's Western standards. But it was the fashion in those days, influenced by notions of the Indian Geological Survey personnel, to consider bigger to be better. Size almost always dominated over quality in the preserved specimens I have inspected from cuts and tunnels of the Poona-Bombay and other railway lines.