f cloth
are put into earthen pots, and burned up over a fire. The ashes are then
thrown into water and quicksilver added thereto. This attracts all the
bits of gold, and makes them combine with itself. The water is then
poured off, and the rest emptied into a cloth and squeezed in the hands,
whereupon the quicksilver, being a liquid, escapes through the loose
texture of the cloth, but the gold, which has been brought together by
the squeezing, is found inside in a pure state.

CHAPTER IX

CINNABAR (_continued_)

1. I will now return to the preparation of vermilion. When the lumps of
ore are dry, they are crushed in iron mortars, and repeatedly washed and
heated until the impurities are gone, and the colours come. When the
cinnabar has given up its quicksilver, and thus lost the natural virtues
that it previously had, it becomes soft in quality and its powers are
feeble.

2. Hence, though it keeps its colour perfectly when applied in the
polished stucco finish of closed apartments, yet in open apartments,
such as peristyles or exedrae or other places of the sort, where the
bright rays of the sun and moon can penetrate, it is spoiled by contact
with them, loses the strength of its colour, and turns black. Among many
others, the secretary Faberius, who wished to have his house on the
Aventine finished in elegant style, applied vermilion to all the walls
of the peristyle; but after thirty days they turned to an ugly and
mottled colour. He therefore made a contract to have other colours
applied instead of vermilion.

3. But anybody who is more particular, and who wants a polished finish
of vermilion that will keep its proper colour, should, after the wall
has been polished and is dry, apply with a brush Pontic wax melted over
a fire and mixed with a little oil; then after this he should bring the
wax to a sweat by warming it and the wall at close quarters with
charcoal enclosed in an iron vessel; and finally he should smooth it all
off by rubbing it down with a wax candle and clean linen cloths, just
as naked marble statues are treated.

4. This process is termed [Greek: ganosis] in Greek. The protecting coat
of Pontic wax prevents the light of the moon and the rays of the sun
from licking up and drawing the colour out of such polished finishing.

The manufactories which were once at the mines of the Ephesians have now
been transferred to Rome, because this kind of ore was later discovered
in Spain. The clod