HANAU

After making a comment on Magic and Memoirs blogspot about geomythology, I decided to get the book down and browse through it. This was an effort to keep my brain from going into total meltdown over the last week. Sometimes I would read a sentence without one word going to the control centre which is why I picked a familiar book.

When I read about the Hanau, I went looking for images on the net and couldn't find one so I used my very own which I picked up on some beach somewhere along the Great Ocean Road. I probably intended to use it on the Blight but it was a good specimen so it was added to the collection in the car boot.

The Hanau or "birth stones" are more often found along the coast of Hawaii as boulders of lava rock. They contain small pebbles or grains of sand in rounded cavities. The cavities were bubbles of gas in the hot lava and when the rock cooled, pounded on the beaches by waves and sand, the bubbles opened up and hollowed out. Little pebbles or grains of sand strike the hollow at just the right angle to be wedged in. The Hawaiians thought they were the babies of the rock, hence the name "birth stones".

The baby is the little red pebble and it is firmly wedged in. If the stones are left on the beach long enough, wind and waves can loosen the pebble and it will churn around, enlarging the hollow but still not be able to fall out.