ON THE RUBIES OF BURMA AND ASSOCIATED MINERALS. 
181 
On the southern hill about its centre, and halfway up its eastern slope, are some 
large quarries, where a granular limestone has been obtained, from which most of the 
multitude of images of Budda, with which the pagodas of the surrounding country are 
supplied, have been sculptured.* From these quarries a mass of limestone was 
excavated, from which was sculptured a huge Godda (Gautama) for the Arakan 
pagoda in Mandalay. The mass was so bulky that a canal was constructed from the 
foot of the hill to a side channel of the Irrawaddy, in order to convey it to Mandalay. 
The largest quarry of the six to be seen there, is 100 feet long, 50 feet wide, and 30 
feet deep. The limestone bed quarried is from six to eight feet in thickness, of a pure 
white to pale bluish-grey tints, and apparently free from foreign ingredients. Its dip 
varies from an angle of 27° to 40°. 
Filling the interstices and clefts in the limestone of the southern hill, is a semi- 
consolidated red earth, somewhat resembling laterite, which has been derived from 
the disintegration of the limestone and gneissic rocks, and which is said to sparingly 
contain light-coloured rubies. This material in the second "hill is of a more consolidated 
nature, and of a greyish-red to reddish colour, forming irregular layers of from 2 
inches to 18 inches in width. Near the southern end these have been extensively 
excavated over a tract 200 yards in length on the slope from the base up, and 
of 100 yards in width, in order to obtain the embedded rubies. With these are 
associated crystals of spinel and water-worn pebbles of brown hydrated oxide of iron, 
the latter showing that they, and the accompanying minerals, have been deposited 
along with the red earth in their present position. Some of the clefts have been filled 
with a dark-coloured earth. A few small pieces of gneiss are seen in the red earth, 
which may have been derived from thin bands of that rock in the limestone. 
The enclosing bluish-tinted, coarsely crystalline limestone beds are as seen imme¬ 
diately underlying the granular rock of the quarries in the southern hill. 
A specimen of limestone, which I obtained at the old workings, contained pale pink 
crystals of ruby, with iron pyrites, and purplish to blue crystals of sapphire. 
The rock forming the third hill, on its eastern side, is a coarsely crystalline bluish 
and white limestone, one layer of which contains rubies. Here the rock has been 
blasted along a line, some 5 feet wide, up the slope of the hill, for the purpose of 
obtaining them. 
On the north-west side of this group is an old cave working, together with 
a pit in the alluvium close by, which were formerly called the Boyal Loo of King 
Mindoon. 
In the main set of limestone bands passing through Letnytaung spur, not far from 
the Momeit road, and one mile north-east of Mogok, is situated the quarry which was 
formerly worked for the extraction of rubies from the matrix. The short limestone 
outcrop there exposed, traced from its southern end northwards, shows some 40 feet 
* This rock takes a fine polish, and in Mandalay is known by the name of Alabaster, from being mis¬ 
taken for that substance. 
