Quartzite - a symbol of Jesus
What is the hardest rock in the world?
Rare minerals like diamond are the hardest, but they are not rocks. What common rock can cover whole landscapes, and is very hard? Granite? Well, there is another rock which is even harder and is called Quartzite. It is composed of tiny grains of sandstone transformed by long exposure to heat and pressure into a rock which is almost pure quartz, though it isn’t quartz crystals. Because it is formed by heat and pressure it is called a metamorphic rock. It is usually pure white, and is becoming rather popular for kitchen benchtops.
... A few percent of rock areas in the world are quartzite. One large one, 48 square kilometers, is the Zhangjiajie area in the Hunan Province in South East China. It is also known as the Hallelujah Mountains because it was the inspiration for mountains in the first Avatar film in 2010. It is a UNESCO global geopark, and 20 Million people visit it each year. (As lifted-up mountains, it draws all men to it.) It would take about a week to walk all the paths, and it is filled with an enormous array of pinnacles and even vegetation, which is rather surprising because quartzite should supply few nutrients – but it does.
There is an enormously high, narrow arch at one place which is said to be the world’s tallest. Ironically this hardest rock is the most pierced. The top of the arch is 40m long, 10 m wide and 15 m thick. The cleft is 357 m high.
If this were symbolic we would say it is a symbol of endurance, but perhaps of piercing as well. At this stage you can probably guess whom I refer to!
I recently bought a polished New Zealand specimen of quartzite. As for most specimens in the rock-shop it was about palm-sized. But most interestingly there was a blood-red stain right through part of this white rock. This is rare and the colour is from iron oxides.
I prefer to think of it as a symbol for actual blood.