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DAY 1
68 The Curse of the Hope Diamond
Vocabulary
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Imagine a hot, dry night long, long ago. You are in India
in a Hindu temple. Over in the corner is a huge stone
statue of the goddess Sita. An enormous deep blue
diamond decorates her forehead. Suddenly you hear a
sound! A man is sneaking toward the statue. He climbs on
the goddess and pries the gem from the stone. Before you
can cry out, the man has run away.
The man thinks he has won a great prize. Little does he
know that this gem is now cursed forever!
This is the beginning of a legend that is the Curse of
the Hope Diamond. Now, curses aren’t real, and the
legend is make-believe, but the Hope Diamond is one of
the most famous and fascinating gems in the world. It has
been owned by kings, lords, gamblers, and heiresses. It
has been cut down in size to be more beautiful and to look
like a different stone.
The real story is almost as interesting as the legend.
It probably started like this: One day in the middle of
the 1600s, a miner in the Kullur mine in Golconda, India,
found one of the biggest, rarest diamonds the world has
ever seen. It was about the size of a walnut and was
deep blue. It was 112.75 carats. (A carat is the way gems
are measured. It is a measure of the mass of a stone,
not its weight.)