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wife? Was it not he, also, who had come into possession of the tamed Koh-I-Noor?
But,
reasoned Tavernier, Emir Jemla is dead and Shah Jehan is dead. So he
began to explore the further history of the Shahs and as we of today
already know, Shah Jehan was deposed by his son, Auiangzeb, and so
Aurangzeb now must have the Koh-I-Noor and this great rough stone.
So
to Delhi went Tavernier. It so happened that the new Mogul, Aurangzeb,
was an even greater lover of gems than his father. Hearing of the
presence in the city of a famed gem traveler named Tavernier, he
summoned him to the palace. And there, standing before the great
Peacock Throne, Tavernier discussed with Mogul Aurangzeb all the great jewels of the world, and Aurangzeb is said to have remarked:
"You have not seen all the great stones" and he ordered his Chief
Keeper of the King's Jewels, one Akel Khan, to bring the Great Mogul.
This, said Aurangzeb, was the diamond found in the Kollur mine. But it no longer was 787-1/2 carats.
It was a rose cut, round, with a slight crack on the lower edge and a
little flaw in it. In fact, it was the same form, said Tavernier later,
"as if one cut an egg through the middle." Its water was fine and it
weighed 319-1/2 ratis, or 280 European carats. The reason for the great
reduction in size was that the royal cutter, one Hortensio Borgio, had
handled it carelessly and performed such a bad job on it that instead
of being rewarded for his work he was fined 10,000 rupees, which was
not a too severe criticism of his cutting art, since he might have had
his head chopped off.
Tavernier held this stone in his hand and later wrote
about it in his Travels in India. But just because the dia-
diamond never left India or came into the greedy hands of
European dealers, his story aroused a controversy among
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