Egyptian+Blue+By+Goerge+W.+Caver

From red clay spotted on a hillside Caver came up with quadruple- oxidized pigment the blue of a royal mummy's innermost windings, an Egyptian Blue no artist or scientist had duplicated since the days of old King Tut. It's the bluest blue bluer than lapis. Paint factories and manufactrers of artists' materials begged him for the formula offering the top floor of Fort Knox. He sent it for the cost of the two-cent stamp it cost him to mail it.

It's an inderscribalble blue. You see it every day on everything from shutters to a child-size flowered dress. We've learned ro live with it without loving it, as if it were something ordinary that blue the world sought for five thousand years. Look around withme:There it is in my folder on my desk, in my close up folder of a fairy turn, in thumbtacks in my corkboard holding up photos, poems, prayers a beaded ancesteral goddess juju doll [it's the blue of the scrab in her hand]. It's the blue of that dictonary of American Regional English, of the box of eighty standard envolopes, the blue dress waiting to be ironed, the blue sky in that Guatemalan cross, it's the blue of the Black Modonna's veil.