The Delhi Purple Sapphire

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• Cawnpore (Kanpur), India, and London · An English collector's story

  The Delhi Purple Sapphire

  The cursed amethyst · the Heron-Allen amethyst

  Told, never investigated

  

  The writer and scholar Edward Heron-Allen wrote in 1904 that his amethyst had been looted from the treasure of the Temple of the God Indra at Cawnpore during the Indian Mutiny, and that ill fortune followed whoever owned it. Saying it had a "baleful influence" on his young daughter, he wrote that he was locking it in seven boxes at his bankers, not to be opened until thirty-three years after his death. It passed to the Natural History Museum after he died, and by the Royal Society's account it had already inspired his own short story "The Purple Sapphire", published under the name Christopher Blayre.

  Earliest written source: Edward Heron-Allen's letter of October 1904; a copy marked "Copy" is held by the Royal Society (MM/11/85), and the original was boxed with the stone at his bank

  Royal Society archive, MM/11/85: Edward Heron-Allen's remarks on an amethyst (October 1904) (archived)

  Tradition · not evidence