A stone that is not merely a stone — one that opens a way, or turns whatever it touches to wealth. Under the magic rock the record keeps two witnesses, a German tale and a Chinese one, and between them they mark the two powers a charged stone can hold: passage, and transformation.

The German witness is a tale collected by the brothers Grimm and given here in the 1884 translation of their Household Tales (collected 1812–1857). A wandering tailor's apprentice, led underground, hears a voice bid him "Step on the stone which lies in the middle of the hall", where "great good fortune awaits thee". He obeys, and "The stone began to give way under his feet", sinking slowly into a deeper hall lit by vases of bluish vapour where an enchanted maiden waits. Here the magic rock is a threshold and a lift at once — the floor itself becoming the road down into the marvel, and, later, the broad stone that bears the freed pair back up to open air.

The Chinese witness, in E. T. C. Werner's Myths & Legends of China (published 1922), gives the stone a plainer greed. A Taoist adept owns a black stone that, with "muttering a charm," he "would rub it on a tile" or brick, and the thing was "forthwith changed into a lump of silver" — a stone that "possessed the property of changing anything into gold". When his covetous friend tricks him and tries it on a great washing-block, "the washing-block was already a solid mass of silver" before the owner can stop him, and the alchemy, spent all at once on stone, is undone by its own excess.

One stone opens; the other transmutes. Both are inert until a word or a footstep wakes them — as though the power were never in the rock but in the person who knew what to say or where to stand. What does it change, to imagine the dead weight of stone as the very thing most ready to serve?