Seven Wonders by Ben Mezrich Page A

of hours wandering through this exhibit, which linked modern DNA research with fossil discoveries—tracing mankind through bones and chemistry back to where it all began.
    She nearly pulled Grange to a stop as they sped past Peking Man, the partial skull discovered in China in the early 1930s that had allowed scientists to recreate the face of one of the earliest known examples of Homo erectus from more than four hundred thousand years ago. But Grange didn’t let her pause, even as they moved from Peking Man to Lucy, the most complete skeleton of an early hominid, dating back a staggering four million years. Jendari had always felt it was fitting that the oldest skeleton of early mankind was actually the interior of a woman. Although Mitochondrial Eve—the mother of modern humanity, whose DNA lived inside each and every living person on earth—wouldn’t exist until many millions years after the primitive Lucy, Jendari liked to think that some of Lucy’s features would have carried over into the first woman, and through her, to every woman who has lived since.
    But at the moment, there was no time to dwell on Lucy or Eve; Grange was moving them forward even faster as they burst from the Hall of Human Origins and bisected the circular Hall of Meteorites, dominated by the massiveCape York Meteorite, the thirty-four ton, mostly nickel piece of an asteroid so heavy that the steel support structure beneath the space rock plunged directly into the bedrock beneath the museum itself. And then they were in the Morgan Memorial Hall of Gems.
    Jendari absentmindedly fingered the pearls on her chest as Grange slowed his pace, leading her past the glass display cases teeming with brightly colored baubles from all over the world. There was a time when Jendari had been obsessed by jewels like those around her now. In her early teens, after the death of her father had left her a millionaire and the largest stockholder in one of the Middle East’s most profitable telecom companies, she had spent months aimlessly trotting the globe, buying everything and anything that turned her fancy. Even now, the dressing rooms of her various homes were cluttered with earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and rings that would have seemed appropriate in this exhibit; maybe nothing as grand as the Star of India, the prize possession of the Hall, standing in its own room, at five hundred and sixty-three carats, the largest blue star sapphire in the world, or the Patricia Emerald, the twelve-sided, six-hundred-and-thirty-two carat gemstone—but certainly she had one of the most expensive private collections of any of her teenage peers. It wasn’t until her great-aunt, Milena Saphra, took her father’s place—not just at the head of the company but as her mentor, her mother figure, her guiding influence—that she’d realized the insignificance of such gaudy material possessions.
    Since that moment, more than forty years ago, Jendari had learned that possessions, like philanthropy, needed a purpose; they had to be useful. It was the purpose, the significance, that made a thing truly beautiful.
    They were both breathing hard as Grange led her the last few steps past the Star of India, deep into the farthest reaches of the Hall of Gems. To Jendari, the most famous sapphire in the world was like a third presence in the room. The perfect dome-shaped gemstone, with its glowing six-pointed star created by the light bouncing off the crystal at its heart, wasn’t beautiful simplybecause it was rare, or famous, or large. It was beautiful because it had a soul, a history.
    Formed millions of years ago by natural forces, discovered almost four centuries ago in a riverbed in Sri Lanka, and donated to the American Museum by the banker J. P. Morgan, the Star had been a mainstay of the museum from its beginning. But as spectacular as it was, the Star of India’s journey hadn’t ended in the display room on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
    In 1964, the Star had been the