Gems: New and Hard to Come By

Diamonds are a girl's best friend, and the egg-sized ruby bestowed on his new wife by Aristotle Onassis has put those blood-red stones, the rarest of all gems, very much back in vogue. But the newest item in the gem world is a precious stone that precious few people have even seen. It is a sapphire-like gem called Tanzanite, which was discovered in 1967 in East Africa.

Until the past year, little was known of Tanzanite. Among the first to realize its value was a Goanese prospector named Manuel de Souza, who stumbled across a pocket of crystals in Tanzania...