Rice Water and Mountain Resin (part 3/7)

More about Rice Water and Mountain Resin (part 3/7)

On the fifth day of my first journey north, we left the Indus plain and began to climb into the lands that drink from snow.

We passed terraced fields: patient steps carved into mountainsides, glittering with standing water. The people here ate less barley and more rice—soft, white, clinging to the fingers.

I watched a woman boil rice in a blackened pot. When she poured the cooked grain into a basket, she did not throw away the cloudy water. She poured it into another pot, and into that pot she added clay.

“Why?” I asked.

“It makes the clay smooth,” she said. “The pot doesn’t crack so easily in the fire.”

I dipped a finger. The water was slick, almost syrupy.
Later, a Babylonian temple-scribe would explain it to me with his reed stylus scratching in the dust:

“Rice water is full of glutamate, Naram. Glue-spirits. They make the clay particles disperse, align. They help the carbon smoke creep into every pore when you smudge it. Think of them as tiny hands arranging the earth.”

In your language, they are amino-acid-based dispersants and weak surfactants. The glutamate helps the clay form a dense, uniform microstructure and helps carbon precursors infiltrate, promoting the formation of CNTs and graphitic layers during firing.

In mine, they are simply rice ghosts that teach clay to sing in the kiln.

Deeper in the mountains, the pine trees thickened. Resin bled from their trunks, hardening into amber tears. We traded salt bricks and lapis beads for baskets of resin and tar. The elders knew its value:

To waterproof boats and jars.

To smear on sandals.

To burn in kilns for smoke that strengthens pottery.

The resin-rich smoke carries complex polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons—benzene rings like little chariots of carbon—that, under heat and in the presence of iron-bearing clay, catalyze into tubular nanostructures.

I did not know those words then.

I just knew that pots smudged with pine tar rang brighter, lasted longer, and that the resin from Lebanon, Cyprus, and the Himalayan foothills all carried the same scent of the Black Bone fire.

Aaron Baker
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