The first of five clues. Each one below gives a little more away.
I am not a stone. I am sap that waited forty million years.
I sometimes hold something that was alive when the tree was.
Rub me and I pick up paper. The Greek word for me is where 'electricity' comes from.
A famous room panelled entirely in me vanished during the Second World War.
Golden, translucent, occasionally with an insect inside.
Amber
The Greek for it was elektron. Rubbing it lifts dust and scraps of paper, and that small parlour trick is where the entire vocabulary of electricity begins.
Amber is tree resin that has polymerised over tens of millions of years, and because resin flows and traps, it preserves what fell into it with a fidelity fossils never achieve: feathers, flowers, a lizard's foot, an entire ant mid-stride. Recoverable DNA, unfortunately for a famous premise, has not survived. Rubbing it produces a static charge strong enough to lift paper, an effect the Greeks noticed and named after the stone itself — elektron — which is why the entire vocabulary of electricity descends from a fossilised drop of pine sap.
Reading five clues at once is not the game. In the real thing they arrive one at a time and every wrong guess costs an hour. Play mystery #59 · today's mystery · the vault
Previous: mystery #58. Next: mystery #60. Or try #36, #37, #38, #39, #40, #41.