Uricite Stalactites

Description

Uricite Stalactites are a mineral formation occurring on the ceilings of well-trafficked stairwells, recorded in the Tower under Serological Deposits, Class IV. Each specimen consists of a slender, amber-to-ochre spike of precipitated urea salts, typically between 4 and 19 centimetres in length, terminating in a bead of clear fluid that the Stonemasons Amp Lapidaries Guild calls "the pendant." Specimens grow at a rate the Bureau of Hydraulic Concordance has measured at 1.1 to 3.4 millimetres per day, though this rate is disputed by the Society for Vertical Cartography, which holds that the figures were taken on descending stairwells only and do not apply to the ascending ones.

The stalactites are structurally brittle and emit a faint odour when struck, a property catalogued under Ordinance 5,307.44 (Liquid Effluent) and never satisfactorily explained.

Occurrence

Uricite forms wherever foot traffic on a stair is heavy, the ceiling is stone, and ventilation is poor. The densest known concentrations are found in the Sub-Basement of Floor 5,307, where the ceiling carries over four hundred specimens in a run of twelve metres, and along the lower reaches of the Fifth Spiral Watercourse, where the stalactites drip into the channel and are believed by some clerks to be the source of the water's characteristic reactivity. The Bureau of Hydraulic Concordance has formally denied this attribution on three separate occasions.

Isolated specimens have been reported in the Renal Rapids and, more contentiously, within the Scriptorium Aquaria, where the Librarian of that room insists the formations there are decorative and were installed under authority now lost.

Nomenclature and dispute

The name "uricite" was proposed by the mineralogist clerk Hedgely Voss in a petition to the Seventh Concordance, and was adopted despite objection from the Librarians, who had preferred the Latinate calculus stactes. The dispute is recorded in Annex Δ-12 of the Second Concordance, which rules that both terms remain in use and that neither may be used in the presence of the other without a witness.

A second, older disagreement concerns whether uricite is a mineral at all. The guild holds that it is a slow exhalation of the building itself and should be catalogued under Architecture. The Bureau counters that anything precipitating at 1.1 millimetres a day is, for practical purposes, hydrology. The Third Concordance appears to support both readings, and the Fifth Concordance contradicts both.

Collection and handling

Specimens are collected by the Lapidaries under licence and stored in the Oblivion Sump pending classification, a arrangement the Bureau considers irregular. Collectors are instructed to harvest from the ceiling upward, never downward, and never while a visitor is standing beneath. Two collectors were lost in the Sub-Basement of Floor 5,307 during the winter of the long inventory, an event recorded in the Register of Reported Oneiric Phenomena though it involved no dream.

Visitors to affected stairwells are asked to refrain from striking the formations, and to keep hats on.

In the record

Uricite is cited obliquely in the Third Concordance as "the hanging teeth of the under-hall," a phrase that has since entered administrative use as a term of art for any recurring obligation whose deadline descends indefinitely.