Humboldt & Payne's Discovery of Coal

A few nights ago, we heard in the Cock and Feather tavern that there are beautiful clear stones in the Rockhaven Mountains. Rubies, they said, and some said there were emeralds and sapphires too. One fellow even claimed he had seen a traveler pass through who paid for everything with diamonds. Payne is skeptical about the diamonds but we both think that there might be something to the other stones.

We camped at the bottom of the foothills on a pleasant plateau known as the sinkhole plateau. Now I'm not sure if that's what kept me awake that first night or if it was the sharp rock under my bedroll that I couldn't seem to find, but I didn't sleep that well the first night. Call me superstitious, but it was too quiet.

Humboldt is used to the sounds of town life and had trouble sleeping last night because it was so pleasantly quiet. I slept like a rock.

We explored crevices and caves in the mountains looking for anything good. Once in a while, we saw something that shone in our lamps. We had hoped for rubies or gold but all we could find was rock. We found a cave that looked different from the rest and we got excited. It was full of shiny black rock. We hoped we could chip away the black rock and find something good.

After about a month of this continued chipping away and finding nothing but the black rock, Payne got irritated one night and threw one of the shiny black rocks into our camp fire. The rock seemed to smoulder and we were surprised by it but we were drinking and singing sad songs. We got a little tipsy and threw more of the black shiny rocks into the fire. I cooked a rabbit and even in my condition, I noticed that the fire burned much fiercer where the black rocks were. The rabbit cooked quickly and we had a good meal.

The next day when we woke up, we realized that the black rock was useful. As far as we knew, nobody had ever used the rock to make fire with. We experimented and discovered that the black rock could be ignited and made a nice long lasting and even fire.

We knew we needed to come up with a name for the fire rock. We wanted something unique that would tie us to it forever so we would be known as the discoverers of such a valuable thing. We believe it might be more valuable than diamonds even. Finally Payne came up with an idea. He suggested we use the first two letters of our names. It would either be alco or coal. For some reason coal sounded more like something that would ignite so we chose to name it coal. And the rest, as they say, is history.