Description
Herbert is vague in describing the appearance of the spice. He hints at its color in Dune Messiah (1969) when he notes that Guild Navigator Edric "swam in a container of orange gas ... His tank's vents emitted a pale orange cloud rich with the smell of the geriatric spice, melange." Later in Heretics of Dune (1984), a discovered hoard of melange appears as "mounds of dark reddish brown." Herbert also indicates fluorescence in God Emperor of Dune (1981) when the character Moneo notes, "Great bins of melange lay all around in a gigantic room cut from native rock and illuminated by glowglobes of an ancient design with arabesques of metal scrollwork upon them. The spice had glowed radiant blue in the dim silver light. And the smell – bitter cinnamon, unmistakable." Herbert writes repeatedly, starting in Dune (1965), that melange possesses the odor of cinnamon.
In Dune, Lady Jessica notes that her first taste of spice "tasted like cinnamon." Dr. Yueh adds that the flavor is "never twice the same .. It's like life – it presents a different face each time you take it. Some hold that the spice produces a learned-flavor reaction. The body, learning a thing is good for it, interprets the flavor as pleasurable – slightly euphoric. And, like life, never to be truly synthesized."
Read more about this topic: Melange (fictional Drug)
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