A friend of mine recently told me a story he’d read long ago (That I had also read, but couldn’t remember for the life of me where or when.) We’re both in our mid thirties and swore we’d read it as children, though he grew up in Ireland and I in Canada. However this is the gist of it:

A messenger is carrying a crystal or jewel on behalf of his ruler across a desert, as a gift.

The crystal naturally formed around water, and is full of water, so is incredibly rare.

He runs into difficulty and has to choose between destroying the jewel for its water (and being executed) or dying of thirst.

The last line is a variation of ‘The water was salt.’ He thought it might have been Lord Dunsany, while I was thinking it might have been a Sufi Parable, but he’s read all of Lord Dunsany and found nothing, and all my searching in the Sufi Parables came up blank too. It’s in that same vein as “The Tigers and the Strawberry.” from the old zen story, or the “That Hell-Bound Train” but yeah, neither of us could really find anything like it. Hopefully someone remembers or knows! Thank you!