The Malachite Box them are keepers of hidden underground riches. The Mistress, described as either a beautiful green-eyed woman in malachite gown or a lizard with the crown on her head, is the keeper of gemstones. Poloz is the master of every existing piece of gold. The miners believed that if a gold-bearing lode disappeared, it meant that the Great Snake moved it to a different place. Bazhov introduced numerous daughters of Poloz, including Golden Hair from the tale of the same name. The relationship between Poloz and the Mistress is unclear. Bazhov commented that he asked some story-tellers about it, but they
The Malachite Box people used to say about the lucky workers that they "knew the words" and had certain helpers. The geography is well known because it is specified in the stories. Bazhov mentions real locations such as Sysert, the Polevskoy Copper Smelting Plant, the Gumyoshevsky mine, the villages Kosoy Brod and Krasnogorka, the Ryabinovka river. Mythical creatures in "The Malachite Box" are either anthropomorphous (primarily female) or zoomorphic. The animals that appear in the stories and have zoomorphic attributes are lizards, snakes ("The Great Snake"), cranes ("Dikes of Gold"), ants ("Zhabrei's Path"), swans ("Yermak's Swans"), cats, the deer. All these creatures, with