Raytracing is hard work

This POVRay raytracing took 9 days and 15 hours for my laptop (Dell Inspiron 5150, 3.2 GHz) to render. It’s not mine (if I could do stuff like this, I’d probably be in a different line of work), just a very cool image that caught my eye while I was browsing the POVRay Hall of Fame. I thought it would be fun to see how long it would take a scene like this to render. I figured a few hours, couple of days at most. Boy, was I wrong.
I love the things POVRay is capable of. If I had more time on my hands I’d probably spend some of it playing with POVRay some more.