Stone Quarry Quotes

Every book is a quotation; and every house is a quotation out of all forests, and mines, and stone quarries; and every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

The greater the monument, the greater the man. The stone the Greeks quarry for his grave is huge and white, stretching up to the sky. A C H I L L E S, it reads. It will stand for him, and speak to all who pass: he lived and died, and lives again in memory.

Eleven thousand five hundred and fifty-one years old, and yes, I feel every day of it. (Acheron) Wow, I had no idea. Hell, I didn’t even know we had people back then. (Nick) Yeah, I was part of the original Bedrock crew who worked in the quarry on the back of dinosaurs and ran with the Flintstones. Barney Rubble was short, but he played a good game of stone-knuckle. (Acheron)

Me, I was still in the pygmy hippo in a skirt, singing lusty songs about Solomon's private life and a giant stone back and forth through the air as I climbed out of the quarry at the edge of the site.

We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals. —Quarry worker's creed

The library was like a stone quarry where no rain had fallen in ten thousand years. Way off in that direction: silence. Way off in that direction: hush. It was the time between things finished and things begun. Nobody died here. Nobody was born. The library, and all its books, just were. We

Night fell upon them dark and starblown and the wagon grew swollen near mute with dew. On their chairs in such black immobility these travelers could have been stone figures quarried from the architecture of an older time.

I've never believed that they're separate. Leonardo da Vinci was a great artist and a great scientist. Michelangelo knew a tremendous amount about how to cut stone at the quarry. The finest dozen computer scientists I know are all musicians. Some are better than others, but they all consider that an important part of their life. I don't believe that the best people in any of these fields see themselves as one branch of a forked tree. I just don't see that.People bring these things together a lot. Dr. Land at Polaroid said, "I want Polaroid to stand at the intersection of art and science," and I've never forgotten that. I think that that's possible, and I think a lot of people have tried.

Once, we built structures entirely from the most durable substances we knew: granite block, for instance. The results are still around today to admire, but we don’t often emulate them, because quarrying, cutting, transporting, and fitting stone require a patience we no longer possess.

In the Golleschau quarry, stone-carriers were forced to haul huge blocks of limestone endlessly, from one mound to another and back again. During the torture, they carried their lives in their hands. The insane task was not futile only in the sense that faith is not futile. A camp inmate looked up at the stars and suddenly remembered that they’d once seemed beautiful to him. This memory of beauty was accompanied by a bizarre stab of gratitude. When I first read this I couldn’t imagine it. But later I felt I understood. Sometimes the body experiences a revelation because it has abandoned every other possibility.

Once, we built structures entirely from the most durable substances we knew: granite block, for instance. The results are still around today to admire, but we don’t often emulate them, because quarrying, cutting, transporting, and fitting stone require a patience we no longer possess. No one since the likes of Antoni Gaudí, who began Barcelona’s yet-unfinished Sagrada Familia basilica in 1880, contemplates investing in construction that our great-great-grandchildren’s grandchildren will complete 250 years hence. Nor, absent the availability of a few thousand slaves, is it cheap, especially compared to another Roman innovation: concrete.

Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There's something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that's not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there's a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side. In the seventies computers became a way for people to express their creativity. Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great art science. Michelangelo knew a lot about how to quarry stone, not just how to be a sculptor.

The men, her husband and sons, leave for the quarry at seven o'clock sharp and return at five. What do they imagine she does all day? It makes her shiver to think of it, how not one pair of eyes can see through the roof and walls of her house and regard her as she moves through her dreamlike days, bargaining from minute to minute with indolence, that tempter.

He pulled his hand back, aware now that sweat beaded on his forehead and that Rale watched him, his eyes dark, intense. Errol licked his lips. Did he want a drink? He hadn't gone more than two days in a row without a drink since he was...since...Warrel...the quarry...stone.

I observed on most collected stones the imprints of innumerable plant fragments which were so different from those which are growing in the Lyonnais, in the nearby provinces, and even in the rest of France, that I felt like collecting plants in a new world... The number of these leaves, the way they separated easily, and the great variety of plants whose imprints I saw, appeared to me just as many volumes of botany representing in the same quarry the oldest library of the world.

7When the house was built, it was with stone prepared at the quarry, so that neither hammer nor axe nor any tool of iron was heard in the house while it was being built.

By the altar, which is made of massive slabs of stone untouched by tools since hewn from the quarry and set up in this vast edifice, a barefooted priest wearing a linen tunic waits for the Levite to hand over the turtledoves. He takes the first one, carries it to a comer of the altar, and with a single blow knocks the head from its body. [...] Joseph has nothing more to accomplish here, he must withdraw, collect his wife and child, and return home. Mary is pure once more, not in the strict sense of the word, because purity is something to which most human beings, and above all women, can scarcely hope to aspire.

Only the mouth-hole piped out, Importunate cricket In a quarry of silences. The people of the city heard it. They hunted the stones, taciturn and separate, The mouth-hole crying their locations. Drunk as a fetus I suck at the paps of darkness. The food tubes embrace me. Sponges kiss my lichens away. The jewelmaster drives his chisel to pry Open one stone eye. This is the after-hell: I see the light. A wind unstoppers the chamber

In Udi's vocabulary, Jewish was equated with the ills of exile: rootless parasitic, superstitious. Yet here, in the Western Wall's solitary dignity, was beauty. In this world of stone, he felt softness; in this quarry of memory, peace.

THE GREATER THE MONUMENT, the greater the man. The stone the Greeks quarry for his grave is huge and white, stretching up to the sky. ACHILLES, it reads. It will stand for him, and speak to all who pass: he lived and died, and lives again in memory.

In the museums we used to visit on family vacations when I was a kid, I used to love those rooms which displayed collections of minerals in a kind of closet or chamber which would, at the push of a button, darken. Then ultraviolet lights would begin to glow and the minerals would seem to come alive, new colors, new possibilities, and architectures revealed. Plain stones became fantastic, “futuristic…” Of course there wasn’t any black light in the center of the earth, in the caves where they were quarried; how strange that these stones should have to be brought here, bathed with this unnatural light in order for their transcendent characters to emerge. Irradiation revealed a secret aspect of the world. Imagine illness as this light; demanding, torturous, punitive, it nonetheless reveals more of what things are. A certain glow of being appears. I think this is what is meant when we speculate that death is what makes love possible.

She remembered how one day she’d gone running to him with a shell, told him to listen and hear the waves inside. He’d taken time off from his endless making of money and driven her way up into the hills and found a quarry and dug a fossil out the rocks and made her put that to her ear as well; she’d heard the same singing and he’d told her that was the noise the years made, all the millions of them shut inside buzzing to get free. She kept the stone a long while after that; and when more time had passed and she knew the whispering and piping were only echoes of her blood she did’t care because she’d still heard what she heard, the sound of trapped eternities.

Pharaohs It took Khufu twenty-three years to build his Great Pyramid at Giza, where some eleven hundred stone blocks, each weighing about two and a half tons, had to be quarried, moved, and set in place every day during the annual building season, roughly four months long. Few commentators on these facts can resist noting that this achievement is an amazing testimonial to the pharaoh’s iron control over the workers of Egypt. I submit, on the contrary, that pharaoh Khufu needed to exercise no more control over his workers at Giza than pharaoh Bill Gates exercises over his workers at Microsoft. I submit that Egyptian workers, relatively speaking, got as much out of building Khufu’s pyramid as Microsoft workers will get out of building Bill Gates’s pyramid (which will surely dwarf Khufu’s a hundred times over, though it will not, of course, be built of stone). No special control is needed to make people into pyramid builders—if they see themselves as having no choice but to build pyramids. They’ll build whatever they’re told to build, whether it’s pyramids, parking garages, or computer programs. Karl Marx recognized that workers without a choice are workers in chains. But his idea of breaking chains was for us to depose the pharaohs and then build the pyramids for ourselves, as if building pyramids is something we just can’t stop doing, we love it so much.

Her face, seen so close, is built of great flats of skin pressed clean of color except for a burnish of yellow that adds to their size mineral weight, the weight of some pure porous stone carted straight from quarries to temples. Words come from this monumental Ruth in the same scale, as massive wheels rolling to the porches of his ears, as mute coins spinning in the light. “You have it pretty good.

GUIDO Ay! without love Life is no better than the unhewn stone Which in the quarry lies, before the sculptor Has set the God within it. Without love Life is as silent as the common reeds That through the marshes or by rivers grow, And have no music in them. DUCHESS Yet out of these The singer, who is Love, will make a pipe And from them he draws music; so I think Love will bring music out of any life. Is that not true?

There is a tendency to romanticize the abilities of the ancient Egyptians because they produced structures that were miraculous for their time and certainly would pose a serious challenge to ours. They were somehow immensely more talented with sticks and stones than modern researchers have been able to demonstrate using the same implements. When pondering the theories proffered by Egyptologists, one gets the impression that an ancient Egyptian quarry worker was like a maestro playing a complete symphony on a violin made of a cigar box and a stick and producing the quality of a Stradivarius. The argument is pleasing and poetic, but the trouble is that, metaphorically speaking, when modern scholars make a violin from a cigar box and a stick, its results are precisely what you would expect from a cigar box and a stick. So the question persists: From what instruments did the symphonic architecture of Egypt materialize?

The different sizes of the different stones provided some degree of salability across scales, as did the possibility of paying with fractions of a single stone. The stones' salability across time was assured for centuries by the difficulty and high cost of acquiring new stones, because they didn't exist in Yap and quarrying and shipping them from Palau was not easy. The very high cost of procuring new stones to Yap meant that the existing supply of stones was always far larger than whatever new supply could be produced at a given period of time, making it prudent to accept them as a form of payment.

Love can thus be responsible for veritable geological upheavals of the mind. In that of M. de Charlus, which a few days earlier had resembled a plain so uniform that as far as the eye could reach it would have been impossible to make out an idea rising above the level surface, there had suddenly sprung into being, hard as stone, a range of mountains, but mountains as elaborately carved as if some sculptor, instead of quarrying and carting away the marble, had chiselled it on the spot, in which there writhed in vast titanic groups Fury, Jealousy, Curiosity, Envy, Hatred, Suffering, Pride, Terror and Love.

Once I started seeing the college clinic psychiatrist, he pulled out my blood and showed me what was really in it, glanced at each trace mineral in the lab results, each lurking marker, but his eyes were focused on the good stuff, the chemicals he'd put there. I don't know if I believe in "Indian blood," but at times, I have wished I could test positive for it when the phlebotomist pulled my blood every month, checking to make sure my lithium levels aren't high enough to pickle my kidneys. Instead, the doctor only ever reads off results that sound like the bottom of a deep quarry, as though my body collects stones.

Supposedly several years ago Egyptologist Mark Lehner spent five hours in the Aswan quarry with a dolerite hammer stone pounding against the granite bedrock (copper is too soft to cut granite). He was trying to prove that the ancient tools could do the job. He managed to excavate a one-foot square hole one-inch deep for his efforts. And yet, the video that is played in a hall at the Aswan quarry site still portrays that the hewing of the stone for the unfinished and all other obelisks was done this way [...]. The experiments of Dr. Lehner reveal, there is no way that simple stone pounders could possibly have been the main tool to quarry and shape the granite obelisks.

He never learned her, quite. Year after year that territory, without seasons, shifted under his eye. An hour he could be lost in the walled anger of her quarried hurt on turning, see cool water laughing where the day before there were stones in her voice. He charted. She made wilderness again. Roads disappeared. The map was never true. Wind brought him rain sometimes, tasting of sea— and suddenly she would change the shape of shores faultlessly calm. All, all was each day new; the shadows of her love shortened or grew like trees seen from an unexpected hill, new country at each jaunty helpless journey. So he accepted that geography, constantly strange. Wondered. Stayed home increasingly to find his way among the landscapes of her mind.

It is hard to imagine the extent to which this anxiety agitated the Baron’s mind, and by the very fact of doing so had momentarily enriched it. Love can thus be responsible for veritable geological upheavals of the mind. In that of M. de Charlus, which a few days earlier had resembled a plain so uniform that as far as the eye could reach it would have been impossible to make out an idea rising above the level surface, there had suddenly sprung into being, hard as stone, a range of mountains, but mountains as elaborately carved as if some sculptor, instead of quarrying and carting away the marble, had chiselled it on the spot, in which there writhed in vast titanic groups Fury, Jealousy, Curiosity, Envy, Hatred, Suffering, Pride, Terror and Love.

Said Jesus, with a sigh: 'This is the greatest misery that man can suffer, O Barnabas. For man cannot here upon earth have God his creator always in memory; saving them that are holy, for they always have God in memory, because they have in them the light of the grace of God, so that they cannot forget God. But tell me, have ye seen them that work quarried stones, how by their constant practice they have so learned to strike that they speak with others and all the time are striking the iron tool that worketh the stone without looking at the iron, and yet they do not strike their hands? Now do ye likewise. Desire to be holy if ye wish to overcome entirely this misery of forgetfulness. Sure it is that water cleaveth the hardest rocks with a single drop striking there for a long period.

Love demands something unrevealed; it flourishes, therefore, only in mystery. No one ever wants to hear a singer hit her highest note, nor an orator “tear a passion to tatters,” for once mystery and the infinite are denied, life’s urge is stilled and its passion glutted. In a true marriage, there is an ever-enchanting romance. There are at least four distinct mysteries progressively revealed. First, there is the mystery of the other partner, which is body-mystery. When that mystery is solved and the first child is born, there begins a new mystery. The husband sees something in the wife he never before knew existed, namely, the beautiful mystery of motherhood. She sees a new mystery in him she never before knew existed, namely, the mystery of fatherhood. As other children come to revive their strength and beauty, the husband never seems older to the wife than the day they were married, and the wife never seems older than the day they first met and carved their initials in an oak tree. As the children reach the age of reason, a third mystery unfolds, that of fathercraft and mothercraft—the disciplining and training of young minds and hearts in the ways of God. As the children grow into maturity, the mystery continues to deepen, new areas of exploration open up, and the father and mother now see themselves as sculptors in the great quarry of humanity, carving living stones and fitting them together in the Temple of God, Whose Architect is Love. The fourth mystery is their contribution to the well-being of the nation. Here, too, is the root of democracy, for it is in the family that a person is valued not for what he is worth, nor for what he can do, but primarily for what he is.

Why the two [gigantic obelisks left unfinished at the Aswan quarry] were never finished is unknown. It appears that the workers simply stopped and never came back. The same possibly was the case at the Serapeum at Saqqara, where most of the 100 ton boxes were never finished. If these are pre-dynastic works as expected, then the great cataclysm of 12,000 years ago could have been the culprit - massive earthquakes and possibly solar blasts devastating all life in these and other areas. There is a massive horizontal crack in the bottom of the right channel of the great obelisk that also may have been the reason [...]. On another note, the left and right channels of the great obelisk would have been too narrow for workers to be shaping them with dolerite stone pounders. A lot of force would be required to remove any material at all, and having a foot or two of clearance would result in very little if any stone removal.

is to read things that are not yet on the page. Edwin Land of Polaroid talked about the intersection of the humanities and science. I like that intersection. There’s something magical about that place. There are a lot of people innovating, and that’s not the main distinction of my career. The reason Apple resonates with people is that there’s a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side. In the seventies computers became a way for people to express their creativity. Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great at science. Michelangelo knew a lot about how to quarry stone, not just how to be a sculptor. People pay us to integrate things for them, because they don’t have the time to think about this stuff 24/7. If you have an extreme passion for producing

The Rai stones that constituted money were of various sizes, rising to large circular disks with a hole in the middle that weighed up to four metric tons. They were not native to Yap, which did not contain any limestone, and all of Yap's stones were brought in from neighboring Palau or Guam. The beauty and rarity of these stones made them desirable and venerable in Yap, but procuring them was very difficult as it involved a laborious process of quarrying and then shipping them with rafts and canoes. Some of these rocks required hundreds of people to transport them, and once they arrived on Yap, they were placed in a prominent location where everyone could see them. The owner of the stone could use it as a payment method without it having to move: all that would happen is that the owner would announce to all townsfolk that the stone's ownership has now moved to the recipient. The whole town would recognize the ownership of the stone and the recipient could then use it to make a payment whenever he so pleased.

The sheer size of some of the limestome foundation blocks [at Baalbek] are the largest ever quarried on the planet, conservatively estimated at 800 to 1200 tons, and the common belief that the Romans chose to do this work on such a massive scale to 'impress the locals' is absolutely ludicrous. Nowhere else in the Roman world is there any evidence of the quarrying of blocks of this size, so we can clearly presume that they were there when the Romans first appeared, and were used as foundational material. A group of three horizontally lying giant stones which form part of the podium of the Roman Jupiter Temple of Baalbek, Lebanon, go by the name 'trilithon.' Each one of these stones is 70 feet long, 14 feet high, 10 feet thick, and weighs around 800 tons. These three stone blocks are the largest building blocks ever used by any human beings anywhere in the world. The supporting stone layer beneath features a number of stones that are still in the order of 350 tons and 35 feet wide. No one knows how these blocks were moved, cut, placed, and fit perfectly together.

that was the case until 1871, when an Irish-American captain by the name of David O'Keefe was shipwrecked on the shores of Yap and revived by the locals.1 O'Keefe saw a profit opportunity in taking coconuts from the island and selling them to producers of coconut oil, but he had no means to entice the locals to work for him, because they were very content with their lives as they were, in their tropical paradise, and had no use for whatever foreign forms of money he could offer them. But O'Keefe wouldn't take no for an answer; he sailed to Hong Kong, procured a large boat and explosives, took them to Palau, where he used the explosives and modern tools to quarry several large Rai stones, and set sail to Yap to present the stones to the locals as payment for coconuts. Contrary to what O'Keefe expected, the villagers were not keen on receiving his stones, and the village chief banned his townsfolk from working for the stones, decreeing that O'Keefe's stones were not of value, because they were gathered too easily. Only the stones quarried traditionally, with the sweat and blood of the Yapese, were to be accepted in Yap. Others on the island disagreed, and they did supply O'Keefe with the coconuts he sought. This resulted in conflict on the island, and in time the demise of Rai stones as money. Today, the stones serve a more ceremonial and cultural role on the island and modern government money is the most commonly used monetary medium.

The world is dead, The Samurai, moving among the inert metal of pumps and lines and distillation columns, over the concrete apron in which the plants were constructed, over gravel brought from the Prospect quarries. it is a world of age-old stones - picking up a piece of gravel in which glinted minerals unknown to him - of basalt chiped from mountains long ago, lying around on roads, lying under hills waiting to be plundered. And laughing at humans. These dead rocks were all of them older than the human race which trod them. each fragment had an immortality. Humans rotted away into the soil in an instant of time. What was the power he had that enabled him to lift this fragment of eternity in his hand and decide where to throw it? What had been breathed into his fragile dust that seemed for his instant of life to mock the inertia of the rock? Was his own existence supported by a paper warrant somewhere? He drew back from following these thoughts. There was a power in him, or rather power came to him that made him stronger than he needed to be. A power that blew up certain feelings to an enormous size, a secret power. Was he so different from the men around him? What was the mission that he had been born to perform? He deliberately relaxed. As he looked about him with a new mood the whole world filled with love. Even the dirt underfoot was sympathetic and grateful. he could love these random stones, these heaps of inert, formed metal so far now from where they were mined. He could love the soil itself and everything that was. He needed, at the moment, no written justification of his existence.

Jung famously said that about a third of his cases weren’t suffering from some clinically definable illness, but from a sense of meaninglessness and aimlessness. Jung believed he could help them find some meaning. It had been his own quest, and understandably he felt he could help others in theirs. In a way, one could say Jung built his Tower so he would have a safe space for himself and some selected others to go crazy, without having to deal with the incomprehension of outsiders. Most people who visited the Tower certainly felt it had an unusual atmosphere. Jung had some strange relationship with his pots and utensils; he spoke with them, believing they had souls, and required his guests to as well, and he insisted that the stove in his Küsnacht study was human.39 He also felt the same about a bronze box that stored his tobacco, and even named it Habbakuk. 40 It isn’t surprising to read that at the Tower Jung could immerse himself deeply in active imagination, often sitting for long periods in utter stillness, in a room set apart for this, where he painted his fantasies on the wall. He would see images and faces in stone and then slowly carve them; one stone in particular, a huge “perfect cube” Jung received from a quarry by mistake, became a favorite, and over the years Jung worked on it, carving on its surface alchemical, Greek, and Latin sayings.41

Once, while at my uncle’s farm my father took me for a ride on my uncle’s buckboard. Not knowing any better, my father took the bridle off of the horse to give him a break. It seemed reasonable to me, but any farmer will tell you that’s not what he should have done. Thinking that he was free and then realizing that he wasn’t, the horse bolted, dragging the wagon down a path and then through a stone quarry where the buckboard was reduced to kindling wood. After my uncle found out what had happened, things were not quite the same for some time to come. Fortunately, the horse survived with only a few scratches but the buckboard was beyond repair and poor Pop never lived down this occurrence. I guess that he wasn’t much of an equestrian either.

In the preface to his little book of miscellaneous essays called Guesses at Truth, the nineteenth-century cleric Julius Hare wrote, ‘I here present you with a few suggestions … little more than glimmerings, I had almost said dreams, of thought … If I am addressing one of that numerous class who read to be told what to think, let me advise you to meddle with this book no further. You wish to buy a house ready furnished; do not come to look for it in a stone quarry. But if you are building up your opinions for yourself, and only want to be provided with the materials, you may meet with many things in these pages to suit you.

Quarrie had hit a rich vein: bright boys now entering their mid-teens, eager for all those charts and statistics, and looking back on their Grantian and Featherstonian origins of just a couple of years before as their ‘stone age’.

Humility, Not Capability (4:1-17) Moses is presented as singularly ill-equipped for the task he is called to do. He stands before us not as a finished sculpture, modeling leadership qualities for us to follow, but rather as rough-cut stone, hewn from the same quarry from which our own humanity was hewn. Which raises a question: Why was the work of salvation entrusted to someone like that? Or why has it been entrusted to someone like us, for that matter? But maybe that’s the point. Salvation is God’s work, not ours. Incompetence may be the essential qualification, lest we presumptuously start taking over something we have no way of comprehending, let alone controlling. Our sight is limited, our steps tentative. That is how we best traverse the landscape of faith—humbly rather than capably.

Excavations in the ruins of the immense royal city of Recópolis (near Zorita de los Canes in the province of Guadalajara), built by the Visigoth king Leovigild, have shown a topographic imitation of Constantinople, the existence of an aqueduct, a palatial basilica (likely an imitation of the Greek Christian basilica of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople), commercial and residential centers, paved streets, coin manufacturing, sturdy buildings constructed with stones extracted with Roman technology from local stone quarries, and other features usually associated with thriving Greek-Roman cities.

Bathed in perspiration he worked like a bull, turning over with a shovel the chalk and the clay which was to become cement. This brute strength of his came not through his intelligence but from the profundities of his strong body; it did not explode within him but flowed out of him in great waves through the thunder of the earth, across the stones and the rails, from this enormous ant-like crowd who with shouting and moaning were rising from the depths with spades and hammers, emerged from smoke-stacks and the factory buildings , from the breaches quarried from the rocks, from the smoky depths up toward the obelisks supporting the power-cables.

A full millennium had passed, the scarred hands of men made strong by toil. The acclimation of the minds of Brek to the concerns of stone construction was in evidence in all quarters, their mastery of masonry proved with but a glance. In the thirty generations that had passed, building had become their pride, the strong shoulders and bronzed skin bought in the quarry a mark of highest honor. "Yet owing to the strange inborn drive possessed by the Trathnona, the men rose to their task without question. So it was that empty quarry, long stripped of stone, gave way to crowded field, the chisel abandoned to the work of plow and scythe. "From that time to the moment of my arrival--a period of more than four thousand years--the Trathnona had lived without fear of domination, knowing as they did the safety and promise of independence granted by virtue of devotion and self-sacrifice. And through famine, plague, and wars of foreign aggression, the willingness of individuals to bend to the needs of all had made of them an unbreakable tribe, sterner even than the stone of their highest pride.

The use of the peace pipe was held sacred by the Indians. Usually it was used in ceremonies of religious, political, or social nature. The decorations on the pipe’s bowl and stem, and even the method of holding or passing the pipe on to the next person, held great ceremonial significance. The pipe was never laid on the ground. To smoke it was a signal that the smoker gave his pledge of honor. It was also believed that the smoke made one think clearly and endowed him with great wisdom. In a treaty ceremony, the pipe usually was passed around to everyone, even before the speeches were made and the problems discussed. Some pipes were made out of wood, clay, or bone. But the most popular and the most treasured were those made of the soft catlinite mined in the pipestone quarries of Minnesota. These red stone quarries were considered sacred by the Dakotas (Sioux), and were traditionally neutral ground for all tribes. Indians traveled many miles to get this pipestone, and it was a medium of barter between various tribes. The stone was so soft that it could be cut and worked into designs with a knife when freshly quarried. Some pipes were inlaid with lead. It is said that some of the Indian raids on small western town newspapers were made by the Indians to get type lead with which to inlay their pipes.

Chebeague Island is the largest of the islands in Casco Bay, near Portland Maine. Everyone knew everybody else on the island, and if they were not related, they were friends, or at the very least knew everything there was to know about each other, including what they had in their stew pot at any given time. Most of the islanders, including the Kimberly family, were descendants of the “Stone Sloopers.” On Chebeague Island they built three wharves. The Stone Wharf, or Hamilton Landing as it was known, is still in use today. The one masted sloops, sometimes known as Chebacco Boats, sailed along the rocky Maine coast transporting granite and stone from Maine’s coastal quarries, to east coast cities as far south as Chesapeake Bay. The Washington Monument and many of the governmental buildings in Washington, D.C., were built of granite brought up the Potomac River by the Stone Sloopers. During the 19th Century, they also supplied rock ballast for the sailing ships that came into New England ports. The Stone Sloopers are also remembered for building Greek revival homes, which can still be seen on the island.

Egyptologists claim that Khufu began construction of his pyramid so it would be completed in time to accept his corpse. I should imagine that while he was considering what style of pyramid he wanted, he would have been consulting his architects and engineers to see what was feasible. He also might have been interested in knowing how long it would take to build and how much it would cost. Using today's technology, modern stonecutters have estimated that it would take at least twenty-seven years just to quarry and deliver the stone. I wonder how long it would have taken Khufu's men using simple, primitive methods?

if we were to build a Great Pyramid today, we would need a lot of patience. In preparation for his book "5/5/2000 Ice: The Ultimate Disaster", Richard Noone asked Merle Booker, technical director of the Indiana Limestone Institute of America, to prepare a time study of what it would take to quarry, fabricate, and ship enough limestone to duplicate the Great Pyramid. Using the most modern quarrying equipment available for cutting, lifting, and transporting the stone, Booker estimated that the present-day Indiana limestone industry would need to triple its output, and it would take the entire industry, which as I have said includes thirty-three quarries, twenty-seven years to fill the order for 131,467,940 cubic feet of stone. These estimates were based on the assumption that production would proceed without problems. Then we would be faced with the task of putting the limestone blocks in place. The level of accuracy in the base of the Great Pyramid is astounding, and is not demanded, or even expected, by building codes today. Civil engineer Roland Dove, of Roland P. Dove & Associates, explained that .02 inch per foot variance was acceptable in modern building foundations. When I informed him of the minute variation in the foundation of the Great Pyramid, he expressed disbelief and agreed with me that in this particular phase of construction, the builders of the pyramid exhibited a state of the art that would be considered advanced by modern standards.

The most compelling evidence for the likelihood that the Great Pyramid was constructed by craftspeople with specialized knowledge and advanced techniques is the precision with which it was built. This precision reveals more about the true nature of its builders than any inscription or cartouche. There is no way to ignore the accuracy of this stonecutting, despite Egyptologists' interpretations of the inscriptions found in pyramids or temples in Egypt. After all, hieroglyphics, like any language, has the potential to be misunderstood. After discussing much of the preceding information with the artisans at today's building sites, machine shops, and quarry mills, I became aware of the reason why we are still influenced by ideas that are not compatible with practical application. The artisans of today are too busy making a living to give serious thought to scholarly theories, and even when gross inequities are presented to them, they respond with a cynical shrug. When told that giant limestone casing stones, which were cut to within 1/100 of an inch, were cut with hammer and chisel, a typical response was a shake of the head.

The quantity of stone that had to be quarried, hauled, and hoisted into place in the Great Pyramid becomes even more impressive when it is compared with other civil engineering feats, whether real or imagined. It has been stated that it contains more stone than that used in all the churches, cathedrals, and chapels built in England since the time of Christ. Thirty Empire State Buildings could be built with the estimated 2,300,000 stones. A wall three-feet high and one-foot thick could be built across the United States and back using the amount of masonry contained in the Great Pyramid.

Marble that was still attached to the mountain vein, or freshly quarried, was considered alive because porous stone retains moisture absorbed from the ground. Quarry sap makes the marble soft, sparkling, and easy to work. After exposure to the air, this calcium-soaked water evaporates, and the stone becomes drier and harder-cotto, Michelangelo calls it in his contract.

I would be lying if I pretended not to find the idea of a new stone circle ersatz. What do they actually mean, these hefts of rock that are not even native to this landscape? What are they supposed to signify? I visited them when they were first laid and found them rather barren, planted in the bald winter ground, still crumbling from their quarrying. I believed at first that they were concrete. They seemed to me to offer and incomplete answer to a question that we have not quite learned how to ask. How do we worship now? How do we get past the blunt knowing of our disenchanted age and tap back into the magic that we used to perceive everywhere? I wanted to touch the stones and for them to return a tingle of meaning laid down over millennia. Instead, they seemed to shrug me off. Make your own meaning, they said. We can't do that for you.

Manishtushu crossed “to the other side of the Lower Sea” (i.e., the Persian Gulf), “quarried their black stones, loaded them on ships, and moored them at the quay at Akkad.

We may compare cannibalism to the stone age, and the times of slavery to the iron and bronze epochs—slavery is as natural a step in human development as from bronze to iron. Whilst speaking of the stone age I may add that in Africa I have never been fortunate enough to find one flint arrowhead or any other flint implement, though I had my eyes about me as diligently as any of my neighbours. No roads are made; no lands levelled; no drains digged; no quarries worked, nor any of the changes made on the earth's surface that might reveal fragments of the primitive manufacture of stone. Yet

As it was with ancient Israel, the quarried stone would become the embodiment of a nation’s misplaced confidence in its own power to emerge stronger than before. And the act of laying down the quarried stone would be a manifestation of what the commentaries call the spirit of defiance:

At the bottom of the quarry wall Gordon had found an ancient tomb chiseled into the limestone with a small entrance and groove cut into its base, which he thought surely was intended for the rolling stone that had covered Jesus’ tomb. As far as Gordon was concerned, everything fit the biblical picture of this being the true tomb of Jesus, for John also had written, “Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new sepulcher, wherein was never man yet laid. There they laid Jesus” (19:41–42).

Records show that slaves who lived in the Washington, D.C., area made up a good portion of the labor pool that worked on the Capitol. More than four hundred slaves, or more than half of the documented workforce that constructed the Capitol, cleared trees from Jenkins Hill and dug up stumps for the wide avenues that radiate out into the city, according to research first publicized by NBC reporter Edward Hotaling in 2000. We now know that slaves baked the bricks used for the building’s foundation and walls, sawed lumber for the interior walls and floors, dug the trenches for the foundation, worked the Virginia quarries where the sandstone was cut, and laid the stones that hold up the Capitol to this day.

It goes without saying that if we were to build a Great Pyramid today, we would need a lot of patience. In preparation for his book 5/5/2000 Ice: The Ultimate Disaster, Richard Noone asked Merle Booker, technical director of the Indiana Limestone Institute of America, to prepare a time study of what it would take to quarry, fabricate, and ship enough limestone to duplicate the Great Pyramid. Using the most modern quarrying equipment available for cutting, lifting, and transporting the stone, Booker estimated that the present-day Indiana limestone industry would need to triple its output, and it would take the entire industry, which as I have said includes thirty-three quarries, twenty-seven years to fill the order for 131,467,940 cubic feet of stone.5 These estimates were based on the assumption that production would proceed without problems. Then we would be faced with the task of putting the limestone blocks in place.

Since the deportees had no way of communicating with anybody anywhere, the known data are sparse. After a short stop at the Stone Quarry, called in Romanian Cariera de Piatra, the Eisingers were sent to Michailovka, a village near the river Bug. Selma managed to find a person, who would take along a letter to her friend Renée2, who was in another locality in Transnistria, a village called Obadovka. This letter reached Renée and has been preserved, the last anybody heard of her, her last piece of writing, last communication.

they had been deported to and what exactly had happened. They had a Popovici permit and were taken away in June 1942. Thousands had dropped by the roadside, dead from sickness, hunger, cold or plainly shot by the Germans. That was the fate of those taken across the Bug river. That locality was called "Cariera de piatra" (Stone Quarry) and most of the deportees lost their lives there.

Whoever digs a pit may fall into it; whoever breaks through a wall may be bitten by a snake. Whoever quarries stones may be injured by them; whoever splits logs may be endangered by them.

It was an attempt to crush our spirits. But those first few weeks at the quarry had the opposite effect on us. Despite blistered and bleeding hands, we were invigorated. I much preferred being outside in nature, being able to see grass and trees, to observe birds flitting overhead, to feel the wind blowing in from the sea. It felt good to use all of one's muscles, with the sun on one's back, and there was simple gratification in building up mounds of stone and lime. Within a few days, we were walking to the quarry, rather than going by truck, and this too was a tonic. During our twenty-minute march to the quarry, we got a better sense of the island, and could see the dense brush and tall trees that covered our home, and smell the eucalyptus blossoms, spot the occasional springbok or kudu grazing in the distance. Although some of the men regarded the march as drudgery, I never did. p404

Derfelle died. He was a French communist who had served time in the stone quarries of Cayenne. Aside from hunger and cold, he was morally exhausted. He could not believe that he, a member of the Comintern, could end up at hard labor here in the Soviet Union. His horror would have been lessened if he could have seen that there were others here like him. Everyone with whom he had arrived, with whom he lived, with whom he died was like that. He was a small, weak person, and beatings were just becoming popular… Once the work-gang leader struck him, simply struck him with his fist – to keep him in line, so to speak – but Derfelle collapsed and did not get up. He was one of the first, the lucky ones to die. In Moscow he had worked as an editor at Tass. He had a good command of Russian. ‘Back in Cayenne it was bad, too,’ he told me once, ‘but here it’s very bad.’ Frits David died. He was a Dutch communist, an employee of the Comintern who was accused of espionage. He had beautiful wavy hair, deep-set blue eyes, and a childish line to his mouth. He knew almost no Russian. I met him in the barracks, which were so crowded that one could fall asleep standing up. We stood side by side. Frits smiled at me and closed his eyes. This Frits David was the first in our contingent to receive a package. His wife sent it to him from Moscow. In the package was a velvet suit, a nightshirt, and a large photograph of a beautiful woman. He was wearing this velvet suit as he crouched next to me on the floor. ‘I want to eat,’ he said, smiling and blushing. ‘I really want to eat. Bring me something to eat.’ Frits David went mad and was taken away.

I called it the Hotel in the Quarry, because something inside me had been broken and crushed and carted away.

No, you do not understand,’ said Gimli. ‘No dwarf could be unmoved by such loveliness. None of Durin’s race would mine those caves for stones or ore, not if diamonds and gold could be got there. Do you cut down groves of blossoming trees in the springtime for firewood? We would tend these glades of flowering stone, not quarry them. With cautious skill, tap by tap – a small chip of rock and no more, perhaps, in a whole anxious day – so we could work, and as the years went by, we should open up new ways, and display far chambers that are still dark, glimpsed only as a void beyond fissures in the rock. And lights, Legolas! We should make lights, such lamps as once shone in Khazad-dûm; and when we wished we would drive away the night that has lain there since the hills were made; and when we desired rest, we would let the night return.

He never learned her, quite. Year after year that territory, without seasons, shifted under his eye. An hour he could be lost in the walled anger of her quarried hurt on turning, see cool water laughing where the day before there were stones in her voice. He charted.1 She made wilderness again. Roads disappeared. The map was never true. Wind brought him rain sometimes, tasting of sea— and suddenly she would change the shape of shores faultlessly calm. All, all was each day new; the shadows of her love shortened or grew like trees seen from an unexpected hill, new country at each jaunty helpless journey. So he accepted that geography, constantly strange. Wondered. Stayed home increasingly to find his way among the landscapes of her mind.

—Yet how did they know to preserve their dead for thousands of years without cryonic suspension? And how did they build their giant pyramids, made out of stone blocks bigger and heavier than shipping containers, quarried from mountains hundreds of miles from the Valley of the Kings?” Obviously, Mary noted, empires that endured for thousands of years couldn’t possibly have achieved anything notable without the helpful guidance of interstellar white saviors—

We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.

Divine wrath is due to impious deeds, not to physical deformities. 257 Next, how could 80,000 lepers and invalids be gathered together in practically a single day? The prophet had bidden him expel the cripples from Egypt, but the king cast them into stone-quarries, as if he needed labourers, not as if his purpose was to purge the land. 258 Manetho says, moreover, that the prophet took his own life, because he foresaw the anger of the gods and the fate in store for Egypt, but left in writing his prediction to the king. 259 Then how was it that the prophet had not from the first foreknowledge of his own death?

The stone from quarries like the Kehoes’ had been carved into skyscrapers in New York and monuments in Washington, DC—places most people around here would never see. It had been used to build temples to the glory of commerce these folks didn’t enjoy, for centers of learning they wouldn’t attend, and for places of worship where they would never kneel. Stone from the next county had been crafted into state houses and courthouses across the country, and even sent to fix up the Pentagon after 9/11. The ground beneath them had been chiseled out and carted away for the far-off business of other places. Close to home, you didn’t see the pretty white stone from their hills turned into monuments to beauty or progress. It was the rubble lining your garden path or maybe, at the end of your days, a slab might mark the resting place of your bones.

Cobblestone pavements were an upgrade from dirt roads in ancient times. They were functional and lasted for ages. Cobblestone is derived from the word “cob” which means round and lumpy and refers to riverside cobbles that were first used to pave roads. The modern version of cobbles is available in natural stone materials, mainly in a small square format with standard thicknesses. The first cobblestones were taken from streambeds, not quarried and shaped like the ones we see today. The name “cobblestone” now refers to any natural stone paver, particularly the square shaped Belgian blocks. These are more uniform in size and shape and are simpler to install. The durability of a granite cobblestone paved surface is superior to that of nearly any other material, and the distinctive “old world” appeal it provides may add a lot of beauty and value to the home. Why Cobblestone Paving? Because cobblestones were easy to source, affordable, and easy to install, they gained popularity in Europe. These rounded stones were sourced from riverbeds and were very useful for roads. They were great for traction and decreasing muck and sludge on the roads because they were created by years of erosion through swift-moving rivers. Cobblestones are a popular option in the community of builders, architects, designers, and even with homeowners who prefer doing a DIY project. Cobblestones are durable First, they are sturdy, long-lasting stones that can withstand the test of time, as shown by the cobblestone streets throughout Europe. They are prone to extreme weathering processes, environmental changes, or high traffic. They are a naturally sturdy and robust building material that withstands wear and strain without chipping, scratching, or staining. Cobblestone suits a variety of project spaces Cobblestones are versatile and come in various colour options, which makes them suitable for an array of project requirements such as driveway, pathway, and other high traffic areas. Cobblestones enhance the look of your home and even raise its curb appeal. This will not only make your home more appealing and pleasurable, but it will also help it stand out from the rest of the houses in the neighbourhood, which adds to its overall value and makes it easier to sell. Cobblestones are easy to install Cobblestones are easy to install since they are generally supplied in mesh form. A set of cobblestones pasted on a silicone mesh. This mesh is easy to install and covers a larger surface area, saving men hours of installation time.  Cobblestones require low maintenance These cobblestone pavers are not only tough, but they are also quite simple to maintain. A quick wash every so often will keep them looking just as stunning as the day they were set. As additional maintenance, you may only need to reseal these pavers every now and then to keep them in good condition. For ages, these granite stones will retain their stunning appearance and colour with little work on your part.

The hill was mainly composed of the soft stone material known as gypsum which possessed two qualities: first, it would slowly dissolve in water and was thus a poor foundation for any large building. Second, when heated, after giving off steam, it could easily be ground into the powder from which white plaster was made. For that reason, men had been burying into the hill of Montmartre for centuries to extract the gypsum. So famous had these quarrying's become, that now, even across the ocean, white plaster had come to be known as Plaster of Paris. When the builders of Sacre Coeur began their task therefore, they found that the underlying terrain was not only soft, but so honeycombed with mineshafts and tunnels that had the great building been placed directly upon it, the entire hill would have surely collapsed, leaving the church in a stupendous sinkhole. The solution had been very French, a combination of elegant logic and vast ambition: 83 gigantic shafts were dug, each over 100 feet deep filled with concrete. Upon these mighty columns, like a huge box, almost as deep as the church above, the crypt was constructed as a platform. This work alone had taken almost a decade, and by the end of it, even those who hated the project would remark with rye amusement: 'Montmartre isn't holding up the church, it's the church that's holding up Montmartre'.

Archaeologists also managed to excavate impressive fossils in a stone quarry located in Okinawa.

with granite of black, gray, and ash white. Jericho explained how all the municipal buildings were built from the same quarry stone, including the courthouse, township building and the walls lining the morgue. It wasn’t the sightseeing that delayed my exit though. In the rich corridors next to the courthouse, we ran into District Attorney Ashtole and Mayor Jonathon Miller, their voices an echo, greeting me with arms extended and questions on their lips. “I’ve already heard so much about you,” the mayor said, his barrel chest filling like a machine as he sucked in air. The man stood a half-foot over me, and though he smiled, his face was fixed in a scowl, his bushy eyebrows stuck in a permanent slant. His shoulders were wide like a football player’s and his hands were like clubs. I wasn’t normally intimidated but he had a presence, and I suddenly found myself feeling nervous. “It’s nice to meet you,” I answered, my hand disappearing in his. Ashtole stood at his side, dwarfed, nearly hidden. “What’s the progress?” the district attorney asked, his voice annoyingly sharp, like the bark of an ankle-high dog. “Three bodies. We need something to tell the press. Heck, the timing is awful.” “Daniel,” the mayor said in a foreboding tone.

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way to the quarry and picked out a stone he liked. He had brought it back on a borrowed pony two days later. But people forgave him his transgressions, partly because he was a truly exceptional stonecarver, and partly because he was so likeable – a trait he definitely had not inherited from his mother, in Philip’s opinion. Philip had given some thought to what Jack would

Grima explained that the primary tool in establishing Malta's prehistoric chronology had been radiocarbon-dating (based on the rate of decay of C-14 stored in all formerly living matter). My views about C-14 are on the record. I think it should be only one amongst several tools and techniques brought to bear on the dating of megalithic or rock-hewn sites. It is a truism, but worth repeating nevertheless, that C-14 cannot date stone -- only such organic materials as are found around or in association with stone ruins. It is an assumption (more or less safe depending on the stratigraphy and general circumstances of the site but still, at the end of the day, an assumption) that organic materials found close to megalith B or trilithon A or dolmen C, etc., do in fact date from the same period as the quarrying and erection of the megaliths concerned.

As a boy, he had worked as a carter for the 5th Duke of Portland, wheeling stone from the local quarry, used to construct a vast network of underground rooms that extended for twelve miles under the Welbeck estate. There was a ballroom that could accommodate 2,000 people and a riding school with a gallop a quarter of a mile long, lit by 8,000 jets of gas. One tunnel led to a suite of rooms covering four acres, and another to stables, cow-houses and dairies, where more than sixty people were employed.

most of which Gloria and I undertook by ourselves. I shoveled two hundred wheelbarrow loads of dirt from the cellar to increase the overhead clearance from five feet to a more comfortable and much dryer six and one-half feet, and I lined the floor with flat blue stones from the creek, creating a perfect place to store my homemade wine, cider, saucisson, and prosciutto. After sledgehammering used telephone-pole ends under the joists to level the floor and provide support, we ripped out walls to create a 1,200-square-foot kitchen-dining room-living room space, covering the floor ourselves with red quarry tile left over from a Howard Johnson’s renovation.

She wondered how to un-know certain things, certain specific things that she knew but did not wish to know. How to un-know, for example, that when people died of stone-dust, their lungs refused to be cremated. Even after the rest of their bodies had turned to ash, two lung-shaped slabs of stone remained behind, unburned. Her friend Dr. Azad Bhartiya, who lived on the pavement of Jantar Mantar, had told her about his older brother, Jiten Y. Kumar, who had worked in a granite quarry and died at the age of thirty-five. He described how he had had to break up his brother’s lungs with a crowbar on the funeral pyre to release his soul. He did it, he said, even though he was a communist and didn’t believe in souls. He did it to please his mother. He said his brother’s lungs glittered, because they were speckled with silica.

Mother once said I’d marry a quarryman. She looked at me as we washed clothes in the giant steel washtub, two pairs of water-wrinkled hands scrubbing and soaking other people’s laundry. We were elbow-deep in dirty suds and our fingers brushed under the foamy mounds. “Some mistakes are bound to be repeated,” she murmured We lived in Stony Creek, a granite town at a time when granite was going out of fashion. There were only three types of men here: Cottagers, rich, paunchy vacationers who swooped into our little Connecticut town in May and wiled away time on their sailboats through August; townsmen, small-time merchants and business owners who dreamed of becoming Cottagers; and quarrymen, men like my father, who worked with no thought to the future. The quarrymen toiled twelve hours a day, six days a week. They didn’t care that they smelled of granite dust and horses, grease and putty powder. They didn’t care about cleaning the crescents of grime from underneath their fingernails. Even when they heard the foreman’s emergency signal, three sharp shrieks of steam, they scarcely looked up from their work. In the face of a black powder explosion gone awry or the crushing finality of a wrongly cleaved stone, they remained undaunted. I knew why they lived this way. They did it for the granite. Nowhere else on earth did such stone exist—mesmerizing collages of white quartz, pink and gray feldspar, black lodestone, winking glints of mica. Stony Creek granite was so striking, it graced the most majestic of architecture: the Battle Monument at West Point, the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Fulton Building in Pittsburgh, the foundations of the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. The quarrymen of Stony Creek would wither and fall before the Cottagers, before the townsmen. But the fruits of their labor tethered them to a history that would stand forever. “You’ll marry one, Adele—I’m sure of it. His hands will be tough as buckskin, but you’ll love him regardless,” Mother told me, her breath warm in my ear as the steam of the wastewater rose around us. I didn’t say that she was wrong, that she couldn’t know what would happen. I’d learned that from the quarry. Pa was a stonecutter and he cut the granite according to rift and grain, to what he could feel with his fingertips and see with his eyes. But there were cracks below the surface, cracks that betrayed the careful placement of a chisel and the pounding of a mallet. The most beautiful piece of stone could shatter into a pile of riprap. It all depended on where those cracks teased and wound, on where the stone would fracture when forced apart. “Keep your eyes open, Adele. I don’t know who it will be—a steam driller, boxer, derrickman, powderman? Maybe a stonecutter like your father?” I turned away from her, feigning disinterest. “There’s no predicting, I told her.

Mother once said I’d marry a quarryman. She looked at me as we washed clothes in the giant steel washtub, two pairs of water-wrinkled hands scrubbing and soaking other people’s laundry. We were elbow-deep in dirty suds and our fingers brushed under the foamy mounds. “Some mistakes are bound to be repeated,” she murmured We lived in Stony Creek, a granite town at a time when granite was going out of fashion. There were only three types of men here: Cottagers, rich, paunchy vacationers who swooped into our little Connecticut town in May and wiled away time on their sailboats through August; townsmen, small-time merchants and business owners who dreamed of becoming Cottagers; and quarrymen, men like my father, who worked with no thought to the future. The quarrymen toiled twelve hours a day, six days a week. They didn’t care that they smelled of granite dust and horses, grease and putty powder. They didn’t care about cleaning the crescents of grime from underneath their fingernails. Even when they heard the foreman’s emergency signal, three sharp shrieks of steam, they scarcely looked up from their work. In the face of a black powder explosion gone awry or the crushing finality of a wrongly cleaved stone, they remained undaunted. I knew why they lived this way. They did it for the granite. Nowhere else on earth did such stone exist—mesmerizing collages of white quartz, pink and gray feldspar, black lodestone, winking glints of mica. Stony Creek granite was so striking, it graced the most majestic of architecture: the Battle Monument at West Point, the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Fulton Building in Pittsburgh, the foundations of the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. The quarrymen of Stony Creek would wither and fall before the Cottagers, before the townsmen. But the fruits of their labor tethered them to a history that would stand forever. “You’ll marry one, Adele—I’m sure of it. His hands will be tough as buckskin, but you’ll love him regardless,” Mother told me, her breath warm in my ear as the steam of the wastewater rose around us. I didn’t say that she was wrong, that she couldn’t know what would happen. I’d learned that from the quarry. Pa was a stonecutter and he cut the granite according to rift and grain, to what he could feel with his fingertips and see with his eyes. But there were cracks below the surface, cracks that betrayed the careful placement of a chisel and the pounding of a mallet. The most beautiful piece of stone could shatter into a pile of riprap. It all depended on where those cracks teased and wound, on where the stone would fracture when forced apart. “Keep your eyes open, Adele. I don’t know who it will be—a steam driller, boxer, derrickman, powderman? Maybe a stonecutter like your father?” I turned away from her, feigning disinterest. “There’s no predicting, I told her.

He continued to quarry mathematical stone at his usual grinding pace.

A short time later, Haganah officers came to take the village from the Irgun. One officer remarked, “All of the killed, with very few exceptions, were old men, women, or children.” He noted, “The dead we found were all unjust victims and none of them had died with a weapon in their hands.” Another Haganah commander sneered, “You are swine,” and ordered his men to surround the militiamen. A tense standoff ensued as the Haganah commanders debated about forcibly disarming the dissidents and shooting them if they refused. At last, the Haganah commander ordered the Irgun to clean the village and bury the dead. They carried the bodies to a rock quarry and set them ablaze. “It was a lovely spring day,” the Haganah commander recorded. “The almond trees were in bloom, the flowers were out, and everywhere there was the stench of the dead, the thick smell of blood, and the terrible odor of the corpses burning in the quarry.”8 The next day, the Haganah commander issued a communiqué: “For a full day Etzel [Irgun] and Lechi [Stern] soldiers stood and slaughtered men, women, and children—not in the course of the operation, but in a premeditated act which had as its intention slaughter and murder only. They also took spoils, and when they finished their work, they fled.” Irgun and Stern leaders denied that any deliberate killings of civilians occurred at Deir Yassin. Menachem Begin noted that they had set up a loudspeaker at the entrance of the village, warning civilians to leave: “By giving this humane warning, our fighters threw away the element of complete surprise, and thus increased their own risk in the ensuing battle. A substantial number of the inhabitants obeyed the warning and they were unhurt. A few did not leave their stone houses—perhaps because of the confusion. The fire of the enemy was murderous—to which the number of our casualties bears elegant testimony. Our men were compelled to fight for every house; to overcome the enemy they used large numbers of hand grenades. And the civilians who had disregarded our warnings suffered inevitable casualties.”9 The Jewish Agency did not accept Begin’s explanation and immediately condemned the killings. Regardless of which view was correct, the events at Deir Yassin would have a more far-reaching impact than anyone could have imagined.

No dwarf could be unmoved by such loveliness. None of Durin’s race would mine those caves for stones or ore, not if diamonds and gold could be got there. Do you cut down groves of blossoming trees in the springtime for firewood? We could tend these glades of flowering tones, not quarry them. With cautious skill, tap by tap – a small chip of rock and no more, perhaps, in a whole anxious day – so we could work, and as the years went by, we should open up new ways, and display for chambers that are still dark, glimpsed only as a void beyond fissures in the rock.

Which leaves many towns in southern Florida no choice but to dig their sand from inland quarries and haul it to the coast one roaring, diesel-spewing truck at a time. Tourists and locals hate the noise and traffic, and county officials hate the extra cost, which can be easily double that of dredged sand. But it does have some advantages. The inland mines, with their elaborate sorting and washing machines, can deliver sand of a precise spec—the exact size, shape, and color county officials deem appropriate for the beach. Beach town residents and tourists alike are very particular about the color and consistency of their beaches. The sugary white-sand beach has become the global standard of perfection, and any resort falling short of it loses points. (That’s nothing compared to the fussiness of Olympic beach volleyball players. To make sure their bare feet come into contact only with grains of just the right size and shape, sand was brought in from Hainan Island for the 2008 Beijing Games, and from a quarry in Belgium for the 2004 Athens Games.)15 “You pump sand from the ocean floor, you don’t know what you’re getting,” said Eastman. That’s not exactly true; sea sand is examined closely to make sure it is suitable for a given beach before the regulatory agencies will allow it to be dredged for nourishment. But land-mined sand can be sorted, sifted, and cleaned to a uniform standard. The grains that Eastman was emplacing were all about the size of a salt grain, all the same silver gray, unadulterated with stones or shell fragments. Their color was approved using the Munsell color order system, a visual index of hues created in 1915. The sand is tested at the mine, at every 3,000 tons, and every 500 yards on the beach after it’s in place to make sure it’s up to spec. The waves will gradually mix in shells and other organic matter, so in a few months it won’t look as obviously artificial as it does now.

The Pragmatic Programmer, a well-regarded book in the computer programming field, makes this connection between code and old-style craftsmanship more directly by quoting the medieval quarry worker’s creed in its preface: “We who cut mere stones must always be envisioning cathedrals.” The book then elaborates that computer programmers must see their work in the same way: Within the overall structure of a project there is always room for individuality and craftsmanship… One hundred years from now, our engineering may seem as archaic as the techniques used by medieval cathedral builders seem to today’s civil engineers, while our craftsmanship will still be honored.

1995 archaeologists began to excavate a site in south-east Turkey called Göbekli Tepe. In the oldest stratum they discovered no signs of a settlement, houses or daily activities. They did, however, find monumental pillared structures decorated with spectacular engravings. Each stone pillar weighed up to seven tons and reached a height of five metres. In a nearby quarry they found a half-chiselled pillar weighing fifty tons. Altogether, they uncovered more than ten monumental structures, the largest of them nearly thirty metres across. Archaeologists are familiar with such monumental structures from sites around the world – the best-known example is Stonehenge in Britain. Yet as they studied Göbekli Tepe, they discovered an amazing fact. Stonehenge dates to 2500 BC, and was built by a developed agricultural society. The structures at Göbekli Tepe are dated to about 9500 BC, and all available evidence indicates that they were built by hunter-gatherers.

Chapter FEEDING YOUR ATTENTION HOG I was once at a New Age party and wanted to get the attention of some particularly lovely sari-wearing, belly-dancing women who were floating in and out of the various rooms. I had discovered that I could move past some of my fear and make a connection with people through singing. So I pulled out my guitar and started playing a song I had worked particularly hard to polish, Fleetwood Mac’s “A Crystalline Knowledge of You.” I was able to make it through without too many mistakes and was starting to feel the relief that comes from surviving traumatic experiences. Then one of the belly-dancing goddesses called to me from across the room, “You are some kind of attention hog, aren’t you!” As soon as she said it, my life passed before me. The room started to swirl, as a typhoon of shame began to suck me down the toilet of my soul. “Embarrassment” is an inadequate word, when someone pins the tail on the jackass of what seems to be your most central core defect. I am usually scrupulous about checking with people when I make requests for attention. But this time I was caught with my hand in the cookie jar up to the elbow. I remember slinking away in silent humiliation, putting my guitar back in its case and making a beeline for my car. I just wanted to get back to my lair to lick my wounds, and try to hold my self-hate demons at bay with a little help from my friend Jack Daniels. After that incident I quit playing music in public at all. Several years later I was attending a very intense, emotional workshop with Dr. Marshall Rosenberg. Our group of about twenty people had been baring and healing our souls for several days. The atmosphere of trust, safety and connectedness had dissolved my defenses and left me with a innocent, childlike need to contribute. And then the words popped out of my mouth, “I’d like to share a song with you all.” These words were followed by the thought: “Now I’ve gone and done it. When everyone turns on me and confirms that I have an incurable narcissistic personality disorder, it will be fifty years before I sing in public again.” Dr. Rosenberg responded in a cheerful, inviting voice. “Sure, go get your guitar!” he said, as though he were unaware that I was about to commit hara-kiri. The others in the group nodded agreement. I ran to my car to get my guitar, which I kept well hidden in the trunk. I was also hoping that I would not just jump in my car and leave. I brought the guitar in, sat down, and played my song. Sweating and relieved that I made it through the song, my first public performance in years, I felt relief as I packed my guitar in its case. Then Dr. Rosenberg said, “And now I would like to hear from each group member how they felt about Kelly playing his song.” “Oh my God!” my inner jackals began to howl, “It was a setup! They made me expose my most vulnerable part and now they are going to crucify me, or maybe just take me out to the rock quarry for a well-deserved stoning!

The stones in the wall said, “We have come from mountains far away—from the sides of rugged cliffs. Fire and water have worked on us for ages but have only produced crevices. Yet human hands like yours have made us into homes where children of your immortal race are born, suffer, rejoice, find rest and shelter, and learn the lessons that our Maker and yours is teaching. But to come to the point of being used for this purpose, we have endured much. Dynamite has torn at our very heart, and pickaxes have broken and split us into pieces. Often as we lay disfigured and broken in the quarry, everything seemed to be without design or meaning.

But gradually we were cut into blocks, and some of us were chiseled with sharper instruments until we had a fine edge. Now we are complete, are in our proper places, and are of service. “You, however, are still in your quarry. You are not complete, and because of that, as once was the case with us, there is much you do not understand. But you are destined for a higher building, and someday you will be placed in it by angelic hands, becoming a living stone in a heavenly temple.

In Navashtra, in Saypur, a young girl obeys a strange impulse and sings a song to the stones in a nearby quarry. She and the rest of her family, who are picnicking nearby, stare in fear and confusion as the stones slowly roll down the slopes to spell the words: THANK YOU, THAT WAS LOVELY.