Man makes an end of darkness
when he pierces to the uttermost depths
the black and lightless rock. . . .
Man attacks its flinty sides,
upturning mountains by their roots,
driving tunnels through the rock,
on the watch for anything precious.
He explores the sources of rivers,
and brings to daylight secrets that were hidden.
But tell me, where does wisdom come from?
Where is understanding to be found?
—JOB 28:3, 9-12
I REMEMBER AN OLD QUARRY in the Catskills where we used to swim. The water was so clean, clear, and cold, just the opposite of the muddy and murky lake a few hundred yards to the south.
No inconvenient soil came between the water and the rock. The nineteenth-century quarrymen had made a fifty-foot-high wall. Through a cleft in it, a stream of water now fell. From either side of the waterfall, you could jump, if you dared, and plunge into deep water.
But a quarry never fully belongs to men. It represents a compromise with the old powers of the earth. This quarry was still there, long after its makers and their towns were dust, and after the rains had worn the inscriptions off their nearby tombstones. And I never once dove into that water without the momentary fear that the earth would simply swallow me.
Quarries live by the Earth’s time and on its scale.
To get to the quarry sites at the Indiana Limestone Company in Bedford, Indiana, you have to drive through ten acres of stoneyard, where they pile the cut blocks. Stacked three and four stories high, the fortyton blocks perch roughly atop each other, each marked at the corners with the neat incision marks of wedges. Over here are the pure gray stones, here the blondish ones, and here the ones with veins and mixtures of tan and gray. (All of them are curing, losing the five percent quarry water of the fresh stone in the earth, a process that makes them tougher and more durable.) In a discard pile are stones too pitted with fossils to be valued by the building industry.
Here are the raw materials of whole cities—their hospitals, courthouses, cathedrals, and banks—laid out in enormous open-air supermarket aisles alongside which my little blue four-door sedan looks like a Matchbox toy. Indeed, I have the impression that I have become a character in a child’s metropolis, formed of kindergarten blocks, and I wonder where the big bright letters are that should adorn the massive stones.
The quarry is an even stranger sight than the blocks that have come from it. The older holes are filling with a deep-blue water; those that are still active look like the negative space of a city, or like holes left after ziggurats have been extracted foot-first from the earth. In a way, they have. One big hole that we pass—about the size and depth of a small lake—is where the Empire State Building came from. Another was the source of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
The quarryman doesn’t speak of soil. What we call soil, he calls overburden. And he drags it off the stone with power shovels, the way a father pulls back the covers of his son’s bed. In the great limestone quarries of Indiana, you can walk in a swirl and tumble of clayey soil that seems to have been swept together like a crumpled blanket.
The quarryman couldn’t care less about the clay. It is too easy to move. He, like his predecessors for five thousand years, must find the way to turn rock into geometry. With his wedges and hammers, he stands on the uncomfortable edge between man and nature. It is little wonder that every ancient quarry is full of religious graffiti: prayers to nymphs and to the Lord God. Alone among mortals, the quarryman can make the earth tremble.
The stones come to shuddering life in quarries. A crack may widen too quickly and bring a side of the mountain down upon you. When you take out blocks of stone, you may find the whole quarry shifts beneath you and a solid block turns into a sheaf of playing cards.
Rock does not sit inertly on the earth. It is already under pressure, both from above and from below. It holds great forces among its folds and twists. Over time, quarries rise into the air, as it were, because as the layers of stone are removed, the force of gravity grows less over the hole, whose floor adjusts upward, like a boat in the water when you lighten it. Sometimes this process releases a twist that has been straining inside the rock for tens of millions of years, and a whole house-sized chunk bursts upward with a sound like a bomb. In some quarries, where they now cut by means of a sword of flame, the rock closes again as soon as the torch has passed, thrust shut by overpowering forces from beneath.
For the better part of five thousand years, quarrymen have been struggling with these processes, using practically the same tools and developing traditions that, along with those of farming, are the most unchanging in the world.
In the sixth century, the fortified Byzantine city of Dara, at the edge of the Mesopotamian plain, challenged the Persians. Procopius, who exhausted himself in praise of Justinian I’s part in building it, attributed everything, from the height of the walls to the novel means of supplying it with water, to the emperor’s wisdom. In fact, however, the aqueduct was designed by the river itself, which in one terrible storm breached the city walls and flowed through the streets, carrying furniture and pottery with it. At one point, the stream is said to have disappeared—flotsam and all—into a well that Justinian had had dug, and reappeared near another town forty miles away!
The stern magnificence of Dara can still be guessed at today by looking at the fabulously deep and sheer-stepped quarries that line the dirt track leading to the little village that is all that otherwise is left of the great fort. They are reminders that, as Procopius said, at one time the city was “surrounded by two walls, the inner of which is of great size and a truly wonderful thing to look upon (for each tower reaches to a height of one hundred feet and the rest of the wall to sixty)”
The city fell and declined into a village of shepherds, but the quarry became filled with tombs hewn into the rock. So as the living withdrew from the area, the dead replaced them, turning the fantastic negative space of the quarry into their own city.
In 573, the Persians took Dara after a six-month siege. So many died in the last week of fighting that it was said the warriors were like harvesters, “mowing and smiting one another like ears of corn.” The last defenders choked the city wells and its river with the dead, hoping to leave at least pestilence among the victorious Persians.
What did the Persians do with the bodies? As the fort’s defenders well knew, the Persian religion, Zoroastrianism, forbade bringing dead bodies into contact with the earth, lest they pollute her. So their last gesture was not only a military move, but an intentional sacrilege. To the Persians, the right way to treat the dead was to expose the corpse to the sun, so that the spirit might be drawn to the light.
What did the Persians do with the Christian dead? The archaeologist Oliver Nicholson has suggested that they simply exposed the dead upon the hillside. Perhaps they piled the bodies on the ledges created by the carving out of blocks in the quarry. It would have been the best thing they could do, since in that way the corpses would have been preserved from polluting contact with the soil. The dead, then, with the birds and beasts that fed on their bodies, would have kept watch over the approach to Dara.
Eighteen years later the Persians returned Dara to the Byzantines. As the Christians rode back to their city, they must have seen shining on the quarry ledges the piles of the white bones of thousands of their countrymen. How could they not have been reminded of Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones? Indeed, among the great reliefs carved into the walls of the quarry-cemetery is a picture of this biblical vision.
The prophet wrote: “The hand of Yahweh was laid upon me, and he carried me away by the spirit of Yahweh and set me down in the middle of a valley, a valley full of bones. He made me walk up and down among them. There were vast quantities of bones upon the ground the whole length of the valley; and they were quite dried up. He said to me, son of man, can these bones live?”
The dead of Dara did not rise up and walk, as did the army of Ezekiel’s vision. The city decayed to dust. The quarry became a place of fear, where until very recent times visitors were warned of the presence of evil spirits. Perhaps this was because, as Job knows, the dead are stronger. Their city is not erected but carved out of the living rock.