"
The artificial depths seem ominously
unstable; despite the solid beds of rock that line their walls, it is hard to
behold a quarry without feeling that somehow, Nature will strike back, bring
the walls crumbling down, reclaim the pit, fill the vacuum. Land dikes
separating quarry pits look precarious to begin with, even before they are
pierced by Gothic arch-shaped openings to permit communication between pits.
And water inevitably finds its way in, requiring constant pumping. The thought
of water overwhelming the works of man is, I suspect, a primal fear on some
level. Here it's not just a shadowy thought, but frank reality.
The quarry pit is a window into the
Earth, showing us a slice of what lies buried under our feet. Rock strata that
have not seen daylight in millions of years lay exposed to the world. Tunnels
hint at darker depths still. The invasion of water gives one a visual grasp of
the water table, the rivers moving below the earth's surface.
And finally, the sheer volume of material removed to create these pits beggars imagination."
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