Quarryman

“ You can easily finish him. Look! he is broken down with suffering; he has hardly a breath of life left; he will make no resistance. Do not be afraid!"
The quarryman remained motionless, whilst the crowd, strangely impressed with this incident, approached a little nearer the railing, without daring to come within the gate.
"Strike then!" resumed Gabriel, addressing the quarryman, whilst he pointed to the crowd with a solemn gesture; "there are the judges; you are the executioner." ”

“ Each quarryman and his partner, or partners, hold the little independent working allotted to them apart from the remainder of the quarry. This obviously prevents blasting and each block of stone is cut out by manual labour. ”

“ If there be walls or roofs to repair, or a road to be set in order, here is a job for him, in case the neighbouring farmers be well enough off to unloose their purse-strings; or, again, he can serve in the quarries, when the farmer has to supply the stones for mending the high roads by a “prestation en nature:” a quarryman earns about fifteen pence a day, which is better than nothing in winter, when you have a family to feed. ”

“ Look at the wretched fate of men unacquainted with writing. A smith is black and grimy, his hands are full of lumps, and he toils night and day all his lifetime. The quarryman pulls his arms out to satisfy his stomach. The mason while forming a capital in lotus shape is hurled off by wind from the scaffold. A weaver has bent knees, a maker of weapons is ever travelling: barely does he come to his house in the evening when he must leave it. ”

“ We do not intend to abandon the domain of our seigneur. We wish to work for him to our last day."
"S-death!" cried out the bailiff, forgetting the quarryman at the announcement of the desertion of a large number of the serfs. "The wretches who have thought of fleeing will be punished." The crowd, opening up before the horse of Garin, he reached the monk and Walter the Pennyless, who were pointed to him as the chiefs of the Crusaders. "By what right do you thus enter with a large troop upon the territory of my seigneur, Neroweg VI, sovereign Count of Plouernel?" ”

“ One of the modes in which large blocks of granite may be severed from [Pg 124] a rock, is exemplified by what takes place in some parts of India at the present day. The quarryman, having found a portion of the rock sufficiently extensive, and situated near the edge of the part already quarried, lays bare the upper surface, and marks on it a line in the direction of the intended separation, along which a groove is cut with a chisel about a couple of inches in depth. Above this groove a narrow line of fire is kindled, and maintained till the rock below is thoroughly heated ”

“ There the quarryman's work seems to have stopped, if it always went so far, and the hoard of blank blades ready to be finished or specialized by some local arrowhead maker into perforators, arrowheads, spears, or knives, as the case may be, is carried away. When for a time its owner is compelled to part company with it, he buries it in the ground for safe keeping or to render the material softer for future work, [2] and there for a dozen reasons
Fig. 5 (about 1⁄4) .—Hammer Stones and Blocked-out Blades. Jasper Mines, Macungie, Pa. ”

“ But I merely turned to the quarrymen, and ordered them to pierce one more portal of ice ere we abandoned the task for the day. They went at the work of piercing the eleventh door with the pace of pack-mules up a mountain-side. But at last the sounding-rod bored a way through, and at a wave of my hand the quarrymen fell back. In an instant Bulger had his nose at the hole, and took three or four quick, nervous sniffs, ending with a long, deep-drawn one, and then breaking out into a string of sharp, jerky, joyful barks, he began scratching furiously at the bottom of the portal. ”

“ For their jewels will be unfolding presently, to soften the cleft granite with misty green and bring the vernal time to these silent cliffs.
The quarry lies like a gash in the slope of the hills. To the dizzy edges of it creep heather and the bracken; beneath, upon its precipices, a stout rowan or two rises, and everywhere Nature has fought and laboured to hide this wound driven so deep into her mountain-side by man. A cicatrix of moss and fern and many grasses conceal the scars of pick and gunpowder; time has weathered the harsh edges of the riven stone ”

“ In almost every kind of work new methods are invented after a while. In quarrying, however, the same old methods are in use. The only difference is that, instead of the work being done by muscle, it is [Pg 15] done by compressed air or steam or electricity. Compressed air or steam works the drill and the sledgehammer. The drill is held by an arm, but the arm is a long steel rod which is only guided by the workman. Not the horse-sweep of old times, but the steam derrick and the electric hoist lift the heavy blocks from the quarry. ”

“ Coming unexpectedly on the quarry, I was amazed to find dead silence reigning and my rascals of workmen all stretched out in the shade under the trees taking it very easy—some sleeping, some playing cards. I watched their proceedings through the bushes for a little while, and then it occurred to me to give them a fright by firing my rifle over their heads. On the report being heard, the scene changed like magic: each man simply flew to his particular work, and hammers and chisels resounded merrily and energetically, where all had been silence a moment before. ”

“ Presently the whistle of a siren silenced the music, and with one accord the quarrymen left their work and took shelter. Five minutes later, a detonation and strong reverberations shook the cliff; and when the smoke cleared, Lucian saw fresh boulders lying displaced from their bed, and a fresh scar graven upon the corrugated walls. So the work went on. Danger was always present; but the danger of the quarry is not like the loathsome sleuth-hound of disease which tracks down the potter and the worker in lead. ”

“ Accordingly, the first thing the next morning they got out the hammer and drills, dynamite, caps and fuse, and became stone quarriers, setting themselves the task of driving a “discovery” tunnel on the vein, because it was easier to tunnel than to sink a shaft. Being new to the quarrying trade, they made slow work of it, blistering their hands plentifully the first day or two, and learning only by laborious experience in drilling the hard rock how to place their blasts where they would do the most good. ”

“ A colony of substantial three-room houses, two large boarding-houses, a power house and, farther up beyond the pines, a stone house and a long low building, partly of wood, partly of granite waste cemented, circled the edges of the quarry.
The usual tale of workmen in the fat years was five hundred quarrymen and three hundred stone-cutters. This population of working-men, swelled to three thousand by the addition of their families, increased or diminished according as the years and seasons proved fat or lean. ”

“ Once I met a group of quarrymen, faces burned brick-red, scarred hands swinging as they walked. And, as I passed them with a nod, turning, I saw that they also had turned to look after me, and I caught a word or two of their conversation, whirled back to me on the sea-wind. ”

“ Once down, I felt pleased with myself for having discovered and used the unknown access, and I admired the care and ingenuity of the keeper, who had fitted and wedged the long stones into the uncertain pile.
It was warm in the quarry; there the sunshine seemed to thicken and sweeten; there the little mounds of overgrown waste were aglow with very early dog-violets; there the sparks were coming out on the bits of gorse, and among the stones the colt-foot plumes were already silvery. Here was spring sitting just awake, unloosening her glittering hair, and opening her purple eyes. ”

“ I returned to the quarry, convinced that a very exquisite pleasure may be a very cheap one, and that the busiest employments may afford leisure enough to enjoy it.
The gunpowder had loosened a large mass in one of the inferior strata, and our first employment, on resuming our labours, was to raise it from its bed. I assisted the other workmen in placing it on edge, and was much struck by the appearance of the platform on which it had rested. The entire surface was ridged and furrowed like a bank of sand that had been left by the tide an hour before. ”

“ The quarry lay to the left of the path, which passed on and out upon the hill's northern slope. Upon that slope there was no need to show myself. I measured out some fifty yards of the path, and paced it to and fro, idly counting my steps; for the chill crept back into my bones if I halted for a minute. Once or twice I turned aside into the quarry, and stood there tracing the veins in the hewn rock: then back to my quarterdeck tramp and the study of my watch. Ten minutes past eight! Fool—to expect her to cheat so many spies. ”

“ Once within the quarry, however, all sense of fatigue vanished, and my thankful mind, entranced and fascinated by the deep silence, the awful grandeur, the mysterious lights and shadows of the place, lent me new strength. At length we had traversed this city of silence and gloom, and once again we emerged into the full glory of the afternoon sun.
Suddenly my little drove of cattle, with playful tossing of their heads, broke into a run, Bulger and I at their heels, however. It was a mad race ”

“ In this quarry, then, and in the heaps around it, hundreds are earnestly busy in laying bare what is beneath; while scores of men, women, and children are silently and earnestly looking on. One has just brought out a ball of stone, or something like stone, about the size of a man's hand, known among the quarrymen as 'a fairy ball;' it is composed of a hard crust, like rusted iron, which, on being broken, is found to contain a yellow shining metal of various shapes and sizes—grains, octohedrons, cubes, and their allied forms, as is the case with gold ”

“ Now he had forsaken the trails of moose and bear and caribou to seek the elusive "color" in the sands of the mountain streams, or the unobtrusive outcrop of the quartz that carries gold. But the old instincts were still strong in him. He felt the lure of a splendid and unknown quarry. He coveted the magnificent head of that calm watcher on the peak; and, having heard that the wild mountain ram of the Rockies was an extraordinarily difficult quarry to bring down, he itched to try his old eastern woodcraft in this new chase and win the prize unaided. ”

“ He opens the yet tighter-shut, harder-to-open human doors. He inclines men favorably toward us personally, and to our message. Under His touch the message becomes as a tongue of flame, kindling, disturbing, softening, burning down, and moulding over into new shape the inner man to whom the message comes.
Sometimes quarrymen find a very hard kind of rock in the stone quarries. They pick little grooves for the iron wedges, and then with great sledge-hammers drive these wedges into the hard rock. ”

“ At Hodgeclose, you must turn from the road, pass through the farm-yard and a wood-girdled field or two, to inspect an adjacent slate-quarry, in which inspection you will find the proprietor an intelligent and obliging cicerone. He will first conduct you by a subterranean passage two hundred yards long, to the principal quarry, where the men are busy boring and blasting, and loading the carts with masses of slate metal, technically called clogs. ”

“ Once more the peregrine climbed and stooped with a like result. A third time she soared upwards in great circles, and a third time rushed downwards, now striking the quarry full and binding to it. Adrian, who was following their flight as fast as he could run, leaping some of the dykes in his path and splashing through others, saw and paused to watch the end. For a moment hawk and quarry hung in the air two hundred feet above the tallest tree beneath them, for at the instant of its taking the heron had begun to descend to the grove for refuge, a struggling black dot against the glow of sunset. ”

“ That's an old quarry ahead; you can get down it, but it isn't easy. There's the railway in front; there's a devil of a fence, and a devil of a hedge to tackle before you reach it. Then ditto, ditto on the other side, then a brook, then a plantation of young trees which want thinning, and which is not so well adapted to horse exercise as the maze at Hampton Court."
The speaker's knowledge of the country proved to be correct—at least, as far as Philipson and I investigated it, which was as far as the old quarry. ”

“ The work at the rock quarry was organized according to the same futilitarian pattern that governed the manure-pile operation. Rock had to be hacked, pried and blasted from one end of the quarry, then reduced to coarse gravel with sledge-hammers and carted to the other end of the excavation in wheelbarrows. Most of the men commenced working at some task in the quarry with the automatic unconcern of trained beasts who have paused for rest and water, perhaps, but have never fully stopped. ”

“ Kelvin breathed a virile grade of tobacco into my face. "Listen, Madison, we have been working this quarry for generations, sometimes more of us working than other times. Today most of us are working getting the stone out. That's the way we like it. We don't want any outsider coming in and interfering with that."
"If this quarry has anything to do with defrauding Manhattan-Universal, I can tell you that I will do something about that!" ”