Digging Limestone

Here is another Scott Russell Sanders excerpt, this one from an essay about the many and massive limestone quarries in southern Indiana and the people who work them:

"Wherever holes have been drilled in the quarry ledges, dirt catches and seedlings take root. Eventually these roots will burst the stone. Our roots also go down into rock—the rock of caves, spearheads, knives, the megaliths and cairns and dolmens of our ancestors, the rock of temples and pyramids, gravestones, cathedrals. Entire millennia of human labors are known to us solely through their stone leavings. The only common stuff that rivals it for durability is language, words laid down in books and scrolls like so may fossils. With a touch of mind, the fossil words spring to life; so might the stones, if we look at them aright."