It's Not Rock Science

We got our rocks and we got them for free. In the end, you get what you pay for.

Although what we received did not split easily under hammer and chisel, and certainly weighed the weight of what we thought we had bargained for, it was the rain that revealed the true nature of our rocks.

Some of these things
are not like the others.

The Ecuadorian Andes are not glacial mountains, though some do contain glaciers. They are not carved of solid rock; they are not of fixed height. The Andes are the geological result of the massive tectonic plates under the earth and ocean coming together and overlapping, a process called orogenesis (Greek: oros [moutain] + genesis [creation, origin]). Every year as the plates continue their movement, the plate on top is pushed slightly higher by the plate on bottom wedging itself further underneath. The top plate folds and deforms, giving birth to mountains. Growth of this sort is a slow thing, but I have heard it is the slow moving things about which one should worry, if one worries at all.

What is now the top, middle and lower strata of the Andes was once, so long ago the entire universe was noticeably younger, the bottom of a great sea. That sea contained mostly sand, a good deal of organic matter and a scattering of relatively small rocks. All of this has been mixed together and very slowly formed into mountains. As Oscar put it, ‘The Andes are made of cement.’ It is a weak cement and while great compressive force has wrought physically tough material capable of withstanding the blows of man and machine, water undoes its bonds in very little time.

Of course, there were signs that our rocks were not rocks. They were very brittle and broke under the chisel in odd ways. I guessed that something was amiss and left the stem-wall un-mortared and incomplete for a week while awaiting a response from an Irish stonemason I had met in Cloughjordan. His response came: he could not tell the rock from only a photo. By then it no longer mattered: the rain had revealed the truth.

The Truth within the rocks.

When the Universal Solvent
has dissolved the 'rock'
to a watery sludge, not even
a single pebble remains

The organic matter of our rocks had turned into a thick sludge not unlike clay slip, but much more watery. This sludge leaked down through the rocks and into the gravel drainage ditch where it covered the top course of gravel and became stuck. The rocks themselves looked like poor disintegrated piles of cement, with a melting exterior over a dry, hard and solid mass. The sight was miserable and the feeling terrible. In the end we had paid dearly for our free material with a month and a half of negotiation and hard labor down the drain — and the drain clogged!

In the Chota Valley we have a saying:

He who laughs last,

is surely Ingeniero Zapata.