The story begins in a galaxy called the Milky Way in the Mesoproterozoic age, some 1.6 billion years ago long before any mammals called the blue planet home.

The ivory beige sedimentations of the ancient tectonic plates called the sea of Tethys, were slowly cooking to perfection for hundreds of millions of years, morphing and twisting into silky soft swirls and clouds of lustrous, spherical and asymmetrical cakes of mica, calcium carbonate, feldspars and crystalline.

Bands of impurities shape into luminous collage of hues and tones, in endless movements and patterns. Welcome to the Marble Universe.

A dimension full of natural drama and an endless variety of encapsulated celestial beauty. Scorched by the immense heat, some Marble formations becoming bleached and brighten into a gleaming luminescent white.

Thrust up to form the hills and mountains of Makrana, Paros, Pathos, Thasos, Athos and Carrara.

We now move forward countless millennia into the future and far west into South East Asia. The scene is set for building of one of the first Hindu temples, the foundations of which are hewn from the solid marble blocks.

Now for a change of scene and a thousand years later on the mother continent, we move to ancient Egypt. There we see the same blazing sun bearing down, the same burning earth with another army of pilgrims and artisans devoting their life’s long efforts to a single goal. Once again it is metamorphic marble gleaming and thousands of white Megalithic blocks in the midday sun, once again it’s the building of a temple.

Then a thousand years later blooms the imperishable beauty, the flowering of Greek Art in a profusion of marble.

The stone taking on a new life, to live once more under the genius of the artists touch. A flowering of marble columns and Caryatidal temples, with documented rations and a philosophical logic demystified and digested like never before.

The temples of Mythological Creatures and concepts, Zeus, Olympia, the Parthenon, Athens, the Gods of old all but forgotten. Their temples lie in ruins amongst the baked dunes beneath the same blazing sun.

Another people, another Empire is born. Toiling up the steep Capitoline hill of Rome, the oxen bear a statue of Claudius, carved from a single block of freshly hewn, purest white marble, stands dazzling and white beneath the deep blue of the Italian sky.

Echoing the Roman metropolis, that is marble Rome in its prime. Its marble temples, its marble theatres, its marble monuments, its marble baths, its marble tombs.

We go forward another two thousand years into the present now. Then is but a remote memory, but the sun baked land is littered with the ruins of past civilizations. Dig where you will and you will unearth Marble Idols, Marble Columns, Marble Shrines and Marble Blocks. . . . . .

What is one two or ten thousand years in the vast one and a half billion year history of marble? We seem to terraform in order to make things more to our accommodation and liking digging into earth like gophers in a grass prairie.

We now live in the confusion of modern things. Machines are building vast steel and glass towers, towers to house the workers, the once deep blue skies bear the scars of our frenetic new metropolis, all that is natural seems forgotten.

“The quarries at Carrara are four or five great glens, running up into a range of lofty hills, until they can run no longer, and are stopped by being abruptly stranded by nature. The quarries, or ‘’ caves ‘’ as they call them there, are so many openings, high in the hills, on either side of the passes, where they blast and excavate for marble: which may turn out good or bad: may make a man’s fortune very quickly, or ruin him by the great expense of working for nothing. Some of these caves were opened up by the ancient Romans, and remain as they left them to this hour. Many others are being worked at this moment; others are to be begun to-morrow, next week, next month; others are unbought, unthought of; and marble enough for more ages than have passed since the place was resorted to, lies hidden everywhere: patiently awaiting its time of discovery.”

Charles Dickens

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