| caption: |
accidents while stone-dragging |
| text: |
(100) The work is not without danger. Close to the bridle-road between Asalu and Impoi, where the track curves round a spur through high grass, they still point out to you a stretch of twenty yards or so where the ground is " bad "; accursed. There have been two fatal accidents there, within a few yards of each other. One concerned a large, flat table-rock, a little way up the hill; the other, the shattered fragments of a big stone, just visible in the grass a dozen paces below the lip of the road. |
| text: |
The first tragedy had nothing to do with stone-dragging. In the old days of Impoi's glory, when it boasted a hundred and forty houses and stone walls, the bucks were out hunting. One of the stops, a young lad, overcome with heat and boredom, lay down to sleep in the lee of the table-rock. The hunt, in the forest above, started a sambhur, and the hunted deer, in full flight down the hill with dogs and men after it, leapt clean over the flat rock - and came down right on the boy. |
| text: |
The second occurred almost where the road runs now. In those days the path to Impoi followed almost the same line; you see it still as a hollow ditch above or below the shelf of the Government track. Impoi were dragging in a huge slab for a grave. The whole manpower of the village was there, with reinforcements from the other villages of the group; an immense, an unwieldy body, numbering, they say, three hundred men. |
| text: |
Suddenly, as they were crossing this short slope, the last man on the rope slipped and fell in front of the sledge. There were shouts, confusion, cries to the teams to stop. They were not heard above the din of chanting. An onlooker snatched out his dao and cut the haulage-ropes. Down went the whole body of pullers, flat; but it was too late. The man had gone under the sledge, and he was dead. |
| text: |
They cut the lashings and pushed and tumbled the great slab down the slope. Then they piled brushwood over it, and logs and dry wood, in a tall pile, and fired it. They let (101) it burn for a day, stoking it till the stone was red-hot, and then like a line of ants they carried water from the near-by stream. This they doused until the cold water on the hot stone cracked it into the scattered fragments that are seen there today below the grassy furrow of the old road. |
