THE NORTH MOLE QUARRY.

South Canterbury Times, Issue 5032, 13 June 1889, Page 3

THE NORTH MOLE QUARRY.

One of the liveliest industries in the neighborhood of limaru at the present moment is that whose premises extend from a point some two and twenty chains out at sea, end over a tramway about two miles long, to a rubble quarry in Wai-iti Creek, —the work and warks in connection with Messrs Palliser and Jones’ contract for the construction of the north mole of the harbour. Most people in Timaru have seen what is going on at this end of the operations. The regular arrival of trains, of big stones and little, say 300 tons per day, the shunting, and the running up up of the loads one by one to the “tip” by an intelligent horse. Here the proceedings are simple, and vary little from day to day; only a few men are employed and so there is not much bustle apparent It is very different at the quarry. Messrs Palliser and Jones employ about 40 men, and of these 30 or so are engaged in the quarry, in getting out and loading up stone for the locomotive to bring down the tramway, half a dozen loads of eight five-ton trucks per day, for a few men at this end to tumble out of sight info the sea. The quarry is a busy scene. .With so many men at work, two steam cranes constantly puffing and whirring, winding up, swinging round, and lowering stones on to trucks; a winding engine every now and then snorting laboriously as it hauls three or four loaded trucks up a steep incline ; there is a wholesome aspect of energy in activity, a look of something being attempted, sorr.utbing being done. There is this to bo seen also at tho other end of the work in a stout sea wall stretching a quarter of a mile from tho shore —and how much more respectable a show it would make if the greater part of it were not sank beneath tho water. At the quarry, however, an idea of the work that has been done in the last twelvemonths is more forcibly convoyed by the huge gap that has been made in tho side of the Wai-iti glen; by lh*e high and long face of splintered rock, that has been pushed back so far from where the moss grown stones used to overhang the sleep side of tbc gully; and by the almost as high face of clay above the rock, and the long steep slopes of spoil along the hank, which represent a vast amount of unavoidable bub unprofitable work in “ stripping.” The gash in the side of the glen is naturally more strikingly suggestive of tho amount of work done than the almost submerged result of it can be. The men in the quarry work eight hours a day at this season, and they work busily. Some are shovelling up and ’wheeling away rubbish,' or clearing spaces on which to lay fresh tracks for the locomotive cranes. Others attend on the cranes, some picking in tho bigger stones, in which to insert the points of the strong grip hooka; some are drilling holes in which to drive iron woclgos that will split a too heavy boulder neatly into two of more manageable size. Souse are half way up a tumbled heap of rock, broken and loosened by the last big blast, warily prizing out chips and half loosened small pieces, with a view of rolling down bigger ones to tho foot of tho keap jo readiness for tie ci'WS; or preparing

and letting off “ pops ” in still bigger ones, to break them up and throw them down, at one and the same time. Above all these is a party with two drays industriously “ stripping ” from the rock the 20 to 30 feet of clay with which it is buried, capsizing the spoil over the edge of the rock, whence it rolls far down to the creak bed. It is alively scene indeed.

Tben,pickingand shovelling in uncomfortable altitudes, and by candlelight, there is one man extending a tunnel beneath the rock, —digging a ditch, one may say, in the soil and subsoil of the old New Zealand that was buried and burned so many thousands of 1 years ago by the red lava flood. This gnome of the underworld has for attendant sprite a youth who, stooping almost as low ns though making a Burmese salaamj pushes ip and out a lilliputiau truck, and anon whirls a light fan to drive in a supply of fresh air to the miner. By and by the latter will have laid a mine] which when fired will wake up the dead grey stone above and about it, and make it think for one brief inslant(if it could

think) there has come the day of a second birth as tremendous as its first. But all the gunpowder, and nilroglyceiine, and robur, and bellite, and the hundred and one “most powerful explosives yet (to be) discovered ” could not reproduce that. r J he miner digs up some interesting odds and ends from his ditch'in old New Zealand. Impressions of plants that were buried by the heavy dust is'orm that blew from our extinct Tarawera,

before the lava began to flow ; marks of their roots in the soil j still open retreats of the “ oldest inhabitant,” the worm of the period ; and now and then, but rarely, bones of a more noble animal, of huge birds, or, as some will have it, even of man, buried within or beneath the ancient soil. The rock itself has many features of interest The tyro iu quarrying must note, as the quarrymen know to their cost, how unevenly the stone has split and splintered on cooling ; how the lower half cooling, more slowly, has split the loss; how in the centre, where the very last movement of flow took place in the stiffening pa’ty mass, a thin stratum was

squeezed by the weight above. as it moved, into a flaky layer of extra hardness,— thb very best of spalls for road metal. Beneath this thin layer the rock is divided for the most part into substantial blocks, by clean straight cracks ; above it, as a rale, the stone is broken in many directions, in some places all into “ rubbish,” or pieces, too small to be good material for mole building. The clay above the rock too, 30 feet deep in pieces, must have a strange “ whence ?” and “how?” Where did it all come from ? How did it come ? I hero is at the base of it,—in some places, not everywhere—a stratum of remark-

ably fine-grained, tough, plastic clay, that ought to be of soma use in the pottery line. The great mass above resembles the cliffs at limaru, but there is in it a stratum of stratified sand as fine as flour, that ought to be worth something for polishing purposes, perhaps also for metal founders. The success that has attended the construction of the north mole so far, its cheapness, and the success with which rubble walls are being carried into heavy’seas at Greymoulb and Westport, are causing many people to assert that it was a very great mistake that the principal part of the harbor works, the breakwater,was not also constructed of rubble, as proposed by Mr Stumbles in the first scheme submitted to the harbor board. It could have been so much soaner completed, if made no longer ■ if would have been so much cheaper; there would have been kept in the district some hundred or huudred and twenty thousand pounds sent Homo for cement; and, —but that is where a doubt may come in—it is declared the rubble wall would have stood as well, or at all events so well that occasional repairs if any would not have cost much.