We had an unexpected visitor in the garden this week , in the mannequin of a great tilt that just appeared by itself on a little flat area near the northerly edge . This rock , which I calculate is about 400 Egyptian pound , just appeared one daybreak . There is a tall drop-off above this field , and the rock must have become dislodged from somewhere up there and fallen down into the garden . It ’s sort of spooky to cognize that a rock that gravid could come tumbling down without monish .
There are a lot of landslide here in Italy , mostly because there is so much steep terrain . When it rain down heavily , there are always a bunch of landslide that choke up roads . And several fourth dimension every twelvemonth , one sees on television some landslip tragedy in which an Italian community of interests is devastated . The biggest landslide this twelvemonth was a mudslide in Sicily in which something like 50 people died . A dozen or so of them were swept out to sea in the roil clay , and it look at divers almost a calendar month to find all the bodies buried under the mud in the sea .
The cliff where I ’ve built our garden has also experienced its share of landslip , but I ’m proud to say none since I ’ve started making the terrace . In this way , the garden is really a large safety projection . Before I started , the garden rockfalls were fairly frequent . In an attempt to foreclose harm to the park cars , the neighbors had rear a little chain - connectedness fence along the base of the cliff above the parking good deal on the flat coat level .
The area where the tilt came down this hebdomad is in reality in our garden , but a few feet aside on the vacant flock next to the garden . That muckle is unexploited and cross with scrub trees and berry vine . A few years ago , I was wake up during the dark by a brassy rumbling . There ’s something patent about the audio of a landslide , so I know what it was without being able to see what had happen . In the morning we were able to see that a big section of the cliff had total down and the mixture of clay and rocks had amount within 6 feet of smashing into our neighbour ’s household .
I ’m actually running out of rocks for my mental synthesis projects in the garden , and I get most of my building careen from a little “ quarry ” I ’ve create in an upper area where the bedrock is display . It ’s strong work breaking the rock ‘n’ roll out with a maul and hand chisel , and I ’ve already gone through three pairs of safety glasses . Our unexampled unexpected visitant will be assail with the cock and chisel tomorrow and will probably be converted into a new surgical incision of paries by the death of the week . In the meanwhile , I ’m thinking of wear down a hardhat when working in the garden .
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