ABSTRACT
The world under our feet has always fascinated man. First as a refuge: “and, lo, there was a great earthquake ... and the kings of the earth, and the great men, and the rich men ... hid themselves in the dens and in the rocks of the mountains”, it is written on the Book of Revelations (VI, verses 12-15). On the other hand, the American Indian prophet Smohalla62, of the Umatilla tribe, utterly refused to make the least incision in the earth: “It is a sin”, he said, “to wound or cut into, to tear or scratch our common mother with our hands. Shall I take a knife and plunge it into my mother’s bosom? Shall I dig under her skin to reach her bones? Then when I die, I cannot enter her body to be born again”. If we exhaust the earth it will take revenge.When the very ancient Egyptians themselves exploited quarries or mines, they felt that they were purloining the possessions of the legitimate owner of the site. The mountain was sacred: it was the land of the god Min or of a goddess and, to obtain their forgiveness, they would engrave a stela or burn incense.
