I was unable to ask questions of the COMAKAT official inside the pit amid the thunderous clanking of metal on stone. I could only observe as this sea of humanity matched brute force against the unforgiving rock. Dust and grit rose from the earth like smoke from a wildfire. It was impossible to fathom how a spectacle such as this could exist in the twenty-first century. One might imagine such a scene millennia ago, perhaps as tens of thousands of oppressed laborers in Egypt excavated thousands of tons of stone to build the great pyramids … but at the bottom of trillion-dollar supply chains
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