This Blue Exists in One Place

You are standing on a beach of grey stones in the southwest of the Dominican Republic. There is almost no sand here. You turn the pebbles over with your foot, the way everybody does, and then one of them stops you. It is blue. Not painted, not glass. Blue the whole way through.

Stojiš na plaži od sivog kamenja na jugozapadu Dominikanske Republike. Ovdje gotovo da nema pijeska. Nogom okrećeš oblutke, kao što to svi rade, i onda te jedan zaustavi. Plav je. Nije obojen, nije staklo. Plav do kraja.

The stone is called larimar, and there is exactly one place on Earth where it comes out of the ground: a single hillside in the mountains above this coast. People have searched for a second one for fifty years and nobody has ever found it. The men who dig it out work with hand tools and buckets on ropes, because a machine would smash the very thing they came for.

Kamen se zove larimar, i postoji točno jedno mjesto na Zemlji odakle izlazi iz zemlje: jedna jedina padina u planinama iznad ove obale. Ljudi već pedeset godina traže drugo takvo mjesto i nitko ga nikad nije pronašao. Muškarci koji ga kopaju rade ručnim alatom i kantama na užadima, jer bi ga stroj razbio, upravo ono zbog čega su i došli.

The name is not old. In nineteen seventy four a man called Miguel Méndez followed the blue pebbles up a river until he found where they were falling from, and he named the stone after his daughter Larissa and the Spanish word for the sea. If you ever buy one, look hard at the colour. The deeper the blue, the further down that hill somebody had to go.

Ime nije staro. Tisuću devetsto sedamdeset i četvrte godine, muškarac po imenu Miguel Méndez pratio je plave oblutke uz rijeku dok nije pronašao odakle padaju, i nazvao je kamen po svojoj kćeri Larissi i španjolskoj riječi za more. Ako ga ikad kupiš, dobro pogledaj boju. Što je plavetnilo dublje, to je netko morao ići dalje dolje niz tu padinu.