“They crested the top, and when they looked down, the man’s breath caught in his throat. What he saw was so alien it could only be understood in installments. The strip mine was a crater that had been sunk a quarter mile into the ground. It was like a pit in the middle of the Amazon. Things were crawling all over it the way bees swarm a hive. And it took the man a moment to realize that these were people.
Hundreds of them.
The weather was warm, and the men laboring below had their shirts off. Each was covered head to toe in mud. The only part of them that seemed human were their teeth and the whites of their eyes. Gigantic ladders had been bolted to the walls of the crater, each the size of a football field. At any one time, at least a hundred men were scaling the ladders with sacks of dirt lashed to their backsides. The sacks were so heavy that when the men reached the top, some could no longer bear the weight and collapsed gradually with each step to the ground.
Something deep inside the man wanted to make it stop. And it all came to him in an instant. What he saw was the entire history of the human race. He saw the slave labor camps of the Nazis and the communists. He saw the seas of peasants chained and lashed by great empires—the Romans, the Greeks and all the others that people still spoke of with admiration. He saw the palace eunuchs in the Middle East, free people reengi- neered into model servants by their own biology. He saw the human chattel shipped to the new world, worked for a lifetime, then forced to breed their replacements. And he remembered there was no high-watermark of culture, no height of civilization, that didn’t stand on the back of a mass labor force.
And he thought, My god, this is it. This is all of us.”