这种蓝色只存在于一个地方

你正站在多米尼加共和国西南部的一片灰色石滩上，这里几乎没有沙子。你和其他人一样，用脚翻动着石子，忽然有一块让你停下了脚步。它是蓝色的，不是染色的，也不是玻璃，而是从里到外都是蓝色。

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.

这种石头叫拉利玛，地球上只有一个地方出产它：就在这片海岸上方山区的一处山坡上。人们寻找第二个产地已经找了五十年，却始终一无所获。挖掘的工人只用手工工具和绳索吊着的水桶作业，因为机器会把他们想要的东西直接压碎。

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.

这个名字并不古老。一千九百七十四年，一个叫米格尔·门德斯的人沿着河流追踪那些蓝色卵石，一直找到它们滚落的源头，并用女儿拉丽萨的名字加上西班牙语里“海”这个词，给这种石头命名。如果你买一块拉利玛，一定要仔细看它的颜色：蓝色越深，说明有人在那座山里挖得越深。

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.