The Weight of Stone: On Building to Last

What the dry-laid basalt walls of the Hauran teach us about permanence in an age of planned obsolescence

Somewhere south of Damascus, the fields give way to a landscape so dark it seems to absorb the light itself. The Hauran plateau is built from basalt — a volcanic stone so dense and somber that early Arab geographers described the region as a place where the earth had been scorched black by divine displeasure. I first visited Bosra in the winter of 2019, and what struck me was not the famous Roman theatre, impressive as it is, but the ordinary houses: their walls assembled without mortar from blocks that weighed more than a man could carry alone.