The pillars had been piled up out of rocks laid like a drystone wall, and then a series of big flat stones dropped across the top.
Farther along was a 5,000-year-old Neolithic burial chamber - a great slab of rock laid atop three smaller stones like a massive table.
Behind the Hall and encircling the whole crest of the hill ran a massive wall of rock, laid without mortar and half fallen down in many places.
The dam for lock 27 is atypical for the Mississippi, being a weir made of tons of rock laid in the Mississippi to create a small pool elevation upstream from the Chain of Rocks.
The Sydney Basin consists of layers of sedimentary rocks laid down over the past 300 million years.
Two beefy hands hung from his sleeves like chunks of rock laid across his lap.
Spaced at the corners of a square, they were half crude masonry, built of unsmoothed rocks laid together with clay.
The buildings were constructed in the same way - unpeeled logs and rough stone - and the low-pitched roofs had large rocks laid on them to keep the shingles from blowing off during the winter blizzards.
It was officially founded in 1851 by Mexican settlers, making it the state's oldest non-Indian permanent settlement, and on the hillside that rises above it, big white rocks laid among the sage spell out that distinction in block letters.
And most of the rooms had pictures on the floor, made of little bits of rock laid in patterns: all colors.