The tagline? "Call the experts for any challenge."
And there they are, driving away in yellow earth-moving equipment – mobile crushers, vibratory rollers, and minimal swing radius excavators – if you look carefully at the left side of the advertisement. In a press release on their site, Komatsu writes how "[n]ew ways to develop hard terrain – sandstone, lava rock and basalt – had to be learned once the easily developed land was taken. As a result," they write, "contractors are facing great challenges."
Including, it seems, the obliteration of whole mountain peaks...
Not ones to be intimidated by geology, however, Komatsu arrives with their "advanced land development practices" – "the absolute top" of the industry, they say – and their "world-class machines," whose "powerful dozing and ripping force" puts the surface of the earth back in its place: as something we will build more suburbs on.
In any case, I'm tempted to propose the plot of some new, geotechnically futuristic version of Paradise Lost – perhaps the world's first book about the geological invasion of Heaven (in which "devilish enginery" has been assembled inside a "hollow cube," whilst an army of demons "turn[s] wide the celestial soil" to unleash "sulphurous and nitrous foam" upon a heavenly landscape "soon obscured with smoke") – but a version that's been written specifically for Hindus.
In other words, rather than Milton's legion of demons, who rip minerals from the earth and hurl clouds of rock at the gathered phalanx of angels surrounding God, you'd read instead about a rogue group of anti-mountain engineers – tens of thousands of them, wearing hardhats and carrying bagged lunches – who have begun dismantling Mount Meru one hunk of granite at a time.
They drill, blast, doze, and mobile-crush their way upward, in an endless fleet of bright yellow trucks, reducing the Himalayan vaults of their own gods to mere gravel.
(Thanks, Ben! And thanks, Alex!)
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