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Finding and Harvesting Morta
The process of obtaining morta is one of the biggest differences
between the creation of a morta pipe and the creation of a briar pipe.
Briar is an active industry emplying legions of workers and large mills
for the most efficient harvesting and cutting of the wood, and a
pipemaker can simply order pre-cut briar blocks by the bag at highly
competitive prices. Some pipemakers, myself included, pay additional
costs for purchasing handpicked blocks or traveling to the mills to
choose their own, but this is still a relatively simple affair by
comparison to the procurement of usable morta. In the map below, the
large green area represents the Briere parkland:
This area is roughly 16 miles across, and it is a trackless wasteland
of marshes, fens, and open moors dotted with ancient standing stones.
It is a vast area to search, and for most of the year it is
inaccessible because the water levels in the crisscrossing aquaducts
rise high enough that the open areas cannot be walked for morta. During
the Fall, however, the water levels fall and during a narrow window
from September to November one can (with wading boots) traverse through
the moors. The morta lies under the moist surface packed in peat and
mineral-rich clay, and can be 4' deep or more. It is found in the form
of huge logs in the process of petrification due to the lack of oxygen
required for the wood to rot, which it normally would have done long
ago.
The morta is found by walking the soft earth and "poling" - driving a
long iron spike into the peat in prospector-fashion, to see if it
strikes the hard log of a tree. Once a tree has been located and
identified by repeated spiking to confirm that it really is a tree and
not a random rock, the area is marked and the search continues. Once
several trees have been located, the digging begins and it is a hard
and laborous process. The earth must be dug out to reveal the black
logs and make it possible to remove them, and they must either be sawn
into movable pieces or lifted out with a portable crane and chains.
This requires the rental of a truck for transporting the large and
heavy sections of wood, plus a lot of hours of labor carrying the stuff
across the marshes. |
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Talbert
Morta 
