沿河而上，你就会找到它

这块蓝色的鹅卵石并不是来自大海。很长一段时间，这里的人们都以为它是。

The blue pebble did not come from the sea. For a long time people here thought that it did.

河流会带着石头走。如果你在河口发现一块鹅卵石，它一定是从更高的地方冲下来的。所以，想知道它的源头，就要沿着河往上游走。一九七四年，两个男人就是这样做的。一个是多米尼加人，一个是美国人，他们沿着河追踪这些蓝色的石头，一直走进了山里。松散的鹅卵石渐渐不见了，而他们找到了它们的源头：一种深色的古老火山岩，里面透着蓝色。

Rivers carry stones. If you find a pebble at a river mouth, it has come down from somewhere higher up. So if you want to know where it started, you walk upstream. That is what two men did in nineteen seventy four. One was Dominican and one was American, and they followed the blue stones up the river into the mountains. The loose pebbles stopped, and there was the rock they came from: dark old volcanic stone with blue inside it.

其中一人名叫米格尔·门德斯。他的女儿名叫拉丽莎，而“mar”在西班牙语里是“海”的意思。他把这两个词合在一起，给这种石头取名叫“拉里玛”。

One of the men was called Miguel Méndez. His daughter was called Larissa, and the Spanish word for sea is mar. He put the two words together and called the stone larimar.

他并不是第一个发现它的人。一九一六年，巴拉奥纳的一位神父就在同一条河里发现了同样的蓝色石头。他申请许可去开采，但得到的答复是不行，因为当时国内没人知道这是什么矿石。波莉把那块鹅卵石翻过来，抬头望向她上方那片绿色的山脊。

He was not the first person to see it. In nineteen sixteen a priest in Barahona found the same blue stones in the same river. He asked for permission to dig. The answer was no, because nobody in the country knew what the mineral was. Polly turns the pebble over and looks up at the green ridge above her.