All those onyx bookends and desk sets and figurines you see in gift catalogs, they come from Mexico. Desk clocks. Ash trays. Well, not ash trays anymore. But in the evil old days when I was a smoker, I had one—green onyx with beautiful striations.

Less frequently seen in the USA are large objects, like this three-foot lizard...

... or this large dolphin. The cost of shipping one north would far exceed the cost of the carving itself.

People decorating Mexican homes are much closer to the source: shipping costs are pretty much not an issue. Marble columns, onyx furniture, travertine floor tiles are frequently found in expensive houses.

All this stuff gets made in factories. We visited one such in the state of Oaxaca. I'd name it and tell you what town it was in, but a man who retails marble sinks told Clint about the place on the condition that he not make the location public, probably to keep demand, and therefore prices down. Or maybe to deprive competitors of a good source.

One way you can tell you're approaching a marble factory is when you see houses with lots of over-the-top stonework. This is the home of a member of the family that owns the factory. The spiral patio is made of small pieces of onyx. Elaborate, but perhaps not particularly esthetic.

It's the front door, though, that drew my eye.

It's a mosaic of patterned onyx. Makes quite a statement, doesn't it? I could not have imagined that anyone could use stone in that way. But the door suffers from the same kind of over-elaborate design that sometimes crops up in fine woodworking, where garish patterns of contrasting woods serve only to showcase the maker's joinery skills, not his design ability.

And if that's not enough, there's an onyx sconce above the door, selected to produce yet another color contrast. Can't have too many, I guess.

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A delightful aspect of traveling in Mexico is the freedom to enter and wander through workshops. At the stoneworking factory we walked unmolested past all the machines and workers, getting a good look at how the work is done.

Here, a worker uses a large crowbar to adjust the position of a large piece of rough marble prior to sawing it. The stone is so heavy that it doesn't need to be clamped during sawing. It's gonna stay right where the guy put it.

A huge saw blade is set to spinning. The operator cranks a handwheel to slide the stone through the cut. My teeth start to ache.

Copious amounts of water cool and lubricate the blade. The saw slices through stone like it was pot roast.

Here an artisan works a marble basin with a hand-held circular saw. He's shaping the piece freehand.

Sure doesn't look very safe. Below, another worker guides a saw through a bevel cut. He's pushing the blade toward his fingers.

I'm guessing these saw blades are not sharp. At one point I saw an operator clean slurry off the edges of a spinning blade with his wet fingers.

Actually, for a small-time Mexican artisanal factory, this one seems oddly safety-conscious. Well, a little bit, anyway. People who work close to cutters wear safety goggles and dust masks. And unlike the woodworkers in Adjuntos del Rio, the workers here seem to have all of their fingers. Still, compared with factories in the U. S., this place is an OSHA nightmare.

Clint buys some onyx sinks from one of the owners. Note that he is wearing huaraches, this in a place where people handle large stones with wet fingers.

A hand-lettered cardboard sign above the compressor behind Clint warns people not to lean on it. That's an exposed drivewheel behind the cylinder heads. Since it's in the nature of compressors to start automatically without warning, anyone leaning on it could lose fingers or worse. So much for safety. I mean, why not cage the damn thing?

Mexican businesses are run with pleasant informality. They don' need no steenkin' procedures. No regulations. Machines are jerry-rigged. Prices are negotiable. The pace is relaxed. The products, though, are art.

This is not a country that cranks out a million perfect iPhones. Instead, it makes a few dozen onyx vases, each one unique. Nobody else will ever have one exactly the same as yours. Nice, huh?