Last Sunday, I went for a walk in the gardens of Humayun’s tomb: the magnificent red sandstone and marble monument built by the widow of the 16th century Mughal emperor at the edge of what was then a former city of Delhi.

It's simpler than the much more famous Taj Mahaj, which was modeled on it, and, I think, more beautiful — the austere red sandstone set against an azure sky, the marble of its perfect dome swirling above it. It took just seven years to build, a remarkable testament to a wife’s devotion as well as craftsmanship and sheer dedication — particularly given the rudimentary nature of the tools that were used.

In the last few years, a major restoration project has been underway to renovate the 30 acres of gardens, waterways, fountains, and smaller tombs which dot the grounds. And the monument itself.

This Sunday, as I walked along the perimeter — skirting tourists, courting couples and young men snapping each other in film star poses — I heard the musical sound of metal striking stone in the distance.

Following the rhythmic clanging, I soon found a group of stonemasons clustered at the base of a smaller tomb set into a remote corner of the grounds. They were busily crouched beside large blocks of sandstone, two men to each block, one man in each team wielding an iron chisel and hammer, the other intermittently brushing away the red dust or engaged in some other stone-carving task.

Unlike some of the other workers I’d passed — laborers shifting rubble and sorting stones for the outer walls — they were completely concentrated. Not one raised his head to stare at me, an out of place woman in jeans walking among them, and only acknowledged me when I asked a question. They were craftsmen, through and through.

I stood and watched them for some time, fascinated. The tools they were using would have been no different to those used five hundred years earlier: rough-hewn iron spikes that looked like flattened nails, ranging in size depending on the fineness of the work; rustic wooden mallets and hollow brushes to dust and blow through. But the quality of the workmanship — ruler-straight pediments, cornices accurate within a hair's breadth, delicately curved lintels and stylised rose borders — being conjured from these lumps of rock was almost miraculous.

The men were from Rajasthan, home of north India’s great stonemasons, and one of them told me that their work would take an impressively short three weeks.

I was surprised. The labor was painstaking. The lumps of rock I could see were mostly still lumps of rock, with only glimpses of their beauty and perfection yet to emerge.

What struck me most, though, wasn’t so much the time they said it would take, nor simply their skill and concentration: it was their patience and their persistence. Their ability to hack away, hour after hour, day after day, at this barely responsive stone; working on tiny pieces of a larger picture, with no obvious immediate creative satisfaction, no apparent end in sight.

Yet they seemed satisfied. They were certainly engrossed. As satisfied and engrossed as master craftsmen can be.

I’m not a stonemason: such work is beyond me and it would belittle them and you to attempt a moral to this story. As I walked on, I was left with no one simple idea, no pat conclusion — more, a collection of thoughts.

Their manner of working was ancient; that was certain. Beautiful but simple. It bore some relation — in its timelessness, its beauty and simplicity, its element of being part of a larger whole — to the basic building blocks of life.

You could come to many conclusions from watching them. In the end, though, if anything, their labors reminded me of breathing. Of how each breath follows another, like strokes of a hammer on a chisel, until ultimately it makes an entire life.

Illustration by Sara Shaffer.