lapidification

— For anybody, though, not part of it all (which was obviously Ishmail's plight), that world was nothing but a smooth, cyclical continuum, without a fold in it, without any form of articulation, as compact as stucco or staff, as putty or portland; an imbrication of nights without adjoining days, a total lapidification, a flat, hard, constant, monotonous uniformity in which all things, big or small, smooth or lumpish, living or not, form a solitary, global unit.