tamp

Hemingway の 'A Farewall to Arms'を読んでいます。
Now in the fall the trees were all bare and the roads were muddy. I rode to Gorizia from Udine on a camion. We passed other camions on the road and I looked at the country. The mulberry trees were bare and the fields were brown. There were wet dead leaves on the road from the rows of bare trees and men were working on the road, tamping stone in the ruts from piles of crushed stone along the side of the road between the trees. We saw the town with a mist over it that cut off the mountains.

Hemingway の小説には外国語が頻繁に出てくるので困ります。外国語はとうてい覚えられないので調べても直ぐに忘れても気にしませんが、俗語や古語は別にして英語はなるべく覚えたいとは思ってします。上記の "tamping stone in the ruts from piles of crushed stone" は文脈からすると石を轍に入れている意味のようですが、辞書で "tamp" を調べます。.

・Oxford English Dictionary: tamp something (down) to press something down hard, especially into a closed space: He tamped down the tobacco in his pipe with his thumb.
・Collins Dictionary: If you tamp something, you press it down by tapping it several times so that it becomes flatter and more solid.: Then I tamp down the soil with the back of a rake.

・Vocabulary.com: To tamp is to push or pack down a loose or granular material. If you work as a barista, you'll learn to tamp espresso grounds before running hot water through them.
Before a road is paved or a patio is laid out, workers will tamp gravel to provide a sturdy, level base. Old-fashioned, muzzle-loading guns had to be filled with gunpowder, which the user would need to tamp firmly before firing. The tool used to do the tamping is sometimes also called a tamp.
詰めたり、しっかりと固めるのですね。