Why Homer Matters (22 page)

The rivers themselves are deeply and naturally poisoned. This is the earth polluting itself. Where it has dried it has left white chemical residues, scurfy scabmarks of receding poison tides. Only one kind of strange, green, long-haired weed can live in it. Apart from that, the water is cloudless, mineral red but entirely clear. This is a place in which almost nothing can live, in which fruit would drop before it was ripe. Those swirling fronds of green hair, seven, eight, nine feet long, are swept downstream around the flakes of rock. Underwater, the whole bed of the stream is coated in a thick dust of iron poison, iron solids precipitated from the water, a fungal metal scum. Where, in a back eddy, the current slows, a crusted porridge of the bloody slurry gathers in the pools, and no fish rise.

An occasional dragonfly hangs its diamond-blue wings over this hell-water, but never with a mate. No songbirds. High above, some distant hawks. Perfectly white flies lie dead, caught in the mineral slicks. If Homer, in Chios, heard of this, of course he would have put Hades and Persephone here. I have never seen a place more suited to them.

At the mining town of Rio Tinto itself, there is a museum where the mysteries of this metal world are on display. If you want to rediscover the Bronze Age entrancement with minerals in the raw, this is the place. In neat, old-fashioned glass cabinets you will find some of the strangest things the natural world can offer: fractured blue-silver flakes of galena; silver-gold cubes of iron pyrites; bulbs of calcite, erupting and diseased like glaucous eyeballs. Cinnabar is a stone blood-pudding, its red shot through with purples and blacks, the background for lilac amethysts. Green malachite is here, with azurite its close cousin, a Prussian blue only to be found in Alpine gentians. Sometimes the pyrites coat the skin of a rock in what is called
calco pitita
, as if a breath of gold had been blown over the stone. But nothing is more like the jewels of a hell palace, or poetry from the depths, than the rainbow stripes of Goethite, the crust of an indigo, lilac and green-gold planet.

The extraction of mineral ores here can only have been hell. The metals were mined from the overlying rock in difficult, cramped, dangerous and unforgiving conditions. Much of the ore was loosened by setting fires in the underground chambers, the heat splitting the rock, which could then be pulled away by hand or levered off with antler picks. Otherwise, it was simply beaten with hard stone hammers that were waisted to take a rope binding, which have been found in the ancient mines, their ends battered with the work they had done before they were cast aside. Human limb bones are occasionally found beside them deep in the ancient workings.

Twenty miles from Rio Tinto, in the dry hills near the village of El Pozuelo, at a place called Chinflón, a Bronze Age copper mine remains much as it was left when the seams were abandoned about three thousand years ago. It is not easy to find, about an hour's walk from the nearest road through poor, scratchy cork oak and eucalyptus hills. This is high and silent country, nearly sterile with its metals, scarcely visited now, a universe away from the industrialized agriculture of the coast. There are deer slots in the dust of the track, and the views are enormous, twenty miles in all directions over the burned forested ridges, taking in at their limit the vast bloody gash of the modern quarries at Rio Tinto. There are pale-winged buzzards in the sky, dust seems to be everywhere and salt sweat runs into your eyes and onto your lips.

The top of the hill at Chinflón is still smothered in the gray-greenish toxic spoil from that ancient mine. Red and orange rock flakes prod up through it. Coppery gray-green lichen spreads over the stones. Because of the way the rock strata are aligned, the flakes run along the crest of the hill in a series of narrow parallel ridges, so the summit is spiked skyward, like the vertical plates on the back of a Stegosaurus. Between those flakes is where the metal-bearing veins of malachite and azurite came to the surface, and where the Bronze Age men dug away for it, mining into a series of slits, pursuing the vein as it sank away from the air and the light, scrabbling with their heavy hammers, diving after the metal like dogs down burrows.

There is a modern chain-link fence surrounding the workings, to prevent you from getting at them, but you can fumble and scrape your way under it easily enough. Within the rough enclosure are the deep but narrow rock trenches cut into the earth, twenty or thirty feet long, six feet wide at their widest; others just wide enough for a ladder to lead down into their dark. They push seventy or eighty feet below the surface. Coppery, blue-leaved plants grow on the mine lip, as if the metal had entered their veins. Clots of quartzite sit there like fat in pâté. Steps are cut into the walls of these red, dark mineral hollows, the rim of each step slightly higher than its cupped floor so that the hold feels safe enough as you go down. But you descend gingerly. In one of them, nineteenth-century iron chain-ladders are set into the little cut cliff-faces, where later miners hoped to find what their predecessors had abandoned. The air feels cool as you drop into the shadow, lowering yourself into the rock-bath, the sweat cooling on your back, the mine wrapping its walls around you. At the bottom, in the half-dark the slits are wet and mossy, comforting, mysteriously juicy, liquid, the walls of Hades seeping with grief. Any noise you make is echoey. But the sides of the walls are vulnerable. There is not much a pick would be needed to dig out. Touch them, and rock pebbles clatter down below you into the dark, ricocheting off the lower walls. I collected flakes of greenish, snakeskin rock, the minerals in them glimmering as they turned through the light from above.

All mines are full of spirits. In the lead mines in County Durham, the men always spoke of the rock as an animal, ready to push at you as you made your way along an adit or down a shaft. In Cornwall the tin miners called the mine spirits the Knockers, as they knocked back at any man cutting away at the metal-bearing veins. They were the mine itself speaking. In sixteenth-century Germany, according to the great Renaissance theorist Georgius Agricola, these spirits were “called the little miners, because of their dwarfish stature, which is about two feet. They are venerable looking and clothed like miners with a leather apron about their loins.”

Most of the time the Knockers were gentle and friendly, hanging about in the shafts and tunnels, only turning vicious if the miners ridiculed or cursed them. You needed to treat them with respect. Whistling could offend them, as could intentionally spying on what they were doing. They liked to be left in the shadows or the depths of the mines, or even behind the rock, knocking from inside it. Many miners placed small offerings of food or candle grease in the mine to feed and satisfy them. If you were good to them, they would show you where to find the metal.

As Ronald Finucane, the historian of the medieval subconscious, has said, ghosts “represent man's inner universe just as his art and poetry do.” Ghosts are what you fear or hope for. The mine, if the gods favored you, could provide a sort of magically immediate richness not to be found in the surface world. But all was hidden until you found it. And that reward-from-nothing was reflected in the miners' attitudes toward metals. In Cornwall, they thought that iron pyrites when applied to a wound would cure it. Even water that had run over iron pyrites was said to be medicinal. Cuts washed in it would heal without any other intervention. But also in Cornwall, and in the parts of the United States where Cornish tinners immigrated and took their ancient beliefs with them, Knockers were thought to be ugly and vindictive. Miners who were lamed were known to be victims of the Knockers' rage. Insult them, and they could damage you for life.

It is a commanding cluster of images: lightlessness, the spirits of the underworld, the hope for treasure and happiness, wounding, cures, the half-glimpsed, the dreaded, a realm of pain and power. This is the dark basement of the Achilles world, the place that metal came from, emerging through processes that were unknown and unintelligible to most of the population, but somehow providing the power-soaked tools with which the killer-chiefs dominated the landscape.

It is at least a possibility that Homer's Hades is a nightmare fantasy fueled by the Bronze Age experience of the mine: a place in which spirits are clearly present but not to be grasped; where life has sunk away from the sunlight to the mute and the insubstantial; to beings that are only half there, regretting the absence of the vivid sunlight above; where a mysterious sense of power lurks in the dark. “When it comes to excavated ground, dreams have no limit,” Gaston Bachelard wrote in
The Poetics of Space
. When you are underground, “darkness prevails both day and night, and even when we are carrying a lighted candle, we see shadows standing on the dark walls … The cellar is buried madness.”

There is a sense of transgression at Chinflón, a feeling that this place was once alive and that the miners hacked at its life, as if they were hunting it, digging out its goodness, a form of rough and intemperate grasping, the masculine dragging of value from a subterranean womb. No one could be in the high, lonely mine at Chinflón, with its rock walls pressing in around them, and an almost oppressive silence filling the gaps between the stones, and not sense the reality of Hades as the house of sorrows, a toxic pit where the price of glory is buried suffering.

*   *   *

To the north, beyond the Sierra de Aracena, a ridge of dry, flaky schists on the frontier of Andalusia and Extremadura, another dimension of the Homeric world makes itself known. Distributed across a wide province stretching over southern Portugal and southwestern Spain are some of the most vivid memorials of the warrior world Homer's poems describe. They are stone stelae, or slabs, cut in the Late Bronze Age, from about 1250 to 750
BC
, designed to show the nature of a hero's life. Other stone stelae, many shaped to look like people, can be found all over the Bronze Age world, but these are among the most articulate. None of them remains where it was found, and Richard Harrison, the Bristol archaeologist, in his catalog of the hundred or so that survive, lists their modern locations: one is in a bar in the Plaza de España in the village of San Martín de Trevejo on the Portuguese border north of Badajoz; others are in Madrid, Porto, in many local museums, in a school, in a town hall, in people's gardens and houses, one used as a seat at the entrance to an estate, another as a lintel over a window. A couple were reused as gravestones in Roman antiquity, with the name of the buried men cut across the Bronze Age designs. Many are beautifully exhibited in the museum in Badajoz. No doubt there are more still lurking unseen in walls or foundations.

The beautiful, hard landscape of Extremadura is natural horse and cattle country. Long, brown distances extend in all directions. Stone corrals are topped and mended with thorns—as they are in the
Odyssey
—and little mustard-yellow damselflies dance through the grasses. The pale roads wind over the hills, tracing the contours between the olives and the cork oaks, with the
tung tung tunk tunk
of the sheep bells a constant metal music beside them. Oaks that have been stripped of their cork are now date-black, as crusty as the blood on a cut. Grasshoppers flash their amber-ocher underwings. Cattle gather in the shade. Lizards seem to be the only liquid. It is above all a stony place: whitewashed upright flakes of schist marking the boundary between estates; bushily pruned olives peering out above stone walls; stones gathered in the dry scratched fields into big cairns, little round fortresses of solid cobble.

None of this is different from the state it was in three or four thousand years ago. Stock were raised then on the wooded savannas, as they are now. Cattle herding was the basis for all wealth. A low understory of grass sustained the herds under the evergreen oaks. Nothing would have been more nutritious for the autumn-fattening pigs than the fall of acorns. Wheat, barley and beans were grown then in small patches of dry farming, as they are now.

In this big, open, manly environment, the stelae were often placed at significant points, where herders' roads met or forked on a hillside, where they crested a pass or came down to a river crossing. Some commanded wide panoramas. They were meant to be seen. You were meant to encounter them as you crossed the country. They were created for public display. Some were attached to graves, but not a majority. These were miniature, highly individual monuments intended to mark the presence—and dominance—of great men in their place.

The stelae are, in another medium, the
Iliad
of Iberia: heroic, human, repetitive but individualized. They mark the shift away from the communal values of the Stone Age, when joint graves gathered the ancestors in a community of the dead, to a time that valued more than anything else the display of the glorious man. None is more than six or seven feet high—these aren't great communal menhirs; they are on the scale of gravestones—but they are not recumbent. There is no knightly sinking into death here. Each is a standing monument to the vigor of a person. Gods do not appear; men dominate. The man himself is often shown as a kind of stick figure, pecked into the surface of the slab, probably with a bronze chisel, and around him are his accoutrements, the things that made him the warrior hero he knew himself to be. And the catalog of those heroic objects is a pointer to the values of the warrior world he wanted to record. To see these images is the strangest of sensations; it is, suddenly, Homer, 1,800 miles from Ithaca, more than two thousand from Troy, drawn in pictures on Spanish stone.

First there are the astonishing shields, dominating one stele after another. In the very early examples, the shield even takes the place of the man himself and stands there for him and his world. The shields are huge, as big as a man, round but notched at the top, made of many concentric rings, the symbol of resistance and resilience, usually shown with the handle visible in the center. In other words, they are seen from within the world that is protected by them. These are our shields, including us. They are the shelter for the life this man dominates, and in their massive, cosmic, many-ringed roundness they symbolize the universe of wholeness that the warrior protects. They are, in other words, the simple graphical equivalent of the great Shield of Achilles, which Hephaestus the smith god creates for the grieving warrior chief in book 18 of the
Iliad
.