Time Song

by Julia Blackburn

  On examining him the museum specialists found that Tollund Man was naked with no sign of having worn clothes that had later disintegrated. His cap had two leather straps that went under his chin and were tied in a bow at his right temple. There was a leather belt around his waist and a long plaited leather cord tight around his neck, its length bunched up beside his left shoulder and falling down his right side. He must have been hung from a tree, just as the one-eyed god Odin was hung on the ash tree called Yggdrasil.

  He was lying on a sandy layer in which no plant remains were visible and this meant that he had been put in an existing cutting far out in the bog. His body had been very carefully arranged, the limbs drawn up, the head turned, perhaps someone closed his eyes for him. He had been there for at least two thousand years.

  His death had taken place during the winter when the water in the bog was cold and best suited for the mysterious process of preservation. His last meal had been a winter gruel and traces of sphagnum moss seemed to indicate that the mixture had been cooked in bog water; perhaps he had also been given bog water to drink.

  The hair on his head was cut very short and there was stubble on his chin and cheeks and above his upper lip. Although his face was perfect, much of the rest of him was badly damaged, although his feet and one thumb were still intact.

  There was no tradition of preserving such a macabre but human creature and no certainty as to how the job should best be done. The Copenhagen Museum wrote to the Silkeborg Museum and suggested that they should try to keep the head, the cap, the belt and the cord, while putting the rest of the body in storage, even though it would inevitably shrink and become distorted. This was agreed and the preserving process began and continued over the next two years. The head was first placed in antibacterial fluid and then in alcohol and then in something called toluol and when it finally emerged it was a bit smaller than it had been, but otherwise perfect. The Copenhagen Museum sent a bill to the Silkeborg Museum covering the cost of the chemicals and of the saucepan in which they put the head when it was ready to be returned to Jutland. There was a little ceremony to mark the event and the director of the Copenhagen Museum was photographed holding Tollund Man’s head rather tentatively in both hands. It looks like a bronze sculpture rather than the remains of a human being.

  * * *

  —

  I was sitting with Tollund Man in a room in the museum. I had drawn a wooden stool up close to the glass case where he lay. There were pale wooden tiles on the floor and they silenced any noise the stool might make when I moved it, and muffled the sound of footsteps. There were no windows but the walls were painted in a yellow ochre wash that made it look as if sunlight was shifting across them. There was nothing else in the room apart from a little notice by the entrance. It was like being in a church but without any god watching over me.

  Tollund Man’s body looked empty and wasted as if he had been left to hang in the wind on a gibbet. He lay as he was found, curled over on his side, the limbs black and shrunken, although there was an energy in the twist of his hip. His arms made me think of bat wings, his hands the wings of smaller bats.

  I moved the stool to sit facing his face. He must have looked very like this when the people who were with him were closing his eyes before they covered him over. I knew it would be powerful to see him, but I was not prepared for the impact of the meeting. It was as if he was about to laugh at the joke that had appeared in his dream and there was a sense that although his eyes were closed they were not fully closed and he could see me, see any one of his visitors, at the point where the eyelids let in a narrow strip of light.

  When my husband was growing increasingly fragile, he often reminded me of Tollund Man and I could see the resemblance now. They had the same pattern of lines across the forehead, the same arch of the nose, the same inward smile. But as soon as my husband had died the person he had been was no longer there, while Tollund Man appeared to be still inhabited by himself.

  A woman came in with her young child and they pulled up two stools and sat close to me. The mother was talking quietly to the child, but I could not understand what she was saying.

  I had made an appointment with the museum director and when he arrived Tim and I interviewed him in Tollund Man’s room, all three of us sitting around the glass case and its contents, a fourth person who was there with us listening to what was being said.

  The museum director had a long, thin, elegant face, the skin stretched over the careful structure of the bones. He seemed both contained and content. He said he had wanted to become an archaeologist as a child when he picked up a Bronze Age potsherd and all of a sudden he had an insight into the people who made it and the time in which they lived and it was as if they stepped through and briefly entered the present moment. He said that seeing Tollund Man every day made him realise that death is not so bad; it is nothing to be afraid of.

  43

  A tall piece of furniture stands against a wall in this room where I am working. It’s called Amberg’s Cabinet Letter File and it was manufactured in the United States in the 1940s. I once saw its twin playing a bit part in an old black-and-white detective movie and felt quite proud seeing it there.

  The cabinet is supposed to have thirty drawers, each one big enough for a ream of paper, but mine has always had one drawer missing which seems appropriate because it was given to me on my twenty-ninth birthday.

  I use the file to organise many aspects of my life that might otherwise get lost or forgotten about. I have a drawer for fairy lights and one for photographic negatives. Old postcards have their own drawer and so do invoices and certificates, tins of shoe polish, electric plugs and book reviews. A slow accumulation of newspaper cuttings has grown so big it occupies two drawers.

  Here’s an interview with Iris Murdoch teetering on the edge of dementia and just beneath it a photograph of the synapses of a mouse waving at each other as they try to make the connections necessary for a mouse memory to function. Then comes a story about phantoms in the sky and how on a summer day in 1797 the image of the coast of France appeared floating above the town of Hastings, with fishing boats pulled up on to a stretch of sandy beach in Picardy. It was something to do with cold air being trapped under hot air and acting like a glass prism that bends the light to reveal far-away places hidden by the curve of the world.

  The discovery of a clam shell etched with little zigzag patterns between 430,000 and 540,00 years ago is followed by the mummified bodies found in the deserts of Peru dressed in clothes of embroidered silk and human skulls used as drinking vessels and a medical explanation for Erik the Red’s fiery temper. I also have an account of the excavations in Gorham’s Cave on Gibraltar that took place in June 1991 and the article includes a photograph of the cathedral-like interior of the cave which was said to be inhabited by human beings for ninety thousand years or more. A team of palaeontologists was busy excavating the accumulation of sand and broken stalactites, bat guano and human traces, held in the deep layers of time. One of those involved in the work was Nick Ashton whom I met not long ago at the British Museum depot.

  When I first read about the cave I thought how much I would like to visit it and now I have been there and come back.

  Time Song 17

  The plane settles its bulk on tarmac and concrete,

  here where Spain and Gibraltar meet

  in a dense spread of roads and road signs,

  offices and hotels, shops and petrol stations

  built upon an isthmus of sand and marsh and lake.

  To the east of the isthmus:

  a sheer curtain drop of limestone rock,

  pushed into precipitous place

  by the slow collision of the tectonic plate of Africa

  with that of Europe.

  This rock that emerges so abruptly from the sea

  once faced a landscape of sand dunes scatt
ered with umbrella pine,

  wild olive and juniper on the more solid ground

  and all the spicy-scented plants of the Mediterranean.

  Great flocks of wading birds working the shallow lakes,

  dancing clouds of swift, swallow and martin,

  the floating presences of osprey, eagle and vulture:

  one hundred and forty-five avian species

  found in fossil records.

  The climate here was mild

  even during the ages of ice,

  no woolly mammoth, steppe bison

  or other northern beasts,

  but ibex and red deer,

  lynx and leopard and scavenging hyena,

  tortoise and lizard,

  rabbits among the dunes.

  Beyond the land’s last edge:

  the deep strait where one sea meets another,

  and through that strait the great fish and marine mammals

  followed the path of their migrations:

  monk seal and beluga whale, dolphin, porpoise and tuna;

  records show that here in the seventeenth century

  three thousand tuna were caught on a single day.

  How has it happened, the modern world?

  And how will it end, when the end comes?

  Abdul at the reception desk of the cheap hotel

  where a cockroach appears as if by magic

  every morning in the bathtub of my room

  says, ‘We need all this,’

  waving an elegant hand towards

  the forests of brick and glass,

  the dark tarmac plains,

  the jostling rivers of people,

  the stinking herds of cars and trucks.

  But then he smiles at the revelation of his own joke and says,

  ‘At least, they say we do.’

  That night, after the drunks had fallen silent,

  I heard a Scops owl calling its two-note cry

  as it flew above this town of fumes and chips and history,

  and today I saw the perfect silhouette of a tuna

  leaping out of the silver sea

  close to the mouth of a cave

  where human beings had their human home

  for tens of thousands of years,

  leaving hardly a trace of their passing.

  44

  There is a long descent of concrete steps that take you down a precipitous cliff on the east coast of Gibraltar. The steps follow the cliff as it makes a sharp turn to the right and then you can see a little bay of boulders lapped by the water’s edge and the arched entrance to a cave that was occupied by human beings for a hundred and twenty thousand years, maybe more because any earlier evidence was washed out during a shift in the world’s climate.

  I was with Clive Finlayson, the director of the Gibraltar Museum. He had driven us away from the tax-evading, Queen-saluting, rubbish-dumping but wonderfully mixed-race confusion of the town and we were following a road cut into the limestone mass against which the town presses its growing weight and size. We stopped at a metal fence where a uniformed soldier greeted Clive through the barrier of wire, before he unlocked a gate and let us in. We were now on Ministry of Defence property. I was given a form to sign, which was something to do with safety rather than secrecy, and we both put on hard hats in case rocks fell on our heads.

  We walked through a short tunnel, one of many tunnels that have been hacked and dynamited through the body of this rock that was once thought to mark the world’s edge. This particular tunnel was called Arow Street because Mr A. R. O. Williams planned its direction and organised its execution. It emerged on to an open-air platform from where the Williams Way tunnel took up the journey. A flat-fronted concrete building with closed screens covering its windows had been pressed into an angle of the rock face. It was meant to serve as a convalescent hospital during the last war but it never progressed beyond the first stage of construction. From the platform you could see the metal handrail that belonged to the steps and, beyond that, the sunlit Mediterranean.

  Down, down, down and we paused to watch a pair of ravens flying quite close and talking to each other, the harsh wide-throated sound of their conversation going back and forth between them. The Neanderthals would have heard the same birds, seen their black shapes cut into the sky and their awkward lurching movements on the land. Fossil remains from Gorham’s Cave and Vanguard Cave that lies next to it have shown the cuts of stone knives on the wing bones of ravens and other birds of prey, but no marks on the breast or back and no evidence of these birds being cooked and eaten. From this it would seem that the wing feathers were collected and used as some sort of decoration.

  At the base of the cliff we scrambled over what had been a concrete path until it was broken up and swept away by the force of the sea, and then we were at the mouth of the cave. Most of it is white limestone but the limestone has merged with sandstone strata which sometimes erupt into ledges that look like wax dripped from a candle. These ledges mark the shoreline of interglacial beaches that were pushed upwards in five stages in a process called tectonics; the higher the ledge, the earlier its formation. Remains of the uppermost ledges are close to Gibraltar’s summit and were probably formed during the Pleistocene Age five million years ago. By now crag martins were swooping out of the cave, so close they almost brushed against me.

  Clive was born in Gibraltar. He originally came to the cave to catch and ring the birds that sheltered and nested here and to study the heaps of their bones littering the cave floor. After a while he shifted to the Neanderthals who had lived alongside the birds and the colonies of bats, lizards and tortoises, while the hyenas and other predators were kept at a distance by the burning of hearth fires. The Neanderthals were here for at least one hundred thousand years and then after a period of cold and drought they were gone and the cave was empty of human life for six to eight thousand years until Homo sapiens arrived. The new humans congregated in larger groups, but apart from that they followed the same way of life, ate the same sort of food and lit their fires and threw away their rubbish in the same places that the Neanderthals had used.

  Until the rising sea levels that also flooded Doggerland, the caves looked out across a wide expanse of territory spreading out some five kilometres towards the Strait. There were many more caves along the cliff face and within the pinnacles of quartzite rock that dotted the landscape. When a palaeontologist friend of Clive’s first came here, he let out a shout of revelation and said, ‘My God, it was a Neanderthal city!’

  This was Africa on the edge of Europe, with a microclimate that was rarely affected by the shifts of temperature a bit further to the north. The sand dunes were held firm by pine trees and other Mediterranean vegetation and even when rain was scarce, freshwater springs fed into a pattern of rivulets and lagoons. If you go diving you can still see the movement of this water as it seeps up from the seabed. Inside the largest of the caves the temperature was hardly affected by the seasons. They were warm and dry and safe places in which to be as the Ice Ages came and went.

  We were in the cave now, under the shelter of an overhanging roof some thirty metres above our heads. On the left was a solid chute of rock, like a waterfall trapped into stillness. A few tatty clumps of greenery were clinging to it but Clive said that this spring, after several dry months followed by heavy rainfall, the whole rock erupted into a firework display of bright flowers that went on emerging and unfolding for a couple of weeks or more. He had never before seen anything like it.

  At the front of the cave there was a wave of dark yellow sandstone and embedded within it I could see what was left of a hearth: black flecks of charcoal from the fire, the shells of limpets broken with a stone to get to the gristly meat of them, fragments of the butchered and cooked bones of ibex, nuts from the u
mbrella pine and a black flint tool that had been partially completed and then abandoned and left lying there until it was trapped by the sand turned into stone.

  A long swathe of loose sand mixed up with broken stalactites, bat guano and everything left behind by the Neanderthals and those who followed on from them erupts from the cave’s mouth like a great tongue and the deeper you dig into it, the further back in time you go. For the most recent excavations a strip of some sort of black rubber has been fixed in place with lengths of wood, so that it enters the cave like a long stair carpet that slowly ascends towards the far end.

  By now the crag martins were growing accustomed to us and they began to settle in a line along a high ridge of sandstone that used to be lapped by the sea. They watched us with the friendly curiosity of their breed.

  We walked up the black slope of steps which went alongside a huge and fortress-like tower of limestone, its flat top surmounted by a tall stalagmite, but I was so busy with the small details of things that I hardly noticed their presence. We reached a wooden platform and from here the cave floor had been excavated into steps, some of them marked with lines and flags or protected with some sort of covering.

  The back wall of the cave was one hundred and twenty metres from the entrance, but the low autumn sunlight shone right in, illuminating everything with a yellow glow. Clive pointed to an area where a second fire used to be lit, the smoke spiralling up into the cracks and fissures in the high ceiling. This fire would have kept predators away and to the left of it there was a low arch which led to a chamber where the people had slept. Within that chamber a Neanderthal had scratched an image on the wall, a little hieroglyph of crossed lines which is currently the earliest evidence of the making of something just for the look of it. Later, Homo sapiens scratched drawings of the heads of horses on the same wall and made imprints of their hands.