by Colin Wilson
I should, at this point, say something about the purpose of our expedition. There are many mysteries attached to the ‘Black Mountain’ , which is part of the Anti-Taurus mountain range. The so-called Hittite Empire collapsed in about 1200 BC, overcome by hordes of barbarians, prominent among whom were the Assyrians. Yet the Karatepe remains date from five hundred years later, as do those at Carchemish and Zinjirli. What happened in those five hundred years? How did the Hittites succeed in preserving so much of their culture through such a turbulent time, when its northern capital—Hattusas—was in the hands of the Assyrians? This was the problem to which I had devoted ten years of my life.
I had always believed that further clues might lie deep under the ground, in the heart of the Black Mountain—just as deep excavations into a mound at Boghazköy had revealed tombs of a highly civilized people a thousand years older than the Hittites. My excavations in 1987 had, in fact, turned up a number of strange basalt figurines, whose carving differed strikingly from the Hittite sculptures found on the surface—the famous bulls, lions and winged sphinxes. They were flat and angular; there was something barbaric about them—and yet not in the manner of African sculptures, with which they have occasionally been compared. The cuneiform symbols on these figures were distinctively Hittite, rather than Phoenician or Assyrian, yet, if it had not been for these, I would have guessed that the figures came from a completely different culture. The hieroglyphs in themselves presented another problem. Our knowledge of the Hittite language has been fairly comprehensive since the researches of Hrozny, yet there are still many lacunae. These tend to occur in texts dealing with religious ritual. (We could imagine, for example, some archaeologist of a future civilization being baffled by a copy of the Catholic mass, with its sign of the cross and odd abbreviations.) In that case, we surmised, the symbols on the basalt figures must deal almost entirely with religious ritual, for about seventy-five per cent of them were unknown to us. One of the few statements we could read was: ‘Before (or below) Pitkhanas dwelt the great old ones’. Another read: ‘Tudaliyas paid homage to Abhoth the Dark’. The Hittite symbols for ‘dark’ may also signify ‘black’, ‘unclean’ or ‘untouchable’ in the Hindu sense.
My finds had excited considerable comment in the world of archaeology. My own first view was that the figurines belonged to another proto-Hattian culture (i.e. the forerunners of the Hittites), that differed considerably from the one discovered at Boghazköy, and from which the Hittites took over their cuneiform. Pitkhanas was an early Hittite ruler of about 1900 BC. If my surmise was correct, then the inscription meant that before Pitkhanas there lived the great proto-Hattians from whom the Hittites derived their script. (‘Below’ could also signify that their tombs were below those of the Hittites, as at Boghazköy.) As to the reference to Tudaliyas, another Hittite ruler of about 1700 BC, it again seemed likely that the Hittites had derived some of their religious ritual from the proto-Hattians, of whom ‘Abhoth the Dark’ (or unclean) was a god.
This, I say, was my original interpretation: that the Hittites had taken over parts of the religion of their predecessors at Karatepe, and had made inscriptions upon Hattian figurines to this effect. But the more I considered the evidence (which is too complex to detail here), the more I was inclined to believe that the figurines helped to explain how Karatepe remained an island of culture long after the fall of the Hittite empire. What force will keep invaders at bay over a long period? Not, in this case, the force of arms; the evidence at Karatepe reveals an artistic, not a military culture. Sheer indifference? Why should they be indifferent? Through Karatepe, Zinjirli and Carchemish lay the road to the south, to Syria and Arabia. No; it seemed to me there was only one force strong enough to hold back an ambitious and warlike nation: superstitious fear. Surely the power of Karatepe and its neighbours was the power of some mighty religion—some religion of magic? Possibly Karatepe was a recognized centre of magical culture, like Delphi. Hence those strange reliefs of bird-headed men, of strange, beetle-like creatures, of winged bulls and lions?
Reich disagreed with me, and his disagreement was based upon his dating of the figurines. He claimed that, in spite of their excellent state of preservation, they were many thousands of years older than the proto-Hattian culture. He later verified this beyond all doubt with the use of his ‘neutron dater’. Well, I was willing to be corrected; I was not entirely happy with my own provisional dating of the figurines. But an immense problem remained. As far as we know, there was no civilization whatever in Asia Minor before 3000 BC Further south, civilization dates back to 5000 BC; but not in Turkey. So who made the figurines, if not the proto-Hattians? Did they come from further south? If so, where?
During the first two months that I spent with him, Reich continued to work on his ‘neutron dater’, and used my figurines as basic testing material. But here absurd difficulties arose. The dater showed itself remarkably accurate with samples of potsherd from Sumer and Babylon, where we had means of cross-checking its results. But they had little success with the figurines. At least, their results were so extra-ordinary as to be obviously inaccurate. The neutron beam was directed at minute fragments of stone dust in the cracks and hollows of the figurines. From the ‘weathering’ and decay of these fragments, the dater should have been able to give us a rough estimate of how long ago the basalt was carved. It failed completely; the needle of the indicator swung to its furthest limit—about 10,000 BC! Reich talked about increasing the range of the indicator, simply out of curiosity, to see what date it would finally arrive at. In fact, he actually doubled its range, by some fairly simple adjustments. The needle still swung to its limit with the same unhesitating speed. It was becoming insane, and Reich began to wonder if he had made some elementary error. Perhaps the dust had not been produced by carving?—in which case, the dater was attempting to give us the age of the basalt itself! At all events, Reich left his assistants the task of constructing a dial that would show anything up to a million years—an immense task that would take most of the summer. And then we made our expedition to Karatepe, to try to investigate the problem at its source.
Yes…the source of the problem. How incredible it now seems as I tell the story! How is it possible to believe in simple ‘coincidence’ in the light of these facts? For my two ‘problems’ were converging: the problem of my friend’s suicide, and the problem of the basalt figurines. When I think back upon that summer, it is impossible to believe in a materialistic historical determinism.
Let me try to place the events in their order. We arrived at Kadirli on April 16th. On the 17th, we established a camp at Karatepe. Admittedly, there was nothing to stop us from commuting between Karatepe and our comfortable hotel at Kadirli. But our workmen had to stay in the nearest village, and we decided that it might be better if we spent most of our time at the site of the excavation. Besides, all the romantic in me revolted at the idea of leaving the second millennium BC and plunging back into the late twentieth century every evening. So we set up our tents on a level space of ground near the top of the mound. From below us came the perpetual roar of the Pyramus river, with its swirling yellow waters. The electronic probe was set up on top of the mound.
I should say a word about this instrument: Reich’s invention, that has since revolutionized the science of archaeology. Fundamentally it is no more than an X-ray, whose principle is similar to that of the mine detector. But a mine detector is only able to detect metal, and an X-ray will only be stopped by some hard, opaque body. Since the earth itself is hard and opaque, the old X-ray principle was of no use in archaeology. Moreover, the things that interest archaeologists—stones, earthenware and the rest—have more or less the same molecular structure as the surrounding earth, so they would hardly show up on an X-ray plate.
Reich’s modification of the electronic laser would penetrate to a depth of three miles, and its principle of ‘neutron feed-back’ meant that it immediately indicated any object of regular shape—a stone slab, for example. The only prob
lem then was to dig down to the object, and this could be done fairly easily with our robot ‘moles’.
It should not be difficult to imagine my state of excitement on the day we set out for Karatepe. Fifteen years of hard digging had failed to reveal any more basalt figurines, or to yield any clue to their source. The sheer volume of earth to be excavated made the problem apparently insoluble. Reich’s invention solved it with a beautiful simplicity.
And yet, for the first three days, the results were disappointing. A probe taken directly below the old diggings revealed nothing. A further half day was occupied in moving the probe to another site a hundred yards away. This time I was certain that something would be revealed—and I was mistaken. Reich and I looked gloomily at the plain below us, then at the enormous bulk of the electronic probe, and wondered how many times it would have to be moved before we made a ‘find’.
On the third evening, we received a visit from our two Turkish colleagues, Fu’ad and Darga. We decided to fly back into Kadirli for a meal at the hotel. Our feelings of irritability—due to our suspicion that they were there to spy on us for the Turkish government—soon vanished, for they were both full of warmth, sympathy and eager questionings. After an excellent meal and some good claret, the day’s disappointments seemed less important. Afterwards, we retired to the visitors’ lounge, which we had to ourselves, and drank Turkish coffee and brandy. It was at this point that Dr. Muhammed Darga revived the topic of suicide. He had come armed with facts and figures this time. I shall not attempt to detail the discussion that followed—it went on until well after midnight—but it certainly seemed to indicate that Darga’s theories about ‘biological decay’ were not as wild as they sounded. How, said Darga, could we account for this tremendous rise in the world suicide rate if we stuck to our view that it was simply a matter of ‘civilization neurosis’? Too much security, lack of real purpose? But there was still plenty of ‘challenge’ in the modern world, and psychology had made tremendous advances in the past fifty years. The crime rate was far below what we might expect from the world’s overcrowding. In the first half of the twentieth century, the crime rate and the suicide rate had risen together. So why had the crime rate dropped while the suicide rate had increased so dramatically? It wasn’t good sense. Suicide and crime had always been connected in the past. In the first half of the twentieth century, the high suicide rate was partly due to crime, since one third of all murderers committed suicide. No, said Darga, this was a matter of some strange law of historical decay that only Spengler had suspected. Individual men are merely the cells in the great body of civilization; and, as with the human body, the rate of decay increases steeply with age…
I had to admit that he had me more than half convinced. At half past midnight, the four of us parted on the best of terms, and our two helicopters separated in the moonlight above Kadirli. We were back at the excavation by one o’clock.
It was a beautiful night. The air was full of the scent of asphodel, which the Greeks called the flower of the under world, and of the distinctive odour of the shrubs that grew over the hill. The only sound was the churning of the river. The mountain peaks reminded me of my first trip to the moon; they had the same detached, dead beauty.
Reich went into his tent; he was still brooding on Darga’s statistics. I walked up the hill, and into one of the chambers of the upper gate. Then I climbed the stairs to the top of the wall, and stood there looking out over the moonlit plain. I admit that my mood was romantic, and that I experienced a need to intensify it. So I stood there, hardly breathing, thinking of the dead sentries who had stood where I now stood, and of the days when only the Assyrians lay on the other side of those mountains.
All at once, my thoughts took a gloomy turn. I felt totally insignificant, meaningless, standing there. My life was the tiniest ripple on the sea of time. I felt the alienness of the world around me, the indifference of the universe, and a kind of wonder at the absurd persistency of human beings whose delusions of grandeur are incurable. Suddenly it seemed that life was no more than a dream. For human beings, it never became a reality.
The loneliness was unbearable. I wanted to go and talk to Reich, but the light in his tent had gone out. I felt in my upper pocket for a handkerchief, and my hand encountered a cigar that I had accepted from Dr. Fu’ad. I had taken it as a ritual gesture of friendliness, for I am almost a non-smoker. Now its smell seemed to take me back to the human world, and I decided to light it. I cut off its end with a penknife, and pierced the other end. As soon as I took the first mouthful of smoke, I regretted it. It tasted foul. I placed it on the wall beside me, and continued to stare out over the valley. After a few minutes, its pleasant smell led me to take it up again. This time I took several more deep pulls at it, swallowing the smoke. My forehead felt damp, and I had to lean on the wall. For a while I was afraid I was about to vomit and waste my excellent supper. Then the nausea passed, but the feeling of disembodiment persisted.
At this point, I looked at the moon again—and was suddenly overwhelmed with an inexpressible fear. I felt like a sleepwalker who wakes up and finds himself balancing on a ledge a thousand feet above the ground. The fear was so immense that I felt as if my mind would dissolve; it seemed impossible to bear. I tried hard to fight it, to understand its cause. It was connected with this world I was looking at—with the realization that I was a mere object in a landscape. This is extremely difficult to make clear. But I suddenly seemed to see that men manage to stay sane because they see the world from their own tiny, intensely personal view-point, from their worm’s eye view. Things impress them or frighten them, but they still see them from behind this wind-shield of personality. Fear makes them feel less important, but it does not negate them completely; in a strange way, it has the opposite effect, for it intensifies their feeling of personal existence. I suddenly seemed to be taken out of my personality, to see myself as a mere item in a universal landscape, as unimportant as a rock or fly.
This led to the second stage of the experience. I said to myself… ‘But you are far more than a rock or a fly. You are not a mere object. Whether it is an illusion or not, your mind contains knowledge of all the ages. Inside you, as you stand here, there is more knowledge than in the whole of the British Museum, with its thousand miles of bookshelves’.
This thought, in a sense, was new to me. It led me to forget the landscape, and to turn my eyes inside myself. And a question presented itself. If space is infinite, how about the space inside man? Blake said that eternity opens from the centre of an atom. My former terror vanished. Now I saw that I was mistaken in thinking of myself as an object in a dead landscape. I had been assuming that man is limited because his brain is limited, that only so much can be packed into the portmanteau. But the spaces of the mind are a new dimension. The body is a mere wall between two infinities. Space extends to infinity outwards; the mind stretches to infinity inwards.
It was a moment of revelation, of overwhelming insight. But as I stood there, totally oblivious of the outside world, straining all my powers to stare into those inner spaces, something happened that terrified me. This is almost impossible to describe. But it seemed that, out of the corner of my eye—the eye of attention that was turned inward—I caught a movement of some alien creature. It was a strange shock, the feeling you would get if you were relaxed in a warm bath, and you suddenly felt a slimy movement against your leg.
In a moment, the insight had passed. And as I looked at the mountain peaks above me, and at the moon sailing over them, I felt a thrill of pleasure, as if I had just returned home from the other end of the universe. I felt dizzy and very tired. All this had taken less than five minutes. I turned and walked back to my tent, and tried to look inside myself again. For a moment, I succeeded.
This time, I felt nothing.
But when I was wrapped up in my sleeping bag, I found that I no longer wanted to sleep. I would have preferred to talk to Reich, or to anyone. I had to express what I had suddenly realized. Man assume
s that his inner world is private. ‘The grave’s a fine and private place’ said Marvell, and we have the same feeling about the mind. In the real world, our freedom is limited; in imagination, we can do anything we like; what is more, we can defy the world to penetrate the secret; the mind is the most private place in the universe—sometimes, perhaps, too private. ‘We each think of the key, each in his prison’. And the whole difficulty of treating madmen is to break into that prison.
Yet I could not forget that feeling of something alien inside my mind. Now I thought back on it, it did not seem so terrifying. After all, if you walk into your own room, expecting it to be empty, and you find someone there, your first response is fear: it could be a burglar. But this soon passes. Even if it is a burglar, you confront him as a reality, and that original flash of fear passes away. What was so alarming was that feeling of something—or someone—inside my own head, so to speak.
As my mind lost its fear, and became simply interested in the problem, I felt sleepy. One of my last thoughts before I fell asleep was to wonder if this was some kind of hallucination due to the Turkish coffee and the cigar.
When I woke at seven the next morning, I knew it wasn’t. The memory of that sensation was curiously clear. And yet, let me confess, it now aroused a kind of excitement in me rather than terror. This should be easy enough to understand. The everyday world demands our attention, and prevents us from ‘sinking into ourselves’. As a romantic, I have always resented this; I like to sink into myself. The problems and anxieties of living make it difficult. Well, now I had an anxiety that referred to something inside me, and it reminded me that my inner world was just as real and important as the world around me.